bradley on my station and its duties

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Bradley on my station and itsdutiesStewart Candlish aa University of Western AustraliaPublished online: 18 Sep 2006.

To cite this article: Stewart Candlish (1978) Bradley on my stationand its duties, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 56:2, 155-170, DOI:10.1080/00048407812341161

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Australasian Journal o/" Philosophy Vol. 56, No. 2; August 1978

STEWART CANDLLSH

BRADLEY ON MY STATION AND ITS DUTIES

1. Introduction. It is just over a hundred years since the publication of Bradley's Ethical Studies, but it is not only this centenary which makes it appropriate to look afresh at part of that remarkable book. For there are current two somewhat diverging views of its place in contemporary philosophical opinion which stand in need of correction. The first is that Bradley's convictions concerning moral philosophy are to be found in the essay entitled 'My Station and its Duties'. The second is that the only thing worth opening the book for is to read the criticisms of hedonistic utilitarianism contained mainly in the essay 'Pleasure for Pleasure's Sake'.

The second of these views will, I hope, be at least implicitly corrected by what follows• The first, however, has already been corrected by Richard Wollheim in his introduction to the 1962 edition of the Studies. ~ But WoUheim leans too far in the other direction. He says

• . . it is extremely important that the principle upon which the various essays have been put together should be properly appreciated. For Ethical Studies is essentially dialectical in its structure• Hegelian in many of its ideas, it is to an even greater extent Hegelian in its method, in the way in which it works its way forwards through different and conflicting theories. It is Bradley's technique to start with one particular view of morality, to examine its merits and its defects, and this leads him on to another view of morality which, while retaining as far as possible the merits of the original view, will be free of its defects: this view in turn shows itself not to be without error, and so the process of correction and refinement goes on indefinitely. That this is the principle upon which Ethical Studies is written has sometimes been overlooked by critics, perhaps because of the assertiveness with which at the time Bradley puts forward a view that ultimately turns out to be merely provisional. In particular, the theory of 'My Station and its Duties', considered in Essay V, has n indeed from Sidgwick's review onwards

often, and quite falsely, been identified with Bradley's own ultimate position. (pp.xiv-xv)

F. H. Bradley, Ethical Studies (London; Oxford University Press, 1962). All subsequent references are to this edition.

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156 Bradley on My Station and Its Duties

This is wrong in two ways. First, Sidgwick makes it quite plain in his review 2 that he is aware that Bradley objects to, ~nd qualifies ' to an important extent ' the doctrine of 'My Station' in later essays: so it is hardly fair to say :hat Sidwick (and no other examples are given) identitied that doctrine with Bradley's own u/tirnate position. Secondly, one noticeable teature of the :structure of the Studies is that the dialectic begins to break down at ~My Station', which does not appear as the opposite of a previous view which has passed over into it, but as a temporary solution of prior difficulties, which admittedly turns out to be deficient, yet whose status is still importantly different from that of the theories previously considered. Further, the place in the book's structure of some of the discussions which follow Essay V is admittedly very unclear as it stands, but is unintelligible if that structure is regarded as rigidly dialectical; the breakdown is here complete. The special position of the doctrine o f ' M y Station' is shown by the fact that it is the only one put torward with the assertiveness which WoUheim remarks. (cf. pp. 184, 187, 199-202 esp. p. 201) Indeed, the manner of its expression shows haw violently Bradley, a known political conservative, was attracted to this deeply conservative ethical doctrine, even if" he was in the end too honest to allow himself to rest in it.

One noteworthy feature of 'My Station' is that it could have been taken to justify the imperialist political aspirations of the times; 3 but this can hardly be offered as a complete account of" its status. And when we try to relate that status to the Studies as a whole, we find that there is no short account which will suffice. I shall try to exhibit that status by exposition, defence and criticism, and shall try further to remove some of the unclarity which notoriously surrounds Bradley?s views by elucidating them where possible in the light of his later metaphysics and logical theory.

2. Exposition o f the thesis o f 'My Station'. This section o f my paper concentrates on pp. 160-163 of the 1962 edition.

As in his metaphysics and his logical theory, Bradley appears to be forced into his views less because of their independent attractiveness than because they seem to offer the only solutions to grave problems uncovered by the examination of other views, though he soon allows himself to yield to their independent attractions. By the beginning of Essay V Bradley has satisfied himself that the end of morality is self-realisation, but has not yet got a view of what that realisation is o f he knows only (from Essay 111) that the self cannot be a pure particular, and (from Essay IV) that it cannot be a pure universal. He recognises further that the self to be realised cannot be merely the one that I happen to have (Bradley typically writes in the manner of a confessional exercise, in the first person) since morality demands the

2 Henry Sidgwick, Critical Notice of Bradley's Ethical Studies, Mind Vol. 1. 1876, p.548. Cf. Heinz Gollwitzer, Europe in theAge ofImperialism (london; Thames and ltudson, 1969), Ch.XII, and Anthony Quinton, 'Absolute Idealism', Dawes tticks Lecture on Philosophy, British Academy, 1971 (London; Oxford University Press).

