ABSTRACT universal User Manual download pdf (Page 29)

as ontological holism or monism). However, if we dig a little deeper, we will

ﬁnd a way to connect Hegel’s position as I have outlined it to the thinking of

some of the British Idealists, and to see that the questions an d issues that drew

them to the doctrine of the concrete universal in this properly Hegelian form

are not as alien to us as may have appeared hitherto.

Where a doctrine of the concrete universal emerges that is close to the one I

have attributed to Hegel, is in the way that some of the British Idealists sought

to attack empiricist claims concerning ‘the abstractness of thought’. This

issue, which was of widespread concern, has several diﬀerent aspects. The ﬁrst

is epistemological: thought has only a subordinate role to play in knowledge,

because our primary engagement with the world comes directly through the

senses, from which thought abstracts. The second is psychological: the

general ideas through which we think about the world are generated via a

process of abstraction from the simple ideas we acquire through sensible

experience. The third is logic al: logical thought involves ever more

abstraction, as we move away from the content of our experience into higher

and higher levels of generality. And the fourth might be termed ‘existential’:

thought leads us into a realm of unreal abstractions, away from the concrete

reality of lived experience and an immediate grasp of things in their unique

individuality. To many of the Idealists, this conception of the abstractness of

thought was mistaken; to quote a summary of their positi on: ‘[T]hought is

essentially a process of concretion, not a process of abstraction from an

experience which , as given, is already concrete’.

As we shall show, it is when

addressing this issue that a number of the British Idealists

come closest to

adopting the Hegelian doc trine of the concrete universal as characterized

above, and in a way that shows that doctrine to have contemporary interest.

We can see most clearly how the attack on the thesis that thought involves

abstraction enabled a properly Hegelian doctrine of the concrete universal to

emerge by looking in some detail at one of the ﬁrst British Idealists to launch

such an attack, namely T. H. Green. Green outlines the abstractionist picture

of thought, with its various problematic dimensions, as follows:

Give sensation this ﬁrst inch, and it takes an ell. If sense gives a knowledge of

properties, nothing remains for thought but to abstract and combine them,

and it is vain then to re-assert for the data of thought, for its abstractions and

‘mixed modes,’ the dignity of the ‘things themselves.’ Thought has abdicated

George H. Sabine, ‘The Concreteness of Thought’, Philosophical Review, 16 (1907) No. 2:

154–69, esp. p. 154.

The question of whether Bradley is an exception here is too complex to be dealt with properly

in what follows: for on the one hand, while Bradley may seem to be more insistent than other

Idealist writers on the abstractive nature of thought, and thus more pessimistic about its

capacity to grasp the unique individuality of reality, he nonetheless also seems to have shared

their view that thought is required in order to give experience a particular content, where this

once again relies on a non-abstractionist account of our concepts. For an enlightening

discussion of these issues, see Phillip Ferreira, Bradley and the Structure of Knowledge (Albany,

1999), where 41–4 are particularly relevant to the themes of this paper.

HEGEL AND THE CONCRETE UNIVERSAL 143

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