Stern R. Hegelian Metaphysics

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130 British Hegelianism: A Non-Metaphysical View?

that Hegel does there treat of the categories by which nature is made intelligible apart

from the process of their application. This, however, is not because he is unaware that it

is in the struggle to interpret experience that the intelligence is made conscious of its own

forms.³⁹

Perhaps under Caird’s inﬂuence, and prior to his conversion into a critic, and

his acceptance of the traditional portrayal of Hegel as a Neoplatonic idealist,

it is striking to ﬁnd that Seth also took this more moderate line, both in his

article ‘Hegel: An Exposition and Criticism’ (1881) and his essay ‘Philosophy

as Criticism of Categories’ (1883). In the former, he explicitly tries to offer a

reading that will avoid the accusation that Hegel wanted to deduce the existence

of nature a priori, as Seth was later to claim himself:

The transition from logic to the realm of nature has always been a favourite point with

assailants of Hegelianism. This is partly owing to Hegel’s own phraseology and the

appearance of apriorideduction which he gives to everything he touches; partly to the

misconceptions of others as to what his system, or philosophy in general, could yield

them ....In reality the necessity for such a transition is purely factitious, because the

notions never existed otherwise than in Nature and Spirit. They are the Absolute, because

they form the common basis of Nature and Spirit, and their treatment apart was a merely

ideal separation. They were got by abstraction from the concrete, not out of the air by

any apriorimethod. We owe, therefore, no apology for a return to the reality from which

we took them.⁴⁰

In ‘Philosophy as Criticism of Categories’, although Seth does not mention

Hegel by name, he takes a distinctively Hegelian line in criticizing Kant for

never subjecting his list of categories to sufﬁcient analysis, and echoes Hegel

in arguing that philosophy should examine the concepts used by ordinary

understanding and empirical science, to test their adequacy and coherence as

forms of thought, and check against their misuse.⁴¹ He suggests that this,

³⁹ Edward Caird, Hegel (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood, 1883), 157–8.

⁴⁰ Andrew Seth, ‘Hegel: An Exposition and Criticism’, Mind, . 6 (1881), 513–30, at 522.

⁴¹ Knowledge is not a collection of facts known as such once for all, and to which we afterwards

add other facts, extending our knowledge as we might extend an estate by adding acre to acre. This

is not a true picture of the march of knowledge. On the contrary, every advance of science is a partial

refutation of what we supposed we knew; we undertake in every new scientiﬁc theory a criticism

and rectiﬁcation of the conceptions on which the old was constructed. On the largest scale the

advance of knowledge is neither more nor less than a progressive criticism of its own conceptions.

And, as we have seen, this is not all. Besides the continual self-criticism carried on by the individual

sciences, there is the criticism which one science or department of inquiry passes upon another.

The science of life cannot move hand or foot without the category of development, which in its

biological acceptation is foreign to the inorganic world; and the science of conduct is founded upon

the notion of duty, of which the whole world of nature knows nothing. But so long as this mutual

criticism is left in the hands of the separate sciences themselves, it tends to degenerate into a strife

in which there is no umpire. Philosophy, as theory of knowledge, can alone arbitrate between the

combatants, by showing the relation of the different points of view to one another, and allowing to

each a sphere of relative justiﬁcation. When physical science, for example, begins to formulate its

own results and to put them forward as an adequate theory of the universe, it is for philosophy to

British Hegelianism: A Non-Metaphysical View? 131

rather than the ‘elaboration of transcendent entities’ is the real goal and task

of philosophy; he therefore envisages a form of category-theory which would

be very close to the current non-metaphysical approach, and which seems

clearly inspired by his reading of Hegel. However, by the time of Hegelian-

ism and Personality, his view of Hegel had clearly changed: although he still

acknowledges that ‘Hegel’s analysis and systematisation of the categories is

therefore of the highest importance both for science and for a sound philo-

sophy’, Hegel was led astray into a more ‘extravagant’ panlogicism by aiming

at presuppositionlessness, with the result that ‘in the exposition of his system,

Hegel has suppressed the reference to experience’, and so becomes an aprioristic

idealist.⁴²

Once Seth himself had come round to this critical position, however, some

of the British Hegelians clearly felt it necessary to show how in fact his earlier

approach could be defended, and that it remained possible to interpret Hegel

as a non-metaphysical category-theorist. Now, it would be puzzling to ﬁnd the

British Hegelians mounting this defence, if they themselves had been inclined

to treat the Idea as absolute on Neoplatonic lines; but, as we shall now see, it

was in fact one of the deﬁning features of their position that this option was

rejected, so that any positive acceptance of Hegel required them to reinterpret

this aspect of his idealism in non-metaphysical terms. This important feature

of Hegel’s reception in Britain is reﬂected clearly in the work of Bradley and

McTaggart.

That Bradley and McTaggart found it impossible simply to accept the Idea as

absolute, and with it any form of panlogistic Hegelianism, can be explained

by the fact that they clearly accepted the truth of an important element in the

Schellingian critique as presented here: namely, they rejected the claim that being

could be deduced from thought as something in itself wholly self-explanatory,

as they acknowledged that while it might possibly be different for an intuitive

step in and show how these results depend entirely upon preconceptions drawn from a certain

stage of knowledge and found to be refuted in the further progress of thought. Philosophy in the

capacity of a science of thought should possess a complete survey of its categories and of their

dialectical connection; but this ‘Wissenschaft der Logik’ will probably never be completely written.

In the meantime it is perhaps better if philosophy, as critic of the sciences, is content to derive its

matter from them and to prophesy in part. (Andrew Seth, ‘Philosophy as Criticism of Categories’,

in Andrew Seth and R. B. Haldane (eds.), Essays in Philosophical Criticism (London: Longmans,

Green and Co., 1883), 8–40, at 38–9)

This passage echoes several central claims made by Hegel, and ones that are often taken to be

particularly important for the category-theory interpretation: cf. Hegel EL, §§9–12, and Hegel EN,

§246.

⁴² Seth, Hegelianism and Personality, 88–90.

132 British Hegelianism: A Non-Metaphysical View?

intellect, the separation of intuition and t hought is a basic feature of our discursive

minds. Bradley emphasizes this latter fact quite explicitly:

For the sake of clearness let me begin by mentioning some things in which I do not

believe. I do not believe in any knowledge which is independent of feeling and sensation.

On sensation and feeling I am sure that we depend for the material of our knowledge.

And as to the facts of perception, I am convinced that (to speak broadly) we cannot

anticipate them or even become independent of that which they give to us. And these

facts of perception, I further agree, are at least in part irrational, so far as in detail is

visible. I do not believe that we can make ourselves independent of these non-rational

data ....Our intelligence cannot construct the world of perceptions and feelings, and it

depends on what is given—to so much I assent.⁴³

Likewise, McTaggart acknowledges that for us, thought alone cannot determine

being, but must rely on perception to relate its concepts to the world:

...thought is only mediation, and must therefore exist in conjunction with something

immediate on which to act. If nothing existed but thought itself, still the fact of its

existence must be in the long run immediately given, and one for which thought

alone cannot account. This immediacy is the mark of the element which is essential to

experience and irreducible to thought.⁴⁴

Thus, both Bradley and McTaggart insist that we must take the ‘What’ and the

‘That’ to be independent, and that unless something is given to us in experience,

we cannot in any way deduce its existence from a concept we may form of it,

so that no concept can be absolute in this sense. As a result, neither Bradley nor

McTaggart were able to endorse the essentialist paradigm that is rightly said to

lie behind the Neoplatonic reading of Hegel.

However, it is important to notice a signiﬁcant difference in emphasis between

them, despite this similarity. In Bradley’s case, he seems to have believed

⁴³ F. H. Bradley, ‘On Truth and Coherence’, in his Essays on Truth and Reality (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1914), 202–18, at 203.

⁴⁴ J. T. E. McTaggart, ‘The Changes of Method in Hegel’s Dialectic’, Mind, .1 (1892),

56–71, 188–205, 199–200; repr. in Stern (ed.) Critical Assessments,vol.2,60–88,at83.A

corresponding passage can also be found in McTaggart Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic, 2nd edn.

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), 207–8. See also ibid., 17:

The consideration of pure thought, without any reference to experience, would be absolutely sterile,

or rather impossible. For we are as unable to employ ‘empty’ pure thought (to borrow Kant’s

phrase) as to employ ‘blind’ intuition. Thought is a process of mediation and relation, and implies

something immediate to be related, which cannot be found in thought. Even if a stage of thought

could be conceived as existing, in which it was self-subsistent, and in which it had no reference to

any data—and it is impossible to imagine such a state, or to give any reason for supposing thought

thus to change its essential nature—at any rate this is not the ordinary thought of common life.

