Henry Sidgwick- Eye of the Universe
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business.
It is also surely no coincidence that the growth of such alternative edu-
cational resources would overlap and mutually interact with the Tractarian
movement, which has been credited with revitalizing and personaliz-
ing the tutorial method in ways that proved useful to Jowett and the
Oxford Hellenists. However different their orientations toward religion,
they shared a strong sense of the moral bankruptcy of the educational
status quo.
When it came to the “art of reconciling by a phrase,” and of soaring,
Maurice knew no peer. But when it came to penetrating innermost feel-
ings, and being separated by nothing but opinion, the “Brethren” worked
together. They descended from Maurice like a spiritual family, inheriting
his drive to seek “a deeper, unifying level, one of active sympathy for other
people and their personal beliefs.” Here, then, was the mission of true
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education, of a culture fit for an educating society. Unity and sympathy,
but without Millian naturalism.
Quite plainly, mystic Apostledom shared much with old Socratic
method. As Rothblatt has suggested, Maurice’s use of paradox, of avoid-
ing system and synthesis by a “logical sleight of hand,” was a “way of
finding unity,” and for his admirers, it made him “a supremely socratic
figure . . . singularly successful in defining terms and devising meanings
which furthered his own argument, at the same time conveying to his
listeners an appreciation of their own careless reasoning and the argument
which had been concealed from them.” Maurice himself would have
been happy to allow that this was so. Indeed, his ascendance coincided
with the revival of Platonism in England, one figure in which had been
Maurice’s own revered classics teacher, Julius Hare. As he remembered
Hare’s dialectical approach:
One could not get the handy phrase one wished about Greek ideals and poet-
ical unity; but, by some means or other, one rose to the apprehension that the
poem had a unity in it, and that the poet was pursuing an ideal, and that the unity was not created by him, but perceived by him, and that the ideal was not
a phantom, but something which must have had a most real effect upon himself,
his age, and his country. I cannot the least tell how Hare imparted this con-
viction to me; I only know that I acquired it, and could trace it very directly
to his method of teaching. . . . we were reading the Gorgia of Plato. But here, again, the lecturer was not tempted for an instant to spoil us of the good which
Plato could do us, by talking to us about him, instead of reading him with us.
There was no résumé of his philosophy, no elaborate comparison of him with
Aristotle, or with any of the moderns. Our business was with a single dialogue;
we were to follow that through its windings, and to find out by degrees, if we
could, what the writer was driving at, instead of being told beforehand. . . . to give us second-hand reports, though they were ever so excellent – to save us the
trouble of thinking – to supply us with a moral, instead of showing us how we
might find it, not only in the book but in our hearts, this was clearly not his
intention.
Perhaps, despite his Christianity, Maurice was more Socratic than
Platonic, as the designation “Broad Church” might suggest. That is, as-
suming (with Vlastos, Nussbaum, and many other classical scholars) that
the claims of Socrates really were quite distinct from those of Plato, it ap-
pears that the tension between these different approaches to inquiry runs
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through much of the debate in these early culture wars. In Nussbaum’s
words, the
historical Socrates is committed to awakening each and every person to self-
scrutiny. He relies on no sources of knowledge external to the beliefs of the citizens he encounters, and he regards democracy as the best of the available forms of government, though not above criticism. Plato, by contrast, argues for the restriction
of Socratic questioning to a small, elite group of citizens, who will eventually gain access to timeless, metaphysical sources of knowledge; these few should rule over
the many.
As we shall see, the Apostolic legacy certainly had its share of Platonic
elitism, and of other forms of elitism as well. But the better, more endur-
ing legacy of Maurice came from the Socratic temperment that he passed
on, a temperament that Sidgwick, a later “Pope” among the Apostles,
would manifest with special clarity. Moreover, even the Socratic side
of the Apostolic story was refined and complicated. It is notorious that
Socrates himself was cold, ironic, strange, not a model of compassion
or even justice. What marked out Apostolic conversation, however, as
it was realized in such figures as Maurice and Sidgwick, was the deter-
mined, sympathetic effort at unity, the empathic, kindly entering into the
perspectives of others. Whether Christian or Romantic, the aim of the con-
fessional group or the encounter group, this imaginative effort was tinged
by Platonic eros, the philosophical friendship celebrated in the Symposium.
