Henry Sidgwick- Eye of the Universe
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Comte and all practical Utilitarians exalt the same sentiments into the
supreme Rule of life” (M –). Thus he writes, in a letter forecasting
much of what was to come:
You know I want intuitions for Morality; at least one (of Love) is required to
supplement the utilitarian morality, and I do not see why, if we are to have one, we
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may not have others. I have worked away vigorously at the selfish morality, but I
cannot persuade myself, except by trusting intuition, that Christian self-sacrifice
is really a happier life than classical insouciance. . . . That is, the question seems to me an open one. The effort to attain the Christian ideal may be a life-long
painful struggle; and therefore, though I may believe this ideal when realised
productive of greater happiness, yet individually (if it is not a question of life or death) my laxness would induce me to prefer a lower, more attainable Goethean
ideal. Intuitions turn the scale. I shall probably fall away from Mill and Co. for a
phase. (M )
By , Sidgwick’s Great Work is tentatively entitled “Eudaemonism
Restated,” but it is causing him no end of problems. Haunted by his
Mauricean conscience, he writes: “I will hope for any amount of religious
and moral development, but I will not stir a finger to compress the world
into a system, and it does not at present seem as if it was going to harmonize
itself without compression” (M ). Soon he is calling for the experiments
in ethics and intuitive theism – often of a highly personal nature – that
the world must fall back on, and even avowing that “life is more than any
study. . . . Every soul has a right to live; let das Individum ‘get its sop and hold its noise’; you see, I believe that enlightened egoism will always put a
limit to itself.” (M ) In November of , he writes to Dakyns: “The
hard shell of Epicureanism (in the best sense, I hope) has grown round me.
I feel sometimes as if it were an extraneous adjunct – but I could not live
without it now probably. I believe in Selfish Ethics; and politics founded
on self-interest well-understood – and more and more I believe in nothing
else.” (CWC) But he does not believe it long.
In February of , he reads a paper to the Grote Club – the faculty
discussion group organized around the person of John Grote, Maurice’s
immediate predecessor as Knightbridge Professor – in which he sketches
out his division of ethical methods. According to the notes of fellow Grote
Club member Alfred Marshall,
S read a long & general sketch of the various systems of morality. I. Absolute
right II Make yourself noble III Make yourself happy IV Increase the general
happiness. In the course of it he committed himself to the statement that without
appreciating the effect of our action on the happiness of ourselves or of others we
could have no idea of right & wrong.
Other notes from various of these meetings report how Sidgwick identified
himself as a utilitarian, fought to get Bentham and Mill included in the
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curriculum, and attacked Whewell’s “dogmatism & freespokenness” –
that is, the way in which he would “put down whatever came into his head
without troubling himself to connect it with what came before or give
reasons first.”
Such remarks are more instructive than one would initially suspect. An
excellent way to approach the Methods is by reading it, as Schneewind
has done, in the light of the great conflicts between Mill, the roman-
ticized utilitarian, and Whewell, the intuitionist defender of orthodoxy
whom Mill himself singled out as representing just about everything that
utilitarianism should oppose. Bring to this Sidgwick’s anxieties about self-
sacrifice and the varieties of egoism – including the classical Greek variant,
“make yourself noble” – and one has the main conflicting elements that
Sidgwick struggled to harmonize in the Methods. In fact, for the rest of
his life, through the five (and a half ) editions of the book that he com-
pleted, Sidgwick would be rethinking his short list of the going “methods,”
mainly by showing how some new contender – say, Idealism – could be
assimilated to his architectonic. The Methods represented not only a rear-
guard defense of the Millian legacy against the old intuitionist opponents,
but also some preemptive maneuvers against the emerging Idealist and
evolutionist perspectives.
