We miss the opening chapters of Opus Maximum and enter the stage in medias res, with Coleridge considering the question what differentiates morality from other sciences. He notes that statements of morality have quite a peculiar flair. If morality tells me that I ought to do something, it does not mean that this action would be absolutely necessary - morality is no mathematics. Yet, the moral “ought” is also something completely different from hypothetical necessity of physical sciences.
Coleridge is clearly following the lead of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason and it is thus no wonder that he invokes as a primary assumption underlying morality the notion of will. Coleridge’s idea appears to be that this will is somehow responsible of its actions and moral statements then indicate, what actions fulfill this responsibility and what actions actively break it.
What is this will then? Coleridge notes as its primary characteristic a capacity to begin causal series. Yet, he remarks, this is no true explanation in the usual sense of the word. Ordinarily, things are explained, Coleridge says, when they have been connected to some previous item that has caused it. In case of will we can never really do that, since this very ability to begin things anew is something completely inexplicable. In other words, the notion of will is an idea, that is, something that definitely underlies our experiences and so must be in our reach, but as a final link of explanation admits no further explanation.
Coleridge is at once opposed to the idea that all morality could be reduced to mere prudential love of oneself. Firstly, he notes in a Kantian manner that this “self” is nothing more than mere formal binding of a bundle of experiences and thus incapable of being loved, or then it means our true self that is beyond all experience and thus beyond mundane love. Indeed, he continues, what is loved in this self-love is usually the earthly representative of our self or body. That is, self-love is just love of bodily pleasures or other benefits, which eventually can be used for a more pleasurable bodily life. But when we are told that we ought to do something, we are not told to do it because of future pleasure.
Coleridge avoids the Kantian disparagement of moral emotions by restricting the notion of pleasure to bodily pleasures. He states that already the satisfaction felt when we use our cognitive abilities is far different from bodily pleasures, and even further removed is the feeling of bliss generated by morality and religion. Thus, there is no demand that moral actions should be done grudgingly.
Maxims of morality, Coleridge notes, seem like commands from another, higher self - what Kant would call our noumenal self - and consciousness of these commands we call conscience. Now, Coleridge continues, even becoming conscious of these commands demands something - we must act in certain manner so that we would not be blind to demands of conscience. In other words, he concludes, conscience is possible only if we actively admit that we are answerable to a superior form of our self and so have faith in something beyond sensible reality.
Coleridge goes even further and says that not just morality or ethics, but every kind of consciousness is dependent on such faith and conscience. We may perhaps detect influence of Fichte here. Coleridge notes that what he has called conscience is in a primary sense self-consciousness - consciousness of our true self as a source of norms for action. Furthermore, whatever we are conscious of - that is, more than just aware of, in the way mere animals are - we have immediately related to our self. To conclude, for Coleridge, the whole human experience is underlined by a consciousness of what we must do in the world we experience.
Coleridge’s next move has also Fichtean tones. He notes that in order to relate any object of experience to ourselves as a moral subject, we need the notion of an object that is also a moral subject, although different from ourselves - every I needs You. When we look at a certain viewpoint, we can not differentiate between the two persons, Coleridge insists, and then we are speaking at the level of reason, that is, at the level of what is necessary according to all subjects. It is only when we move on to the level of will that we can differentiate between persons, and even then our conscience tells us that the other persons are equal to our own self and should be treated as such.
Morality, Coleridge argues, can then be regarded as a demand to subjugate the level of will - differentiation of persons - to the level of reason - equalisation of persons. Furthermore, he notes, our idea of God is just an idea of an entity, in which these two standpoints coincide absolutely - absolute will, which is unified with universal reason. In other words, Coleridge's suggestion is that morality demands that we gain conscience, which is just our communion with the divine level.
Coleridge’s next question is how we humans come to have a link to God. He at once notices that this cannot happen through any ordinary sort of proof. Much like Jacobi before him, Coleridge suggests that such proofs risk the confusion of divine and mundane levels, which leads to pantheistic explanations. Instead, he remarks, faith in God is something we learn even from our mother’s milk. During the first period of our life we humans do not have the capacity to separate ourselves completely from our mothers, and indeed, we are aware of our full dependence of her. When we then see our mother praying to a Superior Being, we gain an inkling of a universal parent taking care of all persons.
