by Bart Schultz
Green’s claims, he does not fall prey to some form of dualism:
[I]f we take Green’s wider notion of Perfection, namely, complete realisation of capabilities, and understand this to include (as he expressly affirms it to include) the development of Science and Art, of the faculties of knowledge and artistic production and appreciation, we cannot say that our own perfection or approximation
P: GYQ
ca.xml
CY/Schultz
February ,
:
Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe
to perfection and others’ perfection are not liable to be presented as alterna-
tives, unless we ignore the facts of experience and the actual conditions of human
life. And Green’s own language, in speaking of Justice, Self-denial, Self-sacrifice,
etc., involves a similar conception of ‘Good to one’ incompatible with ‘Good to
another’ – notwithstanding his assertion that True Good does not consist in objects
that admit of being competed for.
So again as regards . . . the uncertainty of hedonistic calculation – I have aimed in The Methods of Ethics at bringing out clearly the uncertainties of hedonistic calculation, and all that I will now observe is, that the uncertainties on Green’s
view seem to me indefinitely greater, – both more complex and more fundamen-
tal, – if a wider conception of the end as the complete realisation of capabilities
is taken. All the alternatives presented for practical choice involve different real-
isations of different capabilities. What criterion does Green offer for preferring
one sort of realisation to another? I find none whatever; and if the comparison of
quantities of pleasure is difficult and doubtful, the comparison of different real-
isations of capabilities seems to me indefinitely more difficult and more doubtful.
(GSM )
Sidgwick would end up forever lamenting the mysterious logical chasms
separating the Idealist metaphysics from the Idealist ethics and both
from the Idealist practice. His last philosophical lecture, delivered to
the Oxford Philosophical Society in May , was on “The Philoso-
phy of T. H. Green,” and it drew all the chief representatives of Oxford
Idealism. According to F. C. S. Schiller, who attended, the disciples of
Green mostly admitted the fairness of the criticism that Green’s view
was incoherent, though when a prominent Hegelian suggested that the
incoherence pointed to the dialectical limits of thought in the world of
appearance, Sidgwick confessed that “he had never been able to make
out from the school to which he [the critic] evidently belonged how they
managed to distinguish the contradictions which they took to be evidence
of error from those which they regarded as intimations of higher truth”
(M ).
This was more than a Sidgwicked witticism. The talk distilled decades
of critical Sidgwickian engagement with Green’s views, and it posed with
special force the challenge to Green’s Spiritualism: “Let us first take
Green’s positive account of Spirit, and ask, point by point whether we
can definitely think the qualities or functions he attributes to it, with-
out, in so thinking, predicating of it some of the relations which, ac-
cording to Green, result from its combining and unifying activity, and
P: GYQ
ca.xml
CY/Schultz
February ,
:
Friends versus Friends
are therefore not properly predicable of it.” Point by point, Sidgwick
answers no:
And this view, I think, will be confirmed by a rigorous examination of Green’s
main argument for establishing the existence of a spiritual principle in nature. It
is the source of the relations that constitute experience a connected whole: but
where lies the logical necessity of assuming such a source? Green answers that
the existence of the relations involves ‘the unity of the manifold, the existence
of the many in one. . . . But,’ he adds, ‘a plurality of things cannot of themselves unite in one relation, nor can a single thing of itself bring itself into a multitude of relations . . . there must’ – therefore – ‘be something other than the manifold things themselves which combines them.’ The argument seems to me unthinkable,
because, as Green has emphatically declared, I cannot even conceive the manifold
things out of the relations: and therefore I cannot even raise the question whether,
if I could so conceive them, I should see them to require something other than
themselves to bring them into the relations. (LPK , )
This was an important point, one that Sidgwick had often stressed in his
class lectures. As he alternatively put it, for Green, nature is “conceived as
essentially a single unalterable all-inclusive system of relations, by which
