associated by its critics with the Bra dleyean claim that ‘[a man] is universal
because he is one throughout all his different attributes’; instead, universals
are here understood in a more usual way, as properties that are instantiated
in individuals, but where concrete universals ‘embrace’ the individuals into a
holistic system, and so make these individuals parts of a larger individual
entity, whereas abstract universals do not. Therefore, we might say (to use
the sort of example employed by the British Idealists) there are ce rtain
properties by virtue of which citizens of the state form a community or social
whole, while nonetheless the state is an individual. We are therefore
preserving here more of the traditional universal/individual distinction
(because we are not saying that the state qua individual is a universal),
while still giving a distinctive sense to the idea of a concrete universal (as a
property that connects individuals into larger wholes, in an inter-individual
manner).
This view of the concrete universal of course belongs together with the
metaphysical holism (tending tow ards monism) of some of the British
Idealists more generally, so that in the end it is not clear whether they would
allow that some universals are ‘concrete’ in this sense, and others are
‘abstract’; rather, they would seem to hold that in fact all universals are
concrete, although our lack of insight into the full systematic interconnec-
tion of individuals may prevent us from recognizing this.
25
This appears to
be the implication of Bradley’s famous example of the red-haired men:
By being red-haired the two men are related really, and their relation is not
merely external ...‘ButIam ared-haired man’, I shall hear, ‘and I know what
I am, and I am not altered in fact when I am compared with another man, and
therefore the relation falls outside.’ But no finite individual, I reply, can
possibly know what he is, and the idea that all his reality falls within his
knowledge is even ridiculous . . . But, as he really is, to know perfectly his own
nature would be, with that nature, to pass in knowledge endlessly beyond
himself. For example, a red-haired man who knew himself utterly would and
must, starting from within, go on to know everyone else who has red hair, and
he would not know himself until he knew them . . . Nothing in the whole and in
the end can be external, and everything less than the Universe is an abstraction
from the whole, an abstraction more or less empty, and the more empty the
less self-dependent. Relations and qualities are abstractions, and depend for
their being always on a whole, a whole which they inadequately express, and
which remains always less or more in the background.
26
25
Cf. Sprigge, James and Bradley, 514:
[T]he doctrine of concrete universals, as propounded by such as Bradley and
Bosanquet, does not really concern one special type of universal called ‘concrete’,
which they contrast with another called ‘abstract’, but is presented as the correct
account of all genuine universals as opposed to the more usual but inadequate account
of them as merely abstract.
26
F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, 2nd edn, 9
th
impression (Oxford, 1930) 520–1.
124 ROBERT STERN
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