On this score, it is also important to reiterate that, great as the influence
of Mill was on both Sidgwick’s times and Sidgwick, the disciple had always
harbored certain misgivings about the master. This was true from the
very start. Again, as the “Autobiographical Fragment” records, even when
Sidgwick, the newly minted Fellow, began the “more or less systematic
study of philosophy, in the form of a study of J. S. Mill’s works,” he was
aware that
the nature of his philosophy – the attitude it took up towards the fundamental
questions as to the nature of man and his relation to God and the universe –
was not such as to encourage me to expect from philosophy decisive positive
answers to these questions, and I was by no means then disposed to acquiesce in
negative or agnostic answers. In fact I had not in any way broken with the orthodox
Christianity in which I had been brought up, though I had become sceptical with
regard to many of its conclusions, and generally with regard to its methods of
proof. (M )
Hence, of course, the years of storm and stress, biblical criticism, and so
forth. When Sidgwick joined in founding the (short-lived) Free Christian
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Union, in June of , the express object of the society was to recog-
nize how Christians “in vain pursuit of Orthodoxy, have parted into rival
Churches, and lost the bond of common work and love” and to invite
“to common action all who deem men responsible, not for the attainment
of Divine truth, but only for the serious search for it,” relying “for the
religious improvement of human life, on filial Piety and brotherly Charity,
with or without more particular agreement in matters of doctrinal theol-
ogy” (M ).
On this count, the master, it must be said, would also have had serious
misgivings about the disciple. Ho
wever much Sidgwick’s evolution was in
the direction of Millian agnostic hope, and however much he appreciated
Mill’s guarded respect for the religious impulse, he was always more trou-
bled than Mill by certain possibilities for the “religion of the future.” In
his brilliant essays on “The Utility of Religion” and “Theism,” Mill had
poured buckets of cold water on the idea that religion as such, as opposed
to early education and public opinion generally, plays anything like the
key social role that many (figures such as Sidgwick) were apt to attribute
to it. Mill even went so far as to suggest that it was
not only possible but probable, that in a higher, and, above all, a happier condition of human life, not annihilation but immortality may be the burdensome idea; and
that human nature, though pleased with the present, and by no means impatient
to quit it, would find comfort and not sadness in the thought that it is not chained
through eternity to a conscious existence which it cannot be assured that it will
always wish to preserve.
This line of criticism – which Sidgwick found nearly impossible to as-
similate, try as he might – will be developed more fully in connection
with Sidgwick’s parapsychology and the account of Symonds, who shared
Mill’s view, but it is an important qualification to keep in mind when
thinking of Sidgwick as a Millian.
Still, by way of anticipation, it should be said that Sidgwick was as
much fascinated with the supposed “religion of the future” as he was
frightened by it, and in his struggles with his true self versus his Millian
conscience one finds a thousand intimations of what was to come, with
Symonds and Carpenter, Russell and Moore, and Bloomsbury. For be-
tween Mill, Maurice, and the Apostles, Sidgwick had learned the ethical
and epistemological significance of intimate friendship – the school of
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sympathy that was to take the place of orthodox Christianity even if the-
ism were vindicated, but especially if it were not. Indeed, friendship was
the great sustaining element, philosophically and personally, as he strug-
gled to finish the Methods. In a letter of March , , he wrote to Dakyns:
“I feel often as unrelated and unadapted to my universe as man can feel:
except on the one side of friendship: and there, in my deepest gloom
all seems strangely good: and you among the best. . . . But ‘golden news’
expect none unless I light perchance on the Secret of the Universe, in
which case I will let you know.” (M ) And in a most moving bit of
introspection, concerning the painful period of December , when,
among other calamities, his close friend Cowell had died, Sidgwick wrote
to Oscar Browning: “How such a loss makes the days seem irrevoca-
ble when we made friendships without knowing what they were worth.
Well, if life teaches one that it is some compensation for other losses.”
(M )
Thought and feeling, the universal and the particular, humanity in gen-
eral and one’s own circle of attachments, self-sacrifice and self-perfection –
these were apparent conflicts that fueled the search for reconciliation and
unity, generative tensions that held out prospects for a future in which
comradeship would, at least to some degree, fill the void left by orthodox
religion. The years of storm and stress were also years of intense fellowship
that would put an Apostolic stamp on the Methods that even Sidgwick’s
dry judicious style could not cover up. Needless to say, reconciliation was
not always forthcoming, and the esoteric pursuit of truth often sat un-
easily with the real world of politics, the more so given how Sidgwick
always managed to turn supposedly tough-minded utilitarian calculation
into studied reflectiveness, uncertain judgment, and agnosticism.
