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Moore: G.E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles
G. E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles.
- GenresBiographyPhilosophy
335 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 1988
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 25, 2012
The title above sounds like the name of a rock band, but it is actually the title of a biography by Paul Levy of George Edward (GE) Moore, famous contemporary of Bertrand Russell at Cambridge University and mentor to Bloomsbury Group members John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, and Virginia Woolf. Unlike Russell, Moore is not widely known outside of philosophical and Bloomsbury circles, by whom he was greatly admired. Woolf wrote, “The color of our minds and thought had been given to us by the climate of Cambridge and Moore’s philosophy. “ Woolf’s husband Leonard wrote that Moore “resembled Socrates in possessing a profound simplicity, a simplicity which Tolstoy and some other Russian writers consider to produce the finest human beings.” Keynes wrote in My Early Beliefs, “Moore's Principia Ethica came out at the end of my first year. I have never heard of the present generation having read it. But, of course, its effect on us, and the talk which preceded and followed it, dominated, and perhaps still dominate, everything else . . . It seems to me looking back, that this religion of ours was a very good one to grow up under. It remains nearer the truth than any other that I know; with less irrelevant extraneous matter and nothing to be ashamed of . . . It is still my religion under the surface.”
Levy’s book traces out the life of Moore from the Quaker and evangelical roots of his “intellectual aristocracy” family through his early schooling and then his life at Cambridge up until the years of the First World War. He especially focuses on Moore’s membership in The Apostles, or The Cambridge Conversazione Society, founded in 1820 and whose connections with Moore up until the First World War Levy tracks. There is an appendix with all of the names of members from 1820 through 1914. We find here many famous names, including Alfred Tennyson, William Kingdon Clifford, Henry Sidgwick, Alfred North Whitehead, John McTaggart, Bertrand Russell, E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Moore was elected in 1894, nominated by Russell. The Apostles was a weekly discussion society. Moore was a hit from his first meeting. Russell wrote in a letter that “He (Moore) spoke perfectly clearly and unhesitatingly, and at first with no sign whatever of nervousness (which makes most people dumb at their first meeting). He looked like Newton and Satan rolled into one, each at the supreme moment of his life.”
Moore’s first paper read to The Society in May 1894 was entitled “What End?” Levy says about this paper that it is “muddled, confused, and confusing” but that it is “nonetheless a document of great importance: first, because it shows that Moore, who was sitting part I of the classics tripos practically at the time of its delivery, was already interested in and familiar with contemporary philosophical questions. Secondly, this first foray into philosophy is important because Moore’s later refutation of its principle thesis is one of the main strands in the development of Principia Ethica.” The paper begins with a general introduction and proceeds to a discussion later remembered by Russell as starting with “In the beginning was matter and then came the devil.” But the paper was not a demonstration, as Russell writes, that “Moore was an ardent disciple of Lucretius” but rather was an early profession of hedonism, later to be attacked in Principia Ethica (PE).
Levy quotes “What End” as follows: “God is life, and his two indivisible components are consciousness and will. His presence is shewn by the movement of the whole of his own body or by internal causes undiscoverable to science. The lowest animal I conceive has both will and consciousness, and one thing which puts them into connection is two abstractions – pleasure and pain. Either pleasure or pain or both are always to be predicated in some degree of every state in which consciousness is; and will, without which life cannot go on, is always being prompted by desire to avoid pain and seek pleasure.”
Levy maintains that while the Bloomsbury group hero-worshiped Moore and took PE as their Bible, they didn’t seem to have read, or at least paid much attention to anything in the book besides the last chapter, “The Ideal.” In my view, Moore’s first book is important as a watershed which sorted the sheep from the goats in the previous century of ethical thought; from the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill to the “metaphysical ethics” of Kant. Moore rejected both, finding them both guilty of the “naturalistic fallacy,” a fallacy that he coined. PE is so important that I will leave off here talking about Levy’s book and review it separately.
Levy’s book traces out the life of Moore from the Quaker and evangelical roots of his “intellectual aristocracy” family through his early schooling and then his life at Cambridge up until the years of the First World War. He especially focuses on Moore’s membership in The Apostles, or The Cambridge Conversazione Society, founded in 1820 and whose connections with Moore up until the First World War Levy tracks. There is an appendix with all of the names of members from 1820 through 1914. We find here many famous names, including Alfred Tennyson, William Kingdon Clifford, Henry Sidgwick, Alfred North Whitehead, John McTaggart, Bertrand Russell, E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Moore was elected in 1894, nominated by Russell. The Apostles was a weekly discussion society. Moore was a hit from his first meeting. Russell wrote in a letter that “He (Moore) spoke perfectly clearly and unhesitatingly, and at first with no sign whatever of nervousness (which makes most people dumb at their first meeting). He looked like Newton and Satan rolled into one, each at the supreme moment of his life.”
Moore’s first paper read to The Society in May 1894 was entitled “What End?” Levy says about this paper that it is “muddled, confused, and confusing” but that it is “nonetheless a document of great importance: first, because it shows that Moore, who was sitting part I of the classics tripos practically at the time of its delivery, was already interested in and familiar with contemporary philosophical questions. Secondly, this first foray into philosophy is important because Moore’s later refutation of its principle thesis is one of the main strands in the development of Principia Ethica.” The paper begins with a general introduction and proceeds to a discussion later remembered by Russell as starting with “In the beginning was matter and then came the devil.” But the paper was not a demonstration, as Russell writes, that “Moore was an ardent disciple of Lucretius” but rather was an early profession of hedonism, later to be attacked in Principia Ethica (PE).
Levy quotes “What End” as follows: “God is life, and his two indivisible components are consciousness and will. His presence is shewn by the movement of the whole of his own body or by internal causes undiscoverable to science. The lowest animal I conceive has both will and consciousness, and one thing which puts them into connection is two abstractions – pleasure and pain. Either pleasure or pain or both are always to be predicated in some degree of every state in which consciousness is; and will, without which life cannot go on, is always being prompted by desire to avoid pain and seek pleasure.”
Levy maintains that while the Bloomsbury group hero-worshiped Moore and took PE as their Bible, they didn’t seem to have read, or at least paid much attention to anything in the book besides the last chapter, “The Ideal.” In my view, Moore’s first book is important as a watershed which sorted the sheep from the goats in the previous century of ethical thought; from the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill to the “metaphysical ethics” of Kant. Moore rejected both, finding them both guilty of the “naturalistic fallacy,” a fallacy that he coined. PE is so important that I will leave off here talking about Levy’s book and review it separately.
October 1, 2023
Something of an oddity: it’s ostensibly a biography, but it ends in 1916, some 42 years before Moore’s death in 1958, the rationale being that the early years are the point of his greatest influence; it’s also a history of the Cambridge Apostles. Worth reading if you’re interested in that milieu, but not the most compelling or beautifully shaped of biographies.
August 19, 2016
A lot of difficult to find history of Bloomsbury and especially the Cambridge Apostles. Moore himself is little more than one figure among many and the one in which I was least interested. Detail on his relationship with Bertrand Russell, on the other hand, filled in a gap in my understanding. I didn't know that Moore spent a good deal of time with Wittgenstein. I also did not recall that Lytton Strachey was a member of the Apostles (apparently quite a dominant one).
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews