Enacting the Absolute: Subject-Object Relations in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Theory of Knowledge

Abstract

This chapter examines Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Theory of Life’ (1816/1848) and his theory of knowledge, discussed in Biographia Literaria (1817), through the lens of autopoietic enaction. It focuses on parallels between historical and contemporary theories, particularly their philosophical underpinnings, and argues that Coleridge’s theories are an important alternative to Cartesian accounts of the mind. Interrogating these theories in terms of enactive concepts, such as structural coupling, dynamic co-emergence, and mutual co-dependence, exposes the inherent embodied, embedded, and enacted premises on which Coleridge’s theory of cognition relies. The relationship between the subject and the object implicit in dualist and materialist theories reveals the effects assumptions about this relationship have on the way human beings understand themselves in relationship to nature and their own bodies – effects that are frequently inimical. The chapter concludes that Coleridge and the enactive approach offer valuable options for overcoming the schism between consciousness and nature, mind and world.

The Wholeness of Humanity: Coleridge, Cognition, and Holistic Perception

“…Coleridge's theory of subject‐object relations thinks in parallel to Francisco Varela's version of EC known as autopoietic enactivism. “Read through the lens of autopoietic enaction, Coleridge provides an alternative philosophical model for thinking about how we orient ourselves toward the world we inhabit that can provide a corrective to the pernicious effects of Cartesianism on the way human beings relate to the natural world” (Roberston 2019, 121).…”

“…Coleridge was “interested in how individuals acquire knowledge of and understand themselves as part of the whole they comprise” (Roberston 2019, 121). Dissatisfied with the theories of his day, his Theory of Life “provides an ontological basis for the relationship between the subject, the object and the absolute by conceiving of the eternal (God, the absolute) and the transient (nature, human beings) as existing in a recursive, mutually constitutive relationship” (Roberston 2019, 119).…”