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Stewart Candlish 157

development of a superior sell'; and that it must be realised as will, which seems to mean that selfreal isat ion must issue not in a mere state of the sell" but in activity ( f rom Essay 1I).

His solution to this difficulty of identifying the candidate lor, and goal of, self-realisation is that the sell" is essentially social. This claim, although ambiguous (as we shall see), offers some preliminary glimmering of insight into the notion of the concrete universal as it applies here; lor one o f its strands (if we read between the lines a bit) seems to be that the individual shoutd reflect society in microcosm, uniting in himself an infinity of dit]~rent things. Bradley, as a classical scholar, must have known his Plato, and the doctrine o f ' M y Station' bears the s tamp of one of the characteristic doctrines of the Republic . It is only on such a view, or rather on its mirror image, that a just society should reflect the just individual, that one can make sense of Bradley's asseveration that the communi ty is a moral organism with a will of its own (p. 162); for as he freely admits (p. 162), ' t he good will (for morality) is meaningless, if, whatever else it be, it is not the will of living finite beings'.

This, anyway, is the already-anticipated (p.l16) doctrine of ' M y Station and its Duties': that 1 accomplish self-realisation by taking my place as one of the organs of the total moral organism and doing the duties associated with the station I occupy. This amounts to self-realisation because, as Bradley argues in more detail later, the self apart f rom its place in society is a mere nothinga---indeed, the service of the communi ty simply is the es tabl ishment of one 's individual i tymand it is self-realisation for the total organism as well because the good will, which is its life, is concretised in all its individual manifestations and is one and the same in each of these.

The doctrine resolves the three immediate problems with which Essay V was begun. The non-contingency of the self to be realised is provided for because the duties prescribed by my station are above individual men and are independent of my whims and likings; I a m confronted with fixed and objective demands. Secondly, the requirement of particularity is met: the excessive abstraction in the direction of the pure universal which was a fault of the thesis o f 'Du ty for Duty 's Sake' is rectified, for the goal of morality is essentially rooted in particular, living, finite beings, and cannot exist apart f rom them. Abstract duty is done by doing individual duties. Thirdly, the demand for universality is met: the excessive abstraction in the direction of the pure particular which was a fault of 'Pleasure for Pleasure's Sake ' is rectified because the realisation~ of ourselves as the will which is above ourselves, in the activity demanded of us by the total moral organism, is not identifiable with any particular.

Bradley has never denied that pleasure, happiness and duty are involved with morality ( though he does deny false accounts of that involvement in that he is not prepared to regard any as singly sufficient for it, and denies too that morality serves any as a means externally related to it as an end); in ' M y

4 If indeed this is the argument, it appears to amount to a confusion of necessary and sufficient conditions.

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Station', rather, he fuses self-realisation, duty and happiness into a single account.

3. Four likely but unjustif ied criticisms o f 'My Station'. Bradley offers almost nothing in the way of direct argument for the thesis of 'My Station'. Instead, he defends that thesis from what he takes to be four likely but unjustified criticisms, and shows how well it provides for various requirements and resolves various difficulties already encountered. In this section, I shall sketch briefly the criticisms and replies; and deal with the powers of 'My Station' in the next section in more detail, for understanding them is important to grasping the status of 'My Station' in both the Studies and Bradley's thought.

First, in pp. 163-173, Bradley deals with the claims of those who believe that individuals are the primary realities and communities no more than collections of these. He maintains that individualism cannot explain admitted social facts; while the metaphysics which might deny these facts is sheer unproved dogma, which can be denied, and the discussion confined to the facts. If one attempts, say, to arrive at the nature of an Englishman by removing his relations with others to get at the pure individual, one is left with nothing, and all considerations including physiological and sociological go to prove this.

Secondly, in pp. 193-9, Bradley defends 'My Station' against the accusation of practical uselessness by saying that the reasoning characteristic of moral philosophy is out of place in moral decision; genuine, worthy moral judgment will unthinkingly tap the only source of moral thought, namely received community standards.

Thirdly, in pp. 188-9, Bradley rejects the complaint that 'My Station' makes of man nothing but a part of a machine. With a fine disregard for the question of how far the comparison of community to organism can be taken, he reminds us that the members of the social organism are self-conscious whereas the organs of an animal or parts of a machine are not. Without seeming to care or even notice, he retreats so far from the functional view of morality espoused in 'My Station' as to appear to have been reading Kierkegaard, for he says (p. 189) 'What counts is not the visible outer work so much as the spirit in which it is done.'

