and the deut¼ra osı
´
a, or essence constituted by general attributes, are not to
be placed, as Aristotle placed them, over-against each other, as if one
excluded, or even could be present without, the other. They are as necessarily
correlative as subject and object, as the self and the world. Each, by its native
energy, which is the hidden ‘spontaneity’ of thought, necessarily creates its
opposite. Nor is one, as Aristotle supposed, in any special sense ‘matter,’ the
other ‘form.’ Each, taken by itself, is matter, as the indeterminate and negation
of the knowable. Each, again, so taken, is matter, as the ‘subject’
(pokeı
´
menon), receptive of a form – of a form, however, not imposed from
without, but projected from within. Each, lastly, may be regarded either as a
void ‘substratum,’ or as a complex of attributes, according as it is isolated or
regarded in the realisation which it only attains by passing into its opposite.
82
In a passage such as this, therefore, we have unc overed a conception of the
universal employed by one of the British Idealists which I think has a claim
to be viewed as genuinely Hegel ian,
83
where the motivation behind it also
connects to a recognizable set of epistemological concerns: for, what leads
Green to claim that ‘an individual [is] universalised through its particular
relations and qualities’, while ‘a universal [is] individualised through its
particularity’ is not a commitment to holism or the metaphysics of the
Absolute, but a rejection of the kind of metaphysical picture that might
make empiricist claims concerning the ‘abstractness of thought’ in relation
to the ‘concreteness of sense’ seem coherent.
Moreover, seen in the light of this issue, other prominent Idealists can
also be viewed as being closer to the Hegelian conception of the concrete
universal than was apparent hitherto. In Bosanquet, for example, concern
with the ‘abstractness of thought’ was predominantly a question that
involved the status of logic, as Passmore has observed:
The Idealist opponents of logic, Bosanquet argued, did not know what logic is.
For them, Ward for example, logical thinking is the process of working
towards ever emptier abstractions, departing from the concreteness of
everyday life into a world of general formulae which completely fail to convey
the richness and diversity of our everyday experiences. But to think of logic
thus, Bosanquet protested, is to set up the abstract, rather than the concrete,
universal as the logical ideal.
84
82
Ibid., 70–1.
83
For an account of Green’s awareness of Hegel’s thought at the time of this essay on Aristotle,
and some discussion of how that awareness may have influenced it (though with no mention of
Hegel’s conception of the concrete universal) see Ben Wempe, T. H. Green’s Theory of Positive
Freedom: From Metaphysics to Political Theory (Exeter, 2004) Ch. 1.
84
John Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy, 2nd edn (Harmondsworth, 1966), 86. Cf.
Green, ‘The Philosophy of Aristotle’, pp. 58–9, where Green is critical of the logical methods of
Plato, Aristotle, and the ‘scholastic syllogism’, for enshrining this view of logic, for example in
the ‘logical tree’ of Porphyry.
HEGEL AND THE CONCRETE UNIVERSAL 149
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