Bosanquet, Bernard
Bosanquet, Bernard
(1848-1923) Neo-Hegelian idealist, regards Reality as a single individual all-embracing, completely rational experience, combining universality and concreteness. It alone exists. All other particulars — minds or things — are only partially concrete, individual and real. The incidental, incomplete, dependent and only partially existent character of finite consciousness is shown by the reaching, seeking character of all its activities, sense-perceptions, thought, moral action, and even aesthetic contemplation — all of which indicate that self-realization means self-abandonment to something larger than the self.
This something larger is the cosmic drama written, staged, and acted by the Absolute, who is artist and actor as well as a rational intelligence, intent no less upon dramatic than upon intelligible unity and self-expression. The world-process is tragic, witness the sin and suffering and imperfection with which it is fraught. But in the infinite tragedy, as well as in the tragedies composed by men, evil is contributory to the perfection of the whole, and, when seen and accepted as such by the finite individual, not only loses its sting but produces a “catharsis” of his attitude towards it, in which he cheerfully accepts it, battles with it, and finds his triumph over it in nobly enduring it. This “catharsis,” identifying him as it does with the meaning of the life of the Absolute, is his peace and his salvation. Main worksLogic, 1888; The Philosophical Theory of the State, 1899; Value and Destiny of the Individual, 1913. — B.A.G.F.