Today's post is for F.H. Bradley (1846-1924), and for the mysterious lady "E --- R ---," to whom Bradley's "unworthy volume is respectfully dedicated." He was not referring only to his great book of metaphysical speculation, one of three dedicated to "E.R."
Women. The things a guy has to do ...
Primary Sources:
F.H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality (New York: MacMillan Co., 1897) (2nd ed., with Appendix and Response to Critics).
F.H. Bradley, Essays on Truth and Reality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914).
F.H. Bradley, Writings on Logic and Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).
F.H. Bradley, Ethical Studies (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1951), this work first appeared in 1876.
F.H. Bradley, The Presuppositions of Critical History (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1968), this work first appeared in 1874.
F.H. Bradley, Aphorisms (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930).
Scholarly Commentaries:
Anthony Manser & Guy Stock, eds., The Philosophy of F.H. Bradley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).
Phillip Ferreira, Bradley and the Sources of Knowledge (New York: SUNY, 1999).
Western philosophy has struggled with the tension between individualism and communitarianism in ethical, legal and political theory for centuries. The great theoretical moves and counter-moves in this controversy have fallen under one of two categories -- either rights-based, neo-Kantian, deontological theories (like those of Rawls, Nozick, Dworkin); or post-Hegelian, social-communitarian, "teleological" or consequentialist theories (Marx, Mill, Bentham, Sidgwick, Hart). The focus in these rival theories is either upon the rights-bearing individual "choosing agent" facing an ethical dilemma; or upon the decision-maker forced to consider the results of an action in terms of "the greatest good of the greatest number," from a social perspective, in which the worthiness of the act is measured by its consequences for the entire group, not only for the particular agent.
It should be noted that there are variations on the utilitarian position that seek to accomodate individualist values. Fundamental rights are insulated from majoritarian pressures, as in the Bill of Rights. Richard Brandt's rule-utilitarianism is one such variation, and there are others. For instance, the rationalistic utilitarianism of Brand Blanshard is another. There are also efforts to reconcile liberal individualism with communitarian or socialist values (a position I find attractive), as in John Rawls's A Theory of Justice or Noam Chomsky's "libertarian socialism."
This ethical dilemma pitting individual against collectivity both followed from and has led to a continuing metaphysical debate about which is primary, persons or communities. Can there be such a thing as a Kantian "transcendental ego," abstracted from the social entities that make the very notion of an individual meaningful at all -- such as language, gender, social and economic category, nationality, family, history and so on? After all, these are the things that make it possible to speak of individuals in the first place. A person removed from all of these contexts is no longer recognizably a person, to the extent that such a notion is even conceivable or meaningful. ("Roberto Unger's Revolutionary Legal Theory.")
This charge of unreality has been a main criticism against Rawls's description of the "original position" and of his choosing agents, who operate behind a "veil of ignorance" that prevents their knowing such things as social origins. Are such beings "individuals" or persons? Do they become drones? Or Republicans, perhaps? Communitarians say that Ralwsian agents are not persons, if removed to an abstract isolation from all defining conditions and qualities. The key word in this foregoing sentence is "all."
Among leading contemporary thinkers in this Hegelian school are philosophers as different as Charles Taylor and (to some degree) Alasdair MacIntyre, along with the inheritors of the Marxist tradition, whether Critical (Frankfurt School, Castro) or Scientific (Lenin) Marxists. (Compare "'The Island': A Movie Review" with "'I am Legend': A Movie Review.")
In reading Friedrich Nietzsche's essay "On Schopenhauer as Educator," we certainly have a sense of the primal, visceral reality of the unique existential agent or self, who feels, hurts, loves, desires and thinks, apart from all social settings. But is it apart from all social settings? You may wish to consult Miguel Unamuno on this issue. It may be only an illusion, but we certainly feel that there is something tangible and real that can be distinguished from all of the social factors that make up a person's identity. We are persons, with individual rights, but only because we are members of communities. To be human is to dwell within contradictions. (See Roberto Magabeira Unger's Knowledge and Politics.)