In Memoriam, something of an Apostolic bible, was after all a celebration of
homoerotic friendship, and profoundly suggestive of the Apostolic vision
of insight achieved and expressed intimately and poetically.
In truth, the lessons of the leading lights of the Apostles cannot be
happily reconstructed in terms of many of the familiar battle lines of recent
debates over ancients versus moderns. Neither Maurice nor Sidgwick
regarded Socratic inquiry as in some kind of basic conflict with modern
methods of (genuine) critical inquiry. Maurice attributed to Hare
the setting before his pupils of an ideal not for a few ‘religious’ people, but for all mankind, which can lift men out of the sin which ‘assumes selfishness as the basis
of all actions and life,’ and secondly, the teaching them that ‘there is a way out of party opinions which is not a compromise between them, but which is implied
in both, and of which each is bearing witness.’ ‘Hare did not tell us this. . . . Plato himself does not say it; he makes us feel it.’
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And by this means, the spirit of Bacon was also present: “we were, just as
much as the student of natural philosophy, feeling our way from particulars
to universals, from facts to principles.”
Debates over the canon in English-speaking universities often bet
ray
a remarkable ignorance of the fact that Plato only entered it during the
early Victorian period, that he had such champions as Mill and Maurice,
and that he proved a most controversial innovation, being widely regarded
as a “misleader of youth.” In , Macaulay complained in the pages of
the Edinburgh Review that while the Baconian philosophy sought sim-
ply “to provide man with what he requires while he continues to be
man,” the “aim of the Platonic philosopy was to exalt man into a god.”
Thus, “Plato drew a good bow: but, like Acestes in Virgil, he aimed at the
stars. . . . The philosophy of Plato began in words and ended in words –
noble words, indeed – words such as were to be expected from the finest of
human intellects exercising boundless dominion over the finest of human
languages.”
Yet Maurice’s assimilation of Bacon and Wordsworth, Socrates and
Plato was sincere. He was not one to admire the Greeks for despising
what human experience might teach. His “whole sympathies had been
with the scientific men when they were asserting what they had humbly,
patiently investigated, and found out to be true. He was never tired to quot-
ing the spirit of Mr. Darwin’s investigations as a lesson and a model for
Churchmen.” And in this, Sidgwick was truly his spiritual heir, though
as Richard Deacon has noted, against “Sidgwick’s claim that the Apostles
‘absorbed and dominated’ him, Leonard Woolf made the point that this was
‘not quite the end of the story . . . every now and again an Apostle has dominated and left an impression . . . upon the Society. Sidgwick himself was
one of these . . . refertilising and revivifying its spirit and traditions.’ ”
For it was Sidgwick who “paved the way to the Apostles becoming a society
of total doubters, if not atheists.”
Just words – but what else did one need to go soaring on a Saturday
night?
V. Dialogue
If I say that it is impossible for me to keep quiet because that means disobeying
the god, you will not believe me and will think I am being ironical. On the other
hand, if I say that it is the greatest good for a man to discuss virtue every day and
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those other things about which you hear me conversing and testing myself and
others, for the unexamined life is not worth living for men, you will believe me
even less.
Socrates, Apology
When he [Socrates] speaks of the dignity of the philosopher, he means us to
understand the dignity of a man who does not exalt himself, who does not put
himself in the way of the thing which he is examining, who has the simplest, most
open eye for receiving light, whencesoever it shall come. That there is a source
of light from whence it does come, and that this light is connected with man, is a
principle assumed, if it is ever so imperfectly developed, in all his words and acts.
F. D. Maurice, Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy
In the sweep of the Platonic revival that so marked the Victorian era,
Socrates was to be catapulted into a new prominence in cultural debates.
Maurice and the Apostles, Mill and the utilitarians, and a host of Anglican
theologians took Socrates as a figure whose importance was surpassed only
by that of Jesus. This was how he figured in Mill’s On Liberty, a work the
Apostles eagerly devoured.
Of course, as later chapters will detail, the Platonic Revival was also a
sexually loaded affair, and Sidgwick and his friends played no little role in
demonstrating how subversive an appeal to the ancients could be. But it is
also important simply to situate Sidgwick’s Apostolic notions of sympa-
thetic conversation in this context in a preliminary way, the better to bring
out the full significance of Maurice and Mill for his vision of philosophy.
