Bradley's Dialectic

Text extracted from opening pages of book: BradleyY Dialectic by Ralph Withington Church D. Phil.( Oxon.) Sometime Lecturer In Philosophy at Balliol College Associate Professor oj Philosophy in Cornell University LONDON George Allen & Unwin Ltd Preface THE main aim of this work is two-fold. The primary object ive is to bring out in somewhat simple terms the essential character of Bradley's dialectic. To that end, criticism of the dialectic is, for the most part, confined to a chapter oh some basic difficulties in it, in order that excursions in criticism may not unduly complicate exposition of the central doctrine. Perhaps it ought to be said in passing & Eat the difficulties considered in that chapter are not the only ones with which Bradley's dialectic seems to me to be infected. They were selected for emphasis because some selection was unavoidable and these difficulties seem to have been too generally neglected. A parenthetical few words may be called for as to the sense in which the term dialectic is here used. In some quarters dialectic has been given a perverse significance. Thus it is frequently used to mean what is meant by verbal. A line of argument that is considered to be no more than a matter of words is dismissed as being dialectical. There would appear to be no etymological justification for this usage. In its most radical sense, dialectic means what is meant by elucidation. A dialectic is a method or way of elucidation. The history of philosophy alone makes it clear that there are diverse methods of elucidation. But Hegel, and Bradley after him, claim there can be only one, the dialectic of relational essence; what Bradley calls the relational way of thought. Bradley'sdialectic is his method of elucidation. It is rather difficult to avoid the unpalatable conclusion 5 Preface that those who, by virtue of temperament and training, are foreign to any form of systematic Idealism, find it easier to call down criticisms on Bradley than to follow him. And that is no more than natural, so long as the reader of a philosophy of Hegelian origins insists that it must square with Aristotelian logic. Hegel, and Bradley after him, repudiate the logic of contradictories and seek to replace it with the dialectic of contraries, which they call the true logic. Bradley denounces the Law of Identity as being a tautology and therefore inane. He then identifies the contradictory with the contrary, thus to proscribe the Law of Excluded Middle. Now anyone who has the patience to examine this repu diation of the Law of Identity will see that it is no mere shift in doctrine. Rather it is a radical innovation in principle. For consider: on this view there may be no contradictories, as the contradictory is formulated by the Law of Non contradiction. The Law of Identity being repudiated, the contradictory is identified with the contrary. That is why, in a word, there is on this view a middle term between any two co-opponents. And Bradley assumes, as would a thinker out of the tradition from which he largely derives, that Appearance, or everything short of Absolute Reality, is in process. Thus the middle term between any two differences is a moment of mediation in process, not a self-identical, static being. This moment of mediation Bradley calls rela tion; and the terms mediated he calls qualities. For several reasons this repudiation of the Law of Identity and the identificationof the Contradictory with the Contrary entail the consequence that the identity of no matter what is relational. The theory of relational identity is the burden of the neglected chapter on Relation and Quality in Appearance and Reality. That neglected chapter of Bradley's meta physical essay 55 is the subject of the first chapter of the present work. In that chapter it is brought out that quality 6 Preface and relation mutually contribute to constitute the identity of each other. And this conception of relational identity as the essence of the internality of relat