Bradley’s Monistic Idealism

BRADLEY'S l\IONISTIC IDEALISM 1. INTRODUCTION FOR MOST OF ITS contemporary critics metaphysics is usually identified with some version of nineteenth-century idealism, and for most contemporary AngloAmerican philosophers the metaphysics of F. H. Bradley represents the most prominent example of classical idealism. Hence, in much of the present discussion about the possibility of metaphysics in Britain and, to a somewhat lesser extent, in America there is a tendency to view the particular categories of Bradley's metaphysics as the adequate and essential expression of the metaphysical spirit and point of view.1 The two basic themes of Bradley's metaphysics are the experience-theorem and the consistency-theorem. The experience -theorem states that there is no reality independent of sentient experience. The consistency-theorem states that reality is one perfect individual and that any aspect or portion of that individual taken in isolation is self-contradictory. The first is a statement of idealism; the second of monism.2 The arguments on behalf of these two theses are quite complex. In this article I will simply attempt to describe the nature and outlook of monistic idealism. The basic issues seem to be these. 1) Such a metaphysics must undermine the prestigious reality-value that common sense gives to the world of spatial and temporal existence. Hence, the reality of the common sense world, to which we are accustomed to give our practical allegiance and in which we daily live, must 1 This is especially true of those analysts who haYe been deeply influenced by G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, both of whom were students at Cambridge when Bradley's Appearance and Reality was published (1893). 2 Although these are sometimes interpreted as axioms of Bradley's metaphysics, he himself insists that they are the results of ideal experiment, and so it is better perhnps to call them theorems. 568 BRADLEY's MONISTIC IDEALISM 569 be trivialized. 2) This trivialization takes the form of degrading the world and its objects to the status of appearance by revealing evidence of their ideality and self-discrepancy. 3) Bradley then attempts to show that the self-discrepant and ideal presuppose a supra-relational, perfectly consistent individual of actual sentient experience. 4) Since the world as we experience and live it certainly does not seem to be perfectly one and throughout sentient, things cannot really be what they seem to be. Therefore, the character of things as they appear must be transmuted, when viewed from the perspective (or non-perspective) of the Absolute. 2. TRIVIALIZATION OF THE 'VORLD OF EXISTENCE 1. Any speculative metaphysics that attempts to construct a theory of being will distinguish degrees or levels of reality. It will usually distinguish dependent and secondary being from independent and primary being. Traditionally, with the exception of materialism and naturalism, metaphysical systems have purported to show that the world of common sense is somehow dependent and secondary being. What distinguishes the monistic idealist here is the manner in which he holds that the world of space and time is only dependently real. Bradley does not argue that the world we experience is causally dependent but that it proves to be ideal and, therefore, self-inconsistent. Its dependency is not manifested by an experiential insight that its existential actuation is contingent and received but by a metaphysical appraisal that reveals its lack of any proper substantiality. Ordinarily we would assume that we directly experience this world and that nothing, save perhaps our own self, is more immediate to us. But Bradley denies that what is immediately experienced is the daily world in which we live and to which the practical man is accustomed to give the highest realityvalue . The question of reality-value and of the immediacy of experience are closely related. Although it is possible to hold that 570 GARY L. BEDELL what is ultimately real is reached through inference, the plausibility of the reality-claim of our common sense world of existence is directly proportioned to the directness of its being experienced. Once it loses its evidentiary priority, it would have to submit its metaphysical credentials in the same manner as any other realm of reality. For a metaphysician who accepts the...