A Second Reply to Phillip Ferreira

As a philosopher rather than a historian, Phillip Ferreira tends naturally, in his article in this issue of The Pluralist, "On the Imperviousness of Persons," as in his first one on The Worldview of Personalism, to place the emphasis quite as much on the general philosophical issues as on the specific historical interpretation of Pringle-Pattison. But this emphasis was from the beginning invited by my own assessment of Pringle-Pattison. I will continue here to answer Ferreira to a considerable extent in its terms, but, as a historian rather than a philosopher, I will try to use arguments which, based on my historical knowledge of them, I think would have been those of Pringle-Pattison and the other personal idealists—or, as I also call them, early personalists—with whom I deal in my book.

There can be no doubt about the importance of the issues Ferreira keeps raising. But it seems to me his new article evinces more clearly than his first, the characteristic ambiguities and contradictions that the early personalists detected from the beginning in absolute idealism. Pringle-Pattison is but a late example of this, and he focused only on some of them.

Not surprisingly, the most obvious example is found in Ferreira's statements about the absolute itself. When he says the British absolutists were committed to Hegel's general conception of the absolute, the meaning can only be that they were committed, like Hegel, to a general conception of the absolute. They were hardly committed to Hegel's own conception of the absolute, and there are also considerable differences between their own various conceptions of it. While he briefly hints at those differences, Ferreira's reconstruction of a general absolutist conception must be taken as indicative of the shift of his focus from historical interpretation to philosophical truth. As representing the positions of the mentioned absolutists, it is too simplified, and Pringle-Pattison's criticism cannot be understood unless supplementary formulations as cited by him are also taken into account. A more thorough discussion would need to consider not only the changes in British absolutism from Green over Caird to Bradley and Bosanquet, but also the successive stages of the development of German post-Kantian idealism between Kant and Hegel, in the various responses to and criticisms of Kant, in Fichte, and in Schelling. But both because Ferreira's shift of focus is in itself legitimate and warranted, and because space does not allow me to discuss all the various relevant positions of the absolutists, I shall respond here primarily to Ferreira's own philosophical (re-)formulation.

Charging that Pringle-Pattison "fails to grasp" Hegel's conception of the absolute, Ferreira, in more than one place, by putting the word "impersonal" within scare quotes, seems to suggest that Pringle-Pattison was wrong to regard the Hegelian absolute as impersonal in nature. But everything Ferreira himself says about the absolute suggests he was right. It is important to keep in mind here that, as I show in the third chapter of my book, The Personal Absolute, the early idealistic personalists are themselves absolutists in the sense that they accept a general conception of the absolute—only they regard it as personal in nature. But I will keep here to the commonly accepted terminology of absolute idealists, on the one hand, and personal idealists, on the other.

Ferreira's statements that there is no other experience than that of finite individuals are consistent with the view of the transcendental apperception as the mere "ultimate presupposition of phenomenal experience," the mere "overarching unity" within which the distinctions of subjects (empirical apperception) and objects, and thus experience, occur. In "Absolute and Personal Idealism," he emphasized that transcendental apperception was "essentially impersonal." "Subjects of experience (in the sense supposed by Pringle-Pattison)," Ferreira now stresses in "On the Imperviousness of Persons," "are for absolutism always finite subjects." The ground of experience is not "'one Subject of experience' . . . a 'real knower' behind our finite, perspectival awareness . . . some 'super subject' that is 'all knowing'"; "to 'know' something, at least in the ordinary sense of the term, is always to...