Friedrich Nietzsche, in celebrating autonomy -- incidentally, he does so in his own non-Kantian terms -- is in the room with you (as is Schopenhauer in his best work), because Nietzsche is present in his pungent and powerful prose:
"... we are experiencing the consequences of the doctrine, lately preached from all the rooftops," Nietzsche writes, "that the state is the highest goal of mankind and that a man has no higher duty than to serve the state: in which doctrine I recognize a relapse not into paganism, but into stupidity. [Think of the various forms of totalitarianism in the twentieth century.] It may be that a man who sees his highest duty in serving the state really knows no higher duties; but there are men and duties existing beyond this -- and one of the duties that seems, at least to me, to be higher than serving the state demands that one destroy stupidity in every form, and therefore in this form too."
Niezsche rejects collectivism and total adjustment to any society as "stupidity," as an attempt to "evade yourself," to escape the responsibility of "becoming the person you are." What you are, fundamentally, is Kierkegaard's "individual." So the question becomes: How much of what goes into the concept of an individual is social? You are not a transcendental self, for Nietzscheans, not a cool, detached, "spectator" engaged in rational deliberation and searching for the "ethically optimal solution" (unless you are British, smoke a pipe, and study at Oxford University); rather, you are an embodied, contradictory, suffering human being, wrestling with mortality, longing -- perhaps irrationally -- hoping and loving, especially suffering. Notice the crucial distinction between "serving the state" and "realizing yourself in a community" (Bradley) or in "achieving a revolution" (Jefferson, Castro).
Take another look at Bradley's enigmatic dedication of Appearance and Reality to Ms. "E.R." And yes, I have read Terry Eagleton's Aesthetic Theory, Richard Wollheim and T.L.S. Sprigge are excellent commentators on Bradley. You cannot disappear into a crowd (the collectivity, Marxist or otherwise, unless you are a liberal Democrat residing in the East Village); nor can you vanish into the ethereal philosophical realm of Platonic forms or Kant's "noumenal" reality (i.e., "abstract individuality"), unless you are a Republican faculty member at Yale. You live here on earth and have to worry about such things as not running out of toilet paper. Running out of toilet paper at a crucial moment is what philosophers describe as an "empirical crisis." Regrettably, it appears that further disfigurements of this essay have taken place. I will struggle to continue making corrections of this work.
Sadly, this previous sentence was altered, once again, as I review this essay. A very sick or evil person must be responsible for these continuing crimes and a highly inept or corrupt legal system, evidently, allows them to go unpunished.
On second thought, Hugh Grant attended Oxford University and he certainly seems to have desires, including some for "Miss Divine" at $1000 per half hour. Marx? True, Mr. Grant may be the exception that proves the rule. Perhaps he was under the impression that he was going to school at UCLA?
Our sense of being separate and unique, our awareness of individual identity, is too primary and powerful to be destroyed by any theory. Even philosophy is only possible after we have eaten and done our best to get laid. Philosophy is best done if we are successful in our efforts to get laid. This constitutes a "very sticky wicket" indeed, as they say in cricket.
Enough about Mr. Grant, back to F.H. Bradley. We know ourselves to be defined by membership in groups and by aspects of our selves ("relationships") that are social: such as the languages in which we think, nations and families in which we take our place, the identity-conferring emotions that make us up, like the love we feel for those closest to us. Solipsism is disproven, for me, whenever I see an attractive woman and feel her "effects" (as it were) on me. The Catholic theologian Thomas Merton writes:
"... since faith [and art or love?] is a matter of freedom and self-determination -- the free receiving of a freely given gift of grace -- man cannot assent to a spiritual message as long as his mind and heart are enslaved by automatism. He will always remain so enslaved as long as he is submerged in a mass of other automatons, without individuality, and without their rightful integrity as persons. ..."
Merton's point applies to all of humanity, naturally, men and women. Selfishness and greed, vulgar materialism is always a great error:
"No amount of technological progress will cure the hatred that eats away the vitals of materialistic society like a spiritual cancer. The only cure is, and must always be, spiritual. There is not much use talking to [persons] ... about love if they are not able to listen. The ears with which one hears the message of ... [love] are hidden in man's heart, and the ears do not hear anything unless they are favored with a certain interior solitude and silence."