Fourthly, in pp. 189-192, Bradley rejects the charge that 'My Station" commits him to extreme relativism, saying that such a charge springs from an equally extreme and equally mistaken absolutism. (Nearly forty years later he is still inveighing against absolutism of all kinds except his own: see the Concluding Remarks to Essays On Truth and Reali ty . ) 5 He does, however, accept that he is committed to some kind of limited relativism, asserting defiantly that without moral variety there could be no morals.

And here we get the first hint that 'My Station' does not offer an entirely

F. H. Bradley, Essays on Truth and Reality (Oxford; Clarendon Press, 1914).

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satisfactory moral position. For Bradley is aware that morality demands that different communities be morally inter-comparable, and he acknowledges this demand when he admits that the doctrine of 'My Station' depends on the claim that human society is constantly improving, progressing towards the realisation of ideal humanity in history. If this claim be true, one is justified in accepting one's society as it stands, and not demanding of it historically unnecessary and perhaps impossible improvements; but if it be not true, the doctrine will stand only in a curtailed form which involves merely the rejection of individualism, and affirmation of the reality of the universal self particularised in many related beings whose right and duty it is to realise themselves.

4. The powers and advantages o f 'My Station'. Rather less indirect argument for the doctrine of 'My Station' than that outlined in the previous section is provided by Bradley when he considers how useful that doctrine is in disposing of the various difficulties, and accounting for the requirements of morality, which he has noted earlier in the book.

Essay I was concerned with the vulgar notion of morality, or the common moral consciousness, and its requirements. Bradley claims not to regard the deliverances of this voice of the people as authoritative, but it is clear that in practice he does so regard them: for one of the demands (p. 90) which Hedonism failed to meet was that the facts of the moral consciousness are to be explained, but not explained away (my emphasis); and further (pp. 199- 202), we see that the community is the real source of those intuitive moral views which are the only correct ones. So 'My Station' must meet the demands of the common moral consciousness as Bradley has outlined them.

And we can see that it does, even when Bradley himself does not explicitly draw attention to this fact. First, the fact that what is of primary moral significance is my rSle in society, together with the facts that that society is an organism which shapes me in a way neither random nor rationally predictable and that my personal identity is a social matter, gives a clear place for the demand of the common moral consciousness that I and only I am responsible for my misdeeds. I become someone only when I find my station and acknowledge the duties that go with it; and as a self-'conscious agent neither randomly free nor causally determined I am aware of those duties and liable for their neglect. Secondly, the idea that morality is self-realisation fits perfectly with the vulgar notion of action as the translation of thought into physical change. (cf. p. 149) Thirdly, the fact that personal identity is soundly based on social considerations guarantees that one condition of the vulgar notion of responsibility, namely the constant identity of the agent through his actions, is met. And fourthly, another such condition, that the act must spring from the will of the agent, is guaranteed by behaviour's being necessarily self-realising. (pp. 68, 82) The previously rejected views, freewill, necessity, hedonism and Kantianism have all failed to meet some or other of these requirements.

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Essay I1 began by rejecting the natural understanding of the question 'Why should 1 be moral?' on the ground that its presupposition of an ulterior end to morality was inimical to morality. The charge could have been laid against Bradley at that point, with what ultimate significance I do not know, that he tended to con[hse the overall purposes of institutions with the individual purposes of the agents who run them. 'My Station', with its doctrine of the necessary reflection of the community in the moral individual, enables Bradley to say that the distinction is never more than tbrmal and thus to reject th e charge of confusion. Secondly, and connected with this first point, the thesis of ~My Station' does justice to the requirement of morality that it be an end in itself. Thirdly, the claim that the self is essentially social, part of an organic whole, meets the demand that the self be more than a mere collection of particulars. Fourthly, 'My Station' (albeit obscurely) provides a place for the importance given in Essay il to the concrete universal, the realisation o f the formal will in the particular act. Fifthly, an account of selfhood is given by 'My Station' which fulfils the requirement outlined in Essay I1 that the mind be a comprehensive, infinite whole from which all external relations are banned. (More on this later.)

In Essay III Bradley makes four assertions which are clearly not intended to be subject to dialectical revision. These are, that ordinary morality holds there to be higher things than pleasure; that if morality is related to some other things as means to end then that end cannot be only externally related to morality; that utilitarian hedonism is groping after a social conception of the self; and that happiness (no t identified with pleasure) is an end of morality - - only not externally related to it. 'My Station and its Duties', Bradley would hold, will meet all these requirements of a moral view, which emerged from the examination of hedonism.

