Relationship Between the Individual & the State

This research will examine the relationship between the individual and the state as described by F.H. Bradley in Ethical Studies and the concept of living in truth in the context of the state articulated by Vaclav Havel in titled The Power of the Powerless. The research will give an account of Bradley's view of the relationship between the individual and the state and then discuss how Havel's position on the same issue responds to and criticizes that view.

Bradley posits a moral-ethical injunction whereby the individual must come to "the realization of the good will which is superior to ourselves" and allows us to achieve self-realization: the community.

It is an organism and a moral organism; and it is a conscious self-realization because only by the will of its self-conscious members can the moral organism give itself reality (Bradley 100).

Moral universality is to be found in the community of which the individual is a member, not in assertions of individuality, which Bradley regards as violations of morality. As a social being man cannot find moral sense outside human community and its institutions (Bradley 105; 111), which are by the way of themselves moral. Indeed he inherits that sense from the generations of his civilization (107) so much that "the soul within him is saturated, is filled, is qualified by . . . the universal life" (109).

The most plainly real configuration of community is the state, or organized society. Bradley says that the soul (as he calls it) of th

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reality of the world and individual experience of the world. The ideal self absorbed by the moral community "is not realized in us, in any way that we can see" (Bradley 144). We are aware of a ceaseless process, it is well I we can add progress, in which the false private self is constantly subdued but never disappears. An it never can disappear--we are never realized. The contradiction remains; and no to feel it demands something lower or something higher than a moral point of view (Bradley 144). Having cited the disconnect between the reality of imperfect community and the reality of self imperfectly integrated with it, Bradley articulates the need to balance right with responsibility (duty), both being necessary to the concept of the good and to affirmation of the moral universe, which indeed would not exist without both. Nevertheless, Bradley specifically says that the state is entitled to expect that citizens will do duty to the state even as they develop themselves individually within the protections given by the state, "for the state lives in its individuals; and . . . the individual lives in the state" (146). By extension, state good lives in individuals, and individual good lives in the state. Perhaps it is because essay

Category: Philosophy - R