Romantic epistemology emerged from the Romantic challenge to both the static, materialist views of the Enlightenment (Hobbes) and the contrary idealist stream (Hume) when it came to studying life. Romanticism needed to develop a new theory of knowledge that went beyond the method of inertial science, derived from the study of inert nature (natura naturata), to encompass vital nature (natura naturans). Samuel Taylor Coleridge was at the core of the development of the new approach, both in terms of art and the 'science of knowledge' itself (epistemology). Coleridge's ideas regarding the philosophy of science involved Romantic science in general, but Romantic medicine in particular, as it was essentially a philosophy of the science(s) of life.
What is Life? Were such a question proposed, we should be tempted to answer, what is not Life that really is?
Background European thought had come through the scientific revolution concerning heaven (astronomy) and earth (physics), and emerged, full of optimism about man's power of cognition, into the Age of Reason or Enlightenment. In facing the mystery of life itself, researchers first sought to apply the method that had worked so effectively for inertial nature to the realm of vital nature. In this approach Man himself was seen as a static entity and a tabula rasa, onto which was written sense-experience, considered as the source of all knowledge. Thus, life and knowledge were increasingly regarded from a mechanical and materialistic perspective. As William Godwin stated succinctly about the age, "the human mind… is nothing but a faculty of perception," that all knowledge "comes from impression," and the mind starts with "absolute ignorance." (Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 1793)
However, this approach faced a problem: the experience of a split between subject (man as experiencing) and object (the thing being experienced), the inner world of the mind and the outer world of things. This very real experience created a growing unease and doubt in Western philosophy regarding the reliability of sense-experience as the basis for knowledge: did what was perceived bear any true relationship to what was or was perception simply at best a representation of reality and at worst an illusion. The epistemological dilemma arising from man's existential reality eventuated in two positions - materialism and idealism. The materialism of Hobbes elevated matter, and the sense-experience of matter, to the level of sole reality, life being but an epiphenomenon. The contrary position of Hume was that the only reality man could be certain of was his inner experience of thought so that reality was not object-ive (things outside of us), but a creation of the mind. The materialist position was combatted initially by the works of the Cambridge Platonists, notably More and Cudworth, who set out to show how Nature, Man and the Divine were connected through a 'plastic power' that was accessible to the mind if it were approached rightly.
Cudworth had challenged the rising tide of empiricism in his day by asserting that the universe was not (as Hobbes and others believed) composed merely of inert material atoms governed by mechanical laws; rather, the natural world was symbolic of a transcendent reality that lay beyond material appearances.
The idealist position was challenged by the Common Sense Philosophy of Thomas Reid. The German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, whose ancestors came from the same part of Scotland as Reid, set out to rescue scientific knowledge from the idealism of Hume. While his critical analysis set the foundation for a more rigorous philosophy and science, his solution to idealism was to accept Hume's limits to human knowledge as well as the idea of a transcendent reality, but then to assert the legitimacy of natural science in delineating the reality of sense-experience, and to operate 'as if' what one perceived was indeed reality, an approach that served to 'save the appearances'.
Central role of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Romanticism was inspired by Kant's critical approach to the problem of knowledge, but rejected his limits to that knowledge, seeing it as confining the science of vital nature to the materialist approach, making life an epiphenomenon of "the chance whirlings of unproductive particles" as Coleridge put it succinctly. There was a profound feeling that a new epistemology, or 'science of knowledge' was needed to deal with the question of vital nature and the nature of life itself. Art, and in particular poetry, provided a vehicle to explore vital nature and to get to its essence, but for it to be scientific required an epistemological foundation. The central figure in the development of this epistemology was Samuel Taylor Coleridge (along with J.W. von Goethe in Germany); this was recognized in his time, after his time and even most recently.
Certainly he stood athwart his age in many respects…and not least his seminal presence in the more ordered oeuvres of his friends and critics…continues to grow.
...he was so seminal a thinker that his insights and apercus tend to "sprout in the brains" with a fertility that is positively dangerous.
