Henry Sidgwick, Eye of the Universe: An Intellectual Biography (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Henry Sidgwick, Eye of the Universe: An Intellectual Biography Peter Allan Dale (bio) Henry Sidgwick, Eye of the Universe: An Intellectual Biography, by Bart Schultz; pp. xx + 858. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004, £40.00, $48.00. The early-twentieth-century Cambridge philosopher C. D. Broad declared Henry Sidgwick's The Methods of Ethics (1874), "on the whole the best treatise on moral theory that has ever been written" (Five Types of Ethical Theory 143). Writing in 1930, Broad was no doubt conscious of a need to recover Sidgwick's reputation from the depredations of the then-current avant-garde. He was also concerned to remake the case for the central importance of moral philosophy for a generation that seemed to have grown tired of the subject. But Broad was fighting a rearguard battle; it was not until the last quarter of the twentieth century—primarily under the impact of the Harvard moral and political philosopher [End Page 123] John Rawls—that Sidgwick and moral philosophy began to make a comeback. Probably the most distinguished expression of that new interest was J. B. Schneewind's fine study of 1977, Sidgwick's Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy, which uses Sidgwick's Methods as, among other things, a way into portraying one of the principal philosophical preoccupations of an era. Now, a generation later, comes an even more extensive study by a scholar who, while yielding to none in his admiration for Schneewind's work, has carried the discussion well beyond its limits. So thorough and so penetrating is Bart Schultz's "intellectual biography" of this most eminent of Victorian philosophers that it seems appropriate to paraphrase Broad and say that it is, "on the whole," the best book on Sidgwick that has yet been written. It is certainly the most comprehensive. To say that Schultz has produced the most comprehensive study of Sidgwick is to mean essentially two things. First, as intellectual history and philosophical analysis, it moves us beyond the almost exclusive focus on the magnum opus (Methods) and the question of ethics to consider fully Sidgwick's very important work in "social philosophy." (I use the term here to include economic, political, and, in a broad sense, cultural theory.) But by comprehensive, one means as well that Schultz tells us more about the biography, the intimate personality of his subject, than has any previous commentator. To begin with the social philosophy: perhaps the most useful point to make in limited space is that Sidgwick himself was arguably more concerned, in the end, to produce a social philosophy than a moral one and has suffered in his role as social philosopher from the overshadowing celebrity of his book on ethics. Most readers never really get beyond Methods. But, important qualifications notwithstanding, Sidgwick was a utilitarian, and, as Rawls observes in the preface to his own overshadowing magnum opus, we "sometimes forget that the great utilitarians...were social theorists and economists of the first rank; and the moral doctrine they worked out was framed to meet the needs of their wider interests and to fit into a comprehensive scheme" (A Theory of Justice [1971] viii). Sidgwick's "wider interest," very simply put, was to replace, rather than reconstruct (as he felt his longtime friend and rival T. H. Green, for example, was trying to do), a Christian faith in which one could no longer believe with a thoroughly secular rationalism. This, he continued to hope to the end of his life, might provide a new and more secure basis for social solidarity and national preeminence. The development of a rational moral philosophy was but the first step in a practical philosophy that would ultimately encompass economic, social, and political theory. His mission was the characteristically Victorian "prophetic" one, and had his prose been more appealing and his self- assurance less shaky, he might well have claimed a place beside J. S. Mill, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, and William Morris. For the reader primarily concerned with exploring the development of Sidgwick's moral and social philosophy, Schultz has, in effect, provided a relatively short way to satisfaction. One can move directly to chapter 4, "Consensus...