Henry Sidgwick- Eye of the Universe
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London School of Ethics and Social Philosophy, of which Sidgwick was
a vice president and another of Green’s disciples, Bernard Bosanquet,
president, and at which the young G. E. Moore gave the lectures on
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the “Elements of Ethics” that would serve as a dry run for Principia
Ethica.
It is important to bear in mind that Ward and Addams were also the
result of that academic liberalism and Mauricean Christian socialism, with
more than a dash of Ruskin and Arts and Crafts, that shaped both Green
and Sidgwick, since concerns about paternalism (or maternalism) and
patriarchy (or matriarchy) appear rather different when viewed in light of
their work. Again, the disciples of Green were mostly not like Bradley in
harboring a Whewellian reverence for the status quo, which, they felt, left a
lot to be desired as a realization of the Divine Spirit. As Richard Symonds
has urged, what “Ruskin, Jowett (who taught what he called ‘the new
economics’), Green and Toynbee had in common was a detestation for
the consequences of the economic policies of laissez-faire, and their pupils
carried this out into the Empire.” Needless to say, in this they were the
harbingers of the New Liberalism, the liberalism attuned to the positive
functions of the state and the inevitable growth of larger organizations that
would, in the twentieth century, make the Millian vision seem like a distant
libertarian romance. And this brought in its train a wealth of complaints
about paternalism, authoritarianism, and creeping socialism from those
who identified with what they took to be the classical liberalism of the
older utilitarian tradition – not to mention concerns about imperialism,
or “spiritual expansion.” The infamous Alfred Milner, architect of British
imperialism in South Africa, was another student of Green’s, also a friend
of Toynbee’s and a champion of “social service.”
Not surprisingly, Sidgwick turns out to be difficult to classify, though as
later chapters will show, he was in many respects more with the new forces
than against them. However, during this formative age when Jowett’s
Oxford began ruling the world, the Millian strains were a complex and
considerable element even in the work of Green. Even the early Millian
strains, those of the early editions of his Political Economy. For Green
was still a believer in private property and self-help, and he never had
anything like a full-blooded Prussian adoration of the state, even if he
was willing to encourage it to use liquor licensing and zoning to cultivate
temperance among the working class in ways that the Millians regarded as
paternalistic. Nowhere is his ambivalence more evident than in the work
his students Charles Loch and Bernard Bosanquet did – apparently with
his blessing – as leaders of the Charity Organisation Society, an organiza-
tion widely regarded as devoted to effectively implementing the New Poor
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Law, and one that would unite Marx and Dickens in their scorn for the
cruelty of capitalism. The COS was essentially founded on the belief that
pauperism was the result of weak character, a lack of industry and fore-
sight, and that poor relief must not dampen incentives to self-help. Much
of its effort went into screening applicants for relief, so that the “deserving
poor” would be aided, while the undeserving went off to the workhouses.
As the following chapter will show, Sidgwick was also very much entan-
gled in this distinctively Victorian institution, and his involvement was
similar to Green’s in sitting uneasily with other elements of his political
philosophy.
Green’s tragic premature death in March of robbed the philo-
sophical world of what would surely have turned out to be one of the
most famous and fruitful intellectual rivalries in the history of philosophy.
Still, even to the degree that it was played out, their mutual stimulus was
important. When Green’s Prolegomena to Ethics appeared (posthumously,
in ), it marked, among other things, a serious extended engagement
with Sidgwick’s Methods. Indeed, it is striking how far Green went in
positively trying to claim Sidgwick for his side. Like Hayward at a later
date, Green finds it baffling how Sidgwick could identify with the older
utilitarian tradition – the tradition that he, Green, had steadily tried to
demonstrate the incoherence of:
Now in this theory [Sidgwick’s] it is clear that an office is ascribed to Reason which in ordinary Utilitarian doctrine, as in the philosophy of Locke and Hume on which
that doctrine is founded, is explicitly denied to it. To say that as rational beings we are bound to aim at anything whatever in the nature of an ultimate end, would have seemed absurd to Hume and to the original Utilitarians. To them reason was
a faculty not of ends but of means. As a matter of fact, they held, we all do aim
at pleasure as our ultimate end; all that could properly be said to be reasonable or
unreasonable was our selection of means to that end. They would no more have
thought of asking why pleasure ought to be pursued than of asking why any fact
ought to be a fact. Mr. Sidgwick, however, does ask the question, and answers
that pleasure ought to be pursued because reason pronounces it desirable; but
that, since reason pronounces pleasure, if equal in amount, to be equally desirable
by whatever being enjoyed, it is universal pleasure – the pleasure of all sentient
beings – that ought to be pursued. It is not indeed an object that every one ought
at all times to have consciously before him, but it is the ultimate good by reference to which, ‘when we sit down in a calm hour,’ the desirability of every other good
is to be tested.
