The Clerisy and Aesthetic Education

Abstract

Coleridge’s argument about ‘cultivation’ and ‘civilization’ is that if humanity was going to make any moral progress at all both would have to be present. The forces of ‘civilization’, directed at the creation of wealth, more or less take care of themselves, but the forces of ‘cultivation’ need looking after. The ‘cultivation’ of the self is of course the ideal, but clearly this option is available only to the man of leisure and there are not many of these. At the same time, while the state is called on to provide at least the conditions under which even the working class might engage in such ‘self-cultivation’, at least to some degree, Coleridge has no intention of signing over the burden of responsibility to the state. Some other solution needs to be found. Who, in other words, would be in charge of administering this ‘cultivation’? And how would their authority be certified and then maintained? Schiller, as I pointed out in the previous chapter, had put aesthetic educators in charge, but he did not say who they were or what they would do. Coleridge, for his part, puts the ‘clerisy’ in charge. With a name and a fairly clear mission, the ‘clerisy’ embodies Schiller’s vague notion of ‘some few chosen circles’ that, like the pure church and the pure republic, would exemplify the ideals he had been setting. Coleridge, in other words, makes explicit what is implied in the Aesthetic Letters: an institution or class of educators especially responsible for ‘aesthetic education’.