The Dramatization of Absolute Idealism: Gabriel Marcel and F. H. Bradley

This paper consists of an observation, a suggestion, and an illustration. First, the observation: in the English-language literature on the philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, there is, so far as I have discovered, a lack of attention paid to the relationship between Marcel and the British philosopher F. H. Bradley (1846–1924).1 Why might be this be? I speculate (this is not the suggestion previously advertised) that the following are possible reasons for this omission. First, Bradley's influence is neglected in favor of what some might regard as the more obvious influence of Josiah Royce (1855–1916). After all, Marcel wrote a series of articles on Royce early in his career that were subsequently published as a monograph and eventually translated into English as Royce's Metaphysics. Second, there is the confluence of narratives concerning Marcel's philosophical development and the dethronement of Bradley and of idealism by figures such as Russell and Moore. According to the former narrative, Marcel's idealist phase ends with the first part of the Metaphysical Journal (about 1915).2 Since Bradley is less widely read these days and is treated simply as one more (even if the chief) representative of British idealism, it is easy to infer that, when he shed his idealism, Marcel also shed any connection with Bradley.But all that I have achieved thus far is the articulation of two reasons why people interested in Marcel have not also been interested in Bradley. Are there any reasons to believe that Marcel was influenced by Bradley in a positive way? Here, we can do no better than to gather some selected texts. In his preface to the English translation of the Metaphysical Journal, Marcel writes: Meditations on the implications of the word “with” and on metaphysical fruitfulness must in my opinion be counted among the most valuable contributions of the Metaphysical Journal. Later, in the collected writings published under the title Du Refus à l'invocation [translated into English as Creative Fidelity], I was to submit to similar analyses the relations, or rather the super-relations, implies by the French word “chez.” Here, unless I am mistaken, I made use of the word super-relation for the first time. The vigorous criticism made by F. H. Bradley (in Appearance and Reality) of the current notion of relation—considered as a pure makeshift—is there extended, and I think I will be never be able to recognize too explicitly what I owe to that great thinker. (Marcel, Metaphysical Journal xii)In the foreword to his pre-Metaphysical Journal works published as Philosophical Fragments 1909–1914, Marcel writes of his early (idealist) phase: I find it hard to understand today how, during the years immediately following the reception of my aggregation degree, and even after having had the privilege of hearing Henri Bergson at the College de France, I could still feel the need to undertake a groping inquiry in such a rarefied atmosphere and with the help of tools borrowed from post-Kantian philosophy. Bradley—I had read Appearance and Reality—should have helped me shake off the strait jacket in which my thought was so tightly bound. (Marcel, Philosophical Fragments 23)In addition to these quotations, I might also add (a) that Marcel had wanted to write a thesis on Bradley, but that the idea had already been claimed by a fellow student (Marcel, Awakenings 74; “Autobiographical Essay” 18), and (b) the existence of a correspondence between Marcel and Bradley in the year 1920, which includes Marcel's sharing with Bradley his articles on Royce.3 Putting this all together, the following picture emerges. Bradley influenced Marcel as a student and in his idealist years, and beyond his idealist years, as the above references suggest.So much for the observation; now for the suggestion. I suggest that Marcel can be read as, in various places throughout his corpus, dramatizing certain Bradleyan themes, thereby drawing out the ontological weight—to use Marcel's phrase—of Bradley's philosophical positions. There is some evidence for this suggestion in Marcel's self-reflection in The Existential Background of Human Dignity: I shall never be able to say to what precise extent the author of Appearance and Reality contributed to the formation of my thought. But without questioning Bradley's influence in any way I may say that the drift of his thought answered to a fundamental concern already manifest for a number of years—not in my philosophic thinking, but in the working out of my plays. (Existential Background 21)With this statement of Marcel to lend initial credibility to my suggestion, I now proceed to its illustration by two examples. The first links Bradley's critique of inherence with Marcel's reflections on identity and the proliferation of identity-forms in the twentieth century. The second will take up Bradley's critique of relations together with Marcelian reflections on the question “Who am I?”My first illustration focuses on Bradley's treatment of the problem of a thing and its properties in chapter II of Appearance and Reality.4 To approach the problem in a way that will help us to see the manner of its dramatization by Marcel, let us consider it by means of the following dilemma. If A is reducible to its properties, then either it is reducible to one of its properties or it is reducible to more than one of its properties. Unless A has but one property, it is not reducible to one and only one of its properties. To use Bradley's example: sugar is not nothing but its whiteness. So A, if it is reducible to its properties, is reducible to more than one of its properties—maybe even to all of its properties. In that case, what now needs explanation is the unity of those properties in A. A natural move to make at this point would be to invoke relations, and it is for this reason that relations are first discussed by Bradley in chapter II of Appearance