British Idealism
1865 – 1925
Reality is one coherent whole, relations between things are internal to what they are, and nothing can be understood in isolation.
- Active
- 1865 – 1925
- Where
- Oxford and Glasgow
- Status
- extinct as a movement
- Tradition
- Anglo American
The claim
Every relation a thing stands in is constitutive of it. Change any relation and you have a different thing — which means the whole determines the parts, and truth is a matter of coherence with the whole rather than correspondence to a piece of it.
What it held
For fifty years the dominant philosophy in British universities was Hegelian, and it is now the most thoroughly forgotten major school in the language.
Bradley's argument is the sharpest. Take any relation — A is to the left of B. Is the relation something in addition to A and B? If so, it needs relations to connect it to them, and those need further relations, and so on. If not, the relation has no reality. Bradley concludes that relations as ordinarily conceived are incoherent and that appearance is riddled with contradiction; only the Absolute, in which distinctions are transcended, is fully real.
Green's contribution was political and had more effect. If persons are constituted by their relations, then a self-sufficient individual is a fiction, and the state's job is to remove obstacles to self-realisation. That argument is a founding document of British social liberalism and fed directly into the welfare legislation of the following decades.
The school was destroyed with unusual speed. Moore and Russell attacked the doctrine of internal relations around 1900, and analytic philosophy defined itself against it.
How it argued
Dialectical argument about the coherence of ordinary concepts — relations, space, time, causation — driven to show that each generates contradiction.
What it was arguing against
British empiricism's atomism, utilitarian individualism, and the assumption that things can be understood one at a time.
Where it disagreed with itself
Whether the regress argument about relations is sound — Russell said it rested on an unnecessary assumption. Whether the Absolute is a conclusion or a name for the failure of the analysis.
Common misconceptions
That it was an alien German import with no British content. Green's social philosophy was intensely practical and shaped actual legislation, and Bradley's arguments are being taken seriously again by metaphysicians of holism.
How it began
Dissatisfaction with utilitarianism and empiricism among Oxford men who read Hegel and Kant in the 1860s, and found them a way out.
What became of it
Destroyed as a school by Moore and Russell within a decade, and by the association with Germany after 1914.
Lasting influence
British social liberalism and welfare policy through Green. Analytic philosophy, negatively — it defined itself by rejecting this.
Why it still matters
Metaphysical holism and the debate over internal relations are live again, and Bradley's regress is still discussed under his name.
Put another way
A tapestry in which pulling one thread changes the picture everywhere.
Where to start
Bradley's chapter on relations. It is the argument everything else depends on.
The surprising bit
Bradley wrote that metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct, and added that finding them is also an instinct.
In their own words
Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct.
The self is a relation which relates itself to something outside it.
Connections
- Answers
- German Idealism, Hegelianism
- Influenced
- Communitarianism
The verdict
A school that dominated British philosophy for two generations and was erased so completely that its successors could not name it.