On the Imperviousness of Persons: A Reply to Jan Olof Bengtsson

I.

As regular readers of The Pluralist are aware, there appeared in 2008 an issue devoted to Jan Olof Bengtsson's The Worldview of Personalism.¹ The issue included five articles, each concerned with a different aspect of the book; and after each article, there was a "Reply" by Bengtsson. In what follows, I shall say something about Bengtsson's reply to my own contribution, "Absolute and Personal Idealism." However, first let me briefly describe that article's argument.

In "Absolute and Personal Idealism," I examined the personalist attack on absolutism as formulated by Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison in two works: Hegelianism and Personality and The Idea of God in the Light of Recent Philosophy. In the first section of my article, I argued that Pringle-Pattison had largely failed to grasp the central idea of Hegel's Logic—particularly Hegel's conception of the absolute. According to Pringle-Pattison (and most personalists), the Hegelian absolute is "impersonal" in nature, and it falsifies the true relation between finite individuality and reality as a whole. In the second half of my discussion, the focus shifted to the English absolutists: T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, and Bernard Bosanquet. (Although these writers disagreed with Hegel on numerous issues, they were committed to his general conception of the absolute.)

I considered there how in The Idea of God—where epistemic and logical concerns give way to questions of morality and theology—Pringle-Pattison showed a surprising affinity with the absolutists whom he had so harshly criticized in Hegelianism and Personality; and I further claimed that he seemed to have jettisoned the most problematic aspect of the earlier work: the doctrine of the "imperviousness of persons." Indeed, I argued that when we carefully consider Pringle-Pattison's views in the sphere of moral philosophy, there seems to be little to differentiate him from the absolutists, and that perhaps Pringle-Pattison made, late in his career, a partial return to the fold of absolute idealism.²

But what specifically does Bengtsson object to in my account of Pringle-Pattison's personal idealism? His complaints, so far as I follow him, are these:

1. i. I have failed to acknowledge the degree to which personal idealism accepts certain aspects of Hegelianism and later forms of absolute idealism;

2. ii. Though Pringle-Pattison's attack on Hegel (and absolute idealism generally) is at times overstated, it is essentially correct; and I have failed to see that the critique of the impersonal absolute developed in Hegelianism and Personality is sound;

3. iii. I have greatly overestimated the extent to which Pringle-Pattison altered his views in the later works. This is particularly true of the idea of the "imperviousness of persons"—a doctrine that sees finite individuals as not "adjectives" of the absolute, but as substantive entities whose boundaries are clear, distinct, and incapable of being "merged" with some larger form of experience;

4. iv. Despite similarities between the moral doctrine of the Idea of God and that of absolute idealism, these do not indicate a return to absolutism on Pringle-Pattison's part; and finally

5. v. Bengtsson claims that I dogmatically declared absolute idealism to be the only viable form of idealism, rejecting completely the legitimacy of "personal idealism."

Now it would be impossible to discuss all of these charges here; hence, I shall say something only about (ii) and (iii) above. These are the most philosophically important, and by addressing them, the contrast between absolute and personal idealism may, I think, be more sharply drawn.

II.

I would begin by expanding upon what, according to Pringle-Pattison's Hegelianism and Personality, is the principal error of absolute idealism: its turning into a metaphysical reality (at least in the hands of Hegel) what for Kant was merely a logical distinction.³ That is, Hegel and his followers take Kant's notion of "transcendental apperception" and make of it something it was never meant to be—Geist, or the "experiential absolute." And this notion, we are told, leads to the denigration of the finite knower—the actually existing person. The complaint, as I...