Greengarten on Green

I.M. Greengarten's overview of the philosophy of Thomas Hill-Green

Thomas Hill-Green.

Green’s starting point is to appeal to our conscious experience of being. Unlike the empiricists, who claim that our conscious experience derives from our perception of material things, Green follows the Kantian line in suggesting that it is our thought which structures reality. Green goes further than Kant (making him an “absolute idealist”) in asserting no distinction between the substance of mind and the substance of matter. It makes no sense to talk of there “being” any matter without there also being a conscious subject to experience it. We only know objects in their relation to ourselves and other objects, and these relations are essential to existence; “abstract the many relations from the one thing and there is nothing.” (P.E, sec. 28). Objects, conscious subjects, and the relations between them all comprise a system which other idealists (such as A. C. Bradley and Hegel) called “the absolute”.

Green avoids charges of solipsism by appealing to the seemingly permanent order of nature around us. This he evokes from the shared regularity of our experiences, for example in our ability to predict things in a scientific fashion. But if everything that exists is the object of some conscious subject, what is the subject of this permanent natural order? While our individual conscience validates reality in the here and now, for there to be a common reality in which we all partake, Green concludes there has to be an eternal consciousness. Since it is a conscious being like us, the eternal consciousness has a rational mind. And while it exists atemporally and aspacially, it is not some material entity existing outside of time or space; these categories being mere relationships in the absolute, the eternal consciousness is, quite literally, apart of everyone and everything.

From this Green develops his moral philosophy. Being as we are finite creatures, we are constrained physically and so seek to realise our animal desires, which are necessarily selfish and short-sighted. But the eternal consciousness, not bound by our fleshy shortcomings, has a kind of perfect knowledge of everything. And since it is apart of our being man is, in some limited sense, capable of partaking in this perfect knowledge. The moralisation of man involves the reproduction of the eternal consciousness in him by means of his reason. This process never completes, owing to our spatio-temporal limitations, but it is possible. Moral progress therefore consists in our always becoming the eternal consciousness. The true good consists in our orienting our means towards the end of becoming the eternal consciousness. From the true good we get the basis of Green’s political thought.

While it’s tempting to identify Green’s eternal consciousness with the Christian God, his thinking represents a serious break with Christian theology. He rejects Nicenian belief in the divine substance (ousia) of the Godhead, insisting that Jesus was an ordinary person who attained moral perfection by the total reproduction in himself of the eternal consciousness. This means that man can, quite literally, become God. Regardless of this break with orthodoxy, Green wrote a lot on theology, and the impact of Christianity on his thought must have been considerable. Greengarten unfortunately drops the ball here, assuring us it doesn’t impact on the presentation of his political philosophy. But as we’ll see, his assault on Green’s political philosophy really amounts to an assault on how we obtain moral knowledge, which is a matter of man's spiritual life and not his political life.

Equipped with the notion of moral progress, Green sets about examining the state. The state is a ratification of those social relationships existing prior in families and communities. It is a practical means of attaining the true good by securing in each people those rights necessary for them to have the means of attaining the true good, however that may be done, according to our individual capacities. Because the true good involves the reproduction in us of the eternal consciousness that inhabits all of us, the true good is therefore a common good. Green spends a lot of time trying to attack the liberal fixation on personal and private goods. While other liberal theorists, such as Locke, saw the state as guarantor of those God-given individual rights preceding society, Green envisaged them as purely social constructs, contingent on the historical conditions of communities, established and dissolved as necessary for the attainment of the true good. This means no one particular system is necessary to the attainment of the true good, though Green defends democracy as the best among all possible options in its ability to navigate disagreement and correct itself—Churchill’s saying about the “least worst form of government” comes to mind.

Despite his many disagreements up to this point with classic liberal philosophy, Green starts hitting many of the same conclusions. He is deeply cautious about political disobedience—so long as peaceful, democratic means of change are available. This should always be favoured, no matter how slow. The state, as an instrument of the common good, ranging over more than mere personal interest, and persisting temporally before and after the individual with his limited perspective, is not something to be taken for granted. Only when its function as an instrument of the common good is perverted beyond redemption can its violent rejection be justified. Even in the case of slavery—which Green thoroughly condemns—peaceful transition is better than revolution.

Greengarten attacks Green on this point, but the criticism doesn't land. If we reflect on the likes of the abolitionist movement, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King Jr., we recognise their greatness came from their peaceful methods which succeeded in lifting the oppressed into far better circumstances than, say, the Haiti slave uprising. While Greengarten’s zeal in freeing the slaves might be admired, it is easy to say two hundred years after the fact, and he never explains what Green actually got wrong—whether there are circumstances in which political violence is justified, and to what extent this was justified with slavery.