One might think that this genetic explanation of our notion of God is an argument against this notion - people from different cultures and people with no previous education would have no idea of God’s existence. Coleridge tries to show that even the Lockean notion of tabula rasa analysis of human experience points towards a notion of God. Coleridge’s argument begins by noting that Lockean philosophers analyse the experienced things by the characteristics these things are perceived to have. He then remarks that these characteristics differ from one perceiver to another - a plant poisonous to one observer might be harmless to another. Hence, he concludes, these characteristics are not so much passive properties, but active powers that can appear in different manners in different surroundings. The source of such activities, Coleridge insists, must ultimately be a self-causating activity or will.
Having thus based all consciousness and experience on the existence of responsible will and the existence of that will on absolute will, Coleridge next wants to show that this absolute will is no deistic impersonal God. Indeed, in order to be not just reason, but also will, God must be a person, that is, an I compared to You or to another person. From another viewpoint Coleridge notes that God is supposed to be a pure creating activity and therefore must have some result, if nothing else, then this second person.
This necessary result of divine activity, Coleridge says, is nothing more than the so-called second person of trinity - Word or Logos, which could be said to conceptualise the original power of self-creation by creating distinctions within it. In addition to being differentiated into two persons, Father and Son, these two persons also recognise their identity in an act of mutual love, which is represented by Spirit or the third person of trinity. In a sense, then, God must create to itself a community of persons just to exist as a person.
At this point Coleridge notes the peculiarity of religion as a sort of synthesis of philosophy or science dealing with necessities and of history dealing with contingencies. While the trinitarian nature of divinity belongs in Coleridge’s eyes to the necessary portion of religion - God must be a self-created community of persons - the existence of evil does not. Only the possibility of evil is necessary, but its actual existence is not.
In fact, evil offers a true conundrum for Coleridge, because its existence should be explained. It cannot be explained through any activity of God, who cannot be a source of imperfection. The only possibility that Coleridge can fathom is then that evil is similarly self-caused as God himself. The difference is that while God exists necessarily, evil does not. Evil, that is, a will not abiding with God’s absolute will, has just willed itself to existence. Of course, temporal notions are here only a metaphor. In a less figurative sense, evil just is something that need not be, but still is, and since it exists, it retains itself, as long as nothing is done about it.
What is particularly important for Coleridge is to show that evil is not a necessary outcome of the energy of divinity, unlike in Plotinian philosophy, where evil has a mere shadow of an existence, necessarily projected by the ultimate reality. Closely connected with this attempt is Coleridge’s project of showing that certain key tenets of the Bible can be justified philosophically, which would bolster the status of Christianity against Neoplatonism and its modern appearance in Schellingian philosophy.
At this particular stage, Coleridge’s work becomes even more fragmentary, but certain key moments can be discerned. Coleridge evidently tries to show that the biblical story of Genesis can be rationally reconstructed by incorporating what he considered to be the most developed account of natural world - the Schellingian philosophy of nature - but leaving out its seeming pantheism, which denigrates the idea of personal God.
The starting point of Coleridge’s account seems to be the fact of evil - that is, of a will which at the same time stubbornly upholds its own particularity against the truly absolute will of God and tries to place itself in the place of absolute will, remaking all of existence in its own shape. This muddle of contradictory tendencies of particularisation and universalisation in the original evil will Coleridge calls chaos - it is the primordial puddle of contradictory forces, which by itself cannot do anything.
Just like God recognised itself in the other personality and thus loved it, Coleridge continues, God’s love extends also to the primordial chaos, despite its imperfection. This divine love or “breath of God” gives chaos a more stable existence and makes it a potential material for further shapes of existence - chaos becomes aether. In the same act, the differentiating person in trinity or Logos shapes a portion of this aether into a carrier of active energy or light. Thus, Coleridge weds the Biblical tale of God saying “let there be light” with the Schellingian idea that physical world is built out of opposition of active light and passive matter.
Next in Coleridge’s account is the multiplication of these basic opposites into various forms of opposition: separation of unit from true unity in centrifugal force opposed to a search of true unity in centripetal force, mutual repulsion of material units opposed to their coherence as a unified material object and volatile expansion or diffusion of matter opposed to its contraction into a tighter unity. This is followed by construction of air as mediating between mere vacuum and visible matter, and move to concerns of chemistry. We need not go into details, but merely state the obvious parallel of Coleridge's account with Schellingian ideas.
Opus Maximum ends as abruptly as it began, with no indication how Coleridge would have finished the work. Still, we have seen enough to recognise which parts of the work would have been more fruitful. It is especially the idea of ethical underpinning of human consciousness and the notion of necessity of community for personality that hold most interest to a modern reader. On the other hand, his attempt to synthesise Genesis with German philosophy of nature seems like a peculiar and ultimately futile project.