Indeed, 'My Station' is the synthesis of the thesis of 'Pleasure for Pleasure's Sake' and the antithesis of 'Duty for Duty's Sake'. 6 For the latter stresses the doing of duty, a notion to which hedonism could not do justice, but in doing this makes morality impossible. Bradley expounds this himself on pp. 174-6, where he sums up the three objections to Kantianism he made in Essay IV, and in the following seven pages he shows how the thesis o f 'My Station' meets these objections. The first was that while Kantianism is right to stress the universal in morality as opposed to the particularity involved in hedonism, it goes too far in the opposite direction and makes the universal totally abstract, devoid of content and hence unable to be acted upon because its realisation in particularity would be self-contradictory; or alternatively, it leaves the choice of what is to be done completely open to chance because anything will satisfy the purely formal requirement imposed, with the consequence that the good will cannot determine a choice among different courses of action. Bradley maintains that 'My Station' retains the universality

¢' It is sometimes asserted that these terms are strictly alien to the Hegelian dialectic. But they are not alien to Bradley. Cf. The Principles of Logic (London; Oxtbrd University Press, second edition, two volumes, 1922), p.187.

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essential to morality but, unlike 'Duty lbr Duty's Sake' renders action on it free from chance because it is concrete and accordingly has some content. While to some extent 1 may choose my station in the community, thereafter arbitrariness ends. My duties are concrete and prescribed by my place in the moral organism.

The second objection to Kantianism was that, in Bradley's words, its universal was 'subjective', presented to us not as what is, but as what is to be, an inner notion in moral persons which perhaps had not the power to make any change in the external world. The point he is making is, I think, that Kantianism prescribes something like purity of heart, without showing that this is a practical demand - - that in achieving it we shall not automatically render ourselves incapable of action. He claims that moral demands cannot be entirely inward but must have to do with action in the World, and he asserts that 'My Station' meets this requirement by making its universal objective, a genuine unity of subject and object. Morality is not an entirely inward and possibly totally ineffectual business; on the contrary, there are specific inner obligations which are reflections of outer functions, and which are realised by performance of those ['unctions. The good state requires that each individual has the public interest constantly in mind, that the individual be a microcosm of his place in society (and, accordingly, since society is organic, devoid of external relations, a microcosm of society itself).

The third objection to 'Duty tor Duty's Sake' was that its universal excluded an essential part of man, the sensuous side of his nature, and thus made total self-realisation, and hence morality, impossible. The result must be either self-deceit or a perpetual, nagging, peevish sense of failure to meet morality's demands. The thesis of 'My Station', in contrast, resolves the standing contradiction between the actual, sensuous self and the non- sensuous moral ideal.; It makes it possible fbr me to be what I ought to be, and in that to be content. In fact, l will never be perfect since no man does entirely relinquish the bad elements in his nature," but at least 1 am not condemned to wickedness by mere logic.

That concludes my account, based in part on what Bradley himself says but dealing also with implications not formally recognised by him, of the way in which 'My Station' brings together everything left hanging from the previous essays.

5. Further advantages, independent of previous essays. Bradley's discussion of 'My Station', on pp. 183-9, examines four further advantages of the view. At this point his account takes a somewhat rhapsodic turn.

First, one who adopts the point of view of 'My Station' finds himself at

: Ahhough it may be thought that to do so is to give to "sensuous' a meaning not intended by Bradley here, it is perhaps worth pointing out that what is known of his personal history indicates that he would have been likely to have been concerned to integrate the passions with morality rather than oppose them to it.

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peace with life, and is proof against absurd moral and intellectual fashions, impervious to the flatulence of so-called 'theories' and appeals to 'principles', 'rights' and 'freedom'. This peace is not, however, externally related to the life which brings it and cannot be achieved without living a life of such acceptance. Secondly, the individual realised in the organic community is the embodiment of the traditional .virtues of truth, beauty and goodness: truth because he corresponds in reality to his universal conception; beauty, because he realises this conception in a single form; and goodness, because his will is the will of the universal, the whole community. Thirdly, such a view reveals the absurdity of the question. How can one find out what is moral?, for there is no finding out to be done,----one simply looks, and sees directly, for morality exists all around us. (It later turns out that this implication is as much a disadvantage as an advantage. See the next section but one of this paper.) Fourthly, 'My Station' picks up and preserves the essential truth in the doctrines of both despotism and individualism, for the best men require the best community, and the best community the best men.

One cannot help thinking that, although Bradley discusses the matter in a place (pp. 199-202) separate from that allotted to the last four points, he nevertheless feels it a fifth advantage of 'My Station' that it dispels any demand for root-and-branch social and moral change. Reformism, he says, is tolerable in the young, presumably because it is part of the established order of things (and generally ineffectual); but is at best merely silly in those who are old enough to have learned that society is the sole source of moral content. (As a later and less ardently conservative Bradley remarks in a footnote, this ignores literature, for one thing.) We should not be led by visions of utopias: such visions are necessarily cruel deceptions, for there is nothing better or more beautiful than my station and its duties.

6. Unsound criticisms and misunderstandings of Bradley. Before going on to look at some sound criticisms of 'My Station' it would be as well to clear away some tempting errors.