This is a social and intellectual context that merits independent treatment,
such was its importance to the Victorian world.
On the surface, at least, Plato and the Greeks were supposed to help
revitalize a flagging, self-doubting culture, and an extraordinary range of
thinkers would try to appropriate this inheritance for their own purposes.
Of these, Sidgwick was one of the more acute, and it is instructive that the
s, which are so often identified as his years of religious “storm and
stress,” were also the years during which his Apostolic sense of dialogue
matured, as he evolved from classicist to philosopher. And in hammering
out his own interpretive stance, he could again draw on Mill and his
disciples, who, as much as Maurice, regarded themselves as bold innovators
in reviving the study of Socrates and Plato in the thirties. Indeed, one of
Mill’s chief philosophical and political allies, George Grote, was perhaps
the leading figure in the Platonic revival, and an avowed Benthamite. Of
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his monumental History of Greece and Plato, T. H. Irwin has observed:
“Grote’s work constitutes a contribution of the first rank both to the study
of Greek history and to the study of Greek philosophy. None of his English
contemporaries equalled his contribution to either area of study; and no
one at all has equalled his contribution to both areas.”
Much of what Mill wrote on Plato was, in fact, by way of enthusiastic
reviews of Grote. For Mill, Grote had succeeded in setting out the best
side of Socrates, his role as a critic and skeptic. Sidgwick, too, would
align himself with Grote’s work, though in a somewhat different way.
Still, one’s views on Grote served as something of a political touchstone.
When Mill and Sidgwick linked themselves to Grote on Greece, they
were self-consciously allying themselves with the chief liberal alternative
to and critique of the conservative, Tory interpretation of the failings of
Greek democracy. Grote was simply the most formidable to those who, like
Connop Thirwall, Hare, Jowett, and Maurice, sought to liberate Greek
history from the conservative opponents of democracy, from such figures
as William Mitford. Mill the empiricist and Maurice the mystic may have
differed on epistemology, but both passionately believed that the lesson of
ancient Athens was not the impossibility – or viciousness – of democratic
self-rule and the necessity of a paternalistic aristocracy.
Just how Sidgwick fell in with Grote’s program is a complex matter.
Frank Turner, in The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain, cites him in con-
nection with some comments by James Bryce, his close friend, to the effect
that so great were the differences between the direct democracy of Athens
and the representative democracy of n
ineteenth-century Britain that “no
arguments drawn from their experience are of any value as enabling us to
predict its possible results here.” And there is much to such a reading,
which highlights the characteristic Sidgwickian caution about the lessons
of history.
Still, it is illuminating to try to situate Sidgwick a little more precisely
in the context of these debates, which were so vital for the Millians, the
Apostles, and the academic liberals in general. The method that went into
the Methods owed an enormous amount to his developing views, during
the s, on the meaning of the Greeks, especially Socrates, Plato, and
Aristotle. What Sidgwick called his years of storm and stress had more
turbulence in them than his account of religious struggles suggests.
To be sure, there were profound differences between Jowett’s
Hellenizing Oxford and Sidgwick’s less humanistic Cambridge. Robert
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Todd has even argued that Sidgwick was responsible for diminishing the
role of the classics in the study of philosophy at Cambridge, doing so out of
his general analytical aversion to the history of philosophy. Although there
is some truth in the claim that Sidgwick’s notion of the Moral Sciences
Tripos made the classics less significant in the undergraduate philosophy
curriculum, this does not do justice to the extraordinary importance of
Plato and Aristotle in Sidgwick’s own philosophical work, or to the way
they shaped his larger Apostolic vision of the educational enterprise.
Indeed, during the sixties and even the seventies, Sidgwick would iden-
tify himself as one of Grote’s disciples. As always, he took scrupulous care
in framing his arguments, but he was not wholly averse to trying to draw
some lessons from the fate of Socrates. In his review of Thomas Maguire’s
Essays on the Platonic Ethics, for example, he made it plain that if the battle was between the Academy and modern positivism – which is to say, between philosophers like Maguire and Grote, respectively – then he would
side with the latter:
Mr. Grote was a historian, and a philosopher, and a philosophical historian: but