Idealists focussed their attention and claimed to have uncovered that ‘exotic’
but ‘vanished specimen’, the concrete universal.
3
Finally, as the trend of
reading Hegel pushes ever further in a non-metaphysical direction, it might
be thought that the future of the concrete universal is hardly likely to be
brighter than its recent past – for it may seem hard to imagine how a
conception championed by the British Idealists, who were apparently
shameless in their metaphysical commitments,
4
can find favour in these
more austere and responsible times.
In this paper, however, I want to make a case for holding that there is
something enlightening to be found in how some of the British Idealists
approached the ‘concrete universal’, both interpretatively and philosophi-
cally. At the interpretative level, I will argue that while not everything
these Idealists are taken to mean by the term is properly to be found in
Hegel, their work nonetheless relates to a crucial and genuine strand in
Hegel’s position, so that their discussion of this issue is an important
moment in the reception history of his thought. At a philosophical level,
I think that the question that concerned Hegel and these British Idealists
retains much of its interest, as does their shared approach to it: namely,
how far does our thought involve a mere abstraction from reality, and
what are the metaphysical and epistemological implications if it turns out
it does not? As such, I will suggest, taking seriously what these British
Idealists have to say about the concrete universal can help us both in our
understanding of Hegel, and in our appreciation of the contribution
Hegel’s position can make to our thinking on the issues that surround this
topic.
I
At first sight, however, it must be admitted that the doctrine of the
concrete universal looks distinctly unpromising as a source of interpre-
tative and philosophical insights, in so far as the central claim generally
associated with its leading proponents appears to be both unHegelian and
incoherent.
This central claim, that came to be identified as characteristic of the
British Idealists, and which was much criticized in their time, was
summarized by one of those critics as the view that ‘the individual, qua
individual, is a universal’.
5
The thought beh ind this conception of the
universal is taken to be that universals have a ‘one-over-many’ structure in
3
Mander, ‘Bosanquet and the Concrete Universal’, 293.
4
But for a corrective to this commonly held view, see Robert Stern, ‘British Hegelianism:
A Non-Metaphysical View?’, European Journal of Philosophy, 2 (1994) No. 3: 293–321.
5
Norman Kemp Smith, ‘The Nature of Universals’, Mind, 36 (1927) No. 142: 137–57, esp.
p. 144, No. 143: 265–80, No. 144: 393–422.
116 ROBERT STERN
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