One thing that is liable to lead to misunderstanding is that contemporary moral philosophy is governed by two paradigms which, when we fail to find them exemplified in Bradley, can lead us to suppose that his moral philosophy must be a failure. One of these paradigms is moral epistemology-cure- metaphysics--we take moral philosophy to be essentially an inquiry into what can and cannot be known, into the reality of morals, resulting in a defence of morality, by means of argument, against the hydra-headed moral sceptic. Bradley simply does not share this paradigrnmwe find in him no anti- sceptical arguments for he is interested not in defending morality (I imagine that he would think it requred no defence) but in articulating it. He gives us something like a phenomenology of morals. Neither is Bradley to be tested against our second paradigm, recta-ethics. Like Plato's, his question is 'What kind of life ought a man to lead' (though this does not extend to specifice practical decisions).

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It is tempting to aver, against Bradley, that self-realisation cannot serve as a goal of morality because the self may be morally various. Such a charge is obvious, and Bradley seems to acknowledge that he has a problem of giving an account of the nasty streaks which people have. But it is possible to argue that such a criticism is an ignoratio elenchi, for two reasons: first, that Bradley is not doing practical moral epistemology and is not proposing self-realisation as a criterion of right action to be applied in practice; and secondly, neither does he maintain that the self is externally related to morality as this criticism presupposes, for this would be to contravene the requirement of the moral consciousness that morality should not serve an ulterior end. The self that is to be realised is essentially a moral self, for it is essentially a social self, one defined by a place in society inseparable from the duties attached to that place. However, as we shall see in the next two sections, a version of this criticism must, in the end, be admitted to be correct, and destructive.

Finally, it may be tempting to complain that this account of self-realisation in terms of finding a place in the community and fulfilling the duties thereof, is too restrictingmit may actually impede true self-realisation in that it restricts the development of capacities that may not fit one's place. But in reply to this it can be said that everyone is subject to the same restriction here, and it would be irrational to claim the privilege of exemption on no basis other than being 'oneself ' ; and on Bradley's view such a notion of oneself is devoid of content anyway, as the self is established only by filling one's place. For Bradley, the idea of inhibition of potential is simply unintelligible? (Of course, this last fact could easily form the basis of another argument against him.)

7. Sound criticisms.

Some of the possible justified criticisms of 'My Station' are formulated by Bradley himself in the final pages of Essay V (pp. 202-6), for he is in the end too honest to be able to blind himself to these visible drawbacks despite his passionate attachment to the view he has expressed. But the exaggeration in Wollheim's account is manifest when Bradley says

The theory which we have just exhibited . . . seems to us a great advance on anything we have had before, and indeed in the main to be satisfactory . . . . None the less, however, must we consider this satisfaction neither ultimate, nor all-inclusive, nor anything but precarious. If put forth as that beyond which we do not need to go, as the end in itself, it is open to very serious objections . . . . (p. 202)

The special place which 'My Station' has in Bradley's thought is here clearly revealed, particularly when this passage is contrasted with the rejection of earlier views as 'vicious abstractions', and it is characteristic of him that the thing he finds most attractive about the doctrine is that it resolves contradictions, the opposition of ' is ' and 'ought ' in both its forms, viz. the

This point is not really demonstrated until later.

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164 Bradle) on My Station and Its Duties

actual state of the world as opposed to what I think it should be, and the actual state of me as opposed to what 1 should be. ~

But Bradley thinks both of these resolutions incomplete, tbr four reasons.

(1) (a) The sell" of the moral man will merge with the whole, as required by 'My Station', only when engaged in satisfactory work; when not so engaged the bad self will emerge. Also, a previously immoral man may succeed in living a life we should want to call moral but be so marked by his earlier experiences that his thltilling of his function is only imperfectly attained; and his life may be a perpetual struggle, not showing that peace which should flow from embracing the doctrine of 'My Station'.

(b) Neither need the moral man find himself realised in the world lbr (i) the communi ty itself may be imperfect, right and might

separate, (ii) even the best community is flawed and can ensure only that

might and right coincide in gross and not in detail, (iii) there are crippling, even morally crippling, afflictions which no

community can heal, and (:v~ the moral man may have to sacrifice himself for the

community. In none of these four cases can a man simply s e e his realisation and the consequent justification of the moral demands, and the justification of the life he chooses to lead becomes a matter of personal virtue and faith. Bradley is forced to admit a limited place to moral scepticism.

(2) Morality itself is above any given, actual world, since (a) that world is in a state of development and thus must contain

inconsistencies which a moral man must recognise and try to resolve, making the world better, and

(b) men are aware of the differing things regarded as faults and virtues by different communities, and have fbrmed the idea of a morality not confined by time or place; such a man can hence not be realised in any actual station.

(3) There are duties to oneself, and consequent self-improvements, such as the demands lbr achievements in the arts and sciences, the bindingness of which is not exhausted by a social, lhnctional account. Even if a satisfactory social account were produced, it would have to rely on a notion like 'humani ty ' ; and as humanity in t o t o does not lbrm a visible community, the moral demand again could no longer be seen to be justified but would once more need faith.