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In this procedure Mr. Sidgwick is quite consistent with himself. His rejection
of ‘Egoistic’ in favour of ‘Universalistic’ Hedonism rests upon a ground which in
Mr. Mill’s doctrine it is impossible to discover. His appeal to reason may be made
to justify the recognition of an obligation to regard the happiness of all men or all animals equally, which, upon the doctrine that pleasure is the one thing desirable
because the one thing desired, can only be logically justified by the untenable
assumption that the only way to obtain a maximum of pleasure for oneself is to
have an equal regard for the pleasure of everyone else. But Mr. Sidgwick’s way
of justifying his Altr
uism constrains us to ask him some further questions. What
does he understand by the ‘reason’ to which he ascribes the office of deciding what
the one ‘ultimately and intrinsically desirable end’ is; not the means to it, but on
the nature of the end itself? In saying that it is reasonable to pursue desirable
consciousness, is he not open to the same charge of moving in a circle which
he brings against those who say it is reasonable to live according to nature, or
virtuous to seek perfection, while after all they have no other account to give of
the life according to nature but that it is reasonable, or of perfection but that it is the highest virtue? What does he mean by desirable consciousness but the sort of
consciousness which it is reasonable to seek?
Green goes on to maintain that although Sidgwick tries to avoid such
a circle by “describing the desirable consciousness as pleasure,” it would
nonetheless seem, given his impartialism, and the equivocating way in
which he describes pleasure, that “his doctrine comes to this, that it is
reasonable to seek as ultimate good that form of conscious life which is
reasonably to be desired” – a singularly revealing upshot. For according
to Green, by criticizing Sidgwick’s view in this manner, he sought “not
to depreciate it, but to show how much more truth there is in it, from
our point of view, than in the common statement of utilitarianism.” The
circle, that is, is virtuous rather than vicious:
We have previously explained how it comes about that any true theory of the good
will present an appearance of moving in a circle. The rational or self-conscious
soul, we have seen, constitutes its own end; is an end at once to and in itself. Its end is the perfection of itself, the fulfilment of the law of its being. The consciousness of there being such an end expresses itself in the judgement that something
absolutely should be, that there is something intrinsically and ultimately desirable.
This judgement is, in this sense, the expression of reason; and all those who, like
Mr. Sidgwick, recognise the distinction between the absolutely desirable and
the de facto desired, have in effect admitted that reason gives – is the source of there being – a supreme practical good. If we ask for a reason why we should
pursue this end, there is none to be given but that it is rational to do so, that
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reason bids it, that the pursuit is the effort of the self-conscious or rational soul after its own perfection. It is reasonable to desire it because it is reasonably to be desired. Those who like to do so may make merry over the tautology. Those who
understand how it arises – from the fact, namely, that reason gives its own end,
that the self-conscious spirit of man presents its own perfection to itself as the
intrinsically desirable – will not be moved by the mirth.
Not moved by their mirth, and not at all tempted to try to “escape
the charge of tautology by taking the desirableness of ultimate good to
consist in anything else than in the thought of it as that which would
satisfy reason – satisfy the demand of the self-conscious soul for its own
perfection.” Pleasure is no help, since “this notion cannot be determined
by reference to anything but what reason has itself done; by anything but
reflection on the excellences of character and conduct to which the rational
effort after perfection of life has given rise.” Thus, Green’s self-conscious
spirits will
appeal to the virtues to tell them what is virtuous, to goodness to tell them what
is truly good, to the work of reason in human life to tell them what is reasonably
to be desired; and that is the only appropriate procedure, because only in the full
attainment of its end could reason learn fully what that end is, and only in what
it has so far attained of the end can it learn what its further attainment would be.
