Like Green, Bosanquet therefore opposed ‘[t]he tradition of the British
school’, which ‘start[s] from a theory for which thought is decaying sense’,
so that on this view, ‘thought is an abstracting and generalising faculty, and
science is a departure from our factual experience’.
85
Against this view,
Bosanquet argues that ‘it is thought which constructs and sustains the fabric
of experience, and ...it is thought-determinations which invest even sense-
perception with its value and meaning’.
86
Thus, although he allows that
thought ‘presses beyond the given, followi ng the ‘‘what’’ beyond the limits
of the ‘‘that’’’, the bare individual is unintelligible as a mere ‘‘something’’, so
that ‘in following the ‘what’ [thought] tends always to return to a fuller
‘that’’;
87
universality of thought is therefore seen to take nothing away from
the individu ality of the given, but in fact as enabling that individuality to be
made determinate:
[A]s constituting a world [thought] tends to return to the full depth and
roundness of experience from which its first step was to depart. In a ‘world,’ a
‘concrete universal,’ we do not lose directness and significance as we depart
from primary experience; on the contrary, every detail has gained incalculably
in vividness and meaning, by reason of the intricate interpenetration and
interconnection, through which thought has developed its possibilities of
‘being.’ The watchword of concrete thinking is ‘Philosophiren ist dephlegma-
tisiren, vivificiren.’
88
Bosanquet thus uses the emptiness of the ‘that’ in relation to the ‘what’ to
argue against the abstractionist picture of thought in general and of logic in
particular:
It is important that we should dismiss the notion that the higher degrees of
knowledge are necessarily and in the nature of intelligence framed out of
abstractions that omit whatever has interest and peculiarity in the real world.
Nothing has been more fatal to the truth and vitality of ideas than this
prejudice ...If the present reaction against formal logic should end in
establishing a more vital conception of universality than that which sets it
down to mere abstraction, a fundamental reform will have been made in
philosophical first principles.
89
85
Bosanquet, The Principle of Individuality and Value, 54–5.
86
Ibid., 55.
87
Ibid.
88
Ibid., 55–6. The slogan ‘Philosophistisiren ist dephlegmatisiren – Vivificiren’ is taken from
Novalis: see ‘Logologischen Fragmenten’, No. 15; Novalis, Schriften. Die Werke Friedrich von
Hardenbergs, edited by Paul Luckhohn and Richard Samuel, 6 vols, 3rd edn (Stuttgart, 1977– )
Vol. II, p. 526.
89
Bernard Bosanquet, Logic, or the Morphology of Knowledge, 2 vols, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1911)
Vol. I, pp. 60–1. Cf. also Essentials of Logic, 94–7. For further discussion of this aspect of
Bosanquet’s view, see Mander, ‘Bosanquet and the Concrete Universal’, 298–300 and 303–7,
150 ROBERT STERN
Manymanuals.com
Manymanuals.de
Manymanuals.fr
Manymanuals.it
Manymanuals.pl
Manymanuals.cz
Manymanuals.es
Manymanuals-pt.com
Comments to this Manuals