~ Compare, lor instance. Bradley's procedure in Part I of Appearatwe and Reality where item after i tem is consigned to the r e a l m of apl~earance on the basis of the discovery of contradiction. To some extent , this gives the lie to my claim that Bradley was not interested in defending morality. I le certainly was not conducting a typical defence of it, but his anxiety to lind a lbrm of it free from contradiction is at least an interesting lbrerunner of the later view that only what is free from contradiction can be accorded the status of 'real'.

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(4) We are never in fact fully realised. The bad self is always with us.

There are at least two other criticisms of 'My Station' which Bradley does not himself make but which are worth noting here. The first (which Bradley seems to hover on the edge of seeing for himself in the later tbotnote to p.173) is crucial and undeniable: that one may be a member of several different communities, which may or may not include each other and which are likely to pose conflicting demands. One has only to think of the tensions between family and job, or church and state, for example. Bradley would be forced to rely on some kind of hierarchy of roles to give sense to the notion of self-realisation here; but such an order is certainly not actual and only arguably desirable.

A less immediately crucial criticism, but one which does in the end go very deep, concerns Bradley's criticism of individualism and social contract theories of the state. Rejecting their associated metaphysics as unproved dogma, he appears to give such theories the status of historical descriptions, and gives contrary historical descriptions to show that personal identity is a social matter. But such theories have rarely been intended as historical descriptions, and Bradley's charges of 'not proven' are themselves unproved; accordingly he really needs to show that personal identity is necessarily a

social matter for the information of moral relationships by contract between formerly totally isolated beings does not appear a logical impossibility. And there is indeed reason to suppose that this is so, as can be seen by considering (i) the vacuity of attaching personal identity to a soul about which nothing can be said, even by itself, and (ii) the extraordinarily complicated and inefficient nature of a society in which 'body-swapping' was a frequent occurrence, personal identity went strictly on bodily continuity, and not only memories but skills, habits, personality and even personal appearance all went together. "j 'Who am 1?', like 'Where am 1?', is a question the answer to which essentially involves relations.

But the imposition of necessity upon Bradley's doctrine of the social nature of personal identity makes that doctrine unusable as a basis for a social account of morality. For, quite apart from the confusion of necessary and sufficient conditions which I pointed out in footnote 4, there remain difficulties with isolated creatures. Perhaps it is true that saying who those beings are involves giving their histories, geographical locations, and other relational facts. But such facts do not automatically provide them with a social r61e, a moral station. E x hypothesi , an isolated being has no social r61e, and the relational facts we might adduce to deny him total isolation are not sufficient to give him one; yet it is not obvious that morality is necessarily completely absent from his life, even if such a private morality would necessarily be extremely restricted.

~" Cf. J. M. Shorter, "Personal Identity, Personal Relationships, ana ~._,i,~,~4', ,~.r/-:s:elian Socieo' Proceedil~gs, LXXI, 1970-71.

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8. Ethics, logical theory and metaphysics.

As I indicated earlier, one of my goals in this paper is to penetrate some of the obscurities for which Bradley is famous, and in this final section I want to attempt this by means of flagrant anachronism, using the later work in logical theory and metaphysics to cast light upon the earlier. Although we have already seen the usefulness of such a procedure in its casting light upon the importance Bradley attaches to the appearance and avoidance of contradictions in ethics, one might still wish to object to it in principle. Two related objections are fairly obvious. One is that if we wish to understand the nature of Bradley's thought we should look rather to its origins in Hegel. My reply to this is that such a procedure is not necessarily helpful, and in this case would amount to using the more obscure to explain the less. The second is that it is intrinsically wrong-headed to explain the past in terms of the future; and my reply to this is that the endeavour should be undertaken, and justified, or not, by its results. Moreover, as we shall see, Bradley himself provides us with reasons for supposing anachronism to be justified in his case. What, then, can we understand better by looking at Bradley's other works?

First, we shall consider the notion of the concrete universal, a traditionally puzzling concept in Idealist philosophy. In my earlier exposition I left almost unexamined the central claim of 'My Station' that self-realisation is the realisation of ourselves as the good will, the good will being a concrete • universal. (p. 162) As I have already suggested, 'will' here can be read as 'activity', and Bradley is telling us that moral worth consists in some kind of activity. But how can this be a concrete universal?

If we look at The Principles of Logic, the first edition of which was published in 1883, seven years after Ethical Studies, we find a (by Bradleian standards) comparatively clear explanation of the notion. It involves, effectively, the later distinction in Appearance and Reality between the that and the what, between existences and characters, which is crucial to his arguments concerning relations. ~t In the Principles, t2 Bradley says:

The abstract universal and the abstract particular are what does not exist. The concrete particular and the concrete universal both have reality, and they are different names for the individual.

