The Anxiety of Pantheism: Hidden Dimensions of Coleridge’s Transcendental Deduction
This chapter examines two particularly vexed and intriguing issues in the analysis of Coleridge’s account of the imagination in Biographia: his strangely anxious and unstable attempt at a transcendental deduction of the imagination, and the theatrical interruption of that attempt caused by the letter from the ‘friend’. Previous accounts have focused almost exclusively on Coleridge’s plagiarisms from Schelling’s System des transscendentalen Idealismus, and have missed the contextual connections that govern Coleridge’s understanding of Schelling. The controversy over these plagiarisms has unbalanced our assessments, focusing excessive attention on the relationship between System des transscendentalen Idealismus and Biographia and effectively blinding us to all other relationships. The following account uncovers a wealth of connections between Coleridge’s text and the key texts of the pantheism controversy, especially Jacobi’s Uber die Lehre des Spinoza and Schelling’s Uber das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit.