In this document, which was originally
produced to highlight the differences between the MOQ and
idealism, Pirsig's comments are
shown by text marked in red
. The original chapter headings and page numbers (shown
in brackets e.g. [123])
are included for convenient cross-reference.
Dear Anthony McWatt,
You asked in one of your letters how
the MOQ compares with late 19th Century idealism. The
answer that follows copies part of Frederick Copleston’s
summary of that group in Volume 8 of his “History of
Philosophy” and inserts comparisons the MOQ. As I’ve
said before, philosophology isn’t my field, and I assume
that Copleston’s understanding of the positions of the
various idealists is correct. Certainly it’s better than
mine, and using it and trusting it filters out a lot of
red herring.
[171]Chapter Six
THE BEGINNINGS OF THE MOVEMENT
Introductory historical remarks: Literary
pioneers Coleridge and Carlyle; Ferrier and the subject-object
relation; John Grote's attack on phenomenalism and hedonism;
The revival of interest in Greek philosophy; The rise
of interest in Hegel; B. Jowett and H. Stirling.
In the second half of the nineteenth century
idealism became the dominant philosophical movement
in the British universities. It was not, of course,
a question of subjective idealism. If this was anywhere
to be found, it was a logical consequence of the phenomenalism
associated with the names of Hume in the eighteenth
century and J. S. Mill in the nineteenth century. For
the empiricists who embraced phenomenalism tended to
reduce both physical objects and minds to impressions
or sensations, and then to reconstruct them with the
aid of the principle of the association of ideas. They
implied that, basically, we know only phenomena, in
the sense of impressions, and that, if there are metaphenomenal
realities, we cannot know them. This
is what the MOQ states. Right away it diverges from
the absolute idealism that follows. Quality is a phenomenal
reality. The nineteenth-century idealists, however,
were convinced that things-in-themselves, being expressions
of the one spiritual reality which manifests itself
in and through the human mind, are essentially intelligible,
knowable. In the MOQ there are
no things in themselves. Subject and object are
correlative because they are both rooted in one ultimate
spiritual principle. This is
also true in the MOQ. It was thus a question
of objective rather than subjective idealism. In
the MOQ the term, “objective,” is reserved for inorganic
and biological patterns and cannot include “idealism.”
Nineteenth-century British idealism thus
represented a revival of explicit metaphysics. That
which is the manifestation of Spirit can in principle
be known by the human spirit. And the whole world is
the manifestation of Spirit. It
would seem at first appearance that Quality might be
an equivalent of Spirit, but this would be an enormous
mistake. Quality is spiritual
only to the extent that motorcycles and sausages are
spiritual. Science is simply one level of knowledge,
one aspect of the complete knowledge to which the mind
tends, even if it cannot fully [172]
actualize its ideal. Metaphysical philosophy
endeavours to complete the synthesis.The MOQ agrees with this.
The idealist metaphysics was thus a spiritualist
metaphysics, in the sense that for it ultimate reality
was in some sense spiritual. And it follows that idealism
was sharply opposed to materialism. The
MOQ is not opposed to materialism as long is it is understood
that materialism is a set of ideas. In so far
indeed as the phenomenalists tried to go beyond the
dispute between materialism and spiritualism by reducing
both minds and physical objects to phenomena which cannot
properly be described either as spiritual or as material,
we cannot legitimately call them materialists. But these
phenomena were evidently something very different from
the one spiritual reality of the idealists. And in any
case we have seen that on the more positivistic side
of the empiricist movement there appeared an at least
methodological materialism, the so-called scientific
materialism, a line of thought for which the idealists
had no sympathy. If the Quantum
theory can be called scientifically materialistic, then
the MOQ supports scientific materialism.
With its emphasis on the spiritual character
of ultimate reality and on the relation between the
finite spirit and infinite Spirit idealism stood for
a religious outlook as against materialistic positivism
and the tendency of empiricism in general to by-pass
religious problems or to leave room, at best for a somewhat
vague agnosticism. The MOQ is an atheistic religious outlook that solves rather
than bypasses religious problems. Indeed, a
good deal of the popularity of idealism was due to the
conviction that it stood firmly on the side of religion.
To be sure, with Bradley, the greatest of the British
idealists, the concept of God passed into that of the
Absolute, and religion was depicted as a level of consciousness
which is surpassed in metaphysical philosophy, while
McTaggart, the Cambridge idealist, was an atheist. The MOQ agrees with both. But with the earlier idealists
the religious motive was much in evidence, and idealism
seemed to be the natural home of those who were concerned
with preserving a religious outlook in face of the threatening
incursions of agnostics, positivists and materialists.
The MOQ resolves this conflict
and thus takes both sides. Further, after Bradley
and Bosanquet idealism turned from absolute to personal
idealism and was once again favourable to Christian
theism, though by that time the impetus of the movement
was already spent.
It would, however, be a mistake to conclude
that British idealism in the nineteenth century represented
simply a retreat from the practical concerns of Bentham
and Mill into [173] the
metaphysics of the Absolute. For it had a part to play
in the development of social philosophy. Generally speaking,
the ethical theory of the idealists emphasized the idea
of self-realization, of the perfecting of the human
personality as an organic whole, This is true of the MOQ, although “self-realization” is an
extremely vague and slippery word. an idea which
had more in common with Aristotelianism than with Benthamism.
And they looked on the function of the State as that
of creating the conditions under which individuals could
develop their potentialities as persons. In
the MOQ the state is a social pattern, no more.
As the idealists tended to interpret the creation of
such conditions as a removal of hindrances, they could,
of course, agree with the utilitarians that the State
should interfere as little as possible with the liberty
of the individual. They had no wish to replace freedom
by servitude. But as they interpreted freedom as freedom
to actualize the potentialities of the human personality,
This is another vague phrase
that could be the same as Dynamic Quality. and
as the removal of hindrances to freedom in this sense
involved in their opinion a good deal of social legislation,
they were prepared to advocate a measure of State-activity
which went beyond anything contemplated by the more
enthusiastic adherents of the policy of laissez faire.
We can say, therefore, that in the latter
part of the nineteenth century idealist social and political
theory was more in tune with the perceived needs of
the time than the position defended by Herbert Spencer.
Benthamism or philosophical radicalism doubtless performed
a useful task in the first part of the century. But
the revised liberalism expounded by the idealists later
in the century was by no means 'reactionary'. It looked
forward rather than backward.
The foregoing remarks may appear to suggest
that nineteenth-century idealism in Great Britain was
simply a native reaction to empiricism and positivism
and to laissez faire economic and political theory.
In point of fact, however, German thought, especially
that of Kant and Hegel successively, exercised an important
influence on the development of British idealism. Some
writers, notably J. H. Muirhead, have maintained that
the British idealists of the nineteenth century were
the inheritors of a Platonic tradition which had manifested
itself in the thought of the Cambridge Platonists in
the seventeenth century and in the philosophy of Berkeley
in the eighteenth century. But though [174]
it is useful to draw attention to the fact that British
philosophy has not been exclusively empiricist in character,
it would be difficult to show that nineteenth-century
idealism can legitimately be considered as an organic
development of a native Platonic tradition. The influence
of German thought, particularly of Kant and Hegel, cannot
be dismissed as a purely accidental factor. It is indeed
true that no British idealist of note can be described
as being in the ordinary sense a disciple of either
Kant or Hegel. Bradley, for example, was an original
thinker. But it by no means follows that the stimulative
influence of German thought was a negligible factor
in the development of British idealism.
A limited knowledge of Kant was provided
for English readers even during the philosopher's lifetime.
In 1785 a disciple of Kant, F. A. Nitzsch, gave some
lectures on the critical philosophy at London, and in
the following year he published a small work on the
subject. In 1797 J. Richardson published his translation
of Principles of Critical Philosophy by J. J.
Beck, and in 1798 A. F. M. Willich published Elements
of Critical Philosophy. Richardson's translation
of Kant's Metaphysics of Morals appeared in 1799;
but the first translation of the Critique of Pure
Reason, by F. Haywood, did not appear until 1838.
And the serious studies of Kant, such as E. Caird's
great work, A Critical Account of the Philosophy
of Kant (1877), did not appear until a considerably
later date. Meanwhile the influence of the German philosopher,
together with a host of other influences, was felt by
the poet Coleridge, whose ideas will be discussed presently,
and in a more obvious way by Sir William Hamilton, though
the element of Kantianism in Hamilton's thought was
most conspicuous in his doctrine about the limits of
human knowledge and in his consequent agnosticism in
regard to the nature of ultimate reality.
Among the British idealists proper, Kant's
influence may be said to have been felt particularly
by T. H. Green and E. Caird. But it was mixed with the
influence of Hegel. More accurately, Kant was seen as
looking forward to Hegel or was read, as it has been
put, through Hegelian spectacles. Indeed, in J. H. Stirling's
The Secret of Hegel (1865) the view was explicitly
defended that the philosophy of Kant, if properly [175]
understood and evaluated, leads straight to Hegelianism.
Hence, though we can say with truth that the influence
of Hegel is more obvious in the absolute idealism of
Bradley and Bosanquet than in the philosophy of Green,
there is no question of suggesting that we can divide
up the British idealists into Kantians and Hegelians.
Some pioneers apart, the influence of Hegel was felt
from the beginning of the movement. And it is thus not
altogether unreasonable to describe British idealism,
as is often done, as a Neo-Hegelian movement, provided
at least that it is understood that it was a question
of receiving stimulus frorn Hegel rather than of following
him in the relation of pupil to master.
In its earlier phases the British idealist
movement was characterized by a marked concentration
on the subject-object relationship. In this sense idealism
can be said to have had an epistemological foundation,
inasmuch as the subject-object relationship is basic
in knowledge. The metaphysics of the Absolute was not
indeed absent. For subject and object were regarded
as grounded in and manifesting one ultimate spiritual
reality. Here the MOQ agrees
completely except for that term, “spiritual.”
But the point of departure affected the metaphysics
in an important way. For the emphasis placed in the
first instance on the finite subject militated against
any temptation to interpret the Absolute in such a manner
as to entail the conclusion that the finite is no more
than its 'unreal' appearance. In other words, the earlier
idealists tended to interpret the Absolute in a more
or less theistic, or at any rate in a pantheistic, sense,
the monistic aspect of metaphysical idealism remaining
in the background. And this, of course, made it easier
to represent idealism as an intellectual support for
traditional religion.
Gradually, however, the idea of the all-comprehensive
organic totality came more and more into the foreground.
Thus with Bradley the self was depicted as a mere 'appearance'
of the Absolute, as something which is not fully real
when regarded in its prima facie independence.
The MOQ agrees. Oneness, nothingness,
Quality and Absolute are all referent terms for the
same thing. And this explicit metaphysics of
the Absolute was understandably accompanied by a greater
emphasis on the State in the field of social philosophy.
While Herbert Spencer on the one hand was engaged in
asserting an opposition between the interests of the
free individual and those of the State, the idealists
were [176] engaged in
representing man as achieving true freedom through his
participation in the life of the totality. The MOQ supports intellectual freedom from the state but not
biological freedom.
In other words, we can see in the idealist
movement up to Bradley and Bosanquet the increasing
influence of Hegelianism. As has already been indicated,
the influence of Kant was never unmixed. For the critical
philosophy was seen as looking forward to metaphysical
idealism. But if we make allowances for this fact and
also for the fact that there were very considerable
differences between Bradley's theory of the Absolute
and that of Hegel, we can say that the change from emphasis
on the subject-object relationship to emphasis on the
idea of the organic totality represented a growing predominance
of the stimulative influence of Hegelianism over that
of the critical philosophy of Kant.
In the final phase of the idealist movement
emphasis on the finite self became once again prominent,
though it was a question this time of the active self,
the human person, rather than of the epistemological
subject. And this personal idealism was accompanied
by a reapproximation to theism, except in the notable
case of McTaggart, who depicted the Absolute as the
system of finite selves. But though this phase of personal
idealism is of some interest, inasmuch as it represents
the finite self's resistance to being swallowed up in
some impersonal Absolute, it belongs to a period when
idealism in Britain was giving way to a new current
of thought, associated with the names of G. E. Moore,
Bertrand Russell, and, subsequently, Ludwig Wittgenstein
.
As far as the general educated public
was concerned, the influence of German thought first
made itself felt in Great Britain through the writings
of poets and literary figures such as Coleridge and
Carlyle.
(i) Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
seems to have made his first acquaintance with philosophy
through the writings of Neo-Platonists, when he was
a schoolboy at Christ's Hospital. This early attraction
for the mystical philosophy of Plotinus was succeeded,
however, by a Voltairean phase, during which he was
for a short time a sceptic in regard to religion. Then
at Cambridge Coleridge developed a perhaps somewhat
surprising enthusiasm for David Hartley and his associationist
psychology. Indeed, Coleridge claimed to be [177]
more consistent than Hartley had been. For whereas Hartley,
while maintaining that psychical processes depend on
and are correlated with vibrations in the brain, had
not asserted the corporeality of thought, Coleridge
wrote to Southey in 1794 that he believed thought to
be corporeal, that is, motion. At the same time Coleridge
combined his enthusiasm for Hartley with religious faith.
And he came to think that the scientific understanding
is inadequate as a key to reality, and to speak of the
role of intuition and the importance of moral experience.
Intuition sometimes is an equivalent
of Dynamic Quality. However, it also a kind of biological
instinct. Since Western philosophy confuses these two,
the MOQ avoids the term. Later on he was to declare
that Hartley's system, in so far as it differs from
that of Aristotle, is untenable.
Coleridge's distinction between the scientific
understanding and the higher reason or, as the Germans
would put it, between Verstand (empirical
knowledge) and Vernunft (reasoned
knowledge) was one expression of his revolt against
the spirit of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.
He did not, of course, mean to imply that the scientific
and critical understanding should be rejected in the
name of a higher and intuitive reason. His point was
rather that the former is not an omnicompetent instrument
in the interpretation of reality, but that it needs
to be supplemented and balanced by the latter, namely
the intuitive reason. It can hardly be claimed that
Coleridge made his distinction between understanding
and reason crystal clear. But the general line of his
thought is sufficiently plain. In Aids to Reflection
(1825) he describes the understanding as the faculty
which judges according to sense. Its appropriate sphere
is the sensible world, and it reflects and generalizes
on the basis of sense-experience. Reason, however, is
the vehicle of ideas which are presupposed by all experience,
and in this sense it predetermines and governs experience.
It also perceives truths which are incapable of verification
in sense-experience, and it intuitively apprehends spiritual
realities. The MOQ denies this. Reason grows out of experience and is never
independent from it. Further, Coleridge identifies
it with the practical reason, which comprises the will
and the moral aspect of the human personality. J. S.
Mill is thus perfectly justified in saying in his famous
essay on Coleridge that the poet dissents from the 'Lockian'
view that all knowledge consists of generalizations
from experience, and that he claims for the reason,
as distinct from the understanding, the power to perceive
by direct intuition realities and truths which transcend
the reach of the senses. The MOQ disagrees.
[178] In
his development of this distinction Coleridge received
stimulus from the writings of Kant, which he began to
study shortly after his visit to Germany in 1798-9.
But he tends to speak as though Kant not only limited
the scope of the understanding to knowledge of phenomenal
reality but also envisaged an intuitive apprehension
of spiritual realities by means of the reason, whereas
in point of fact in attributing this power to the reason,
identified moreover with the practical reason, Coleridge
obviously parts company with the German philosopher.
He is on firmer ground when he claims an affinity with
Jacobi in maintaining that the relation between reason
and spiritual realities is analogous to that between
the eye and material objects.
Nobody, however, would wish to maintain
that Coleridge was a Kantian. It was a question of stimulus,
not of discipleship. And though he recognized his debt
to German thinkers especially to Kant, it is clear that
he regarded his own philosophy as being fundamentally
Platonic in inspiration. In Aids to Reflection he
asserted that every man is born either a Platonist or
an Aristotelian. I have heard that he got this from Goethe. Aristotle,
the great master of understanding, was unduly earthbound.
He began with the sensual, and never received that which
was above the senses, but by necessity, but as the only
remaining hypothesis. That is to say, Aristotle postulated
spiritual reality only as a last resort, when forced
to do so by the need of explaining physical phenomena.
Plato, however, sought the supersensible reality which
is revealed to us through reason and our moral will.
As for Kant, Coleridge sometimes describes him as belonging
spiritually to the ranks of the Aristotelians, while
at other times he emphasizes the metaphysical aspects
of Kant's thought and finds in him an approach to P]atonism.
In other words, Coleridge welcomes Kant's restriction
of the reach of understanding to phenomenal reality
and thcn tends to interpret his doctrine of reason in
the light of Platonism, which is itself interpreted
in the light of the philosophy of Plotinus.
These remarks should not be understood
as implying any contempt for Nature on Coleridge's part.
On the contrary, he disliked Fichte's 'boastful and
hyperstoic hostility to Nature, as lifeless, godless,
and altogether unholy'. And he [179]
expressed a warm sympathy with Schelling's philosophy
of Nature, as also with his system of transcendental
idealism, in which 'I first found a genial coincidence
with much that I had toiled out for myself, and a powerful
assistance in what I had yet to do'. Coleridge is indeed
at pains to reject the charge of plagiarism, and he
maintains that both he and Schelling have drunk at the
same springs, the writings of Kant, the philosophy of
Giordano Bruno and the speculations of Jakob Boehme.
However, the influence of Schelling seems to be sufliciently
evident in the line of thought which we can now briefly
outline.
'All knowledge rests on the coincidence
of an object with a subject.' But though subject and
object are united in the act of knowledge, we can ask
which has the priority. Are we to start with the object
and try to add to it the subject? Or are we to start
with the subject and try to find a passage to the object?
In other words, are we to take Nature as prior and try
to add to it thought or mind, or are we to take thought
as prior and try to deduce Nature? Coleridge answers
that we can do neither the one nor the other. The ultimate
principle is to be sought in the identity of subject
and object. This is strikingly
similar to the MOQ.
Where is this identity to be found? At
this point Coleridge is at the same door that Phaedrus
was at, but he doesn’t have the key of Quality with
him. So he answers: 'Only in the selfconsciousness
of a spirit is there the required identity of object
and of representation.' What
in the world is selfconsciousness of a spirit? But
if the spirit is originally the identity of subject
and object, it must in some sense dissolve this identity
in order to become conscious of itself as object. Ridiculous. Self-consciousness, therefore, cannot arise
except through an act of will, How
did will get in here? and 'freedom How
did freedom get in here? must be assumed as a
ground of philosophy, and can never be deduced
from it'. The spirit becomes a subject knowing itself
as object only through 'the act of constructing itself
objectively to itself'. This is the sort of nonsense that has inspired logical positivism.
This sounds as though Coleridge begins
by asking the sort of question which Schelling asks,
then supplies Schelling's answer, namely that we must
postulate an original identity of subject and object,
and finally switches to Fichte's idea of the ego as
constituting itself as subject and object by an original
act. The MOQ regards the ego as a construction of all four sets of
static patterns that is capable of responding to Dynamic
Quality. Independently of Dynamic Quality, the patterns
do not create anything or engage in any original acts.
But Coleridge has no intention of stopping short with
the ego as his ultimate principle, especially if we
mean by this the finite ego. Indeed, he ridicules the
'egoism' of Fichte. Instead, he insists that to arrive
at the absolute [180]
identity of subject and object, of the ideal and the
real, as the ultimate principle not only of human knowledge
but also of all existence we must 'elevate our conception
to the absolute self, the great eternal I am'. Coleridge
criticizes Descartes's Cogito, ergo sum and refers
to Kant's distinction between the empirical and the
transcendental ego. But he then tends to speak as though
the transcendental ego were the absolute I am that
I am of Exodus and the God in whom the finite self
is called to lose and find itself at the same time.