and Reality. For the sake of space, I will forgo further treatment of chapter II, since I discuss Bradley's views on relations below.There is, however, another element of Bradley's thought that must be introduced at this point, for together with the problem of the relation of a thing to its properties, it forms a whole that, I will argue, gets taken up by Marcel in his discussion of identity. The element in question is the logical analogue of the problem of inherence5 and the unity of A's properties: Bradley's account of contradiction.6 According to Bradley's formulation of the law of non-contradiction in the Appendix to Appearance and Reality, “a thing cannot without internal distinction be (or do) two different things, and differences cannot belong to the same thing in the same point unless in that point there is diversity” (Appearance 501).7 The “appearance of such a union may be a fact,8 but is for thought a contradiction” (Appearance 280). Later on, Bradley applies his formulation to the problem of inherence. A thing's properties cannot be united with each other simply by applying the logical operation of conjunction. Such a conjunction would be a bare conjunction—an attempt to “unite diversities without any internal distinction, and the attempt to do this is precisely what contradiction means” (Appearance 504–05). We are left with an apparent dilemma between rejecting what is given (a plurality of properties in/of a thing) and accepting a contradiction. Bradley rejects the dilemma, arguing that in such situations, we are invited to replace the bare conjunction with one that acknowledges that any such conjunction is an abstraction, subject to conditions grounded in the background from which the abstraction was made (Appearance 503). We are invited to search for “internal diversity or external complement” in order to transcend the (apparent) contradictions we encounter (Appearance 505).Related to these points is another: Bradley's denial that there are real contradictions in things. Where there is contradiction is not in the qualities as united, when taken as parts of, and as qualifying, a whole, but where the qualities are taken separately and apart from a whole which they qualify: But, in the object and within the whole, the truth may be that we never really do have these discrepants. We only have moments which would be incompatible if they really were separate, but, conjoined together, have been subdued into something within the character of the whole. (Principles of Logic 149)9We are left with three warnings: first, against drawing our subjects too narrowly, for the narrower the subject, “the less internal ground for diversity it contains, the more it threatens us with standing or insoluble contradictions” (Appearance 506). Second, against simply identifying the conjuncts of a bare conjunction: this is nothing but that. The union of two properties implies some ground of distinction (and connection) that we cannot set aside.10 We want something more than bare conjunction but less than complete identification. Third, against identifying a quality abstracted from a whole with that same quality as qualifying and qualified by a whole.11How are these metaphysical problems and logical injunctions dramatized by Marcel? To see the connection, recall the dilemma presented in the previous section: if A is reducible to its properties, then either A is reducible to one and only one of its properties, or to more than one (perhaps all) of its properties. Like Bradley, Marcel is averse to any such reduction. But while, in Bradley's prose, the problems are presented dryly, in Marcel, they are presented in a dramatic, existential manner. This does not vitiate Bradley's insights, but it does clarify that Bradley's arguments are live to the human drama, not abstract speculations. What Marcelian themes are applicable to each horn? To the first horn corresponds Marcel's horror at what he called the “spirit of abstraction.” To the second horn corresponds Marcel's consternation with the proliferation of identity-forms in the twentieth century.The first horn of the dilemma (reducing A to a single property) is dramatized in real life by what Marcel calls the “spirit of abstraction.” The spirit of abstraction manifests itself in making claims of the form: a person (A) is nothing but Y (some property of hers). At its height, the spirit of abstraction reduces all persons to the “mass” or “mob” at which point the abstraction achieves a “pragmatic existence” in that it becomes a force to be reckoned with, or even used by opportunistic leaders (Marcel, Man against Mass Society 116).Apart from such evil consequences, what makes the spirit of abstraction problematic is that it implies a disjunctive method for dealing with the other properties of its victims, a method which, either way it is applied, involves falsifying who the other person is. For if a person A is nothing but Y, then, if the person practicing the spirit of abstraction is to be consistent, all of his victim's other properties must either be negated (A is nothing but Y, so she cannot also be Z), or simply identified with each other in one-sided fashion (A is both Y and Z, but Y and Z are really the same). By “one-sided fashion,” I mean that the identification proceeds, as in the last paragraph, by means of the phrase “is ________ and is nothing but ________.” So, if Smith is taken to be nothing but a Papist, then either his other properties are set aside as irrelevant, or all of his other properties are likewise reduced to him being a Papist.12 This latter possibility is manifested in the tendency to interpret other persons exclusively through one piece of information about them. Knowing that Smith is a Papist, we interpret, for example, his Catholicism as nothing but him being a Papist, his theological works as nothing but the expression of him being a Papist, his objections to certain developments within the Church of England as nothing but the expression of him