Thomas Hill Green (7 April 183626 March 1882), known as T. H. Green, was an English philosopher, political radical and temperance reformer, and a member of the British idealism movement. Like all the British idealists, Green was influenced by the metaphysical historicism of G. W. F. Hegel. He was one of the thinkers behind the philosophy of social liberalism.
Life
Green was born on 7 April 1836 at Birkin, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England, where his father was rector. On his paternal side, he was descended from Oliver Cromwell. His education was conducted entirely at home until, at the age of 14, he entered Rugby, where he remained for five years.
In 1855, he became an undergraduate member of Balliol College, Oxford, and was elected fellow in 1860. He began a life of teaching (mainly philosophical) in the university—first as college tutor, and later, from 1878 until his death, as Whyte's Professor of Moral Philosophy. and the Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation, which contain the whole of his positive constructive teaching. These works were not published until after his death, but Green's views were previously known indirectly through the Introduction to the standard edition of David Hume's works by Green and T. H. Grose, fellow of Queen's College, in which the doctrine of the "English" or "empirical" philosophy was exhaustively examined.
In 1871 he married Charlotte Byron Symonds who was known as a promoter of women's education. In 1879, Green sat on the committee formed to create an Oxford women's college "in which no distinction will be made between students on the ground of their belonging to different religious denominations." Green and his wife's work resulted in the founding of Somerville Hall (later Somerville College). At this time, he was also lecturing on religion, epistemology, ethics, and political philosophy.
Most of his major works were published posthumously, including his lay sermons on Faith and The Witness of God, the essay "On the Different Senses of 'Freedom' as Applied to Will and the Moral Progress of Man", Prolegomena to Ethics, Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation, and the "Lecture on Liberal Legislation and Freedom of Contract".
Green died of blood poisoning at the age of 45 on 26 March 1882. In addition to friends from his academic life, approximately 2,000 local townspeople attended his funeral.
He helped to found the City of Oxford High School for Boys.
Thought
Hume's empiricism and biological evolution (including Herbert Spencer) were chief features in English thought during the third quarter of the 19th century. Green represents primarily the reaction against such doctrines. Green argued that when these doctrines were carried to their logical conclusion, they not only "rendered all philosophy futile", but were fatal to practical life. By reducing the human mind to a series of unrelated atomic sensations, these related teachings destroyed the possibility of knowledge, he argued.
Green further objected that such empiricists represented a person as a "being who is simply the result of natural forces", and thereby made conduct, or any theory of conduct, meaningless; for life in any human, intelligible sense implies a personal self that (1) knows what to do, and (2) has power to do it. Green was thus driven, not theoretically, but as a practical necessity, to raise again the whole question of humankind in relation to nature. When (he held) we have discovered what a person in themselves are, and what their relation to their environment is, we shall then know their function—what they are fitted to do. In the light of this knowledge, we shall be able to formulate the moral code, which, in turn, will serve as a criterion of actual civic and social institutions. These form, naturally and necessarily, the objective expression of moral ideas, and it is in some civic or social whole that the moral ideal must finally take concrete shape.
Green stressed the need for specific solutions to be tailored to fit specific problems. He stressed that there are no eternal solutions, no timeless division of responsibilities between national and local governmental units. The distribution of responsibilities should be guided by the imperative to enable as many individuals as possible to exercise their conscientious wills in particular contingent circumstances, as only in this way was it possible to foster individual self-realisation in the long-run. Deciding on the distribution of responsibilities was more a matter for practical politics than for ethical or political philosophy. Experience may show that the local and municipal levels are unable to control the harmful influences of, say, the brewery industry. When it did show this, the national state should take responsibility for this area of public policy.
Green argued that the ultimate power to decide on the allocation of such tasks should rest with the national state (in Britain, for instance, embodied in Parliament). The national state itself is legitimate for Green to the extent that it upholds a system of rights and obligations that is most likely to foster individual self-realisation. Yet, the most appropriate structure of this system is determined neither by purely political calculation nor by philosophical speculation. It is more accurate to say that it arose from the underlying conceptual and normative structure of one's particular society.
Influence of Green's thought
Green's teaching was, directly and indirectly, the most potent philosophical influence in England during the last quarter of the 19th century, while his enthusiasm for a common citizenship, and his personal example in practical municipal life, inspired much of the effort made in the years succeeding his death to bring the universities more into touch with the people, and to break down the rigour of class distinctions.
Works and commentary
Green's most important treatise—the Prolegomena to Ethics, practically complete in manuscript at his death—was published in the year following, under the editorship of A. C. Bradley (4th ed., 1899). Shortly afterwards, R. L. Nettleship's standard edition of his Works (exclusive of the Prolegomena) appeared in three volumes: