Bowne’s Idealistic Personalism, 3

Introduction

Personal “Reason” and Impersonal “Understanding”

The Personal Absolute

Although the personalists share some ground with absolute idealists, the former’s conception of the absolute is, as we have noted, more than a mere superimposition upon that of the latter. It has, in Knudson’s words, lost its ‘blank negativity and its all-devouring unity’, it is no longer the ‘undetermined ground of the universe’. Knudson holds that Bradley and Bosanquet both tend to interpret Hegel in the light of Spinoza. Both explicitly deny personality as an attribute of the absolute. Instead, they designate the Absolute as ‘superpersonal’, but they thereby ‘lapse into an agnosticism akin to that of Herbert Spencer, for no definite meaning can be attached to the phrase’. [1]

The absolute can for Bowne be accepted only as personal, and this conclusion is based on the epistemological insights regarding the relation of personal reason and experience on the one hand and abstractive understanding on the other. Tracing the personal to the impersonal involves a ‘logical aberration’; ‘uncritically handled’, the law of sufficient reason leads us to seek to explain the explanation, losing us in the infinite regress. [2] Demanding causation, it ‘always shuts us up to barren tautology when impersonally taken’; it only repeats the problem. [3] In reality, the regress ends with intelligence; we cannot get behind it and understand it as ‘something welling up from impersonal depths behind it’:

[Block quotation:] When we look for something beneath intelligence, we merely leave the supreme and self-sufficient category of personality for the lower mechanical categories, which are possible only in and through intelligence. The law of the sufficient reason is a most excellent principle; but of itself it does not tell us what can be a sufficient reason. Reflection shows that only living intelligence can be a sufficient reason; and logic forbids us to ask a sufficient reason for a sufficient reason. [4]

Plainly, ‘intelligence’ is here personal intelligence, intelligence as inseparable from personality. The self ‘is not to be abstractly taken. It is the living self in the midst of its experiences, possessing, directing, controlling both itself and them’. [5] For Bowne as for all personalists, there is no impersonal reason at all: ‘Reason itself is a pure abstraction which is realized only in conscious spirits; and when we abstract from these all that constitutes them conscious persons there is nothing intelligible left’; impersonal reason can signify nothing but ‘a blind force which is not reason, but which is adjusted to the production of rational results. In this sense any machine has impersonal reason.’ [6]

The impersonalists’ conception of universal reason as the same in all, with the finite mind participating in it ‘as one of its phases or manifestations’, is dismissed as an ‘echo’ of scholastic realism. [7] The explanatory emptiness of the metaphysics of universalist abstractionism is revealed, and countered with the familiar speculative theist argument:

[Block quotation:] There is no system of things in general, or of unrelated general laws. There is only the actual system of reality; and the divine thought and activity which produce this actual system must be as manifold and special as the facts themselves. The simplicity of the class term does not remove the complexity and plurality of the individuals comprised under it; and for each of these special facts, there must be correspondingly special thoughts and acts [in the ‘divine thought and activity’]. [8]

Impersonal reason and abstraction yield the view of unity as ‘simplicity, or the opposite of complexity and variety’, which, as applied to the world-ground, reduces the divine being to ‘a rigid and lifeless stare’. This ‘brings thought to a standstill’ and ‘explains nothing’, it ‘contains no ground of differentiation and progress’. As we have seen, monism is accepted by Bowne, not in the sense of pantheism or materialism, but in the sense of the unity of the world-ground that it is imperative also for any proper theism to maintain. Interaction between independent things is impossible; its ultimate explanation is found only in a fundamental, unitary reality, which is the independent, infinite world-ground, the absolute. But such an absolute does not exclude freely posited, non-restrictive relations. The required  monism is a theistic monism, not one of bare simplicity and emptiness. It must not only coordinate the interaction of independent things and beings, it must also be able to explain and produce them: ‘the unity of the world-ground must contain some provision for manifoldness and complexity’. The only unity that can do this is that of the ‘free and conscious self’, the known and concrete unity of personal experience: ‘[F]ree intelligence by its originating activity can posit plurality distinct from its own unity, and by its self-consciousness can maintain its unity and identity over against the changing plurality. Here the one is manifold without being many. Here unity gives birth to plurality without destroying itself. Here the identical changes and yet abides.’ [9]

As with unity, so with unchangeability: this consists not in ‘an ontological rigidity of fixed monotony of being’, but – as Lotze had already said – in the ‘constancy and continuity of the law which rules its several states and changes’. As applied to God, it is ‘the divine nature which exists through all the divine acts as their law and source’. But this constancy and continuity ‘can be found only in personality’, in which it ‘does not consist in any rigid core of being, but rather in the extraordinary power of self-consciousness, whereby the being distinguishes itself from its states, and constitutes itself identical and abiding’. Changelessness can be understood only in terms of living experience; it is not ‘the rigidity of a logical category but the self-identity and self-equality of intelligence’. Like change too, it has to be interpreted ‘in the concrete…with reference to self-consciousness’. [10] And so also with omnipresence, eternity, omniscience, omnipotence. By taking categories and relations of thought abstractly, Bradley finds only contradictions, and his attempt at resolving them in the absolute fails as long as the absolute is impersonally understood as well. [11] The whole series of attributes of the world-ground is personalistically reinterpreted by Bowne, largely on the basis of the phenomenality of space and time as understood by personalism.

Bowne’s whole argument in favour of the personalistic conception of the absolute conjoins the now familiar criticism of the abuse of abstractive reason with this stronger insistence on and the new implications drawn from the phenomenality of space and time, which are central in his general metaphysics. It is this that in Bowne’s system provides the philosophical basis for the distinctive dynamism of personalism, in its view of the universe as well as of the absolute itself. All along, it is certainly, as Knudson held, with enthusiasm that Bowne makes use of and develops Lotze’s positions, and in the general analysis of experience he is also in line with other American idealists at the time, who did not, however, draw out and emphasize the distinctly personalistic implications.

With regard to the pan of the hen kai pan, Bowne of course denies that the infinite is ‘the quantitative all’. This too is an abstraction, ‘a mental product which represents nothing apart from our thought’. The infinity of the world-ground means simply that it is ‘the independent source of the finite and its limitation’. [12] The universe as a totality does not exist in space, but ‘only in the infinite consciousness and will’, in the absolute being who alone transcends space ‘in the sense of limitation’. The divine intelligence is the ‘place’ of the world, and from this spaceless place, space relations are established. For the finite being too, for whom experienced objects are spatially related and whose temporally structured experience is a mark of limitation, it is true that we do not act where we are, but are where we act – which fact is of course the experiential ground for the speculative conclusion regarding the analogous but unlimited reality in the absolute. Concrete presence is ‘a function of our dynamic relations’ and relative to the ‘dynamic range’ and power of the mind’s apprehending activity; it is not a question of filling an absolute, independent space. [13]

Nor is experience ‘in the present as a separate point of time, but rather the present is in experience’; ‘The person who can grasp only a few things has a small present; one who can grasp many things has a larger present; and one who can grasp all things has an all-embracing present or a changeless now.’ The absoloute person possesses the whole of his experience in immediacy of consciousness, in a state of complete self-possession and self-realization, ‘so as to be under no law of development and possessing no unrealized potentialities’. This alone is what omnipresence in space and time, as well as the transcendence of space and time, could mean. Regarding the absolute as subject to some ‘necessary and successive development’ means ‘speculative disaster’. [14]

Bowne insists, like Boström, that this does not imply any ‘rigid monotony of being’ but that it is to be thought of as ‘the perfect fullness of life, without temporal ebb or flow’. Just as other idealists of personality had objected to this, finding the alleged difference from Aristotle hard to discern or insufficient, so later American personalists moved in the direction of a metaphysical temporalism and even relapsed to the Schellingian position of a ground in God, which implied the idea of a developmental absolute. In this they went much further than the normal personalist alternative of attempting, like Pringle-Pattison, to conceive of an absolute that included both timelessness and temporal experience. If for Boström the spatiotemporal world was exclusively a phenomenon in the finite being’s experience, it was for other personalists a phenomenon or an ‘appearance’ for the absolute too, as it were. And there are many formulations that point in the direction of this position in Bowne as well. It is of course necessary for Bowne to preserve the dynamism of the life of the absolute itself, to maintain the proper, distinctive conception of the personal absolute in contradistinction to the mechanical or logical mechanism of naturalisistic and absolute idealistic impersonalism which, as Bowne sought to show, explains nothing. Dynamic existence is for him part of the concept of personality, and since Bowne insists that since God’s transcendence of time ‘means essentially his absolute self-possession and lack of our human limitations which grow out of our dependence’, it is possible, Bowne thinks, to save God’s ‘relations of sympathy with the world of finite spirits’. God is not fixed transcendence but part of the ‘cosmic movement’. For Bowne, ‘a staticably immovable and intellectually monotonous being’ is something quite different from ‘a self-sufficient, self-possessing, all-embracing intelligence, which, as such, is superior to our finite temporal limitations’. [15]

Obviously, there is a difference between the supreme intelligence as ‘an abstract logical mechanism or function of categories’ and Bowne’s concept in that the former subordinates personality to a higher rational order; not even personality in the meagre form of a mere static conscious gaze is necessarily a ‘function’ of categories. And for Bowne as for other early personalists, there is no sharp separation of the divine will from the divine nature. Yet his insistence on the supreme intelligence itself as at the same time ‘a Living Will’, as ‘a synthesis at once of knowledge and power’, [16] does not in itself differ from those of the more explicitly or strictly atemporalist personalists; they used the same language.

It is rather due to the fact that his general reinterpretation of the attributes of the absolute presupposes temporality as a kind of phenomenon for the absolute itself as well as for the finite beings that Bowne really begins to move toward a more fully dynamic idea of the personality of the absolute. Knudson states that it is because God ‘is a Person’ that he can initiate change while remaining super-temporal and uninvolved. This, Knudson explains, ‘is the mystery of personality’, and indeed ‘its most distinctive characteristic’. Through the concept of personality it is possible to understand the causal initiation of change in a different sense than, for instance, the teleological pull of the strictly timeless consciousness of Aristotle’s God. But what is according to Bowne the relation of God to this change? The answer is that in contradistinction to Boström, the changing world is experienced as such not only by the finite beings, but also directly by God. Since the subordination of the forms of intuition and of the categories to individualistically and voluntaristically conceived personality, and their inclusion in the living experience of such personality, must hold not only for finite persons but for the absolute world-ground, both time and timelessness are part of the experienced world of God. In Knudson’s words, ‘[t]he cosmic order may very possibly have for him, as it has for us, the temporal and spatial form’. [17]

In the next chapter, we will have the opportunity to return to this aspect of what could perhaps be called the question of the degree of dynamism of the personality of Bowne’s absolute, as we look at Bowne’s view of the relation between the personal absolute and the finite persons. For now, it is sufficient to understand Bowne’s more general arguments for the primacy of personality even as the absolute.

