F. H. Bradley

English philosopher

• Born: January 30, 1846
• Birthplace: Clapham, Surrey, England
• Died: September 18, 1924
• Place of death: Oxford, Oxfordshire, England

Bradley stands out in the distinguished history of British philosophy as a thinker who represented a point of view that was fundamentally Idealist. He was a vigorous, gifted, brooding critic of England’s empirical philosophers.

Early Life

Francis Herbert Bradley was the fourth child of the Reverend Charles Bradley, an Evangelical minister, and Emma Linton Bradley. Little is known about his early life. He was educated at Cheltenham (1856-1861) and Marlborough (1861-1863), and in 1865 he attended University College, Oxford. In 1870, at the age of twenty-four, he became a Fellow at Merton College, Oxford, where he remained until his death in 1924. A year after arriving at Oxford, he contracted a kidney disease that disabled him and left him sick and suffering, sardonic and sometimes bitter. Fortunately, his fellowship allowed him to pursue scholarships without the added burden of teaching or lecturing, tasks that his disability would never permit. His illness made him something of a recluse, and, in some measure, this accounts for his biting, often cruel prose.

Life’s Work

Bradley’s frail constitution frequently forced him to take shelter from Oxford’s severe winters on the southern coast of England or on the French Riviera. On one sojourn to Saint-Raphael in the winter of 1911, he became friends with Elinor Glyn, who was later to depict him as “the sage of Cheiron,” in her book Halcyone (1912).

In appearance Bradley was erect, with a thin face, fine eyes, and a long nose. Fastidious in his habits, he was affable, courteous, and a good conversationalist, although it was said that he did not suffer fools gladly. He is said to have had a small shooting gallery constructed above his living quarters where he practiced routinely. By his own claim he was a good marksman, known to employ his skill on cats.

Bradley had strong political opinions. He was a conservative, perhaps even reactionary, with a lifelong dislike for the English Liberal Party and a specific disgust for its famous leader Prime MinisterWilliam Ewart Gladstone . In particular, he was angry at Gladstone for, as he said, betraying General Charles Gordon at Khartoum in the Egyptian Sudan in 1885. For Bradley, Gladstone represented what Bradley characterized as a degrading social sentimentality, an inviolate pacifism, and a false humanitarian notion of the natural equality of persons.

Almost nothing is known about Bradley’s private life, except that he dedicated all of his books to “E. R.,” an American woman named Mrs. Radcliffe who lived in France. Bradley met her while on holiday in Egypt, and although she had absolutely no literary or philosophical interests, he laid out for her, voluminously, his complete metaphysical system in a series of letters, which she later destroyed.

Although his philosophical system had its roots in German soil (specifically in the ideas of G. W. F. Hegel, Johann Friedrich Herbart, and Arthur Schopenhauer), he had little time or sympathy for the greatest of all German philosophers, Immanuel Kant.

Bradley died of blood poisoning on September 18, 1924, the same year that he was recipient of England’s highest literary award, the Order of Merit. Little can be marked of the external events in Bradley’s life—primarily because as a philosopher the events of moment were internal and mental—yet there can be no understanding of Bradley the man apart from Bradley the philosopher.

Richard Wollheim has called Bradley a man of caustic epigrams and poetic metaphors. Nevertheless, he was also Great Britain’s finest philosopher of metaphysics in the nineteenth century. He wrote numerous articles and reviews but only four book-length pieces are of major importance: Ethical Studies (1876), The Principles of Logic (1883), Appearance and Reality (1893), and Essays on Truth and Reality (1914). His Aphorisms appeared posthumously in 1930, and his Collected Essays was published in 1935. Throughout these volumes there is an obsessive criticism of empiricism, or what he refers to as that English philosophy’s devotion to “sense experience.”

Empiricism is, Bradley argues, a shallow, surface view of the world with two rather “contemptible” qualities: first, a naïve devotion to the idea that raw sense data is philosophically significant, and second, a pedestrian attachment to the doctrine of Utilitarianism. Utilitarianism, he insists, is the inevitable philosophical result of the ill-conceived dogmas of empiricism. When Bradley was at the height of his powers, his two most illustrious adversaries were the Englishman Bertrand Russell and the American William James . Both men were empiricists and Utilitarians.