The neglected British philosophers in the idealist tradition -- some of the very best produced by that nation or anywhere -- from Berkely (an empiricist, whose work is foundational for these thinkers) to R.G. Collingwood, or a close cousin, Christopher Peacocke (an important young rationalist philosopher working today), in one way way or another, all speak to these epistemological and metaphysical issues. I know that rationalism and idealism are not the same thing. Professor Peacocke is concerned with defending the validity of a priori knowledge, which is highly important to the idealists as well as rationalists.
F.H. Bradley in particular, while a critic of "relations" as "contradictory," nevertheless sought to bridge the distance between self and other in the "Absolute." Bradley's "Absolute" is Hegel's "Spirit" wearing English tweeds. Perhaps, for Bradley, this quest for the Absolute had something to do with finding a space to meet that absent lady to whom he dedicated Appearance and Reality. The Absolute is a space in which relations are not only possible, but realized. You may recall my discussion of the Forest of Arden. More importantly, the Absolute is the only way in which relations can make sense or become meaningful.
The following words are among the most revealing and heart-breaking ever written by one of the great philosophers. They were set down by the reclusive Professor Bradley near the end of his life. I believe that they are incomprehensible without understanding that dedication of Appearance and Reality to the elusive "E.R.":
"In philosophy we must not seek for an absolute satisfaction. Philosophy at its best is but an understanding of its object, and it is not an experience in which that object is contained wholly and possessed. ... The shades nowhere speak without blood, and the ghosts of Metaphysic accept no substitute. They reveal themselves only to that victim whose life they have drained, and, to converse with shadows, he himself must become a shade." (Introduction to Bradley's final essays.)
To fully appreciate this paragraph, I ask the reader to compare my essays on Nietzsche and Santayana, with my comments on Bradley's works, then see my essay entitled "The Forest of Arden." A possible subject for a future dissertation in the history of philosophy is to discover the purpose and destination of Bradley's mysterious and frequent trips to France (Ms. "E.R."?). The literary-minded are asked to recall the name that Oscar Wilde took upon arriving in Paris after enduring an unjust prison sentence, "Sebastian Melmoth," inspired by Charles Maturin. See Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (London: The Folio Society, 1993), p. ix ("Melmoth's perpetual sorrow, loneliness, alienation from humanity and longing for peace burns fiercer as he realises the hopelessness of his desires.") and Oscar Wilde, "De Profundis," in De Profundis and Other Writings (London & New York: Penguin, 1984), p. 161 ("Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask.")
Bradley is often misunderstood as a "relativist" concerning ethical obligations, when he was actually at the opposite end of the spectrum, a champion of absolute obligation in ethics. No, there is no contradiction between these two paragraphs:
" ... my duty may be mine and no other man's, but I do not make it mine. If it is duty, it would be the duty of any person in my case and condition, whether they thought so or not -- in a word, duty is 'objective,' in the sense of not being contingent on the opinion or choice of this or that subject."
Next is a comment, also from Ethical Studies:
" ... the end is the good will which is superior to ourselves; and again the end is self-realization. Bringing these together we see the end is the realization of ourselves as the will which is above ourselves. And this will (if morality exists) we saw must be 'objective,' because not dependent on 'subjective' liking; and 'universal,' because not identifiable with any particular, but standing above all actual and possible particulars."
It is ironic that Bradley -- whose genius and historical influence are difficult to deny -- is mostly out of print. I have experienced great difficulty in finding a copy of his Ethical Studies. Philosophical fame is a fleeting thing. Fortunately, Bradley has been rediscovered by a new generation of thinkers and his books will soon be on their way to new editions from Oxford University Press, for $75.00 each, which is probably what Bradley earned in a month as a professor during the nineteenth century. ("Arthur's Schopenhauer's Metaphysics of Art" and "David Hume's Philosophical Romance.")
F.H. Bradley is the best philosopher in Britain between Hume and Russell. Bradley may be better -- if less influential -- than Russell. Several recent sholarly works have been devoted to Bradley's philosophy. R.G. Collingwood described F.H. Bradley early in the twentieth century as "the finest philosophical intellect produced in Britain since David Hume." T.S. Eliot agreed and never escaped Bradley's influence. Collingwood learned from Bradley that "the chief business of twentieth century philosophy is to reckon with twentieth century history."