All this is obviously cloudy and imprecise.
Yes. But it is at any
rate clear that Coleridge opposes a spiritualistic interpretation
of the human self to materialism and phenomenalism.
And it is clearly this interpretation of the self which
in his view provides the basis for the claim that reason
can apprehend supersensible reality. Indeed, in his
essay on faith Coleridge describes faith as fidelity
to our own being in so far as our being is not and cannot
become an object of sense experience. Our moral vocation
demands the subordination of appetite and will to reason,
and it is reason which apprehends God as the identity
of will and reason, as the ground of our existence,
and as the infinite expression of the ideal which we
are seeking as moral beings. The MOQ agrees completely with the logical positivists that
it is not reason that does this. In other words,
Coleridge's outlook was essentially religious, and he
tried to bring together philosophy and religion. The MOQ is essentially philosophical. He may have tended,
as Mill notes, to turn Christian mysteries into philosophical
truths. But an important element in the mission of idealism,
as conceived by its more religious adherents, was precisely
that of giving a metaphysical basis to a Christian tradition
which seemed to be signally lacking in any philosophical
backbone. The MOQ supports religion
but does not support many Christian traditions.
In the field of social and political theory
Coleridge was conservative in the sense that he was
opposed to the iconoclasm of the radicals and desired
the preservation and actualization of the values inherent
in traditional institutions. At one time he was indeed
attracted, like Wordsworth and Southey, by the ideas
which inspired the French Revolution. But he came to
abandon the radicalism of his youth, though his subsequent
conservatism arose not from any hatred of change as
such but from a belief that the institutions created
by the national spirit in the course of its history
embodied [181] real values
which men should endeavour to realize. As Mill put it,
Bentham demanded 'the extinction of the institutions
and creeds which had hitherto existed', whereas Coleridge
demanded 'that they be made a reality'. The MOQ supports both conservatism and liberalism at the same
time. Freedom and order are contradictory but both are
necessary at the same time.
(ii) Thomas Carlyle ( 1795-1881 ) belonged
to a later generation than that of Coleridge; but he
was considerably less systematic in the presentation
of his philosophical ideas, and there are doubtless
very many people today who find the turbulent prose
of Sartor Resartus quite unreadable. However,
he was one of the channels through which German thought
and literature were brought to the attention of the
British public.
Carlyle's first reaction to German philosophy
was not exactly favourable, and he made fun both of
Kant's obscurity and of the pretensions of Coleridge.
But in his hatred of materialism, hedonism and utilitarianism
he came to see in Kant the brilliant foe of the Enlightenment
and of its derivative movements. Thus in his essay on
the State of German Literature (1827) he praised
Kant for starting from within and proceeding outwards
instead of pursuing the Lockian path of starting with
sense-experience and trying to build a philosophy on
this basis. The MOQ is Lockean. The Kantian, according to Carlyle,
sees that fundamental truths are apprehended by intuition
in man's inmost nature. In other words, Carlyle ranges
himself with Coleridge in using Kant's restriction of
the power and scope of the understanding as a foundation
for asserting the power of reason to apprehend intuitively
basic truths and spiritual realities.
Characteristic of Carlyle was his vivid
sense of the mystery of the world and of its nature
as an appearance of, or veil before, supersensible reality.
In the State of German Literature he asserted
that the ultimate aim of philosophy is to interpret
phenomena or appearances, to proceed from the symbol
to the reality symbolized. And this point of view found
expression in Sartor Resartus, under the label
of the philosophy of clothes. It can be applied to man,
the microcosm. 'To the eye of vulgar Logic what is man?
An omnivorous Biped that wears Breeches. To the eye
of Pure Reason what is he? A Soul, a Spirit, and divine
Apparition.... Deep-hidden is he under that strange
Garment.' And the [182]
analogy is applicable also to the macrocosm, the world
in general. For the world is, as Goethe divined, 'the
living visible Garment of God'.
In the State of German Literature
Carlyle explicitly connects his philosophy of symbolism
with Fichte, who is regarded as having interpreted the
visible universe as the symbol and sensible manifestation
of an all-pervading divine Idea, the apprehension of
which is the condition of all genuine virtue and freedom.
And there is indeed no great difficulty in understanding
Carlyle's predilection for Fichte. For seeing as he
does, human life and history as a constant struggle
between light and darkness, God and the devil, a struggle
in which every man is called to play a part and to make
an all important choice, he naturally feels an attraction
for Fichte's moral earnestness and for his view of Nature
as being simply the field in which man works out his
moral vocation, the field of obstacles, so to speak
which man has to overcome in the process of attaining
his ideal end.
This outlook helps to explain Carlyle's
concern with the hero, as manifested in his 1840 lectures
On Heroes, HeroWorship and the Heroic in History.
Over against materialism and what he calls profit-and-loss
philosophy he sets the ideas of heroism, moral vocation
and personal loyalty. Indeed, he is prepared to assert
that 'the life-breath of all society [is] but an effluence
of Hero-worship, submissive admiration for the truly
great. Society is founded on Hero-worship.' The MOQ sees heroism as a rather low-level social quality that
can be without intellectual and Dynamic merit. Soldiers
are often considered heroic when all they have done
is sit where an artillery shell came down. Again,
'Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished
in the world, is at bottom the History of the Great
Men who have worked here'. That
is a defect in the writing of history.
In his insistence on the role of history's
'great men' Carlyle resembles Hegel's and anticipates
Nietzsche in some aspects, though hero-worship in the
political field is an idea which we are likely to regard
with mixed feelings nowadays. However, it is clear that
what especially attracted Carlyle in his heroes was
their earnestness and self-devotion and their freedom
from a morality based on the hedonistic calculus. For
example, while aware of Rousseau's shortcomings and
faults of character, which made him 'a sadly contracted
Hero' Carlyle insists that this unlikely candidate
for the title possessed 'the first and chief characteristic
of a Hero: he is [183] heartily
in earnest. In earnest, if ever man was; as none
of these French Philosophes were.'
(iii) In spite of the fact that both men
delivered lectures it would be idle to look either to
Coleridge or Carlyle for a systematic development of
idealism. For a pioneer in this field we have to turn
rather to James Frederick Ferrier (1808-64), who occupied
the chair of moral philosophy in the University of St.
Andrews from 1845 until the year of his death, and who
made a great point of systematic procedure in philosophy.
In 1838-9 Ferrier contributed a series
of articles to Blackwood's Magazine, which was
published with the title Introduction to the Philosophy
of Consciousness. In 1854 he published his
main work, The Institutes of Metaphysics,
which is remarkable for the way in which the author
develops his doctrine in a series of propositions, each
of which, with the exception of the first fundamental
proposition, is supposed to follow with logical rigour
from its predecessor. In 1856 he published Scottish
Philosophy, while his Lectures on Greek Philosophy
and Other Philosophical Remains appeared posthumously
in 1866.
Ferrier claimed that his philosophy was
Scottish to the core. But this does not mean that he
regarded himself as an adherent of the Scottish philosophy
of common sense. On the contrary, he vigorously attacked
Reid and his followers. In the first place a philosopher
should not appeal to a multitude of undemonstrated principles,
but should employ the deductive method which is essential
to metaphysics and not an optional expository device.
In the second place the Scottish philosophers of common
sense tended to confuse metaphysics with psychology,
trying to solve philosophical problems by psychological
reflections, instead of by rigorous logical reasoning.
As for Sir William Hamilton, his agnosticism about the
Absolute was quite misplaced.
When Ferrier said that his philosophy
was Scottish to the core, he meant that he had not borrowed
it from the Germans. Though his system was not uncommonly
regarded as Hegelian, he claimed that he had never been
able to understand Hegel. Indeed, he expressed a doubt
whether the German philosopher had been able to understand
himself. [184] In any
case Hegel starts with Being, whereas his own system
took knowledge as its point of departure. While
the MOQ starts with experience.
Ferrier's first move is to look for the
absolute starting-point of metaphysics in a proposition
which states the one invariable and essential feature
in all knowledge, and which cannot be denied without
contradiction. For the MOQ this
is, “Some things are better than others.” Every infant
knows this before he learns his first word. This
is that 'along with whatever any intelligence knows,
it must, as the ground or condition of its knowledge,
have some cognizance of itself'. Already
the subject-object python has him in its coils.
The object of knowledge is a variable factor. But I
cannot know anything without knowing that I know. To
deny this is to talk nonsense. To assert it is to admit
that there is no knowledge without self- consciousness,
without some awareness of the self.
It follows from this, Ferrier argues,
that nothing can be known except in relation to a subject,
a self. In other words, the object of knowledge is essentially
object-for-a-subject. And Ferrier draws the conclusion
that nothing is thinkable except in relation to a subject.
From this it follows that the material universe is unthinkable
as existing without any relation to subject.
The critic might be inclined to comment
that Ferrier is really saying no more than that I cannot
think of the universe without thinking of it, or know
it without knowing it. If anything more is being said,
if, in particular, a transition is being made from an
epistemological point to the assertion of an ontological
relation, a solipsistic conclusion seems to follow,
namely that the existence of the material world is unthinkable
except as dependent on myself as subject. Yes,
this is the reward of SOM.
Ferrier, however, wishes to maintain two
propositions. First, we cannot think of the universe
as 'dissociated from every me. You cannot perform
the abstraction.' Secondly, each of us can dissociate
the universe from himself in particular. And from these
two propositions it follows that though 'each of us
can unyoke the universe (so to speak) from himself,
he can do this only by yoking it on, in thought, to
some other self'. This is an essential move for Ferrier
to make, because he wishes to argue that the universe
is unthinkable except as existing in synthesis with
the divine mind.
The first section of the Institutes
of Metaphysics thus pur-
[185] ports to show that the absolute element
in knowledge is the synthesis of subject and object.
But Ferrier does not proceed at once to his final conclusion.
Instead, he devotes the second section to 'agnoiology',
the theory of 'ignorance'. We can be said to be in a
state of nescience in regard to the contradictions of
necessarily true propositions. But this is obviously
no sign of imperfection in our minds. As for ignorance,
we cannot properly be said to be ignorant except of
what is in principle knowable. Hence we cannot be ignorant
of, for example, matter 'in itself' (without relation
to a subject). For this is unthinkable and unknowable.
Further, if we assume that we are ignorant of the Absolute,
it follows that the Absolute is knowable. Hence Hamilton's
agnosticism is untenable.
But what is the Absolute or, as Ferrier
expresses it, Absolute Existence? It cannot be either
matter per se or mind per se. For neither
is thinkable. It must be, therefore, the synthesis of
subject and object. There is, however, only one such
synthesis which is necessary. For though the existence
of a universe is not conceivable except as object-for-a-subject,
we have already seen that the universe can be unyoked
or dissociated from any given finite subject. Hence
'there is one, but only one, Absolute Existence which
is strictly necessary; and that existence is
a supreme, and infinite, and everlasting Mind in synthesis
with all things'.
By way of comment it is not inappropriate
to draw attention to the rather obvious fact, that the
statement 'there can be no subject without an object
and no object without a subject' is analytically true,
if the terms 'subject' and 'object' are understood in
their epistemological senses. It is also true that no
material thing can be conceived except as object-for-a-subject,
if we mean by this that no material thing can be conceived
except by constituting it ('intentionally', as the phenomenologists
would say) as an object. But this does not seem to amount
to much more than saying that a thing cannot be thought
of unless it is thought of. And from this it does not
follow that a thing cannot exist unless it is thought
of. Ferrier could retort, of course, that we cannot
intelligibly speak of a thing as existing independently
of being conceived. For by the mere fact that we speak
of it, we conceive [186] it.
If I try to think of material thing X as existing outside
the subject-object relationship, my effort is defeated
by the very fact that I am thinking of X. In this case,
however, the thing seems to be irrevocably yoked, as
Ferrier puts it, to me as subject. And how can I possibly
unyoke it? If I try to unyoke it from myself and yoke
it to some other subject, whether finite or infinite,
does not this other subject, on Ferrier's premises,
become object-for-a-subject, the subject in question
being myself?
It is not my intention to suggest that
in point of fact the material universe could exist independently
of God. The point is rather that the conclusion that
it cannot so exist does not really follow from Ferrier's
epistemological premises. The conclusion which does
seem to follow is solipsism. And Ferrier escapes from
this conclusion only by an appeal to common sense and
to our knowledge of historical facts. That is to say,
as I cannot seriously suppose that the material universe
is simply object for me as subject, I must postulate
an eternal, infinite subject, God. But on Ferrier's
premises it appears to follow that God Himself, as thought
by me, must be object-for-a-subject, the subject being
myself. Ferrier’s philosophy
demonstrates how far from some idealism the MOQ is.
(iv) Among Ferrier's contemporaries John
Grote (1813-66), brother of the historian, deserves
mention. Professor of moral philosophy at Cambridge
from 1855 until 1866, he published the first part of
Exploratio philosophica in 1865. The second part
appeared posthumously in 1900 His Examination of
Utilitarian Philosophy (1870) and A Treatise
on the Moral Ideals (1876) were also published after
his death. It is true that nowadays Grote is even less
known than Ferrier, but his criticism of phenomenalism
and of hedonistic utilitarianism is not without value.
Grote's critique of phenomenalism can
be illustrated in this way. One of the main features
of positivistic phenomenalism is that it first reduces
the object of knowledge to a series of phenomena and
then proceeds to apply a similar reductive analysis
to the subject, the ego or self. In effect, therefore,
the subject is reduced to its own object. The MOQ avoids this reduction. Or, if preferred, subject
and object are both reduced to phenomena which are assumed
to be the basic reality, the ultimate entities out of
which selves and physical objects can be reconstructed
by [187] thought. But
this reduction of the self or subject can be shown to
be untenable. In the first place talk about phenomena
is not intelligible except in relation to consciousness.
But phenomena exist independently of talk about them.
We are getting into the old logical positivist fallacy
here of saying, “If we cannot talk about it it must
not exist.” For that which appears, appears to
a subject, within the ambit, so to speak, of consciousness.
We cannot go behind consciousness; If
by consciousness he means intellectual consciousness
the answer is, “Yes, we can. Value goes behind consciousness.
It exists where there is no intellectual consciousness.”
and analysis of it shows that it essentially
involves the subject-object relationship. In primitive
consciousness subject and object are virtually or confusedly
present; In the pre-intellectual
consciousness of an infant value is present and there
are no subjects and objects and they are progressively
distinguished in the development of consciousness until
there arises an explicit awareness of a world of objects
on the one hand and of a self or subject on the other,
this awareness of the self being developed especially
by the experience of effort. As, therefore, the subject
is present from the start as one of the essential poles
even in primitive consciousness, No
it isn’t it cannot be legitimately reduced to
the object, to phenomena. Yes
it can. At the same time reflection on the essential
structure of consciousness shows that we are not presented
with a self-enclosed ego from which we have to find
a bridge, as in the philosophy of Descartes, to the
non-ego. The MOQ agrees with
this last sentence.
In the second place it is important to
notice the way in which the phenomenalists overlook
the active role of the subject in the construction of
an articulated universe. The subject or self is characterized
by teleological activity; it has ends. It is the preintellectual value, not the subject, that does
these things.And in pursuit of its ends it constructs
unities among phenomena, not in the sense that it imposes
a priori forms on a mass of unrelated, chaotic
data, but rather in the sense that it builds up its
world in an experimental way by a process of auto-correction.
Again, It is the preintellectual
value, not the subject, that does these things.
On this count too, therefore, namely the active role
of the self in the construction of the world of objects,
it is clear that it cannot be reduced to a series of
phenomena, its own immediate objects. Yes,
it can, and these phenomena are not its objects. They
are it’s source.
In the sphere of moral philosophy Grote
was strongly opposed to both egoistic hedonism and utilitarianism.
The MOQ says hedonism is the
intellectual advocacy of biological quality, utilitarianism
is the intellectual advocacy of social quality. He
did not object to them for taking into account man's
sensibility and his search for happiness. On the contrary,
Grote himself admitted the science of happiness, 'eudaemonics'
as he called it, as a part of ethics. What he objected
to was an exclusive concentration on the search for
pleasure and a consequent neglect of other aspects of
the human personality, especially
[188] man's capacity for conceiving and pursuing
ideals which transcend the search for pleasure and may
demand self-sacrifice. Hence to 'eudaemonics' he added
'aretaics', the science of virtue. Notice
the root of arete here. And he insisted that
the moral task is to achieve the union of the lower
and higher elements of man's nature in the service of
moral ideals. For our actions become moral when they
pass from the sphere of the merely spontaneous, as in
following the impulse to pleasure, into the sphere of
the deliberate and voluntary, impulse supplying the
dynamic element and intellectually-conceived principles
and ideals the regulative element. The
MOQ agrees strongly agrees here, with the exception
that it is the Dynamic element that supplies the impulse.
Obviously, Grote's attack on utilitarianism
as neglecting the higher aspects of man through an exclusive
concentration on the search for pleasure was more applicable
to Benthamite hedonism than to J. S. Mill's revised
version of utilitarianism. But in any case it was a
question not so much of suggesting that a utilitarian
philosopher could not have moral ideals as of maintaining
that the utilitarian ethics could not provide an adequate
theoretical framework for such ideals. Grote's main
point was that this could be provided only by a radical
revision of the concept of man which Bentham inherited
from writers such as Helvétius. Hedonism, in Grote's
opinion, could not account for the consciousness of
obligation. For this arises when man, conceiving moral
ideals, feels the need of subordinating his lower to
his higher nature. The MOQ
agrees.
(v) We can reasonably see a connection
between the idealists' perception of the inadequacy
of the Benthamite view of human nature and the revival
of interest in Greek philosophy which occurred in the
universities, especially at Oxford, in the course of
the nineteenth century. We have already seen that Coleridge
regarded his philosophy as being fundamentally Platonic
in inspiration and character. But the renewal of Platonic
studies at Oxford can be associated in particular with
the name of Benjamin Jowett (1817-93), who became a
Fellow of Balliol College in 1838 and occupied the chair
of Greek from 1855 to 1893. The defects in his famous
translation of Plato's Dialogues are irrelevant
here. Particularly his confusion of arete and virtue. The point
is that in the course of his long teaching career he
contributed powerfully to a revival of interest in Greek
thought. And it is not without significance that T.
H. Green [189] and E.
Caird, both prominent in the idealist movement, were
at one time his pupils. Interest in Plato and Aristotle
naturally tended to turn their minds away from hedonism
and utilitarianism towards an ethics of self-perfection,
based on a theory of human nature within a metaphysical
framework.
The revival of interest in Greek thought
was accompanied by a growing appreciation of German
idealist philosophy. Jowett himself was interested in
the latter, particularly in the thought of Hegel; and
he helped to stimulate the study of German idealism
at Oxford. The first large-scale attempt, however, to
elucidate what Ferrier had considered to be the scarcely
intelligible profundities of Hegel was made by the Scotsman,
James Hutchison Stirling (1820-1909), in his two-volume
work The Secret of Hegel, which appeared in 1865
.
