September 9, 2009 at 9:29 A.M. "Errors" inserted, perhaps while my access to this site was blocked by New Jersey hackers yesterday. New allegations of perversion among judges in Trenton (Ms. Poritz?), mafia arrests, disappearing funds from teacher contracts have also arisen in New Jersey. I will continue to write.
"The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring. And that is not happiness."
F.H. Bradley, Aphorisms (1930), 33.
Yesterday I received my copy of F.H. Bradley's Ethical Studies. I could not stop pouring over the book, together with Appearance and Reality. I recommend the sections of Bradley's treatise on metaphysics dealing with evil, self, and the Absolute. I also read a great deal about Bradley (W.H. Walsh, Brand Blanshard, Simon Blackburn, James Bradley -- all have written about him). I read the chapter on Hegel in my favorite History of German Philosophy. I studied J.N. Findley's article on Bradley's idealism and other sources.
I have read Edward Caird's biography and exposition of Hegel's philosophy. I also enjoyed Friedrich Beiser's excellent book about Hegel. I am about to read Alison Brown's essay on Hegel. Alison Brown is a young American academic. Professor Brown is part of the "feminist wave" of Hegelians that includes Kimberly Hutchins, Gillian Rose, Drucilla Cornell and others. Alison Leigh Brown, On Hegel (Belmont: Wadsworth, 2001), http://www.wadsworth.com/
Bradley was always a philosopher I admired and is now one that I will study seriously. This will require a return to Hegel, as interpreted by the British during the nineteenth century. It is a strange experience to encounter and come to know someone only through his or her writings, to feel a bizarre intimacy or friendship with a person who is long gone.
My deepest appreciation of great philosophers is indistinguishable, in this sense, from lasting relationships with great novelists. As a reader, I "connect" with some writers and not so much with others. It is better to go along with such responses to books, not to wonder too much why a particular author seems important until after we have read the person's books. I feel much the same about painters, poets, actors, or directors, composers, and other artists. Trust the heart and all subconscious motivations in intellectual work or the arts.
In a mysterious way, this "connecting" with thinkers is not necessarily only about talent. Bradley is one of those writers I identify with and read with special pleasure. He is one of my best teachers. I think Bradley belongs in the same category with idealists like Schopenhauer, also with adversaries like Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. I have no doubt that F.H. Bradley is a philosophical genius. In reading through my much-thumbed copy of Alice in Wonderland, I find that Lewis Carroll's "Alice" is in equal parts F.H. Bradley and Charles Dodgson. This is a strange thing for a little girl to be ... "curioser and curioser."
Bradley is "present" in his books as few authors are. There is a vividness in his literary voice, a personality in his work which, today, could well cost him tenure at any university. I feel a comparable powerful identification with Mary Wollstonecraft, for example, being sure that she is someone I would love if I were to meet her. I suppose we can "meet" Wollstonecraft in the books she left behind, especially her novels. (See the film "Lost in Jane Austen.")
This makes me no different from Leslie Chamberlain, whose emotional connection to Nietzsche seemed silly to me. Chamberlain's book is beautifully written and provides excellent interpretations of recent scholarship concerning Nietzsche. Leslie Chamberlain, Nietzsche in Turin: An Intimate Biography (New York: Picador, 1996), pp. 130-158 ("The Brahmin of Superabundance and the Mad Professor"). I also admire John Banville's essay review commenting on this book by Ms. Chamberlain and his visit to Turin while working on Shroud.
Philosophy -- which must be the most personal form of inquiry -- is turned into the least personal form of writing in the Anglo-American academy. This is all part of the inhumanity which is often mistaken for professionalism and objectivity in academia and the professions. Bradley writes well and is eloquent on many occasions when lesser figures make do with safe pronouncements. It is always a pleasure and instructive to read his work. Are there many philosophers who can be described in such terms today? I doubt it. Hume and Bradley are among the great masters of English prose. Santayana and Blanshard are among the best writers of American English.
