Background
BRADLEY, Francis Herbert was born in 1846. Son of Reverend Charles Bradley, Vicar of Glasbury, and half-b. of late Dean of Westminster.
BRADLEY, Francis Herbert was born in 1846. Son of Reverend Charles Bradley, Vicar of Glasbury, and half-b. of late Dean of Westminster.
He studied at Oxford.
Soon after his graduation, he was elected to a research fellowship at Merton College. Here he lived the rest of his life as a secluded bachelor scholar, devoting himself wholly to writing and thinking, and never lecturing, teaching, or appearing at philosophical meetings.
From Oxford he occasionally retired to a life of seclusion in France. He was deeply interested in literature as well as in philosophy, and owed no small part of his influence to his mastery of literary style. He was a brilliant and merciless critic of the empiricist tradition in philosophy, and, aided by Green, Caird, and Bosanquet, he decisively broke its holds on the British universities.
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Principles of Logic
Essays on Truth and Reality
Bradley’s central work in idealist metaphysics was expressed in Appearance and Reality (1893), although he did not regard this as a systematic exposition of his thinking. His earlier Ethical Studies (1876) and Principles of Logic (1883) were also important as critiques of utilitarianism and empiricism. Ethical Studies and the chapter on ‘goodness’ in Appearance and Reality stress the importance of self-realization as an end for morality, but Bradley was equally anxious to stress that this end could only be understood in a wide metaphysical context, rather than as an appeal to mere self-interest.
The ‘self to be realized’ was not ‘the self to be pleased’. The ‘real moral idea’ was the community, which provided the only intelligible framework for realization: Bradley’s famous notion of ‘My station and its duties’. ‘There is nothing better’ than this, he wrote, ‘nor anything higher or more truly beautiful’.
His scorn for utilitarian ethics was almost unlimited: happiness could have nothing at all to do with morality. The idea that any kind of pleasure principle could act as a moral motivation was incoherent. The general strategy of Ethical Studies was dialectical in a way that can mislead the unwary reader searching for clear conclusions.
Essay VI, on ‘Ideal morality’, tries to explain how self-realization falls into his wider view: ‘The general end is self-realization, the making real of the ideal self. And for morality, in particular, the ideal self is the good will, the identification of my will with the ideal as a universal will’. However, none of the necessary superstructure for this was given in Ethical Studies.
That had to wait for Appearance and Reality.
Principles of Logic, like Appearance and Reality, opens with a denial that it is a systematic treatise. Bradley also distances himself from Hegel, usually seen as his main source of influence: ‘We want no system-making or systems home-grown or imported’. Although there are obvious differences, Bradley’s logic can be appreciated best in contrast with that of Frege, his near contemporary.
Like Frege, he totally rejected psychologism in logic, sarcastically referring to Mill as our ‘great modern logician’. But, also like Frege, he was preoccupied with whatever it was about or within a judgement that held it together, and with the connections between judgements that enabled logical relations to exist between them. Like Frege, but without any supporting symbolism, he repudiated subject—predicate logic and stressed the significance of logical as opposed to superficial forms.
But extremely unlike Frege, Bradley drew idealist conclusions from his critiques of psychologistic logic: the unity within a statement, and the unity between logically related statements, could only be grasped truly as part of a wider metaphysical unity: 'All judgment is of Reality, and that means that it makes its idea the adjective of the real Universe'. Again, as with his moral philosophy, the underlying metaphysics of this had to wait to be fully explained.
This explanation came in Appearance and Reality, where Bradley expounded his absolute idealism as fully as he ever did anywhere. The object of the book was ‘to state merely a general view about Reality, and to defend this view against more obvious and prominent objections'.
His metaphysical thinking was not based on epistemology. Appearance and reality were not aligned with phenomena and noumena. Although the ordinary, perceived world was not Reality for Bradley, he was at pains to stress that it was unreal in comparison with a higher ideal and. not in comparison with anything concealed behind the veil of perception inherited from egocentric epistemology: ‘The assertion of a reality falling outside knowledge, is quite nonsensical'.
Experience, he held, was genuine enough in its own terms. Appearance was unreal mainly for logical reasons. The idea that anything could be only accidentally related to anything else was a profound error.
Deeper reflection would show that all relations were in some way essential or intrinsic, and could not. in any event, be considered themselves, apart from the reality within which they existed. ‘Reality is one. It must be single, because plurality, taken as real, contradicts itself. So a full statement about anything—and hence a fully true statement about anything—could not be made without reference to everything else.
Thus: ‘There will be no truth which is entirely true, just as there will be no error which is totally false’. The repudiation of ‘external relations’ and the doctrine of degrees of truth and reality were seen by Bradley’s pluralist critics, Moore and Russell, as well as by him. as logically fundamental.
The critical side of Bradley’s metaphysics is often surprisingly trenchant. The positive characterization of the absolute is more elusive.
‘There is but one Reality, and its being consists in experience’. Any further categorical statement about it would be bound to be false since: ‘any categorical judgment must be false. The subject and the predicate, in the end, cannot either be the other’.
Nevertheless, in a sense, it may be said that: ‘the Absolute is actually good, and throughout the world of goodness it is truly realized in different degrees of satisfaction. Since in ultimate Reality all existence, and all thought and feeling, become one, we may even say that every feature in the universe is thus absolutely good’. Appearance and Reality ends with what Bradley invokes as ‘the essential message of Hegel’: ‘Outside of spirit there is not, and there cannot be, any reality, and the more that anything is spiritual, so much the more is it veritably real’.
Bradley, with McTaggart, is normally taken to be the principal figure in British idealism: a movement that now seems peculiar for the speed of its total downfall. Its culmination in Bradley’s Appearance and Reality (1893) was succeeded, soon after 1898, by its alleged intellectual defeat by Moore and Russell. But its influence lasted longer than that, starting with the earlier work of Green.
Bosanquet and Bradley himself, going on through McTaggart’s Nature of Existence (19217) and lasting for the terms of many later university appointments of idealists in England and Scotland, half a century after their philosophy had been pronounced dead.
Russell tended to take Bradley as a main target of his 'revolt into pluralism’, although it is striking that he engaged in direct published debate only with Joachim. Bradley scarcely mentioned his pluralist critics. His only sustained response was the posthumous ‘Relations’.
Bradley was a remarkable writer: powerful, allusive and scornful, and wholly undeserving of the charges of woolly unclarity brought against him by his later positivist critics.
T. S. Eliot noted in his Preface (1964) to the reissue of his doctoral dissertation on Bradley how closely his own prose style was ‘formed on that of Bradley and how little it has changed in all these years’. Bradley’s colourful use of metaphor may be valued more highly as philosophical rhetoric becomes more appreciated. (‘The Absolute has no seasons, but all at once bears its leaves, fruit, and blossoms.
Like our globe it always, and it never, has summer and winter’.).
Ethics; logic; metaphysics. Stiuc: Manuscripts and Archives, University College, Oxford. lnfls:T. H. ^reen. E. Caird, Bosanquet and Hegel.