all phenomena are combined into a systematic whole: and the source of
connexion, the combiner and unifier, must be a non-natural or Spiritual
Principle.” But then,
How, as no element of nature is conceivable out of relation, can we conceive it as
requiring a non-natural principle to bring it into relation? It seems that in order to exhibit the evidence for a non-natural principle Green has first to conceive Nature
as analysed into elements; yet this in the same breath he declares to be irrational
and inconceivable! (LPK )
Should Green appeal to self-consciousness as yielding a “positive con-
ception of the action of the Divine Mind in the universe,” Sidgwick coun-
ters that, as for himself, “I seem to find, not to originate, truth”; but even granting the consciousness of “action absolutely from itself ” – human
freedom – how “can we infer from this the action of the Universal Mind,
consistently with Green’s theory of the human spirit?” After all, “if my
self-consciousness is to be the causa cognoscendi of the causality of the unifying principle in the world, that self-consciousness must surely include
an indubitable cognition of the essential unity of the self: but in trying
to think Green’s conception of the human spirit, I find that notion of its
essential unity vanishes.” Green, that is, has not reconciled the mental and
P: GYQ
ca.xml
CY/Schultz
February ,
:
Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe
the physical, despite his appeal to the analogy of a two-sided shield: “For
I see clearly that a shield not only may but must have two opposite sides, united into a continuous surface by the rim: whereas I cannot see how
one indivisible self can possibly have as its two sides an animal organism
and a self-limiting eternal consciousness” (LPK –). In the fuller
formulation of the point in Sidgwick’s lectures:
One of the things I am most certain of is the unity of myself. Green says that
() I am really two things, so disparate as an eternal consciou
sness out of time, and a function of an animal organism changing in time; and yet at the same time that
() I am one indivisible reality contemplated from two different points of view.
I submit that Green is bound to reconcile this contradiction, which he does not
do by simply stating that both contradictory propositions are true. As it is, his
doctrine is rather like the theological doctrine of the Athanasian Creed, only the
Athanasian Creed does not profess to give an intelligible account of the mysteries
it formulates. (LPK )
For his part, Green would probably have thought this a prime example
of the cheap mirth one ought to expect from utilitarians. But for Sidgwick,
from the self-contradictions of empirical experience Green has only pro-
duced a self-contradictory metaphysics, unable to present its own basic
tenets in a consistent and coherent fashion. What can’t be said can’t be
said, and it can’t be whistled either, as later Wittgensteinians were fond of
singing.
It is not stretching it to find in these and many other passages of Sidg-
wick’s critique the springboard for the (not much) later arguments of
Moore and Russell, particularly during their early, realist period of re-
bellion against Idealism. Sidgwick had urged in his lectures that “when
Green draws the inference that this knowing consciousness is not a ‘phe-
nomenon,’ not an ‘event in the individual’s history,’ he seems to be con-
founding the knowing consciousness with the object known” (LPK ).
And of course, Russell attacked head on the central Idealist doctrine
that, as he put it, “Every apparently separate piece of reality has, as it
were, hooks which grapple it to the next piece; the next piece, in turn has
fresh hooks, and so on until the whole universe is reconstructed.” Russell,
like Sidgwick, found this question-begging, a view that presupposed that
existing incomplete things demanded the existence of other things, and
that the nature of a thing was constituted by all the truths about it. Russell
argued that the relations that a thing has do not necessarily constitute
P: GYQ
ca.xml
CY/Schultz
February ,
:
Friends versus Friends
its nature, and that one can know things by direct acquaintance while
remaining quite ignorant of many other relations:
I may be acquainted, for example, with my toothache, and this knowledge may be
as complete as knowledge by acquaintance ever can be, without knowing all that
the dentist (who is not acquainted with it) can tell me about its cause, and without
therefore knowing its ‘nature’ in the above sense. Thus the fact that a thing has
relations does not prove that its relations are logically necessary.