And as the dialectic process professes to start from a basis common to every one, so as to enable it to

claim universal validity for its conclusions, it is certain that it will be necessary for thought, in the

dialectic process, to have some relation to data given immediately, and independent of that thought

itself. Even if the dialectic should ﬁnally transcend this condition it would have at the start to take

thought as we use it in every-day life—as merely mediating, and not self-subsistent. And I shall try

to show later on that it never does transcend, or try to transcend that limitation.

British Hegelianism: A Non-Metaphysical View? 133

that in stressing the role of intuition, he was breaking from Hegel—and his

commentators have usually agreed,⁴⁵ arguing that there emerges here an essential

strand of empiricism, an emphasis on the non-conceptual nature of reality, that

is at odds with Hegel’s essentialism and Platonic rationalism. This can be seen

clearly in the well-known passage at the end of Bradley’s Principles of Logic,where

Bradley can be shown to be distancing himself from orthodox Hegelianism on

these grounds:

But what is it guarantees this presumed identity of truth and fact? We have an instinct,

no doubt, that leads us to believe in it, but our instincts, if they can not be in error,

may at least be mistranslated and misunderstood. And here we seem placed between rival

promptings, that contend for mastery over our reason. It is an old preconception that

reality and truth must contain that same movement of a single content that, by itself

not intellectual, then doubles itself in the glass of reﬂection. On the other hand, it is a

certain result that our intellect and the movement of our intellect’s content is abstract

and discursive, a mere essence distilled from our senses’ abundance. And this certainty

has inspired the opposite conclusion ....

In the face of these promptings, I must venture to doubt whether both have not

branched from one stem of deceit, whether truth, if that stands for the work of the

intellect, is ever precisely identical with fact, or claims in the end to possess such

identity ....Unless thought stands for something that falls beyond mere intelligence, if

‘thinking’ is not used with some strange implication that never was part of the meaning

of the word, a lingering scruple still forbids us to believe that reality can ever be purely

rational. It may come from a failure in my metaphysics, or from a weakness of ﬂesh which

continues to bind me, but the notion that existence could be the same as understanding

strikes as cold and ghost-like as the dreariest materialism. That the glory of this world in

the end is appearance leaves the world more glorious, if we feel it is a show of some fuller

splendour; but the sensuous curtain is a deception and a cheat, if it hides some colourless

movement of atoms, some spectral woof of impalpable abstractions, or unearthly ballet

of bloodless categories. Though dragged to such conclusions, we can not embrace them.

Our principles may be true, but they are not reality. They no more make that Whole

which commands our devotion, than some shredded dissection of human tatters is that

warm and breathing beauty of ﬂesh which our hearts found delightful.⁴⁶

Here, then, we ﬁnd that in accepting a more moderate, non-Platonistic position,

Bradley takes himself to be breaking with Hegel.⁴⁷ Thus, while this shows that

as a British Hegelian he was nonetheless opposed to any sort of conception of

the Idea as absolute, it does not show that Bradley had a non-metaphysical view

⁴⁵ Cf. Gary Bedell, ‘Bradley and Hegel’, Idealistic Studies, 7 (1977), 262–90, at 283–4.

⁴⁶ F. H. Bradley, Principles of Logic, 2nd edn. corrected, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1928), vol. 2, 590–1.

⁴⁷ As a result of this, in his attacks on Hegel’s apparent panlogicism, Seth took Bradley to

be an ally. See, for example, Seth, Hegelianism and Personality, 130; Scottish Philosophy, 2nd edn.

(Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1890), 203; and ‘A New Theory of the Absolute’ (1894), repr.

in Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison, Man’s Place in the Cosmos and Other Essays, 2nd edn. (Edinburgh

and London: William Blackwood, 1902), 92–158, at 143–4.

134 British Hegelianism: A Non-Metaphysical View?

of Hegel; indeed, it implies that he accepted the orthodox nineteenth-century

interpretation, which explains his desire not to be associated with any sort of

Hegelian school.⁴⁸

McTaggart, however, is rather more positive in his attitude to Hegel, because

unlike Bradley, he does not go along with the orthodox interpretation of Hegel as

some sort of Neoplatonic idealist, who wanted to treat thought as prior to being.

