Timothy Sprigge (1932–2007) felt himself, with reason, to be out of step with the sort of philosophy conducted in most British universities, but not with the older tradition. He reckoned that one's metaphysical outlook must also affect one's ethical conclusions, and that a ‘purely physical conception of what a human being or an animal is can only distort our sense of moral values’ (5). As a metaphysician he was an absolute idealist and panpsychist, believing that reality was a network of experiencing subjects, and that each moment of time was equally real and present to itself. As a moralist, he was a utilitarian of a staunchly anti-speciesist variety. As a member of the ‘loyal opposition’ he disliked both Wittgenstein and the physicalists, seeing in both a solipsistic tendency. These essays, written over thirty years from 1969 to 1999, range from the simply argumentative, through examinations of Royce, Santayana, William James, Husserl and Bradley, to fierce condemnations of current agricultural and laboratory practice, which he considered had been supported by physicalist philosophers with an interest in denying the reality of subjective experience, either to ‘animals’ or even to human beings too.
The collection put together by Leemon McHenry is divided into three sections: on the metaphysics of experience, the unreality of time, and ethical questions about the rights of animals and even – in some measure – the insentient environment. Sprigge identified the problem of subjectivity back in 1969, in opposition to what was then the fashionable rejection of any supposedly ‘private’ experience (as being something that could only, per impossibile, be described in a ‘private language’, necessarily unintelligible to any other speaker – or even the speaker herself at any other moment). That early essay did not, perhaps, convince, partly because he did not then advance the really radical notion implicit in what was to be his absolute idealism, namely that subjective experience is indeed not private, being always open to the absolute intelligence that undergirds (and maybe guides) the totality of experienced reality (which is all the reality there is). In 1971 he identified the core of subjective life in the notion of what it is like to be whatever creature (as Thomas Nagel also did a few years later): we may not be able to describe what it is like even to be ourselves, but can mostly, readily, agree that there is something it is like to be a particular person, wombat, wasp or worm. Whether there is any such somewhat in the case of plants, protists or elementary particles he seemed uncertain, though the panpsychist message leaves it open, so it seems, that there may be: there may, that is, be a way that the world is present to each such seemingly inanimate or insentient object, though we don't know how. Or else there isn't, and such objects are only that: compounded of the observations of their many sentient observers. George Berkeley was similarly hesitant even about some animals: do they exist merely as objects of our observation (the horse is ‘in the stable’ only in the sense that we could find him there) or as subjects of their own experience (the world is present even to a fly, in the mode peculiar to flies). Among the differences between Sprigge and Berkeley are, first, that Sprigge was uncertain that the Absolute could really be considered ‘God’ (since it is the totality of all experience, not to be reckoned itself a conversation partner, and since it is not worshipful), and second that he reckoned that the Berkeleian distinction between percipi and percipere was moot, as neither could exist without the other. The question what it is that renders my experience a unity is to be answered, maybe, by a network of cross-connections and not by their appearing to a central and necessarily unknown self (what I call ‘myself’ can only be a past or partial experience, not the very ‘thing’ that ‘has’ the experience). Further, if I am ‘a stream of experiences’ which is also a part of another larger stream, the cosmic experience, why may there not be compounded streams associated with lesser unities, whole nations or confraternities (as another eccentric philosopher, Olaf Stapledon, suggested): something it is like to be China or Bavaria as well as something it is like to be, on the one hand, Me, and on the other, the whole cosmos?
Sprigge accepted Berkeley's argument that the objects we live amongst, and their obvious properties, could not exist unperceived, and that any imagined world (though in fact we can't imagine it) that was entirely stripped of the properties that even physicalists acknowledge as mind-dependent could not reasonably be supposed the origin or explanation of those properties. We cannot experience a universe outside the phenomena, and have no good reason even to posit its existence when it does not and cannot actually explain the phenomena we know. He differed from Berkeley in believing that ‘time’, the seeming difference of past and future, was unreal: our memory of past events can only be possibly veridical if those events remain just as they were – and their being present to themselves was how they were. If we were to suppose instead that events somehow lose that character of being present as they fall into the past, why should we not expect them to lose all manner of other properties: might not Caesar's death somehow become less bloody as it also becomes less ‘present’ (146)? That way lies the notion beloved of Orwell's Party, that ‘the past’ exists only in the records that we choose to keep, and that those records therefore never lie. But if the events that we call past are really ‘present’ to themselves then part of their identity is that we here-now are in their future – just as other events, also real and present to themselves, lie in our futures. All events, accordingly, are equally real and present, and there is no more a privileged Now than there is a privileged Here. New Zealand, judged from the ambience of the United Kingdom, is quite ‘far away’, but it is not ‘far away’ from itself. Does it follow that – since all events from the very first to the very last whimper of creation are equally real and present in the network of experience – we have neither ‘freedom’ nor any chance of ‘altering the future’? Not so: the mere fact that all events are determinate does not require that they are determined. What happens elsewhere in the array cannot always be reliably inferred from what happens in any particular region. And even if events were all determined we need not, as the Stoics recognized, succumb to fatalism: our acts would play some part in that very determination.