If we suppose with abstractionist impersonal rationalism that ideas precede personality, we must, Bowne writes, ask where they exist. If in time and space, they would ‘dissolve away in the dialectic of spatial and temporal existence’; the position is impossible on Bowne’s view of the phenomenality of space and time. If in consciousness, it would be ‘contrary to the hypothesis, which is that they are preconditions of consciousness’. They thus retreat, as the only remaining alternative, ‘into some kind of metaphysical nth dimension, where we cannot follow them because they mean nothing’. Furthermore, if we suppose the relations between these abstract ideas to be purely logical, the intellect to be ‘merely a set of logical relations’, and ‘the universe…a logical implication of ideas’, all the contents of the universe would be ‘as eternal as the ideas’. There would be ‘no room for change, but all their implications would rigidly coexist’. All the contents of finite minds would, as ‘implications of eternal ideas’, be ‘equally eternal’. Here, of course, also the moral and theological problems of pantheism become evident: ‘as error and evil are a manifest part’ of these supposed contents of the finite mind, ‘it follows that they likewise are necessary and eternal. Hence we should have to admit an element of unreason and evil in the eternal ideas themselves’. ‘There is no escape from this result as long as we look upon the intellect as a logical mechanism of ideas’, Bowne explains: ‘Only a living, active, personal intelligence can escape this fatalism and suicidal outcome of the impersonal reason. A purely logical and contemplative intellect that merely gazed upon the relations of ideas, without choice and initiative and active self-direction, would be absolutely useless in explaining the order of life. [18] The earliest personalist arguments are here merely repeated:

[Block quotation:] The essentially impersonal can never by any logical process other than verbal hocus-pocus, which is not logical after all, be made the sufficient reason for a personal development. But our existence does not really abut on, or spring out of, an impersonal background; it rather depends on the living will and purpose of the Creator. And its successive phases, so far as we may use temporal language, are but the form under which the Supreme Person produces and maintains the personal finite spirit. [19]

The world ‘is not merely an idea, it is also a deed. It is not merely a presentation to us which ends in itself, it is also a revelation of the cosmic activity of the Supreme Will.’ It is ‘a thought expressed in act’. The universe is ‘the divine thought finding realization through the divine will’. Freedom and uniformity or necessity coexist in the absolute being in the same personal manner as in ourselves. [20] Similar formulations could be found in mediaeval theists; but in view of the modern understanding of self-consciousness and phenomenal experience characteristically added by modern personalism, they acquire a different meaning in Bowne.

Interestingly, alongside the conceptions of the world-ground as impersonal reason, Bowne also turns against various typical forms of romantic philosophy. Most importantly, he explicitly rejects the imperfect theism of the later Schelling. In this explicitness at least he seems to be unique among the British and American personalists, and it connects him even more closely with the concerns of the post-Schellingian personalists in Europe: ‘The existence of the world in God means simply its continuous dependence on him. To find the world in God in any discriminable ontological form, such as Schelling’s “dark nature-ground”, would cancel his necessary unity. The experienced relation of active intelligence to its products is the only solution to this problem.’ [21]

Other romantic notions, some of which are quite irrationalistic, such as the idea of the world-ground as ‘pure will’ and as ‘unconscious intelligence’, Bowne dismisses, together with the notion of impersonal reason, as mere ‘empty phrases, obtained by unlawful abstraction’. These notions, it is important to understand, were normally derived directly from that side of the philosophy of the later Schelling which the personalists rejected. Schopenhauer’s pure will, without intellect or personality, is ‘nothing’: ‘Will itself, except as a function of a conscious and intelligent spirit, has no meaning’. Without ‘the conscious perception of ends and the conscious determination of the self according to those ends’, all that is left is ‘the conception of a blind and necessary force’. The same holds for the position of Eduard von Hartmann. All of these doctrines share a ‘notion of an impersonal spirit, which is the ground of all existence, and which comes to consciousness only in finite spirits’. It is all just ‘atheism under another name’; again, romantic pantheism turns out to be virtually or actually identical with naturalism: ‘What the atheist calls persistent force or the fundamental reality, is here called impersonal spirit; but the meaning is in both cases the same. Both alike understand by the terms that blind and necessary reality which underlies all phenomena, and which, in its necessary on-goings, brings to life and death.’ [22]

But even when it has established that the absolute must be active, metaphysics has only reached a most incomplete idea of God: an idea which, Bowne holds, pantheism, even atheism, might accept. Although Grubbe did not, or could not for chronological reasons consider the later romantic philosophical extravaganzas that Bowne took into account, both the argumentative progression and the substance of Bowne’s reasoning about the attributes of the absolute, gradually leading up to the full conception of its personality, are noticeably similar to what we find in him. Like Grubbe, Bowne first establishes the attributes ascertainable by the use of the ‘understanding’ and the ‘speculative intellect’ alone, which cannot  lead to ‘a properly religious conception, but only to the last term of metaphysical speculation’. This, Bowne echoes Jacobi, is where Aristotle ended; for him ‘God has a purely metaphysical function and significance’ and is not yet ‘the object of love and trust and worship’. In line with his discussion of Comte, Bowne shares the new personalist view that the human race originally had the full, religious conception, and that the metaphysical one is a later abstraction. The religious attributes, as Grubbe calls them, the attributes that ‘concern the divine character, or ethical nature’, cannot be deduced by pure speculation; we have to go beyond the understanding in accordance with what we saw in the previous chapter, appealing to experience and to faith in the ideal of the perfect being. Only in this way can we reach the full religious concept of the personal absolute. [23]

But having reached it, what Bowne calls ‘the antinomy of the theistic argument’ must still be addressed: the objection that personality is not attributable to the absolute and infinite. It seems as if ‘we are shut up on the one side to the belief in an intelligent, and hence personal, world-ground’ while at the same time ‘we are shut out on the other by the contradictory character of the conception’. We are shut up to the former since Bowne’s version of personalistic epistemology and metaphysics has already shown that the alternative conception, ‘the notion of impersonal existence’, is contradictory too. Conscious thought he had shown to be ‘the supreme condition of all existence’; he had shown that ‘[t]he universe of experience has no meaning or possibility apart from conscious intelligence as its abiding source or seat.’ The ‘speculative dogma that personality is second and not first’ had already been reversed, so that ‘living, personal intelligence’ had been established as ‘the only possible first’. It still seemed unclear however where these conclusions left us with regard to the conceptual contradictoriness of the theistic antinomy. In addition to his general conclusions regarding the nature of the world-ground, Bowne therefore also embarks on his own rendering of the Lotzean and other earlier personalist arguments specifically pertaining to this issue. As signifying ‘only self-knowledge’, ‘self-control’, and ‘self-direction’, personality, he first states, has ‘no implication of corporeality or dependent limitation’. Self-consciousness does not require finitude, the self does not need a not-self. Nor does God, as the developmental pantheists held, need the finite ‘in order to realize his own ethical potentialities and attain to a truly moral existence’. Pantheism ensues when the moral is thus made ‘subordinate to the metaphysical’ and ‘the proper absoluteness of God is denied’; it becomes ‘pronounced’ when ‘God apart from the world’ is conceived to be ‘as impossible as the world apart from God’. [24] Instead of making personality in God possible, the relativization of God rather cancels it. This is a considerably stricter theistic position than Pringle-Pattison’s. As for Illingworth, it is only the personalistic and theistic concept of the absolute with its partial transcendence that preserves the proper absoluteness of the absolute. [25] Pantheism is at once bogged down in relativism.

The objections against the personal conception are ‘largely verbal’, Bowne asserts, and many of them spring from a ‘literal anthropomorphism’. [26] But ‘Laying aside…all thought of corporeal form and limitation as being no factor of personality, we must really say that complete and perfect personality can be found only in the Infinite and Absolute Being’. Here Bowne’s formulations are not original at all or even more ‘exciting’, but merely restatements of Lotze’s. Only in this absolute being ‘can we find that complete and perfect selfhood and self-possession which are necessary to the fullness of personality’. We must beware lest we transfer onto the ‘Supreme Person’ the limitations, accidents and peculiarities of our ‘human personality’. The ‘notion of personality’ does not necessarily include them, but only ‘fullness of power, knowledge, and selfhood’ are ‘the essential factors of the conception’: [27]

[Block quotation:] A thought life so different from ours eludes any but the vaguest apprehension on our part. Its unchanging fullness yet without monotony, the structure of the absolute reason also which determines the eternal contents of the divine thought, the timeless and absolute self-possession – how mysterious all this is, how impenetrable to our profoundest reflection. We can see that these affirmations must be made, but we also see that in a sense they must always lie beyond us. Here we reach a point where the speculation of philosophy must give place to the worship and adoration of religion. [28]

This insistence on the radical difference harmonizes with the metaphysical considerations which led to the reaction among subsequent American personalists of calling for a termporalist conception of God and in that respect for a God more personal in the human sense – and to go so far as to abandon the whole concept of the absolute.

This, however, was not a return to Jacobi, but rather to that side of the later Schelling which the speculative theists rejected. With this move, the continuity in the development of personalism was broken, and we stand before a personalism of a distinctly neoteric, twentieth-century variety. For Bowne, enough of the characteristics of human personality were preserved in the divine for the personal absolute still to be a viable concept. In this as in other respects, Bowne seems to belong securely in what I regard as the original, European tradition of personalism.

[1] Knudson, The Philosophy of Personalism, 32, 64.

[2] Bowne, Theism, 168.

[3] Bowne, Personalism, 262.

[4] Ibid., 168-9.

[5] Ibid., 262.

[6] Bowne, Theism, 158-9.

[7] Ibid., 202.

[8] Ibid., 242-3.

[9] Ibid., 50-62, 173-5.

[10] Ibid., 178-9.

[11] Bowne, Personalism, 259-60.

[12] Bowne, Theism, 164.

[13] Bowne, Personalism, 141-3, 146.

[14] Ibid., 143-6, 148.

[15] Ibid., 149-50.

[16] Bowne, Theism, 289, 322.

[17] Knudson, The Philosophy of Personalism, 236.

[18] Bowne, Personalism, 255-7.

[19] Ibid., 265-6.

[20] Ibid., 108, 159-60, 205-6.

[21] Bowne, Theism, 203.

[22] Ibid., 157-8, 160.

[23] Ibid., 62, 248-50.

[24] Ibid., 150, 162, 164-7, 169, 287-8.

[25] For Bowne’s view of transcendence, see ibid., 209, 244-7. Again as for Illingworth, God’s self-limitation for the purpose of the relative independence of finite beings is in reality an expression of God’s absoluteness; Knudson, The Philosophy of Personalism, 64.

[26] Bowne, Personalism, 266.

[27] Ibid., 266-7; Bowne, Theism, 170-1.

[28] Bowne, Theism, 170-1.