Green also agrees in conclusion with the liberals on how the economy is to be organised: free markets for all! This is based on his understanding of property, which he sees not as the acquisition of goods for supplying pleasures and means, but as an expression of man’s moral dimension—his potential self to be realised in the eternal consciousness—as opposed to his animal urges. The appropriation of goods is not about satisfying the desire for material pleasures, as the liberals had it, but recognising and securing for one’s self the means of their self-actualisation. And insofar as political and economic life is oriented towards the true good, the exercise of personal property rights is a common good, because the personal good is aligned with the common good. While Green accepts that some degree of inequality is inevitable (not just in the proceedings of a capitalist economy, but also in our differing individual capacities), he does not see this as a problem if everyone can seek the true good and recognise their own capacities. The economic ideal of society therefore lies in the flourishing of what Marx called the petit bourgeoisie: small property owners, largely self-sufficient, trading, producing, and consuming in accordance with the common good. But whereas Marx recognised a distinction between capitalist and proletariat in their relation to the means of production (owning the means vs. selling their labour), Green believed the essential distinction was one of consciousness. The wretched, who sell their labour for “starvation wages”, end up so because of their degraded rational character. They toil in a general state of ignorance only for the attainment of animal desires which sustain their body, but do not help them realise the eternal consciousness.

To alleviate this the state has a role to play via remedial legislation. This is Green’s major contribution to “liberal democratic” thought. But he is very clear that the state cannot realise the true good for man, it can only furnish him with the tools he needs to do this himself, just as Bob Marley urged us to “emancipate yourselves from mental slavery", since "none but ourselves can free our mind.” Green therefore opposes charity (and presumably welfare), but supports temperance because of alcohol’s ability to rob men of their sense of responsibility and moral freedom. While he recognised this as an affront to personal freedom, he saw alcoholism as a greater threat to the more important moral freedom of the working class; until their self-emancipation, such laws could be justified. Though scathing of the mindset of poverty (which he saw as causing material deprivation), he also saw class-conflict as exacerbating the matter. This class-conflict not only played out in bottom-up resentment, but also top-down arrogance, but could be gradually dissolved by schools that integrated students across the social divide, rather than parallel to it. As capitalist mixed with proletariat, the mindset and habits of morally free and dutiful class would flourish in a one-consciousness society oriented towards the true good.

It’s at this point Greengarten launches his main anaemic attack: Green saw no necessary connection between the “market morality” of capitalism and the rest of society, and failed to understand how the social conditions of someone can determine their mindset. Green saw man’s animal nature—the vulgar, fallen state of the working class—as merely a product of man’s being a sentient human creature and nothing more. The bulk of this argument merely pathologises Green, characterising his ideas as a mere post-hoc rationalisation of the prevailing economic forces of his time, without ever really engaging with his philosophy.

The more substantive criticisms comes by way of C. B. MacPherson. MacPherson highlights Green’s conception of man’s animal nature as tending to consume endlessly, checked only by the application of our reason to orient our desires toward the true good. Green also rejected state control of the economy. Then, MacPherson argues, some men, in the execution of their own capacities as manifest in the attainment of property, owing to historical exigencies that produced their current mindset, will succeed in appropriating all available private property to the exclusion of others, who therefore will lack the means to moralise themselves.

This is a justified criticism of Green as Greengarten presents him, but it is not related to his political philosophy. Much of Green’s time is spent focusing on how the working class is to be moralised, but almost none on how the capitalist class is to be moralised—perhaps his real deficiency was in thinking they would be moralised automatically on the attainment of property, or that the attainment of property was necessarily the consequence of a moral effort. But the issue McPherson presents is not about recognising the societal instruments used for allowing men to realise the true good—this being the proper role of state. It is about their just application, a just economy being non-competitive and all-inclusive, as both producers and consumers. The fault is not a political failing in Green’s eyes, but a moral failing, so it cannot be an error in his political philosophy. This category error is inadvertently reinforced whenever Greengarten insists (despite it making no sense) that man’s animal vs. moral nature is a hard dualism, like that of matter vs. mind. The use of property without robbing other men of that ability is an exercise of man’s moral nature to become the eternal consciousness. This exercise, being of his moral nature and not his animal nature, is not within the sphere of state, but the sphere of church and school (which Green did not want to socialise and which the church usually ran). So Green’s solution to the problem of practical exclusion would not be found in the political sphere where McPherson and Greengarten are looking for it, as this would entail the state moralising men on their behalf, which Green is adamant must be done by the individual. Greengarten himself admits that what the state is to political society and capitalism to economic society, the true good and Christianity are to moral and religious society (88). And the church, much more powerful and instrumental in Green’s time, is surely the instrument to man’s socialisation into a moral order that does not appropriate to the exclusion of others. It is therefore not fair of Greengarten to ignore Green’s religious writings while attacking his political writings, when the state is not responsibility for the function he finds missing in the political sphere.

Yet even granting the religious sphere may not be practically capable of solving these issues, it’s not clear that Green wouldn’t attenuate the economic order so as to discourage effective exclusion. Green is not dogmatic about the organisation of political and economic society. He could well have supported a more active role by the state in economic affairs without full central planning, which is exactly what liberal democratic societies did. There is no reason to assume Green would fundamentally oppose this, just as he does not fundamentally oppose labour laws and temperance despite their intrusions into personal freedom. What matters is the wider vision of the common good, to be found in the personal recognition of the eternal consciousness in everyone. Phrased in these terms, Greengarten’s criticisms are revealed to be less of a perfect takedown and more a case of smug hindsight.