by Bart Schultz
efforts to impart them. Strong powers of abstract and discursive thought must be
always rare: but I lament that we do so little to stimulate and direct them. Nor
must we forget that it is much more important for ordinary men to learn to think
correctly about historical and philosophical subjects than about philological: and
that each study requires to a certain extent a special training; which men who do
not receive it from others have to acquire for themselves (except in the case of a
gifted few) by gradually finding out their mistakes and deficiencies in a prolonged
process of self-education.
Such thoughts were given fuller expression in “The Theory of Classical
Education,” which Sidgwick published in . There he pointedly ob-
served that “the advocates of classical education, while they rightly insist
that educational studies should be capable of disciplining the mind, forget
that it is equally desirable that they should be capable of stimulating it.”
With true Socratic irony, he cites a Mr. Clark’s claim that “it is a strong
recommendation to any subject to affirm that it is dry and distasteful,”
commenting that one “cannot help thinking that there is some confusion
here between ‘dry’ and ‘hard’” (MEA –).
These may not seem like democratic sentiments, given the concern with
elite philosophical education, but the message is at least the broadly Millian
one about making education more relevant and thereby improving the
quality of public deliberation. When Sidgwick trained his critical acumen
on his own time and place, he was concerned with both the state of popular
morality and the inadequate reflectiveness of elite morality, as this was
molded by elite education.
Much could be made of Sidgwick’s reform of classics at Cambridge.
Again, the influence of classical authors on his philosophical vision
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has sometimes been underestimated out of an exaggerated sense of
how Sidgwick’s Cambridge differed from T. H. Green’s Oxford. As
Christopher Brooke has observed, the
history of Oxford and Cambridge is a saga of mutual imitation; and yet there have
been some things which Cambridge has failed to copy from Oxford, to its loss.
By linking philosophy to classics in Mods and Greats the Oxford tutors ensured
that numerous undergraduates studied history and philosophy as well as classical
literature; and although no Oxford moral philosopher of the age now seems to us
to hold a candle to Sidgwick, far more Oxford students studied philosophy than
sat at Sidgwick’s feet.
Thus, the suggestion is that despite Sidgwick’s debts to Socrates, Plato,
and Aristotle, and his feeling that the classics should not be an exercise in
rote learning, he failed to turn Cambridge into the equivalent of Jowett’s
Oxford, the hotbed of the Platonic revival, when he had the chance to
do so by working more of the classics into the Moral Sciences Tripos.
Robert Todd, quoting Sidgwick’s exasperated confession that he hated
“the history of philosophy even more than any other history; it is so hard
to know what any particular man thought, and so worthless when you do
know it,” argues that it was just this analytical attitude that contributed
to his downplaying of classical education at Cambridge. According to
Todd:
This larger need to understand the contemporary world was clearly one that
Sidgwick satisfied philosophically in a Moral Sciences Tripos freed from any
extensive historical studies. It helps explain why he was content to leave the study
of ancient philosophy to the Classical Tripos, after he had found it unsuitable
for an undergraduate curriculum in philosophy. In his own work Sidgwick of
course made constructive use of the history of philosophy, ancient as well as
modern. He also held general views about the nature and historical evolution
of Greek ethical thought, and formulated a sound conception of the procedures
to be followed in dealing with the history of philosophy. But none of this either
significantly influenced him in the teaching of philosophy, or led him to emphasize
the study of ancient philosophy in the Cambridge Moral Sciences Tripos. He
placed limited value on historical studies in philosophy generally in the context
of an undergraduate curriculum.
As Todd observes, in “The Theory of Classical Education,” Sidgwick
emphasized not only science but also modern literature, the branch of
literature “which explains to us (as far as possible) the intellectual life of
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our own age; which teaches us the antecedents of the ideas and feelings
among which, and in which, we shall live and move.” This, as we shall see,
would prove to be of fundamental importance: Sidgwick would devoutly
carry on the Apostolic tradition of using modern literature, particularly
poetry, to explore, express, and refine the human emotional fabric. Again,
he was himself a poet and critic of some talent.