To be sure, as we have seen, Sidgwick was emphatic in claiming that
his “first adhesion to a definite Ethical system was to the utilitarianism of
Mill.” And he even remarked that one of the things he found so attractive
about this was the relief it afforded him from the moral rules – “exter-
nal and arbitrary” – that he had been raised upon, which were given a
philosophical gloss in Whewell’s Elements of Morality, the undergraduate
text that left him with the abiding impression that “[i]ntuitional moralists
were hopelessly loose (as compared to mathematicians) in their definitions
and axioms” (ME xvii). Yet what Mill’s ethics did not help him with was
the big problem that his Christian inheritance had so impressed upon
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him: self-sacrifice. Thus, in a key statement, he writes:
The two elements of Mill’s view which I am accustomed to distinguish as Psy-
chological Hedonism [that each man does seek his own Happiness] and Ethical
Hedonism [that each man ought to seek the general Happiness] both attracted
me, and I did not at first perceive their incoherence.
Psychological Hedonism – the law of universal pleasure-seeking – attracted me
by its frank naturalness. Ethical Hedonism, as expounded by Mill, was morally
inspiring by its dictate of readiness for absolute self-sacrifice. They appealed to
different elements of my nature, but they brought these into apparent harmony:
they both used the same words “pleasure,” “happiness,” and the persuasiveness of
Mill’s exposition veiled for a time the profound discrepancy between the natural
end of action – private happiness, and the end of duty – general happiness. Or if
a doubt assailed me as to the coincidence of private and general happiness, I was
inclined to hold that it ought to be cast to the winds by a generous resolution.
But a sense grew upon me that this method of dealing with the conflict be-
tween Interest and Duty, though perhaps proper for practice could not be final for
philosophy. For practical men who do not philosophise, the maxim of subordinat-
ing self-interest, as commonly conceived, to “altruistic” impulses and sentiments
which they feel to be higher and nobler is, I doubt not, a commendable maxim;
but it is surely the business of Ethical Philosophy to find and make explicit the
rational ground of such action.
I therefore set myself to examine methodically the relation of Interest and
Duty. This involved a careful study of Egoistic Method, to get the relation of
Interest and Duty clear. Let us suppose that my own Interest is paramount. What
really is my Interest, how far can acts conducive to it be known, how far does
the result correspond with Duty (or Wellbeing of Mankind)? This investigation
led me to feel
very strongly this opposition, rather than that which Mill and the earlier Utilitarians felt between so-called Intuitions or Moral Sense Perceptions,
and Hedonism, whether Epicurean or Utilitarian. Hence the arrangement of my
book – ii., iii., iv. [Book ii. Egoism, Book iii. Intuitionism, Book iv. Utilitarianism].
(ME xvi–xvii)
This investigation led Sidgwick to conclude that “no complete solu-
tion of the conflict between my happiness and the general happiness was
possible on the basis of mundane experience,” that the problem of the
“moral choice of the general happiness or acquiescence in self-interest as
ultimate” was therefore real and that solving it was a “practical necessity,”
and, despite his aversion to Whewell, that there was need of “a fundamental
ethical intuition,” since the utilitarian method could not “be made coher-
ent and harmonious without this fundamental intuition” (ME xvii–xix).
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That is, he rejected the claim, associated with psychological hedonism,
that as a matter of fact people invariably do pursue their own individual
pleasure, but he nonetheless appreciated the need to supply a rational justi-
fication for self-sacrifice or disinterested action generally. John Skorupski
has described at length just how Sidgwick parted company with both Mill
and Green when it came to the claim that a desired object is always desired
“under the idea that it will contribute to one’s good,” and how expert he
was at insinuating doubt that the good of the individual part and that of
the societal whole were always coincident. But it is also important to
bear in mind just how sensitive Sidgwick was to the charge that utilitar-
ianism lacked justificatory grounds and metaphysical weight – Green’s
point of departure in seeking a new, Idealist ground for ethics in the face
of religious crisis.
With this statement about the need for a fundamental intuition, one
witnesses, as it were, both the birth and the death of the Methods: the
conflict between the happiness of the individual and the happiness of
society – the “dualism of practical reason,” as Sidgwick called it – both