The Divided Line: Lower and Higher

Chapter 7 begins, in Section 7.1 (i), by demonstrating how Coleridge’s modified Platonism draws on Plotinus to theorize how imagination provides aesthetic access to ideas. The chapter then outlines, in Section 7.1 (ii), Plato’s epistemology and ontology in the context of Coleridgean concerns. Like Plato, Coleridge divided lower and higher powers, while also arguing that the divide can be crossed without being negated. Coleridge recasts key Platonic notions, retaining phantasía as fancy in the lower mind, and elevating imagination to a role above the divide, as the intermediary, or Plotinian ‘border’ (methórion), between the sensible and the intelligible. Section 7.2 examines the movement from eikasía to pístis, Plato’s lower powers. This movement is equivalent to the Coleridgean transition from sense and fancy to the lower understanding. Section 7.3 then focuses on the Platonic transition in the higher mind to nóēsis, examining the influence of Plato, often read through a Plotinian lens, on Coleridge’s theory of noetic contemplation.