Royce

Josiah Royce

Josiah Royce was the great American idealist, the one major thinker who held, in the age of pragmatism and against his own dear friend William James, that reality is finally one infinite Mind, the Absolute. But he was no metaphysician only. He gave American thought its most searching ethics, the philosophy of loyalty, and its most fertile social ideal, the Beloved Community, and his argument from error is among the most original proofs of idealism anyone has ever devised. He joined a rigorous logic of the Absolute to a warm gospel of devotion, and the combination is his alone.

The corpus and how the chat cites it. This room reads The Philosophy of Loyalty (1908), Royce's ethical masterwork, public domain by way of the Internet Archive. His metaphysics, in The World and the Individual and the argument from error of The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, and his late social philosophy in The Problem of Christianity, are public domain as well and are discussed from training knowledge, natural additions for a later corpus pass. The chat cites by work and by lecture or chapter. Expect citations to The Philosophy of Loyalty by lecture.

Life. Royce was born in 1855 in Grass Valley, a rough mining town in the California of the first frontier generation, a setting whose problem of how a scattered people becomes a true community he never stopped pondering. He studied at the new University of California, in Germany, where he drank deep of post-Kantian idealism, and at Johns Hopkins, and was brought to Harvard by William James. There the two became colleagues, neighbors, and lifelong philosophical opponents, idealism against pragmatism, in one of the great friendships in the history of philosophy, each sharpening the other across decades of generous combat. His thought only grew in reach and influence with time.

Where to begin. Start with The Philosophy of Loyalty for the ethics, then The World and the Individual, his Gifford Lectures, for the metaphysics of the Absolute, The Religious Aspect of Philosophy for the argument from error, and The Problem of Christianity for the Beloved Community and the theory of interpretation.

The argument from error. His most original stroke in metaphysics begins from an undeniable fact: we make mistakes. But what makes a mistake so much as possible? To be in error, my judgment must be about some real object and must fail to match it. Yet a finite mind, Royce argues, cannot by itself fully pick out the object it is wrong about, for to specify that object completely would be to know it, and then one could not be in error at all. Error is possible only if there exists an all-inclusive Thought, an Absolute Mind, that holds together both my mistaken judgment and the whole truth it misses, and so makes the very relation of being wrong about something possible. The bare possibility of error, then, proves the Absolute. It is a startling and genuinely new argument.

The Absolute and the individual. Reality, for Royce, is one infinite Self, an all-encompassing consciousness in which every finite mind and every fact has its place; the world is the life of an Absolute. But Royce labored, above all in The World and the Individual, to show that this need not swallow the finite person. Each individual self is a unique purpose, a particular will reaching for its own fulfillment, and the Absolute is not a featureless unity but the complete realization of all these purposes together. The one and the many are reconciled: the individual is real precisely as an irreplaceable moment of the infinite, fulfilled in the whole rather than dissolved in it.

The philosophy of loyalty. His ethics is his most enduring work. Royce defines loyalty as the willing, practical, and thoroughgoing devotion of a person to a cause, a cause felt to be larger than the private self, in whose service the self at last finds the meaning and the unity it could never find alone. The drifting, merely self-seeking individual becomes a real self by giving himself to something beyond himself. Loyalty, for Royce, is the very source of the moral life: in serving a cause with his whole will, a person finally has a center, a direction, a self worth being.

Loyalty to loyalty. One refinement saves the doctrine from fanaticism. Not every cause is worthy, and loyalties collide, the loyal soldiers of warring nations destroy one another's devotion even as each is faithful. Royce's supreme principle is therefore loyalty to loyalty: be loyal to your cause in such a way as to increase the whole sum of loyalty in the world, never in a way that wantonly tramples the loyalties of others. The best cause is the one that serves the spread of loyalty itself. With that single principle a personal virtue becomes a universal ethics, and points beyond the lone individual toward community.

The Beloved Community. Royce's late and most influential idea is that no one is saved alone. What redeems, he argues in The Problem of Christianity, is membership in a community, and at the limit in the Beloved Community, the ideal fellowship of all the loyal, bound across time and space by a shared devotion. Communities, he saw, are held together not by mere likeness but by interpretation, the ceaseless work, which he analyzed with help from Peirce's theory of signs, by which the members read one another, and the community's past and future, into a common life. The self is constituted by community and interpretation, not given in isolation. Through later hands Royce's Beloved Community would pass into the dream of Martin Luther King Jr.

Reception, and adjacent reading. Long overshadowed by the pragmatism of his own Harvard circle, Royce has been steadily rediscovered as the most powerful systematic philosopher America produced and a prophet of community. Read now, he is the idealist of loyalty and of the Beloved Community, the thinker who married a stringent metaphysics of the Absolute to a generous ethics of devotion and a deep theory of social life. He drew his idealism from Hegel and the tradition that grew from Kant; he carried on with William James a lifelong friendly combat of idealism against pragmatism that sharpened them both; his community of interpretation took up the semiotics of Peirce; and his absolute idealism is the American cousin of the systems of Bradley and McTaggart across the Atlantic. His conviction that we become selves only through loyal devotion to a community larger than ourselves has long outlived the system that first housed it.