Here, too, one runs into difficulty, for an analysis of Bradley’s thought is difficult because so much of what he writes is enigmatic and obscure. A primary question for Bradley was that of how one obtains knowledge. Bradley rejected as contradictory the notion that knowledge can be obtained from the senses, as was claimed by the empiricist philosophers John Locke and David Hume. For Bradley, knowledge should begin and end with an analysis of meaning. The proper role of philosophical investigation is understanding the use and meaning of the language. This powerful redirection of philosophy from an analysis of sensate ideas in the mind to an analysis of the structure and meaning of language has become the dominant theme in Anglo-American philosophy and owes much to Bradley’s initial critical assessment of empiricism.

For Bradley, proper philosophical study is the examination of rationality; that is, it is understanding the “internal connection” that mental ideas have to one another, the internal relations of species, kind, and class (in more contemporary terminology, the investigation into conceptual elements of signs, symbols, and semantics). In other words, the primary interest of philosophy should be in the laws of intelligibility, rather than in particular physical facts or specific sensations as the empiricists had believed. Universal understanding transcends empirical sensations; it requires absolute knowledge. Such knowledge should embrace the logical possibilities of past, present, and future, the real and the imagined. Further, all conceptual worlds are internal and theoretically complete.

Thus, rather than identifying information about an object, such as a lemon, by collecting sense data, Bradley would begin with the proposition that the lemon exists—in particular, that it possesses qualities. More important, the object, for Bradley, is more than the sum of these qualities. John Locke had recognized that there is more to things than the sum of their parts, and he called this nonsensed element underlying the sensory ideas “substance.” However, for Locke, substance is unknowable precisely because it is not sensed, a conclusion that leaves those who sense in a state of skepticism about the reality of substance—a position that was acceptable to almost no one except Locke’s philosophical heir, David Hume.

Bradley argues that the confusion fostered by this notion of substance ends in a rational contradiction. Ostensibly, when one says that a lemon is yellow, one never means that “lemon” and “yellow” mean the same thing, that they are equivalent terms, as (2 + 3) and (4 + 1) are equivalent sets. Yellow is a quality of lemon, but lemon is more than the color yellow. The empiricists would add that the lemon is also ellipsoid in shape. However, this, for Bradley, leads to confusion, for to say that being an ellipsoid is identical with being a lemon is contradictory, because it means that a lemon is identical with that which is yellow, which it is not, and with that which is ellipsoid, which it is not; finally, it means that that which is yellow is identical with that which is ellipsoid, which it is not. Thus, the empiricist must argue that a lemon is the sum of all its sensed qualities, not merely one of them in contradiction to some others. Hence, the “substance” of a lemon, for the empiricist, must be the collection of all of these discrete qualities taken together: yellow, elliptical, sour, and so forth. A collective relationship of these qualities constitutes the lemon’s substance.

It is at this point that Bradley declares empiricism worthless. Suppose, for example, that a lemon is defined as a yellow object that is elliptical and sour. Then yellow is the subject of the proposition declaring it so, and elliptical and sour are predicates of this proposition. However, it is as possible to define a lemon with sour as the subject and yellow and elliptical as its predicates. These combinations are, in other words, interchangeable. What this demonstrates, Bradley argues, is that these qualities are interchangeable as subjects and predicates, and hence, it is the relationship in which people think and talk about these qualities that properly establishes the meaning of “lemon.” Thus, a lemon is something more than the sum of its sensed qualities; it is a cognitive entity. However, one should not assume that there is a kind of Lockean substance underlying the sensed qualities, because this only sustains the contradictions that the limits of sense perceptions produce.

For Bradley, there is an Archimedean point on which any definition of reality is to be balanced: That point is freedom from contradiction. In order to escape contradiction, all qualities must be internally related to all other elements of experience in a single conceptual system. This “transcendent” view of reality, however, requires Bradley to employ the language of the European Idealists, most particularly the discourse of the post-Hegelians. Therefore, reality, the “substance behind” appearances, is not material, it is mental.

In Bradley’s words, it is a conceptual “unity of all multiplicity.” Human knowledge is filled with contradictions; nevertheless, it is also a part of a wider and higher relation: It is part of “absolute experience.” Thus, appearances (sense data) are manifestations in lesser degree of something conceptually truer, morally higher, and aesthetically more beautiful. Collectively for society, idealized experience is nearer to the heart of things. Higher idealized experience draws society closer to ideals of perfection, closer to its historical myths about God. Reality, thus, is idealized experience, not sensible experience. Bradley thus changed the focus in philosophy from observation of phenomena to an examination of pure reality, which is mental.

Significance

Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle has observed that when F. H. Bradley began his career the burning issues in philosophy were between theologians and antitheologians. They were issues of faith and doubt. When he died in 1924, philosophical energies had turned to ratiocinative technique and rigor. Transcendental dicta had lost their influence, and the technicalities of logical theory, linguistic meaning, and the investigation of scientific methodology had changed the tone and temperament of philosophers.

