Henry Sidgwick- Eye of the Universe
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at this particular moment was partly due to a need which he felt of doing some
practically useful work. What he did in giving up his Fellowship was negative,
and he wanted to do something positive. (M –)
This play of negative and positive action, or at least Sidgwick’s sense of
it, was destined to become one of the major aftereffects of his resignation
crisis, figuring time and again, in one guise or another, in his theoretical and
practical ethics. He would continue to worry about the duties incumbent
on him in his academic role, especially when it seemed that his experiments
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in ethics and intuitive theism were driving him to decidedly uncomfort-
able conclusions. And his casuistical doubts concerning hypocrisy would
influence and intertwine with those of many of his friends. He would
continue to strive to balance the active and the passive tendencies in his
life, refusing, like a good Rugbyean, to become “antipractical” even when
it was obscure in the extreme just what practicality demanded. After all,
nothing we have considered so far suggests that he had answered that most
fundamental of questions: why be moral at all? It may well be that Sidg-
wick did go further than any previous utilitarian in assimilating Kantian
considerations – positive versus negative actions, acts versus omissions –
within a broadly utilitarian framework, and that this is the reason why
critics such as Donagan have found it so hard to make sense of him. But
there was much more to him than closet Kantianism.
Truth to tell, although what follows will be much taken up with the
details of Sidgwick’s past and present philosophical reception, his philo-
sophical reception, both past and present, leaves a lot out of the picture.
The year was a singular one for Sidgwick not only because he then
made direct contact with Mill, but also because that year brought him into
an intimate friendship with Symonds, who would eventually prove to be
the most intellectually probing and emotionally troubling of all his closest
friends. Although he had known Symonds distantly for quite a few years,
he had not been part of his inner circle, of which, however, his younger
brother Arthur was a fixture. But in a letter of July , , Symonds wrote
to Dakyns: “Henry Sidgwick has been with me a week. He is numbered
among mine.”
Now Sidgwick would have to contend with a prophet of culture who was
as critical as Mill, as contemplative as Clough, and as classical as Arnold
and Jowett, but who actually had something important to say about sex.
The problem of hypocrisy now wore a new mask. With the private life of
John Addington Symonds, the public sphere would never be the same.
And neither would the Platonic revival.
But the discussion of Sidgwick and Symonds must come after discussion
of philosophical ethics and ghosts – two Sidgwickian priorities that were
more highly visible to the educated public.
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Part I. Consensus
But just as the scientific discoverer must not follow his own whims and fancies but
earnestly seek truth, so it is not the man who abandons himself to impulse, but the
man who, against mere impulse and mere convention alike, seeks and does what
is Right who will really lead mankind to the truer way, to richer and fuller and
more profoundly harmonious life. My ideal is a law infinitely constraining and
yet infinitely flexible, not prescribing perhaps for any two men the same conduct,
and yet the same law, because recognised by all as objective, and always varying
on rational and therefore general grounds, ‘the same,’ as Cicero says, ‘for you and
for me, here and at Athens, now and for ever.’
Sidgwick to Roden Noel, (M )
Or would it not be absurd to strain every nerve to attain to the utmost precision
and clarity of knowledge about other things of trifling moment and not to demand
the greatest precision for the greatest matters?
Plato, Republic, E (the epigraph to The Methods of Ethics)
Mr. Henry Sidgwick has recently published a book which, apart from its intrinsic
value, is an interesting display of rare intellectual virtues. He almost seems to
illustrate a paradox which would be after his own heart, that a man may be too
reasonable.
Leslie Stephen, “Sidgwick’s Methods of Ethics”
I. A Great Work
Clearly, Sidgwick counted the problems of ethics, especially the problem
of egoistic self-regard, among the “deepest problems of human life.” And
to his dismay, what his years of storm and stress had brought home to
him was not only the intractability of the theological questions he had set
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himself, but also, relatedly, the potential insolubility of the fundamental
problems of ethics. “Self-sacrifice” was the deepest of deep problems. Was
his utilitarian conscience too demanding?
