In defence of the British Idealists, however, it might be argued that
those who criticized them for holding this seemingly incoherent doctrine
misrepresented their position. It is notable that in the way it is presented
by Bradley in the discussion from The Principles of Logic that we have
cited, he says not just that ‘The individual is both a concrete particular
and a concrete universal’, but also that these are ‘names of the whole
from different points of view [my emphasis]’, namely when we see the
individual as having ‘limiting and exclusive relat ions to other phenomena’
on the one hand and when we see it as ‘one throughout all [its] different
attributes’ on the other.
13
This may then suggest that in calling the
individual a concrete universal, Bradley does not mean to collapse the
distinction between these ontological categories on the grounds that both
involve identity-in-diversity, but rather to say that the individual can be
viewed as akin to a universal in this respect, just as it can also be viewed
as akin to a bare particular when considered in isolation from all other
things.
14
However, even if a defence of Bradley (and perhaps also of Bosanquet)
could be mounted along these lines, it might be argued that the claim that
‘the individ ual, qua individual, is a universal’ because it is the same amid
diversity should still be seen as part of the doctrine of the concrete universal,
on the grounds that a view of this sort can be traced back to Hegel. For
Hegel to be a source of this view, we would have to find a place where Hegel
states that an individual is (or can be seen as) a universal, on the grounds
that the individual combines unity in diversity; and commentators have
claimed to find such places. One example is said to be x175 of the
Encyclopaedia Logic, and another Hegel’s discussion of sense-certainty in
the Phenomenology of Spirit. However, I think we should not be persuaded
by these claims.
The section from the Encyclopaedia Logic is cited,
15
presumably on
the grounds that Hegel writes here: ‘The subject, the singular as singular
(in the ‘‘singular’’ judgment), is something-universal’.
16
But Hegel’s point
here is not to say that the identity-in-difference of the individual
13
Bradley, The Principles of Logic, Vol. I, p. 188.
14
A more radical defence of the Bradleyean position, suggested to me by Fraser MacBride,
might be to follow Ramsey in attempting to challenge the whole universal/individual
distinction: see F. P. Ramsey, ‘Universals’ in The Foundations of Mathematics and other
Logical Essays, edited by R. B. Braithwaite (London, 1931), pp. 112–34; but I take Bradley’s
more moderate talk of ‘points of view’ to suggest that he would not want to adopt that line
(though I would agree that there are some intriguing parallels between the two positions that
deserve to be explored further).
15
Mander, ‘Bosanquet and the Concrete Universal’, 296, n8.
16
G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic: Part I of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical
Sciences, translated by T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting and H. S. Harris (Indianapolis, 1991),
x175, p. 252 [‘Das Subjekt, das Einzelne als Einzelnes (im singula
¨
ren Urteil), ist ein Allgemeines’,
G. W. F. Hegel, Werke in zwanzig Ba
¨
nden, edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus
Michel (Frankfurt, 1970), Vol. VIII, p. 326].
HEGEL AND THE CONCRETE UNIVERSAL 119
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