of late, i've been paddling in quite the lovely little philosophical backwater, which i might term "post-idealist british metaphysics." in the late nineteenth century, british philosophy was dominated by folks who were in some sense and in some degree hegelians: t.h. green, bernard bosanquet, and f.h. bradley. "analytic" philosophy arose, in my view, as a rebellion against idealism, not only against its grand and basically non-empirical system-construction, but against its turgid, obscure, profound prose. (in fact, the british guys even at their worst wrote much more clearly than hegel, e.g., or than germans in general: a basic aspect of british thought beginning to end.)

so, bertrand russell, g.e. moore and co started ripping idealism apart and going for certain, clear results under the auspices of fregean logic. they more or less proclaimed all metaphysics, by which they meant really the philosophies of their own teachers, to be doa: actually meaningless and pointless. they tried to achieve (and succeeded to an amazing extent in achieving) extreme clarity and precision and certainty. after that, wittgenstein, logical positivism, etc. analytic philosophy dominated the whole field in the uk and us and australia for the whole century, and it retained its anti-hegel rage: really there were and even are purges, where we declare that you people who read hegel or heidegger aren't philosophers, are spouting nonsense, and must not be hired, granted tenure, allowed to work with grad students, etc.

big fun! but one thing that happened is that through the 1920s and 30s there were a whole bunch of "systematic" philosophers in british universities who were still basically working in the green/bradley framework, while also grappling with russell and moore. these guys were still building systems at the same time as they were trying to hold to or re-develop an empiricist-clear style.

so anyway, i'm sort of thinking i'm going to write a "system" of philosophy, running through epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics etc in a "bone-head" or "direct" realist vein. in trying to see what's out there i got hold of a book called a theory of direct realism, by j.e. turner (1925). well, from here it looks bizarrely incoherent methodologically, lurching from russell to hegel, from super-precise logic to hyper-woolly idealism, from rank scientism to rank speculation. that's a product of a professional dilemma at a certain moment. but it also in a way suggests that these strands could have been synthesized in various ways had the analytic folks not been in their own way stalinists.

but exploring the footnotes etc i touched on a literature with which i was unfamiliar except as names or except for their translations or commentaries on kant, etc: people like robert stout, or norman kemp-smith, c.d. broad, pringle-pattison, etc. one of the interesting things about this lit is that most of these folks were trying actually to crush hegel in a realist vein. but their style was still essentially the grand metaphysical manner, which they did not know was already unreadable when they wrote, and which essentialy has not been read since.

the great find in this world of funk is, for my money, the astonishing genius samuel alexander, whose work, including the massive slab of systematic metaphysics space, time, and deity (1920), is entirely anti-idealist and pointedly clear, indeed almost painfully lucid. but it is also in its way squarely in the speculative, here's my system-of-everything style. what is says, beautifully, is that believe it or not space and time and even we are actual material objects in a reality independent of our consciousness. and then he makes the next move: consciousness itself is a real thing in a real world. now that for my money is the real problem with the idealist tradition: that it denies that, which is...ridiculous. alexander is, in fact, far less idealist in such matters than are russell or wittgenstein or carnap. stylistically, he's closer to german idealism. doctrinally, he's a much more thorough critic and opponent of it than the heroes of the analytic tradition.

indeed, that tradition at least started out as "phenomenalist": it has us building reality out of sense data: all we knew was our own mental images, tactile sensations, etc. this is exactly how british empiricism ended up devouring the world in the first place, why it had to eventuate in kant and hegel. it's understandable that the analytic dudes loved hume and hated hegel, wanted to re-institute pre-idealist empiricism, or didn't really know where else to start. but really that was not the best move. start with a world constructed out of sensations and you end up a solipsist or a transcendental or absolute idealist, and analytic empiricism had to be saved from this fate again, for example by austin. well, alexander just rips phenomenalism apart. he notes dryly that it is incompatible with our own experience of the world and status as natural creatures.

space, time, and deity was welcomed as a classic at the time, and then fell off the cliff when the analytic style became entirely hegemonic. it's a model of what i want to do, though i doubt that anyone i've ever met has ever read it. it indicates a counter-factual history in which anti-speculative philosophy took a different mode, where plain-speaking realism replied to hegelianism in its own terms and killed it. whether we'd be better off in that history than this one is a hard but cool question.

Comments

[crispy]

ok, what should i say bout oakeshott?
i think the differences are linguistic/cultural or something: but the linguistic differences are cultural and cultural differences linguistic. or maybe the differences are ind of...accidental; like, kant read leibniz, hegel read kant etc: a prose-style fad or influence. but if you said that the brits ae temperamentally empiricist, you'd have a point: like who are the british rationalists? but by 1850 there was no doing philosophy anywhere without hegel.

[marriotr]

This actually looks very interesting; I'm gonna give space, time and deity a try once my current workload lessens(that means it goes somewhere in my now 46-item "List of things to read"). Out of curiosity, how much of the differences in style between the British philosophic cults and the German philosophic cults do you think has its origin in linguistic differences?

[THOMAS J. BIETER]

How can you comment on the British idealists and not mention Michael Oakeshott?