The influence of Coleridge, like that of Bentham, extends far beyond those who share in the peculiarities of his religious or philosophical creed. He has been the great awakener in this country of the spirit of philosophy, within the bounds of traditional opinions. He has been, almost as truly as Bentham, 'the great questioner of things established'; for a questioner needs not necessarily be an enemy. (John Stuart Mill, in Coleridge, 1840)
Coleridge was strongly influenced in his initial study of philosophy by Kant, but also from the re-introduction of Platonic thought via the Cambridge Platonists, particularly the discovery of Cudworth's history of thought [Hill, Introduction], and the ideas of Plotinus and neo-Platonism, not to mention the common sense philosophy of Thomas Reid. The view of the mind as passive was challenged, as it seemed to leave no room for creativity and individuality. His own experience of creative powers of the mind, as experienced in and through poetry in particular, led him to seek out the role of imagination in human thought, and necessarily to distinguish it from fancy.
Role of imagination The meeting with Wordsworth in 1795 marked a turning point in Coleridge's thinking about thinking. In Wordsworth, Coleridge found a congenial mind, one that helped to foster the "innate platonising quality" of his mind. This collaboration led to an enhancement of his own poetic creativity and the growth of his critical faculty.
If Coleridge plunged impulsively into the Rubicon in 1795, it is equally clear that he emerged on the further shore in the late summer of 1802 and advanced directly on Rome with confidence and a firmly defined sense of mission.
Coleridge went to Germany with Wordsworth in 1798-99, learned German and became more acquainted with German philosophy, both the Kantian stream and German Idealism (Fichte, Schelling). Coleridge came to realize that the mind was not an associative faculty governed by blind, mechanical laws, as Hartley's doctrine of mechanical association presented it, but rather was essentially a product of a creative shaping power (imagination) that ruled perception and governed our mentation but could also in its higher form be used to create new "things", resulting in the evolution of consciousness and mind itself. Coleridge distinguished between imagination and fancy, which only fabricated illusions. For Coleridge, the creative capacity of the imagination, the "prime agent of all human perception," was the key to connecting to the essence of things outside of ourselves and overcoming the apparent split between self and object occasioned by man's self-consciousness. The driving force of that connection and the activation of the creative imagination to get at the inherent essence of external objects was love, a deep desire to know other than ourselves. As Dorothy Emmet (1952) noted, the entire basis of Coleridge's new approach to knowing nature was that "we should be able not only to look, but to love as we look" making philosophy and science a romantic endeavour.
Relation of matter and sense-experience to reality For Coleridge, Western philosophy was intellect-bound and driven, containing no power of creative imagination, such as could be discerned in the Greek term nous ("noetic capacity"), as expressed most maturely in neo-Platonic philosophy (Plotinus). Philosophy, for Coleridge, was scientia scientiarum (the science of science), and critical to any advance in knowledge was its ability to go beyond a mere compilation of facts to the use of the creative imagination to create a true epistemology, or the 'true and original realism.'
The final object and distinctive character of philosophy, is this: for all that exists conditionally (i.e. the existence of which is inconceivable except under the condition of its dependency on some other as its antecedent) to find a ground that is unconditional and absolute, and thereby to reduce the aggregate of human knowledge to a system. Philosophy itself becomes the supplement of the sciences, both as the convergence of all to the common end, namely, wisdom; and as supplying the copula, which modified in each science in the comprehension of its parts to one whole, is in its principles common to all the sciences, as integral parts of one system. And this is METHOD, itself a distinct science, the immediate offspring of philosophy, and the link or mordant by which philosophy becomes scientific and the sciences philosophical. The office of philosophical disquisition consists in just distinction; while it is the privilege of the philosopher to preserve himself constantly aware, that distinction is not division. In order to obtain adequate notions of any truth, we must intellectually separate its distinguishable parts; and this is the technical process of philosophy. But having so done, we must then restore them in our conceptions to the unity, in which they actually co-exist; and this is the result of philosophy.