S. T. COLERIDGE AND GERMAN TRANSCENDENTAL PHILOSOPHY: INFLUENCE OR CONFLUENCE?

The article grapples with the complex networking between exponents of German Romantic Idealism and S T Coleridge's metaphysics and transcendental speculations, paying specific attention to Biographia Literaria. It argues that Coleridge was immensely influenced by and distinguished himself from German philosophers like Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Karl Wilhelm Schlegel, Friedrich Leopold, Freiherr von Hardenburg (Novalis) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. These philosphers advanced complex, enigmatic and controversial positions on hermeneutic and phenomenological questions of asethetics and sublime, being, nature and mind and spirit, body and soul, the subjective and objevtive and plenitude. The question of influence and/or confluence situates Coleridge's Romantic and idealist speculations in the context of acknowledging the German idealists and submitting to shared ideologies, but at the same time accentuating his formulated opinions prior to and after he met with or read their works. Biographia Literaria as a seminal treatise on English Romanticism expresses how this networking grounded Coleridge's metaphyics in line with artistic and aesthetic concerns. In other words, Coleridge's conviction that a poet was an ardent expression of the mutual inclusivity between phliosophy and creative writing lends credence to his rigorous critical broodings on continental philosophers. His theorisation of imagination in philosophical and poetic expression owes much to both these influneces and his personal stance.