What does the writer say about socrates and coleridge?
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Platonism, in its eclecticism and hidden continuity, proved congenial to Coleridge, whose conception of the nature and role of philosophy differed profoundly from the empirical orthodoxy of his time (and ours). Coleridge's conception resembles the Greek ideal, found in Plotinus and others, of philosophy as less a purely rationalistic pursuit than a form of gnosis involving the whole man and leading toward ultimate perceptions. Platonism has important literary consequences: Coleridge's "philosophical" writings may be read as a complex (and often beautiful) form of prose poetry. Analysis suggests that the mode of argument in crucial chapters of the Biographia (XXI-XIV) is substantially poetic in nature and perhaps deliberately paralogical. Coleridge attempts certainty, without attaining it, and shows, astonishingly, an equivalent of Keats's "Negative Capability" in the disinterestedness of his symbolic investigations or "constructs" of reality. Literary form and style are more important in Coleridge's intellectual prose than has been thought.