Bryan Ferry

Jag ogillar rockmusik i dess rena form och i synnerhet femtiotalets ofta alltför enfaldiga rock and roll. Inte minst ogillar jag elgitarr, utom när den spelas av sådana som Genesis’ Steve Hackett och YesSteve Howe i sammanhanget av dessa gruppers form av progressive rock, eller som, för det mesta, Phil Manzanera i Roxy, där den är starkt nedtonad och djupt inbäddad i en musikalisk ljudbild i lika hög eller högre grad präglad av andra instrument, som måste inkludera  “keyboards” – som det nu heter med en med nödvändighet vag och omfattade term – som är de instrument som kan bidra mest till den av mig önskade utvecklingen av rocken till något annat, och som också har gjort det. Det bör noteras att Roxy under sin bästa period hade två keyboardister, eftersom Ferry själv, utöver Enos och senare Eddie Jobsons keyboards (Eno spelade dock mest bandspelare), ofta spelade elpiano. Utöver detta skjöts elgitarren ofta i bakgrunden – och började deras musik delvis förflyttas bortom den vanliga rocken – även genom att Jobson också var elviolinist, och inte minst genom den ofta dominerande oboisten och saxofonisten Andy Mackay. Jag delar i mycket Roger Scrutons uppfattning om elgitarren, liksom även i övrigt hans syn på popmusik. Jag har ofta diskuterat rockens ”världsbild”, dess imaginativa egenart, dess känslovärld, rocken som kvintessentiellt uttryck för vad Folke Leander kallade den ”lägre romantiken”.

Dessutom har vi naturligtvis att göra med hela det uppenbart problematiska fenomenet musik- eller, mer allmänt, underhållningsindustrin. Låt mig som del av denna apologi för mina Ferry-klipp tydliggöra den av mig omfattade allmänna syn på detta fenomen som kan tänkas lugna eventuella kulturkonservativa kritiker.

Att jag överhuvudtaget är intresserad av detta beror förstås bara på att jag är ytlig och världslig. Detta måste man hela tiden komma ihåg. En stor del av innehållet i den här bloggen, huvudsakligen sådant som kan hänföras till “arts” och bara består av bilder och musikklipp från YouTube, är överhuvudtaget bara ytligt och världsligt. Det finns ingenting särskilt viktigt i detta innehåll. Jag tillmäter det ingen större betydelse, och inte heller mig själv som intresserad av det. Detta gäller inte allt – en del har verklig och djup betydelse. Men man måste också förstå att en del av det nämnda innehållet som inte har denna verkliga och djupa betydelse dock egentligen inte heller har mindre betydelse och är mindre viktigt än någonting annat i det mänskliga livet och denna värld. Filosofin – eller, mer exakt, den verkliga sofin – och andligheten är i motsats till allt detta det absolut viktiga och absolut betydelsefulla innehåll jag kommunicerar, och en mindre del av konstinnehållet når upp till denna nivå.

Jag minns när jag första gången kom i kontakt med rockmusiken, i ett pojkrum i Bromma någon gång vid början av 1970-talet. Det var en omtumlande upplevelse. Man stod inför en akt av aggression. Det var omedelbart uppenbart hur de ömtåliga kulturella mönster som präglade livet i min omgivning – en värld där, exempelvis, familjen fortfarande var normen, där det ännu till och med fanns mängder av hemmafruar som upprätthöll välordnade, fungerande hem och övervakade alla oss barn i grannskapet, där det fanns kvar normer, ja till och med regler för uppträdandet och umgänget på alla nivåer och i alla sammanhang – var hotade.

Jag insåg att det inte var möjligt att bara avvisa det hela. Även jag började i någon utsträckning lyssna på en viss typ av rock. Men mina sunda kulturella hämningar, om jag får uttrycka mig så, är fortfarande sådana att jag känner ett allmänt obehag inför det mesta av rocken, inför det vanliga förhållningssättet till den, inför rockkonsertens dionysiska masspsykologi. Jag har alltid vägrat bli ett fan. Jag vidmakthåller den rätta, nödvändiga nojjigheten till och med inför att bara skriva om ämnet här – och det är därför jag måste skriva som jag nu gör. Jag förmår inte i spontana utbrott av odistanserad och perspektivlös entusiasm skriva sådana saker som vanligen återfinns i kommentarerna på YouTube. Jag till hör dem som måste uttrycka sig på annat sätt, såväl i form som i sak, som måste förhålla sig till rock på samma sätt som till annan musik, och för vilka den rock ifråga om vilken detta inte är möjligt helt enkelt faller bort. Men det måste sägas att för att vara en sådan person har jag lyssnat jämförelsevis mycket på rock, om än bara ett mycket begränsat urval.

68-radikalernas och hippiernas värld var jag för ung för att ha upplevt, och jag levde också på ett avsevärt avstånd från den. Men under 70-talets lopp hade jag flera dramatiska och avgörande upplevelser av samma typ som det första mötet med rocken: viss film, den samtida konsten och arkitekturen, de pornografiska veckotidningarna som låg hos frisörerna, mycket av reklamen, diskoteken, den politiska och kulturella vänstern, mycket på radio och TV, de första McDonalds, en stor del av romanutgivningen, drogkulturen. Och dessa upplevelser har naturligtvis fortsatt och ytterligare mångfaldigats: MTV, datorspelen och andra popkulturella fenomen. För att inte tala om de olika rent teoretiska angreppen – den kritiska teorin, postmodernismen, ’cultural studies’, postmarxismen, den politiska korrekthetens till synes motståndslösa utbredning och institutionalisering.

Det är fråga om akter av aggression som det inte är adekvat att reagera på medels vad som tidigare var normala begreppsliga uttryck för avståndstagande och fördömande. Man kan inte bara säga om den eller den rockproduktionen att detta är otroligt grovt, vulgärt o.s.v. Attackerna är inte bara upplagda och genomförda på sådant sätt utan också innehållsligt av sådan art att  reaktioner i termer av traditionella kritiska begrepp och kategorier är från början avväpnade, oskadliggjorda, satta ur spel. När man når en viss grad av grovhet, vulgaritet och smaklöshet är det meningslöst att protestera genom att säga att det är grovt, vulgärt och smaklöst. Enskilda hämningslösa och extrema författare alltifrån franska revolutionen – en de Sade, exempelvis – kunde inte forma samhället i dess helhet, men ett samhälle som kontrolleras av de media som själva producerar ett nästan motsvarande innehåll låter sig formas i den utsträckning dagens kultursidor sedan länge burit vittnesbörd om. Konservativa kritiker har systematiskt förlöjligats och smutskastats av media som ett led i attacken alltsedan – Carl David af Wirsén, för att ta ett svenskt exempel som man på Flashback också klagat på att jag försvarat.

Att motarbeta dessa fenomen kräver därför sedan länge något mer och annat än vad som kan åstadkommas inom ramen för vanlig musik-, litteratur- och konstkritik. Men det innebär inte att denna kritik ska överges. Vad som krävs är att den fördjupas, vidareutvecklas och kompletteras, bland annat på sådant sätt att den kan s.a.s. omringa – belysa, avslöja, uppvisa – de fenomen och de krafter jag här pekat på, på sådant sätt att de i sin tur kan desarmeras. De djupare kulturhistoriska kategorierna, exempelvis analysen i termer av olika former av romantik, måste också införas och göras central. Men det är inte bara en fråga om att förstå dessa större sammanhang. Framför allt är det en rent stilistisk utmaning.

Det blev snart uppenbart för mig att det inte bara var fråga om ”kommersialism”, som 68orna hävdade, utan om medvetna, avsiktliga, kalkylerade attacker från vad konservativa tidigare brukade kalla de ”samhällsupplösande krafterna” mot den livsform och de traditioner som för det mesta (om än inte alltid – där fanns naturligtvis de äldre kulturradikala förberedarna) omgav mig när jag växte upp. Det krävdes ingen undersökande journalistik för att se att det var fråga om att bryta ned moraliska föreställningar, försvaga samhällsgemenskapen, störa eller bryta kontakten mellan generationerna. 68orna och hela vänstern var bara lydiga redskap för allt detta. ’Staten och kapitalet’ var en delvis missvisande rocklåt. Vad det handlade om var vänstern och kapitalet.

När man idag tittar tillbaka på det 70-tal jag här talat om blir det ju än mer löjligt uppenbart. Titta till exempel på något YouTube klipp med BBCs Top of the Pops från tidigt 70-tal. Här ser vi påfallande obehagliga programledare vars arbete är att locka personer i de tidigaste tonåren bort från sina hem och föräldrar och normala sociala gemenskaper och få dem att “dansa” – röra sig på nya oformliga sätt – till i studion framförd musik som förmedlar alla slags subversiva budskap, inte minst sexuella.

Detta var vad en stor del av ”vuxenvärlden” ägnade sig åt. Detta var hur vuxen den var. Större delen av “etablissemanget” var här involverat. En stor del av ”borgerligheten” levde av detta, och det var inte svårt att förstå varför den hela tiden, steg för steg, anpassade sig till det i hög grad artificiellt producerade förfallet. Några 68or trändge sig in även i skolorna och lärde ut revolution genom sexuell “frigörelse” eller vice versa.

Hur revolterar man i ett sådant läge? Hur gör man uppror mot en upprorisk vuxenvärld? Man blir konservativ. Så småningom ledde allt detta till en första förtroendekris i mitt förhållande till det samtida samhället och dess ideologi. Dessa fenomen var vad de vuxna i näringslivet, media o.s.v. ägnade sig åt att producera. Åhlén & Åkerlunds, utgivaren av frisörernas pornografiska veckotidningar (“herrtidningar”), gjorde också riktade utskick av ett första gratisnummer – med prenumerationserbjudande – av sin tidning Ny Musik till personer i min ålder i hela Sverige, en tidning i vilken musikskribenter i fyrtiotalistgenerationen talade om vad vi skulle gilla och köpa. De var inte ute enbart efter att ”tjäna pengar”, åt sig själva eller skivbolagen. Deras agenda var mycket mer omfattande.

Med tiden förstod jag att allt detta pågått i generation efter generation, alltsedan jazzåldern, och naturligtvis än längre i andra former. Detta var vad hela underhållningsindustrin, Hollywood, ja nästan alla media, inklusive nyhetsmedia, till stor del handlade om: medveten styrning och manipulation i distinkta intressens och ideologiska övertygelsers tjänst. Och styrning och manipulation är i många fall egentligen alltför svaga ord. Vad det i själva verket i stor utsträckning handlar om är destruktion: en systematisk förstörelse av den västerländska civilisationen. I tidigare inlägg har jag skrivit om andra aspekter av detta.

Ferry framträdde under det 70-tal jag här talat om. Han är självklart en del av allt det jag beskrivit, en medverkande, ett instrument, en subversiv, nedbrytande kraft, ett uttryck för dekadenskulturen – och han vet det själv. Alla artister är underkastade dessa branchvillkor, och de flesta låter sig mer eller mindre användas, formar sig själva och skapar i enlighet med de styrandes direkt eller indirekt uttryckta vilja. Även publiken är naturligtvis underkastad dessa villkor. I stor utsträckning sitter hela samhället fast i den av dem betingade kulturen, och såtillvida är det något alla måste hantera. Även jag visar mig nästan med nödvändighet som en dekadenskulturens liebhaber när jag lägger ut musik av det slag vi här talar om. Alla i min generation har oundvikligen på ett eller annat sätt gått igenom och formats av 60- och 70-talens “frigörelse”kultur eller antikultur. Men det är förbluffande att se inte bara att så många fortfarande kan finna något som helst av intresse i kulturradikalismen när alla dörrar sedan länge är insparkade, utan också hur de faktiskt kan undgå att se och förstå dess djupare väsen och drivkrafter.