As we have seen, it had been a most difficult period, during which his
private, Apostolic soul searching had ultimately led to a very public en-
gagement with the problem of saying what one meant and backing it up
with deeds – in effect, a self-sacrificing attempt to inject more conversa-
tional Socratic candor into the formulas of public discourse. Educational
institutions, potentially so important for social change, ought not to require
systematic dishonesty, rendering public morality a contemptible sham in
the eyes of earnest and intelligent youth. Again, laxness, not philosophy,
was the corrupting force, and self-sacrifice, not self-perfection, was the
answer.
But this was modern England, not ancient Athens. In so many ways,
Sidgwick was obviously a child of his times, obsessed with the crisis of
religious faith and the correlative problem of hypocrisy. From Maurice
and Clough to Stephen and Sidgwick, the spirit of the age had been
inexorably working toward the day of Darwin and doubt, of democracy
and – it was feared – decadence. If Sidgwick struggled harder and thought
more critically than most, he was nonetheless within the current that
would in due course be producing Nietzschean reverberations throughout
the modernist worldview. And indeed, many have wondered just how
positive Sidgwick’s views h
ad become, following his turbulent decade.
True, he had acted with resolve and straightforwardness in resigning his
position. But this had come after years of experimentalizing and hesitation,
when he had been more inclined to say: “I sometimes think again of
resigning. I am so bankrupt of most things men desire, I would at least
have a sort of savings bank pittance of honesty. But perhaps this very
impulse is only another form of Protean vacillation and purposelessness.”
(M ) And besides, his action admittedly sprang from a religious and
ethical stance that was largely agnostic, a suspension of final judgment
until the process of inquiry had been carried much further than he had
been able to carry it. He did, to be sure, want to show that doubt did
not necessitate a falling off of moral standards. And, as Chadwick has
put it, he
was also sure that in a land where religion and morality were inseparable, the
decline of the one was certain to lead to the decline of the other. He would never
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attack religion lest he injure the society in which he lived. It even became a delicate question of conscience for him how far it could be right to speak out; he must say
what he thought if he were asked, and yet he must not trample upon the scruples
of others.
But in none of this is there a demonstration that the best account of
morality is utilitarianism and that there are conclusive reasons for acting
according to its dictates.
Consequently, if one turns to The Methods of Ethics hoping to find
the big answers to the big questions, one will probably come away dis-
appointed. Better to expect from Sidgwick only that judiciousness that
his “true” self could wrest from his highly Socratic, skeptical intellect.
To be sure, this skepticism is not merely critical or destructive, much less
Cartesian, but more of a pervasive sense of fallibilism, admitting both the
limitations of human knowledge and the demands of practical action. Cu-
riously enough, this turn of mind was very happily captured in Sidgwick’s
presidential address to the Economic Section of the British Association,
in :
Really, in this as in other departments, my tendency is to scepticism, but scepticism of a humble, empirical, and more or less hopeful kind. I do not argue, or even think, that nothing is known, still less that nothing can be known by the received methods,
but that of what is most important to know we, as yet, know much less than most
people suppose. (CWC)
Or, as he would often put it, he had a terrific faith in “Things in General,”
even if not much faith in any belief in particular. This was a very Socratic
faith indeed, by his very own account. But it was, to Sidgwick’s mind,
more of a “working philosophy” than a “fighting faith.”
If one turns to the Methods in this spirit, one can hardly come away dis-
appointed, though it is perhaps by now evident that for his part, Sidgwick
threw himself into the work with higher expectations. His wild mood
swings during the sixties, when he would soar high and then sink low, re-
flected the vastness of the task he had set himself. As he wrote to Dakyns,
in : “I have kept silence even from
good words because I have found
out nothing yet, either or . I seem on the verge ever
of discovering the secret of life, but perhaps I am like the rustic of Horace
and the turbid stream of doubt & debate flows & will flow.” (M ) One
might say that he was reduced to “scepticism of a humble, empirical, and
more or less hopeful kind,” after having given himself over to a much
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grander hope – one that would periodically return to haunt him in later
life, even after he had cultivated a more becoming sense of patience. The
epigraph from Plato is telling, as is the fact that he had originally planned
to use a second epigraph, drawn from Descartes: “Ils élevent fort haut la
vertu, mais ils n’enseignent pas assez à la connaˆıtre” (CWC).
