WJEC/Eduqas RS for A2/Yr2: Religion and Ethics (DRAFT)

WJEC / Eduqas Religious Studies for A Level Year 2 and A2 Religion and Ethics

Bradley’s essay My Station and Its Duties In looking at Bradley’s vision of ethics in My Station and its Duties , it may help us to consider the two opposing views that he wanted to leave behind (Hedonistic Utilitarianism and Kantian ethics). Two passages from English literature may help us explain Bradley’s problem and solution from a different perspective. The first is a famous prose passage written by the Metaphysical poet John Donne in the 17th century: No man is an island, Entire of itself, Every man is a piece of the continent, A part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less. As well as if a promontory were. As well as if a manor of thy friend’s Or of thine own were: (John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation 17) Although not originally meant as a poem, it expresses extremely well an aspect of Bradley’s philosophy in the essay My Station and its Duties in that it sees a human being as an essentially social creature working inter-dependently with other human beings and affecting them within this world. This is a far cry from the idea of an isolated self, suggested by Aldous Huxley, that is some kind of separate personal entity that looks on agonisingly from outside the world, and yet can still see and understand, what we all experience: We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies — all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes. (Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception ) The problem that Bradley had was that he wanted to demonstrate that Hedonistic Utilitarianism did not recognise the ‘self’ as part of the whole (as in Donne’s poem) and that it was too egotistical. At the same time, he also rejected Kant’s transcendental idealism of the ‘self’ as some kind of separate but interactive autonomous will (like Huxley’s passage). Bradley’s position in My Station and Its Duties was to demonstrate that the ‘isolated’ self was actually part of the ‘island’ of the whole social organism. Bradley wished to unite Huxley’s separated self to the empirical world of Donne. He writes: For he does not even think of his separate self; he grows with his world, his mind fills and orders itself; and when he can separate himself from that world, and know himself apart from it, then by that time his self, the object of his self- consciousness, is penetrated, infected, characterised by the existence of others. Its content implies in every fibre relations of community. Any man’s death diminishes me, Because I am involved in mankind, And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

Key quote The moral world is a world of active agents, choosing things and doing things, and projecting themselves upon their environment. (Warnock)

DRAFT

Aldous Huxley the British author

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