The philosophy that interests me is the kind that is "written in blood," as Nietzsche puts it, which screams of desperation -- desperation to understand, to make sense of something, which will ultimately defy rational understanding, perhaps, but will simply not go away. For example, pain and/or love (probably a redundancy), evil, or the certainty of death. Despite the high level of abstraction in Bradley (or Hegel), one has the sense that both men are working out some serious personal "issues" in their theorizing. Me too. Philosophy as cleverness in the manipulation of symbols, or games with words, is uninteresting to me.
It may sound weird to say this, but I am sure that I can bring into relation Bradley's writings with the works of the great existentialists, especially Kierkegaard. Perhaps in terms of a shared longing for the Absolute in both men or "God-intoxication." And this is not to mention certain similar, very unfortunate episodes in their love-lives. On this point, C.S. Peirce (who was even crazier than Bradley!) is also a fellow sufferer. Absent lovers may be the world's greatest inducement to philosophizing. Santayana said that Peirce's name should be pronounced "Percy."
Bradley speaks of the particular as a moment in the realization of the universal, of the subject as a fragment of the Absolute. If you believe that you will see someone important in the fullness of time, or in the course of self-realization, then to the extent that the older version of yourself who will meet that person is present in you today -- to that extent -- you can say that the missing person is with you today, now, and that you are with that much-needed person always. Always.
Bradley's metaphysics of feeling has been described as his brilliant fusion of British empiricism with German idealism. It is the most profound connection in British thought to Romanticism in art: " ... feeling, as immediate experience must be seen as continuous with a form of feeling even larger than itself." Philip Ferreira, Bradley and the Struture of Knowledge (New York: SUNY, 1999), pp. 172-173.
This next paragraph is dedicated to a Bradley scholar from "the University of Kent":
" ... the most philosophically accurate way to put the matter is to say that the Absolute thinks and feels through me. In other words, it is the condition of any finite centre's experience that there exists an Absolute experience of which our feeling as this or that finite centre is but a limited and partial manifestation."
Bradley and the Structure of Knowledge, at p. 174. (Wonderland?)
For Bradley, the wound or scar in the Western psyche -- separating spirit (philosophy, art) from nature (science) -- is overcome and the wound is healed with feeling. Schopenhauer's ethics of compassion is relevant, together with the writings of Walter Pater and Victorian Platonism. My deepest feelings are present and fresh, even more intense now than ever, when it comes to the most important relationships in my life. Time is no obstacle. They are directed not only at a specific object or person inhabiting a narrow quantum of space, at one specific time; rather, passion is "about" another human being living a life in its entirety, infinitely; or it may concern the "eternal" beauty in a work of art, that speaks so differently to us as we age together. ("'Star Trek 2009': A Movie Review.")
Compare Walter Pater, Plato and Platonism (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2005), p. 181 with Walter Pater's description of La Gioconda, "Leonardo da Vinci," in Harold Bloom, ed., Selected Writings of Walter Pater (New York: New American Library, 1974), p. 46. ("The presence ... is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire.") Finally, see my essay "Arthur Schopenhauer and the Metaphysics of Art." Mona Lisa is a Renaissance version of "Alice in Wonderland." ("A Review of the Television Show, 'Alice.'")
With the coming of age and a mutual loss of "brilliance," there is something more that is acquired, shared wounds and a little wisdom. Maybe, if we are fortunate, we learn something along the way. To love another human being or a great artistic masterpiece (for me) is a "lifetime deal." Incidentally, this experience is available "in relation" with a great film, films change -- as we do -- over time, or other works of art, Opera, theater, dance. Peter Ackroyd summarizes Bradley's metaphysics, as absorbed by T.S. Eliot, whose "Four Quartets" is an exposition of "Bradleyan metaphysics":
"We live in a world of 'appearances' which partake of the Absolute without fully containing or representing it. And yet this Absolute can only be approached from the perspective of a number of finite centers -- not quite the same as the 'self' or the 'soul' but equivalent to them. And although 'finite truth must be conditional' it is only through such experience and through 'appearances' that we can begin to have any knowledge of the Absolute. [Absolute truth is not conditional.] This consorts very well with Eliot's own skepticism, and his awareness of the limitations of conceptual knowledge [no one is denying those] which he emphasized in Royce's seminars, but it provides also the comfort of an absolute reality or order which, however elusive it remains, is that unrealized whole in which we move and have our being."
