Abducting the Imagination: The Methodological Foundation of Science and Criticism in Coleridge and Peirce

Coleridge;Imagination;not listed

Dechand, ThomasGonzalez, Eduardo ;

Johns Hopkins University

关键词: Coleridge;    Imagination;    not listed;   

Others  :  https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/bitstream/handle/1774.2/40199/DECHAND-DISSERTATION-2014.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: JOHNS HOPKINS DSpace Repository

【 摘 要 】

The core the dissertation examines S. T. Coleridge’s writings on method and imagination from the 1815 composition of Biographia Literaria through the publication of the ;;Essays on the Principles of Method” in the 1818 Friend. I demonstrate how these writings clarify, develop, and indeed repair Coleridge’s earlier theory of imagination by articulating its role within a general theory of inquiry meant to comprehend the works of science and literature as methodical investigations. Whereas the Biographia fails in its attempt to ground the imagination within a conception of the self as intellectually intuited in a manner conceived by German Idealists such as Schelling, Coleridge’s ;;Essays on Method” explore the imagination through a theory of inquiry predicated on the discovery, analysis, and contemplation of relations. I argue that Coleridge aligns the operation of the secondary imagination to a logical function: the eduction of an ;;idea,” according to Coleridge’s precise sense of that term as a necessarily tautegorical relation – one that expresses the same subject, but with a difference. It is ideas, so conceived, that serve to guide inquiry. Coleridge’s refinement of the theory of imagination is done in serve of his argument that ideas are ;;constitutive” -- that is, they play a fundamental role in what it is, internal to our constitution and that of the world, that enables inquiry in the first place -- and should be seen as part of Coleridge’s answer to what he identifies as the highest problem of philosophy in the 1816 Statesman’s Manual. I emphasize how Coleridge’s ;;Essays on Method” move him away from the dialectic of major oppositions that fettered his earlier work and still linger in contemporary theory, particularly the opposition between science and poetry in its relation to a metaphysical framework that sees the world as irreducibly split into its ;;objective” and ;;subjective” components.Part two examines the consonance of Coleridge’s ;;Essays on Method” with Charles S. Peirce’s later development of logic as semeiotic. I trace the broad compatibility of Coleridge’s account of the operation of the secondary imagination as the apprehension of an idea through the discarding of imagery with Peirce’s depiction of abduction as a mode of inference – aligned with the play of musement – that is responsible for the formation of explanatory hypotheses. Part two does not merely trace historical connections between Coleridge and Peirce (as mediated by the work of Edgar Allan Poe) but identifies a certain strain of reflection on method, imagination, and inquiry that is exhibited tautegorically in the works of thinkers who followed, were influenced by, or appropriated Coleridge in one way or another. One of the key insights of the dissertation is that Coleridge himself introduced – indeed coined – the tautegorical paradigm as a new methodological framework for connecting the ideas and contributions of thinkers from disparate epochs and with apparently disparate backgrounds and motivations. Coleridge, Poe, and Peirce repeatedly single out the work of Johannes Kepler both for its crucial importance within the history of science and for its strikingly imaginative character. Their testimony is used to retrospectively illuminate, via principles that Coleridge was the first to explicitly articulate, the methodological and imaginative underpinnings of Kepler’s 1611 Six-Cornered Snowflake. My analysis of how these thinkers all exemplify Coleridge’s ideas about method and inquiry – but differently in each case – shows how an analysis of historical connections and influences can dovetail with, and be augmented by, the kind of tautegorical explication performed by the dissertation. The dissertation concludes by outlining how the framework developed by Coleridge (and further modified by Peirce) provides the means to theorize imaginative literature as itself a form of reasoning. Unlike contemporary models that seek to account for the literary text as the result of something antecedent to its composition (whether the author’s conscious thoughts and feelings, the author’s unconscious, the various power structures of the time and place in which the work was written, and so forth), Coleridge’s model of literary reasoning offers a philosophically and historically grounded means to explore what Kenneth Burke memorably called ;;literature as equipment for living.” Dissertation Directors: Richard Macksey and Leroy Searle