Department of English Publications
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
4-15-2019
Volume
80
Issue
Issue 1 - 2 : Schelling’s After-Lives
Journal
International Journal of Philosophy and Theology
First Page
39
Last Page
56
URL with Digital Object Identifier
https://doi.org/10.1080/21692327.2017.1392257
Abstract
This paper considers how Schelling’s earlier work functions as a fifth column for the Germano-Coleridgeans, particularly Coleridge himself and Green. I consider their engagement with Schelling’s First Outline in relation to the Hunterian collection bought by the Crown in 1799, which made the life sciences a public concern within the framework of how knowledge was to be organized. The paper explores the pressure the life sciences put on philosophy and the constraining of both, in the context of British Idealism, by religious imperatives that are internal, conceptual censors, and external (cultural and institutional) censors. Consolidating his work between the Romantic and Victorian periods, Green is a neglected figure in a progress from natural to political theology that coincides with a shift in British idealism from Schelling to a sanitized Hegel. Coleridge’s dialogue with and often expedient misrepresentations of Schelling are more complex, as he uses Schelling’s “Stufenfolge” to argue for a design in nature, yet is constantly troubled by a biodiversity and difference in nature to which Schelling was more open. Initially deploying Schelling to reconcile transcendental and natural philosophy, Coleridge can never entirely escape the trouble that biology causes philosophy and that philosophy (through Schelling) causes religion.
Publication Status
1
Notes
Tilottama Rajan (2019) Immunitary foreclosures: Schelling and British Idealism, International Journal of Philosophy and Theology, 80:1-2, 39-56, DOI:10.1080/21692327.2017.1392257 To link to this article:
https://doi.org/10.1080/21692327.2017.1392257
Published online: 15 Apr 2019.
Tilottama Rajan is a Canada Research Chair and Distinguished University Professor at the University of Western Ontario. She is the author of four monographs (most recently Romantic Narrative [Johns Hopkins, 2010]), editor or coeditor of seven books (most recently Idealism Without Absolutes [SUNY, 2004]), and author of over a hundred articles on Romantic literature, German Idealist and Romantic philosophy, and Contemporary Theory. Her current interest is in organizations of knowledge. She is working on a book on entangled knowledge from Idealism to Deconstruction.
Funding
This work was supported by the Canada Research Chairs.