Inte minst är det dock nödvändigt att förstå att vad som skapas av konstnärligt värde också nästan alltid måste skapas inom dessa ramar. En självklar strategi blir därför att urskilja och ta fasta på detta som äger mer eller mindre av sådant värde. Det innebär åtminstone ett slags klättrande på förfallets murar, som ställer i utsikt att vi en gång ska kunna göra oss fria.

Rock blir för mig intressant i den mån den avlägsnar sig från sitt ursprung och sträcker sig mot att bli något annat, via s.k. art rock och progressive rock. Detta började på en del håll ske – och bli möjligt – först från slutet av 1960-talet. I något fall når den vad som kan betecknas som ”högre romantik” (och jag ska försöka återkomma till det i ett senare inlägg). Men jag säger inte att den måste göra det för att äga estetiskt värde i vid mening; liksom så mycket i övrig musik, konst och litteratur från de senaste århundradena kan den äga partiell och s.a.s. perspektivisk giltighet även som uttryck för den lägre romantiken. Det mesta i de rockens genrer jag finner intressant är naturligtvis fortfarande sådana uttryck, även om de är intressantare uttryck än övrig rock.

Vi rör oss här dock naturligtvis överhuvudtaget fortfarande ännu inte på den högsta nivån av konstnärlig seriositet. Genren som sådan sätter – och satte än mer på den tid vi här talar om – konstitutivt vissa bestämda gränser för denna, liksom i fallet med jazzens delvis motsvarande men inte lika långt nående utveckling. Men man måste (som T.S. Eliot – vars gamla förlag, Faber & Faber, nu utger böcker om Roxy, Ferry och Eno –  framhöll och själv exemplifierade) kunna röra sig på olika stilnivåer.

Min analys och värdering av Ferry skiljer sig i väsentliga avseenden från den vanliga. Roxy Music brukar under sina första år, när Brian Eno var medlem, sägas ha varit en ”intellektuell” grupp av stort intresse, d.v.s. en grupp i linje med de vanliga avangardistiska idealen – om än inte med rockpuristernas specifika garadeideal – som sedan förföll efter att Eno lämnade den och Ferry blev den dominerande medlemmen. Ändå har Ferry förblivit ett stort namn även i den svenska kultur- och mediavärlden (Henrik Berggren och Daniel Birnbaum är exempel jag just nu kommer ihåg på personer jag sett uttrycka uppskattning av honom; Mats Gellerfelt klagade på ett tidigt stadium över att så många gjorde det, och över rockmusiken i allmänhet, men har nu själv dragits med och översatt Bob Dylans memoarer), så förfallet har inte uppfattats som alltför stort.

Roxy var ett vanligt namn på tidigare årtiondens biografer, och markerade den nya gruppens inriktning på tillbakablickande populärkulturella pastischer. Ferry själv talar fortfarande ofta – som kan ses i intervjuklippet nedan – om sina tidiga akademiska konststudier, om Duchamp, popkonsten, Richard Hamilton, postmodernismen avant la lettre (eller åtminstone innan termen fullt etablerats och gjorts allmänt känd av Lyotard) o.s.v., allt det som påverkade bland annat de tidiga skivomslagen som, inte minst på Country Life, uppvisade en förutsägbar, programmatiskt provokativ smaklöshet. En rad  böcker böcker har skrivits om allt detta.

Men eftersom jag helt enkelt inte delar den ortodoxa radikala kultursynen, i någon av dess varianter, har allt detta naturligtvis för mig bara ett högst begränsat värde. Det “bästa” på de tidiga skivorna är tvärtom det som pekar fram mot deras, och Ferrys, senare utveckling, när ironismen gav vika för Ferry som crooner i centrum, och med andra ambitioner. Nu bidrog förvisso även Eno till en del av det som går utöver den antydda begränsade horisonten på de första två skivorna (Roxy Music och For Your Pleasure, av vilka jag anser den förra klart “bäst”), men det är framför allt föregripandena av Ferrys senare utveckling som här är intressanta (med ”intressant” avser jag här genomgående intressant inom denna genre och i det specifika sammanhang jag här redogjort för). Även Eno själv lär ha erkänt att den tredje skivan, Stranded, där han inte är med, överträffade de två föregående.

Den nya utvecklingen lyckas inte alltid så bra. Redan Stranded markerade höjdpunkten inom ramarna för Roxy. Country Life håller inte riktigt som helhet samma mått. Siren visar hur Ferry blir alltmer dominerande i sin nya identitet. Det är viktigt att förstå att Ferrys soloalbum In Your Mind (som inleds med en sång som lånat namnet från den kända konstutställningen med Hamilton och andra vid 50-talets mitt) s.a.s. egentligen är Roxy Musics sjätte album, eller att, alternativt, Siren är ett soloalbum av Ferry. Många förbiser, tror jag, hur nära de hänger samman.

In Your Mind inte är på samma nivå som Siren. Allt har förenklats, ja förgrovats flera steg; såvitt jag förstår höll Ferry på att flytta till Bel Air med Jerry Hall och försökte skapa ett sound anpassat till amerikansk publik (“my old world charm isn’t quite enough”, som han sjunger om denna situation på Siren). Men In Your Mind avspeglar ändå liksom Siren på ett nytt och mer distinkt sätt den speciella utveckling jag här pekar på.

Det gör också Ferrys egna sånger på The Bride Stripped Bare (titeln är lånad från Duchamps ”glasmålning” La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même), av vilka ‘Can’t Let Go’ handlar om hur han redan tröttnat på Bel Air. Dock finns beklagligt många covers – till dessa räknar jag naturligtvis inte höjdpunkten ‘Carrickfergus‘ – på detta album (på Another Time, Another Place var det bara det egenkomponerade titelspåret som var av något intresse, även om ‘Smoke Gets In Your Eyes‘ kanske var passabel). De är verkligen det skräp som Roxy Music, och Ferry i Roxy Music, vid samma tid i så stor utsträckning försöker men inte lyckas skapa. Ferry lever utan självkritik ut sin fascination för vanlig pop. Enos soloalbum var givetvis vida överlägsna i alla avseenden.

Märk att jag anser det finns mycket som är dåligt – poppigt – på alla skivor jag nämner här. Men det är den här antydda utvecklingens idé jag är intresserad av hos Ferry. Den kan studeras även på Roxys Manifesto, Flesh and Blood, och Avalon, som dock inte alls befinner sig på samma nivå som deras tidigare album. Särskilt Avalon, som många nytillkomna Roxy-lyssnare prisade omåttligt under 80-talet och som blev deras största försäljningssuccé, finner jag svag – på det hela taget den svagaste av alla deras skivor, även om det i och för sig går att förstå både vad det var de nya lyssnarna uppskattade, i förhållande till annan musik vid denna tid, och den stora betydelsen av detta och det föregående Roxy-albumet för andra artister under det fortsatta 80-talet. Endast Ferry/Mackays – med stor sannolikhet främst Mackays – avslutande ‘Tara’ är invändningsfri. Jag har ingen anledning att tro att Avalons popularitet beror på särskilt mycket mer än en ovanligt effektiv reklamkampanj. Idag jämför även kritiker i en yngre generation hela tiden på löjligt sätt vad Ferry gör nu med detta i deras ögon tydligen oöverträffade mästerverk. Men vad Ferry gör idag – eller det “bästa” av vad han gör idag – överträffar vida detta album från Roxys och Ferrys djupaste nedgångsperiod.

Det viktiga förblir här dock för mig alltså det delvis nästan genremässiga skiftet bort från den programmatiska ironismen o.s.v., eftersom detta skifte åtminstone principiellt möjliggör en generellt högre estetisk nivå. Ferrys första soloalbum från 80-talet, Boys and Girls fortsätter på Avalons väg och höjer sig knappast över den, trots att idén egentligen är den rätta. 80-talet var ju generellt en katastrof för nästan alla artister i denna och angränsande genrer med en storhetsperiod bakom sig under 70-talet.

Bête Noire är dock betydligt “bättre”, i synnerhet det briljanta avslutande titelspåret. Och trots att den egentligen är ännu tröttare och mer oinspirerad än Avalon och Boys and Girls är Mamouna åtminstone mer fascinerande såtillvida som den i sin melodiska minimalism, totala enhetlighet, nästan programmatiska textmässiga trötthet och allmänna utstuderadhet (inklusive omslagskonsten som med sin till nya höjder drivna artificialitet är extravagant även med Ferrys egna mått) så att säga går längre än och renodlar dessa föregångares typiska drag med en än högre grad av medveten estetisk reflexion. Själva tröttheten har delvis gjorts intressant. Den trötta oförmågan till melodisk och annan popighet är snarast en befrielse, om man erinrar sig Ferrys tidigare utflykter åt det hållet. Huvudinnehållet är här i själva verket omslaget med dess bilder. I synnerhet i ljuset av dem måste denna skiva nästan betraktas som ett litet mästerverk av trött och dekadent artificialitet. Ferry kan t.o.m. sägas i denna trötthet ha ansträngt sig för att uppnå denna estetiska effekt, som på sitt sätt är helt övertygande. Detta kan inte drivas längre än så här. Musikvideon till titellåten bekräftar och förstärker ytterligare detta intryck.

Jag ska försöka posta de enstaka saker som är passabla från Roxys sista album och Ferrys soloalbum från 80-talet om jag hittar klipp av tillräcklig kvalitet. Ferry är genom den allmänna hållning och delvis nya artistiska identitet under denna period hursomhelst principiellt viktigare och intressantare än under den tidiga Roxy-perioden, trots att det som under den senare anteciperade denna hållning och tillhörighet är av högre kvalitet.

Som redan framgått har jag sällan stått ut med Ferrys många illa valda covers av andras material, förutom på As Time Goes By, som skiljer sig genom valet av material (bara ‘These Foolish Things‘ var passabel på det första soloalbumet som bar detta namn) och som genom detta val också pekar vidare i den rätta riktningen. Det gör också ‘Sonnet 18‘. Att han gav ut These Foolish Things efter Roxys två första skivor, Another Time, Another Place efter Stranded förstörde mycket av intrycket av dessa album och visade från början att han inte var så konstnärligt självständig och nyskapand som dessa album delvis kunde ge anledning att tro att han var. Ferry själv ansåg utan tvekan att det fanns en charm i dessa gamla låtar. Men de visade mest att han var en vanlig popsångare som bara undantagsvis höjt sig till det exceptionella. Detta gällde även Bowies Pinups, om än i mindre utsträckning, eftersom den fokuserar mer på tidig rock eller proto-rock, som per definition är mer seriös.

