Samuel Taylor Coleridge on ideas actualized in history

ABSTRACT

Situating Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s thought on historically actualized ideas with reference to a range of classical thinkers, this article examines his intriguing philosophical theory about how ideas become progressively actualized in history. This cultural growth can be understood as contemplation-in-action, although it occurs through mainly fumbling – or else overenthusiastic – human agents. I distinguish Coleridgean first-order, transcendent ideas (such as God, infinity, the good, the soul) from second-order, historical ones (such as church, state, the constitution). It has been argued that Coleridge’s theory of ideas develops from Bacon’s inductive method for discovering laws of nature through experiment and natural law through common law. I further claim that Coleridge upholds the reality of “Forms” in science, and of rights in ethics and politics; that his later political thought is inherently more progressive than is generally admitted; and that his account differs from Schelling’s and Hegel’s respective theories by maintaining the transcendence of ideas above the immanence of their evolving historical actualizations. Coleridge’s philosophy is therefore, whether political or metaphysical, ultimately an ontological defence of the transcendence of ideas above the immanence of their progressive but imperfect actualization.     

One Origen or Two? The Status Quaestionis

It has generally been assumed that there were two Origens in the early third century, both of whom were taught by Ammonius Saccas, the Alexandrian teacher of Plotinus. In recent years, it has become more common to maintain that there was only one Origen. Hermann Dörrie's theory that there were two Origens, each taught by a different Ammonius, has enjoyed little favour, and some have denied the existence of the peripatetic Ammonius, proposed as a possible tutor for the Christian Origen. The first part of this article shows that the existence of two Ammonii is accepted by all scholars who are familiar with the evidence of Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists 2.27. The second points out that the identification of the two Origens raises chronological difficulties which are not always recognized in modern treatments of this question. The rest of the paper, responding to recent studies by Tobias Böhm and Ilaria Ramelli, argues that the teachings ascribed to “Origen” by later Neoplatonists are not sufficiently convergent with those of the Christian Origen to justify the conclusion that there was only one man of this name.