F.H. Bradley's "Absolute."

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.

F.H. Bradley's "Concrete Universals."

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.")