Idealism & idealists in Britain and America

 

Note:

‘N’ = Narrow sense: denial of physical reality to some extent or other;

‘W’ = Wide sense: denial of materalism and naturalism, and affirmation of mental/spritiual reality with its own laws, categories and concepts, in addition to physical reality (frequently used in 19th C. and up to c. 1920)

‘B’ = Applies to both N & W.

‘M’ = Monist, there is really only one entity (the Absolute, or Brahman-Atman in Hiduism) and it is mental-spiritual; all else is ‘phenomenal’, ‘appearance’ or ‘illusion’, maya in Advaita (Non-Dualist) Vendantism in Hinduism; finite minds not real.

‘P’ = Pluralist; finite minds-spirits-persons are real and not just appearances of the Absolute, etc. nor merge into Brahman-Atman

‘T’ = Theist, but often God is finite in Theist idealism which is always W & P;

‘A’ = Non-Theist usually N & P

 

Idealism and Idealists1. The rise of Idealism

Idealism (N) is a consequence of Descartes’ problems with the reality of the external world and Locke’s ‘representationalism’, that our perceptions are pictures of things and not of the things themselves. From this there is no escape and it inevitably leads to Hume’s scepticism (and atomism) and to Mill’s phenomenalism, which has since been described as ‘subjective idealism’. That entails solipsism because other people can be only constant groups of phenomena, just as mere things are, and I can never get beyond phenomena. Even when G.E. Moore stuck up his hand to refute Idealism (N) he was wrong to claim that he saw it, for elsewhere he expressly stated that he saw various sense-data. Idealism (N), in its various forms, was both the consequence, as with phenomenalism, and attempted answers to it by closing the gap between phenomena or sense-data and reality in one way or another. It (B) was also taken to be the answer to materialism and naturalism, probably a more important reason for embracing it.

 

2. Idealism and Idealists in Britain

1. Berkeley and NPT Idealism

George Berkeley is generally regarded has having begun Idealism (N) in Britain by denying the reality of matter and holding that only minds and their ‘ideas’ are real, and securing a common world by holding that God holds the totality of ideas. Thus his system is NPT, or is usually thought to be, though he said that it was what the ordinary person thought.

Later followers of him were James Ferrier (1808-64) in Scotland who insisted that Berkeley did not deny the reality of the physical world but only that between appearances and reality; Hastings Rashdall (1858-1924) at Oxford, for whom God is finite and the Absolute is God and the spirits; and W.R. Boyce Gibson at Oxford.

 

2. Absolute -monist and personal-pluralist Idealism

In the 19th C. Kant’s philosophy was welcomed by some philosophers, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and T.H. Green as an alternative to the scepticism of Hume, the naturalism of Associationist psychology, as in Hartley and Bain, and the hedonistic Utilitarianism of Bentham and the Mills.

In 1865 J.H. Stirling’s The Secret of Hegel aroused similar and greater interest in Hegel, as shown in The Development from Kant to Hegel (1882) by Andrew Seth (1851-1931, later Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison), which enthusiastically welcome this development, via the elder Fichte, for overcoming Kant’s dualism of the phenomenal and ‘things-in-themselves’ and avoided both taking God to be a merely external being and ordinary pantheism.

Thomas Hill Green (1836-82) in his Prolegomena to Ethics argues that the awareness of relations and time requires not only Kant’s ‘synthetic unity of apperception’ but also an eternal ‘Spiritual Principle’ in nature, so that we are . But Green does not dissolve the finite individual into it, but insists on the inherent value of the individual and his progress to perfection of character. Hence he tries both to combine a narrow and a wider Idealism, and something of a Monist one with the reality of the individual.

Absolute Idealism (NMA) was inspired by Hegel but significantly differed from his system, most notably in its conception of the Absolute, not as coming into being through the course of world history (in the ‘mythical’ prima facie interpretation), but as one eternal, infinite, relationless Being, which is nevertheless Spirit and Experience, and exists in and through its finite and transient ‘appearances’. Its leaders were F.H. Bradley (Logic, Appearance and Reality), and Bernard Bosanquet (Logic, Psychology of the Moral Self, The Philosophical Theory of the State, The Principle of Individuality and Value, The Value and Destiny of the Individual, )who especially emphasised the unreality of finite minds. It is ideas which are real, and each finite mind is passing collection of ideas , so that minds overlap and the more ideas they have in common the more they are one mind, and thus the state, as what many minds share, is a higher and more real (or less unreal) mind in extent and comprehensiveness.