Det hjälpte inte att Ferry inkluderade de seriösa rocklåtarna ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall’ och ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ på These Foolish Things; de blev trivialiserde inte minst genom den triviala inramningen. Jag hade inte hört så mycket av 50- och 60-talspopen när jag först hörde dessa album, så det var egentligen de som lärde mig att ogilla den. Det var som Abba, vid denna tid enhälligt och med rätta fördömda av kritiken, marknadsförda av den som allmänt frånstötande ansedde popprofitören Stickan Andersson. När de mot slutet gick över till kall, mekanisk disco, som inte på samma sätt upprätthöll den olidliga popfiktionen att de sentimentala klichéerna skulle betyda något, var det närmast en befrielse. Men vid den tiden närmade vi oss det förenade nyliberala och postmoderna genombrott som möjliggjorde att Abba betraktades som kultur, och smakförskämningen därför ohämmat kunde bejakas. Let’s Stick Together, utgiven efter Siren, gav samma intryck trots att den också innehöll några inte i allo ointressanta nya versioner av tidiga Roxy-låtar, på The Bride Stripped Bare fanns mycket dåligt av detta slag, och Taxi är en något mindre popig men ändå lika meningslös och påtagligt trött 90-talsversion av samma sak.

Men när Roxy under Flesh and Blood-turnén 1980 avslutade konserten i Westfalenhalle i Dortmund i december med Jealous Guy, efter mordet på Lennon, med en gråtande Ferry, tyckte även jag att det var storartat. Deras version blev en välförtjänt hit. Och det är möjligt att Dylanesque är bra, men min under mycket lång tid fast etablerade uppfattning av hans cover-projekt gör att jag ännu helt enkelt inte har förmått mig att lyssna på den.

På höjdpunkterna på Frantic och förra årets Olympia tycker jag i alla fall att den Ferry som Ferry strävat att utvecklas mot, slutligen uppnåtts, avtäckts, stabiliseras. Croonern har i sig upptagit rockpoeten av det slag av vars sånger Ferry gjort sina tyngst vägande covers har sammansmälts och ömsesidigt modifierats enligt Ferrys från början inte bara skönjbara utan redan starkt framträdande inre estetiska teleologi. Ofullkomligheterna, ojämnheterna har slipats bort, det eftersträvade lyser fram. Framför allt ’Reason or Rhyme’ från Olympia, som jag, som framgick ovan, postat här i två olika videoversioner, hör till hans allra “bästa” sånger och därmed till det “bästa” i genren överhuvudtaget.

Ferry uppnår när han är som “bäst” inte bara ett mått av stilens enhetlighet utan också – och självfallet oskiljaktigt såväl från denna enhetlighet som, på visst sätt, från ett likaledes ovanligt enhetligt innehåll av bestämt slag – av dess kvalitet som jag nästan aldrig sett på annat håll inom ramarna för hans genre (även om detta sistnämnda faktum kan bero på att jag inte tittat tillräckligt uppmärksamt och i tillräcklig utsträckning). Han, och Roxy, jämfördes i början alltid med David Bowie, men detta blev inom kort alltmer missvisande. Bowie gick längre i glamdekadens, radical chic och postmodernitet, och det är just det som idag gör honom mindre intressant. Ferrys enhetlighet, urskiljbar alltifrån början, är intressantare än den identitetslöshet eller de tillfälliga identiteter som blev centrala för Bowies skapande – både formellt, genom att överhuvudtaget vara en kontinuerligt elaborerade artistisk identitet, och genom denna identitets innehåll. Bowie har förflyktigats genom åren, Ferry stabiliserats, utmejslats, förtätats. Återigen, om något ska väljas ur Ferrys genre – och det ska det alltså – måste det av dessa skäl, trots allt det nästan oundvikligen dåliga (som ju dock lätt kan väljas bort), för min del i stor utsträckning bli just Ferry.

Allt detta är viktigt. Oscar Wilde framhöll ju att det är ytligt att undervärdera ytan. Men det måste också sägas att Ferry är mer allmänt intresserad av konst (han ställde nyligen ut sin egen konstsamling) och även arkitektur, utöver de tidiga inspirationskällor som brukar nämnas i texter om honom. Han säger sig, trots en del av dessa inspirationer såväl som en del av hans musikaliska, vara konservativ, stödja Cameron, och försvara The Countryside Alliance. Detta räcker ju inte så långt, och behöver inte betyda så mycket i hans fall. Men det är åtminstone ovanligt i Ferrys branch och ligger i någon mån i linje med vad jag här kort antytt om honom. Bowie skulle aldrig kunna göra det.

Men den större fråga som uppkommer här är om den kritik som tydligen uttryckts mot mina Ferry-poster går ut på att Ferry är dålig i sin genre eller på att genren i sig är dålig. Om innebörden är att Ferry är dålig i sin genre, blir frågan vad som är “bättre” och som jag därför skulle ha postat i stället. Om genren är dålig, måste man inte bara fråga vilken eller vilka genrer som, i sig, är bättre – en rimlig fråga – utan också varför skillnaden mellan dessa genrer och Ferrys är sådan att den senare genren inte bör vara representerad här.

Detta är stora frågor som jag inte kan diskutera i detta inlägg. Låt mig bara avslutningsvis säga att jag definitivt inte är estetisk relativist eller de gustibus nonnare – jag följer men går också utöver Kant här – och även att jag försvarar övergripande kritiska kriterier, en måttstock tillämpbar på all musik, och såtillvida behandlingen av all musik som en enhet. Jag tror därför exempelvis inte på uppdelningen i ”populärmusik” från senare tid och äldre tiders ”seriösa” musik eller ”konstmusik” (framför allt vill jag förkasta det utomordentligt grova och kitschiga begreppet ”klassisk musik”, såvida meningen inte i själva verket är ”klassicistisk”, även om begreppet är så etablerat och vanligt att det ibland är omöjligt att undvika åtminstone dess passiva accepterande).

Inte därför att det inte finns en helt dominerande kvantitet uppenbart och utpräglat ”populär” musik i nyare tid som är dålig och som konsumeras av personer som saknar djupare förståelse och intresse för musik (detta följer självklart av analysen av underhållningsindustrin ovan), och en lika dominerande, distinkt seriös konstmusik från förr som är “bra” – och verkligen förtjänar att kallas “klassisk” i egentlig mening – och som då som nu lyssnas till av fler musikkunniga personer. Utan därför att den principiella uppdelningen av historiska och estetisk-filosofiska skäl helt enkelt är omöjlig.

Mitt argumentet är inte det vanliga historiskt-relativistiska att mycket av den äldre musiken en gång var populärmusik och först senare blev ”finkultur” (även musik av den typ jag här skriver om lyftes ju för länge sedan in på kultursidorna). Verkens väsen, deras objektiva essens i det större historiska såväl som estetisk-filosofiska sammanhanget, i det absoluta perspektivet sådant detta kan av oss approximeras, förändras inte av deras skiftande historiska sammanhang och publiker, även om de förvisso också kan uppfattas, belysas, förstås på ständigt nya sätt.

Jag menar i stället att en stor del av den äldre musiken fortfarande är – i sig är – populärmusik i en mening jämförbar med en hel del av samtidens (eller hela 1900-talets). Mycket har drag av trivialitet. Det innebär inte att den inte ofta är ”bättre” än samtidens, inte att den programmatiskt destruktiva underhållningsindustrin inte påverkar den senare på ett sätt som saknar motsvarighet för den förra, utan bara att den principiella skillnaden är omöjlig att definitionsmässigt etablera. Och detta bekräftas av det faktum att en del av det som skapas de genrer som definitionsmässigt hänförs till samtidens populärmusik är ”seriöst” i en mening som är jämförbar även med äldre icke-populär musik.

Till detta kommer att seriositetskriteriet i sig rymmer en del estetisk-filosofiska problem för kritiken. Det är viktigt, ett centralt inslag i den kreativa klassicism och högre romantik jag brukar försvara. Men det äger också principiella begränsningar inom konsten i allmänhet exempelvis såtillvida som – för att uttrycka det kort och förenklat – konsten alltid har ett inslag av ”lek”, som i sig står i förbindelse med även djupa verklighetsdimensioner, och seriositet inte alltid är det mest relevanta begreppet när det gäller att förstå lekens väsen. Det är otillräckligt inte bara som kritiskt kriterium utan också som historisk och genremässig indelningsgrund.

Men andra värden erbjuder tillsammans de tillräckliga kriterierna och grunderna, och det är när vi tittar närmare på dem som de senares – såväl som, ur denna synpunkt, kritikens föremåls – enhetlighet blir tydlig, i och genom såväl som bortom den historiska och mer tidlöst-normativa klassifikationen.

Ja, detta var alltså sannolikt inte något jag skulle ha kommenterat om det inte varit för Flashback. Förhoppningsvis har jag nu i alla fall, även om de stränga kritiker jag alltså inte kunnat läsa inte blir övertygade, i någon mån förklarat mitt lättsinniga postande av Ferry-klipp.

Bowne’s Idealistic Personalism, 2

Introduction

Personal “Reason” and Impersonal “Understanding”

Since my purpose is to demonstrate that it is the pre-Lotzean, European personalistic tradition that Bowne takes over and develops further, I will focus less on the original contributions of Bowne than on the features that establish his personalism as belonging to the older philosophical and theological current. With the American personalism of Bowne, we come to the work on which the definitions of personalism that I have looked at in Chapter 1 were for the most part based. The purpose of this section on American personalism and those in the following chapters is to show by reference to and by a more detailed treatment of Bowne’s work itself – and drawing also on Knudson, one of the most faithful followers of Bowne, to the extent that his formulations bring out better than Bowne’s own the similarities with early European personalism – that these definitions indeed do describe the same personalist movement as the one we have now, in one aspect, studied in its earlier European development.

