by Bart Schultz
various points. See Skorupski, “Desire and Will in Sidgwick and Green,” e.g.,
p. .
. Intriguingly, some similar thoughts turn up in a very early essay, “On Foundations of Ethics,” by Sidgwick’s then-student Bertrand Russell, which puzzles over how
Green could possibly think “that self–sacrifice is a good in itself.” This essay is
included in The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, vol. , ed. K. Blackwell et al.
(London: George Allen and Unwin, ), pp. –; this volume also includes
the papers that Russell wrote for Sidgwick and records many of Sidgwick’s pro-
fessorial comments on his student’s work. A particularly revealing one concerns a
paper on “The Ethical Bearings of Psychogony” in which Russell had “pointed out
the very serious advantages of Suttee,” eliciting Sidgwick’s comment, “Savages
can overeat themselves without being the worse for it. Don’t want to take re-
sponsibility for all your illustrations. Morality of civilized societies not wholly
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due to natural selection.” (p. ) Sidgwick knew Russell personally not only
from tutorials, but also from their membership in the Ethical Club and Sidgwick’s
continuing participation in the Apostles.
. As the Memoir makes patent, Sidgwick really slaved to come to terms with Green’s views, though he always found himself unable to see how they could hang together:
“I have been busy lately reviewing Green’s posthumous book – Prolegomena to
Ethics. I read it twice over carefully: the first time much impressed with its ethical force and persuasiveness: the second time unable to resist the conviction that my
intellect could not put it together into a coherent whole – in fact, that it would not do – and yet that probably it was better that young men should be believers in it than in anything I can teach them. This is a conviction adapted to make a Professor cynical.” (M ) That Sidgwick did have a touch of cynicism is perhaps suggested
by the famous story of how, upon reading McTaggart’s fellowship dissertation,
he said to his fellow examiners: “I can see that this is nonsense, but is it the right kind of nonsense? (see Blanshard, Four Reasonable Men, p. ). McTaggart, for his part, produced one of the best, most sensitive, short overviews of Sidgwick’s
life and work ever penned – “The Ethics of Henry Sidgwick,” Quarterly Review
ccv (October ), pp. – – in which he cogently observed that Sidgwick
“was above all things a student.”
. Moore, in his famous “The Refutation of Idealism,” had argued that “the most
striking results both of Idealism and of Agnosticism are only obtained by identi-
fying blue with the sensation of blue: that esse is held to be percipi, solely because what is experienced is held to be identical with the experience of it.” In G. E. Moore: Selected Writings, ed. T. Baldwin (London: Routledge, ), p. .
. Worth stressing in this connection is the way in which many of Noel’s letters to
Sidgwick from the s make it clear that Sidgwick was arguing for the realist
case, rather than for any phenomenalistic version of positivism.
. Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
), pp. –.
. See Gibbins, “John Grote and Modern Cambridge Philosophy.”
. From “The Incoherence of Empirical Philosophy” (LPK).
. From “Criteria of Truth and Error” (LPK).
. There are points in Sidgwick’s discussion where he appears to come strikingly close to the upshot of more recent debates over the “Myth of the Given ” – e.g., John
McDowell’s suggestions in Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, ), pp. –. It is also worth noting that Sidgwick did have something
of a nascent philosophy of language – he corresponded with Lady Victoria Welby
on semiotics – and was far from oblivious to many of the concerns that would
emerge with the “linguistic turn.”
. See the very illuminating Appendix to “Criteria of Truth and Error” (LPK –
) for an exceptionally clear statement of Sidgwick’s fallibilism.
. It is interesting that James Ward would go on to address this issue at length,
ultimately trying to keep “feeling” in a subordinate place, cognitively speaking,
and denying that either it or the self could be noninferentially known.
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. The allusion is of course to the famous passage in Book of Plato’s Republic that introduces the idea of the philosopher king.
