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Eye of the Universe: Henry Sidgwick and the Problem Public
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 January 2009
Abstract
Henry Sidgwick has gone down in the history of philosophy as both the great, classical utilitarian moral theorist who authored The Methods of Ethics, and an outstanding exemplar of intellectual honesty and integrity, one whose personal virtues were inseparable from his philosophical strengths and method. Yet this construction of Sidgwick the philosopher has been based on a too limited understanding of Sidgwick's casuistry and leading practical ethical concerns. As his friendship with John Addington Symonds reveals, Sidgwick was deeply entangled in an effort to negotiate the proper spheres of the public and private, not only in philosophical and religious matters, but also with respect to explosive questions of sexuality – particularly same sex actions and identities, as celebrated by Symonds and other champions of Oxford Hellenism and Whitmania. His willingness to mislead the public about such issues suggests that Sidgwick's utilitarian casuistry was rather more complex and esoteric than has been recognized.
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References
1 See Rawls, J., A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, Mass., 1971Google Scholar, esp. ch. 3, sect. 23.
2 See Williams, , ‘The Point of View of the Universe’, Making Sense of Humanity, Cambridge, 1995, pp. 153–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 I have argued this elsewhere, e.g., in ‘Truth and Its Consequences: the Friendship of Symonds and Henry Sidgwick’, John Addington Symonds: Culture and the Demon Desire, ed. Pemble, J., London, 2000Google Scholar.
4 I say ‘as such’ because there is obviously a thriving industry surrounding Blooms-bury and its vanguardism; the point is that Bloomsbury sexual theorizing has not effectively been brought into the context of the evolution of utilitarianism (no doubt in part because of their own hostility to earlier figures such as Sidgwick).
5 It should be tolerably clear that much of what follows proceeds on the assumption that Foucauldian work on the history of sexuality has not proved very helpful when it comes to utilitarianism, despite Foucault's obsession with Bentham's Panopticon scheme. Indeed, by highlighting the figure of Symonds, I am in effect highlighting serious shortcomings in Foucault's own various readings of nineteenth-century England. However, the better Foucauldian style historical accounts, such as Weeks's, Jeffrey classic Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present, rev. edn., London, 1990Google Scholar, have certainly been a vitally important inspiration to my own research.
6 One could of course make an excellent case that The Methods of Ethics is the greatest work in the classical utilitarian tradition; my designation of Sidgwick as ‘third greatest’ is simply an acknowledgement of the general view of the matter that one finds in textbooks.
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9 Oddly enough, one of the things that seems to have most offended the Bloomsberries was Sidgwick's openness in discussing the Apostles, which the Memoir more or less exposed.
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23 There is an extensive discussion of these figures in my Eye of the Universe: Henry Sidgwick and the Quest for Certainty, forthcoming, and in an essay, ‘Sidgwick's Racism’, Classical Utilitarianism and the Questions of Race, ed. G. Varouxakis and B. Schultz, Lanham, Maryland, forthcoming.
24 Methods, p. 489.
25 As later sections will suggest, although Sidgwick's more scholarly philosophical work would seem to be a reliable indicator of his actual views on the whole, there were various concerns of considerable philosophical significance to him that he tended to mask even in his books.
26 Methods, pp. 316 f.
27 Ibid., pp. 448 f.
28 Sidgwick, , ‘The Ethics of Conformity and Subscription, Cambridge, 1870, p. 18Google Scholar. The arguments that Sidgwick formulates in this pamphlet are uncannily relevant to today's discussions of religious orthodoxy and gay/lesbian religious participation.
29 Ibid., p. 36.
30 Ibid., p. 37.
31 Ibid., p. 29.
32 Ibid., p. 39.
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34 See ‘The Ethics of Religious Conformity’, Practical Ethics, p. 74.
35 Rayleigh, p. 165.
38 The Rev. Hastings Rashdall is often cited, in e.g. Practical Ethics, as a case of high-minded laxity.
37 Sidgwick, , ‘Initial Society Papers’, Sidgwick Papers, Wren Library, Cambridge UniversityGoogle Scholar, Add.Ms.c.96.4.
38 Quoted in Henry Sidgwick, A Memoir, ed. Sidgwick, A. and Sidgwick, E. M., London, 1906, p. 346Google Scholar.
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40 Of course, if Sidgwick supposed that utilitarianism could underwrite much of common-sense morality, with the acts/omissions distinction as part of that, then there is no obvious inconsistency involved here. I am grateful to Roger Crisp for stressing this to me.