Bradley's Absolute contains all diversity, all fragments, yet is unitary and universal. In setting forth this notion, Bradley develops the concept of a "concrete universal." This language harks back to the Christian discussion of spirit in a material world, and/or the infinite within the finite. Think of Spinoza's "substance" and "the intellectual love of God." There is also a reaction by Bradley (based on Hegel's thinking) against Kant's dual-aspect theory (Bradley calls it "dualism"), or even against a Kantian minimizing of the particular for the sake of a categorical universal obligation attaching to an abstract self or "transcendental ego."
For Bradley, the Good (because it is objective and absolute) can only be ultimately or perfectly realized in religion. Being imperfect persons, however, does not diminish the objectivity of our ethical obligations in our flawed earthly societies. We still have to struggle to do the right thing, even if we know that we will never be perfect. Bradley's tragedy, I believe, is that he did exactly that in his own life. What he learned at the end of his life is that love, however painful, is the greatest good. Self-realization is "self-giving in love to one's community." ("David Hume's Philosophical Romance" and "George Santayana and Quantum Mechanics.")
Although Bradley is usually listed as a conservative, which he was in lots of ways, Bradley may also be regarded as a kind of socialist. I say this knowing that he would hate the word. Compare T.H. Green's Prolegomena (deliberately echoing Kant) and Oscar Wilde in De Profundis, with key sections of Bradley's logic and with Bradley's posthumous Aphorisms.
Mind you, Bradley admires Kant, though he thinks more of Hegel, while admitting that we must be moral for the sake of being moral. Bradley reserves even more criticisms against Bentham-Mill-type utilitarianism. For Bradley, as I say, ethics is about self-realization in ultimate terms. To my knowledge, there is no book-length study comparing Mary Wollstonecraft's writings with Bradley's work. This is unfortunate. There are instructive parallels to be explored by scholars in the works and lives of these two philosophers. Until very recently, only one of these two persons would have been called a true "philosopher." This is significant in assessing their respective works and their importance. Mary Wollstonecraft could not have attended any university in England during her lifetime.
It is especially regrettable that Mary Whiton Calkins never established a dialogue with Bradley because their philosophical interests and solutions are so similar. I cannot say whether there were parallels in Calkins' life that suggest even greater affinity between the two philosophers. I believe that Ms. Calkins would have been, to say the least, "apprehensive" about approaching Bradley for an interview or scholarly dialogue, because (as a woman lecturer in philosophy and psychology) her place in academia was marginal and uncertain during the early years of the twentieth century.
Calkins lived in a time -- almost one hundred years after Wollstonecraft -- when women still could not study at most universities and were denied (as she was) the highest degrees because of their gender, despite achievements on a global level of importance. Calkins would have feared being thought presumptuous or "pushy" by seeking an encounter with Professor Bradley. We are the losers because of this nonsense. In Ethical Studies, Bradley says:
"Not troubling ourselves with our relation to Kant, we may say that the ideal is neither to be perfectly homogeneous nor simply to be specified to the last degree, but rather to combine both these elements. Our true being is not the extreme of unity, nor of diversity, but perfect identity of both. And 'Realize yourself' does not mean merely 'Be a whole,' but 'Be an infinite whole.' ..."
I don't know about you, but there are days when I find it difficult to be "infinite," except that it may be more difficult (if not impossible), on Bradley's terms, not to be infinite. This is called "physics" today. In fact, Bardley anticipated developments in quantum physics before Einstein's relativity theory. ("Time is the Fire in Which We Burn.") Bradley says:
"It [the Absolute] is the self-realization of each member because each member cannot find the function which makes him himself, apart from the whole to which he belongs; to be himself he must go beyond himself, to live his life he must live a life which is not merely his own, but which, none the less, but on the contrary all the more, is intensely and emphatically his own individuality. ... we have the end, we have found self-realization, duty, and happiness in one. Yes, we have found ourselves when we have found our station and its duties, our function as an organ in the social organism." (Ethical Studies, Ch. V.)
