Contemplative Practice and the Ideas

Coleridge increasingly focused on ideas as diffused through contemplative practice and everyday experience. He retained a Plotinian sense of theoria in and through sense and imagination. The author introduces the con-templum, a mental space opened by imagination for ideas, allowing them aesthetic expression and deeply felt meaning. Coleridge elevated imagination as an insightful faculty, unlike Plato's view of it as merely imaging. He argued reason is 'higher than' imagination and will is deeper than reason. Ideas of reason are confreres of the human soul.

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Abstract

AbstractChapter 2 turns to Coleridge’s increasing focus on ideas as diffused in and through different kinds of contemplative practice and everyday experience. Throughout his thinking about contemplative reason, or Platonic nóēsis, he retained a Plotinian sense of theoria in and through sense and imagination. Section 2.1 outlines what the author calls the con-templum, a mental space opened up by imagination for ideas, allowing them to receive aesthetic expression, bridging the gap to allow ideas to have a deeply felt meaning in human life. Section 2.2 introduces the argument that, like Plotinus, Coleridge elevated the role and status of imagination as an insightful and not just a merely imaging and often deceptive faculty, as Plato viewed it. Section 2.3 reconstructs Coleridge’s argument for that reason to be ‘higher than’ imagination and his related position that will is deeper than reason. Finally, Section 2.4 examines Coleridge’s claim that ideas of reason are confreres of the human soul.