. It might be added that the theological (or in some cases contemplative) versions
of indirect utilitarianism in general – not, of course, Green’s Idealism – do afford
much argument to rebut the criticisms of indirect utilitarianism advanced by
Williams and others. When the utilitarian standard invokes an appeal to the direct
utilitarian decision procedure of a benevolent and all-knowing God, there seems
little reason why mortals should suffer from moral schizophrenia, as opposed to
an acute inferiority complex.
. William James, “Bradley or Bergson?,” in William James, Writings –
(New York: Library of America, ), pp. –.
. Ibid., p. .
. See Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, pp. –.
. Henry Sidgwick, “Green’s Ethics,” Mind o.s. (April ), p. .
. The situation arose because, as Richter explains, “to take his degree of MA,
he would have to subscribe again to the Thirty–nine Articles of the Church of
England; and if he decided that he could in good conscience do so, ought he
then go on to take deacon’s orders? The situtation in relation to University Tests
between and was that although a student could take his BA without any
religious profession, he could not become an MA, the almost invariable condition
of holding a fellowship, without signing the Articles.” ( Politics of Conscience, p. ) Sidgwick found Green’s breezy attitude toward subscription – “one kiss does not
make a marriage” – perfectly revolting.
. Interestingly, when the young G. E. Moore did start presenting his ethical views
to the philosophical public – including the working-class philosophical public –
at Passmore Edwards House, one of the things that persuaded the Idealists in
attendance that here was a student of Sidgwick’s was Moore’s stress on practical
ethics and casuistry. See Regan’s Introduction to Moore, The Elements of Ethics, and Jennifer Welchman, “Moore’s Principia.”
. Thus, Sidgwick’s position would appear to be a variant of what Parfit, in Reasons and Persons, labels the non-Red
ucationist view of personal identity, albeit one that ends up being fairly elusive about the “Further Fact.”
. See Skorupski, “Desire and Will in Sidgwick and Green,” p. . His concern is
that the “Greenian (or German idealist) conception of a person’s good importantly
focuses on the way in which what comes to belong to an agent’s good results in part
from his or her self-identifying choices. My good is not determined by the identity I evolve, as the idealist conception can seem to claim. . . . My good is sufficiently independent of that identity to provide a criterion for criticizing it; but certainly it is shaped by my identity and my identity is something I help to make.” (p. )
Sidgwick has more to say about this than Skorupski realizes.
. James also unsuccessfully tried to recruit Sidgwick for a visit to Harvard; it is quite possible that Sidgwick declined the offer, and limited his travels generally,
because of his tendency to seasickness (which when crossing the English Channel
he sought to overcome by getting absorbed in the recitation of poetry).
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. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, in William James: Writings – (New York: Library of America, ),
p. .
. Ibid., pp. –.
. William James, Psychology: Briefer Course, in William James: Writings –
(New York: Library of America, ), p. .
. Richard Rorty, “Nineteenth–Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textual-
ism,” in his The Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), p. .
. See the recent edition, Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. D. L. Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), p. .
. Dellamora, Masculine Desire, p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. Quoted in Franco Paloscia’s Goethe Strolling in Rome (Milano: E.S.T.E. Srl, ), p. . For Goethe’s own erotic verse, see J. W. von Goethe, Erotic Poems, trans.
D. Luke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), with a helpful introduction by
Hans Rudolf Vaget that details how Rome “became the site of Goethe’s sexual
liberation” (p. xvii).
. Quoted in Pater, The Renaissance, p. ; cf. Dellamora, Masculine Desire, p. .
. Pater, The Renaissance, p. .
. Ibid., pp. –.
. Ibid., p. .
. Quoted in Dellamora, Masculine Desire, p. .
. Letters of John Addington Symonds, vol. , p. .
. Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality, p. .
. J. A. Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets, second series (London: Smith, Elder
& Co., ), p. . The Greek means “percipient reason.” The first version of
“The Genius of Greek Art,” the most famous, provocative part of the Studies, is reproduced in John Addington Symonds, Male Love: A Problem in Greek Ethics
and Other Writings, Foreword by R. Peters, ed. J. Lauritsen (New York: Pagan
Press, ).
. Richard St. John Tyrwhitt, “The Greek Spirit in Modern Literature,” The Con-
temporary Review (March ), pp. –.