Stirling developed an enthusiasm for Hegel
during a visit to Germany, especially during a stay
at Heidelberg in 1856; and the result was The Secret
of Hegel. In spite of the comment that if the author
knew the secret of Hegel, he kept it successfully to
himself, the book marked the beginning of the serious
study of Hegelianism in Great Britain. In Stirling's
view Hume's philosophy was the culmination of the Enlightenment,
while Kant, who took over what was valuable in Hume's
thought and used it in the development of a new line
of reflection, fulfilled and at the same time overcame
and transcended the Enlightenment. While, however, Kant
laid the foundations of idealism, it was Hegel who built
and completed the edifice. And to understand the secret
of Hegel is to understand how he made explicit the doctrine
of the concrete universal, which was implicit in the
critical philosophy of Kant.
It is noteworthy that Stirling regarded
Hegel not only as standing to modern philosophy in the
relation in which Aristotle stood to preceding Greek
thought but also as the great intellectual champion
of the Christian religion. He doubtless attributed to
Hegel too high a degree of theological orthodoxy; but
his attitude serves to illustrate the religious interest
which characterized the idealist movement before Bradley.
According to Stirling, Hegel was concerned with proving,
among other things, the immortality of the soul.
In the MOQ there is no soul, except as a literary expression.
And though [190] there
is little evidence that Hegel felt much interest in
this matter, Stirling's interpretation can be seen as
representing the emphasis placed by the earlier idealists
on the finite spiritual self, an emphasis which harmonized
with their tendency to retain a more or less theistic
outlook. The MOQ is atheistic.
[191]Chapter Seven
THE DEVELOPMENT OF IDEALISM
T. H. Green's attitude to British empiricism
and to German thought; Green's doctrine of the
eternal subject, with some critical comments;
The ethical and political theory of Green; E. Caird
and the unity underlying the distinction
between subject and object; J. Caird and the philosophy
of religion; W. Wallace and D. G. Ritchie.
1. Philosophers are not infrequently more
convincing when they are engaged in criticizing the
views of other philosophers than when they are expounding
their own doctrines. And this perhaps somewhat cynical
remark seems to be applicable to Thomas Hill Green (1836-82),
Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, and White's professor
of moral philosophy in that university from 1878 to
the year of his death. In his Introductions to Hume's
Treatise of Human Nature, which he published in
1874 for the Green and Grose edition of Hume, he made
an impressive broadside attack on British empiricism.
But his own idealist system is no less open to criticism
than the views against which he raised objections.
From Locke onwards, according to Green,
empiricists have assumed that it is the philosopher's
business to reduce our knowledge to its primitive elements,
to the original data, and then to reconstruct the world
of ordinary experience out of these atomic data. Apart,
however, from the fact that no satisfactory explanation
has ever been offered of the way in which the mind can
go behind the subject-object relationship and discover
the primitive data out of which both minds and physical
objects are supposed to be constructed, The
MOQ is precisely a satisfactory explanation of
the way in which the mind can go behind the subject-object
relationship and discover the primitive data out of
which both minds and physical objects are constructed,the
empiricist programme lands us in an impasse. On the
one hand, to construct the world of minds and physical
objects the mind has to relate the primitive atomic
data, discrete phenomena. In other words, it has to
exercise activity. On the other hand,
[192] the mind's activity is inexplicable on
empiricist principles. It is
explicable when value is brought into the picture.
For it is itself reduced to a series of phenomena. And
how can it construct itself? Value
constructs it. Further, though empiricism professes
to account for human knowledge, it does not in fact
do anything of the kind. When value is included as the source of empirical phenomena it does do so.
For the world of ordinary experience is interpreted
as a mental construction out of discrete impressions;
and we have no way of knowing that the construction
represents objective reality at all. Objective
reality is the most valued intellectual construction.
In other words, a consistent empiricism leads inevitably
to scepticism. Not when value
is included.
Hume himself, as Green sees him, was an
outstanding thinker who discarded compromise and carried
the principles of empiricism to their logical conclusion.
'Adopting the premises and method of Locke, he cleared
them of all illogical adaptations to popular belief,
and experimented with them on the basis of professed
knowledge.... As the result of the experiment, the method,
which began with professing to explain knowledge, showed
knowledge to be impossible.' Knowledge
is a set of static patterns of value. 'Hume himself
was perfectly cognizant of this result, but his successors
in England and Scotland would seem so far to have been
unable to look it in the face.' The MOQ faces it and overcomes it.
Some philosophers after Hume, and here
Green is evidently referring to the Scottish philosophers
of common sense, have thrust their heads back into the
thicket of uncriticized belief. Others have gone on
developing Hume's theory of the association of ideas,
apparently oblivious of the fact that Hume himself had
shown the insufficiency of the principle of association
to account for anything more than natural or quasi-instinctive
belief. In other words, Hume represented both the culmination
and the bankruptcy of empiricism. This
bankruptcy exists only in subject-object empiricism.
It does not exist in an empiricism that includes value
as the source of empirical knowledge. And the
torch of inquiry 'was transferred to a more vigorous
line in Germany'.
Kant, that is to say, was the spiritual
successor of Hume. 'Thus the Treatise of Human Nature
and the Critique of Pure Reason, taken together,
form the real bridge between the old world of philosophy
and the new. They are the essential "Propaedeutik"
without which no one is a qualified student of modern
philosophy.' It does not follow, however, that we can
remain in the philosophy of Kant. For Kant looks forward
to Hegel or at any rate to something resembling Hegelianism.
Green agrees with Stirling that Hegel developed
[193] the philosophy of Kant in the right direction;
but he is not prepared to say that Hegel's system as
it stands is satisfactory. It is all very well for the
Sundays of speculation, as Green puts it; but it is
more difficult to accept on the weekdays of ordinary
thought. There is need for reconciling the judgments
of speculative philosophy with our ordinary judgments
about matters of fact and with the sciences. Hegelianism,
however, if taken as it stands, cannot perform this
task of synthesizing different tendencies and points
of view in contemporary thought. The work has to be
done over again.
In point of fact the name of Hegel does
not loom large in the writings of Green. The name of
Kant is far more prominent. But Green maintained that
by reading Hume in the light of Leibniz and Leibniz
in the light of Hume, Kant was able to free himself
from their respective presuppositions. And we can justifiably
say that though Green derived a great deal of stimulus
from Kant, he read him in the light of his conviction
that the critical philosophy needed some such development,
though not precisely the same, as that which it actually
received at the hands of the German metaphysical idealists,
and of Hegel in particular.
In the introduction to his Prolegomena
to Ethics, which was published posthumously in 1883,
Green refers to the temptation to treat ethics as though
it were a branch of natural science. This temptation
is indeed understandable. For growth in historical knowledge
and the development of theories of evolution suggest
the possibility of giving a purely naturalistic and
genetic explanation of the phenomena of the moral life.
The MOQ gives a purely naturalistic
and genetic explanation of the phenomena of the moral
life. But what becomes then of ethics considered
as a normative science? The MOQ is normative. The answer is that the philosopher
who 'has the courage of his principles, having reduced
the speculative part of them [our ethical systems] to
a natural science, must abolish the practical or preceptive
part altogether'.
Quality is the
most practical preception we have. The fact,
however, that the reduction of ethics to a branch of
natural science involves the abolition of ethics as
a normative science should make us reconsider the presuppositions
or conditions of moral knowledge and activity. This is what the MOQ does. Is man merely a child of Nature?
Yes. Quality is nature.
Or is there in him a spiritual principle which makes
knowledge possible, whether it be knowledge of Nature
or moral knowledge? The MOQ
says there is no spiritual principle in man that makes
knowledge possible. Nature does the whole job.
[194] Green thus finds it necessary to start
his inquiry into morals with a metaphysics of knowledge.
And he argues in the first place that even if we were
to decide in favour of the materialists all those questions
about particular facts which have formed the subject
of debate between them and the spiritualists, the possibility
of our explaining the facts at all still remain to be
accounted for. 'We shall still be logically bound to
admit that in a man who can know a Nature—for whom there
is a "cosmos of experience"—there is a principle
which is not natural and which cannot without a UOTEpOV
'.TpÔTEpOV be explained as we explain the facts of nature.'
The MOQ says there is a principle
and it is natural and it can explain everything.
According to Green, to say that a thing
is real is to say that it is a member in a system of
relations, the order of Nature. The
MOQ says experience is reality. It doesn’t need a system
of relations to be real. But awareness or knowledge
of a series of related events cannot itself be a series
of events. This is what Green
gets himself into when he defines reality in this way.
Nor can it be a natural development out of such
a series. In other words, the mind as an active synthesizing
principle is irreducible to the factors which it synthesizes.
But Quality is not a factor
synthesized by the mind. Mind is a set of intellectual
patterns synthesized by Quality. True, the empirical
ego belongs to the order of Nature. But my awareness
of myself as an empirical ego manifests the activity
of a principle which transcends that order. Now
he is heading in the direction of the MOQ. In
fine, 'an understanding—for that term seems as fit as
any other to denote the principle of consciousness in
question—irreducible to anything else, "makes nature"
for us, in the sense of enabling us to conceive that
there is such a thing'. Yes,
but Quality is a better term for what he is talking
about than “understanding.” Understanding is an intellectual
activity. Pure, immediate, “artistic” valuation is
not.
We have just seen that for Green a thing
is real in virtue of its membership in a system of related
phenomena. At the same time he holds that 'related appearances
are impossible apart from the action of an intelligence'.
Nature is thus made by the synthesizing activity of
a mind. It is obvious, however, that we cannot seriously
suppose that Nature, as the system of related phenomena,
is simply the product of the synthesizing activity of
any given finite mind. Though, therefore, it can be
said that each finite mind constitutes Nature in so
far as it conceives the system of relations, we must
also assume that there is a single spiritual principle,
There is that word “spiritual”
again. Whenever I hear it I smell a rat. an eternal
consciousness, which ultimately constitutes or produces
Nature.
From this it follows that we must conceive
the finite mind as participating in the life of an eternal
consciousness or in- [195] telligence
which 'partially and gradually reproduces itself in
us, communicating piece-meal, but in inseparable correlation,
understanding and the facts understood, experience and
the experienced world'. This amounts to saying that
God gradually reproduces his own knowledge in the finite
mind. Here comes the rat. And,
if this is the case, what are we to say about the empirical
facts relating to the origin and growth of knowledge?
For these hardly suggest that our knowledge is imposed
by God. Green's answer is that God reproduces his Here,
with the word “his,” is the anthropomorphism of the
rat. All we need now is a priest to collect money for
the rat and pocket it for himself. I really have no
use for these smart-talking theists. They destroy religion.
own knowledge in the finite mind by making use,
so to speak, of the sentient life of the human organism
and of its response to stimuli. There are thus two aspects
to human consciousness. There is the empirical aspect,
under which our consciousness appears to consist 'in
successive modifications of the animal organism'. And
there is the metaphysical aspect, under which this organism
is seen as gradually becoming 'the vehicle of an eternally
complete consciousness'.
Green thus shares with the earlier idealists
the tendency to choose an epistemological point of departure,
the subject-object relationship. Under the influence
of Kant, however, he depicts the subject as actively
synthesizing the manifold of phenomena, as constituting
the order of Nature by relating appearances or phenomena.
This process of synthesis is a gradual process which
develops through the history of the human race towards
an ideal term. And we can thus conceive the total process
as an activity of one spiritual !!!!! principle which lives and acts in and through finite
minds. In other words, Kant's idea of the synthesizing
activity of the mind leads us to the Hegelian concept
of infinite Spirit. Now he has capitalized it.
At the same time Green's religious interests
militate against any reduction of infinite Spirit to
the lives of finite spirits considered simply collectively.
It is true that he wishes to avoid what he regards as
one of the main defects of traditional theism, namely
the representation of God as a Being over against the
world and the finite spirit. Hence he depicts the spiritual
life of man as a participation in the divine life. But
he also wishes to avoid using the word 'God' simply
as a label either for the spiritual life of man considered
universally, as something which develops in the course
of the evolution of human culture, or for the ideal
of complete knowl [196] edge,
an ideal which does not yet exist but towards which
human knowledge progressively approximates. He does
indeed speak of the human spirit as 'identical' with
God; but he adds, 'in the sense that He is all
which the human spirit is capable of becoming'. God
is the infinite eternal subject; and His complete knowledge
is reproduced progressively in the finite subject in
dependence, from the empirical point of view, on the
modifications of the human organism. Thus
we make the slow journey from reason to Bible-babble.
These are the people who create logical positivists
as a reaction.
If we ask why God acts in this way, Green
implies that no answer can be given. 'The old question,
why God made the world, has never been answered, nor
will be. We know not why the world should be; we only
know that there it is. In like manner we know not why
the eternal subject of that world should reproduce itself,
through certain processes of the world, as the spirit
of mankind, or as the particular self of this or that
man in whom the spirit of mankind operates. We can only
say that, upon the best analysis we can make of our
experience, it seems that so it does.' The
reason he “knows not why” is that he has abandoned intelligence
for religious conformity. Actually Green is saying
things that are very close to the MOQ and it is angering
to see him curtseying in this way to medieval dogmatic
superstition. The selling out of intellectual truth
to the social icons of organized religion is seen by
the MOQ as an evil act.
In Green's retention of the idea of an
eternal subject which 'reproduces itself' in finite
subjects and therefore can not be simply identified
with them it is not unreasonable to see the operation
of a religious interest, a concern with the idea of
a God in whom we live and move and have our being. But
this is certainly not the explicit or formal reason
for postulating an eternal subject. For it is explicitly
postulated as the ultimate synthesizing agent in constituting
the system of Nature. And in making this postulate Green
seems to lay himself open to the same sort of objection
that we brought against Ferrier. For if it is once assumed,
at least for the sake of argument, that the order of
Nature is constituted by the synthesizing or relating
activity of intelligence, it is obvious that I cannot
attribute this order to an eternal intelligence or subject
unless I have myself first conceived, and so constituted,
it. And it then becomes difficult to see how, in Ferrier's
terminology, I can unyoke the conceived system of relations
from the synthesizing activity of my own mind and yoke
it on to any other subject, eternal or otherwise. Right.
But the MOQ avoids all these problems.
It may be objected that this line of criticism,
though possibly valid in the case of Ferrier, is irrelevant
in that of Green. For Green sees the individual finite
subject as par [197] ticipating
in a general spiritual life, the spiritual life of humanity,
which progressively synthesizes phenomena in its advance
towards the ideal goal of complete knowledge, a knowledge
which would be itself the constituted order of Nature.
Hence there is no question of unyoking my synthesis
from myself and yoking it to any other spirit. My synthesizing
activity is simply a moment in that of the human race
as a whole or of the one spiritual principle which lives
in and through the multiplicity of finite subjects.
This could be “quality” except
for that word “spiritual.” Remember that people were
burned at the stake to release their “spirits” from
their bodies. Quality inheres in high-priced sausages.
Spirit does not.
In this case, however, what becomes of
Green's eternal subject? If we wish to represent, say,
the advancing scientific knowledge of mankind as a life
in which all scientists participate and which moves
towards an ideal goal, there is, of course, no question
of 'unyoking' and 'yoking'. But a concept of this sort
does not by itself call for the introduction of any
eternal subject which reproduces its complete knowledge
in a piecemeal manner in finite minds.
Further, how precisely, in Green's philosophy,
are we to conceive the relation of Nature to the eternal
subject or intelligence? Let us assume that the constitutive
activity of intelligence consists in relating or synthesizing.
Now if God can properly be said to create Nature, it
seems to follow that Nature is reducible to a system
of relations without terms. And this is a somewhat perplexing
notion. If, however, the eternal subject only introduces
relations, so to speak, between phenomena, we seem to
be presented with a picture similar to that painted
by Plato in the Timaeus, in the sense, that is
to say, that the eternal subject or intelligence would
bring order out of disorder rather than create the whole
of Nature out of nothing. In any case, though it may
be possible to conceive a divine intelligence as creating
the world by thinking it, terms such as 'eternal subject'
and 'eternal consciousness' necessarily suggest a correlative
eternal object. And this would mean an absolutization
of the subject-object relationship, similar to that
of Ferrier. All these objections occur because Green is overburdening the
word “conscious.” When you use “quality” they vanish.
Objections of this sort may appear to
be niggling and to indicate an inability to appreciate
Green's general vision of an eternal consciousness in
the life of which we all participate. But the objections
serve at any rate the useful purpose of drawing attention
to the fact that Green's often acute
[198] criticism of other philosophers is combined
with that rather vague and woolly speculation which
has done so much to bring metaphysical idealism into
disrepute.
3. In his moral theory Green stands in
the tradition of Plato and Aristotle, in the sense that
for him the concept of good is primary, not that of
obligation. Sounds like the MOQ. In particular, his
idea of the good for man as consisting in the full actualization
of the potentialities of the human person in an harmonious
and unified state of being recalls the ethics of Aristotle.
Green does indeed speak of 'self-satisfaction' as the
end of moral conduct, but he makes it clear that self-satisfaction
signifies for him self-realization rather than pleasure.
He is getting very close to “quality.” We must distinguish
between 'the quest for self-satisfaction which all moral
activity is rightly held to be, and the quest for pleasure
which morally good activity is not'. This does not mean
that pleasure is excluded from the good for man. But
the harmonious and integrated actualization of the human
person's potentialities cannot be identified with the
search for pleasure. For the moral agent is a spiritual
subject, not simply a sensitive organism. And in any
case pleasure is a concomitant of the actualization
of one's powers rather than this actualization itself.
Now it is certain that it is only through
action that a man can realize himself, in the sense
of actualizing his potentialities and developing his
personality towards the ideal state of harmonious integration
of his powers. Zen argues that
it is through stillness, not action, that a man can
realize himself, in the sense of actualizing his potentialities
and developing his personality towards the ideal state
of harmonious integration of his powers. And
it is also obvious that every human act, in the proper
sense of the term, is motivated. It is performed in
view of some immediate end or goal. Quality. But it is arguable that a man's motives are
determined by his existing character, in conjunction
with other circumstances, and that character is itself
the result of empirical causes. static quality. In this case are not a man's actions
determined in such a way that what he will be depends
on what he is, what he is depending in turn on circumstances
other than his free choice? True, circumstances vary;
but the ways in which men react to varying circumstances
seem to be determined. statically
And if all a man's acts are determined, is there any
room for an ethical theory which sets up a certain ideal
of human personality as that which we ought to strive
to realize through our actions? Yes,
Dynamic Quality. [199]
Green is quite prepared to concede to the determinists
a good deal of the ground on which they base their case.
But at the same time he tries to take the sting out
of these concessions. The MOQ needs to concede nothing. 'The propositions,
current among "determinists", that a man's
action is the joint result of his character and circumstances
, is true enough in a certain sense, and , in that sense,
is quite compatible with an assertion of human freedom.'
In Green's view, it is not a necessary condition for
the proper use of the word 'freedom' that a man should
be able to do or to become anything whatsoever. To justify
our describing a man's actions as free, it is sufficient
that they should be his own, in the sense that he is
truly the author of them. And if a man's action follows
from his character, if, that is to say, he responds
to a situation which calls for action in a certain way
because he is a certain sort of man, the action is his
own; he, and nobody else, is the responsible author
of it. The freedom-order issue
is handled much more simply and precisely in the MOQ
by the static-Dynamic split.
In defending this interpretation of freedom
Green lays emphasis on self-consciousness. In the history
of any man there is a succession of natural empirical
factors of one kind or another, natural impulses for
example, which the determinist regards as exercising
a decisive influence on the man's conduct. Green argues,
however, that such factors become morally relevant only
when they are assumed, as it were, by the self-conscious
subject, that is, when they are taken up into the unity
of self-consciousness and turned into motives. They
then become internal principles of action; and, as such,
they are principles of free action.
