T. H. Green
Thomas Hill Green, known as T. H. Green, was an English philosopher, political radical and temperance reformer, and a member of the British idealism movement. Like all the British idealists, Green was influenced by the metaphysical historicism of G. W. F. Hegel. He was one of the thinkers behind the philosophy of social liberalism.
Life
Green was born on 7 April 1836 at Birkin, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England, where his father was rector. On his paternal side, he was descended from Oliver Cromwell. His education was conducted entirely at home until, at the age of 14, he entered Rugby, where he remained for five years.In 1855, he became an undergraduate member of Balliol College, Oxford, and was elected fellow in 1860. He began a life of teaching in the university—first as college tutor, and later, from 1878 until his death, as Whyte's Professor of Moral Philosophy.
The lectures he delivered as professor form the substance of his two most important works, viz., the Prolegomena to Ethics and the Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation, which contain the whole of his positive constructive teaching. These works were not published until after his death, but Green's views were previously known indirectly through the Introduction to the standard edition of David Hume's works by Green and T. H. Grose, fellow of Queen's College, in which the doctrine of the "English" or "empirical" philosophy was exhaustively examined.
In 1871 he married Charlotte Byron Symonds who was known as a promoter of women's education. In 1879, Green sat on the committee formed to create an Oxford women's college "in which no distinction will be made between students on the ground of their belonging to different religious denominations." Green and his wife's work resulted in the founding of Somerville Hall.
Green was involved in local politics for many years, through the university, temperance societies and the local Oxford Liberal association. During the passage of the Second Reform Act, he campaigned for the franchise to be extended to all men living in boroughs even if they did not own real property. In that sense, Green's position was more radical than that of most other Advanced Liberals, including William Ewart Gladstone.
It was in the context of his Liberal Party activities that in 1881, Green gave what became one of his most famous statements of his liberal political philosophy, the "Lecture on Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract". At this time, he was also lecturing on religion, epistemology, ethics and political philosophy.
Most of his major works were published posthumously, including his lay sermons on Faith and The Witness of God, the essay "On the Different Senses of 'Freedom' as Applied to Will and the Moral Progress of Man", Prolegomena to Ethics, Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation, and the "Lecture on Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract".
Green died of blood poisoning at the age of 45 on 26 March 1882. In addition to friends from his academic life, approximately 2,000 local townspeople attended his funeral.
He helped to found the City of Oxford High School for Boys.
Thought
Hume's empiricism and biological evolution were chief features in English thought during the third quarter of the 19th century. Green represents primarily the reaction against such doctrines. Green argued that when these doctrines were carried to their logical conclusion, they not only "rendered all philosophy futile", but were fatal to practical life. By reducing the human mind to a series of unrelated atomic sensations, these related teachings destroyed the possibility of knowledge, he argued. These teachings were especially important for Green to refute because they had underpinned the conception of mind that was held by the nascent science of psychology. Green tried to deflate the pretensions of psychologists who had claimed that their young field would provide a scientific replacement for traditional epistemology and metaphysics.Green further objected that such empiricists represented a person as a "being who is simply the result of natural forces", and thereby made conduct, or any theory of conduct, meaningless; for life in any human, intelligible sense implies a personal self that knows what to do, and has power to do it. Green was thus driven, not theoretically, but as a practical necessity, to raise again the whole question of humankind in relation to nature. When we have discovered what a person in themselves are, and what their relation to their environment is, we shall then know their function—what they are fitted to do. In the light of this knowledge, we shall be able to formulate the moral code, which, in turn, will serve as a criterion of actual civic and social institutions. These form, naturally and necessarily, the objective expression of moral ideas, and it is in some civic or social whole that the moral ideal must finally take concrete shape.
What is man?
