Contemplative Practice and the Ideas
Coleridge's Contemplative Philosophy January 16, 2020 Peter Cheyne
Coleridge increasingly focused on ideas as diffused through contemplative practice and everyday experience. He retained a Plotinian sense of theoria in and through sense and imagination. The author introduces the con-templum, a mental space opened by imagination for ideas, allowing them aesthetic expression and deeply felt meaning. Coleridge elevated imagination as an insightful faculty, unlike Plato's view of it as merely imaging. He argued reason is 'higher than' imagination and will is deeper than reason. Ideas of reason are confreres of the human soul.