E. M. Forster, who sadly but confidently predicted that Carpenter’s reputation would decline to the point of invisibility, would have been surprised and delighted to see the current revival of interest in his friend’s life and work. There have been two major studies by Rowbotham and Tsuzuki and the provocative if condescending earlier article by Pierson. Carpenter is currently in print once more, as part of the Gay Men’s Press project to produce new editions of selected works.
But this revaluation has been understandably selective, concentrating on his sexual politics, his vegetarianism adn the Simple Life. The endpaper of the new anthology puts this matter thus:
While directly involved in the labour movment, he also championed women’s liberation and animal rights, and believed in a life close to nature. But above all, his socialist vision was imspired by the homogenic love of other men…
All this is true enough, but it neglects a systematic idealist philosophy which supported a critique of contemporary science and a distinctive epistemology.
Carpenter was not alone in advocating these views. To an extent, they were widespread in the ethical socialist movement of the 1880s and 1890s and articulated very clearly in the work of Henry Salt. This study examines the philosophy the two men shared and shows how both a view of science and a programme of opinion-shaping were derived from it. The aim is to present a fuller view of Carpenter and to locate him within a climate of humanitarian opinion which has surprising resonances with some of today’s concerns about the environment and the rights of animals.
I
Carpenter was not reticent about his philosophy or about the image of human nature derived from it. Works like Civilisation: its Cause and Cure, Angels’ Wings, The Art of Creation and Towards Democracy itself presented an elaborate and totalising metaphysic which saw cohesion at the heart of the universe. Quite explicitly Carpenter refused to separate the human race from the rest of nature. Rather the whole universe was an expression of a purposive mystical entity, known variously as the Great Self, the Universal Ego or the World Soul. Humanity’s role in this scheme was both prodigal son and saviour: inside nature and yet at the same time capable of viewing it from the outside, human experience was to be the agency th.rough which the connectedness of things was to be celebrated and the shattered wholeness of the cosmos to be re-integrated.
Human experience was a microcosm of the deep reality of things:
… there is in Man a Creative Thought-source continually in operation, which is shaping and giving form not only to his body, but largely to the world in which he lives. In fact, the houses, the gardens, the streets among which we live, the clothes we wear, the books we read, have been produced from this source.
[…]
Christopher E. Shaw
Edward Carpenter and Late Victorian Radicalism, Routledge, 1990, pp. 33-57
Notes
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