by Bart Schultz
Sidgwick (his brother), and, of course, John Addington Symonds.
Sidgwick and his friends were not of Mill’s formative period; they were
admirers not only of Wordsworth’s Romanticism, but also of the pen-
etrating intellectuality of Arthur Hugh Clough’s “Dipsychus,” the am-
bivalences of Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” and the vitality of Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass – the poetic voices that spoke to the deep homoerotic di-
visions of the self, and from whom they took their deepest inspiration in
their struggles to frame a new science of the self. They too were analysts
of the twin-souled, like James and DuBois.
Sidgwick’s relationship with Symonds is of special significance.
Symonds, the son of a physician who positively personified the medicaliza-
tion of discourse surrounding sexuality, was early on persuaded that his
homosexuality was an inherent disposition, and in due course he became
equally convinced that it was not a morbid condition, that the culture of
ancient Greece had demonstrated that homosexuality could be a healthy
aspect of high cultural life, and that the poetry of Whitman pointed the way
to a new synthesis of the best of ancient and modern. It was to be a New Age,
with Millian sympathy extended to include that very Hellenic Whitmanian
comradeship. For Sidgwick, Symonds’s Hellenism and Whitmania rep-
resented further experiments, alternative ways of revitalizing and edifying
a culture that all good Millians agreed needed revitalizing and edifying.
And his letters and journal exchanges with this remarkable friend would
prove to be the most passionate and revealing of all his writings, intensely
debating the fate of ethics in a godless world and everything else under
the sun and over the rainbow.
Sidgwick was, however, a very cautious reformer when it came to such
explosive issues, and he worked assiduously to keep Symonds from being
ruined by public scandal. No history of utilitarianism has yet captured this
side of the story – how Sidgwick’s intuitionism inexorably led on to an
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epistemology of the closet. A dual-source theory of practical reason, a
longstanding concern over hypocrisy, and a dipsychical moral psychology
produced a very sensitive rethinking of the public and the private. An
esoteric morality? Sidgwick, at least, worked very hard to keep it esoteric,
effectively constructing the standard biographical treatment of Symonds
that spun his sexual angst into religious angst. Quite possibly the issue
of hypocrisy loomed so large for him because he was, in so many ways,
perpetually caught up in trying to elude certain forms of public reaction.
Thus, despite a reputation for saintly honesty, won in part by his
resignation, Sidgwick was quite given to behind-the-scenes efforts betray-
ing a highly qualified belief in the value of veracity. And of course, he has
often been criticized in more abstract philosophical terms for advancing a
doubly indirect approach to happiness, both individual and social, coun-
tenancing the possibility of justifying on utilitarian grounds an “esoteric
morality” in which the true (utilitarian) principles of ethics were known
to and practiced by an elite group of philosophical sophisticates only. This
seems in flat contradiction to the Kantian insistence – evident in Rawls’s
theory of justice – on “publicity” as a basic criterion of moral principles,
a criterion usually supposed to be much in accord with common sense.
Such accusations, sometimes provocatively framed in terms of the pos-
sibility of Sidgwick’s ethics supporting colonial paternalism or “Gov-
ernment House” utilitarianism, have never been formulated in a clear
and historically informed way. That is, not only has Sidgwick’s sexual
politics been glossed over in his critical reception, but remarkably little
attention has been devoted even to his political theory and practice, which
is odd indeed, given how often the classical utilitarians are celebrated –
or derided – for having produced comprehensive works covering poli-
tics, law, economics, ethics, and so on. In Sidgwick’s case, however, it
means that his ethics has been treated only in an isolated and abstract way,
without reference to his economic and political views and entanglements
(much less his sexual ones). To read his Methods without benefit of these
contexts is, alas, to dangerously decontextualize his Methods. His ethical
work appears in a different light when connected with his claims about,
say, home rule for Ireland or the duty to advance the cause of civilization
across the globe. As with Mill, many of the most profoundly troubling
questions arise when one considers Sidgwick’s work outside of the do-
mestic context. Just how were Millian friendship and sympathy supposed
to figure in imperial rule?