It is in the preface to Personalism that Bowne makes the historical observation I mentioned in Chapter 1: Comte, he says, was right that explanation in terms of personality was historically primary, and also in his view of abstract metaphysics as merely ‘the ghost of earlier personal explanations’. ‘[T]he conceptions of impersonal metaphysics’ are now seen to be ‘only the abstract forms of the self-conscious life’, which ‘apart from that life…are empty and illusory’. Where Comte went wrong was in his failure to understand the meaning of the primordial personalism, the ‘personal beginning of all speculation’. It is this meaning, obscured throughout most of the history of philosophy, that Bowne sets out to explain. If we do not understand ‘the primacy of the personal world from the start’, we are led ultimately to naturalism and the ‘elimination of personality altogether’ through the notions of objective space and time, matter, force, ‘impersonal substances’ – all of which are ‘abstractions broken from the system of living experience’. Accepting them as reality is to transcend experience through the ‘crude metaphysics’ of common sense. Bowne’s position, as that of all earlier personalists, is that the experiential element in common sense must be retained, but that if it is not combined with critical idealism it will soon lead to the mistaken view of reality represented by realistic empiricism, given the common proneness to the fallacies of abstraction. Experience must be ‘accepted as trustworthy as far as it goes’. Science studies the laws of experiential phenomena in space and time and legitimately introduces a limited range of hypothetical inferential interpretation within its own sphere. Comte was right in his restriction of science to ‘the investigation and registration of the orders of coexistence and sequence in experience’. But spatiotemporal, phenomenal experience as a whole must be transcended for its ultimate explanation, and this can be properly done only through the interpretation of philosophy. This implies ‘a personal interpretation of experience’, the first step to which ‘consists in the insight that we are in a personal world from the start, and that the first, last, and only duty of philosophy is to interpret this world of personal life and relations. Any other view can only lead to the misleading abstractions and aberrations with which the history of thought abounds.’ [1]

If we do not understand the ‘concrete process’ of knowing as ‘necessarily individual’, the result will be a ‘confounding of all distinctions’ which may lead to the conclusion that ‘the subject of the universal experience is the same as the subject of the particular experience – a dark saying, to which unfortunately no key has been furnished’. [2]

The first experiential fact is for Bowne ‘the validity of our personal knowledge’, which includes ‘our mutual understanding of one another’. [3] A doctrine which overlooks this fact, a doctrine which fails, as Kant’s does, to consider the given ‘plurality of persons’, relying only on the process of knowledge in abstraction from it, ‘must end in solipsism’:

[Block quotation:] [I]f we make the world of things subjective presentations because the knowledge of them arises through our mental construction, we must do the same thing with the world of persons, for the knowledge of them has an equally subjective character. Kant passes from the “me” to “us” without telling us how he makes the transition. He really begins with “us” – not merely with the individual self, but with the whole collection of individual human beings – and gets an experience valid for us all in exceedingly obscure ways. But what Kant did not do the critic must do, and we must inquire into the relation of these many minds to one another ina system of phenomenal knowledge. [4]

Pringle-Pattison and others before him had reached their personalistic conclusions after having begun with the analysis of the impersonalist idealists’ absolute, universal ‘Self’, operative in all the finite and supposedly merely phenomenal ones, and of the problematic trajectory through which Kant’s transcendental ego was developed into this conception. They had then pointed to its problems in the face of the experiential givenness and reality of finite persons. But some had also tended to start directly from the epistemological significance of the concrete plurality of the latter. Although he too gives an account of the development of absolute idealism, [5] this is the method preferred by Bowne:

[Block quotation:] [T]he basal certainties in knowledge are not the ontological existence of material and mechanical things, but rather the coexistence of persons, the community of intelligence and the system of common experience. And these are not given as speculative deductions, but as unshakable practical certainties. We cannot live intellectually at all without recognizing other persons than ourselves, and without assuming that the laws of intelligence are valid for all alike, and that all have the same general objects in experience…These are the deepest facts and presuppositions, and they involve some profound mysteries; but they cannot be questioned without immediate practical absurdity. [6]

But again, it is not that the self is dependent on other finite selves for its identity, as in Hegel’s process of Anerkennung. The experienced ‘living, conscious, active’ empirical self is not a phenomenon, but the most concrete reality. It is the transcendental ego, understood as separate from this self, that is a mere ‘fiction’. Kant’s phenomenalism is an abstract deduction contrary to experience. It is not needed to refute the claims of the rational psychologists, nor is it proved by their paralogisms. Things may be regarded as phenomenal, but it is impossible to understand the self as phenomenal in the same sense: the certainty of self-existence, of the self ‘as the subject of the mental life and knowing and experienceing itself as living, and as one and the same throughout its changing experiences, is the surest item of knowledge we possess’. [7]

In his brief summary of his own position cited in Chapter 1, Bowne stressed not least his combination of a certain kind of realism with idealism – the non-Hegelian combination which, as we have seen, in more or less developed forms was definitional of the development of personalism from a very early stage. In Bowne’s works, this synthesis or interplay of  transcendentalism and empiricism, activity and passivity of the mind, creativity and receptivity, mediation and immediacy, are explained at length.

It might perhaps look as if Bowne’s stress on the active contributions of the mind is stronger than that of earlier European personalists, and that in this respect he is more of a Kantian and less of a Platonist than they. But this is not necessarily the case. The new partial insights of Kant in this field were assimilated by all nineteenth-century personalists – and modified in a manner similar to that of Bowne. For Bowne too reinserts Kantian mental activity into a broader idealistic and partly Platonic framework. The notion of the active mind can be found to some extent already in the Plotinian and the Augustinian tradition. Knudson argues – somewhat sweepingly – that the Platonic and Kantian traditions are essentially the same in their insistence on the reality of the self, the independence of reason, and the creative activity of thought; it is only the method of argument that differs. Plato’s reason is ‘not concerned with the data of sense, nor even general notions abstracted from them, but with an independent realm of ideas’; both traditions vindicate the claims of reason, the higher interests of man. What is important for the personalist in the doctrine of the creative activity of the self is primarily its metaphysical implications: the reality of the self, its identity, unity and permanence, holding together the experiential complexity and flow. [8]

Experience goes beyond sense experience to include ‘the data of self-consciousness’, ‘the inner experience of the conscious self’. In the inner world, there is immediacy of experience. Although for Kant the categories derived concrete meaning from experience, he neglected or misunderstood inner, personal experience. For Bowne the latter becomes the key to the interpretation of the categories, and since in contradistinction to outer perception it is immediate, the categories become categories of reality. While remaining preconditions of experience, their true meaning can be realized only in ‘living self-experience’. [9] Providing elaborate analyses of the categories thus understood, he concludes, with regard to the category of identity, that it ‘is given as the self-equality of intelligence throughout experience’ and that ‘any other conception destroys itself’. The category of unity similarly

[Block quotation:] may be purely formal, as when we call a thing one; but when we come to real unity only experience can tell us whether it be possible and what form it must take on. There can be no real unity in anything existing in space and time, for in that case everything would be dispersed in infinite divisibility. We find the problem solved only in the unity of a conscious self, which is the only concrete unity that escapes the infinite dispersion of space and time. [10]

The category of causality cannot be thought ‘abstractly and impersonally’, for we then ‘find ourselves lost in the infinite regress, and if we escape it we have no means of telling whether there is anything corresponding to our ideas or not’. In general, ‘[i]t is absolutely necessary to find in experience something that will insure that our ideas have some corresponding concrete existence; or else we are simply shuffling verbal counters’. The meaning of causality can only be found in ‘the self-conscious causality of free intelligence’. [11]

The problem of change and identity eludes us or vanishes in contradiction when we transfer it to ‘the impersonal world of space and time and abstract principles’; it has to be referred to the experiential world of the self-conscious subject, the ‘fixed point’ which is the ‘origin of ordinates in this field’. [12] And so with the problem of unity and plurality. In concrete, conscious experience, the unity of the self is inseparable from plurality, although it does not produce or explain it: the plurality is an aspect of the unity: not of ‘an abstract unity without distinction or difference’, but of ‘a living, conscious unity, which is one in its manifoldness and manifold in its oneness’. This is contradictory only for formal, discursive thought; ‘taken concretely it is the fact of consciousness’. [13]

All of this illustrates what Bowne in his brief Selbstdarstellung termed ‘transcendental empiricism’. It is the doctrine that

[Block quotation:] all thought about reality must be rooted in experience and that apart from experience we never can be sure whether our conceptions represent any actual fact or not. The categories themselves are not something which precede the mind and found its possibility. They are rather modes of mental operation. They are the forms which the mind gives to its experience, but the mind is not to be understood through them. Rather they are to be understood through the mind’s living experience of itself. [14]

Through this transcendental empiricism, the extra-mental universe of common-sense realism, the unknowables of agnosticism, the ‘transfigured realism’ which defines reality ‘apart from intelligence and ends by presenting us with a set of barren and worthless abstractions as the truly real, while the whole system of living experience is excluded from reality altogether’, and the ‘static universe which eludes knowledge’, are all refuted. [15]

Although there is no immediacy in outer perception, as naturalism asserts, there is yet in it a given ‘other’. It is a phenomenon, but not of an unknowable noumenon. It is a real appearance, an appearance of reality through which we have real knowledge of it. [16] Fichte had rejected Kant’s thing in itself as unaffirmable; Bowne, with all personalists, asserted that it was not only affirmable but knowable, albeit not in any simple, non-idealist manner. That which shall explain the given experiential world must to some extent be knowable through its causal relations to it, whereas that which is ‘truly extra-mental’, which is ‘beyond thought and independent of it and in no way amenable to it’, is according to Bowne ‘an impossible conception’. [17]

Kantianism had failed to refute the scepticism engendered by Cartesian radical dualism (just as, it might be added, this Cartesian dualism had thus itself obviously failed to refute the scepticism engenderd by late mediaeval radical, nominalistic voluntarism [18]), and epistemological monism, both of the absolute idealist and the neorealist variety, had succeeded it. Personalism, in its resistance to the polarized yet interconnected and interdependent extremisms of modernity, returns, in a limited sense, to a pre-Cartesian position. For Bowne, epistemological monism not only makes knowledge impossible. It also destroys ‘the independence and distinctive worth of personality’: ‘If personality is to maintain its integrity, it must be kept “a handbreadh off”, both from the Absolute and from things; and this means an epistemological dualism, no matter what one’s theory of things or of the Absolute may be.’ But the dualism of personalism is different from the Cartesian; it steers a ‘middle course between agnostic dualism and an impossible identification of thought and thing’. [19] Rejecting Cartesian dualism as well as the monistic reactions against it, personalism’s positive alternative, while drawing on premodern traditions, is still a modern synthesis. The experienced phenomenal order mediates a real content knowable by our categories, but the precondition of this is that behind it is ‘a Supreme Intelligence which manifests his thought through it and thus founds that objective unity of the system of experience which is presupposed in all our knowing’. [20] The necessary dualism on which personalism insists against absolute idealism is explained and made possible by the parallelism of a ‘theistic monism’, where God is the source of the thing-series as well as the thought-series. Things are knowable since minds are created in the image of the underlying intelligence. [21] The ‘theistic suggestion’ that the phenomenal world of things originates in and expresses thought brings it ‘within the thought sphere’. The Berkeleyan streak in Bowne’s personalism appears: things are ‘independent of our existence’ but not of ‘all thinking’: it is as in this sense situated ‘within the thought sphere’ that they are knowable. Significantly, after having excluded a priori reasons for the unknowability of things, Bowne continues, in the same sentence, by saying that this solution ‘assimilates the problem of knowledge to that of mutual understanding among persons’. [22]

Bowne’s personalist epistemology is a late product of the development that started with the late eighteenth-century distinction between Vernunft and Verstand. [23] Reason in a broad sense, as the whole field of conviction and insight, is distinguished from reason in a narrow sense, as the faculty of inference through argument; and the misuse of ‘the understanding’, which Bowne uses in a largely Coleridgean sense, is criticized. When the understanding oversteps the limits of its proper sphere and moves into metaphysics, claiming to provide in its geometrically and numerically expressed concepts and laws ‘veritable transcripts of reality’, it errs, sometimes falling into ‘the pernicious errors of materialism and atheism’. It cannot account for ‘the essential dynamism’ of the metaphysical system; and the science based on it has ‘neither the call nor the power to penetrate’ into the realm of ‘true efficient causality’. [24]

