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Ethics Replaces Morality: The Victorian Legacy to Bloomsbury That it has given a new sense, that it has laid open a new organ, is the highest that can be said of any critical effort. It is interesting then to ask what kind of man it was who thus laid open a new organ? Under what conditions was that effected? —Walter Pater, The Renaissance Todd P. Avery Indiana University TO DATE, CRITICAL DISCUSSIONS about the Bloomsbury Group's debt to English moral philosophy have revolved almost exclusively around the figure of G. E. Moore and Moore's book, Principia Ethica (1903).1 These discussions have largely ignored the role Moore's eminent Victorian predecessors played in the formation of Bloomsbury values. The extent to which Bloomsbury's "ethical aestheticism" or "aesthetic ethics" grew out of the intellectual antagonism between Henry Sidgwick and Walter Pater on the one hand, and Leslie Stephen on the other, remains unmeasured. Sidgwick's The Methods of Ethics (1874) and Pater's Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) develop an ethics incommensurable with the moral philosophy contained in Stephen 's The Science of Ethics (1882). It will be one purpose of this essay to demonstrate the nature ofthat antagonism. A second purpose will be to show that a close look at the Victorian ethical legacy to Bloomsbury reveals some perhaps surprising connections between Bloomsbury's ethical aestheticism and some of the major themes of philosophical/ theoretical postmodernism, e.g., Louis Althusser's assault upon the power of the family Ideological State Apparatus, Michel Foucault's and Gilles Deleuze's own versions of ethical aestheticism, and, especially, Deleuze's categorical distinction between morality and ethics. Through 294 Avery : bloomsbury this remapping of the late-Victorian/early-Edwardian ethical terrain, I hope to expand the theoretical basis we now have for understanding what critics such as Patrick Brantlinger, Christopher Reed, and Peter Stansky have recently argued to be the radically democratic impulse behind many of Bloomsbury's literary and artistic productions.2 John Bicknell, in an intriguing footnote in his recent, two-volume edition of the Selected Letters of Leslie Stephen (1996), begins such a remapping . He suggests that Stephen's letter of 10 October 1882 to his friend Sidgwick, together with the remarks with which Stephen's Science concludes, adumbrate the ethical position that has come to be virtually synonymous with Bloomsbury. In this epistolary response to the unfavorable review Sidgwick had given Science earlier that month in Mind,3 Stephen writes: "My chief moral doctrine in practice is that all real happiness ... consists in the domestic & friendly affections; & as a practical moral, to wind up my remarks in the orthodox way, I hope that we shall always be friends in private spite [sic] of any little skirmishes in print."4 Stephen's letter indeed echoes the final sentences of Science, where he appears to sum up his moral theory: The dread of hunger, thirst, and cold; the desire to gratify the passions; the love of wife and child or friend; sympathy with the sufferings of our neighbours ; resentment of injury inflicted upon ourselves—these and such as these are the great forces which govern mankind. When a moralist tries to assign anything else as an ultimate motive, he is getting beyond the world of realities___My love of those who are nearest to my sympathies must be the ultimate ground of any love that I can have for anybody else. My desire for the welfare of my race grows out of my desire for the welfare of my own intimates; and that exists independently of any ethical theory whatever.5 Stephen's letter to Sidgwick echoes these final sentences οι Science, but not in quite the way Bicknell imagines when he suggests that "Students of Bloomsbury may see in these sentiments a bridge between high Evangelical morality and the ethical aestheticism of G. E. Moore and some members of Bloomsbury."6 It would be a mistake to find in Stephen's remarks the germ, for example, of E. M. Forster's oft-cited claim, "I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have...

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