This pairing of Plato and Descartes, the two finest examples of what
Dewey termed the philosophical quest for certainty, ought to suggest the
degree of ambition that the younger Sidgwick brought to the “deepest
problems,” in ethics as in theology. Perhaps, too, it was frustrated ambition
that led him to retain the more moderate passage from Plato while dropping
the one from Descartes. Sidgwick, at least, was only too ready to pronounce
his work a failure. In a famous story, related to F. H. Hayward by Oscar
Browning, Browning told of his encounter with Sidgwick shortly after he
had completed the Methods; pointing to his manuscript, Sidgwick sadly
observed: “I have long wished and intended to write a work on Ethics.
Now it is written. I have adhered to a plan I laid out for myself; its first
word was to be ‘Ethics,’ its last word ‘Failure.’ ” As Hayward comments,
the “word ‘Failure’ disappeared from the second and succeeding editions,
but I doubt whether Sidgwick ever acquired a faith in the possibility of a
perfectly satisfactory ethical system.”
But this sense of failure was only the inevitable result of having aimed
at the stars. One can scarcely resist the thought that he considered himself
on a mission from Mill, and as a potential heir to Mill’s role. How odd
that the Methods should finally see the light just after Mill’s death. Of the latter, Sidgwick had written to Charles Henry Pearson, in a letter dated
May , :
I cannot go on – Mill is dead! – I wonder if this news will have affected you at all as it does me. . . . ‘Vive le roi’ – but I do not know who it is to be: most of my friends say Herbert Spencer – if so I am a rebel. At Oxford I hear much of Hegelians, but
they have not made up their minds to say anything yet.
Sidgwick also had some instructive reflections on the spirit of the age,
thoughts that, in more guarded form, he also put into a short obituary
notice of Mill. He recognized that “Mill’s prestige has been declining
lately: partly from the cause to which most people attribute it – the public
exhibition of his Radicalism, but partly to the natural termination of his
philosophical reign, which was of the kind to be naturally early and brief.”
At Oxford, the reaction was “going too far,” but still, the change had
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come: “from –�
�� or thereabouts he ruled England in the region of
thought as very few men ever did: I do not expect to see anything like it
again.” Still, one detects in such remarks certain aspirations, a sense that
the reaction must be kept from going too far, though also that this cause
may be ill served by public exhibitions of one’s radicalism. Among the
academic liberals, Sidgwick was a likely claimant to the Millian mantle,
though such rivals as Leslie Stephen – a mere littérateur, according to
Sidgwick – might have disputed this. But of course, the Book had yet to
appear, and as Jowett had once nastily observed, “One man is as good as
another until he has written a book.”
Certainly, as we have seen, Sidgwick’s book was long in the making.
His interest in utilitarianism – encompassing ethics, politics, and political
economy – dated back to his Apostolic days. The record of his ethical
doubts is as long as the record of his theological ones, with which it was
intertwined. His diary and commonplace book are replete with accounts
of his struggle to find in Mill and Comte the culmination of the Chris-
tian moral vision, and his correspondence from the sixties suggests that
however powerfully he was distracted by his forays into historical biblical
criticism or by the urgency of sorting out his duty, the questions of ethics
were at no point absent from his mind. Much as he vacillated, and much as
he was intermittently smitten with the ancient Greeks or with the “Selfish
Philosophy,” the trend of his thought was clear enough – toward altruism
and self-sacrifice.
Thus, in , he informs Dakyns that he is “revolving a Theory of
Ethics” and that he thinks he sees “a reconciliation between the moral sense
and utilitarian theories” (M ). He also starts telling people, only half-
facetiously, that he is “engaged on a Great Work,” though he confesses to
Dakyns that he has not “advanced much” in his “Reconciliation of Ethical
Systems.” Not surprisingly, the big stumbling block is egoistic self-regard,
or, on the other side, how to justify self-sacrifice. He complains that “Bain
is the only thoroughly honest Utilitarian philosopher I know, and he allows
self-sacrifice and to constitute a ‘glorious paradox,’ whereas