Bosanquet Bernard (1848–1923), British philosopher, the most systematic British absolute idealist and, with F. H. Bradley, the leading British defender of absolute idealism. Although he derived his name from Huguenot ancestors, Bosanquet was thoroughly English. Born at Altwick and educated at Harrow and Balliol College, Oxford, he was for eleven years a fellow of University College, Oxford. The death of his father in 1880 and the resulting inheritance enabled Bosanquet to leave Oxford for London and a career as a writer and social activist. While writing, he taught courses for the London Ethical Society’s Center for University Extension and donated time to the Charity Organization Society. In 1895 he married his coworker in the Charity Organization Society, Helen Dendy, who was also the translator of Christoph Sigwart’s Logic. Bosanquet was professor of moral philosophy at St. Andrews from 1903 to 1908. He gave the Gifford Lectures in 1911 and 1912. Otherwise he lived in London until his death. Bosanquet’s most comprehensive work, his two-volume Gifford Lectures, The Principle of Individuality and Value and The Value and Destiny of the Individual, covers most aspects of his philosophy. In The Principle of Individuality and Value he argues that the search for truth proceeds by eliminating contradictions in experience. (For Bosanquet a contradiction arises when there are incompatible interpretations of the same fact.) This involves making distinctions that harmonize the incompatible interpretations in a larger body of knowledge. Bosanquet thought there was no way to arrest this process short of recognizing that all human experience forms a comprehensive whole which is reality. Bosanquet called this totality ‘the Absolute.’ Just as conflicting interpretations of the same fact find harmonious places in the Absolute, so conflicting desires are also included. The Absolute thus satisfies all desires and provides Bosanquet’s standard for evaluating other objects. This is because in his view the value of an object is determined by its ability to satisfy desires. From this Bosanquet concluded that human beings, as fragments of the Absolute, acquire greater value as they realize themselves by partaking more fully in the Absolute. In The Value and Destiny of the Individual Bosanquet explained how human beings could do this. As finite, human beings face obstacles they cannot overcome; yet they desire the good (i.e., the Absolute) which for Bosanquet overcomes all obstacles and satisfies all desires. Humans can best realize a desire for the good, Bosanquet thinks, by surrendering their private desires for the sake of the good. This attitude of surrender, which Bosanquet calls the religious consciousness, relates human beings to what is permanently valuable in reality and increases their own value and satisfaction accordingly. Bosanquet’s defense of this metaphysical vision rests heavily on his first major work, Logic or the Morphology of Knowledge (1888; 2d ed., 1911). As the subtitle indicates, Bosanquet took the subject matter of Logic to be the structure of knowledge. Like Hegel, who was in many ways his inspiration, Bosanquet thought that the nature of knowledge was defined by structures repeated in different parts of knowledge. He called these structures forms of judgment and tried to show that simple judgments are dependent on increasingly complex ones and finally on an all-inclusive judgment that defines reality. For example, the simplest element of knowledge is a demonstrative judgment like ‘This is hot.’ But making such a judgment presupposes understanding the contrast between ‘this’ and ‘that’. Demonstrative judgments thus depend on comparative judgments like ‘This is hotter than that.’ Since these judgments are less dependent on other judgments, they more fully embody human knowledge. Bosanquet claimed that the series of increasingly complex judgments are not arranged in a simple linear order but develop along different branches finally uniting in disjunctive judgments that attribute to reality an exhaustive set of mutually exclusive alternatives which are themselves judgments. When one contained judgment is asserted on the basis of another, a judgment containing both is an inference. For Bosanquet inferences are mediated judgments that assert their conclusions based on grounds. When these grounds are made fully explicit in a judgment containing them, that judgment embodies the nature of inference: that one must accept the conclusion or reject the whole of knowledge. Since for Bosanquet the difference between any judgment and the reality it represents is that a judgment is composed of ideas that abstract from reality, a fully comprehensive judgment includes all aspects of reality. It is thus identical to reality. By locating all judgments within this one, Bosanquet claimed to have described the morphology of knowledge as well as to have shown that thought is identical to reality.
Bosanquet removed an objection to this identification in History of Aesthetics (1892), where he traces the development of the philosophy of the beautiful from its inception through absolute idealism. According to Plato and Aristotle beauty is found in imitations of reality, while in objective idealism it is reality in sensuous form. Drawing heavily on Kant, Bosanquet saw this process as an overcoming of the opposition between sense and reason by showing how a pleasurable feeling can partake of reason. He thought that absolute idealism explained this by showing that we experience objects as beautiful because their sensible qualities exhibit the unifying activity of reason.
Bosanquet treated the political implications of absolute idealism in his Philosophical Theory of the State (1898; 3d ed., 1920), where he argues that humans achieve their ends only in communities. According to Bosanquet, all humans rationally will their own ends. Because their ends differ from moment to moment, the ends they rationally will are those that harmonize their desires at particular moments. Similarly, because the ends of different individuals overlap and conflict, what they rationally will are ends that harmonize their desires, which are the ends of humans in communities. They are willed by the general will, the realization of which is self-rule or liberty. This provides the rational ground of political obligation, since the most comprehensive system of modern life is the state, the end of which is the realization of the best life for its citizens. See also HEGEL, IDEALISM. J.W.A.