With British Idealism and the Concept of the Self W.J. Mander and Stamatoula Panagakou bring together a collection of papers which provides a critical discussion of the concept of the self for British Idealists and emphasizes its centrality to their philosophical thought.

While the self is a topic often disdain or substantially narrowed by modern analytic philosophers, British Idealists adopted a broader perspective on it, bringing together the mind, the world, and God in the characterization of the self, which has implications in ethics, metaphysics, logic, philosophy or religion, and aesthetics.

Although the book is primarily devoted to recent work in idealism, that of F. H. Bradley, Edward Caird, T.H. Green, Bernard Bosanquet, R.G. Collingwood, and J.M.E. McTaggart, some space is also reserved to the antecedents of British Idealism. In the second chapter Jenny Keefe discusses the metaphysics of the self in the philosophy of J.F. Ferrier (1808-1864), John Grote (1813-1966) and J.H. Stirling (1820-1909), who – as she claims – developed idealist ideals before British Idealism became a school of thought. As she shows, the concept of the Self was already subject to deep discussion among the early idealists. Ferrier argued, for instance, that the conscious self cannot be identified with the mind or any of its states, but it is rather conscious awareness of varying experiences. Grote distinguished between the self as an essential component of all experiences and the conscious self. Finally, Stirling identifies in Reason the unity of the Ego.

The discussion proceeds then with the philosophy of F.H. Bradley. In the third chapter, James W. Allard discusses metaphysics, religion and self-realization in Bradley’s thought and shows that Bradley might fall in contradiction by committing himself both to the claim that God has meaning for the metaphysical consciousness and to the claim that God has no meaning for metaphysical consciousness. In the fourth chapter, instead, Dina Babushkina offers a new reading of Bradley’s conception of the moral Self. She claims that the moral self cannot be explained in terms of habits, desires or beliefs, but it is more complex. She claims that a moral life ought to be lived in accordance with the coherent set of an agent’s reasonable commitments. There is no list of characteristics to the moral self that Bradley provides, rather the moral life of an agent ought to be considered in relation to the agent’s circumstances, hobbies, religion, artistic inclinations and family status.

The next author discussed is Edward Caird. In the fifth chapter, Philip Ferreira discusses the idea of self-consciousness in Caird’s philosophy. For Caird self-consciousness is circumscribed to the following three indissolubly connected ideas. The idea of not self, which coincides with our awareness of the external world. The idea of the self, i.e., the awareness of the self as conscious being separated from other objects. Finally, the idea of God which includes bu transcends the ideas of the self and of the not-self.

In the sixth chapter, the focus turns on T.H. Green. Janus Grygieńć shows that the moral philosophy of Green can be regarded as an attempt to reconcile an individualistic and a collectivist approach through an idea of self-realization compatible with the realization of the common good. In the seventh chapter, Rex Martin discusses three dimensions of Green’s idea of the self. These are the metaphysical, the ethical and the civic dimension; which relate, respectively, to the consciousness of the self, to self-realization and to social recognition.

In the eighth chapter, Stamatoula discusses instead the ethical system of the state in Bernard Bosanquet. The ethical system of the State is the subject of Bosanquet’s philosophical theory of the State. In this ethical system the individual connects with the spirit of the community. Ethical life is at the heart of the ethical system of the state, which encompasses institutions such as family, government and civil society, which are unified by the goal of a common good. The political life of a man cannot be thought as independent from the rest of the world, and self-realization cannot be described on the basis of a dichotomy between ‘self’ and ‘others’. Similarly, the State is both the fundamental constituent and the culmination of the ethical life and encompasses not only the government, but also the complex of lives and activities. The consistency of Bosanquet’s moral self with its idea of the metaphysical self is discussed by William Sweet in the ninth chapter. It has been argued that Bosanquet’s metaphysical self conflicts with it ethical self and he considers three reasons for holding that this tension is only apparent. He finally concludes that the apparent inconsistency can be overcome by considering Bosanquet’s understanding of individuality, the self, and the nature of human subject. The author argues, indeed, that moral development and the development of self-consciousness occur much in the same way and that the finite individual has a key role in the articulation of the Absolute.

