British Idealism and the Concept of the Self, edited by W. J. Mander and Stamatoula Panagakou

Abstract

Reviewed by: British Idealism and the Concept of the Self ed. by W. J. Mander and Stamatoula Panagakou Adela Pinch (bio) British Idealism and the Concept of the Self, edited by W. J. Mander and Stamatoula Panagakou; pp. xii + 335. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, £89.99, $119.99. It is not often that philosophy books are reviewed in the pages of Victorian Studies. While the authors in this collection of essays, British Idealism and the Concept of the Self, clearly feel they fight an uphill battle in encouraging their colleagues in their own discipline to take seriously what these Victorian writers can contribute to philosophical discussions about the nature of the self, my task is to persuade readers of this journal how relevant this book is to Victorian studies in other fields. Scholars of Victorian cultural history and literature have long pondered what is distinctive about what Victorians thought and felt about being, or having, a self, but recent decades have largely sent us running to empiricist psychology for answers. The work of associationists and physiologists such as Alexander Bain, George Henry Lewes, James Sully, and others has appealed because its principles chime well with our own: the self is located at the intersection of body and experience; it is a bundle of sensations, and hence contingent, fragmented, in flux. British Idealism and the Concept of the Self is a fine gateway drug for readers interested in learning about an alternative, adjacent body of thinking. The outstanding introduction by the editors, W. J. Mander and Stamatoula Panagakou, clearly lays out what is distinctive, intriguing, and challenging about ideas of the self in the major British Idealists treated in the book: James Frederick Ferrier, F. H. Bradley, Edward Caird, T. H. Green, Bernard Bosanquet, R. G. Collingwood, and J. M. E. McTaggart. Mander and Panagakou provide historical background for the flourishing of Idealism in Victorian Britain: it arose not only from the impact of Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel, but also from dissatisfaction with the shriveled understanding of self implicit in empiricist theories of knowledge, and with the narrowed ethical responsibilities for the self under utilitarianism. In response, the Victorian Idealists crafted concepts of a self that—while immanent in the empirical self—exists fundamentally outside of time and space. By positing a self that is "connected with the spiritual world of values which expands before and beyond their immediate existence," they sought above all to provide a new model for the self's relation to community (158). The sequence of the fourteen essays in British Idealism and the Concept of the Self largely follows chronology, and moves as well from historically focused pieces on individual philosophers to broader essays that address the ways the Victorian and early-twentieth-century [End Page 494] British Idealists speak to enduring philosophical issues. Thus, for example, in the first essay, Jenny Keefe explains how and why the earliest Victorian Idealist, Ferrier, devoted An Introduction to the Philosophy of Consciousness (1838–39) to demolishing the notion of the "mind" that was the object of study in the empiricist psychology of the era, and to replacing it with philosophical reflection on the nature of subjectivity. Thence follow several essays each on the central figures of the 1870s and 1880s—Bradley, Caird, Green, and Bosanquet—focusing in many cases on the relation between these writers' metaphysics of the self and their ethical and political thought. They argued that if there is to be an ethics of free will, personal agency, and responsibility, there must be a continuous, non-contingent self. In the last of the author-focused essays, Gary L. Cesarz considers the ways in which McTaggart's account of the self as immaterial substance (in Some Dogmas of Religion [1906], but I would add "The Further Determination of the Absolute" [1890]) solves some logical problems in both materialist and social-constructionist accounts of the self, both then and now. In my view, the chapter that may be most helpful in clarifying what was at stake in the Victorian Idealists' non-empirical self is Mander's penultimate summary essay, "Idealism and the True Self." If one of the surprises in this book...