Peter Ackroyd, T.S. Eliot: A Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), pp. 49-53.
Simon Critchley's book (I can't remember the title right now) begins with a meditation on his father's death and describes -- as the motive for a great deal of philosophy -- the need to come to terms with loss, incompleteness, inadequacy, failure ... all of which are universal. The sadness that is found between the lines of that book is, often, part of the experience of great philosophy. Critchley says: "Philosophy begins in disappointment." I agree. Santayana is the obvious thinker to illustrate this theme. But then, so is the philosopher who is probably Bradley's closest partner in dialogue, a person that Professor Bradley never met or spoke to, sadly, Mary Whiton Calkins.
Much of Bradley's best work is tinged with a frightening and dark "melancholy" (even when it is witty), so that he is always inspirational. You feel the man's solitariness, together with his effort and need to be understood. It is difficult not to admire him. It is also difficult not to feel sorry for him. Whatever you may think of his philosophy, it is not possible to doubt Bradley's genius or his capacity for love. Far from being a relativist in the sense that we use the term today, Bradley believed in the objectivity of ethical obligations at any given time, even as he insisted that full realization of the good is achieved only in the Absolute, with the realization of all: "Surely philosophy does not reach its end," Bradley writes, "till the 'reason of thought' is adequate to the 'reason of love'." All genuine revolutions are always unfinished. Philosophy's completion is religion.
Try putting together Spinoza, Kant and Hegel, with some of the great Scottish thinkers of the Enlightenment, more Thomas Reid than David Hume. If you can do that, then you'll get Bradley -- or even someone like R.D. Laing, who was a very different kind of genius. Mary Wollstonecraft is so important a piece in this puzzle that it continues to baffle me that Wollstonecraft is not accorded due consideration as a thinker and "connecting" figure in the story of British philosophy.
Mary Whiton Calkins -- later Marjorie Grene -- continues this trajectory in America, as I continue to insist to young students of philosophy. Of course, no one has associated the works of these thinkers nor has it been noticed that this body of ideas overlaps in a number of academic areas, both in the sciences (including psychology) and humanities. ("Nihilists in Disneyworld.") Incidentally, I would add Judith Butler to that list of thinkers who matter in ultimate terms, i.e., metaphysically. Professor Butler may disown the forbidden word "metaphysics."
I remember Bryan Magee's description of his discovery of Schopenhauer as one of the great events of his intellectual life. I think that I must include Bradley among the handful of philosophers who have spoken to me in a similar way, in the most powerful, life-altering kind of way -- along with Plato (when I was very young), Kant, Hegel (the latter mostly at second hand), Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Sartre, Ricoeur and a few others -- including Wollstonecraft and Angela Davis -- whose humanistic Marxism may be associated with these developments in an American context.
I am reading Royce now and having a similar reaction. If there is a good biography of Bradley, then I will certainly read it. Something comparable to Edward Caird's book about Hegel would be nice. I like Robert C. Solomon's book. I am struggling with Charles Taylor's massive study of Hegel. Unhappy lives make the best biographies. This is small consolation to those who must live them.
Bradley's work has been "rediscovered." Philosophers of genius go in and out of fashion much too quickly these days. Nietzsche was a non-subject in the forties and fifties, he is now the leading subject of analysis among philosophers in the U.S. After attacks by Russell and Moore, Bradley and the British idealists fell into neglect. Now people are figuring out that they are better philosophers -- better metaphysicians especially -- than many recent Continental heros, and they write so well.