41 Memoir, pp. 395 f.
42 Ibid., p. 467.
43 Robinson, , Gay Lives: Homosexual Autobiography from John Addington Symonds to Paul Monette, Chicago, 1999, p. 8Google Scholar. I follow Robinson's example of sometimes using the term ‘gay’ anachronistically, as long as there is little danger of any serious misunderstanding arising. Symonds himself preferred such terms as ‘Uranian’, ‘sexual inversion’, or ‘homogenic’; he disliked the term ‘homosexual’ only because of its mixed linguistic derivation, a criticism also made by Carpenter.
44 For these incidents, see Symonds's, own account, in The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds: The Secret Homosexual Life of a Leading Nineteenth-Century Man of Letters, ed. Grosskurth, P., New York, 1984Google Scholar.
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46 This letter is reproduced in The Complete Works and Select Correspondence of Henry Sidgwick.
47 Grosskurth, , The Woeful Victorian: A Biography of John Addington Symonds, New York, 1964, p. 128Google Scholar. In many respects, a more accurate picture of Symonds emerges from the massive collection of his correspondence that also appeared in the sixties; see The Letters of John Addington Symonds, 3 vols., ed. Peters, R. and Schueller, H., Detroit, 1967–9Google Scholar. But for more recent scholarly developments, see Dakyns, Robinson, and Schultz.
48 Reproduced in Dakyns, Robinson, and Schultz.
49 Not surprisingly, Sidgwick was less forthcoming than Symonds about his sexual tendencies, though the pattern of his life and many small bits of evidence rather clearly suggest that, to put it in the current idiom, he was bi-sexual in so far as he was sexual at all.
50 Thus, to give another example, Browning claimed that he had consistently followed Sidgwick's advice when it came to handling his crisis at Eton, from which he had been dismissed because of his close relationships with some of his students. See his account in Memories of Sixty Years, London, 1910Google Scholar.
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57 Reproduced in Dakyns, Robinson, and Schultz.
58 This letter is dated 27 November 1894 and is reproduced in Dakyns, Robinson, and Schultz.
59 E.g., in a letter to Dakyns from 12 November 1894, reproduced in The Complete Works and Select Correspondence of Henry Sidgwick.
60 The Labouchére amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, the law under which Wilde was prosecuted, made acts of ‘gross indecency’ between men punishable by up to two years hard labour. For an excellent account of the law and its historical context, see Weeks, J., Sex, Politics & Society, 2nd edn., London, 1989, pp. 102 fGoogle Scholar.
61 Two excellent works on the historical context, in addition to those by Weeks cited in other notes, are Foldy, Michael, The Trials of Oscar Wilde: Deviance, Morality, and Late-Victorian Society, New Haven, 1997Google Scholar, and Sinfield, Alan, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment, New York, 1994Google Scholar. The latter is especially helpful on the misogyny embedded in manly Whitmanian comradeship.
62 It has certainly seemed that way to Grosskurth, Weeks, Sedgwick, and others writing primarily about Symonds.
63 Reproduced in Dakyns, Robinson, and Schultz.
64 Thus, the memoir of Sidgwick assembled by his brother Arthur and widow, Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick, followed a rather similar pattern of masking all sexual issues.
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66 Dowling, , Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford, Ithaca, 1994, p. xivGoogle Scholar.
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68 See her account in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, New York, 1985, pp. 201–17Google Scholar.
69 Again, see my Eye of the Universe, ch. 8. and forthcoming essay, ‘Sidgwick's Racism’.
70 See especially my ‘Truth and Its Consequences’.
71 On Carpenter, see the contribution by Weeks in Rowbotham, S. and Weeks, J., Socialism and the New Life: The Personal and Sexual Politics of Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis, London, 1977Google Scholar.
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73 He writes, in a letter from 11 November 1894, ‘I do not suppose that any man ever had such acute, abundant & sympathetic help as I have had from you & H.S.’ See Strange Audacious Life.
74 Reproduced in Dakyns, Robinson, and Schultz.
75 Ibid.
76 Grosskurth, , Havelock Ellis, A Biography, New York, 1980, pp. 181 fGoogle Scholar.
77 Brown to Carpenter, Sheffield Archives, ref. Carpenter Mss. 386/76.
78 On this see my ‘Sidgwick's Feminism’ and Tullberg, Rita McWilliams, Women at Cambridge, 2nd edn., Cambridge, 1998Google Scholar.
79 The letter is from 30 September 1894 and is reproduced in The Complete Works and Select Correspondence of Henry Sidgwick.