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Overture
Sidgwick was a friend and colleague of such imperialist luminaries as
Sir John Seeley and Charles Henry Pearson, and it is natural to wonder
to what extent he shared their influential views of England’s “civilizing”
imperial mission – and their worries over the “lower” classes and races,
race “degradation,” and so forth. Sidgwick’s invocations of such things
as “common sense,” the “consensus of experts,” and the direction of
“civilised opinion” read quite differently if read as tacit or possible affir-
mations of racial superiority. Just who, it may well be asked, concretely
represented the “spirit of justice” and the “consensus of experts”? The
Millian inheritance, although pre-Darwinian and emphasizing nurture
over nature, was nonetheless deeply involved in British rule in India.
Sidgwick’s work was post-Darwinian and the product of an environment
that was often both more crudely racist and more enamored of empire.
And these changing historical contexts made themselves felt in Sidgwick’s
life and work: he took seriously views that he should have dismissed with
the full force of his skeptical intellect and was guilty of some very serious
lapses of judgment, amounting to a form of racism.
Indeed, the great outstanding paradox of Sidgwick’s life and work is how
he could have been so soberly critical of all the philosophizing that went
into the ethical and political vision of the gentlemanly imperialists while
remaining so complacent, even enthusiastic, about England’s civilizing
mission, its role in educating the world. The Platonic, idealistic, and
utilitarian ideals afloat in the Victorian world
in general and Oxbridge in
particular could be all too unreflective.
That these matters have been treated with a method of avoidance for
the past century is singularly unfortunate and philosophically distorting,
of a piece with the distortions resulting from the neglect of Sidgwick’s
sexual politics, practical ethics, and casuistry. Admittedly, some will find
this line of interpretation disturbing – the issues of racism and ped-
erasty are disturbing. If some come away from this book agreeing with
Moore that Sidgwick was a “wicked edifactious person,” that cannot be
helped, though Moore and Bloomsbury shared many of Sidgwick’s fail-
ings. On my Goethean reconstruction of Sidgwick’s quest, Sidgwick ends
up being a much harder philosopher to come to terms with – better than
the familiar depictions in some respects, worse in others. Perhaps he
ends up being a more interesting philosopher simply because he ends up
being a more complex and conflicted person, his own mix of light and
shade.
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So much for thematics and problematics. My general pragmatist orien-
tation spares me any undue worries about eclecticism, or about the some-
what unorthodox organization of this book. The treatment is only roughly
chronological; the chapters often recapitulate earlier material from a new
angle; and the argument is often indirect and allusive. The following two
chapters deal with Sidgwick’s early intellectual life, before the publication
of the Methods, and the formative influences on him; although many of
the basic facts rehearsed may be familiar, the focus on his Apostolic ideals
and the context of the Platonic revival is somewhat novel, and opens
the way to the emphasis in later chapters on the social dimensions of
Sidgwick’s epistemology. The fourth chapter deliberately changes voice
and approaches the Methods through the interpretive controversies of
Sidgwick’s more narrowly philosophical commentators, past and present.
The purpose of this is twofold: to convey some sense of the most significant
philosophical readings of the Methods and the content of Sidgwick’s philo-
sophical ethics in more analytical terms, but also to suggest in a preliminary
way some of the limitations of analytical efforts to treat Sidgwick’s work so
innocently, as though it were simply that of a slightly senior contemporary.
Just how different Sidgwick’s world was becomes increasingly evident in
the following chapters, which deal with his parapsychology, his views on
sex and gender, and his elaborate, often offensive positions on economic
and political issues, including imperialism and race. Again, these dimen-
sions of Sidgwick’s inquiries do illuminate his philosophical work, and
the way he interpreted his social epistemology of Apostolic fellowship and
Millian friendship. The Sidgwickian ascent to abstraction, in the perpet-
ual hope of winning the prized consensus of experts, may strike some
as in effect another mask of conquest, papering over legitimate concrete
conflict with high principle and tacit elitism. At any rate, it is hard to deny
that the life can in some ways reveal the thought and stimulate rethinking.
