Background
McTaggart, John McTaggart Ellis was born in 1866 in London.
Ontological idealist inis: Metaphysics
McTaggart, John McTaggart Ellis was born in 1866 in London.
Manuscripts and Archives and LittD, Trinity College, Cambridge.
Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. 1891-1923; College Lecturer. 1897-1923.
McTaggart gave short, clear outlines of his thinking in two papers reprinted in Philosophical Studies (1934): early, in ‘The further determination of the absolute’ (1893), and late, in ‘An ontological idealism' (1923). There was little change in his views during his lifetime, although he did move from a preference for a dialectical, Hegelian method towards a more directly deductive exposition. His final position is summed up in the two volumes of The Nature of Existence (1921 -7), a detailed and comprehensive treatment of his idealist metaphysics, along with its ramifications for religion and the place of values. McTaggart called himself as ‘ontological idealist’ although he did not regard this position as being open to ‘rigid demonstration'. He was also, unusually, an epistemological realist in that he said that knowledge was a true belief: ‘and I should say that a belief was true when, and only when, it stands in a relation of correspondence to a fact’. Although he was impressed by Hegel, and has often been classed with Bradley as an English neo-Hegelian, his idiosyncratic form of idealism differed from Hegel and Bradley in crucial ways. He accepted the real existence of separate individuals. He thought that individual truths could be fully true, and believed that truth consisted in a relation of correspondence between a belief and a fact. The starting-point for his idealism was not the dependence of an object on a knowing subject but ‘the assertion that nothing exists but spirit’. He differed from Hegel and Bradley, too, in the clarity of his exposition and the modesty of its tone. Broad commented unkindly that if Hegel was the prophet of the absolute and Bradley its chivalrous knight, McTaggart was its ‘devoted and extremely astute family solicitor’. This is less than fair, not only because McTaggart’s meticulous caution is more likely to appeal to modern readers than Bradley’s haphazard rhetoric, but because McTaggart’s Universe, ‘a substance which contains all content, and of which every other substance is a part’, is far less metaphysically charged than Bradley’s Hegelian Absolute. Although McTaggart rarely acknowledged the direct debit, his nearest philosophical ancestor was not Hegel but Spinoza: both he and Spinoza aimed at the same kind of comprehensive, deductively explained metaphysical view. He felt a sympathy with the mystical strain in Part V of Spinoza’s Ethics, but he also shared the reluctance of Spinoza to appeal directly to mystical experience. The exact details of McTaggart’s system will be followed by very few modern readers. There are numerous undefined terms. The reasoning, from a priori premises, is proudly deductive, allowing tor only two empirical postulates: that something exists and that what is exists is differentiated. There is a plurality of substances which together make up the Universe, but no God. McTaggart considers issues of divisibility, definition and identity to reach a conclusion that a sui generis relation of ‘determining correspondence’ must hold between wholes and parts of substances. Reality as it is has to be very different from how it seems. Space, time and physical objects are all proved to be ‘unreal-. Individual minds are substances which must be immortal: a point to which McTaggart attached great personal significance. Love was seen as an "emotional quality’ of souls of particular importance: an ‘intense and passionate’ ‘species of liking’ only felt by persons for each other. McTaggart’s moral philosophy was only scantily developed. His attribution of values to states of souls and his views on the indefmability of good owe a clear debt to Moore. The Nature of Existence ends with Spinozistic praise of ‘a timeless and endless state of love—love so direct, so intimate and so powerful that even the deepest mystic rapture gives us but the smallest foretaste of its perfection’. McTaggart’s philosophy ¡s highly individual in combining views that are often held apart: a belief in the immortality of the soul along with atheism; ontological idealism along with epistemological realism and pluralismMcTaggart is usually seen as a foil in the earlv development of G. E. Moore and Russell, who both came to differ diametrically from him alter their revolt against idealism in 1898. Later readers may find that his arguments were less ridiculous that Moore and Russell portrayed them to be. His argument on the unreality of time, in particular, continues to attract some interest. Few today will accept his opinion that the ‘utility of Metaphysic is to be found.. in the comfort it can give us. He had no disciples and no successors, but he has had occasional admirers, sometimes unexpectedly; for example: ‘I could not ■■■ imagine a much more exciting and rewarding enterprise than the rational rigour combined with •he satisfaction of one’s deepest cravings that it seemed McTaggart offered’ (M. Tanner, ‘Metaphysics and music’, in A. Phillips Griffiths, The Impulse to Philosophise, Cambridge, 1992, p. 191).