The Philosophy of Shipreck: Gnosticism, Skepticism, and Coleridge's Catastrophic Modernity

Drawing on critiques of modernity by Blumenberg, Arendt, C. Taylor, and Heidegger, this essay examines the Gnostic underpinnings of modernity's conception of knowledge. Skeptical in its origination, modern specialized, disciplinary inquiry construes knowledge as the open-ended accumulation and inventorying of "information." Connecting these macro-historical shifts to classical Liberalism's disavowal of Aristotelian ends and norms in favor of an unspecified, infinitely deferred social and epistemological utopia, Coleridge's poetry (esp. his Rime) and later prose grasp modernity as a psychological and metaphysical disaster that unwittingly echoes the essential incompatibility of eidos and physis first flagged by ancient Gnosticism.