System and Certainty Sensitive at Hegel and Bradley

Authors

  • Guillaume Lejeune FNRS/Université de Liège

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4294152

Keywords:

Hegel, Bradley, system, language, feeling

Abstract

Bradley has often been called a Neo-Hegelian, but the points of tangency between the two philosophers are rather thin. The main reference to the German philosopher concerns the figure of the sensible certainty, which opens up the Hegelian system in its phenomenological version. Bradley sees it as the knot of immediate experience on which the form of his system depends. But his interpretation of it differs radically from that of Hegel. Whereas for Bradley the discordance between the singular immediate feeling and the expression of a "this" - which in itself is universal - is a sign of the failure of discursive thought, for Hegel it is less a problem of language than a problem within language. Hegel then tries to remedy within language the problem of subjective instantiation, while Bradley tries to indicate a beyond of language in a normative absolute. From this, one can understand the decidedly different focus of the two systems.

The Hegelian system will try to construct a discourse which, in the universality of the spoken word, reflects the singular aim, which will lead it to envisage the whole no longer through immediate feeling, but through the mediations of culture. The Bradleyan system, which is more sceptical about language, takes a critical perspective. It dramatises the tension between feeling and discursive thought and, by insisting on the inadequacy of these two levels, postulates the idea of an absolute of experience that can only be approached negatively.

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Published

2020-07-31

How to Cite

Lejeune, G. (2020). System and Certainty Sensitive at Hegel and Bradley. Characteristica Universalis Journal, 1(1), 68–93. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4294152

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