being a Papist, and so on. In short, even when there is not a literal identification of the properties (as in Smith's Catholicism just is him being a Papist, or that Catholicism just is Papism), there is an interpretive reductionism that has the same effect.The spirit of abstraction not only illustrates the first horn of Bradley's dilemma (the reduction of A to one property), but also the second and third of the logical warnings discussed above: simply identifying the conjuncts of a conjunction (Smith's Catholicism and his Papism), and reducing a quality as it is in a whole to that same quality considered separately.13 What is called for, rather, and this is suggested by Bradley's texts on contradiction and conjunction, is that we see Smith as a whole person, qualifying and qualified by his properties, none of which exist, in him, as mere types. In short: Smith is one person, not the concatenation of exemplars of different types of person, or different properties more broadly.14 I will return to these themes when discussing Bradley's views on relations; now, I turn to Marcel's dramatization of the second horn of the dilemma: the reduction of A to several (perhaps all) of his properties. Again, Bradley's logical warnings will accompany us.In the fifth lecture of his first series of Gifford Lectures, Marcel considers the existence and increasing prevalence of identity forms. He strikes me as especially concerned by the pretensions of such forms to actually identify persons, the felt tension between this pretension and a person's own sense of who they are, and the sinister effects of such forms on precisely how persons understand themselves in the twentieth and now the twenty-first centuries. Here, for our purposes, is the central text: I have not a consciousness of being the person who is entered under the various headings: sign of, born at, occupation, and so on. Yet everything I enter under these headings is strictly true. (Marcel, Mystery of Being 84)The pretension of such forms is that, on the basis of the information entered under the headings, a conjunction of what is entered on the form will suffice to identify an individual person. Marcel imagines being asked by a civil servant if he is the “Mr. So-and-So” who answered to the conjunction generated by the form. If he (Marcel) answers “no,” then the civil servant will conclude that either Marcel is insane or that he is passing under a false identity. What never occurs to the unreflective civil servant is that the conjunction consists of true sentences about Marcel, but that nevertheless Marcel is not the resulting conjunction.15This brings us to what I call Marcel's Numbering Argument. The civil servant's question addresses somebody. We can number that somebody, if like, for example, as Number 98. Marcel then describes being questioned about his “identity” (scare quotes) as if he were being asked to answer for this somebody (Number 98). The conclusion to which Marcel builds is that there is thus, or so it seems to me, a sense in which I am not a definite somebody; from the moment when I start to reflect,16 I am bound to appear to myself as a, as it were, non-somebody linked in a profoundly obscure fashion, with a somebody about whom I am being questioned and about whom I am certainly not free to answer just what I like at the moment when I am being questioned. I appear to myself both as a somebody and not as a somebody, a particular individual and not a particular individual. (Mystery of Being 86)The identity form dramatizes the problem of inherence and Bradley's account of contradiction. For what the identity form pretends to do is to reduce who I am (my identity) to a bare conjunction of properties. Number 98 may (if only by stipulation) be identified with such a conjunction—but the question is whether I am Number 98.17 It with this identification that Marcel reports dissatisfaction, and he wonders what “urgent inner need” inspires this dissatisfaction (Mystery of Being 85).The problem is that while Number 98 is necessarily the so-and-so who is F, G, and H,18 Marcel feels himself to be only contingently F, G, and H (Mystery of Being 87).19 What are some reasons for this feeling of contingency? I think that one reason is the recognition—if only implicit—that the conjunction selected by the identity form is one of an infinite number of such conjunctions that could have been selected for the purpose of identifying me, and only me, from among other persons. A second reason has to do with the bareness of the resulting conjunction. The problem is not that I don't recognize that certain properties are truly ascribed to me, but that you cannot reach who a person is by way of disassembling them into a list of properties and re-assembling them into a bare conjunction.20 The resulting conjunction, detached from the whole of who I am as the necessary background to any abstraction of properties, is not me.21Beyond stemming from the fact that there are an infinite number of such conjunctions, the feeling of contingency has to do also with the principle(s) governing the inclusion of certain headings on the identity form (i.e., with how the conjunction is selected). The choice of headings on the form is contingent, and so I feel myself only contingently related to the information entered under those headings. Usually, such headings are merely conventional. More sinister, though, is the prospect that the principle of selection is somehow ideological or shaped by malevolent intentions (think, e.g., of the use of such forms by totalitarian regimes). Given that the proliferation of such forms has the effect, thinks Marcel, of limiting the imagination of those who play the game of form-filling, we have before us the prospect of identity-forms modifying, even restricting, the self-understanding of persons.22To bring us back to Bradley's critique of inherence and doctrine of contradiction: what appears—especially to his critics—as Bradley looking down from the inhuman point