In this, they could take some inspiration from Sidgwick, while asking him
for some reason why “having accepted principles, as it would seem, so
antagonistic to those of the philosophic Utilitarians,” he should “end by
accepting their conclusion.”
Manifestly, there is in such a view a good deal of the old Mauricean
Platonic soaring toward the form of the Good, apprehended in this world
only through a glass darkly. But the nature of Green’s position may be
rather hard to make out without a fuller sense of his metaphysical system.
This is not easily summarized. In fact, Sidgwick came about as close to
giving an accurate thumbnail account of it as anyone: “Briefly, then, a
spirit’s thinking activity is the source of a system of notions, by which the
world is constituted, but it cannot itself be thought under any of these. It
is the former proposition that leads me to call Green’s view Idealistic: it is
the latter which leads me to call it Spiritualistic. . . .” That is, for Green, as
for the Germans, a “mentalistic” metaphysics is crucial. “Nature, or the
world of space and time, is conceived as a single, unalterable, all-inclusive
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system of relations: and these relations are thought-relations; they result
from the activity of thought.” Hence, Green’s Idealism.
However, Green does not follow Hegel in viewing Thought as having
completed itself in Spirit, “so that the Universe of Reality would have
been truly thought as Thought itself.” Rather, Green rejects such a view,
holding instead that the all-inclusive system of thought relations “im-
plies something other than itself, as a condition of its being what it is.” It
“presupposes the activity of a thinking being, a ‘self-distinguishing, self-
objectifying, unifying, combining consciousness’ whose synthetic activity
is the source of the relations by which the knowable world is unified: and
we are entitled to say of this entity, that the relations which result from
its synthetic action are not predicable of it.” This is the Divine Spirit,
outside of space and time, the great unifying consciousness that cannot
be another object to itself, on a par with the phenomena it unifies. This is
what constitutes the world, while remaining itself unconditioned. And it is
a macrocosmic analogue of the Kantian transcendental “I” that finds itself
reproduced microcosmically in the individual person. As “knower,” “each
man’s consciouness is nothing but the eternal consciousness itself, repro-
ducing or realising itself in a limited form in connexion with the man’s
animal organism which it makes its vehicle, and whose sentient life it uses
as its organ. It is as such a reproduction or realisation of the one Divine
Mind that a man is also a ‘self-distinguishing, self-objectifying conscious-
ne
ss,’ a ‘self-conscious personality’ or briefly a ‘spirit.’” (LPK –)
As an irreverent contemporary Balliol rhyme so famously had it:
I am the self-distinguishing
consciousness in everything;
the synthetic unity
one in multiplicity,
the unseen nexus of the seen
sometimes known as TOMMY GREEN
Evidently, even Sidgwick’s powers of luminously clear exposition
were taxed to the limit in his account of Green’s metaphysics. Still, it
should be tolerably plain that Green held that there was a Mind that
constituted the world but remained separate from it. He was, in effect,
rehabilitating the notion of God by developing – out of a critical account
of the incoherence of empiricism in accounting for itself, free will, the
knowing subject, or the kind of uniformity of experience required even by
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scientific explanation – an account of the world that portrays it as the uni-
fied thought processes of one big consciousness, with some of the thoughts,
namely persons, more closely reflecting the nature of the Divine Thinker
than others, as the consciousness of free will indicates. As Skorupski puts
it, for Green,
Self-consciousness, or Thought as such, is not to be identified with this or that
empirical thought, since all such particular thoughts are within experience. Self-
consciousness is rather a single, actively self-distinguishing spiritual principle:
which expresses itself in temporal human intelligence, in something like the way
that the whole meaning of a text is potentially present throughout the temporal
act of reading.
This is phenomenalism made honest, brought into holistic coherence after
the devastation of Hume. There is, manifest in persons as knowers and free
moral agents, a principle of originality and creativity that will ever defy
naturalistic science, will ever frustrate science because science presupposes
it and science, even if it can catch its own tail, can never swallow itself
whole.
This is recognizably a critical philosophical friend of the familiar Chris-