It is at this point that I wish to bring together Bradley's ideas with McTaggart's philosophy of love and spirit, also with the works of contemporaries John MacMurray and John Finnis. (Please see my essay "The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem.") Ironically, the greatest proximity to Bradley's thinking is found in the theoretical writings of contemporary physicists and other scientists. See David Deutsch, "The Ends of the Universe," in The Fabric of Reality (London & New York: Penguin, 1997), pp. 361-363, then read Bradley on relations. The following quotes are from a summary by Professor Warnock:
"The Absolute must be One, a Unity, ... because plurality would involve relatedness. Yet it is a unity, ... which contains diversity. The Absolute would otherwise be empty of content. At this point, [the theory of concrete universals emerges] ... We are accustomed to think of things arranged in a classificatory order: horses included among quadrupeds, quadrupeds among animals, animals among living things. As the terms in this classification increase in generality, their own content diminishes in richness -- 'living things' is much more abstract and less specific than 'horses.' If we then think of the Absolute as the final point in such a classificatory system, it seems so poor in content as to vanish into nothing."
Now keep your eyes on Bradley's argument, as Professor Warnock in One Hundred Years of Philosophy shows him pulling not a rabbit, but a metaphysical elephant (or is it that "abstract" horse?) out of his top hat:
"Such a classification makes use of the 'abstract' universals beloved by thought. HORSE, the horse as such is, an abstraction from, and thus, a falsification of, experience. With this abstract universal the 'concrete' universal is contrasted. [The concrete universal] is not an abstraction from, but A COMMUNITY OF its members. It is an individual: we can understand its nature if we consider a person or, better still, a society. A society includes the rich diversity of all its members, in all their conflicts and cooperative efforts. It is richer, not more empty than any separate member of that society, just as a person is richer in content than any of the separate events which occur as part of his life. ... A person, a society, is 'universal' just in so far as it brings into unity a diversity -- as a class does also -- but it is individual, as a class is not." (Again: "David Hume's Philosophical Romance.")
No society is absolute, since it is defined by what it is not, i.e., other societies, but we can think in terms of an Absolute that contains all societies and their relations, each of which is still individual. We can think of humanity as "instantiated" not only in the persons we love or the self we encounter in the bathroom mirror, but in our neighbors and friends, even in our enemies in foreign lands. The challenge then becomes a problem of recognition, of SEEING the particularity and rights that we demand for ourselves as properly due to all others like us, who stand within or as part of the Absolute, as we do, being (in that sense) identical to us. ("Arthur Schopenhauer's Metaphysics of Art" and "'Inception': A Movie Review.")
Bradley's response to Hume concerning the reality of the self is to emphasize that identity is a matter of totality, not of locating the self at any single point in time. ("David Hume's Philosophical Romance" and "Immanuel Kant and the Narrative of Freedom.")
This argument was foreshadowed in some comments made to Hume by The Countess Mme de Boufflers, another woman whose philosophical and political brilliance has not yet been discussed by feminist scholars as far as I know. Maybe someone will steal the idea from me, after describing me as a "fool" of course. I am sure that Bradley was unaware of this correspondence between Hume and his French lady. ("What is it like to be plagiarized?" and "'Brideshead Revisited': A Movie Review.")
Bradley would not have regarded Mary Wollstonecraft as an important British philosopher, for example, despite being an enlightened male of his era. Considering that Bradley happened to be a philosophical genius -- he was certainly aware of Wollstonecraft's writings and role in history -- this omission is a significant illustration of the blinding effect of ideology in scholarship and all philosophical thinking.
We see both in the universe around us and in the suffering of a child in Darfur not only the pain of others, but kinship, sameness, shared suffering and mortality. I am beginning to think that it must be painful for readers to experience the mutilations of these texts along with me. I believe that these mutilations of my writings are attempts at refutation of my arguments by inarticulate persons who are adept at cybercrime and other forms of brutality who are protected by government officials. ("William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft.")
The importance of recognition has become a subject of debate for philosophers today. This is true of thinkers as diverse as Charles Taylor, Susan Wolf and Michael Walzer. Perhaps F.H. Bradley arrived at this insight before all of them. A person's physical absence does not diminish her importance or her presence, in other ways, for us. The distance or proximity of others does not alter their connection to us. Identity is a narrative project in time which is necessarily dialectical and holistic. Ricoeur's hermeneutics of freedom becomes inescapable. (''In Time': A Movie Review" and "Immanuel Kant and the Narrative of Freedom.")
This same dialectical movement from particular to universal can now be traced entirely in the language of physics. It means that we must be wary of all talk of observers and observed, since in a fundamental sense, the observer is already a part of what he or she wishes to observe. Subject is object; fact is value. You are your neighbor. To be a person is to be "incepted" into a context. I believe that, as a matter of philosophical argument, this can be demonstrated. But it can also be shown scientifically, in physics, in terms of the ultimate building blocks of all matter out of which we are made; and biologically, in terms of our common genetic heritage. As a species, we are one. Hence, the connection between the objectivity and universality of humanity with the Good/Beauty is not too difficult to defend, while preserving our precious individuality is still possible.
Compare Amit Goswami, Ph.D., The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World (New York: Penguin, 1995), pp. 63-147 ("Idealism and the Resolution of the Quantum Paradoxes") with Danah Zohar, The Quantum Self: Human Nature and Consciousness Defined by the New Physics (New York: William Morrow, 1990), pp. 107-125 ("The Person That I Am: Quantum Identity" and "The Relationships That I Am: Quantum Intimacy").
Ms. Zohar should consider amending her chapter title to read: "The Relations That We Are." These writers and many others from several countries are scientist-philosophers whose core ideas were foreshadowed by Bradley and Mary Whiton-Calkins in the nineteenth century. To my knowledge, this integrationist-structuralist insight has not been communicated by humanistic scholars in the English-speaking world, until now. Under this reasoning, by the way, the Absolute includes the universe or any number of "multiverses." (See "The 'Matrix': A Movie Review" and the film Mindwalk, then, again, "Arthur Schopenhauer's Metaphysics of Art.")
This idealist position overlaps with much of what is called "phenomenological-hermeneutics."
Scientists are directed to: Stuart Sim, "The Science and Technology of the Postmodern," in Irony and Crisis: A Critical History of Postmodern Culture (London: Icon, 2002), pp. 151-183. ("Physics is transformed into metaphysics ... and we seem to be on the verge of a new narrative [for the existence of God] based on that old favorite, the argument from design.") Admirers of Lewis Carroll will enjoy, P. Heath, The Philosopher's Alice (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1974). Mr. Heath is the author of the excellent article dealing with the "logic of Alice" in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. ("A Review of the t.v. Show 'Alice.'")
I discovered a modestly priced edition of Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos at Strand Books. I immediately appreciated the work as a contribution to the latest thinking about physics and also another chapter in the history of the intellectual project of humanity or philosophy. Alice's puzzles about time are answered by Professor Greene. Greene displays joyful humanistic celebrations of intelligence as well as wonder at the universe. This paragraph and many others in the book might have been written by F.H. Bradley, who is not a thinker Professor Greene is likely to know:
"The central concern of this book is to explain some of the most prominent and pivotal of these revisions to our picture of reality, with an intense focus on those that affect our species' long-term project to understand space and time. From Aristotle to Einstein, from the astrolabe to the Hubble Space Telescope, from the pyramids to mountaintop observatories, space and time have framed thinking since thinking began." (pp. 5-6.)
Like most great philosophers and scientists, Greene's sentences have a child-like simplicity combined with genius. This foregoing elegant prose is produced by a scientist. Scientists who write this well are scary. Aside from chronology, this statement might have been written by Immanuel Kant.
We begin with an individualist ethics of duty or law, for Bradley, then move to a communitarian ethics of aspiration or love. The trajectory, for me, is from Plato/Kant (individualist, masculine) to Hegel/Bradley/Calkins (spiritual communitarian, feminine). What I admire most about the U.S. Constitution is that both elements are part of the architecture of that document: individualist elements or "freedom" (Bill of Rights) and communitarian elements or "equality" (forms of community representation in legislatures, federalism, and "equal protection"). Freedom and equality with due process of law from a government of limited powers is what the Constitution is about. (See again, if it has not been defaced once more: "Manifesto for the Unfinished American Revolution" and "Master and Commander.")
We can be certain that no ethics that neglects one aspect of this duality will be satisfactory. We insist on freedom with equality. Democratic socialism. We need autonomy, but we also need others whom we may love (and who may love us), as equals, in order to become fully healthy and autonomous individuals in supportive communities. We need others in order to be. This would be Bradley's response to Nietzsche in defense of ultimate "Reality" over mere "Appearance." ("Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")