And yet, in some respects, what Todd demonstrates is just how rele-
vant Sidgwick found the classics to his ethical work. Todd notes that in his
essay on “Liberal Education,” for example, in which Sidgwick posed the
question of whether philosophy ought “to be studied, to the extent that it
is at Oxford, through the medium of Plato and Aristotle,” he allowed that
this would be appropriate for the history of ethics, since “the principles
of ethics lie still involved in doubt and conflict” and hence might be bet-
ter confronted via problems from a more remote period. This effort to
achieve impartiality through greater historical distance would often serve
as a counterweight to his view that progress had rendered historical ex-
ample largely irrelevant, and it would be evident in such works as The
Elements of Politics. But in any event, Sidgwick, in this essay, took the
opportunity largely to endorse Mill’s recent lecture at St. Andrews on
the nature of education, noting that he and Mill agreed that “there should
be some literary element in general education” and that “classical litera-
ture,” including Plato and Aristotle, is “best adapted for this purpose,”
though the superiority is only a matter of degree and study of it should not
preclude interest in other literatures. This is not quite the stock Cambridge
emphasis on Newton, Locke, and mathematics, but a more balanced view,
though Oxford is criticized for its “exaggerated neglect of the more defi-
nite branches of study in favour of the less definite.” For the Sidgwickian
student: “Be
fore he attempts the problems with which the human mind
is still militant, he should understand the processes by which it had been
triumphant.”
Furthermore, by Sidgwick’s lights, much of the deeper educational en-
terprise took place more or less outside of the formal institutional context.
When it came to the discussion societies, for example, the differences be-
tween Cambridge and Hellenizing Oxford were less marked; education
could be a very personal affair at both of the ancient universities. Indeed,
it had to be. Like Mill and the early Apostles, Sidgwick was not enamoured
with the educational quality of formal Oxbridge: “the warmest admirer of
these ancient seats of learning is forced to speak of their intellectual aspect
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in much colder terms; and the comparatively meagre results of the large
sums spent upon liberal studies there, has become a commonplace with
the critics who undertake the ungrateful task of making periodic inroads
on our national self-complacency.”
To be sure, Sidgwick did have a rather different vision of professional
philosophy from that of Hellenzing (or idealizing) Oxford, one that was
more analytical and less historical. But that should not be taken to mean
that he disparaged the value of this philosophical inheritance in the fashion
of later (or even Comtean) positivists. In an early paper, probably delivered
to the Apostles, Sidgwick struggled with the question, as his title put it,
“Is Philosophy the Germ or the Crown of Science?” He was keenly aware
that “the great philosophers each has made a system, and his system has
made a noise and filled a considerable space in the horizon of thought for
a time but ultimately it has collapsed, dwindled, and vanished, leaving
behind it what? Why some particular discovery some luminiferous and
fructiferous ideas in some special department of study.” But he could not
rest content with this reduction of philosophy to the “germ” of science,
or with the disparaging views of the ongoing philosophical quest it could
support:
Many would say that man is now mature: his time for the stimulating dreams of
youth is over: he is deeply impressed with the vanity of attempting ever anew the
solution of the insoluble: and he has been impressed with this in time, because the
incidental profit of these vain attempts has ceased.
I confess that to me to argue this seems a flagrant abandonment of just the
basis of experience on which the arguer plants his feet. How can we tell that
the function of Philosophy is over? Even if we attribute to it no more than this
Germinal function? If a man says to me that he and his friends have really no
interest in solving the Universe, I have nothing to answer but ‘Then in heaven’s
name leave the universe alone.’ But if he tries to prove that any one else ought to
leave it alone, I ask by what empirical arguments he proves that this crisis in the
history of thought has been reached: that the endeavour to grasp the Golden robe
of complete Wisdom will no longer as of old leave even a fragment thereof in our
hands.
