Floating Life

This came my way through the Arts and Letters Daily page: I should thank Simon H for telling me about this a while ago. It is now my browser’s home page! I clicked on it because 1) Martha Nussbaum is great and 2) The Nation is what one hopes America might be more often.

I wasn’t disappointed. The article is a review of a new book on the least familiar (to me at least) of the 19th-century Utilitarians, Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900).

…Far from being a complacent egoistic philosophy, Utilitarianism was radical in both its methods (counting all people equally) and its results, which often urged sweeping change in existing social structures.

Nor were Utilitarians political conservatives, as their modern descendants in economics tend to be. On the contrary, in line with their philosophical convictions, they supported an end to religious establishments, the equality of women, a demanding globalism and, in the case of Mill and Bentham, a dedication to animal rights (since “each” included all sentient beings). Arrested at the age of 18 for distributing contraceptive literature among the poor of London, Mill went on to introduce a motion for women’s suffrage as a member of Parliament. Bentham issued the first Western philosophical defense of animal rights since Greco-Roman antiquity, and Mill left much of his estate to the SPCA. Both, as atheists, were unable to hold an academic appointment, which at that time required swearing belief in the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England. Even more radically, Bentham condemned laws against same-sex relations, commenting, “It is wonderful that nobody has ever yet fancied it to be sinful to scratch where it itches, and that it has never been determined that the only natural way of scratching is with such or such a finger and that it is unnatural to scratch with any other.”

Henry Sidgwick is usually regarded as the tame Victorian among these radicals, the person who domesticated Utilitarianism and made it both academically and socially respectable, in the process smoothing its rough edges. This facile story runs up against some inconvenient facts, such as Sidgwick’s resignation of his Cambridge fellowship when he decided that he could not support the Thirty-Nine Articles (he resumed it again only when the rules were changed), and his key role, with his wife, Eleanor, in founding Newnham College, the first women’s college to be located right in the heart of Cambridge, not (like Girton) at a safe distance from the centers of power. Despite these signs of radical commitment, however, Sidgwick’s reputation for tameness has persisted…

…Sidgwick spent his life on one of philosophy’s most difficult problems, which is also one of the most difficult problems of personal and political life: How can we be happy while at the same time pursuing fairness? If he himself did not solve it, he contributed more than all but a few to our understanding of its dimensions and our sense of where to look for its solution. How odd that his widow and friends became so obsessed with his putative communications from beyond the grave, when he had already achieved this far worthier, and genuine, immortality, in a life marked, as we now know, by painful struggle and a strange combination of radical openness and fearful self-concealment.

Sidgwick also became involved in “the Society for Psychical Research and devoting a great part of his later life to experiments that tested the claims of mediums, clairvoyants and hypnotists.”

…While Sidgwick was testing the limits of religion, Schultz shows in the most surprising portion of his book, he was also profoundly unconventional in matters of gender and sexuality–much more so indeed than Bentham, a lifelong solitary bachelor, or Mill, whose most scandalous act was to go about with a beloved married woman for many years, probably without sleeping with her, and then to marry her after her husband’s death. Sidgwick, by contrast, was not just a feminist, which we knew, but also a lifelong homosexual, which we have never clearly known…

Not entirely ugly as a young man either.