Metaphysics

Appearance and Reality

♡+

F.H. Bradley

1893

Appearance and Reality is Bradley's masterwork — the most systematic and uncompromising expression of British Idealism, and one of the most challenging works in the entire tradition of Western metaphysics. The book is divided into two parts. In the first ("Appearance"), Bradley subjects the main categories that common sense and science use to understand the world — things, qualities, relations, space, time, causation, the self, motion — to dialectical critique, arguing that each of them, when examined carefully, generates internal contradictions and so cannot be real in the sense they claim to be. Relations are the central target: Bradley's famous argument is that relational thought always requires further relations to hold the terms and the relation together, generating a vicious regress that shows that reality cannot ultimately be relational. In the second part ("Reality"), Bradley argues that reality must be a single, all-encompassing, non-relational whole — what he calls the Absolute — in which the contradictions of appearance are somehow resolved and transcended. The Absolute is experience, but experience purified of the finite, discursive, relational structure that characterises ordinary thought.