In Search of a ‘True Naturalism’

Abstract

Attempting to swim against the tide of modernity, and in particular against contemporary naturalisms that degrade Life and deaden Thought, Coleridge sets out to frame a ‘true naturalism.’ His goal is to displace materialistic approaches to Nature that strip it of its ‘quicknesses’ by rendering its forms of organization into mere abstractions. No problem of philosophy is liable to generate more confusion or obfuscation, he suggests, than such questions as ‘What is life?’ unless it is the question, ‘What really is the problem of life?’ For Life does not present a problem in the modern sense of a puzzle awaiting an ingenious scientific resolution:

Analyse the seed with the finest tools, and let the solar microscope come in aid of your senses, what do you find? Means and instruments, a wondrous fairy tale of nature, magazines of food, stores of various sorts, pipes, spiracles, defences — a house of many chambers, and the owner and inhabitant invisible!² But never entirely absent. For his reflections on Life lead Coleridge to the conclusion that ‘Whatever is, lives.’

‘The Truths of Reason, as distinguished from the Truths of History, are all anonymous.’¹