Aesthetic Education in Biographia Literaria, The Friend and the Lectures on Literature

Abstract

Coleridge and Schiller’s similar investment in the notion of aesthetic autonomy is only the first step in theorizing the link between art and moral action. The next is to postulate an anthropology asserting that to be human in the fullest sense is to be ‘at play’. Here the moral, and in due course the political, purpose of freedom is made explicit. How Coleridge’s claim, that art leads indirectly to moral benefit, draws on Schiller’s argument for the Spieltrieb is the subject of this chapter. Beginning with an analysis of how the notion of ‘indirection’ presents itself in Biographia as a way to characterize the relationship between aesthetic pleasure and moral action, I then consider some specific instances in related texts where Coleridge reworks Schiller’s argument, sometimes mediated through Schelling. This leads, perhaps inevitably, to an analysis of what Coleridge, like Schiller, makes of the didactic, one of the most popular contemporary literary modes.