The next two chapters are devoted to the discussion of R.G. Collingwod’s philosophy. In chapter 11, Ian Winchester discusses Collingwood’s Conception of personhood and its relation to language use. For Collingwood a person is an agent possessing reason and free will, which he both sees as dependent on the possession of linguistic abilities. The author shows that this presupposition is false for children and animals are also capable of a certain reasoning and possess a degree of free will. However, he concludes, higher order activities, such as constructing philosophical arguments or writing poetry, likely depend on linguistic abilities. Therefore, he argues, if for full personhood reason and free will must be possessed to a reasonably sophisticated extent and if such sophistication relies on the possession of linguistic abilities, then linguistic abilities constitute a requirement for personhood. James Connelly, in chapter 12, reflects instead on Collingwood’s philosophy in relation to biographical writing. In this chapter the author sees Collingwood both as a possible subject of biographical writing and as a philosopher whose reflections on historical writing must be taken into account by a biographer.

In the successive chapter Gary L. Cesarz discusses J.M.E. McTaggart’s stand on the immaterial substantial self and proposes to reinterpret it in light of its relation to Humean bundles and the new trends of scientific research. McTaggart stands against materialism and the idea that the self can be reduced to an activity of the body, arguing instead that matter is an abstraction from the sensations experienced by the selves. Against Hume, McTaggart maintain that selves are not bundles of perceptual states of themselves and other selves and that perception cannot be separate from the perceiver. More in general, in McTaggart’s view primary (objective) and secondary (subjective) qualities despite being different cannot be separated.

Chapter 14 is devoted to the topic of the True Self. W.J. Mander presents the conception of True Self for British Idealists by its reference to the moral ideal, the concept of obligation, the idea f freedom and th notion of theology. This because, as the author claims, the idealist doctrine f the True Self is complex and multifaceted, and it can be grasped only by understanding its role in different areas of philosophy. However, he points out, this does not mean that there are separate senses of ‘true self’ for, as he leaves clear, to claim that there are one would need to subscribe to an understanding of concept as self-contained and sharply definable, essentially different from the idea of living concepts embraced by idealists. 

In the conclusive chapter of this book persons, categories and the problems of meaning and value are discussed in a paper by Leslie Armour (1931-2014), to whose memory this book is dedicated. The first issue tackled here is the problem of personhood. It is hard to define a person. As she argues, e.g., persons cannot simply be rational animals because it would be counterintuitive to say that one stops to be a person by temporarily losing her rationality. This issue is difficult to solve as it is important, indeed, as the author show us, value and meanings are strictly related to persons. Following the authors examples, it would make little sense to protect a work of art by hiding it forever to the human sight. Similarly, two computers might talk each other forever but such process would be meaningless if a person were not to assign a meaning to it: computers only choose between discrete states, but persons can give infinite meaning to their print outs. Attempts to find the right criteria of personhood typically fail, which suggests to the author that what makes some creature a person is that statement that such creature is a person, and in the judgments about personhood several notions are involved. In particular, those of the psychological person, the social person, the civil person and the relationship among them. Again, as it already emerged from the previous discussions, the inter-relation between the individual and the community becomes fundamental for understanding the self.

British Idealism and the Concept of the Self is surely recommended to all those who have a per-existing interest for the idealist philosophies, but it also a reading to suggest to those who are just approaching this line of thought. Although the language of idealism might result difficult to the unacquainted reader, most papers in this book are accessible also to non-expert audience. 

Importantly, this book offers an interesting overview of British Idealism which comprises both a discussion of the antecedents of this school of though – discussed in the second chapter of the book – and a discussion of the most recent works of British Idealists. The reader is then provided with a wide view on British Idealism tat does not live aside its history and development.  The biographies of British Idealists provided in many of the papers do a great work for the purpose of contextualizing the authors’ philosophical thought, which in the idealist philosophy cannot be fully understood as abstracted from the historical context and from the philosopher’s life.

The emphasis on the concept of the self is particularly appreciable. The self is yet a mysterious subject that keeps fascinating the contemporary philosophers, and that seems to become less and familiar to us as we attempt to characterize it. Central to the philosophical though of British Idealism, the self it is certainly a good starting point to discuss their philosophical though in ethics, metaphysics, theology, and other disciplines. As it is certainly a good topic for highlighting the connection and potential inconsistencies between the authors’ thoughts on the different disciplines. 

This book is recommended to those interested in a critical discussion of the philosophies of British Idealists as well as to a historical view and contextualizing of their philosophical thought. It is warmly recommended to those interested in the connection and divergences between the philosophical thought of the same idealist philosopher in various disciplines as well as to those interested in the connection and divergences between the different philosophers. A plus of this book with respect to other collections on British Idealism is certainly the excellent choice to organize the discussion around the topic of the self, wisely chosen for his centrality to the British Idealist thought but also because it is certainly among the most fascinating, mysterious and always timeless topics of discussion.

 

© 2017 Flavia Felletti

 

 

Flavia Felletti, PhD Researcher, University of Duisburg-Essen