What is real is the individual; and this individual, though one and the same, has internal differences. You may hence regard it in two opposite ways. So far as it is one against other individuals, it is particular. So far as it is the same throughout its diversity, it is universal. They are two distinctions we make within it. It has two characters, or aspects, or sides, or moments. And you consider it from whichever side you please, or from the side which happens for the purpose of the context to be the emphatic or essential side. Thus a man is particular by virtue of his

~t F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality (Oxford; Clarendon Press, second edition, 1897) pp.142 and 517.

J2 F. H. Bradley, The Principles of Logic, p.188.

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limiting and exclusive relations to other phenomena. He is universal because he is one throughout all his different attributes. You may call him particular, or again universal, because, being individual, he actually is both, and you wish to emphasize one aspect or side of his individuality. The individual is both a concrete particular and a concrete universal; and, as names of the whole from different points of view, these both are names of real existence.

When Bradley says that the abstract particular does not exist, he means that particular instances of, say, beardedness or red-hairedness are not independent existents; what is primarily real is the man who exhibits these attributes. And when he says that the abstract universal does not exist, he means that beardedness and red-hairedness are abstractions imposed by thought upon the world, again not independent existents. When he speaks of a thing's being a concrete particular, he is drawing attention to the fact that a man shares with a particualr instance of red-hairedness (an abstract particular) the property of excluding other members of the same class--other men are shut out from the space I occupy just as instances of black- hairedness are shut out from the space occupied by an instance of red- hairedness. And when he speaks of a thing's being a concrete universal, he is implying that that thing collects together a number of diverse abstract particulars in a way analogous to the way in which an abstract universal collects together a number of scattered abstract particulars which are its instances. ~ 3

Now why is the good will a concrete universal if a paradigm of a concrete universal is a physical thing which exhibits internal diversity throughout its continuing identity? Bradley's answer (Studies, p. 162) is that this follows from '[its belonging] to its essence that it should be realised, and [its having] no real existence except in and through its particulars'. The latter part of this explanation seems to fly in the face of the extract from the Principles just given since together they seem to suggest that the concrete and abstract universals are similar in this respect. But this reading is not forced upon us. We can instead see a shift of view between the writing of the Studies and of the Principles, such that in the earlier work abstract universals are allowed some kind of existence independent of their exemplification since they are, even if not exemplified, but in the later abstract universals are regarded as 'mental creations' (Principles, p. 189) having no real existence at all, whether exemplified or not. The view of the concrete universal, however, remains the same throughout, as something essentially exemplified. And this feature of the concrete universal is highlighted in the former part of the explanation, by which, presumably, Bradley means that the good will, or moral activity, is not like red-hairedness, in that it is not an attribute, not something which can be conceived of without instantiation, not something of which an abstract notion can be formed.

~3 This may suggest that Bradley is a source of Strawson's views on the subject of universals and particulars.

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168 Bradley on My Station and Its Duties'

Here, perhaps, we find a forerunner of the more recent doctrine that goodness is not an attribute, not something which is one and the same in all its diverse instances. We cannot learn what goodness, or morality, is by generalising from the study of particular instances of it since there is no common principle amongst the instances to make the generalisation possible. (cf. Studies, p. 115) However, it is well known that Bradley thought, at least by the time he wrote the Principles, that no universal, abstract or concrete, could be reached by generalising from particular instances (Principles, p. 306), so this cannot in the end distinguish the concrete universal from the abstract. The answer must be, I think, given that Bradley had not yet consigned abstract universals to the realm of vicious abstractions, that the real distinction in the Studies lies simply in the necessary exemplification of the concrete universal. His moral philosophy is too encumbered by his metaphysics to enable him to draw the modern distinction; though modern theorists of goodness are free to draw it, and do so.

The mention of metaphysics brings me to my second, and major anachronism. Bradley says in Essay I1 (p. 65):

How can it be proved that self-realisation is the end? There is only one way to do that. This is to know what we mean, when we say 'self', and 'real', and 'realize', and 'end'; and to know that is to have something like a system of metaphysics, and to say it would be to exhibit that system.

Thus, Bradley himself is saying here that a full understanding, as well as proof, of his ethical views depends upon the articulation of a system of metaphysics; which he straighaway admits that he does not have.

But within the next seventeen years he puts one together, and gives it canonical expression in Appearance and Reality; and it is a system with some obvious similarities with the views expressed in Ethical Studies. Furthermore, Bradley began to revise Ethical Studies in 1924, and we have his incomplete notes towards this revision incorporated in the second edition. From them it is clear that the criticism he had of his earlier work concerned mainly the detail of argumentation rather than the overall account and that he still largely cleaved to his old views. Apart from this, in 1893, in a footnote to the first edition of Appearance and Reality (second edition, p. 356) he said, 'My Ethical Studies, 1876, [is] a book which in the main still expresses my opinions . . . . '

Accordingly, I would claim at the very least that puzzlement about Bradley's meaning in Ethical Studies can often be relieved by interpretation in the light of his later metaphysical work, and indeed that at times only in the light of the later work can the Studies be properly understood. Several points of correspondence between the earlier and the later writings lend some weight to this claim; no doubt there are others which I have missed.

