ABSTRACT universal User Manual

ARTICLEHEGEL,BRITISH IDEALISM,AND THE CURIOUS CASEOF THECONCRETE UNIVERSALRobert SternLike the terms ‘dialectic’, ‘Aufhebung’ (or ‘sublation’), and ‘G

associated by its critics with the Bra dleyean claim that ‘[a man] is universalbecause he is one throughout all his different attributes’; instead, uni

It seems that Bradley is arguing here that a universal such as ‘red-hairedness’may appear to be an abstract universal, in the sense that no internal r

To see why, we need to look more closely at the way in which Hegelhimself draws a contrast be tween universals that are abstract and universalsthat ar

for, whereas the ‘abstract universal...is opposed to the particular and theindividual’,33the concrete universal is not, where it is characteristic of

Hegel thus conceives of the concrete universal as ‘the universal of theNotion’, in so far as it involves a dialectical relation to particularity andin

something an individual, becau se it is only qua individual of a certain kindthat the individual has these properties, and not as a ‘bare’ individual:

Concept,42and the universal as it is now envisaged is truly concrete, in thefollowing respects:1. It is not merely a property, in the sense of being a

3. It can be exemplified in individuals which have different properties, sothat there need be nothing further in common between these individualsthan th

what Hegel means by this claim: A rose is not an individual rose by virtue ofexemplifying the abstract universal ‘red’, whereas it is an individual ro

(so Platonism is false).46Therefore, starting from any one of the categoriesof the Concept (universality, particularity, individuality), this category

Idealists focussed their attention and claimed to have uncovered that ‘exotic’but ‘vanished specimen’, the concrete universal.3Finally, as the trend o

only intelligible in relation to the others and through the others, and whilethe substance universal characterizes the individual as a whole in a way

Bradley appears to contrast the ‘individualism’ that he rejects with a moreholistic model of a community like England, on the grounds that there is an

pervading a system of differences and realized only in them’,51on thegrounds that individuals within the state are ‘the true particularisation of thehu

Hegel’s crucial discussion of the will can be found in the ‘Introduction’ tothe Philosophy of Right, xx5–7:The will contains (a) the element of pure i

product is not an expression of the ‘real (universal) me’.57On the other hand,I can take mysel f to be nothing but a set of particular projects and co

Hegel’s social philosophy is indeed holistic, in the sense that for him thestructure of the individual’s will when rightly constituted has ‘moments’ o

based on any claim that this unity is grounded in some common nature thatthe individuals share, as on the holistic model of the concrete universal.It

This way of moving from the structure of the will to a social holism is clearlyvery different from the sort of position envisaged by Hobhouse, and woul

manifestation of individuality, the executive is a manifestation ofparticularity, and the legislature is a manifestation of universality, eachalso emb

as ontological holism or monism). However, if we dig a little deeper, we willfind a way to connect Hegel’s position as I have outlined it to the thinki

relation to their instances, and so are the same amid diversity, and in so faras individuals also have this structure in relation to their attributes,

its proper prerogatives. It has admitted that experience is something given to itfrom without, not that in which it comes to itself. It inevitably fol

ideas; but, Green argued, without complex ideas, we could not pick outobjects and relations, and thus our sense experience would not be ofproperties a

separate contribution to our knowledge of the world from that of feeling,because both are equally required in order to have experience, a fact thatLoc

being regarded as that which becomes universal so soon as it is judged of orknown, in virtue of the property under which it is known, it is connected

matter as the ‘substratum’ underlying the prope rties and relations of theindividual, on the other hand he treats the individual as the parti culariza

and the deut¼ra osı´a, or essence constituted by general attributes, are not tobe placed, as Aristotle placed them, over-against each other, as if on

Like Green, Bosanquet therefore opposed ‘[t]he tradition of the Britishschool’, which ‘start[s] from a theory for which thought is decaying sense’,so

Like Bosanquet, Richard Lewis Nettleship also cites Novalis’s dictum toargue against the abstractness of thought, paraphrasing it as follows: ‘tophilo

of the concrete universal; however, he perhaps did not express himself inthese terms because he accepted a simpler set of categories than Hegel, andso

is, if anything, clearer still. Take away from the various figures what makesthem figures and nothing remains. It may be said that lines might still exi

disagree with an early critic of this conception, Norman Kemp Smith, whenhe writes:It has, of course, been usual to define the universal as ‘the one in

In defence of the British Idealists, however, it might be argued thatthose who criticized them for holding this seemingly incoherent doctrinemisrepres

(‘das Einzelne ’)17makes it a universal; rather , he is commenting that thereare judgements where we predicate attributes not just of the individual a

through many Heres into the universal Here which is a simple plurality ofHeres, just as the day is a simple plurality of Nows’.20On the basis of these

even being ‘now’ and ‘here’ does not make a temporal or spatial instantunique and thus purely individual, for there are always further instants thatar

This conception of the concrete universal has the advantage that it avoids thepeculiar conflation of individuality with universality that we saw earlie