This literary elan is especially true of Bradley who relishes the opportunity to charm the reader. I am told that a treasure trove of Bradley's papers has been left untouched for years at the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, possibly including some of his letters. I would do (almost) anything to read those documents. Certainly, anything sexual would be oh-so easily extracted from me for a peek at those papers. These idealist philosophers wrote to be understood and to persuade.
It would be nice if accessibility became a goal for philosophers once again. Philosophy should matter in the public discourse of a free society. Philosophers must communicate with intelligent readers who are not philosophers. Improving the quality of legal writing may be a lost cause; happily, clarity is still possible in philosophy. Blanshard's treatise on philosophical writing is a book I am searching for right now. No luck so far. Blanshard's Reason and Analysis is highly recommended. (I did find and read, in a day, Blanshard's book on philosophical prose.)
The British idealists have been dusted off by eager graduate students in search of suitably obscure thinkers for doctoral research. I shudder to think of what they will do to poor Bradley. I fear that he was not politically correct. Chi-chi intellectual fashionistas of indeterminate gender (aren't we all?), may soon poke and prod him in his grave to establish his insentivity to abortion rights or to the glories of Silvia Plath's poetry. Worse, he was the subject of T.S. Eliot's dissertation and we all know that Eliot was ... gasp, a Christian and Conservative. And this must only be whispered, also an "antisemite." Horrors! So what if Eliot was a jerk, since he was also a great poet?
I will continue to read Bradley for the next few months, then I will write about him. His work means too much to me to be ignored. T.H. Green and John MacMurray are next. If Bradley's work speaks to me in so powerful a way, then there must be some good reasons for it -- aside from shared painful experiences. Consider this passage from Appearance and Reality:
"Without a metaphor, feeling belongs to perfect thought or it does not, there is at once a side of existence beyond thought. But if it does belong, then thought is different from thought discursive and relational. To make it include immediate experience its character must be transformed. It must cease to predicate, it must get beyond mere relations, it must reach something other than truth. Thought, in a word, must have been absorbed into a fuller experience. Now such an experience may be called thought, if you choose to use the word. But if anyone else prefers another term, such as feeling or will, he would be equally justified. For the result is a whole state which both includes and goes beyond each element; and to speak of them as simply one of them seems to be playing with phrases. For I must repeat it, when thought begins to be more than relational, it ceases to be mere thinking ... Thus, in reaching a whole which can contain every aspect within it, thought must absorb what divides it from feeling and will. But when these all have come together, then, since none of them can perish, they must be merged in a whole in which they are harmonious. But that whole assuredly is not simply ONE of its aspects. And the question is NOT whether the universe is in any sense intelligible. The question is whether, if you thought it and understood it, there would be no difference left between your thought and the thing [which is apprehended in thought]. And, supposing that to have happened, the question is then whether thought has not changed its nature." (Quantum Mechanics?)
If we need to think of something or someone outside of us, then the object of thought is discovered to be part of us already, as we are part of all that "is" in our constant "becoming." The Absolute that contains all individuals, where we ultimately dwell (here and now), is a powerful idea. It is the resolution of the fundamental tension between individual and social, self and other, one and many, concrete and universal, masculine and feminine. Analogies to the discoveries of particle physicists are available. ("Where are thoughts located?" and "Are you trying to make a monkey out of me?") What follows is a restatement of Bradley's metaphysics by a scientist who, probably, has never heard of Bradley:
" ... if quantum mechanics is right, even in some appropriately restricted domain, then the possible and the actual [both are real] are in much closer contact than we are used to thinking. ... And if that is right, all the usual bets in metaphysics are off." ("'Inception': A Movie Review.")
Allen Stairs, "Quantum Mechanics, Mind, and Self," in Daniel Kolak & Raymond Martin, eds., Self & Identity: Contemporary Philosophical Issues (New York: MacMillan, 1991), pp. 453-472. (" ... God is transcendent and imminent. Both are attempts to express a conception of a reality that cannot be captured by a single, non-paradoxical description.")
Concrete universals? Fact and value? To think of a person you love, is not only to be changed yourself but to transform the world. This is not mystical mumbo-jumbo. It is ethical wisdom compatible with the scientific search for a unified field theory linking Newtonian with Einsteinian physics that is also a theory of transcedence. What we discover at the end of all our exploring is merely what was looking for us. I will allow you to supply the missing word at this point. It is a short one. (See "Is it rational to believe in God?" and "Is this atheism's moment?")
The only response to these arguments that I have encountered is "yuk-yuk-yuk" humor and insults. I have decided to respond in kind. It may help if I refer to a comedian on the old Ed Sullivan Show. It may have been Jackie Mason, whose routine was entitled: "Everybody's gotta be somewhere." If we can agree on the truth of this proposition, we all have to be somewhere, then we may also agree that the Absolute must contain everything and all times, including this instant and myself. If so, then the person that I seek must (for good or ill) share this Absolute philosophical space with me, no matter where she is -- and so do you -- so that it is now only necessary for us to meet in what is laughingly known as the "real world." And we will. Rest assured, we will meet again. ("Flower in the Cranied Wall.")
More "errors" inserted and corrected. September 9, 2009 at 9:25 A.M. This coincides with allegations of "peculiar" relationships by Ms. Poritz and new mafia arrests in New Jersey. What a coincidence?
We are "concrete universals," escaping what Bradley elsewhere describes as the "desolation" of alienation from ourselves and one another. The Absolute is the negation of self-division (the shadow of Hegel falls across these pages), and it is the "homecoming of the soul." Bradley's genius is to supplement and "fill in" (his term) Kantian ethics, by "dressing Hegel in silk phrases," completing the circle between those two greatest social thinkers of the modern world.
Bradley was a recluse, who delighted in shooting cats from the window of his rooms in Merton College, Oxford University, while taking aim at any American tourists who wandered by. If Bradley were around today, we might go out together, the two of us -- suitably armed with bows and arrows, of course, another of his favorite weapons -- in search of acountants and tax lawyers to shoot on a beautiful morning. Afterwards, over a picnic lunch, we may discuss the ultimate riddle of life, a greater paradox than the mystery of evil -- which is Woman, naturally -- and I think I know what Bradley would say to me:
"It is meaningless to suppose of something which always comes in combination with something else, [like men and women?] that it [the two of us?] can be capable of existing uncombined."
Right you are, sir. This is very much like "particle pairs." Bradley would insist (me too!), that we, she and I, are always combined. We are ONE. Talk about happiness. No wonder the trendy feminists don't like him. See the Matrix movies and listen to some great Opera duets. The finale in "Andrea Chenier" might do the trick:
"Bradley challenged his contemporaries to refute this argument," George Santayana comments in reference to Bradley's epistemological constructivism, " and not being able to do so, many of them felt constrained to accept it, perhaps not without grave misgivings. For was it not always a rooted conviction of the British mind that knowledge brings material power, and that any figments of consciousness (in religion, for instance) not bringing material power are dangerous bewitchments, and not properly knowledge?"
This was written before Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, by a philosopher who regarded Bradley as a genius despite criticizing some of Bradley's ideas. Today, we see that Bradley anticipated phenomenologists, hermeneutic thinkers, and quantum physicists in works dating from the mid- to late-nineteenth century:
"Yet it is no less characteristic of the British mind to yield occasionally, up to a certain point, to some such enthusiastic fancy, provided that its incompatibility with honest action may be denied or ignored. ... British idealists, in the act of defining knowledge idealistically, as the presence to consciousness of its own phenomena, never really ceased to assume transcendent knowledge of a self-existing world" -- neither did Kant or Hegel -- "social and psychological, if not material: and they continued scrupulously to readjust their ideas to those dark facts, often more faithfully than the avowed positivists or scientific psychologists."
"Fifty Years of British Idealism," in Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1934), pp. 52-53 (emphasis added). If you are British, please read Santayana's Soliloquies in England.