Other prominent Absolute Idealists were Edward Caird, R.H. Haldane (later Liberal Secretary of State for War), and D. Ritchie. Stirling, John Caird, W. Wallace and Sir Henry Jones were nearer to ‘Personal Idealism’ and less monist. A.E. Taylor was and remained an intimate of Bradley, and wrote two very appreciative obituaries of him (Mind, British Academy), published The Elements of Metaphysics (1903), a shorter, clearer and less monist version of Bradley’s metaphysics. In the Preface to the 2nd ed. (1912) he stated that he used ‘Idealism’ only in its wider sense. By then he had return to Plato and became the leading exponent of philosophical theism.

 

‘Personalist Idealism’ (BPT) was the reaction against the monism, with its denial of the reality of the finite individual, especially by Bosanquet. It included narrow Idealists (see Rashall and W.R. Boyce Gibson, above), and wider ones (James Seth, W.R. Sorley, C.B. Upton, J.R.R. Illingworth, C.C.J. Webb) and converts from Absolute Idealism (Taylor, J. Mackenzie). This reaction was initiated by Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison in his Hegelianism and Personality (1887) which reversed the argument of his previous book, urged a return to Kant, and criticised ‘those about Green’ (not Green himself) for their monism and denial of the reality of finite persons. The high point, and conclusion of the controversy, was a debate in 1917, organised by the Aristotelian Society, between Pringle-Pattison, seconded by G.F. Stout vs Bosanquet seconded by Haldane: see ‘The Mode of Being of Finite Individuals’, PAS, XVIII, 1918, republished as a booklet, as Life and Finite Individuality, 1918. After that, narrow Idealism faded out, save for a few later revivals: Michael Oakeshott (Experience and its Modes), G.G. Mure (Hegel).

J.M.E. McTaggart is not usually counted among the personal idealists although his NPA metaphysics is radically pluralist. He argued that matter is an incoherent conception and time with it, and that the only type of reality we know is spiritual but that there may be other forms as well. Spiritual reality consists of a plurality of timeless individuals unite by love. The Nature of Existence, 2 Vols., Cambridge, CUP, 1921, 1927.

Personal idealism probably had much more appeal and effect that the merely epistemological arguments of G.E. Moore and Russell, to which most accounts of that period ascribe the demise of Idealism (N) and completely ignore the personalist reaction.

 

For more details generally, see Dictionary of Nineteenth Century British Philosophers, Bristol, Thoemmes Press Press, 2002; and ed. J. Muirhead, Contemporary British Philosophy, 2 series, London, Allen & Unwin, early 1920s.

 

For more details of Personal Idealism in Britain and similar earlier movements in Germany and Sweden, plus general background, see Jan Olof Bengtsson, The World View of Personalism: Origins and Early Development, Oxford, OUP, 2006.

On A.S. Pringle-Pattison see also article on www.britishpersonalistforum.org.uk.

 

3. American Idealism

 

I know little about this, but have read some of the books of the Boston School of Personalism: Borden Parker Bowne, Edgar Sheffield Brightman and Peter Bertocci. I have a Polish book, in English, on American Personalism which includes with the more narrowly Idealist personalists, as below. I know the author but have heard nothing from him since 2009, and his group’s website is inactive., so I doubt if you can get the book.

 

The term ‘Personal Idealism’ was coined by G.H. Howison (1834-1916; latterly at U. of California, at Berkeley) for his Berkeleian NPT system, and he was annoyed when H. Sturt used it for a collection of essays from Oxford. God in his system is more a primus inter pares than the Creator: The Limits of Evolution and Other Essays Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Idealism (1901).

At Boston U., Borden Parker Bowne developed a PT philosophy in which the physical world is more phenomenal than really real, and God is finite to some degree: Theory of Thought and Knowledge, Theism, Personalism (1908), Metaphysics.

He was followed there by Edgar Sheffield (1844-1953) with a similar philosophy, and then by Peter Bertocci (1910-1989). Other members of the school, including the group in California, had no leanings to narrow Idealism, and the label is not applied to them in the wider sense..

 

Absolute Idealism is represented by Josiah Royce at Harvard, to whom the British Personal Idealists felt more akin, especially in his later works.