In the chapter in Personalism entitled ‘The Failure of Impersonalism’, Bowne compresses and restates the detailed arguments in his Theory of Thought and Knowledge and his Metaphysics regarding the untenability of the two forms of impersonalism against which all personalism turns: that of naturalism and that of absolute idealism. They both have the same principal epistemological point of departure:

[Block quotation:] Uncritical minds always attempt to explain the explanation, thus unwittingly committing themselves to the infinite regress. Accordingly when they come to living intelligence as the explanation of the world, they fancy that they must go behind even this. We have the categories of being, cause, identity, change, the absolute, and the like; and intelligence at best is only a specification or particular case of these more general principles. These principles, then, lie behind all personal or other existence, as its presupposition and source, and constitute a set of true first principles, from which all definite and concrete reality is derived by some sort of logical process or implication. [25]

In typical personalist fashion, Bowne points to the consequences of this view, which had been amply demonstrated in the actual historical development in Germany. ‘[I]dealistic impersonalism’ is in ‘its origin…antipodal to naturalism, but in the outcome the two often coincide’. Bowne mentions that D. F. Strauss said that the difference between Hegelianism and materialism ‘was only one of words’; this, Bowne adds, ‘was certainly true of Hegelianism of the left wing’. [26] The monism of neorealism, which reduces thoughts to things (or aggregates of sense-qualities), is parallel to that of absolute idealism, which reduces things to thoughts; and just as rationalistic materialism has historically developed into rationalistic absolute idealism, so the latter has led back to naturalism. [27] Impersonalism ‘is a failure whether in the low form of materialistic mechanism or in the abstract form of idealistic notions…personality is the real and only principle of philosophy which will enable us to take any rational step whatever’. [28] Bowne analyses the confusion of logic and ontology, the progression from abstraction to deduction, in terms identical with those of Jacobi and the earlier personalists. [29]

The onesided theoretical approach to metaphysics overlooks the importance of will and active causality, reducing things to objects of knowledge, to ideas; and since the mind too is such an object, it is likewise reduced to an idea or collection of ideas; next ‘the personal implication’ is eliminated from these ideas, and mind is regarded as ‘a function of impersonal ideas’. The purely epistemological interest ‘seeks to make ideas all-embracing’, making us ‘unwilling to admit anything that cannot be conceptually grasped’. We are left with ‘a tissue of abstractions’. [30] In absolute idealism, everything is generated within thought itself, thought is made all-inclusive. [31] But ‘[t]he impersonal idea is a pure fiction. All actual ideas are owned, or belong to some one, and mean nothing as floating free.’ Impersonalistic idealism assumes that the categories can be conceived in themselves, that they are ‘in a measure the preconditions of concrete existence’, so that ‘we might almost suppose that a personal being is compounded of being plus unity plus identity plus causality, etc.’ [32]

The problem can be solved only if raised to the personal plane, where ‘we take the terms in the meaning they have in living experience’. Abstractly conceived, the categories are easily made contradictory and worthless – as, we add, was evident in Bradley. But philosophy is concerned only with the forms the categories ‘take on’ in concrete, ‘living experience’. There, they turn out to be compatible. [33] In sum, personality

[Block quotation:] can never be construed as a product or compound; it can only be experienced as a fact. It must be possible because it is given as actual…When we have lived and described the personal life we have done all that is possible in sane and sober speculation. If we try to do more we only fall a prey to abstractions. This self-conscious existence is the truly ultimate fact. [34]

We should note this presence of the language of life in Bowne, who lived in the era of the life-philosophy of which Jacobi and the later Schelling were distant pioneers. Beyond the understanding, self-knowledge rests on ‘our living self-consciousness’. We conceive, but we also live: ‘This living indeed cannot be realized without the conception, but the conception is formal and empty without the living. In this sense intelligence must accept itself as a datum, and yet not as something given from without, but as the self-recognition of itself by itself.’ [35] Life proceeds on ‘a vast deal of informal and instinctive inference’. ‘If one were called upon to formally justify his confidence in another, he would not succeed. The formal statements would seem cold and equivocal alongside of the confidence of friendship.’ Logic cannot fully reproduce this intuitive immediacy. This is especially true with regard to the ‘highest and deepest things’: ‘Here the whole man enters into the argument, and not simply the understanding as an isolated faculty.’ Moral action must supplement passive contemplation. And the matter of arguments which ‘root in life itself’ often ‘elude definite and adequate statement’, there is ‘an unformulated activity of the mind which is the real gist of the reasoning’. Because of this primacy of the person and the life of the person, the relation of character and belief familiar from Jacobi, Fichte and Schelling must still be taken into account: ‘Since the belief expresses the life, it must vary with it’; this explains ‘the peculiar moral quality that attaches to certain beliefs. It would be quite absurd to hold one responsible for belief, if it were always the passionless conclusion of a syllogism. But some beliefs express the believer himself, what he loves, what he stands for, what he desires to be. Such beliefs have personal and moral quality.’ A man’s beliefs depend upon what he is rather than upon logic; arguments are often ‘little more than pretexts, or excuses, for a foregone conclusion’; the ‘living movement of conviction’ is determined by the underlying ‘vital process’. It is through this personal life that we reach insight not only into reality in general, but also, and inseparably, into the nature of God; humanity’s faith in divine righteousness is discovered through ‘open field’ study of ‘the entire movement and manifestation of humanity’, ‘the historical drama of humanity’; and feeling the force, the meaning, and the profundity of ‘the ethical demand for an ethical Creator’ is possible only through ‘living participation in the moral effort and struggle of humanity’. [36] As we saw in the discussion of Lavely’s article on personalism in the last chapter, with Brightman, it became possible to find a personalist version of the ‘dialectical movement toward wholeness’ in philosophy; it is easy to see the need, for the pusposes of the philosophical assimilation and elaboration of the historical experience gained in the way Bowne describes, for an adequate form of dialectical reason. Of course, to some extent, such reason is in reality already operative in the personalists’ account of the limits of the ‘understanding’ and what lies beyond them.

Knudson dwells the consequences of the intellectualism of the Greeks, which did not allow a full understanding of the significance of the will and the emotions for knowledge. Even Plato’s Good was intellectualistically conceived. This intellectualism was taken over by mediaeval thought. Against the impersonal reason of the tradition of natural theology stood only outer, religious authority. Natural theology relied merely on the perceptual and logical facultiles. [37] Truth was either factually or logically established, or asserted by authority. Practical reason, will, and emotion had no standing within philosophy and philosophical theology. Yet in the ‘proofs’ of God and immortality, valuational elements were smuggled in – as a residue, it might be added, of the pre- and early-scholastic tradition. [38] With the rise of modern rationalism and empiricism, however, such elements were increasingly separated from the perceptual and logical faculties, so that, for instance, teleology was rejected.

Knudson significantly focuses exclusively on Kant’s reaction against this development, and thus misses Jacobi’s analysis of the emergence of the worldview of enlightenment rationalism and its distinctly modern kind of impersonal pantheism. Only with Kant there appeared for Knudson in the course of modernity a position which not only harmonizes with religion but ‘also with that type of philosophy which sees in personality something deeper, broader, and more divine than the perceptual or logical faculty’. The ‘deepest truth of reality’ is ‘derived from our ethical and spiritual nature, from that practical and vital experience that lies back of all purely intellectual processes’; ‘life is deeper than logic’. Yet Knudson is of course perfectly clear about the respects in which Kant’s position is insufficient and mistaken from the personalist point of view. Personalism goes beyond Kant in its understanding of the cognitive function of the volitional and emotional aspects of our nature, their warrant for affirmations about ultimate reality. Kant’s distinction between faith and knowledge is too sharp. Knowledge is not confined to phenomena, and theoretical reason itself implies faith: it demands for its satisfaction to pass beyond the phenomenal, it cannot dispense with the metaphysical categories, or eliminate value. Since mechanical causality is always incomplete, for reality to become a coherent whole, knowledge must rise to free, non-mechanical causality, guided by purpose. Theoretical and practical reason thus cannot be separated in the Kantian fashion; practical reason is theoretically necessary. [39] It should be added that Fichte too had transcended the Kantian distinction, but only in the context of his general modern constructivist development of idealism; personalism’s fusion of theoretical and practical reason was in some respects, and mutatis mutandis, rather a renewal and variation of the Platonic and Augustinian traditions.

The many sides of the life of the mind are developed into separate aspects of Bowne’s epistemology. Their postulates and assumptions are not speculative constructions or logical deductions but expressions, implicit in life, of our ‘practical and ideal interests and necessities’, representing ‘the conditions of our fullest life’. [40] Faith is implicit or immanent in reason. It is not a question of outside validation of knowledge, as in pragmatism. The faith of reason, Knudson explains, is an ultimate, underived, undeduced, ‘axiomatic act’, an autonomously valid, self-certified, immediate practical assumption and presupposition. In addition to the intellect it ‘embraces also the aesthetic, the moral, and the religious faculty, and affirms the autonomous validity of each’. [41] These are independent yet co-ordinate forms of mental activity:

[Block quotation:] [T]he interests of truth, goodness, beauty and God belong together. To cast discredit on one is to weaken faith in all. Hence personalism insists on the trustworthiness of both the theoretical and the practical reason…Both, when thought through, involve faith in the ideal, and faith in one form of the ideal is as valid as faith in any other form…The conflict between intellectualism and voluntarism…turns out to be a conflict between two types of faith or value; and the solution of the conflict lies in the recognition of the validity of both. [42]

The cognitive, moral, and religious ideal tendencies, interests, and postulates, arising from our total nature and experience, are logically clarified and harmonized by philosophy. [43] The various ‘faculties’ are expressions of ‘a deeper underlying reason’, deeper than the formal understanding. Ultimately, it is ‘that deepest of all rational unities, the personal spirit. Personality with its fundamental needs and interests is the fountain-head of all that passes under the name of reason, whether it be theoretical or practical’. [44]

Religion is part of experience, and thus ‘must receive its recognition and interpretation as belonging to reality’; it is ‘[t]his fact preëminently’ that ‘leads to a personal conception of existence’. [45] Religion is ‘a function of the entire man’: Purely metaphysical arguments do not give ‘the full religious conception of God’, the actual grounds being not only intellectual but ‘emotional, aesthetic, and ethical’; ‘The needs of the intellect, the demands and forebodings of conscience, the cravings of the affections, the impulses of the aesthetic nature, and the ideals of the will, – all enter into the problem, apart from words of revelation, or any direct influence of God on the soul.’ The idea of God is not demonstrable by anything, yet it is implicit in everything. [46] But religion is more than ideas of theoretical and even practical reason, it is a path that demands ‘practical realization of [the] divine presence’: beliefs ‘must be lived to acquire any real substance or controlling character’; we must ‘build them into life and organize our lives around them’; ‘If we ignore them practically we may soon accost them skeptically; and they vanish like a fading gleam.’ [47] Typically, along with the onesided rationalism which leads to naturalism, irrational fideism is also rejected. Religious impulse or instinct is not enough. Conscience is emphasized, and the role assigned by personalism to the understanding and to logic and metaphysics is certainly important too. [48]

