Like Bosanquet, Richard Lewis Nettleship also cites Novalis’s dictum to
argue against the abstractness of thought, paraphrasing it as follows: ‘to
philosophise is to get rid of one’s phlegm, to acquire a vivid consciousness of
some aspect of reality’.
90
His argument here again relies on the claim that
universality and individuality are dialectically interrelated: ‘when we say
that all concepts are general, we must add that no concept is ‘‘ge neral’’ if this
means that it is not individual. The most general concept in the world has its
own unique individuality’.
91
Nettleship argues that to have a concept such
as ‘triangle’ is not to have a general idea in which all particularity is lost, as
having the concept requires us to see that there can be different types of
triangle, and that these types can all be exemplified in different ways, down
to the individual, so that thought can grasp universals like ‘triangle’ without
losing sight of individuality:
Taking the generality of a concept in this sense, we cannot properly say that
the general concept is ‘got by abstraction,’ for this concept is not made general
by being abstracted, its generality means its capability of being abstracted.
Nor can we properly say that it is abstracted from particulars; for its generality
does not exclude, but implies, particularity.
92
Another related, but more complex case, is that of McTaggart. On the one
hand, McTaggart did not use the terminology of the ‘concrete universal’,
and so may a ppear to be uninfluenced by Hegel’s thinking on this issue. On
the other hand, in his conception of substances and their individuation,
McTaggart adopted something very like what I have characterized as the
Hegelian view, offering an account that (like Green’s) follows Hegel in
rejecting both bundle and substratum views. Thus, while McTaggart refuses
to reduce an individual to a collection of properties (as on the bundle view),
he holds that an individual cannot exist in abstraction from its properties (as
on the substratum view);
93
and as a result (like Hegel) he defends Leibniz’s
principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles (which McTaggart re-labels ‘the
Dissimilarity of the Diverse’),
94
as it is on the basis of their divergent
properties that substances come to be individuated. In these respects, we can
now see, McTaggart’s thought has aspects that related to Hegel’s treatment
and W. J. Mander, ‘Life and Finite Individuality: The Bosanquet/Pringle-Pattison Debate’,
British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 13 (2005) No. 1: 111 – 30, esp. section V.
90
Nettleship, Philosophical Remains, 128.
91
Ibid., 226.
92
Ibid., 222.
93
J. McT. E. McTaggart, The Nature of Existence, edited by C. D. Broad, 2 vols (Cambridge,
1927) Vol. I, Ch. VI. For helpful discussion of McTaggart’s position, see P. T. Geach, Truth,
Love and Immortality: An Introduction to McTaggart’s Philosophy (Berkeley and Los Angeles,
1979) Ch. III.
94
McTaggart, The Nature of Existence, Vol. I, Chap X. Cf. Hegel, Science of Logic, 422–4
(Werke, Vol. VI, pp. 52–5).
HEGEL AND THE CONCRETE UNIVERSAL 151
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