This theory, which is in some respects
reminiscent of Schelling's theory of freedom, is perhaps
hardly crystal clear. I would
say so. But it is clear at least that Green
wishes to admit all the empirical data to which the
determinist can reasonably appeal, and at the same time
to maintain that this admission is compatible with an
assertion of human freedom. Perhaps we can say that
the question which he asks is this. Given all the empirical
facts about human conduct, have we still a use for words
such as 'freedom' and 'free' in the sphere of morals?
Green's answer is affirmative. The acts of a self-conscious
subject, considered precisely as such, How
can a “self-conscious subject“ be considered “precisely?”
I turn positivist when I read statements like this.
can properly be said to be free acts. Actions which
are the result of physical compul
[200] sion, for example, do not proceed from
the self-conscious subject as such. They are not really
his own actions; he cannot be considered the true author
of them. And we need to be able to distinguish between
actions of this type and those which are the expression
of the man himself, considered not merely as a physical
agent but also as a self-conscious subject or, as some
would say, a rational agent.
Mention of the fact that for Green self-realization
is the end of moral conduct may suggest that his ethical
theory is individualistic. But though he does indeed
lay emphasis on the individual's realization of himself,
he is at one with Plato and Aristotle in regarding the
human person as essentially social in character. In
other words, the self which has to be realized is not
an atomic self, the potentialities of which can be fully
actualized and harmonized without any reference to social
relations. Either Copleston
is summarizing too much or Green’s philosophy is rambling
and disconnected here. This is just a smorgasbord of
pleasant platitudes. On the contrary, it is
only in society that we can fully actualize our potentialities
and really live as human persons. And this means in
effect that the particular moral vocation of each individual
has to be interpreted within a social context. So what
is society? Does Green ever say? Hence Green can use
a phrase which Bradley was afterwards to render famous,
by remarking that 'each has primarily to fulfil the
duties of his station'.
Given this outlook, it is understandable
that Green lays emphasis, again with Plato and Aristotle
but also, of course, with Hegel, on the status and function
of political society, the State, which is 'for its members
the society of societies'. It will be noted that this
somewhat grandiloquent phrase itself indicates a recognition
of the fact that there are other societies, such as
the family, which are presupposed by the State. But
Hegel himself recognized this fact, of course. And it
is clear that among societies Green attributes a preeminent
importance to the State.
Precisely for this reason, however, it
is important to understand that Green is not recanting,
either explicitly or implicitly, his ethical theory
of self-realization. He continues to maintain his view
that 'our ultimate standard of worth is an ideal of
personal worth. All other values are relative
to value for, of, or in a person.' This ideal, however,
can be fully realized only in and through a society
of persons. There is a conflict
between what Green calls “personal worth” and what he
calls “society” but Green does not resolve it here.
He just straddles it. Society is thus a moral
necessity. And this applies to that larger form
[201] of social organization which we call political
society or the State as well as to the family. But it
by no means follows that the State is an end itself.
On the contrary, its function is to create and maintain
the conditions for the good life, that is, the conditions
in which human beings can best develop themselves and
live as persons, each recognizing the others as ends,
not merely as means. In this sense the State is an instrument
rather than an end in itself. It is indeed an error
to say that a nation or a political society is merely
an aggregate of individuals. For use of the word
'merely' shows that the speaker overlooks the fact that
the individual's moral capacities are actualized only
in concrete social relations. It implies that individuals
could possess their moral and spiritual qualities and
fulfil their moral vocation quite apart from membership
of society. At the same time the premiss that the nation
or the State is not 'merely' a collection of individuals
does not entail the conclusion that it is a kind of
self-subsistent entity over and above the individuals
who compose it. 'The life of the nation has no real
existence except as the life of the individuals composing
the nation.' These platitudes
all seem good enough for a college commencement address,
but they don’t crystallize into a structured moral philosophy
the way the MOQ does.
Green is therefore quite prepared to admit
that in a certain sense there are natural rights which
are presupposed by the State. For if we consider what
powers must be secured for the individual with a view
to the attainment of his moral end, we find that the
individual has certain claims which should be recognized
by society. It is true that rights in the full sense
of the term do not exist until they have been accorded
social recognition. Indeed, the term 'right', in its
full sense, has little or no meaning apart from society.
At the same time, if by saying that there are natural
rights which are antecedent to political society we
mean that a man, simply because he is a man, has certain
claims which ought to be recognized by the State as
rights, it is then perfectly true to say that 'the State
presupposes rights, and rights of individuals. It is
a form which society takes in order to maintain them.'
It is sufficiently obvious from what has
been said that in Green's view we cannot obtain a philosophical
understanding of the function of the State simply by
conducting an historical investigation into the ways
in which actual political socie-
[202] ties have in fact arisen. We have to consider
the nature of man and his moral vocation. Similarly,
to have a criterion for judging laws we have to understand
the moral end of man, to which all rights are relative.
'A law is not good because It enforces "natural
rights", but because it contributes to the realization
of a certain end. We only discover what rights are natural
by considering what powers must be secured to a man
in order to the attainment of this end. These powers
a perfect law will secure to their full extent.'
From this close association of political
society with the attainment of man's moral end it follows
that 'morality and political subjection have a common
source, "political subjection" being
distinguished from that of a slave, as a subjection
which secures rights to a subject. That common source
is the rational recognition by certain human beings—it
may be merely by children of the same parent—of a common
well-being which is their well-being, and which they
conceive as their well-being, whether at any moment
any one of them is inclined to it or no, . . .' Obviously,
any given individual may be disinclined to pursue what
promotes this common well-being or good. Hence there
is need for moral rules or precepts and, in the political
sphere, for laws. Moral obligation and political obligation
are thus closely linked by Green. The real basis of
an obligation to obey the law of the State is neither
fear nor mere expediency but man's moral obligation
to avoid those actions which are incompatible with the
attainment of his moral end and to perform those actions
which are required for its attainment
It follows that there can be no right
to disobey or rebel against the State as such. That
is to say, 'so far as the laws anywhere or at any time
in force fulfill the idea of a State there can be no
right to disobey them'. But, as Hegel admitted, the
actual State by no means always measures up to the idea
or ideal of the State; and a given law may be incompatible
with the real interest or good of society as a whole.
Hence civil disobedience in the name of the common good
or well-being can be justifiable. Obviously, men have
to take into account the fact that it is in the public
interest that laws should be obeyed. And the claim of
this public interest will usually favour working for
the repeal of the objectionable
[203] law rather than downright disobedience
to it. Further, men ought to consider whether disobedience
to an objectionable law might result in some worse evil,
such as anarchy. But the moral foundation of political
obligation does not entail the conclusion that civil
disobedience is never justified. Green sets rather narrow
limits to the scope of civil disobedience by saying
that to justify our practising it we ought to be able
'to point to some public interest, generally recognized
as such'. But from what he subsequently says it does
not seem that the proviso 'generally recognized as such'
is intended to exclude entirely the possibility of a
right to civil disobedience in the name of an ideal
higher than that shared by the community in general.
The reference is rather to an appeal to a generally
recognized public interest against a law which is promulgated
not for the public good but in the private interest
of a special group or class.
Given Green's view that the State exists
to promote the common good by creating and maintaining
the conditions in which all its citizens can develop
their potentialities as persons, it is understandable
that he has no sympathy with attacks on social legislation
as violating individual liberty, when liberty signifies
the power to do as one likes without regard to others.
Some people, he remarks, say that their rights are being
violated if they are forbidden, for example, to build
houses without any regard to sanitary requirements or
to send their children out to work without having received
any education. In point of fact, however, no rights
are being violated. For a man's rights depend on social
recognition in view of the welfare of society as a whole.
And when society comes to see, as it has not seen before,
that the common good requires a new law, such as a law
enforcing elementary education, it withdraws recognition
of what may formerly have been accounted a right.
Clearly, in certain circumstances the
appeal from a less to a more adequate conception of
the common good and its requirements might take the
form of insisting on a greater measure of individual
liberty. For human beings cannot develop themselves
as persons Unless they have scope for the exercise of
such liberty. But Green is actually concerned with opposing
laissez-faire dogmas. He does not advocate curtail
[204] ment of individual liberty by the State
for the sake of such curtailment. Indeed, he looks on
the social legislation of which he approves as a removal
of obstacles to liberty, that is, the liberty of all
citizens to develop their potentialities as human beings.
For example, a law determining the minimum age at which
children can be sent to work removes an obstacle to
their receiving education. It is true that the law curtails
the liberty of parents and prospective employers to
do what they like without regard to the common good.
But Green will not allow any appeal from the common
good to liberty in this sense. Private, sectional and
class interests
however hard they may mask themselves
under an appeal to private liberty, cannot be allowed
to stand in the way of the creation by the State of
conditions in which all its citizens have the opportunity
to develop themselves as human beings and to live truly
human lives.
With Green, therefore, we have a conspicuous
example of the revision of liberalism in accordance
with the felt need for an increase in social legislation.
He tries to interpret, we can say, the operative ideal
of a movement which was developing during the closing
decades of the nineteenth century. His formulation of
a theory may be open to some criticism. But it was certainly
preferable not only to laissezfaire dogmatism
but also to attempts to retain this dogmatism in principle
while making concessions which were incompatible with
it.
In conclusion it is worth remarking that
Green is not blind to the fact that fulfilment of our
moral vocation by performing the duties of our 'station'
in society may seem to be a rather narrow and inadequate
ideal. For 'there may be reason to hold that there are
capacities of the human spirit not realizable in persons
under the conditions of any society that we know, or
can positively conceive, or that may be capable of existing
on the earth'. Hence, unless we judge that the problem
presented by unfufilled capacities is insoluble, we
may believe that the personal life which is lived on
earth in conditions which thwart its full development
is continued in a society in which man can attain his
full perfection. 'Or we may content ourselves with saying
that the personal selfconscious being, which comes from
God, is for ever continued [205]
in God.' Green speaks in a rather non-committal
fashion. It seems to me that
Green’s fashion is not so much non-committal as half-formed.
He pursues the meaning of his terms only insofar as
they defend a stand-pat, status-quo, do-nothing conservatism.
When he gets into “spirit” and “God” and “man’s station
in life” we see this motive more clearly. But
his personal attitude seems to be much more akin to
that of Kant, who postulated continued life after death
as an unceasing progress in perfection, than to that
of Hegel, who does not appear to have been interested
in the question of personal immortality, whether he
believed in it or not.
4. The idea of a unity underlying the
distinction between subject and object becomes prominent
in the thought of Edward Caird (1835-1908), Fellow of
Merton College, Oxford (1864-6), professor of moral
philosophy in the University of Glasgow (1866-93) and
Master of Balliol College, Oxford (1893-1907). His celebrated
work, A Critical Account of the Philosophy of Kant,
appeared in 1877, a revised edition in two volumes
being published in 1889 under the title The Critical
Philosophy of Kant. In 1883 Caird published a small
work on Hegel, which is still considered one of the
best introductions to the study of this philosopher.
Of Caird's other writings we may mention The Social
Philosophy and Religion of Comte (1885), Essays
on Literature and Philosophy (two volumes, 1892),
The Evolution of Religion (two volumes, 1893)
and The Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers
(two volumes, 1904). The two last named words are
the published versions of sets of Gifford Lectures.
Though Caird wrote on both Kant and Hegel,
and though he used metaphysical idealism as an instrument
in interpreting human experience and as a weapon for
attacking materialism and agnosticism, he was not, and
did not pretend to be, a disciple of Hegel or of any
other German philosopher. Indeed, he considered that
any attempt to import a philosophical system into a
foreign country was misplaced. It is idle to suppose
that what satisfied a past generation in Germany will
satisfy a later generation in Great Britain. For intellectual
needs change with changing circumstances.
In the modern world, Caird maintains,
we have seen the reflective mind questioning man's spontaneous
certainties and breaking asunder factors which were
formerly combined. For example, there is the divergence
between the Cartesian point of departure, the self-conscious
ego, and that of the empiricists, the object as given
in experience. And the gulf between the two traditions
has grown so wide that we are told that
[206] we must either reduce the physical to the
psychical or the psychical to the physical. In other
words, we are told that we must choose between idealism
and materialism, as their conflicting claims cannot
be reconciled. Again, there is the gulf which has developed
between the religious consciousness and faith on the
one hand and the scientific outlook on the other, a
gulf which implies that we must choose between religion
and science, as the two cannot be combined. Yes,
these are primary conflicts that the MOQ addresses.
When oppositions and conflicts of this
kind have once arisen in man's cultural life, we cannot
simply return to the undivided but naïve consciousness
of an earlier period. Nor is it sufficient to appeal
with the Scottish School to the principles of common
sense. For it is precisely these principles which have
been called in question, as by Humian scepticism. Hence
the reflective mind is forced to look for a synthesis
in which opposed points of view can be reconciled at
a higher level than that of the naive consciousness.
Kant made an important contribution to
the fulfilment of this task. But its significance has,
in Caird's opinion, been misunderstood, the misunderstanding
being due primarily to Kant himself. For instead of
interpreting the distinction between appearance and
reality as referring simply to different stages in the
growth of knowledge, the German philosopher represented
it as a distinction between phenomena and unknowable
things-in-themselves. And it is precisely this notion
of the unknowable thing-in-itself which has to be expelled
from philosophy, as indeed Kant's successors have done.
And the MOQ does also. When
we have got rid of this notion, we can see that the
real significance of the critical philosophy lies in
its insight into the fact that objectivity exists only
for a self-conscious subject. Up
to this point the MOQ is in agreement. In other
words, Kant's real service was to show that the fundamental
relationship is that between subject and object, which
together form a unity-in-difference. The
MOQ does not support this. It says object and subject
are levels of evolution that taken together do not form
a unity. There is still value which has been left out.
Once we grasp this truth, we are freed from the temptation
to reduce subject to object or object to subject. Once
we grasp the MOQ we are also freed from the temptation
to reduce subject to object or object to subject.
For this temptation has its origin in an unsatisfactory
dualism which is overcome by the theory of an original
synthesis. The distinction between subject and object
emerges within the unity of consciousness, a unity which
is fundamental. In the MOQ
value is more fundamental.
According to Caird, science itself bears
witness in its own [207] way
to this unity-in-difference. True, it concentrates on
the object. At the same time it aims at the discovery
of universal laws and at correlating these laws; and
it thus tacitly presupposes the existence of an intelligible
system which cannot be simply heterogeneous or alien
to the thought which understands it. In other words,
science bears witness to the correlativity of thought
and its object.
Though, however, one of the tasks allotted
to the philosopher by Caird is that of showing how science
points to the basic principle of the synthesis of subject
and object as a unity-in-difference, he himself gives
his attention chiefly to the religious consciousness.
And in this sphere he finds himself driven to go behind
subject and object to an underlying unity and ground.
This sounds like the MOQ.
Subject and object are distinct. Indeed, 'all our life
moves between these two terms which are essentially
distinct from, and even opposed to, each other'. Yet
they are at the same time related to each other in such
a way that neither can be conceived without the other.
And 'we are forced to seek the secret of their being
in a higher principle, of whose unity they in their
action and reaction are the manifestations, which they
presuppose as their beginning and to which they point
as their end'. This is exactly what the MOQ says.
This enveloping unity, which is described
in Platonic phrases as being 'at once the source of
being to all things that are, and of knowing to all
beings that know', is the presupposition of all consciousness.
And it is what we call God. It does not follow, Caird
insists, that all men possess an explicit awareness
of God as the ultimate unity of being and knowing, of
objectivity and subjectivity. An explicit awareness
is in the nature of the case the product of a long process
of development. Up to this point
the MOQ agrees. And we can see in the history
of religion the main stages of this development. At this point the MOQ diverges.
The first stage, that of 'objective religion',
is dominated by awareness of the object, not indeed
as the object in the abstract technical sense of the
term, but in the form of the external things by which
man finds himself surrounded. The
MOQ would say that “objective religion” is preceded
by awareness of values, as in infants before they learn
to distinguish shapes, and in lower biological species
such as earthworms which probably do not distinguish
objects but do distinguish what is better and worse.
At this stage man cannot form an idea of anything 'which
he cannot body forth as an existence in space and time'.
We can assume that he has some dim awareness of a unity
comprehending both himself and other things; but he
cannot [208] form an idea
of the divine except by objectifying it in the gods.
The second stage in the development of
religion is that of 'subjective religion'. Here man
returns from absorption in Nature to consciousness of
himself. And God is conceived as a spiritual being standing
apart from both Nature and man and as revealing Himself
above all in the inner voice of conscience.
In the third stage, that of 'absolute
religion', the selfconscious subject and its object,
Nature, are seen as distinct yet essentially related,
and at the same time as grounded in an ultimate unity.
And God is conceived 'as the Being who is at once the
source, the sustaining power, and the end of our spiritual
lives'. This does not mean, however, that the idea of
God is completely indeterminate, so that we are forced
to embrace the agnosticism of Herbert Spencer For God
manifests Himself in both subject and object, and the
more we understand the spiritual life of humanity on
the one hand and the world of Nature on the other, so
much the more do we learn about God who is 'the ultimate
unity of our life and of the life of the world'. The
MOQ would add a fourth stage where the term “God” is
completely dropped as a relic of an evil social suppression
of intellectual and Dynamic freedom. The MOQ is not
just atheistic in this regard. It is anti-theistic.
Insofar as Caird goes behind the distinction
between subject and object to an ultimate unity, we
can say that he does not absolutize the subject-object
relationship in the way that Ferrier does. At the same
time his epistemological approach, namely by way of
their relationship, seems to create a difficulty. For
he explicitly recognizes that 'strictly speaking, there
is but one object and one subject for each of us'. That
is to say, for me the subject-object relationship is,
strictly, that between myself as subject and my world
as object. And the object must include other people.
Even if, therefore, it is granted that I have from the
beginning a dim awareness of an underlying unity, it
seems to follow that this unity is the unity of myself
as subject and of my object, other persons being part
of 'my object'. And it is difficult to see how it can
then be shown that there are other subjects, and that
there is one and only one common underlying unity. Common
sense may suggest that these conclusions are correct.
But it is a question not of common sense but rather
of seeing how the conclusions can be established, once
we have adopted [209] Caird's
approach. Taken by itself, the idea of an underlying
unity may well be of value. But arrival at the conclusion
at which Caird wishes to arrive is not facilitated by
his point of departure. And it is certainly arguable
that Hegel showed wisdom in starting with the concept
of Being rather than with that of the subject-object
relationship. I think this is
a good criticism. Hegel’s Being is yet another term
for our growing list of terms meaning the same thing:
Oneness-Nothingness-Quality-Absolute-Being.
5. It has been said of John Caird (1820-98),
brother of Edward, that he preached Hegelianism from
the pulpit. A Presbyterian theologian and preacher,
he was appointed professor of divinity in the University
of Glasgow in 1862, becoming Principal of the University
in 1873. In 1880 he published An Introduction to
the Philosophy of Religion, and in 1888 a
volume on Spinoza in Blackwood's Philosophical Classics
Some other writings, including his Gifford Lectures
on The Fundamental Ideas of Christianity (
1899 ), appeared posthumously.
In arguing against materialism John Caird
maintains not only that it is unable to explain the
life of the organism and of consciousness, but also
that the materialists, though undertaking to reduce
the mind to a function of matter, tacitly and inevitably
presuppose from the outset that the mind is something
different from matter. After all, it is the mind itself
which has to perform the reduction. In an analogous
manner he argues that the agnostic who says that God
is unknowable betrays by his very statement the fact
that he has an implicit awareness of God. 'Even in maintaining
that the human mind is incapable of absolute knowledge
the sceptic presupposes in his own mind an ideal of
absolute knowledge in comparison with which human knowledge
is pronounced defective. The very denial of an absolute
intelligence in us could have no meaning but for a tacit
appeal to its presence. An implicit knowledge of God
in this sense is proved by the very attempt to deny
it.' This is casuistry. If
you deny knowing anything about rutabagas in Russia, does the fact that you are denying it prove that you really
do know something about rutabagas in Russia?