of view of an absolute experience shows up in Marcel for the first-person point of view of a human person. The problem of inherence is my problem: the problem of how I am related to my qualities (in general) and to the unique conjunction of qualities (or multiple such conjunctions) that suffices to pick me out of a crowd. And what may seem like a bloodless logical concept (contradiction) is dramatized as the experience of being reduced to a singular point into which are jammed any number of discrete pieces of information without any effort at understanding me as a whole, and not simply as the (unexplained) conjunction of certain properties.23Another central Bradleyan topic is that of relations. Given that Marcel explicitly acknowledges his debt to Bradley's arguments pertaining to relations, it is worth thinking about what those arguments are24 and how Marcel dramatizes them. Before saying more about the arguments, let me begin by explaining what Bradley's conclusion is not. This is crucial, for Bradley has been widely misunderstood on this point. Bradley does not argue that relations are utterly without reality or that they represent mere illusion.25 Relations are appearances, and appearances exist and must be within Reality, for there is nothing outside of Reality. The question is whether they represent ultimate reality (Bradley, “Relations” 2:635). Nor is Bradley urging a view whereupon all relations are internal relations—again, despite the attribution of such a view to him (“Relations” 2:641, 2:645; Essays on Truth and Reality 312).Rather, Bradley's arguments aim to establish two conclusions: (C1) the unreality of relations (i.e., their ultimate unreality, where this does not entail that relations are not appearances, or that relations are illusions, or that relational thought is neither necessary nor serviceable in the advance of human knowledge); and(C2) that relations are neither merely external nor merely internal (or, positively, that a relation must bear the marks both of externality and internality).The argument for (C1) consists in making explicit several contradictions that haunt relations. These may be briefly stated as follows: (1)1: A relation both is, and is not, the entire relational situation.(2)2a: A relation both qualifies, and does not qualify, its terms.(3)2b: A relation is both qualified by, and not qualified by, its terms.The reason a relation both is, and is not, the entire relational situation is the same reason for which a relation both is, and is not, qualified by its terms (and both qualifies and does not qualify) its terms. That reason is that no actual relation is an abstraction, and yet that relations be such abstractions is required by the very procedure of relational thought. To see this point, let us take an example of the parent/child relation. Analysis of this relational situation yields the following constituents: the parent, the child, and the parent-of relation. Bradley's main contention is that no actual relations are the “relations” yielded by such an analysis of the whole into its parts (“Relations” 2:636, 2:638).26 One's parental relation to one's child is not the abstraction, “parent-of,” yielded by analysis because such an abstraction fails to qualify the parent and child in the way that the relationship really does qualify the parent and child. In other words: relations are supposed to qualify their terms, yet if we identify relations with the product of analysis, they cannot do what they are supposed to do. So it seems we must identify relations with the whole relational situation.27Yet with this identification, we fall into another trap. If we are engaged in relational thought at all, we need terms that are not reducible to their relations, and relations that are not reducible to their terms. In other words, to engage in relational thought, to interpret the world as one of terms-in-relation, the relations really must be something apart from the terms, and this seems to require that we do identify them with the abstract products of analysis—in the present example, with the “parent-of” relation. Relations, qualified by and qualifying their terms, are the whole relational situation; but relations, neither qualified by nor qualifying their terms, are the abstract products of analysis. Nor can we simply distinguish these and solve the contradiction by invoking two senses of “relation.” For there is not, for relational thought, a sense of “relation” as the whole relational situation. In other words: relational thought works with its abstraction and trades on a pre-relational, immediate experience or feeling of the unity in question.Therefore, any attempt to solve the contradiction in this manner does not actually leave us with two senses of “relation.” Rather, it leaves us, on the one hand, with the abstract relations of analysis and, on the other, not with relations at all, because not with the products of thought. Put another way: the whole relational situation must, for discursive thought, be broken up into terms-in-relation, and so discursive thought does not have two senses of “relation.” It operates with the only tool it has to hand, and this does not, itself, do the job of relating, and trades, inevitably, on a pre-discursive experience or feeling of the unity in question (Bradley, “Relations” 2:637).28 Hence why, for Bradley, to truly understand such relational situations requires a further development of experience (i.e., the Absolute).The foregoing argumentation can be mapped onto the distinction between internal and external relations, and Bradley's conclusion that no relation can be absolutely external or internal. Conceived as an external relation, parenthood (or any example you choose) cannot do the work of relating its terms. Conceived as something external to its terms, the relation would require some further relation relating itself to the term. This is the infamous, and much misunderstood, Chain Argument that first emerges in the third chapter