Sidgwick had struggled hard with analogous claims in Green, con-
cerning internal relations. He confessed himself unable to make out how
Green could claim that “the single things are nothing except as deter-
mined by relations which are the negations of their singleness, but they
do not therefore cease to be single things. . . . On the contrary, if they did not survive in their singleness, there could be no relation between them –
nothing but a blank, featureless identity.” Among other things, Sidgwick
wondered why the “fact that they survive in their singleness” – whatever
that singleness is – should show “that they need something other than
themselves to make them so survive” (LPK ). Furthermore, as John
Gibbins has plausibly suggested, Russell’s appeal to knowledge by ac-
quaintance versus knowledge by description can be traced back through
Sidgwick to John Grote. In any event, Sidgwick plainly recognized the
crucial point of the distinction, and the problematic that would animate
much of Russell’s epistemological work, at least during its phenomenalistic
and reductionistic phases:
Let us suppose that both Materialists and Mentalists agree to affirm () that we
immediately know the external world, so far as it is necessary to know it for the
purpose of constructing physical science; () that we immediately know nothing
but our own consciousness; and () that these two statements are perfectly con-
sistent. It still remains to ask who are the ‘we’ who have this knowledge. Each
one of us can only have experience of a very small portion of this world; and if
we abstract what is known through memory, and therefore mediately, the portion
becomes small indeed. In order to get to what ‘we’ conceive ‘ourselves’ to know
as ‘matter of fact’ respecting the world, as extended in space and time – to such
merely historical knowledge as we commonly regard not as ‘resting’ on experience,
but as constituting the experience on which science rests – we must assume the
general trustworthiness of memory, and the general trustworthiness of testimony
under proper limitations and conditions. I do not for a moment say that we have
P: GYQ
ca.xml
CY/Schultz
February ,
:
Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe
no right to make these assumptions; I only do not see how we can prove that we
have such a right, from what we immediately know. (LPK –)
However, it must be allowed that on various points, Sidgwick, while clearly
pointing to the possibility of a program resembling Russell’s logical atom-
ism, would have resisted any overly ambitious formulation of it out of a
fairly robust sense of the theory-ladenness of obervation, a sense of just
how conceptualized perception, in any useful sense, always already is:
The truth seems to be that the indubitable certainty of the judgment ‘I am con-
scious’ has been rather hastily extended by Empiricists to judgments affirming that
my present consciousness is such and such. But these latter judgments necessarily
involve an implicit comparison and classification of the present consciousness with elements of past conscious experience recalled in memory; and the implied classification may obviously be erroneous either through inaccuracy of memory or a
mistake in the comparative judgment. And the risk of error cannot well be avoided
by eliminating along with inference this implicit classification: for the psychical
fact observed cannot be distinctly thought at all without it: if we rigorously purge
it away, there will be nothing left save the cognition of self and of we cannot say
what psychical fact. Nay, it is doubtful whether even this much will be left for
the Empiricist’s observation: since he may share Hume’s inability to find a self
in the stream of psychical experience, or to maintain a clear distinction between
psychical and material fact. Thus the Empiricist criterion, if extended to purge
away comparison as well as inference, may leave us nothing free from error but
the bare affirmation of Fact not further definable. (LPK –)
>
Sidgwick takes pains to explain that he does not want to deny “the value
of the Empirical criterion” and that he has no doubt of “the importance of
distinguishing the inferential element in our apparently immediate judg-
ments as far as we can, with a view to the elimination of error.” The point is
simply that “the assertion that we can by this procedure obtain a residuum
of certainly true cognition seems to me neither self-evident nor confirmed
by experience.” Often enough, in Sidgwick’s eyes, the “given” turned out
to be a myth.
Thus, although Sidgwick was well aware of the type of neo-Humean
direction that empiricism might take – and later would take, in the work
of the mature Russell – his own conception of experience held on to some
of the more holistic and nonreductive elements of Idealism, in at least
proto-pragmatist fashion. The empiricists and the rationalists offered up
“useful” criteria for “guarding against error,” but neither their schools
P: GYQ
ca.xml
CY/Schultz
February ,
:
Friends versus Friends
nor any other had found the key to infallibility. This comports well with
the account of his epistemology set out in Chapter in connection with
the Methods.
Beyond all this, Sidgwick always found the whole Idealist business just
terribly overimpressed by thought, at the expense of feeling. In his final
talk, as in so many other places, he explained of Green:
He is equally willing to admit that there is ‘no such thing as mere thought’; and
in fact only to contend that feeling and thought are inseparable and mutually
dependent. And he expressly affirms this mutual dependence of thought and
feeling, not only in the case of our empirical consciousness, but in the case also of
‘the world-consciousness of which ours is a limited mode.’ But if this be so, I do not see how Green is justified – or thinks himself justified – in making the thought
element so prominent, and the feeling element so subordinate in his account
of Nature; or in speaking of Nature as a system of relations, instead of related
feelings; or in resolving – as we saw – the particularity of a feeling entirely into