To ask "What is man?" is to ask "What is experience?" for experience means that of which I am conscious. The facts of consciousness are the only facts that, to begin with, we are justified in asserting to exist. On the other hand, they are valid evidence for whatever is necessary to their own explanation, i.e. for whatever is logically involved in them. Now the most striking characteristic of humans, that in fact which marks them specially, as contrasted with other animals, is self-consciousness. The simplest mental act into which we can analyse the operations of the human mind—the act of sense-perception—is never merely a change, physical or psychical, but is the consciousness of a change.Human experience consists, not of processes in an animal organism, but of these processes recognised as such. That which we perceive is from the outset an apprehended fact—that is to say, it cannot be analysed into isolated elements which, as such, are not constituents of consciousness at all, but exist from the first as a synthesis of relations in a consciousness which keeps distinct the "self" and the various elements of the "object," though holding all together in the unity of the act of perception. In other words, the whole mental structure we call knowledge consists, in its simplest equally with its most complex constituents, of the "work of the mind." Locke and Hume held that the work of the mind was eo ipso unreal because it was "made by" humans and not "given to" humans. It thus represented a subjective creation, not an objective fact. But this consequence follows only upon the assumption that the work of the mind is arbitrary, an assumption shown to be unjustified by the results of exact science, with the distinction, universally recognised, which such science draws between truth and falsehood, between the real and "mere ideas." This distinction logically involves the consequence that the object, or content, of knowledge, viz., reality, is an intelligible ideal reality, a system of thought relations, a spiritual cosmos. How is the existence of this ideal whole to be accounted for? Only by the existence of some "principle which renders all relations possible and is itself determined by none of them"; an eternal self-consciousness which knows in whole what we know in part. To God the world is, to humans the world becomes. Human experience is God gradually made manifest.
Moral philosophy
Carrying on the same method into the area of moral philosophy, Green argued that ethics applies to the conditions of social life—that investigation into human nature which metaphysics began. The faculty employed in this further investigation is no "separate moral faculty", but that same reason which is the source of all our knowledge—ethical and other.Self-reflection gradually reveals to us human capacity, human function, with, consequently, human responsibility. It brings out into clear consciousness certain potentialities in the realisation of which human's true good must consist. As the result of this analysis, combined with an investigation into the surroundings humans live in, a "content"—a moral code—becomes gradually evolved. Personal good is perceived to be realisable only by making real and actual the conceptions thus arrived at. So long as these remain potential or ideal, they form the motive of action; motive consisting always in the idea of some "end" or "good" that humans present to themselves as an end in the attainment of which he would be satisfied; that is, in the realisation of which he would find his true self.
The determination to realise the self in some definite way constitutes an "act of will", which, as thus constituted, is neither arbitrary nor externally determined. For the motive which may be said to be its cause lies in the person himself, and the identification of the self with such a motive is a self-determination, which is at once both rational and free. The "freedom of man" is constituted, not by a supposed ability to do anything he may choose, but in the power to identify himself with that true good that reason reveals to him as his true good.
This good consists in the realisation of personal character; hence the final good, i.e. the moral ideal, as a whole, can be realised only in some society of persons who, while remaining ends to themselves in the sense that their individuality is not lost but rendered more perfect, find this perfection attainable only when the separate individualities are integrated as part of a social whole.
Society is as necessary to form persons as persons are to constitute society. Social union is the indispensable condition of the development of the special capacities of its individual members. Human self-perfection cannot be gained in isolation; it is attainable only in inter-relation with fellow-citizens in the social community.
The law of our being, so revealed, involves in its turn civic or political duties. Moral goodness cannot be limited to, still less constituted by, the cultivation of self-regarding virtues, but consists in the attempt to realise in practice that moral ideal that self-analysis has revealed to us as our ideal. From this fact arises the ground of political obligation, because the institutions of political or civic life are the concrete embodiment of moral ideas in terms of our day and generation. But, since society exists only for the proper development of Persons, we have a criterion by which to test these institutions—namely, do they, or do they not, contribute to the development of moral character in the individual citizens?
It is obvious that the final moral ideal is not realised in any body of civic institutions actually existing, but the same analysis that demonstrates this deficiency points out the direction that a true development will take.
Hence arises the conception of rights and duties that should be maintained by law, as opposed to those actually maintained; with the further consequence that it may become occasionally a moral duty to rebel against the state in the interest of the state itself—that is, in order better to subserve that end or function that constitutes the raison d'être of the state. There exists a "general will" that is a desire for a common good that cannot be easily reconciled as there is an antagonism between the "common good" and the "private good": such as: "... interest in the common good, in some of its various forms, is necessary to produce that good, and to neutralise or render useful other desires and interests". Its basis is can be conceived as coercive authority imposed upon the citizens from without or it can be seen as a necessary restriction of individual liberty in light of a social contract, but this consists in the spiritual recognition or metaphysics, on the part of the citizens, of what constitutes their true nature, some conceptions and complicating factors are elaborating questions concerning: "Will, not force, is the basis of the state.", "Citizen Rights Against the State", "Private Rights. The Right to Life and Liberty", "The Right of the State Over the Individual in War", "The Right of the State to Punish", "The Right of the State to Promote Morality ", "The Right of the State in Regard to Property", and "The Right of the State in Regard to the Family".