of Appearance and Reality. Note that Bradley is not himself endorsing the reification of relations but is simply drawing out the consequences of treating relations as absolutely external to their terms. There are no absolutely external relations, for such relations cannot relate their terms.29What of relations that are internal absolutely? Enough has been said that the problem should already be in view. Internal relations (those that affect their terms, i.e., qualify and are qualified by them) may explain the “togetherness” of their terms, but they fail to stand “between” them. And since we need something, in the terms, apart from their relation, so that the terms may stand in relation and not be reduced to their relations, the basic problem breaks out again within each term. Or, as Bradley puts it in Appearance and Reality, we need something in the term apart from its being in relation, to serve as ground or condition of the relation, and something else to be the result or product of the relation (26). This gives rise to the internal diversity response, according to which the problem is solved by simply distinguishing diverse internal aspects of each term.30This purported solution, though, raises the question of how to reconcile this double character of the terms. Call the different aspects of A, a and α. The former is that aspect of A that makes A different from that to which it is related; the latter is that aspect of A that realizes the distinctness forged by the relation. Alternately: a is the condition of A entering into relation (the term must be), and α is the result of the relation (the term must be related).The problem is that this division of aspects sets off an infinite regress no less than do external relations, for a and α must themselves somehow be related in order that A be one, yet “with an internal relation A's unity disappears, and its content[s] are dissipated in an endless process of distinction” (Bradley, Appearance 26). In short, then, the purported solution simply transfers the problem “into the bowels of each particular term,” leaving behind the question of how these diverse aspects are themselves related: externally or internally (Bradley, “Relations” 2:637, 2:644–45). If externally, then they are not actually related, save by another relation; and if internally, then we must search again for fresh, diverse aspects, and a further relation between them.31 In short, we are left with a dilemma, and both horns lead to an infinite regress. Granted that we can distinguish such aspects, the mystery that remained with Bradley to the end was “how that part of the term which enters in is related to that part which remains outside leaves us (we may remind ourselves once more) with a final contradiction” (“Relations” 2:645).The previous section is a woefully inadequate treatment of what is arguably the most important aspect of Bradley's philosophy.32 Yet with this much in hand, we must return to Marcel. There is much in the foregoing discussion that finds itself dramatized by Marcel. Here, I would like to name two points. The first is the connection between the unreality of relations and what Marcel has to say about “being in a situation” and certain modes of non-objective participation, including feeling. This connection I leave for future work. The second is the dramatization of the question of internal and external relations by a person asking himself the question “Who am I?” It is this connection that will occupy us in what remains of this section.Instead of talking about qualities and their relations or terms and their relations, I will talk about persons and their relations. Bradley's problem still applies, and we need not even venture to his chapters on the self in order to see this.33 The problem is that persons must be in their own right in order to stand in relations (i.e., they cannot be reducible without remainder to relations), but equally they must stand in relations in order to be (i.e., they cannot be and yet be utterly unrelated to anything else).34 This metaphysical problem is dramatized from the first-person perspective when I ask the question “Who am I?” Upon asking the question, I see that it betrays a more fundamental question, namely, whether I am even qualified to answer the question in the first place (Marcel, Mystery of Being 148). Note that this is already to recognize the bearing of relations upon my being—what Bradley refers to as the essential relativity of all finite being—namely, that by relations with others, what (who) I am transcends any answer that might simply be given to me on my own.35 Realizing that I cannot answer this question on my own, I turn to others. But whether I turn to certain social groups to define who I am (e.g., political affiliation) or turn to trusted friends, the assistance received from outside is still subject to Bradley's arguments.36It may be asked how this is so, for isn't the question here not that of making intelligible my relations with another, but rather making intelligible the information about myself that I receive from another? Observe, though, that the latter presupposes the former. If I receive information about myself from another (e.g., a friend), then I have entered into a relation with the other person. It is here that the drama of Bradley's critique of external and internal relations makes itself felt. Is the relation merely external? No, for then it would fail to actually relate my friend and me. So then is it internal? If it is, then once I admit that relations with others beyond myself are part of what answers the question of who I am, I am forced to reckon with the distinction between that part of me that is irreducible to, and apart from, those relations, and that helps to ground my relations with others, and that part of me that is made by those relations. What, in other words, is the relation of these two aspects of my identity? To what extent is the former, as Bradley says, “infected” with relations?Allow me t