But more: it may be said that it is impossible that Philosophy should perform
this germinal function, as long as we have made up our minds that this is it’s only
function. The supreme effort from which alone any partial discovery of the kind
described can come, cannot be made without a hope of the supreme attainment
that transcends all partial discoveries. Therefore in this as in other matters just
from the most practical point of view, for the winning of just the most definitely
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measurable results we must pursue the ideal: and that though the face of the ideal
is “evermore unseen/and fixed upon the far sea line.” (CWC)
These last lines, a bit of Tennyson’s “The Voyager” that Sidgwick would
frequently quote, are perhaps a little too bleak to capture his early vision of
philosophy. Consider, by contrast, how he responded to his friend Roden
Noel in a letter of :
You say that “we do not use terms in the same way” and there is one which
we certainly do not – Absolute. I do not mean by it total complete: all that can be known about the objects. But I oppose it to relative in the sense in which
you generally but not always use the word: i.e. implying that two contradictory
opinions about the same object – say a planet – held by two persons may both be
true.
It is this latter opinion, and all that hangs on it, which I feel it important to
refute. As to the unknowable, I admit that I have a faith that nothing is intrinsically unknowable: that if one thing is true, true today yesterday and for ever, true for
all men; then is the Spirit of Truth come who will guide us into all truth. Or, (to
parody Archimedes,) ‘Give me but a locus Standi and I will prove the Universe.
(CWC)
To deny the larger philosophical impulse, then, would be self-defeating
and contrary to his faith in “things in general.” And after all, if Mill
could join in the Platonic revival, so could Sidgwick, and all the more
easily. Both thought that they were being truer to the Greek spirit than
their critics:
And if there be any who believe that the summit of a liberal education, the crown of
the highest culture, is Philosophy – meaning by Philosophy the sustained effort, if
it be no more than an effort, to frame a complete and reasoned synthesis of the facts of the universe – on them it may be especially urged how poorly equipped a man
comes to such a study, however competent he may be to interpret the thoughts of
ancient thinkers, if he has not qualified himself to examine, comprehensively and
closely, the wonderful scale of methods by which the human mind has achieved its
various degrees of conquest over the world of sense. When the most fascinating of
ancient philosophers taught, but the first step of this conquest had been attained.
We are told that Plato wrote over the door of his school, ‘Let no one who is without
geometry enter here.’ In all seriousness we may ask the thoughtful men, who
believe that Philosophy can still be best learnt by the study of the Greek masters,
to consider what the inscription over the door should be in the nineteenth century
of the Christian era. (MEA –)
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In effect,
the classicists had abandoned the actual spirit of Greek phi-
losophy, had become a church of sorts, requiring submersion in scripture.
Everything vital was missing. And of course, this was in perfect parallel to
Sidgwick’s thoughts about orthodox religion. The two were scarcely sep-
arable – the question of the role of philosophy could not be separated from
the question of the role of religion. By Sidgwick’s time, to promote the
one was to demote the other, and this was a heavy responsibility, one that
bore especially heavily on an academic liberal out to improve cultural life.
Given the fragility of goodness, the precariousness of ordinary decency,
the philosopher’s position was fraught, even if it was not the main causal
factor involved in the degeneration of a society’s morals. For Sidgwick,
it was crucial to understand how the sun of philosophy might rise, in his
own era, and what this would mean for a popular morality that was of-
ten as confused and incoherent as that of the ancient Athenians. Indeed,
materialism and mocking irreverence had never had so much corrosive
power, and this courtesy of science itself. And this was not to mention
sexual matters.
What was a philosopher to do? What was the larger cultural project,
beyond improving the institutional apparatus of philosophical education?
Just how important was it not to “be over-conscientious about using words
which do not to us convey what we believe”? And what kind of Millian
reformer could insist that “our ideas are more or less incommunicable to
uneducated minds and that what we have out-grown is actually not only
‘best for them’ but perhaps brings them as near as they can be brought to
the truth”?
II. After the Way of Heresy
He who begins by loving Christianity better than truth, will proceed by loving
his own sect or church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better
than all.
Samual Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection
The more a man feels the value, the true import, of the moral and religious
teaching which passes amongst us by the name of Christianity, the more will
he hesitate to base it upon those foundations which, as a scholar, he feels to