Instead, McTaggart argues, Hegel always recognized that thought is essentially

mediated by intuition, and so it is a mistake to assume (as Bradley does) that this

is a view that Hegel would have rejected, or which marks a departure from the

outlook of Hegelian idealism:

In the stage immediately before the Absolute Idea—that of ordinary cognition and

volition—it is evident that the idea is not self-sufﬁcing, since it is certain that we can

neither think nor resolve in every-day life without some immediate data ....Again,

in the idea of Life, thought is certainly not self-sufﬁcing, since one of the essential

characteristics of this category is that the soul is in relation to a body, which involves, of

course, sensation. Now the Absolute Idea is a synthesis of this category and the category

of Cognition. Thought is mediate in both of these. How then can it be immediate in

the synthesis? ....[T]hought remains, for Hegel, in the Absolute Idea, what it has been

in all the ﬁnite categories. Although the content of all experience contains, in such a

case, nothing which is not a manifestation of the pure Absolute Idea, yet to every subject

in whom that idea is realised, the idea is presented in the form of immediate data,

which are mediated by the subject’s own action. The fundamental nature of subject and

object is the same, but the distinction between them remains in their relation to one

another.⁴⁹

In adopting this position, McTaggart was consciously seeking to overturn the

orthodox nineteenth-century interpretation of Hegel, by denying that he ever

meant to suggest that general concepts are prior to particulars, as they might

be for the intuitive intellect. In this respect, McTaggart’s view foreshadows the

non-metaphysical approach—for it enables McTaggart to reject the dominant

picture of Hegel as an essentialist, as trying to deduce being from thought.

This comes out clearly in chapters 1 and 2 of his Studies in the Hegelian

Dialectic, where McTaggart responds explicitly to the Schellingian critique of

Hegel offered by Trendelenburg and Seth. Fundamentally, McTaggart argues

that his critics have interpreted the notorious transition from Logic to Nature

too extravagantly: Hegel was not seeking to deduce existence from essence, but

was simply assuming the former as a prius for thought (and this, of course, is

⁴⁸ Cf. Bradley’s well-known comments in the Preface to the 1st edn. of The Principles of Logic:

I fear that, to avoid worse misunderstandings, I must say something as to what is called ‘Hegelianism’.

For Hegel himself, assuredly I think him a great philosopher; but I never could have called myself

an Hegelian, partly because I can not say that I have mastered his system, and partly because I could

not accept what seems his main principle, or at least part of that principle. (Bradley, The Principles

of Logic,x)

⁴⁹ McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic, 52–4.

British Hegelianism: A Non-Metaphysical View? 135

precisely what the existentialists themselves had urged). McTaggart summarizes

his position as follows:

If this explanation be correct, it will follow that Hegel never endeavoured to claim

ontological validity for his Logic in the second sense mentioned above—by attempting,

that is, to deduce all the contents of experience from the nature of pure thought only.

The deduction which does take place is not dependent merely on the premise from which

it starts, which is certainly to be found in the nature of pure thought, but also on the

whole to which it is working up, and which is implicit in our thought. If we can proceed

in this way from Logic to Nature and Spirit, it proves that Logic without the additional

elements which occur in Nature and Spirit is a mere abstraction. And an abstraction

cannot possibly be the cause of the reality from which it is an abstraction. There can be

no place here, therefore, for the attempt to construct the world out of abstract thought,

of which Hegel’s philosophy is sometimes supposed to have consisted.⁵⁰

McTaggart’s strategy is therefore to turn the tables on Hegel’s critics, by offering

a revisionary reading of the latter’s idealism: those critics are mistaken in the

objections they direct at him, because they misunderstand his true position,

which in fact is much closer to their own.

Thus, perhaps surprisingly, McTaggart turns out to have a view of Hegel

that shares both the essential attributes of the non-metaphysical interpretation

speciﬁed by Rosen above: namely, that Hegel does not hold that the categories

discussed in the Logic are anything like Platonic Forms, existing beyond the

realm of sensible experience, or that as such they can somehow be known

by reason working alone. As we have seen, McTaggart emphasizes that for

Hegel, human knowledge is based on sensation and the given in experience,

and he denies that Hegel attempted any kind of a priori deduction of nature

or spirit, by somehow deriving them from the Logic.Inthisway,therefore,

it is clear that McTaggart—like Ritchie, Caird, and the early Seth—had a

more sophisticated and differentiated view of Hegel than that of many of

their predecessors in the nineteenth century, so that perhaps the current non-

metaphysical reading of Hegel is not so novel or path-breaking as has previously

been thought.

