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 the society feeds and is fed by the character of the souls of its inhabitants:
[W]here the moral world exists . . . moral institutions are carcasses without personal morality, and personal morality apart from moral institutions is an unreality, a soul without a body (Bradley 114).
The moral individual must be willing to identify personal morality with the morality of the community, or state. Key to that is finding one's "station" in the community, w...