The faith that is immanent in reason is also free; the presence of faith and volition at the basis of reason is itself evinced by the possibility and reality of doubt and error. ‘Our faculties are made for truth, but this alone does not secure truth’, and the laws of thought ‘do not of themselves secure obedience’. [49] The facts of doubt and error disprove the unity of thought and thing. It is here that Bowne makes his contribution of explaining the theoretical and not merely practical significance of freedom. [50] Error is accountable for only by freedom. Necessitarian systems can make no distinction between true and false and between rational and irrational beliefs, since both must be equally ineluctable effects, regardless of whether they are produced by a spiritual or a material mechanism. ‘Any system which makes error necessary and cosmic destroys itself’. [51] Determinism leads to scepticism and irrationalism. Since for necessitarianism truth and error have the same source, it is mere accident that the one is called true and the other false. [52] ‘[T]he actual is all’. If they are both necessary, there is no means of or rational standard for distinguishing between them. And even if there were such a standard, we would not be able to use it without freedom. [53] Without freedom, argument and persuasion are absurd. Thus only on the plane of freedom do truth and error acquire significance; only to free agents, persons, is rationality possible. [54] Freedom is not opposed to reason, or to a ‘modest’ science of phenomena, but only to ‘some absolute “Science”, that is, that speculative theory which ignores the indications of experience and the practical aim and foundation of concrete science, and seeks to bind all things together in a scheme of necessity’; this is ‘only inconsistent and illiterate dogmatism, a pseudo-science and an enemy of humanity’. Necessitarian speculation, arising out of abstractive rationalism of the idealist or materialist variety, only begs the question, telling us nothing about what will happen but only that what happens is necessary. [55]

Rejecting necessitarianism, Bowne, as we will by now expect, at the same time rejects ‘the opposite abyss of lawless caprice’. [56] Freedom is not ‘pure lawlessness’. [57] The mistaken idea that this is the only alternative has been a support of necessitarianism, but the mind must then ‘vacillate between the two extremes, being driven out from either as soon as it grasps its implications’. The solution is to carry ‘everything back to intelligence, while resolutely eschewing every attempt to comprehend intelligence as the result of its own categories, or to do anything with it but experience and use it’. [58] Freedom is the concretely experienced power of self-direction. It is not a matter of freedom from motives, but of choice among motives not wholly determined by the motives themselves. Of this ‘mystery of self-determination’, Bowne writes that it is ‘the central factor of personality, the condition of responsibility, and the basis of the moral life’. It canot be ‘mechanically analyzed’ or deduced as necessary; ‘The attempt to analyze it contradicts it’; ‘it can only be experienced’. Freedom presupposes for its meaningfulness ‘a basis of fixity or uniformity’. Yet their coexistence is not a compound of them as abstractly preexistent: as such, and thus as contradictory, freedom and uniformity or necessity simply do not exist. As in the case of unity and plurality, reality is immediately and concretely given under these dual aspects. We find this in the experience of our own thought: the laws of thought are given in the fixed nature of reason, but they are not necessarily obeyed. Only by our free act of accepting them do we become rational. [59]

Although Bowne’s special contribution was this exposition of the theoretical meaning of freedom, there was for him a definite parallel betwen theoretical and moral freedom. In Knudson’s words: ‘Rationality…implies the possibility of error as morality does the possibility of sin. But if error and sin are necessary, there is manifestly an end to faith in reason and conscience.’ [60]

By means of the consistent development of personalist thought, Jacobi’s form of ‘realism’ has in Bowne’s philosophy been retrieved and consolidated within a rational idealism. The essential elements of Jacobi’s criticisms and positive suggestions seem to be preserved at a higher philosophical level. We ‘conserve the sense of reality and validity in knowledge, and at the same time recognize the results of criticism. We remain where we began, in the world of personal experience, and with the strengthened conviction that this world can never be explained on any impersonal plane.’ This lays the foundation for the achievement of Jacobi’s objectives: saving ‘life and mind and morals and society’. [61]

[1] Bowne, Personalism, p. vi, 25-6, 32-6, 45-53.

[2] Ibid., 59-60.

[3] Ibid., 80.

[4] Ibid., 84.

[5] See, for instance, Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 302-4.

[6] Bowne, Theism, 127-8.

[7] Bowne, Personalism, 86, 88.

[8] Knudson, The Philosophy of Personalism, 124, 136-8.

[9] Bowne, Personalism, 99-102.

[10] Ibid., 103.

[11] Ibid., 103-4.

[12] Ibid., 124.

[13] Ibid., 261-2.

[14] Ibid., 104-5.

[15] Ibid., 109-10.

[16] Knudson, The Philosophy of Personalism, 146.

[17] Bowne, Personalism, 91-2.

[18] The kind of voluntarism which, as Knudson elsewhere makes clear, personalism rejects; Knudson, The Philosophy of Personalism, 166.

[19] Knudson, The Philosophy of Personalism, 113-14, 166.

[20] Bowne, Personalism, 78, 89.

[21] Knudson, The Philosophy of Personalism, 153.

[22] Bowne, Personalism, 92-3.

[23] The ‘pragmatism’ attributed to Bowne by James and others seems to me to be limited to his view of the scientific use of Verstand; Bowne, Personalism, 97-9, 117, 151-2.

[24] Ibid., 26, 32, 152-3.

[25] Ibid., 218-19.

[26] Ibid., 219.

[27] If ‘we regard the divine thought as identical with cosmic thought and as constituting a logical process, sufficient in itself, without a guiding or realizing will, we lose ourselves in a wholly abstract conception of reality and fall into a devastating pantheism or naturalism. This is the peril that confronts absolute idealism, and we can escape it only by surrendering its monistic epistemology.’ Knudson, The Philosophy of Personalism, 107-8.

[28] Bowne, Personalism, 263.

[29] Ibid., 238-9.

[30] Ibid., 253.

[31] Knudson, The Philosophy of Personalism, 103-4, 106-7.

[32] Bowne, Personalism, 253-4.

[33] Ibid., 260-1; cf. 253-4.

[34] Ibid., 264-5.

[35] Ibid., 258.

[36] Bowne, Theism, 36, 259-62.

[37] Knudson, The Philosophy of Personalism, 159.

[38] Knudson significantly discusses this whole subject, from Plato to Kant, in terms of ‘value’.

[39] Knudson, The Philosophy of Personalism, 98, 155, 161-2.

[40] Bowne, Theism, 17-18; cf. 38.

[41] Knudson, The Philosophy of Personalism, 147-8, 162.

[42] Ibid., 166-7.

[43] Bowne, Theism, 22-3, 29, 31.

[44] Knudson, The Philosophy of Personalism, 164-5.

[45] Bowne, Personalism, 292.

[46] Bowne, Theism, 9, 15, 48.

[47] Bowne, Personalism, 325-6.

[48] Bowne, Theism, 9, 28, 33, 39.

[49] Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 143.

[50] The central formulations are found in chs. 10 and 11 of Theory of Thought and Knowledge, and in part 3, ch. 4, of Metaphysics.

[51] Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 239.

[52] Knudson, The Philosophy of Personalism, 149; cf. Bowne, Personalism, 200-2, where Bowne extends the argument to include all ‘materialistic, atheistic, necessitarian, and mechanical philosophies’.

[53] Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 242-3.

[54] Knudson, The Philosophy of Personalism, 151.

[55] Bowne, Personalism, 209, 211-12.

[56] Bowne, Metaphysics, 417.

[57] Bowne, Personalism, 204-6.

[58] Bowne, Metaphysics, 417-18.

[59] Bowne, Personalism, 199-200, 205-6, 209-10.

[60] Knudson, The Philosophy of Personalism, 154.

[61] Bowne, Personalism, 110, 235-6.

Bowne’s Idealistic Personalism, 1

Introduction

Some reviewers and other readers of my book The Worldview of Personalism: Origins and Early Development (2006) expressed the view that I should have added sections on Borden Parker Bowne to each of the three thematic chapters, ‘Personal “reason” and impersonal “understanding”‘, ‘The personal absolute’, and ‘Personal unity-in-diversity’, instead of just providing a summary of his philosophy in chapter 1, ‘The current view of personalism and its origins’.

The reason why I did not do so was that I found it was not needed for the historical argument I set forth in the book. According to my thesis, Bowne represents a relatively late form of personalism; and this thesis of course required that the emphasis be placed on the earlier development which it claims is the early development precisely of personalism.

For the purpose of this argument, for the purpuse of demonstrating the continuity of Bowne’s personalism with the personalism I traced from the late eighteenth century and through the nineteenth, I found the summary, in combination with the presentation of other, more general accounts of American personalism (as well as of American accounts of personalism in general) to be quite sufficient.

Moreover, it was evident that if I included sections of Bowne in the thematic chapters, the book would have become not only too long (this was, in particular, the view expressed by the publisher), but also too repetitive. Bowne’s formulations of the themes of the earlier philosophers I deal with, while certainly contributing some developments of his own, also often use almost precisely the same Words.

But in fact, I did consider adding such sections, and wrote drafts of them. They were never fully developed in terms of my own comments and analyses in the way I would have liked to develop them had they been included; I left them at the stage where they are primarily mere compilations of some relevant formulations and passages from Bowne and one or two later American personalists of his school (the sections, following those called ‘British personal idealism’ in each of the mentioned chapters, would probably have been called ‘American personalism’). These are, however, tied together by a minimal narrative which does explain further and emphasize the mentioned continuity, and thus continues to make the various points of the book’s general historical argument.

It must be kept in mind that these drafts, like the book as a whole, only set forth this historical argument, a thesis in the history of philosophy. Various positions are described, explained and analysed only to the extent that it is necessary for this thesis. Although in the fifth chapter of the book, I indicate briefly and in general terms the lasting relevance of “early personalism”, I am not at all, in the book or in these as yet unpublished drafts, making the case for idealistic personalism in strict philosophical terms. (I do make that case elsewhere.)

The drafts, taken together, are too long to be reworked into an article or even a book chapter. But they are also too short to be reworked into a new and separate book. They could be published in a collection of articles and/or book chapters, but at the moment I do not plan to publish any such book. Awaiting a suitable occasion for such publication, I therefore now publish them here, beginning with the section belonging to the first thematic chapter, chapter 2, ‘Personal “reason” and impersonal “understanding”‘.

Hopefully, this could be of use to scholars who want further exemplification and corroboration of my thesis with regard to Bowne – although all who have read the book will, I think, easily see the redundance of the sections that these drafts could have been developed into.

The drafts, as they exist now, are written as direct continuations of the respective chapters in the book and thus make frequent reference to it. The book is also where the publication details for all cited works are found.