As expressed in this particular quotation,
Caird's theory is obscure. But it can be elucidated
in this way. Caird is applying to knowledge in particular
Hegel's thesis that we cannot be aware of finitude without
being implicitly aware of infinity. More casuistry. The infinity which finitude makes us aware of
is a secondary experience that grows out of intellect.
It is not the same as the infinity out of which finitude
grows. The MOQ agrees with what Hegel seeks to prove
but disagrees with his specious way of proving it.
To put it in Zen terms, infinity is understood by subtracting
finitude, not by making intellectual deductions from
finitude. Experience teaches us that our minds
are finite and imperfect. But we could not be aware
of this except in the light of an implicit idea of complete
or absolute knowledge, [210]
a knowledge which would be in effect the unity
of thought and being. It is this implicit or virtual
idea of absolute knowledge which constitutes a vaguely-conceived
standard in comparison with which our limitations become
clear to us. Further, this idea draws the mind as an
ideal goal. It thus operates in us as a reality. And
it is in fact an absolute intelligence, in the light
of which we participate. See what happens when you make deductions from finitude? The
intellect that is making the deductions is now assumed
to be the infinity! This is why the Buddhists use the
term “nothingness.” It shuts out the attempted encroachment
of intellect into areas that are beyond its scope.
Obviously, it is essential for Caird to
maintain the view expressed in the last two sentences.
For if he said simply that we strive after complete
or absolute knowledge as an ideal goal, we should probably
conclude that absolute knowledge does not yet exist,
whereas Caird wishes to arrive at the conclusion that
in affirming the limitations of our knowledge we are
implicitly affirming a living reality. Hence he has
to argue that in asserting the limitations of my intelligence
I am implicitly asserting the existence of an absolute
intelligence which operates in me and in whose life
I participate. He thus utilizes the Hegelian principle
that the finite cannot be understood except as a moment
in the life of the infinite Whether the employment of
these Hegelian principles can really serve the purpose
for which Caird employed them, namely to support Christian
theism, is open to dispute. But he at any rate is convinced
that they can.
John Caird also argues, in the same way
as his brother that the interrelation of subject and
object reveals an ultimate unity underlying the distinction.
The MOQ says there is an ultimate
unity but the interrelation of subject and object does
not reveal it. As for the traditional proofs
of God's existence, they are exposed to the customary
objections, if they are taken as claiming to be strictly
logical arguments. If, however, they are interpreted
more as phenomenological analyses of ways 'by which
the human spirit rises to the knowledge of God, and
finds therein the fulfilment of its own highest nature,
these proofs possess great value'. It is not quite clear
perhaps where this great value is supposed to lie. Caird
can hardly mean that logically invalid arguments possess
great value if they exhibit ways in which the human
mind has as a matter of fact reached a conclusion by
faulty reasoning. So presumably he means that the traditional
arguments possess value as illustrating ways in which
the human mind can become explicitly conscious of an
awareness which they already possess in an implicit
and [211] obscure manner.
This point of view would allow him to say both that
the arguments beg the question by presupposing the conclusion
from the start and that this does not really matter,
inasmuch as they are really ways of making the implicit
explicit.
Like Hegel, John Caird insists on the
need for advancing from the level of ordinary religious
thought to a speculative idea of religion, in which
'contradictions' are overcome. For example, the opposed
and equally one-sided positions of pantheism and deism
are both overcome in a truly philosophical conception
of the relation between the finite and the infinite,
a conception which is characteristic of Christianity
when rightly understood. As for specifically Christian
doctrines, such as that of the Incarnation, Caird's
treatment of them is more orthodox than Hegel's. He
is, however, too convinced of the value of the Hegelian
philosophy as an ally in the fight against materialism
and agnosticism to consider seriously whether, as McTaggart
was later to put it, the ally may not turn out in the
long run to be an enemy in disguise, inasmuch as the
use of Hegelianism in the interpretation of Christianity
tends, by the very nature of the Hegelian system, to
involve the subordination of the content of the Christian
faith to speculative philosophy and, indeed, a tie-up
with a particular system.
In point of fact, however, John Caird
does not adopt the Hegelian system lock, stock and barrel.
What he does is rather to adopt from it those general
lines of thought which seem to him to possess intrinsic
validity and to be of service in supporting a religious
outlook in the face of contemporary materialist and
positivist tendencies. He thus provides a good example
of the religious interest which characterized a large
part of the idealist movement in Great Britain.
6. Among those who contributed to spreading
a knowledge of Hegelianism in Great Britain William
Wallace (1844-97), Green's successor as White's professor
of moral philosophy at Oxford, deserves a mention. In
1874 he published a translation, furnished with prolegomena
or introductory material, of Hegel's Logic as
contained in the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical
Sciences. He later pub [212]
lished a revised and enlarged edition in two
volumes, the translation appearing in 1892 and the greatly
augmented Prolegomena in 1894. Wallace also published
in 1894 a translation, with five introductory chapters,
of Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, again from the
Encyclopaedia. In addition he wrote the volume
on Kant (1882) for Blackwood's Philosophical Classics
series and a Life of Schopenhauer (1890). His
Lectures and Essays on Natural Theology and Ethics,
which appeared posthumously in 1898, show clearly
the affinity between his thought and John Caird's speculative
interpretation of religion in general and of Christianity
in particular.
Though we must refrain from multiplying
brief references to philosophers who stood within the
ambit of the idealist movement, there is a special reason
for mentioning David George Ritchie (l853-1903), who
was converted to idealism by Green at Oxford and who
in 1894 became professor of logic and metaphysics in
the University of St. Andrews. For while the idealists
in general were unsympathetic to systems of philosophy
based on Darwinism, Ritchie undertook to show that the
Hegelian philosophy was perfectly capable of assimilating
the Darwinian theory of evolution. After all, he argued,
does not Darwin's theory of the survival of the fittest
harmonize very well with Hegel's doctrine that the real
is the rational and the rational the real, and that
the rational, representing a value, triumphs over the
irrational? And does not the disappearance of the weaker
and less fitted for survival correspond with the overcoming
of the negative factor in the Hegelian dialectic? Hegel is not under survey here or this would be an interesting
area to explore.
It is true, Ritchie admitted, that the
Darwinians were so concerned with the origin of species
that they failed to understand the significance of the
movement of evolution as a whole. We must recognize
the facts that in human society the struggle for existence
takes forms which cannot be properly described in biological
categories, and that social progress depends on co-operation.
But it is precisely at this point that Hegelianism can
shed a light which is shed neither by the biological
theory of evolution taken purely by itself nor by the
empiricist and positivist systems of philosophy which
are professedly based on this theory. [213]
Though, however, Ritchie made a valiant attempt
to reconcile Darwinism and Hegelianism, the construction
of 'idealist' philosophies of evolution, in the sense
of philosophies which endeavoured to show that the total
movement of evolution is towards an ideal term or goal,
was actually to take place outside rather than inside
the Neo-Hegelian current of thought.
[214]Chapter Eight
ABSOLUTE IDEALISM: BRADLEY
Introductory remarks: The Presuppositions
of Critical History; Morality and its self-transcending
in religion; The relevance of logic to metaphysics;
The basic presupposition of metaphysics; Appearance:
the thing and its qualities, relations and their terms,
space and time, the self-Reality: the nature of the
Absolute; Degrees of truth and reality; Error and evil;
The Absolute, God and religion; Some critical discussion
of Bradley's metaphysics.
It was in the philosophy of Francis Herbert
Bradley (1846-1924) that emphasis on the subject-object
relationship was decisively supplanted by the idea of
the suprarelational One, the all-embracing Absolute.
Of Bradley's life there is little which needs to be
said. In 1870 he was elected a Fellow of Merton College,
Oxford, and he retained this post until his death. He
did not lecture. And the quantity of his literary output,
though substantial, was not exceptional. But as a thinker
he is of considerable interest, especially perhaps for
the way in which he combines a radical criticism of
the categories of human thought, when considered as
instruments for apprehending ultimate reality, with
a firm faith in the existence of an Absolute in which
all contradictions and antinomies are overcome
In 1874 Bradley published an essay on
The Presuppositions of Critical History, to which
reference will be made in the next section. Ethical
Studies appeared in 1876, The Principles of Logic
in 1883, Appearance and Reality in 1893,
and Essays on Truth and Reality in 1914. Other
essays and articles were collected and published posthumously
in two volumes in 1935 under the title Collected
Essays. A small book of Aphorisms appeared
in 1930.
Bradley's enemies were those of the idealists
in general, [215] namely
empiricists, positivists and materialists, though in
his case we have to add the pragmatists. Since
the MOQ is pragmatic and empirical this would apparently
put it on Bradley’s enemy list. As a polemical
writer he did not always represent his opponents' views
in a manner which they considered fair; but he could
be devastating, and on occasion none too polite. His
own philosophy has often been described as Neo-Hegelian.
But though he was undoubtedly influenced by Hegelianism,
the description is not altogether appropriate. It is
true that both Hegel and Bradley were concerned with
the totality, the Absolute. But the two men held markedly
different views about the capacity of the human reason
to grasp the Absolute. Hegel was a rationalist, in the
sense, that is to say, that he regarded reason (Vernunft),
as distinct from understanding (Verstand), as
capable of penetrating the inner life of the Absolute.
He endeavoured to lay bare the essential structure of
the self-developing universe, the totality of Being;
and he showed an overwhelming confidence in the power
of dialectical thought to reveal the nature of the Absolute
both in itself and in its concrete manifestations in
Nature and Spirit. Bradley's dialectic, however, largely
took the form of a systematic self-criticism by discursive
thought, a criticism which, in his opinion at least,
made clear the incapacity of human thought to attain
any adequate grasp of ultimate reality, of what is really
real. The MOQ clearly sides with Bradley. The world of discursive
thought was for him the world of appearance; and metaphysical
reflection showed that it was precisely this, by revealing
the antinomies and contradictions engendered by such
thought. Bradley was indeed convinced that the reality
which is distorted by discursive thought is in itself
free from all contradictions, a seamless whole, an all-comprehensive
and perfectly harmonious act of experience. Note
the use of the term “harmonious” here. It is the same
synonym for Quality that ZMM shows Henri Poincaré used.
The point is, however, that he did not pretend to be
able to show dialectically precisely how antinomies
are overcome and contradictions solved in the Absolute.
In the MOQ they are not “solved” in the Absolute but
emerge from it. To be sure, he did in fact say
a good deal about the Absolute. And in view of his thesis
that ultimate reality transcends human thought, it is
arguable that in doing so he showed a certain inconsistency.
What is it? Copleston does
not seem to say. But the point which is relevant
here is that Bradley gave expression not so much to
Hegelian rationalism as to a peculiar combination of
scepticism and fideism; of scepticism through his depreciation
of [216] human thought
as an instrument of grasping reality as it really is,
and of fideism by his explicit assertion that belief
in a One which satisfies all the demands of ideal intelligibility
rests on an initial act of faith that is presupposed
by all genuinely metaphysical philosophy. Faith
is not required for an understanding of Quality. Here
Quality succeeds where Bradley’s Absolute and Hegel’s
Being and the Buddhist Nothingness and the Hindu Oneness
and the theists’ God and Allah and you-name-it; all
of them fail. For quality, no faith is required because
there is no way you can disbelieve that there is such
a thing as quality. You cannot conceive of or live
in a world in which nothing is better than anything
else.
In reaching this characteristic position
Bradley was influenced to a certain extent by Herbart's
view that contradictions do not belong to reality itself
but emerge only through our inadequate ways of conceiving
reality. The MOQ agrees.
This is not to suggest that Bradley was an Herbartian.
He was a monist, whereas the German philosopher was
a pluralist. But the late Professor A. E. Taylor relates
that when he was at Merton College, he was recommended
by Bradley to study Herbart as a wholesome correction
to undue absorption in Hegelian ways of thinking. And
an understanding of Herbart's influence on Bradley helps
to correct any overemphasis on Hegelian elements in
the latter's philosophy.
Bradley's philosophy, however, cannot
be adequately described in terms of influence exercised
by other thinkers It was in fact an original creation,
in spite of the stimulus derived from such different
German philosophers as Hegel and Herbart. In some respects,
for instance in the way in which the concept of 'God'
is represented as transcended in that of the suprapersonal
Absolute, Bradley's thought shows clear signs of the
influence of German absolute idealism. And the way in
which the tendency of earlier British idealists to absolutize
the subject-object relationship gives way before the
idea of the totality, the One, can be said to represent
the triumph of the absolute idealism which is associated
above all with the name of Hegel. But British absolute
idealism, especially in the case of Bradley, was a native
version of the movement. It may not be as impressive
as the Hegelian system; but this is no good reason for
depicting it as no more than a minor replica of Hegelianism.
2. In his essay on The Presuppositions
of Critical History Bradley writes that the critical
mind must provisionally suspect the reality of everything
before it. At the same time 'critical history must have
a presupposition, and this presupposition is the uniformity
of law'. That is to say, 'critical history assumes that
its world is one', this unity being that
[217] of the universality of law and of 'what
loosely may be termed causal connection'. History does
not start by proving this unity; it presupposes it as
the condition of its own possibility, though developed
history confirms the truth of the presupposition.
There is no mention here of the Absolute.
Indeed, the world of causal connections is relegated
by Bradley in his metaphysics to the sphere of appearance.
But in the light of the later development of his thought
we can see in the idea of the unity of the world of
history as a presupposition of historiography a hint
of the idea of a total organic unity as the presupposition
of metaphysics. And this suggestion seems to be supported
by Bradley's assertion in a note that 'the universe
seems to be one system; it is an organism (it would
appear) and more. It bears the character of the self,
the personality to which it is relative, and without
which it is as good as nothing. Hence any portion of
the universe by itself cannot be a consistent system;
for it refers to the whole, and has the whole present
in it. Potentially the whole (since embodying that which
is actually the whole), in trying to fix itself on itself,
it succeeds only in laying stress on its character of
relativity; it is carried beyond and contradicts itself'.
To be sure, this is not precisely a statement of the
doctrine of the Absolute as we find it in Appearance
and Reality, where the Absolute is certainly not
depicted as a self. At the same time the passage serves
to show how Bradley's mind was dominated by the idea
of the universe as an organic whole. All
this is in agreement with the MOQ.
3. Bradley's Ethical Studies is not
a metaphysical work. Indeed, on reading the first essay
one may receive the impression that the writer's line
of thought has more affinity with the modern analytic
movement than with what would naturally be expected
from a metaphysical idealist. For Bradley concerns himself
with examining what the ordinary man understands by
responsibility and imputability, and he then shows how
two theories of human action are incompatible with the
conditions of moral responsibility which are implicitly
presupposed by 'the vulgar'.
On the one hand, the ordinary man implicitly
assumes that he cannot legitimately be held morally
responsible for [218] an
action unless he is the same man who performed the action.
And if this assumption is taken to be correct, it excludes
that form of determination which is based on the associationist
psychology and to all intents and purposes does away
with any permanent self-identity. The
MOQ not only holds that there can be morality without
the creation of an independent self, it holds that nothing whatsoever is apart from this morality.
'Without personal identity responsibility is
sheer nonsense; and to the psychology of our Determinists
personal identity (with identity in general) is a word
without a vestige of meaning.' On the other hand, the
ordinary man assumes that he cannot legitimately be
held morally responsible for an action unless he is
truly the author of it, unless it proceeds from him
as effect from cause. And this assumption rules out
any theory of indeterminism which implies that human
free actions are uncaused and does away with the relation
between a man's action and his self or character. For
the agent as described by this sort of theory is 'a
person who is not responsible, who (if he is
anything) is idiotic'. This
is an ancient quarrel that the MOQ happily avoids.
Bradley is, of course, the last man to
suggest that we should take the beliefs of the ordinary
man as a final court of appeal. But for the moment he
is concerned not with expounding a metaphysical theory
of the self but with arguing that both determinism and
indeterminism, when understood in the senses mentioned
above, are incompatible with the presuppositions of
the moral consciousness. And the positive conclusion
to be drawn is that the moral consciousness of the ordinary
man implies a close relation between actions for which
one can legitimately be held responsible and one's self
in the sense of character.
Though, however, Ethical Studies is
not a metaphysical work, either in the sense that
Bradley sets out to derive ethical conclusions from
metaphysical premises or in the sense that he explicitly
introduces his metaphysical system, it certainly has
a metaphysical bearing or significance. For the upshot
of the work is that morality gives rise to contradictions
which cannot be resolved on the purely ethical level
and that it points beyond itself. True, in this work
morality is depicted as leading on to religion. But
elsewhere religion is depicted as leading on to the
philosophy of the Absolute.
For Bradley the end of morality, of moral
action, is self-realization. The
MOQ can be stretched to take this point of view if by
“self” is meant all static patterns of quality, and
“self realization” is the disappearance of all static
patterns into Dynamic Quality—but this is quite a stretch.
And it follows that the good for man cannot be
[219] identified with 'the feeling of self-realizedness',
or indeed with any feeling. Hedonism therefore, which
locks on the feeling of pleasure as the good for man,
is ruled out. In the MOQ it
is the exclusive pursuit of biological quality.
In Bradley's view, as in that of Plato, the hedonist
should logically assert that any action is moral which
produces greater pleasure in the agent. For consistent
hedonism admits only of a quantitative standard of discrimination.
Once we introduce, with J. S. Mill, a qualitative distinction
between pleasures, we require a standard other than
the feeling of pleasure and have thus in effect abandoned
hedonism. The truth of the matter is that Mill's utilitarianism
expresses a groping after the ethical idea of self-realization,
and that it is hindered from arriving fully at this
idea by its illogical attempt to retain hedonism at
the same time. 'May we suggest, in conclusion, that
of all our utilitarians there is perhaps not one who
has not still a great deal to learn from Aristotle's
Ethics?
In making pleasure the sole good hedonism
is a hopelessly one-sided theory. Another one-sided
theory is the Kantian ethics of duty for duty's sake.
But here the trouble is the formalism of the theory.
We are told to realize the good will, 'but as to that
which the good will is, it [the ethics of duty for duty's
sake] tells us nothing, and leaves us with an idle abstraction'.
Bradley safeguards himself from the charge of caricaturing
the Kantian ethics by saying that he does not intend
to give an exegesis of Kant's moral theory. At the same
time he states his belief that the Kantian ethical system
'has been annihilated by Hegel's criticism'. And Hegel's
main criticism was precisely that the Kantian ethics
was involved in an empty formalism. These
arguments appear because duty and reality and self-realization
are not all integrated into one system as they are in
the MOQ.
Bradley does not disagree, any more than
Hegel did, with the view that the end of morality is
the realization of a good will. The
term “will” is translated by the MOQ as “attraction
to Quality.” This doesn’t sound like the common
meaning of the word because in the common meaning will
is a property of an autonomous self-realizing individual.
The MOQ, like the Buddhists
and the Determinists (odd bedfellows) says this “autonomous
individual” is an illusion. His point is that
content must be given to this idea. And to do this we
must understand that the good will is the universal
will, If Bradley had stopped
here the MOQ would agree. the will of a social
organism. But he didn’t stop
there and the MOQ strongly disagrees that the universal
will is the will of the social organism. For
this means that one's duties are specified by one's
membership of the social organism, and that 'to be moral,
I must will my station and its duties'. Hitler
couldn’t have agreed more.