Ironically, in the end, it may well seem that I have agreed with Sidgwick’s
self-assessment concerning the symmetry and continuity of his life – at
least his inner life – even if much of my gloss of it may appear highly
destructive. But as Sidgwick once said, “I think my present formule de la
vie is from Walt Whitman. ‘I have urged you forward, and still urge you,
without the slightest idea of our destination.’” (M ).
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First Words
But in the English universities no thought can find place, except that which
can reconcile itself with orthodoxy. They are ecclesiastical institutions; and it is
the essence of all churches to vow adherence to a set of opinions made up and
prescribed, it matters little whether three or thirteen centuries ago. Men will some
day open their eyes, and perceive how fatal a thing it is that the instruction of those who are intended to be the guides and governors of mankind should be confided
to a collection of persons thus pledged. If the opinions they are pledged to were
every one as true as any fact in physical science, and had been adopted, not as they
almost always are, on trust and authority, but as the result of the most diligent and impartial examination of which the mind of the recipient was capable; even then,
the engagement under penalties always to adhere to the opinions once assented
to, would debilitate and lame the mind, and unfit it for progress, still more for
assisting the progress of others. The person who has to think more of what an
opinion leads to, than of what is the evidence of it, cannot be a philosopher, or a
teacher of philosophers.
John Stuart Mill, “Whewell on Moral Philosophy”
I. Sidgwick and the Talking Cure
When Henry Sidgwick died of cancer, on August , , he was even
less at home in the world than Bentham or Mill had been when they passed
on. He was buried in the quiet family corner of the village churchyard at
Terling Place, the spacious Essex estate of the Rayleighs, to whom he was
related by marriage. Although he had prepared a brief, minimally religious
statement to be read at his funeral, he was given the Church of England
ceremony, and thus in death maintained something of the tolerant facade to
which he had become accustomed in life. His brother-in-law, the famous
Tory politician Arthur Balfour, wrote of him to Lady Elcho: “He was
ardently desirous of finishing some literary and philosophic designs, so
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far only sketched in outline: and I am sorry that it was otherwise ordained –
not merely because it was a disappointment to him but because, though I
never was a disciple of his, I do believe that he had something valuable to
say which he has left unsaid.” By contrast, Mill’s dying words were “You
know that I have done my work.”
There is more than a little irony in the idea that Sidgwick died leaving
much unsaid, for he was by all accounts a most expressive man, albeit one
whose books did not do him justice. The Methods of Ethics, first published
in , may well be his great philosophical masterpiece, but those who
knew him best were unanimous in thinking that it was his talk, and the p
ro-
foundly sympathetic character that the talk expressed, that made Sidgwick
what he was. The Millian struggle to come to terms with imagination and
intimacy, friendship and fellow feeling, had found a new champion, a
philosopher of interiority for whom intimate talk, and its role in inquiry
into personal and philosophical truth, would become a guiding concern.
The pursuit of truth involved the pursuit of unity, and the pursuit of
unity involved intimate talk, even poetic talk. As Frank Podmore, one of
Sidgwick’s younger colleagues in parapsychological research, flatly put it:
“No one who knew Sidgwick only from his most important philosophical
works could form any fair idea of the man. . . . His talk was always alive
with sympathy and humour.”
That Sidgwick was devoted to talk may not seem terribly surprising,
given that he spent his entire adult life in the academic setting of Cambridge
University – from as Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy –
and was every bit as much the philosopher-educator as Plato, Rousseau,
or Dewey. But like such illustrious counterparts, he was also highly crit-
ical of the educational system as he found it. He agreed with Mill that
Oxbridge was more church than university, often a fount of the “higher
ignorance.” The talk at which he excelled was neither Victorian sermoniz-
ing, nor political oratory, nor donnish lecturing, which last he deemed a
relic from the pre-Gutenberg era. His conversation was not in the mode of
Carlyle’s peremptory holding forth, or, except reluctantly, along the lines
of the German professorial model. His was very much the “new school”
of professional academics, whose reforms virtually created modern
Cambridge and changed the face of higher education in general. He stood
for modern languages, modern literature, modern biblical criticism, mod-
ern science, and the attitudes toward intellectual freedom that such in-
quiries manifested – which may be part of the reason why his views are
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First Words
proving uncannily relevant to current debates over multiculturalism, post-