Moreover, in a way that also foreshadows an important element in the

current non-metaphysical reading,⁵¹ McTaggart clearly wanted to defend this

interpretative approach by showing that once this reading is adopted, we can

ﬁnd in Hegel’s treatment of the categories in his Logic a way of solving the most

intransigent-seeming philosophical puzzles, so that this position still constitutes

a form of rationalism in the broadest sense: namely, it shows how ‘the world

can present no problem which we cannot some day solve; it is therefore

⁵⁰ Ibid., 29–30.

⁵¹ Cf. White, Absolute Knowledge and Pinkard, Hegel’s Dialectic. White in particular offers a

defence of Hegel against Schelling’s question of existence that echoes McTaggart’s position: see

op. cit., ch. 6.

136 British Hegelianism: A Non-Metaphysical View?

rational’.⁵² We can see most clearly how McTaggart hoped this category-theory

might work—and how close his position is to contemporary defenders of this

strategy—by seeing how he responds to Schelling’s puzzle ‘Why is there anything

at all? Why is there not nothing?’

III

According to Schelling and the Left Hegelians, this question could be answered—

and rationalism thereby vindicated—only if the ‘nasty broad ditch’ between

thought and being could be crossed, and existence deduced from essence. Of

course, as we have seen, they believed that this ditch was uncrossable, and

therefore that Hegel’s rationalistic project must ultimately fail:⁵³ but, because

they assumed that this project could not hope to succeed in any other way, they

took Hegel’s commitment to panlogistic idealism for granted. It was therefore

necessary for McTaggart to show that once this commitment is abandoned, and

Hegel is read as a category-theorist, it is still possible to settle Schelling’s ‘last

despairing question’, in such a way as to uphold Hegel’s faith in the ability of

reason to resolve all aporiai, including the puzzle of existence.⁵⁴

McTaggart’s strategy—like that of a contemporary category-theorist such as

Alan White—is to show how Hegel’s Logic enables this question to be disposed

of, not by offering some extravagantly metaphysical solution along panlogistic

lines, but by showing how his analysis in the Logic of the categories of cause

and effect, necessity and contingency, whole and part, can be used to dissolve

⁵² ‘The Further Determination o f the Absolute’, in J. T. E. McTaggart, Philosophical Studies,

edited with an introduction by S. V. Keeling (London: Edward Arnold, 1934), 210–72, at 211.

⁵³ It is, I think, signiﬁcant in this respect that Seth accepted that once his metaphysical idealism

was abandoned, it was also then necessary to abandon Hegel’s rationalism:

In truth, this golden age of philosophy, with its absolute knowledge and its rational state, strikes

at last upon the spirit with a sense of intolerable ennui. We feel instinctively with Lessing that the

search for truth is a nobler thing, and better for our spirits’ health, than the truth here offered for

our acceptance. It might be otherwise if the truth were really ours, but that, we may well believe,

is reserved for God alone. The perfect knowledge and the perfect State of Hegelianism ring alike

hollow, when brought face to face with the riddle of the painful earth—with the always solemn

and often terrible mystery that environs us. Let us be honest with ourselves, and let us be shy of

demonstrations which prove too much. We are men and not gods; the ultimate synthesis is not

ours. (Seth, Hegelianism and Personality, 212–13)

⁵⁴ Cf. Hegel’s well-known expression of this faith in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy:

The love of truth, faith in the power of mind, is the ﬁrst condition in Philosophy. Man, because

he is Mind, should and must deem himself worthy of the highest; he cannot think too highly of

the greatness and power of his mind, and, with this belief, nothing will be so difﬁcult and hard that

it will not reveal itself to him. The Essence of the universe, at ﬁrst hidden and concealed, has no

power which can offer resistance to the search for knowledge; it has to lay itself open before the

seeker—to set before his eyes and give for his enjoyment, its riches and its depths. (Hegel, LHP

I, xiii (trans. modiﬁed) [Werke, XVIII: 13–14]

British Hegelianism: A Non-Metaphysical View? 137

it. McTaggart’s approach is therefore essentially deﬂationary: he allows that

Schelling’s question cannot be positively answered, but argues that this tells us

nothing about the limits of the human intellect; rather, it is unanswerable because

it is ill-posed in so far as it rests in a misapplication of certain categories, and

this is therefore a matter of logic, rather than our ignorance. Thus, McTaggart

aims to show that Hegel’s rationalistic optimism is not ultimately threatened

on this issue, but in such a way as to establish this as a victory for the

non-metaphysical view.