At first sight this Hegelian point of
view, with its reminiscences of Rousseau, may seem to
be at variance with Brad- [220]
ley's doctrine that the end of morality is self-realization.
But all depends, of course, on how the term 'self' is
understood. For Bradley, as for Hegel, the universal
will, which is a concrete universal What
on earth is a “concrete universal?” existing
in and through its particulars, represents the individual's
'true' self. Apart from his social relations, his membership
of a social organism, the individual man is an abstraction.
This is ridiculous. The individual
man is primarily a biological organism. 'And
individual man is what he is because of and by virtue
of community.' Hence to identify one's private will
with the universal will is to realize one's true self.
What does this mean in less abstract terms?
The universal will is obviously the will of a society.
I have learned over the years that when someone uses the word
“obviously” in a sentence you should study that sentence
closely. If it were obvious he wouldn’t need to say
it was obvious. In this case it is not only not obvious,
it is wrong. At this point I see only evidence that
Bradley is advocating a totalitarian society.
And as the family, the basic society, is at the same
time preserved and taken up in political society, the
State, the emphasis is placed by Bradley, as by Hegel,
on the latter. To realize oneself morally, therefore,
is to act in accordance with social morality, that is
with 'the morality already existing ready to hand in
laws institutions, social usages, moral opinions and
feelings'.
This view obviously gives content to the
moral law, to the command of reason to realize the good
will. But, equally obviously, morality becomes relative
to this or that human society. Bradley does indeed try
to maintain a distinction between lower and higher moral
codes. It is true that the essence of man is realized,
however imperfectly, at any and every stage of moral
evolution. But ‘from the point of view of a higher stage,
we can see that lower stages failed to realize the truth
completely enough, and also, mixed and one with their
realization, did present features contrary to the true
nature of man as we now see it'. At the same time Bradley's
view that one's duties are specified by one's station,
by one's place and function in the social organism,
leads him to assert that morality not only is but ought
to be relative. That is to say, it is not simply a question
of noting the empirical fact that moral convictions
have differed in certain respects in different societies.
Bradley maintains in addition that moral codes would
be of no use unless they were relative to given societies.
In fine, 'the morality of every stage is justified for
that stage; and the demand for a code of right in itself
apart from any stage, is seen to be the asking for an
impossibility'.[221] It
scarcely needs saying that the very idea of a moral
code involves the idea of a relation to possible conduct,
and that code which had no relation at all to a man's
historical and social situation would be useless to
him. But it does not necessarily follow that I must
identify morality with the existing moral standards
and outlook of the society to which I happen to belong.
Amen. Indeed if, as Bradley admits, a member of an existing
society can see the defects in the moral code of a past
society, there does not seem to be any adequate reason
why an enlightened member of the past society should
not have seen these defects for himself and have rejected
social conformism in the name of higher moral standards
and ideals. This is, after all, precisely what has happened
in history.
In point of fact, however, Bradley does
not reduce morality simply to social morality. I think that in philosophy when you make a statement, you should
let it rise or fall as it is tested against reality.
You should not make a statement and then fudge a little
here and make an exception there and bend of meaning
elsewhere in order to accommodate objections as they
come in. For in his view it is a duty to realize
the ideal self; and the content of this ideal self is
not exclusively social. But
he said it was social. For example, 'it is a
moral duty for the artist or the inquirer to lead the
life of one, and a moral offence when he fails to do
so'. This is fudging. True, the activities of an artist or
of a scientist can, and generally do, benefit society.
But 'their social bearing is indirect, and does not
lie in their very essence'. More fudging. This idea is doubtless in tune with Hegel's
attribution of art to the sphere of absolute spirit,
rather than that of objective spirit, What
on earth is “objective spirit?” where morality
belongs. But the point is that Bradley's assertion that
'man is not man at all unless social, but man is not
much above the beasts unless more than social' might
well have led him to revise such statements as that
'there is nothing better than my station and its duties,
nor anything higher or more truly beautiful'. If morality
is self-realization, and if the self cannot be adequately
described in purely social categories, morality can
hardly be identified with conformity to the society
to which one belongs. Right.
Copleston has caught him in his contradiction here.
Yet in a sense all this is simply grist
to Bradley's mill. For, as has already been mentioned,
he wishes to show that morality gives rise to antinomies
or contradictions which cannot be overcome on the purely
ethical level. In the MOQ there
is no other “level”.For example, and this is
the principal contradiction, the moral law demands the
perfect identification of the individual will with the
ideally good and universal will, though at the same
time [222] morality cannot
exist except in the form of an overcoming of the lower
self, a striving which presupposes that the individual
will is not identified with the ideally good will. I
don’t see the problem here. In other words, morality
is essentially an endless process; but by its very nature
it demands that the process should no longer exist but
should be supplanted by moral perfection. Perhaps this problem is created by the absence of a distinction
between enlightenment and unenlightenment. In unenlightenment
morality is a progress toward enlightenment. In enlightenment
this process is supplanted by moral perfection.
Obviously, if we deny either that overcoming
of the lower or bad self is an essential feature of
the moral life or that the moral law demands the cessation
of this overcoming, the antinomy disappears. If, however,
we admit both theses, the conclusion to be drawn is
that morality seeks its own extinction. Yes,
unenlightened morality seeks it extinction in enlightened
morality. That is to say, it seeks to transcend
itself. 'Morality is an endless process and therefore
a self-contradiction; and, being such, it does not remain
standing in itself, but feels the impulse to transcend
its existing reality.' If the moral law demands the
attainment of an ideal which cannot be attained as long
as there is a bad self to be overcome, and if the existence
in some degree of a bad self is a necessary presupposition
of morality, the moral law, we must conclude, demands
the attainment of an ideal or end which can be attained
only in a supra-ethical sphere. This
is not a problem for the MOQ.
As far as Ethical Studies is concerned,
this sphere is that of religion. The moral ideal is
'not realized in the objective world of the State';
but it can be realized for the religious consciousness.
It is true that 'for religion the world is alienated
from God, and the self is sunk in sin'. At the same
time for the religious consciousness the two poles,
God and the self, the infinite and the finite, are united
in faith. For religious faith the sinner is reconciled
with God and justified, and he is united with other
selves in the community of the faithful. Thus in the
sphere of religion man reaches the term of his striving
and he fulfils the demand of morality that he should
realize himself as 'an infinite whole' a demand which
can be only imperfectly fulfilled on the ethical level
through membership in political society. The
MOQ bypasses all this ecclesiastical terpsichore.
Morality, therefore, consists in the realization
of the true self. The true self, however, is 'infinite'.
This means that morality demands the realization of
the self as a member of an infinite whole. But the demand
cannot be fully met on the level of the ethics of my
station and its duties. Ultimately,
[223] indeed, it can be met only by the transformation
of the self in the Absolute. And in this sense Bradley's
account of morality is pregnant with metaphysics, the
metaphysics of the Absolute. Here he is coming closer to the MOQ which also unites metaphysics
with ethics. But in Ethical Studies he
is content to take the matter as far as the self-transcending
of morality in religion. The self-transcending of religion
is left to the explicit metaphysics of Appearance
and Reality.
4. Turning to Bradley's logical studies,
we must note in the first place his concern with separating
logic from psychology. This
is a separation that is not important to the MOQ because
the MOQ regards psychology, with its objectification
of the subjective, as metaphysically unsound.
Needless to say, he does not question the legitimacy
of inquiries into the origin of ideas and into the association
between ideas, inquiries which had occupied so prominent
a place in empiricist philosophy from Locke to J. S.
Mill. But he insists that they belong to the province
of psychology, and that if we confuse logical and psychological
inquiries, we shall find ourselves giving psychological
answers to logical questions, as the empiricists were
inclined to do. 'In England at all events we have lived
too long in the psychological attitude.' I
do know what he includes under the term “psychology.”
That should be explained here but is not.
Bradley starts his logical studies with
an examination of the judgment, considered not as a
combination of ideas, which have to be previously treated,
but as an act of judging that something is or is not
the case. In the MOQ something
is “the case” if it has high intellectual quality.
It is true, of course, that we can distinguish various
elements within the judgment. But the logician is concerned
not with the psychological origin of ideas or concepts
nor with the influence of mental associations but with
the symbolic function, the reference, which concepts
acquire in the judgment. Sort of like mathematics, I would suppose. 'For logical
purposes ideas are symbols, and they are nothing but
symbols.' Terms acquire a definite meaning or reference
in the proposition and the proposition says something
which is either true or false. The logician should concern
himself with these aspects of the matter, leaving psychological
questions to the psychologist.Again, I don’t know what
he means here. If he does really stick to symbols that have no reference to
the experienced world, the logician is not going to
say anything meaningful.
Bradley's anti-psycholigizing attitude
in logic has won him a good mark from modern logicians
including those whose general philosophical outlook
is more or less empiricist. But the connection between
his logic and his metaphysics is generally regarded
much less benevolently. On this point, however, we have
to be careful. On the one hand Bradley does
[224] not identify logic with metaphysics. And
he regards his inquiries into the forms, quantity and
modality of judgments and into the characteristics and
types of inference as pertaining to logic, not to metaphysics.
On the other hand in the preface to the first edition
of The Principles of Logic he implicitly admits
that 'I am not sure where logic begins or ends'. In
the MOQ logic begins and ends in rhetoric, of which
it is an important branch. Rhetoric begins and ends
in cultural patterns. Cultural patterns begin and end
in biology. Biological patterns begin and end in inorganic
nature. And some of his logical theories have
an obvious connection with his metaphysics, a connection
which I wish to illustrate briefly by one or two examples.
As every judgment is either true or false,
Not so. we are naturally
inclined to assume that it asserts or denies a fact,
its truth or falsity depending on its correspondence
or lack of correspondence with some factual state of
affairs. Here, without warning,
Bradley suddenly plunges us into the middle of a subject-object
dichotomy. “Whoa,” one wants to say, “Who is this ‘we?’
“What is this ‘factual state of affairs?’ How did they
get separated in the first place?” But while
a singular judgment such as 'I have a toothache' or
'This leaf is green' seems at first sight to mirror
a particular fact, reflection shows that the universal
judgment is the result of inference and that it is hypothetical
in character. For example, if I say that all mammals
are warm-blooded, I infer from a limited number of instances
a universal conclusion; and what I am actually asserting
is that if at any time there is something which possesses
the other attributes of being a mammal, it also possesses
that of warm-bloodedness. The judgment is thus hypothetical;
and a gap is introduced between ideal content and actual
fact. For the judgment is asserted as being true even
if at any given time there are no actually existing
mammals.
According to Bradley, however, it is a
mistake to assume that though the universal judgment
is hypothetical, the singular affirmative judgment enjoys
the privilege of being tied to a particular fact or
experience, which it mirrors. If I say that I have a
toothache, I am referring, of course, to a particular
pain of my own; but the judgment which I enunciate could
perfectly well be enunciated by someone else who would
obviously be referring to a different toothache, his
own and not mine. True, we can try to pin down the reference
of singular judgments by the use of words, such as 'this',
'that', 'here' and 'now'. But though this device serves
very well for practical purposes, it is not possible
to eliminate every element of generality from the meaning
of these particularizing expressions. If someone holds
an apple in his [225] hand
and says 'This apple is unripe', I am obviously perfectly
well aware what apple is being referred to. But the
judgment 'This apple is unripe' is not tied to this
particular apple: it could be uttered by someone else,
or indeed by the same man, with reference to some other
apple. The singular affirmative judgment, therefore,
does not enjoy any special privilege of being a mirror
of existent fact.
The conclusion which Bradley wishes to
draw is that if the judgment is regarded as a synthesis
or union of ideas, every judgment is general, and that
a gap is thus introduced between ideal content and reality.
'Ideas are universal, and, no matter what it is that
we try to say and dimly mean, what we really express
and succeed in asserting is nothing individual.' If,
therefore, an abstract universal judgment is hypothetical
and so divorced to some extent from actual reality,
it is no use thinking that in the singular judgment
we can find an unequivocal reference to a particular
fact. The observation
of that fact can be unequivocal but the language of
the judgment All judgments are tarred with the same
brush. The MOQ agrees with
this.
In point of fact, however, 'judgment is
not the synthesis of ideas, but the reference of ideal
content to reality'. And it is Bradley's contention
that the latent and ultimate subject of any judgment
is reality as a whole, reality, we may say, with a capital
letter. 'Not only (this is our doctrine) does all judgment
affirm of Reality, but in every judgment we have the
assertion that "Reality is such that S is P".'
If, for example, I assert that this leaf is green, I
am asserting that reality as a whole, the universe,
is such that this leaf is green. There is no such thing
as an isolated particular fact. So-called particular
facts are what they are only because reality as a whole
is what it is.
This point of view has an evident bearing
on the relative adequacy of different types of judgment.
For if reality as a whole is the latent ultimate subject
of every judgment, it follows that the more particular
a judgment is, the less adequate is it as a description
of its ultimate subject. Further, an analytic judgment,
in the sense of one which analyses a particular given
sense-experience, distorts reality by arbitrarily selecting
elements from a complex whole and treating them as though
they constituted a self-sufficient particular
[226] fact, whereas there are no such facts.
The only self-sufficient fact is reality as a whole.
Very good.
Bradley thus turns his back on the empiricist
belief that the more we analyse, the closer we approach
to truth. The MOQ does not turn
its back on the empiricist belief that the more we analyse,
the closer we approach to truth. Truth is the highest
quality static intellectual pattern and analysis has
shown over and over again historically that it improves
the quality of intellectual patterns. The MOQ, however
does agree with Bradley that Dynamic Quality, the Absolute,
is not to be understood through analysis, since once
it is analyzed it is no longer the Absolute. It
has been assumed that 'analysis is no alteration, and
that, whenever we distinguish, we have to do with divisible
existence'. This assumption, however, is a 'cardinal
principle of error and delusion'. In reality truth,
as Hegel saw, is the whole.
This may suggest that we shall come nearer
to an apprehension of reality if we turn away from the
immediate judgments of sense to the general hypotheses
of the sciences. But though in this sphere there is
less fragmentation, there is also a much higher degree
of abstraction and of mental construction. If reality
consists of what is presented to the senses, the abstractions
of the sciences seem to be further removed from reality
than the immediate judgments of sense. And if reality
does not consist of the wealth of sensuous phenomena,
can we really suppose that it consists of logical constructions
and scientific abstractions? 'It may come from a failure
in my metaphysics, or from a weakness of the flesh which
continues to blind me, but the notion that existence
could be the same as understanding strikes as cold and
ghost-like as the dreariest materialism. That the glory
of this world in the end is appearance leaves the world
more glorious, if we feel it is a show of some fuller
splendour but the sensuous curtain is a deception and
a cheat, if it hides some colourless movement of atoms,
some spectral woof of impalpable abstractions, or unearthly
ballet of bloodless categories ' Here
Bradley is clearly making the case for Dynamic Quality.
This oft-quoted passage is directed not
only against the reduction of reality to scientific
generalizations which form a web through whose meshes
there slips the whole wealth of sensible particulars,
but also against the Hegelian idea that logical categories
reveal to us the essence of reality and that the movement
of dialectical logic represents the movement of reality.
And Bradley's general point of view is that the process
of judgment and inference, or, better, the process of
discursive thought, is unable to grasp and represent
reality. To be sure, for the purposes of practical life
and of the sciences discursive thought is a perfectly
adequate instrument. [227]
This is shown by its success. But it does not
necessarily follow that it is a fit instrument for grasping
ultimate reality as it is in itself. This
is in complete accord with the MOQ, except that the
MOQ regards both the static and Dynamic realities being
opposed here are ultimate reality. To say that one
is right and the other wrong is incorrect.
When Bradley was writing The Principles
of Logic, he tried to avoid metaphysics as much
as he felt possible. In the second edition, published
twenty-nine years after the publication of Appearance
and Reality, there is naturally more reference to
metaphysics, together with modifications or corrections
of some of the logical views advanced in the first edition.
In other words, Bradley's explicit metaphysics reacted
on his logic. In any case, however, it is quite clear
that his logical theories have from the start a metaphysical
relevance, even if the main conclusion is perhaps a
negative one, namely that discursive thought cannot
comprehend reality. At the same time, as Bradley remarks
in his additional notes, if reality is the whole, the
totality, it must somehow include thought within itself.
5. In his introduction to Appearance
and Reality Bradley remarks that 'we may agree,
perhaps, to understand by metaphysics an attempt to
know reality as against mere appearance, or the study
of first principles or ultimate truths, or again the
effort to comprehend the universe, not simply piecemeal
or by fragments, but somehow as a whole'. Most of us
would probably accept his contention that a dogmatic
and a priori assertion of the impossibility of
metaphysics should be ruled out of court. And it is
obviously reasonable to say that if we are going to
make the attempt to understand reality as a whole, it
should be made 'as thoroughly as our nature permits'.
But in view of what has been said in the last section
about the shortcomings of discursive thought it may
seem odd that Bradley is prepared to make the attempt
at all. He insists, however, that it is natural for
the reflective mind to desire to comprehend reality,
and that even if comprehension in the full sense turns
out to be unattainable, a limited knowledge of the Absolute
is none the less possible. This is very similar to the path followed in Lila.
Now, if we describe metaphysics from the
start as an attempt to know reality as contrasted with
appearance, we presuppose that this distinction is meaningful
and valid. And if we say that metaphysics is an attempt
to understand re- [228] ality
as a whole, we assume, at least by way of hypothesis,
that reality is a whole, that there is in the same sense
a One. But Bradley is perfectly prepared to admit that
metaphysics rests on an initial presupposition. 'Philosophy
demands, and in the end it rests on, what may fairly
be termed faith. The MOQ does
not rest on faith. In the MOQ faith is very low quality
stuff, a willingness to believe falsehoods. It
has, we may say, to presuppose its conclusion in order
to prove it.' No, a hypothesis
is not an act of faith.
What precisely is the content of this
assumption or presupposition or initial act of faith?
In the appendix which he added to the second edition
of Appearance and Reality Bradley tells us that
'the actual starting-point and basis of this work is
an assumption about truth and reality. I have assumed
that the object of metaphysics is to find a general
view which will satisfy the intellect, and I have assumed
that whatever succeeds in doing this is real and true,
and that whatever fails is neither. This is a doctrine
which, so far as I can see, can neither be proved nor
questioned.'
The natural way of interpreting this passage,
if it is taken simply by itself, seems to be this. The
scientist assumes that there are uniformities to be
discovered within his field of investigation. Otherwise
he would never look for them. And he has to assume that
the generalizations which satisfy his intellect are
true. Further investigations may lead him to modify
or change his conclusions. But he cannot proceed at
all without making some presupposition.
That is true but
this presupposition is not an act of faith. Faith occurs
when in the presence of conclusive contrary information
he still clings to his presupposition.
Similarly, we are free to pursue metaphysics
or to leave it alone; but if we pursue it at all, we
inevitably assume that a 'general view' of reality is
possible, and therefore that reality as a whole is intelligible
in principle. If by “intelligible”
is meant intellectually intelligible, then the MOQ does
not state that reality as a whole is intelligible in
principle. We further inevitably assume that
we can recognize the truth when we find it. We assume,
that is to say, that the general view which satisfies
the intellect is true and valid. For our only way of
discriminating between rival general views is by choosing
the one which most adequately satisfies the demands
of the intellect.