One such point we have seen already, that the concrete universal is of importance in both the Studies and the Principles. It may seem contrary to my view that it gets little attention in Appearance and Reality but this is because by 1893 Bradley had become convinced of monism, and the only

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concrete universal then recognised as genuine was the Absolute. A second point is another we have already seen, the concern with the avoidance of contradiction in characterising the real which is characteristic of both the ethics and the metaphysics.

A third point is the prefiguration of the later Idealism in the Studies.

Consider the argument on p. 68 for the view that all action is necessarily self- realisation:

• . . it is clear that nothing moves unless it be desired, and that what is desired is ourself. For all objects or ends . . . have been left in and as ourselves, or we have telt ourselves therein . . . .

Not perhaps very clear as it stands, but in the later note (p. 82), the nature of the point begins to emerge:

How is it possible to will what is not one 's self, how can one desire a foreign object? What we desire must be in our minds; we must think of it; and besides, we must be related to it in a particular way. If it is to be the end, we must feel ourselves one with it, and in it; and how can we do that, if it does not belong to us, and has not been made part of us'? . . . when [thoughts] are carried out, that therefore is self-realization.

What this argument is, of course, is a special case of the traditional general argument for Idealism, used by Berkeley and revived by Bradley on pp. 127-9 of Appearance and Reality. It is summed up by Wollheim on p. 201 of F. H. Bradley: 14

Everthing that we come across or accept as real, everything that we call a piece of existence or a fact, is always found combined with experience; and if it is always combined with experience, then no meaning can be attached to the assertion that it could exist without experience; and if it could not exist without experience, then it is indivisible from experience; and if it is indivisible from experience, then it is, or is nothing but, experience.

A fourth point, and probably the most important, is the correspondence between the ethical views and the later doctrine o f internal relations. For a comparison between these to be really illuminating one would need a detailed discussion of the later doctrine and for this there is no time here. But we can at least remark that Bradley's later hostility to the whole notion o f external relations takes in the Studies the form of a curious mixture of an intellectual dislike of individualism, grounded in the belief that people are internally related to each other (p. 171), and a moral dislike of those who stand apart from society and who, presumably, both refuse to accept society and to recognise and accept their own necessary involvement with it.

A further feature of this point is that the obscure injunction of Essay II to realise oneself as an infinite whole, and the even obscurer explanation of this (p. 78), begin to take on some sense when viewed in the light of the doctrine

t4 Richard Wollheim, F. H. Bradley (Harmondsworth, Middlesex; Penguin, 1959).

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of internal relations. ~5 What Bradley must be telling us to do is to involve ourselves with our communi ty in such a way that neither it nor we are independent of each other, to exemplify morally the logical doctrine of internal relations. (p. 79) (There is a certain tension here, involving the question how we can avoid exemplifying it if it is a logical truth, and Bradley may be forced back into a non-practical ethical injunction of the kind associated with the early Wittgenstein, namely something like, accept things for what they are, for you cannot alter the world. This point is connected with my earlier point that preserving the truth of the claim of the social nature of personal identity by making it a necessity renders that claim unusable as a basis for a social account of morality.)

The development of the doctrine of internal relations into the propounding of the entirely non-relational Absolute is also prefigured in the Studies. The remark on p. 204 that the final reality o f a man 's identity may not reside in a visible community, is a strong hint o f the necessity of the Absolute. Moreover Bradley, in a footnote to p. 75, remarks on the inherent contradiction of the finite, and the command to realise oneself as an infinite whole suggests strongly the notion o f the Absolute in which, as he remarks time and again, the contradictions o f the finite are ultimately resolved; indeed, even without understanding either, one can see the similarity o f the language used here to describe the infinite with that used later to describe the Absolute. Ethical Studies offers us a kind of ur-Absolute as the goal of morality.

If my claim that Ethical Studies is inextricably entangled with a metaphysical system is correct, then we have a reason for not treating it too unkindly when it is obscure. For the demand for a perfect translation of Bradley's metaphysics into everday English is absurd, unless this is part of a general criticism of all metaphysics. One might as well ask Leibniz to show us examples of monads. This is not to say that partial explanations of the kind I have attempted here are neither possible nor desirable.

University o f Western Australia Received February 1978

~5 A. J. M. Milne, in his The Social Philosophy of English Idealism (London; Allen and Unwin, 1962), p.60, offers an account of Bradley's meaning here in non-metaphysical terms. But the account is thin and unconvincing, and does little justice to the developments of Essay V. Miine's account of Bradley is distorted by the straitjacket of his overall thesis concerning the British Idealists.

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bradley on my station and its duties

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