According to McTaggart, the question of existence is ill-posed because it is

based on the misconception that it makes sense to ask for an explanation of the

entire universe; for, while anything within the universe can have something other

than itself through which it can be explained, this cannot be true of the universe

as a whole, so that no account can be given for the totality. Explanation can

work only by explaining some things in terms of others: but when we are dealing

with the question of existence, there is nothing left over (so to speak) in terms

of which it can be answered, because in this case everything must be included

in the explanandum. Conversely, McTaggart argues, as there cannot be anything

beyond itself to act as an explanans, we can legitimately treat the universe as

self-subsistent, as existing without a cause,⁵⁵ which those who raise the question

of existence assume to be impossible:

Explanation essentially consists of arguments from premises; and it would seem therefore

that such perfection could never be attained, since each argument which explained

anything must rest upon an unexplained foundation, and so on, ad inﬁnitum. And it is

true that we can never reach a point where the question ‘Why?’ can no longer be asked.

But we can reach a point where it becomes unmeaning, and at this point knowledge

reaches the highest perfection of which, as knowledge, it is susceptible ....

If knowledge reached this point, the only question which could remain unanswered

would be the question, ‘Why is the universe as a whole what it is, and not something

else?’ And this question could not be answered. We must not, however, conclude from

this the existence of any want of rationality in the universe. The truth is that the question

ought never to have been asked, for it is the application of a category, which has only

meaning within the universe, to the universe as a whole. Of any part we are entitled and

boundtoask‘why’,for,bytheveryfactthatitisapart,itcannotbeself-subsistent,

and must depend on other things. But when we come to an all-embracing totality, then,

with the possibility of ﬁnding a cause, there disappears also a necessity of ﬁnding one.

Self-subsistence is not in itself a contradictory or impossible idea. It is contradictory if

applied to anything in the universe, for whatever is in the universe must be connected

with other things. But this can of course be no reason for suspecting a fallacy when we

ﬁnd ourselves obliged to apply the idea to something which has nothing outside it with

which it could stand in connection.⁵⁶

⁵⁵ It is important to remember that this is not equivalent to saying that the universe is its

own cause.

⁵⁶ J. McT. E. McTaggart, Studies in Hegelian Cosmology (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1901), 256–8. Cf. also McTaggart, Philosophical Studies, 219–20. A similar deﬂationary

138 British Hegelianism: A Non-Metaphysical View?

McTaggart’s argument here is this: There are some categories that it is legitimate to

employ in thinking about things within the universe, that we cannot legitimately

employ in thinking about the universe as a whole. Thus, although everything

within the universe can be thought to have a cause, this concept cannot be

applied to the universe as a totality: for, in order for something to have a cause,

there must be something outside it, of which it is the effect, but this cannot be

true of the totality of things, which cannot (ex hypothesi) have anything beyond

itself to act as a cause. It can therefore be meaningful to ask only of events or

things within the universe why they have occurred or why they exist: it cannot

be meaningful to ask this of the universe as a whole.⁵⁷ In this way, it appears,

the question of existence is unanswerable because it goes beyond the point at

which the search for reasons makes sense, and as such the rationalist is in no way

obliged to respond to it.

Now, in adopting this approach, McTaggart can once again be seen to have

turned the tables on Hegel’s nineteenth-century critics. As we have seen, they

had argued that in a vain effort to overcome the question of existence, Hegel had

sought to derive the being of the universe from its essence, and so to treat the

Logic as a kind of ﬁrst cause. On McTaggart’s reading, however, Hegel’s position

is no longer taken to involve any such claim: instead, McTaggart argues that it

was through categorical analysis alone that Hegel had wanted to show that the

question lacks any real content, ‘for it is the application of a category, which has

only meaning within the universe, to the universe as a whole’. ⁵⁸

This attempt by McTaggart to defuse the question of existence could of

course be challenged. Perhaps the main difﬁculty is that while it might show

that it is wrong to ask for a causal explanation for the existence of the universe,

strategy is used by both Ritchie and Seth (in one of his earlier, pro-Hegelian writings): see D. G.

Ritchie, ‘What is Reality?’, Philosophical Review, 1 (1892), 265–83, at 277–8, and Seth, ‘Philosophy

as Criticism of Categories’, 39–40.