Considered in itself this point of view
is reasonable enough. But difficulties arise when we
bear in mind Bradley's doctrine about the shortcomings
of discursive thought. And it is perhaps not surprising
to find expression being given to a somewhat different
view. Thus in a supplementary note to the sixth chapter
of his Essays on Truth and Reality
[229] Bradley maintains that the One which is
sought in metaphysics is not reached simply by a process
of inference but is given in a basic feeling-experience.
This sounds like Quality.
'The subject, the object, and their relation, are experienced
as elements or aspects in a One which is there from
the start.' That is to say, on the pre-reflective level
there is an experience 'in which there is no distinction
between my awareness and that of which it is aware.
There is an immediate feeling, a knowing and being in
one, with which knowledge begins.' Indeed, 'at no stage
of mental development is the mere correlation of subject
and object actually given'. Even when distinctions and
relations emerge in consciousness, there is always the
background of 'a felt totality'. This is a very clear description of Zen enlightenment.
This point of view is possibly compatible
with that previously mentioned, though one would not
normally describe a basic immediate experience as an
'assumption'. In any case Bradley's thesis that there
is such an experience enables him to give some content
to the idea of the Absolute, in spite of the shortcomings
of discursive thought. Metaphysics is really an attempt
to think the One which is given in the alleged primitive
feeling-experience. In a sense this attempt is foredoomed
to failure. For thought is inevitably relational. But
inasmuch as thought can recognize the 'contradictions'
which emerge when reality is conceived as a Many, as
a multiplicity of related things, it can see that the
world of common sense and of science is appearance.
And if we ask, 'Appearance of what?', reference to the
basic experience of a felt totality enables us to have
some inkling at any rate of what the Absolute, ultimate
reality, must be. We cannot attain a clear vision of
it. To do so, we should have to be the comprehensive
unified experience which constitutes the Absolute. We
should have to get outside our own skins, so to speak.
But we can have a limited knowledge of the Absolute
by conceiving it on an analogy with the basic sentient
experience which underlies the emergence of distinctions
between subject and object and between different objects.
In this sense the experience in question can be regarded
as an obscure, virtual knowledge of reality which is
the 'presupposition' of metaphysics and which the metaphysician
tries to recapture at a higher level. This
is really an excellent statement of the MOQ position.
[230] In other words, Bradley admits the truth
of the objection that metaphysics presupposes its own
conclusion, but he regards it not as an objection but
rather as a clarification of the nature of metaphysics.
In view, however, of the importance of the theme it
is regrettable that he does not develop his thesis more
at length. Perhaps the MOQ can be seen as such a development.
As it is, he speaks in a variety of ways,
employing terms such as presupposition, assumption,
faith and immediate experience. And though these different
ways of speaking may be compatible, we are left in some
doubt about his precise meaning. Yes. However, we are probably justified in laying emphasis
on Bradley's thesis that there is an immediate experience
of 'a many felt in one', and that this experience gives
us an inkling of the nature of the Absolute.
6. By the nature of the case there is
not much that can be said by way of positive description
either about the alleged pre-reflective experience of
a felt totality or about the infinite act of experience
which constitutes the Absolute. And it is hardly surprising
if Bradley concentrates his attention on showing that
our ordinary ways of conceiving reality give rise to
contradictions and cannot yield a 'general view' capable
of satisfying the intellect. But it is not possible
to enter here into all the details of his dialectic.
We must confine ourselves to indicating some of the
phases of his line of thought.
(i) We are accustomed to group the world's
contents into things and their qualities, This is a different use of the word “quality.” To prevent confusion
the MOQ calls these “properties” as does scientific
description. in Scholastic language into substances
and accidents, or, as Bradley puts it, into the substantive
and adjectival. But though this way of regarding reality
is embedded in language and undoubtedly has a practical
utility, it gives rise, Bradley maintains, to insoluble
puzzles.
Consider, for example, a lump of sugar
which is said to have the qualities of whiteness, hardness
and sweetness. If we say that the sugar is white, we
obviously do not mean that it is identical with the
quality of whiteness. For if this were what we meant,
we could not then say that the lump of sugar is hard,
unless indeed we were prepared to identify whiteness
and hardness. It is natural, therefore, to conceive
the sugar as a centre of unity, a substance which possesses
different qualities. [231] If,
however, we try to explain what this centre of unity
is in itself, we are entirely at a loss. And in our
perplexity we are driven to say that the sugar is not
an entity which possesses qualities, a substance in
which accidents inhere, but simply the qualities themselves
as related to one another. Yet what does it mean to
say, for example, that the quality of whiteness is related
to the quality of sweetness? The MOQ would say it is an inorganic pattern of values.
If, on the one hand, being related to sweetness is identical
with being white, to say that whiteness is related to
sweetness is to say no more than that whiteness is whiteness.
If, on the other hand, being related to sweetness is
something different from being white, to say that whiteness
is related to sweetness is to predicate of it something
different from itself, that is, something which it is
not.
Obviously, Bradley is not suggesting that
we should cease to speak about things and their qualities.
His contention is that once we try to explain the theory
implied by this admittedly useful language, we find
the thing dissolving into its qualities, while at the
same time we are unable to give any satisfactory explanation
of the way in which the qualities form the thing. In
the MOQ repeated experience of the pattern gives it
its “thingness.” All sorts of ephemera pass in front
of the scientist’s eye but the patterns he values are
those that repeat themselves. In brief, no coherent
account can be given either of the substance-accident
theory or of phenomenalism.
(ii) Now let us rule out the substance-accident
theory and confine our attention to qualities i.e. properties and relations. In the first place we
can say that qualities without relations are unintelligible.
When we substitute “properties” for “qualities” we see that
properties and relations are pretty much the same thing.
For one thing, we cannot think of a quality without
conceiving it as possessing a distinct character and
so as different from other qualities. And this difference
is itself a relation.
In the second place, however, qualities
taken together with their relations are equally unintelligible.
On the one hand qualities cannot be wholly reduced to
their relations. For relations require terms. The qualities
must support their relations; and in this sense qualities
can be said to make their relations. On the other hand
a relation makes a difference to what is related. Hence
we can also say that qualities are made by their relations.
A quality must be 'at once condition and result'. But
no satisfactory account of this paradoxical situation
can be given. I think all this
tangle-footedness occurs because cause properties and
relations are being given some sort of reality here
that is independent of empirical knowledge.
Approaching the matter from the side of
relations we can [232] say
at once that without qualities they are unintelligible.
For relations must relate terms. But we are also driven
to say that relations are unintelligible even when they
are taken together with their terms, namely qualities.
For a relation must be either nothing or something.
If it is nothing, it cannot do any relating. But if
it is something, it must be related to each of its terms
by another relation. And we are then involved in an
endless series of relations.
A Scholastic reader of this ingenious
piece of dialectic would probably be inclined to remark
that a relation is not an 'entity' of the same logical
category as its terms, and that it makes no sense to
say that it requires to be related to its terms by other
relations. But Bradley does not, of course, intend to
say that it is sensible to talk about relations being
related to their terms. His point is that they must
either be so related or be nothing at all, and that
both theses are unacceptable. And his conclusion is
that 'a relational way of thought—any one that moves
by the machinery of terms and relations—must give appearance,
and not truth. It is a makeshift, a device, a mere practical
compromise, most necessary, but in the end most indefensible.'
To say roundly that thinking which employs
the categories of terms and relations does not give
us truth, seems to be an exaggeration even on Bradley's
premises. For, as will be seen later, he expounds a
theory of degrees of truth, a theory which does not
admit any simple distinction between truth and error.
It is clear, however, that what he means is that relational
thinking cannot give us Truth with a capital letter.
That is to say, it cannot disclose the nature of reality
as contrasted with appearance. For if the concept of
relations and their terms gives rise to insoluble puzzles,
it cannot be an instrument for attaining the 'general
view' which will satisfy the intellect.
Bradley's position can be clarified in
this way. It has sometimes been said that he denied
external relations and accepted only internal relations.
But this statement can be misleading. It is true that
in Bradley's view all relations make a difference to
their terms. In this sense they are internal. At the
same time they cannot be simply identified with the
terms which they relate. And in this sense there not
only can [233] but also
must be external relations, though there cannot indeed
be a relation which exists entirely on its own, and
to which it is purely accidental whether it happens
to connect terms or not. Hence Bradley can say: 'External
relations, if they are to be absolute, I in short cannot
understand except as the supposed necessary alternative
when internal relations are denied. But the whole "Either-Or",
between external and internal relations, to me seems
unsound.' Apparently Bradley
sees the materialistic explanation of the world as one
held together by relationships, and he is out to destroy
the validity of these.
At the same time it is precisely the rejection
of 'Either-Or' and the assertion of 'Both-And' which
gives rise to Bradley's critique of relational thought.
Relations cannot be external in an absolute sense. But
neither can they be wholly internal, completely merged
with their terms. And it is the difficulty in combining
these two points of view which leads Bradley to conclude
that relational thought is concerned with the sphere
of appearance, and that ultimate reality, the Absolute,
must be supra-relational.
(iii) Bradley remarks that anyone who
has understood the chapter in Appearance and Reality
on relation and quality 'will have seen that our
experience, where relational, is not true; and he will
have condemned, almost without a hearing, the great
mass of phenomena'. We need not, therefore, say much
about his critique of space, time, motion and causality.
It is sufficient to illustrate his line of thought by
reference to his critique of space and time.
On the one hand space cannot be simply
a relation. For any space must consist of parts which
are themselves spaces. And if space were merely a relation,
we should thus be compelled to make the absurd statement
that space is nothing but the relation which connects
spaces. On the other hand, however, space inevitably
dissolves into relations and cannot be anything else.
For space is infinitely differentiated internally, consisting
of parts which themselves consist of parts, and so on
indefinitely. And these differentiations are clearly
relations. Yet when we look for the terms, we cannot
find them. Hence the concept of space, as giving rise
to a contradiction, must be relegated to the sphere
of appearance.
A similar critique is applied to the concept
of time. On the one hand time must be a relation, namely
that between 'before' and 'after'. On the other hand
it cannot be a relation. [234]
If it is a relation between units which have
no duration, 'then the whole time has no duration, and
is not time at all'. If, however, time is a relation
between units which themselves possess duration, the
alleged units cannot be really units but dissolve into
relations. And there are no terms. It may be said that
time consists of 'now's'. But as the concept of time
involves the ideas of before and after, diversity is
inevitably introduced into the 'now'; and the game starts
once more.
(iv) Some people, Bradley remarks, are
quite prepared to see the external spatio-temporal world
relegated to the sphere of appearance, but will assure
us that the self at least is real. For his own part,
however, he is convinced that the idea of the self,
no less than the ideas of space and time, gives rise
to insoluble puzzles. Obviously, the self exists in
some sense. But once we start to ask questions about
the nature of the self, we soon see how little value
is to be attached to people's spontaneous conviction
that they know perfectly well what the term means.
On the one hand a phenomenalistic analysis
of the self cannot be adequate. If we try to equate
a man's self with the present contents of his experience,
our thesis is quite incompatible with our ordinary use
of the word 'self'. For we obviously think and speak
of the self as having a past and a future, and so as
enduring beyond the present moment. If, however, we
try to find a relatively enduring self by distinguishing
between the relatively constant average mass of a man's
psychical states and those states which are clearly
transitory, we shall find that it is impossible to say
where the essential self ends and the accidental self
begins. We are faced with 'a riddle without an answer'.
On the other hand, if we abandon phenomenalism
and locate the self in a permanent unit or monad, we
are again faced with insoluble difficulties. If all
the changing states of consciousness are to be attributed
to this unit, in what sense can it be called a unit?
And how is personal identity to be defined? If, however,
the unit or monad is depicted as underlying all these
changing states, 'it is a mere mockery to call it the
self of a man'. It would be absurd to identify a man's
self with a kind of metaphysical point.
[235] Bradley's conclusion is that 'the self
is no doubt the highest form of experience which we
have, but, for all that, is not a true form'. The earlier
idealists may have thought that the subject-object relationship
was a firm rock on which to build a philosophy of reality,
but in Bradley's opinion the subject, no less than the
object, must be relegated to the sphere of appearance.
The MOQ concurs with all of
this.
7. Reality for Bradley is one. The splintering
of reality into finite things connected by relations
belongs to the sphere of appearance. Which
the MOQ calls “static patterns of value.” The word “appearance”
seems to suggest these static patterns are unreal. The
MOQ does not make this suggestion. But to say
of something that it is appearance is not to deny that
it exists. 'What appears, for that sole reason, most
indubitably is; and there is no possibility of conjuring
its being away from it.' Further, inasmuch as they exist,
appearances must be comprised within reality; they are
real appearances. Here he comes close to an oxymoron. “Appearance” is a poor word
for reality. Indeed, 'reality, set on one side
and apart from all appearance, would assuredly be nothing'.
In other words, the Absolute is the totality of its
appearances: it is not an additional entity lying behind
them. Now he is saying the
same thing as the scientific materialists.
At the same time appearances cannot exist
in the Absolute precisely as appearances. That is to
say, they cannot exist in the Absolute in such a way
as to give rise to contradictions or antinomies. For
the whole which we seek in metaphysics must be one which
completely satisfies the intellect. In the Absolute,
therefore, appearances must be transformed and harmonized
in such a way that no contradictions remain.
What must the Absolute, or reality, be,
for such a transformation of appearances to be possible?
Bradley answers that it must be an infinite act of experience,
and moreover, sentient experience. 'Being and reality
are, in brief, one thing with sentience; they can neither
be opposed to, nor even in the end distinguished from
it.' Again, 'the Absolute is one system, and its contents
are nothing but sentient experience. It will hence be
a single and all- inclusive experience, which embraces
every partial diversity in concord.' You
can see why people turn to the logical positivists after
reading something like this. The MOQ agrees with everything
Bradley is saying here but the term, “Absolute,” and
its subsequent description here conveys nothing to the
man-in-the-street. It is a description empty of common
meaning.
Use of the term 'sentient experience'
should not, of course, be taken to imply that according
to Bradley the Absolute can be identified with the visible
universe as animated by some kind of world-soul. The
Absolute is spirit. There is
brand of vodka called “Absolut.” 'We may fairly
close this work then by insisting that Reality is spiritual.
When you hear the words “spirit”
and “faith” always look for a traditional religionist
trying to sneak his goods in the back door. Bradley
is obviously not one of these, but he lived at a time
when these people had a lot of influence and were raising
hell about Darwin
so that may be why he used the words. They are certainly
not essential to his metaphysics, or if they are, the
MOQ is a great improvement over his metaphysics, because
like the positivists, the MOQ drops spirit and faith,
cold.
Outside of spirit there is not, and there
cannot be, any real- [236] ity,
and, the more that anything is spiritual, so much the
more is it veritably real.'
We may very well ask, however, what Bradley
means by saying that reality is spiritual, and how this
statement is compatible with describing reality as sentient
experience. And to answer these questions we must recall
his theory of an immediate basic feeling-experience
or sentient experience in which the distinction between
subject and object, with the consequent sundering of
ideal content from that of which it is predicated, has
not yet emerged. This is Dynamic
Quality. On the level of human reflection and
thought this basic unity, a felt totality, breaks up
and externality is introduced. The world of the manifold
appears as external to the subject. But we can conceive
as a possibility an experience in which the immediacy
of feeling, of primitive sentient experience, is recovered,
as it were, at a higher level, a level at which the
externality of related terms such as subject and object
ceases utterly. The Absolute is such an experience in
the highest degree. In other words, the Absolute is
not sentient experience in the sense of being below
thought and infra-relational: it is above thought and
supra-relational, including thought as transformed in
such a way that the externality of thought to being
is overcome. The MOQ agrees.
When, therefore, the Absolute is described
as sentient experience, this term is really being used
analogically. The MOQ uses it
literally. 'Feeling, as we have seen, supplies
us with a positive idea of nonrelational unity. In
the MOQ feeling corresponds to biological quality.
The idea is imperfect, but is sufficient to serve as
a positive basis', as a positive basis, that is to say,
for conceiving ultimate reality. And reality or the
Absolute can properly be described as spiritual inasmuch
as spirit is definable as 'a unity of the manifold in
which the externality of the manifold has utterly ceased'.
This is a long way from that
entity which flies to heaven at death. I think Bradley
is warping the term to make it connect with his metaphysics.
In the human mind we find a unification of the
manifold; but the externality of the manifold has by
no means utterly ceased. The human mind is thus only
imperfectly spiritual. 'Pure spirit is not realized
except in the Absolute.'
It is important to understand that when
Bradley describes the Absolute as spiritual, he does
not mean to imply that it is a spirit, a self. Inasmuch
as the Absolute is its appearances, as transformed,
it must include within itself all the elements, so to
speak, of selfhood. 'Every element of the uni-
[237] verse, sensation, feeling, thought and
will, must be included within one comprehensive sentience.'
But it would be extremely misleading to apply to the
infinite universe a term such as 'self', which connotes
finitude, limitation. Whatever
happened to self-realization? (pp 218, 220 and 221)The
Absolute is supra-personal, not infra-personal; but
it is not a person, and it should not be described as
a personal being.
In other words, the Absolute is not a
sentient life below consciousness. But consciousness
involves externality; and though it must be comprised
within the Absolute, it must be comprised within it
as transformed in such a way that it is no longer what
it appears to us to be. Hence we cannot properly speak
of the Absolute as conscious. All that we can say is
that it includes and at the same time transcends consciousness.
As for personal immortality, Bradley admits
that it is just possible. But he considers that a future
life 'must be taken as decidedly improbable'. And he
evidently does not believe in it, though his main concern
is with arguing that a belief in personal immortality
is required neither for morality nor for religion. True,
the finite self, as an appearance of the Absolute, must
be included within it. But it is included only as somehow
transformed. And it is clear that the transformation
required is for Bradley of such a kind that an assertion
of the personal immortality of the finite self would
be quite inappropriate.
8. The Absolute, therefore, is all its
appearances, every one of them; but 'it is not all equally,
but one appearance is more real than another'. That
is to say, some appearances or phenomena are less far
removed than others from all-inclusiveness and self-consistency.
Hence the former require less alteration than the latter
in order to fit into the harmonious, all-inclusive and
self-consistent system which constitutes reality. 'And
this is what we mean by degrees of truth and reality.'
The criteria of truth are coherence and
comprehensiveness 'Truth is an ideal expression of the
Universe, at once coherent and comprehensive. It must
not conflict with itself, and there must be no suggestion
which fails to fall inside it Perfect truth in short
must realize the idea of a systematic whole.' Thought
sunders, as Bradley puts it, the what from
[238] the that. We try to reconstitute
the unity of ideal content and being by proceeding beyond
singular judgments of perception to ever more comprehensive
descriptions of the universe. Our goal is thus a complete
apprehension of the universe in which every partial
truth would be seen as internally, systematically and
harmoniously related to every other partial truth in
a self-coherent whole.
This goal is, however, unattainable. We
cannot combine comprehensiveness with an understanding
of all particular facts. For the wider and more comprehensive
our relational scheme becomes, the more abstract it
becomes: the meshes of the net become wider, and particular
facts fall through. Further, our relational thinking,
as we have already seen, is not in any case fitted to
grasp reality as it is, as one fully coherent and comprehensive
whole. 'There is no possible relational scheme which
in my view in the end will be truth. . . . I had long
ago made it clear (so I thought) that for me no truth
in the end was quite true....'