If all times and places are equally real and present, and our own focus on what is yet to come is only a quirk of evolutionary logic no more to be taken as important than our focus on the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum, we need not and should not judge the world or our lives by their eventual outcomes. And if all the experiences of all time are ‘just eternally there’ (11), including very horrible ones, how is this made better or much easier to endure by believing that there is something to which all things are moving, some ‘far off divine event’ (13) which the cosmic consciousness has to believe in if it is to believe itself, overall, a good? Neither gradual progress nor revolutionary redemption are either to be expected or required, and we must simply hope that the sum of all experience is positive despite the evils that seem to triumph in all times and places. All experiences, and all of us, are eternally real and immortal – not in any sense that allows us any unending progress, but simply that our finite lives are fixed forever. This is not, as Sprigge acknowledges along with Santayana, entirely comforting, granted the nature of many of our experiences. There will be no hand to wipe away the tears or unmake the errors. But somehow the cosmic consciousness – and we along with it – can ‘rise above its shudders at miscellaneous evil and its anxiety concerning its psyche's fate through the satisfaction it finds in conceiving the eternal character of the situations in which they arise, and its essential relation to other characters both actualized and unactualized’ (157).
The points on which Sprigge very clearly disagreed with Stoics were, first, that experienced pleasure (and not virtue) is the only good, and second, that animals' pains and pleasures were morally significant. On this latter issue he was also at odds with Spinoza (though he may not have noticed this: cf. 230), who reckoned that a concern for ‘animals’ was only ‘womanish sentimentality’ (Ethics 4.37.1), and that our duty as reasoning beings was to ignore such stuff. Sprigge didn't, and was vehement in his disapproval of the pains and frustrations we impose on animals in our care, whether on the excuse of turning them into food we do not need or of testing drugs, household goods and cosmetics to make sure they are safe for ‘us’. It has been, he thought, the fault of physicalist philosophers that respectable people have found it easy to suppose that ‘animals’ are only moving things, without any real experience of what happens to them (and so nothing really ‘happens to them’ at all). Physicalists might plausibly respond that human beings everywhere have always exploited animals, even if they thought that animals were also living souls. But it may also be true that physicalists have at least provided a modern excuse to replace an older (that the Creator made them for our use) for thinking that dismembering or maiming a living animal is no more significant than cutting up a toy, precisely because there isn't anything that it is like to be a toy, or a chicken. One issue that Sprigge didn't confidently address in these papers was whether it was wrong in principle to end an animal life, as long as animal pleasures were broadly maintained for the least available cost in pain. That doctrine comes close to the surface opinion of many kindly people: it is wrong to hurt an animal (except when it is very inconvenient not to), and even somewhat wrong to deny the animal the pleasures it would otherwise seek out, but not wrong actually to kill the animal. This is a convenient doctrine, though possibly not a coherent one: killing, after all, does clearly put a stop to ordinary pleasure! And if the animal's own pleasure in its life does not weigh heavily against its being killed, does its life and pleasure matter much at all?
Almost all the papers are readable with enjoyment – I make an exception myself for the paper on Russell and Bradley on relations – and all can be read with profit. There are occasional moments when Sprigge seems not to have quite noticed the implications of his doctrine: why, for example, should it be so obvious that those who report a Hindu statue's moving are hallucinating (8)? Merely physical reality, on Sprigge's terms, is only an imagined arrangement of the experiences of all of us: the fact that the statue moves for some and not for others is no more startling than that some see red and green distinctly, and others don't.
Sprigge does acknowledge one problem with the hedonic utilitarianism he proposes (266): most of us suppose that there are wicked pleasures, ones essentially dependent on the pain and humiliation of others, or on the wilful disregard of what is or should be sacred. If whatever feels good is good, and the only reason to discount the feeling is that there are contingent connections with what feels very bad for others, then the world may be a better place over all if predators enjoy tormenting prey, and if there are spirits larger than ourselves to enjoy our inevitable sufferings even when they do not cause them: the judgement would depend on the relative weight of pain and pleasure in the encompassing cosmic consciousness. This might engender a theodicy a little too reminiscent of Soame Jenyns' fantasy (in his Free Inquiry 1757): ‘as we receive a great part of our pleasures, and even subsistence, from the sufferings and deaths of lower animals, may not these superior Beings do the same from ours?’ Sprigge, laudably, prefers to refer to ‘beauty’ as a great good, and to reject ‘ugly’ characters and behaviour: whether this is entirely supported by his focus on the reality of feeling is unclear.
Sprigge's future reputation will rest, no doubt, on his major publications: The Vindication of Absolute Idealism, The Rational Foundation of Ethics, and The God of Metaphysics. This collection of papers from his long career, including some other and more personal memoirs and a final pantheistic prayer, is a good introduction to his life and thought, and a welcome addition to any admirer's library.