⁵⁷ Versions of this position are often used to attack the Cosmological Argument, which argues

from the existence of the universe to a transcendent cause. Cf. Ronald Hepburn, Christianity and

Paradox (London: Watts, 1958), 167–8 and William Rowe, The Cosmological Argument (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1975), 132 ff.

⁵⁸ Cf. McTaggart, ‘The Changes of Method in Hegel’s Dialectic’, 205; repr. in Stern (ed.),

Critical Assessments,vol.2,88:

The dialectical system is not so wonderful or mystic as it has been represented to be. It makes

no attempt to deduce existence from essence; it does not even attempt to eliminate the element

of immediacy in experience, and to produce a self-sufﬁcient and self-mediating thought. It cannot

even, if the view I have taken is right, claim that its course is a perfect mirror of the nature of reality.

But although the results which it attains are comparatively commonplace, they go as far as we can

for any practical purpose desire. For, if we accept the system, we learn from it that in the universe

is realised the whole of reason, and nothing but reason. Contingency, in that sense in which it is

bafﬂing and oppressive to our minds, has disappeared. For it would be possible, according to this

theory, to prove that the only contingent thing about the universe was its existence as a whole,

and this is not contingent in the ordinary sense of the word. Hegel’s philosophy is thus capable of

satisfying the needs, theoretical and practical, to satisfy which philosophy originally arose, nor is

there any reason to suppose that he ever wished it to do more.

British Hegelianism: A Non-Metaphysical View? 139

not all explanations need be causal, so the question of existence might be

answerable some other way.⁵⁹ One possibility is that it could be answered

in non-causal terms by giving some sort of metaphysical argument to show

that it is necessary that there should be a universe of the sort that there

actually is. For, if some ground could be given why the universe as it is must

exist, then this would explain why there is something rather than nothing,

without involving any (possibly dubious) causal notions;⁶⁰ and, the sceptic

can argue, until we have grasped this metaphysical explanation, we will be

left not knowing the reason for the existence of things. Another possibility

is that the explanation for the universe’s existence need not be causal, but

could be axiarchic: that is, the reason why the universe exists is because it is

best.⁶¹ Given these possibilities, it is hard to see how McTaggart’s argument

can succeed, for even if it makes no sense to apply the notion of cause to

the universe as a totality, he has not shown that no notion of explanation is

intelligible here.

However, on closer inspection, it becomes clear that from McTaggart’s

perspective, this challenge is no great worry. For, his central claim is not that

there might not conceivably be an explanation for the totality; rather, it is that

we feel the question of existence to be unanswerable because our usual methods

of explanation have come to an end, but this need not trouble us, because in

the case of any totality, we can see that what brings explanation to an end is

intrinsic to the thing itself, and not the result of our ignorance or any limit

on what we can understand. (‘But when we come to an all-embracing totality,

then, with the possibility of ﬁnding a cause, there disappears also a necessity

of ﬁnding one.’) And, once we thereby come to see that we should not be

concerned by the idea of the universe existing without a causal explanation

(‘self-subsistence is not in itself a contradictory or impossible idea’), then we will

no longer feel obliged to posit these other accounts, which have only a dubious

plausibility.

McTaggart’s strategy, therefore, is to defend the adequacy of Hegelian ration-

alism by showing that the call for explanatory ﬁnality is essentially contradictory

at this level, and in this way the question of existence can be undermined. Bradley

adopts a similar approach. Central to Bradley’s rationalism is his claim that it is

possible for the true conception of reality to ‘satisfy the intellect’; but, he argues,

⁵⁹ For a general discussion of the possibility of non-causal explanation, see David-Hillel Ruben,

Explaining Explanation (London: Routledge, 1990), ch. VII.

⁶⁰ Indeed, in the case of Spinoza, for example, it could be argued that it was precisely in order

to avoid an objection like McTaggart’s that ‘God or Nature’ was said to have a necessary existence,

because then the explanation can be ‘internal’ (based on its deﬁnition as a substance) and not

‘external’ (based on some prior state that brings it about), as this latter notion does not make sense

when applied to an inﬁnite being like God or Nature.

⁶¹ For two recent attempts to answer the question of existence by providing an axiarchic

explanation, see John Leslie, Value and Existence (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979), and Derek Parﬁt,

‘The Puzzle of Reality’, in Times Literary Supplement, no. 4657 (1992), 3–5.