Now, if we take it that for Bradley the
standard in reference to which we have to measure degrees
of truth is the ideal truth which perpetually eludes
our grasp, we seem to be left without any standard or
criterion which can be of practical use. But Bradley's
line of thought seems to be this. 'The criterion of
truth, I should say, as of everything else, is in the
end the satisfaction of a want of our nature.' i.e. quality We do not know in advance what satisfies
the intellect. But by using our intellect in the attempt
to understand the world we discover that what satisfies
us is coherence and comprehensiveness, as far as we
are able to find them. This, then, is what we are aiming
at, the ideal goal of perfect coherence and comprehensiveness.
But to be able to distinguish between different degrees
of truth it is not necessary to have attained this goal.
For reflection on the degrees of satisfaction and dissatisfaction
which we experience in our actual attempt to understand
the world will enable us to make corresponding distinctions
between degrees of truth.
9. If the Absolute is its appearances,
it must in some sense be or contain error and evil.
And though Bradley disclaims the ability to explain
precisely how they are transformed in the Absolute,
he at any rate feels that it is incumbent on
[239] him to show that they are not positively
incompatible with his theory of ultimate reality. The
MOQ, on the other hand, explains evil in evolutionary
terms that are compatible with its theory of ultimate
reality.
The line which Bradley takes in regard
to error follows from his theory of degrees of truth.
If undiluted truth, so to speak, is identified with
the complete truth, every partial truth must be infected
with some degree of error. In other words, any sharp
distinction between truth and error disappears. An erroneous
judgment does not constitute a peculiar kind of judgment.
All human judgments are appearance; and all are transformed
in the Absolute, though some need a more radical transformation
than others. The transformation of what we call erroneous
judgments, therefore, does not demand special treatment.
It is all a question of degree.
As for evil in the sense of pain and suffering,
Bradley suggests that it does not exist, as such, in
the infinite act of experience which constitutes the
Absolute. The possibility of this can be verified to
some extent within the field of our own experience,
by the way in which a small pain can be swallowed up,
as it were, or neutralized by an intense pleasure. This
suggestion is hardly a source of much consolation to
the finite sufferer; but Bradley is understandably unwilling
to envisage the Absolute as undergoing pain. In
the MOQ pain is negative biological quality, and is
not considered to be mere “Appearance.”
In treating of moral evil Bradley makes
use of the interpretation to which reference has already
been made. Moral evil is in a sense a condition of morality,
inasmuch as the moral life consists in an overcoming
of the lower self. But morality tends, as we have seen,
to transcend itself. And in the Absolute it no longer
exists as morality. Absolute experience transcends the
moral order, and moral evil has no meaning in this context.
In the MOQ Quality and morality
are identical and morality is never dismissed.
10. Can Bradley's Absolute be properly
described as God? Bradley's answer is plain enough:
'for me the Absolute is not God'. Obviously, if we meant
by God simply ultimate reality, without any further
specification, the Absolute would be God. But Bradley
is thinking of the concept of God as a personal being;
and he will not allow that personality can be predicated
of the Absolute. Good for him.
True, to speak of the Absolute as impersonal would be
misleading. For this would suggest that the Absolute
is infra-personal. In point of fact personality must
be contained within reality, so that the Absolute cannot
[240] be less than personal. But, as so contained,
personality is transformed to such an extent that we
cannot speak of the Absolute as personal 'if the term
"personal" is to bear anything like its ordinary
sense'. Reality 'is not personal, because it is personal
and more. It is, in a word, suprapersonal.' This
is good.
Some theistic philosophers would obviously
comment that they predicate personality of God in an
analogical sense and not, as Bradley seems to suppose,
in a univocal sense. As predicated of God, the term
'personal' does not imply finitude or limitation. This,
however, is precisely the line of argument to which
Bradley objects. In his view theistic philosophers begin
by wishing to satisfy the demands of the religious consciousness.
That is to say, they desire to reach the conclusion
that God is personal, a being to whom man can pray and
who can hear man's prayers. But they then pursue a line
of argument which progressively eliminates from the
concept of personality all that gives it concrete content
or meaning for us. And the proper conclusion of this
line of argument is that God is not personal but superpersonal,
above personality. The conclusion, however, which these
philosophers actually assert is the one which they wish
to arrive at, not the one which follows from the line
of argument which they actually employ. It is not that
they are deliberately dishonest. It is rather that they
take a word which has a definite range of meaning when
applied to human beings, evacuate it of its content
and then imagine that it can be meaningfully applied
to God. In point of fact, if we once admit that terms
such as 'personal' cannot be applied to God in the sense
which they ordinarily bear in our language, we create
a chasm between personality and God. 'Nor will you bridge
the chasm by the sliding extension of a word. You will
only make a fog, where you can cry out that you are
on both sides at once. And towards increasing this fog
I decline to contribute.' Excellently
said.
The question, however, is not simply whether
God should be called personal or super-personal. It
must be remembered that Bradley's Absolute is its
appearances. It is the universe as transformed. If therefore
we understand by God a being who transcends the world
in such a way that he cannot be
[241] identified with it, it is obvious that
God and the Absolute cannot be equated. We could
call the Absolute 'God'. But Bradley's contention
is that the term already has in ordinary speech a meaning
which is different from that of the term 'Absolute'.
Hence confusion results if the two are identified. And
in the interest of clarity, and of intellectual honesty,
it is preferable to say that the Absolute is not 'God'.
The MOQ agrees.
This point of view affects what Bradley
has to say of religion. If we assume that for the religious
consciousness God is a being distinct from the external
world and the finite self, we can only conclude that
this consciousness is involved in a self-contradiction.
On the one hand it looks on God as the one true reality.
And in this case God must be infinite. On the other
hand it conceives God as distinct from the multiplicity
of creatures and so as one being, even if the greatest,
among many. And in this case God must be limited, finite.
If, therefore, when we speak of religion, we are thinking
of its concept of ultimate reality, we are compelled
to conclude that it belongs to the sphere of appearance,
and that, just as morality passes into religion, so
does religion pass into the metaphysics of the Absolute.
'If you identify the Absolute with God, that is not
the God of religion.... Short of the Absolute God cannot
rest, and having reached that goal, he is lost and religion
with him.'
There is, however, another point of view
to which Bradley gives expression. The essence of religion
he maintains is not knowledge. Nor is it feeling. 'Religion
is rather the attempt to express the complete reality
of goodness through every aspect of our being. In
this sense the MOQ is a religion. And, so far
as this goes, it is at once something more, and something
higher, than philosophy.' The precise meaning of this
definition of religion may not be immediately evident;
but it is at any rate clear that there is no question
of religion, as so defined, passing into metaphysics.
In the MOQ, in
which goodness is central, this passage is made. Religion
may still be appearance; but so is philosophy. And 'the
completion of each is not to be found except in the
Absolute'. It is obvious from what has been said that
Bradley by no means has the desire of some of the earlier
British idealists to use metaphysics to support the
Christian religion. Nor does
the MOQ. But it is equally obvious that he does
not share He- [242] gel's
sublime confidence in the power of speculative philosophy.
Nor does the MOQ.
In conclusion we can mention Bradley's
passing suggestion of the need for a new religion and
religious creed. He obviously does not think that metaphysics
can justify Christianity, as Hegel thought that it could.
Indeed, Bradley would doubtless think it misleading
to apply the name of Christianity to 'absolute religion'
as interpreted by Hegel. At the same time it might be
possible to have 'a religious belief founded otherwise
than on metaphysics, and a metaphysics able in some
sense to justify that creed.... Though this fulfilment
is a thing which I cannot myself expect to see and though
the obstacles in the way are certainly great, on the
other hand I cannot regard it as impossible.' I think that in time it will be seen that the MOQ fulfills this
prophesy.
1 1. In the preface to Appearance and
Reality Bradley quotes from his note-book the celebrated
aphorism, 'metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons
for what we believe upon instinct, but to find these
reasons is no less an instinct'. This remark is clearly
not intended as a flat denial of the view expressed
in the same preface that 'the metaphysician cannot perhaps
be too much in earnest with metaphysics', provided at
any rate that he recognizes the limitations of metaphysics
and does not exaggerate its importance. Bradley himself
takes seriously his own contention that 'the chief need
of English philosophy is, I think, a sceptical study
of first principles . . . an attempt to become aware
of and to doubt all preconceptions'. This element of
scepticism, 'the result of labour and education', is
represented by the dialectic of appearance, the critique
of our ordinary ways of thought. At the same time the
element of belief 'upon instinct' is represented by
Bradley's explicit statement, to which reference has
already been made, that metaphysics rests on a basic
presupposition or assumption or initial act of faith,
and by the whole doctrine of the Absolute as a completely
self-coherent and comprehensive totality.
This element of belief 'upon instinct'
occupies a prominent position in the development of
Bradley's metaphysics. In the
MOQ instinct is biological quality. Consider,
for example, the theory of the transformation of appearances
in the Absolute. The theory is not, of course eschatological
in character. That is to say, Bradley is not sug-
[243] gesting that at some future apocalyptic
date the phenomena which give rise to contradictions
or antinomies will undergo a transformation. He maintains
that they exist here and now in the Absolute otherwise
than they appear to us to exist. The completely harmonious
and all-inclusive experience which constitutes the Absolute
is a present reality, not simply something which will
come into being in the future. But Bradley does not
profess to be able to tell us precisely in what this
transformation consists. The
MOQ takes takes the Oriental line, that it is a falling
away of static patterns achievable by meditation or
other disciplines. The Buddha also does not tell us
precisely in what this transformation consists. He
simply says “See for yourself.” What he does
is to argue from possibility to actuality. We can show,
for instance, that the transformation of error is not
impossible. And if it is not impossible, it is possible.
And if it is possible, it is an actual reality. 'For
what is possible, and what a general principle
compels us to say must be, that certainly is.'
The same holds good of the transformation
of pain. 'That which is both possible and necessary
we are bound to think real.' Similarly, of the transformation
of moral evil Bradley remarks that 'if possible, then,
as before, it is indubitably real'. Again, 'the "this"
and "mine" are now absorbed as elements within
our Absolute. For their resolution must be, and it may
be, and so certainly is. And as a final example
we can mention the transformation of finite centres
of consciousness, which 'evidently is real, because
on our principle it is necessary, and because again
we have no reason to doubt that it is possible'.
An obvious objection to this line of argument
is that we can hardly be said to know that the required
transformation is possible, unless we are able to show
how it can take place. How, for example, can we legitimately
claim to know that finite centres of consciousness can
exist as elements within one infinite absolute experience
without any disharmony or 'contradiction', unless we
are able to show how they can so exist? It is really
not enough to say that nobody can prove the impossibility
of our thesis. After all, there is very considerable
difficulty, prima facie at least, in seeing how
finite centres of consciousness can be said to exist
as elements within one unified and harmonious experience.
And the burden of proof lies on the shoulders of those
who claim that it is possible rather than of those who
say that it is not possible. You
are never going to be able to prove the existence of
that which lies beyond static patterns by piling on
more static patterns to prove it. Copleston is saying
that if isn’t on the menu then there isn’t any meal.
The Buddha is saying, “Just eat.”
It may be said in reply that as Bradley
believes both that [244] reality
is one infinite self-coherent and all-inclusive experience
and that appearances are real, and not simply illusory,
appearances, he must also believe that the required
transformation of appearances is not only possible but
also actual. This is quite true. The point is, however,
that Bradley is forced to draw this conclusion only
because of an initial assumption or presupposition or
hypothesis about reality. The assumption is not proved
by the dialectic of appearance. True, the elimination
of substance, of the substantial, is skilfully used
to suggest that all finite things are adjectival to
one reality. But Bradley's criticism of substance is
itself open to criticism. And in any case the fact,
if it is a fact, that our ordinary ways of conceiving
reality give rise to contradictions and antinomies does
not of itself prove that reality is a selfcoherent whole.
For reality might be precisely what the dialectic reveals
it as being, namely incoherent. If we go on to assert
that reality, as contrasted with appearance, is a selfcoherent
totality, this is because we have already decided that
reality must be of this nature. References to a primitive
sentient experience of a 'felt totality' will not help
us much. The idea of such an experience may indeed serve
as an analogue for conceiving the Absolute, if we have
already decided that there must be an Absolute. But
it can hardly be said to prove that it is necessary
to postulate the Absolute, as Bradley conceives it.
It is true that Bradley's line of thought
can be presented in a plausible way. If we are going
to try to understand reality at all, we must assume
that reality is intelligible. Not true. Hence we must
take it that the real is that which satisfies the demands
of the intellect. An account of reality which is riddled
with self-contradictions does not satisfy the intellect.
We must therefore conclude that in reality, as contrasted
with appearance, all contradictions are overcome. And
in the end this means that we must accept the doctrine
of a completely harmonious and all-inclusive totality,
the Absolute.
Though, however, it is reasonable to claim
that no account of reality which is riddled with contradictions
can be accepted as true, it obviously does not follow
that we have to accept Bradley's contention that all
our ordinary and scientific ways of conceiving reality
are in fact riddled with contra-
[245] dictions. True, concepts such as those
of space, time and the self have for centuries provided
philosophers with problems or puzzles. But we would
probably not be inclined to acquiesce in the conclusion
that the problems are insoluble on the ground that the
concepts are inherently self-contradictory, unless we
already believed that reality is different from what
it appears to be.
Further, when Bradley makes statements
about the Absolute, they are apt to cause no less difficulty
than, say, the concept of an enduring self. For example,
we are told that 'the Absolute has no history of its
own, though it contains histories without number....
The Absolute has no seasons, but all at once it bears
its leaves, fruit and blossoms.' Now if Bradley's Absolute
were transcendent, we could understand the statement
that it has no history of its own. But, in his view,
the appearances of the Absolute are internal to it:
it is nothing apart from them. Hence history, change,
development are internal to it. Yet at the same time
it 'has no seasons'. The thesis is, of course, that
change is 'transformed' in the Absolute. But if it is
so transformed that it is no longer what we call change,
it is difficult to see how the Absolute can be said
to contain histories without number. And if change is
not so transformed as to be no longer change, it is
difficult to see how the Absolute can be said to have
no history. For, to repeat, it is its appearances.
The obvious answer to this line of criticism
is that it is illegitimate to expect perfect self-coherence
from metaphysics. For, given Bradley's interpretation
of the shortcomings of human thought, it follows necessarily
that any concept of the Absolute which we are capable
of forming belongs itself to the sphere of appearance.
Indeed, the whole of metaphysics is appearance. Nor
does Bradley hesitate to admit this. As we have seen,
he declares that philosophy, no less than religion,
reaches its completion in the Absolute. That is to say,
philosophy is an appearance which, as transformed, is
included in the infinite experience which constitutes
the Absolute but which transcends our grasp. It is no
matter for surprise, therefore, if metaphysical statements
themselves fail to attain an ideal standard of self-coherence.
This is true enough. But it simply adds
point to the con- [246] tention
that in the long run Bradley's assertion of the Absolute
rests on an initial act of faith. In
the MOQ this objection is overcome. In the long
run it is the 'must be' which is decisive. For Bradley's
sceptical mind all constructions of human thought, including
the metaphysics of the Absolute, must be relegated to
the sphere of appearance. He allows indeed for degrees
of truth. And he is convinced that the metaphysics of
the Absolute in truer than, say, a concept of reality
as consisting of many separate things linked by relations.
But this does not alter the fact that speculative philosophy
is appearance, and not identical with absolute experience.
As has been already noted, Bradley does not share Hegel's
confident 'rationalism'. Hence we can say that his scepticism
extends even to metaphysics, as is indeed suggested
by the aphorism quoted at the beginning of this section.
This scepticism is combined, however, with a firm belief
that reality in itself, transcending our powers of comprehension,
is a comprehensive, completely harmonious totality,
an all-embracing perfectly self-coherent eternal experience.
It is not altogether surprising if contemporary
British philosophers, when writing on Bradley, have
tended to concentrate on the puzzles which he raises
in regard to our ordinary ways of thought and to pass
over his doctrine of the Absolute in a rather cursory
manner. One reason for this is that the logical puzzles
raised by Bradley can often be treated on their own,
without reference to any act of faith in the One, and
that they are in principle capable of being definitely
solved. For example, in order to decide whether it is
true to say that space cannot be and at the same time
must be a relation or set of relations, it is not necessary
to discuss the transformation of space in the Absolute.
What we need in the first place is to clarify the meaning
or meanings of 'space'. Again, if we take Bradley's
thesis that the concept of relation is self-contradictory,
as on the one hand all relations make a difference to
their terms and so must be internal to them, while on
the other hand they must in some sense fall between
and connect their terms and so be external to them,
we have a problem which we can hope to solve, provided
that we are prepared for the requisite clarificatory
analysis. We can understand what is meant by Bradley's
thesis and what questions [247]
have to be answered in order to decide whether
or not it is true.
At the same time we obviously miss what
one might call the essential Bradley, if we use Appearance
and Reality simply as a quarry for detached logical
puzzles. For the philosopher is clearly a man who is
possessed by the idea of the Absolute, of a completely
self-consistent and all-inclusive whole. And it is easy
to understand how his philosophy has been able to arouse
the interest of Indian thinkers who have not abandoned
the native traditions of Hindu speculation, and of some
Western philosophers who have an initial sympathy with
this line of speculation. For there is at any rate some
affinity between Bradley's theory of speculation and
the Indian doctrine of Maya, the phenomenal world which
veils the one true reality. Not
just affinity, but identity. Obviously, both
Bradley and the Indian philosophers in question are
faced with the same difficulty, namely that every concept
which we can form of ultimate reality must itself belong
to the sphere of appearance. But their initial 'visions'
are similar, and it is a vision which can exercise a
powerful attraction on some minds. Perhaps what we need
is a serious inquiry into the bases of this vision or
initial inspiration, an inquiry which is not dominated
by the a priori assumption that what Bradley speaks
of as a presupposition or act of faith must be devoid
of objective value. It is an inquiry which possesses
considerable importance in regard to the foundations
of speculative metaphysics. I think what Copleston is asking for here is precisely what
the MOQ provides. As was stated in ZMM there was a time
many years ago when I looked through the pantheon of
philosophers for resemblances to the MOQ. Since Bradley
was always classified as an idealist, it did not seem
important to investigate him thoroughly because the
MOQ rejects the metaphysical assertion that the fundamental
reality of the world is idea.
But the description
of Bradley as an idealist is completely incorrect.
Bradley’s fundamental assertion is that the reality
of the world is intellectually unknowable, and that
defines him as a mystic.
So It has really
been a shock to see how close Bradley is to the MOQ.
Both he and the MOQ are expressing what Aldous Huxley
called "The Perennial Philosophy," which is
perennial, I believe, because it happens to be true.
Bradley has given an excellent description of what the
MOQ calls Dynamic Quality and an excellent rational
justification for its intellectual acceptance. It and
the MOQ can be spliced together with no difficulty into
a broader explanation of the same thing.
A singular difference
is that the MOQ says the Absolute is of value, a point
Bradley may have thought so obvious it didn't need mentioning.
The MOQ says that this value is not a property of the
Absolute, it is the Absolute itself, and is a much better
name for the Absolute than "Absolute." Rhetorically,
the word "absolute" conveys nothing except
rigidity and permanence and authoritarianism and remoteness.
"Quality," on the other hand conveys flexibility,
impermanence, here-and-now-ness and freedom. And it
is a word everyone knows and loves and understands—even
butcher shops that take pride in their product. Beyond
that the term, “value,” paves the way for an explanation
of evolution that did not occur to Bradley. He apparently
avoided discussing the world of appearances except to
emphasize the need to transcend it. The MOQ returns
to this world of appearances and shows how to understand
these appearances in a more constructive way.