. In fact, contrary to a popular view, later editions were in some ways less conciliatory, dropping the inclusion of pederasty in the list of the “evils” of the ancient Greeks.
. Symonds, Studies, second series, p. and pp. –.
. Ibid., pp. –.
. Ibid., p. .
. Ibid., p. . The Greek terms mean “natural science” and “nature,” respectively.
. Ibid., p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. Symonds, “Genius,” in Male Love, p. and p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. Annan, The Dons, p. .
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. Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality, pp. –.
. Annan, The Dons, pp. –.
. The Letters of John Addington Symonds, vol. , pp. –.
. Dellamora, Masculine Desire, p. .
. It is striking how some of the most famous commentaries on Symonds emerg-
ing from gay studies have been almost completely uninformed about Symonds’s
intimate circle of friends – e.g., Dakyns, Brown, and the Sidgwicks. See, for exam-
ple, Eve Sedgwick’s Between Men (New York: Columbia University Press, )
and Paul Robinson’s Gay Lives: Homosexual Autobiography from John Addington
Symonds to Paul Monette (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ). With very few exceptions, the recent scholarly research on Symonds has been as disappointing as it has been derivative.
. Symonds, Memoirs, pp. –. Grosskurth’s edition of the Memoirs is in fact a much abridged version of the famous (unpublished) manuscript, which was kept
under embargo at the London Library for fifty years following Symonds’s death.
. Symonds, Letters and Papers, p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. Though interestingly, in a letter written before he actively considered becoming a candidate, he had written to his sister (who was married to Green): “If I had stood
for the Poetry Professorship & got it, I think I should have lectured on the AEsthetik of Hegel. It is an extremely interesting book & full of the most brilliant things: all the discussion of Classic Art & Sculpture seems to me luminous in the last degree.
But just what a critic most wants, & what ought to form the ground question of
Esthetics, Hegel hardly touches upon – the principle of beauty.” ( Letters of John Addington Symonds, vol. , p. )
. Ibid., p. . Symonds withdrew his candidacy shortly after learning that Shairp
was in the race; he had been assured, in January, that Shairp would not be a
candidate.
. Quoted in Eric Haralson, “Henry James’s ‘Queer Comrade’,” in Victorian Sexual Dissidence, ed. R. Dellamora (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), p. .
Interestingly, this James, who shared Symonds’s orientation, was less sympathetic
to him than his brother William, who did not.
. Brown’s biography, as explained in the final chapter, was effectively the joint work of Brown, Dakyns, and Sidgwick; although it is a carefully censored work, the
treatment of Symonds’s religious views is nonetheless illuminating and reflective
of how his closest friends were apt to understand him.
. The Letters of John Addington Symonds, vol. , p. .
. The full significance of Symonds for the changing structure of sexual discourse
has yet to be fully appreciated, though Jeffrey Weeks’s clas
sic works on the history
of sexuality do, unlike Foucault’s, highlight Symonds’s pioneering efforts in what
would eventually become gay studies and gay liberation – see, especially, Coming
Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present and Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since (London: Longman,
nd ed. ).
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. Symonds, Memoirs, p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. Ibid., pp. –.
. Ibid., p. .
. Included in Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds, Sexual Inversion
(London: Wilson and Macmillan, ; reprint edition by Ayer Company Pub-
lishers, ), p. . Symonds composed his own case history, and collected
similar accounts from many others, in the last years of his life, when he was ac-
tively collaborating with Ellis on Sexual Inversion (which would appear only after Symonds’s death).
. Symonds, Memoirs, p. .
. Symonds, Sexual Inversion, p. .
. Symonds, Memoirs, p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. Ibid., pp. –.
. Ibid., p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. ThisfragmentisintheSymondsPapers,SpecialCollections,UniversityofBristol
Library.
. Symonds, Memoirs, p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. Ibid., p. .
. See Davis, “Symonds and Visual Impressionability,” in John Addington Symonds: Culture and the Demon Desire, ed. Pemble, p. . This volume, based on the first academic conference ever devoted expressly to Symonds and his work, stands