Theologians had withdrawn from the battle with scientists, claiming that their endeavors were conducted in different domains: Religion spoke to the needs, aspirations, and hopes of supplicants, while science was searching for explanations of the world’s operations. Theology thus maintained a certain immunity from the restrictive, austere propositions of science, enabling theological language to become more subjective and introspective. It became the language of feeling and aspirations, a verbal instrument of communal persuasion and solidarity. Within these limits, only the most literal believers would fear the quantitative onslaught of science.

Bradley, however, had no sympathy with this verbal compromise. He believed it to be a futile, crippling solution. Scientific knowledge is not in another domain; it is, rather, an attempt to understand reality—theology and metaphysics should do no less, according to Bradley. Transcendental philosophy had been abandoned because it was unable to withstand the inexorable successes of science.

For more than two centuries, English philosophy had attempted to imitate the method of science with a philosophy of “mental science,” a science of sense experience. This method failed. In fact, it produced only circumlocutions and contradictions. Bradley led philosophy into the realm of logical and semantical discourse, where its primary task was a search for meaning and understanding. Thought and judgment became the primary function of conceptual inquiry. Bradley’s philosophical method begins and ends with the premise that truth is the systematic application of self-consistent coherent propositions that are derivatively appropriate, in a rationally unifying fashion, to all aspects of human experience. He envisioned a rationally coherent metaphysics that would replace an antiquated theology and supplant the spiritually bereft notions of science.

Bibliography

Bradley, F. H. Appearance and Reality. Rev. ed. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1897. This is Bradley’s account of metaphysics, his most famous and enduring work. He explains why the world is monistic and not pluralistic, and why logic is necessary for a theory of metaphysics. His principal theme is that a sensory view of things, persons, and qualities is a surface of appearances, while the proper view of reality is embodied in coherent conceptual propositions generated by logical thought.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Essays on Truth and Reality. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1914. Bradley demonstrates that the theory of truth goes together with the theory of reality; answering questions about truth entails answering questions about the nature of things. Explanations of reality must be free from conceptual contradictions, which means that truth is neither derivable nor doubtable; it is self-confirming.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Ethical Studies. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1962. Bradley produced four major books. This was the first, published originally in 1876; a revised version, published in 1927, contains additional, important material. This volume includes the essay “My Station and Its Duties,” perhaps the single most widely read piece he wrote.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Principles of Logic. Rev. ed. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1922. Bradley’s text on the meaning of logical arguments. For him, logic includes both judgments and inferences. Much of this volume is devoted to refuting John Stuart Mill’s claim that logic is a derivative of sense experience.

Bradley, James, ed. Philosophy After F. H. Bradley: A Collection of Essays. Bristol, England: Thoemmes Press, 1996. The essays trace Bradley’s influence upon twentieth century philosophy, analyzing his relationship to Alfred North Whitehead, John Dewey, and other thinkers, and explaining how his concept of Absolute Idealism affected modern logic, pragmatics, and idealistic philosophy.

Manser, A., and Guy Stock, eds. The Philosophy of F. H. Bradley. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1984. An attempt to show the relation of Bradley’s thought to contemporary philosophy. The editors aim to demonstrate the greatness of Bradley, even though he has not been the center of philosophical discussion for more than half a century. They have succeeded; this is a collection of first-rate papers, by first-rate philosophical writers.

Muirhead, John. The Platonic Tradition in Anglo-Saxon Philosophy. London: Allen & Unwin, 1931. This is a good, although brief, account of Bradley’s philosophical development. Detailed analysis of Bradley’s thought is difficult to find or understand. Some of the blame is Bradley’s, but much of the reason for his obscurity stems from the fact that he was a speculative philosopher writing in an analytic tradition. Muirhead’s work is somewhat informal but still accurate and worthwhile.

Stock, Guy, ed. Appearance Versus Reality: New Essays on Bradley’s Metaphysics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. A collection of papers delivered at a conference to mark the centenary of Appearance and Reality. Among the topics examined are Bradley’s theory of truth and doctrine of absolutism, and Bertram Russell’s criticisms of Bradley’s philosophy.

Wollheim, Richard. F. H. Bradley. London: Penguin Books, 1959. This excellent book is the most accessible today. Wollheim discusses Bradley’s theory of logic and rejection of empiricism, contradiction in the notion of “facts,” the relation of thought to truth, and his view of morality and God. He makes it clear why Bradley nearly dominated British philosophy in the latter part of the nineteenth century and why he has little influence today.