Royce

DOUGLAS
MACDONALD
CONFERENCE on the
Life and Work of Josiah
Royce, his Colleagues
and Students
OCTOBER 18-20, 2019
Vanderbilt University
Philosophy Department
111 Furman Hall
Nashville, TN 37212

The Spirit of Modern
Philosophy Revisited: A
Committed Jamesian
Reconsiders Royce
Phil.Oliver@mtsu.ed
u

First let me say that this, particularly in present company, is very much a
humble first draft of an effort to begin critically examining the habitual
assumption of my career as a professional student, scholar, and
teacher: that a Jamesian cannot be a Roycean. I took that idea on board
early. Maybe it’s not too late to jettison whatever part of it is false. I look
to you seasoned Royceans for wise, kind, patient guidance in this
endeavor.

A note on the text and slideshow: It’s
great to be back in Furman Hall, where I
first saw John Lachs hand out full-text hard
copies of his lectures. He did that
habitually, accompanied by the explanation
that on his view information makes a
greater and more lasting impression when
it enters the hearer’s mind through more
than one portal. That’s why this, like most
of my presentation slideshows, includes
most of my text. Feel free to read along or
not, as you prefer. (That can be a
challenge, I do tend to depart and drift from
the script.)
And feel free to revisit the
slideshow later, posted at
https://osopher.wordpress.com/,
slideshare.net, and
DelightSprings.blogspot.com.
Comments welcome.

Like Lachs, I find that “age
clarifies…” For him it was the happy
marriage of stoicism and
pragmatism. For me, it’s the belated
understanding that Royce and
James are also a partnership - not
an irreconcilably duelling duo.
Or, if it’s too soon to declare and
sign off on that insight, it’s the eager
reconsideration of a committed
Jamesian’s old prejudices. More on
those shortly.
Stoic Pragmatism preview

Also like Lachs, I’m drawn to the
exercise of comparing and
contrasting Royce with one of his
prominent and preferred peers
(Santayana, for Lachs)... not to
vanquish the former but to enlist
him - or what we may see as the
more salutary parts of him - as
an ally of sorts, if not of James’s
exactly, then of ours. But a broad
and strategic alliance with James
was more than possible.

This is not to deny the profound distinctiveness of each philosopher, but to yoke
those differences in a harness capable occasionally of pulling a load together
and effectively.
The “load” I’d like to think Jamesians and Royceans can in conscience recommit
themselves to pulling is some version of pluralism (though not the kind that says
pragmatists can’t be pluralists), and just about any version of meliorism.

“Deep philosophical differences” notwithstanding, Lachs says, “the differences
between Santayana and Royce are not nearly as final as they seem. And
examining their arguments, their divergences, and their similarities yields
lessons for us today.”
That’s also the spirit, I find, of Royce’s Spirit of Modern Philosophy, and it’s the
spirit in which I propose to explore the Royce-James connection as well.
“Someone viewing these thinkers from a great distance may see only the
differences. But the closer we get to them, the more similarities emerge.”

One more Lachs riff: “Divergent as their views of the nature and fate of
individuals may be, Santayana and Royce are in remarkable agreement about
the way persons stand apart from others. ‘An individual is unique…’”
Quite so. James harmonizes with his friendly antagonists and completes the
trio, on this fundamental point of human dignity. Theirs is a cosmopolitan, nee
cosmic perspective. Make it a quartet, if we can time-hop forward to another of
my personal heroes...

As a callow undergraduate four-plus decades ago I
somehow won an essay contest on a subject whose
opacity continues, to this day, to mystify me: the
Idealistic metaphysical systems of Johann Fichte and
Friedrich Schelling. I received the delightfully
unexpected news from my equally mystifying
Heideggerian professor, who cryptically informed me
that I wrote like T.S. Eliot. Still don’t know if that was
meant to flatter or insult, but I took it gratefully.
AVS, Plutarchian
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
The mind is not a
vessel to be filled, but
a fire to be lighted.
Plutarch

My old prof, as I say, was a
Heideggerian. I was almost seduced.
I’m not very churchable, but I’ve set
foot in Unitarian establishments a
handful of times over the years. One
of those times, one of our now-grown
daughters was captured in possession
of Sein und Zeit.
“Yearn to learn throughout your life”...
and you may learn that some
philosophers are more compromised
than you knew.

The prize-winning paper took a
generally sympathetic view of
Schelling, as I recall. The next
year I came to Vandy...
So, where I’d started was with a
professorially-encouraged predisposition
to think well of post-Kantian metaphysical
idealism, and to think not at all of classic
American philosophy. I didn't know there
was any such thing.

...where James's name was in the air,
spoken frequently by my new teachers
Lachs, Hodges, and Compton. His
pragmatic approach to thinking came as
a revelation, and Royce became a
convenient stand-in for Fichte, Schelling,
and Hegel. Through this new lens the
"Absolute," the Idealists' sacred ground of
Being and source of universal unification
and rational order, flipped in my mind
from great to awful. At some point in the
‘80s that old paper went missing,
probably cast out in a purge of what I
thought was merely a record of youthful
intellectual indiscretion. Full circle

I might also have caught Royce’s name in
the air at Vandy in those days, and
developed an appreciation for the subtlety
and complementarity (to James) of his
thought. Evidently just wasn’t listening.
It was John Kaag’s American Philosophy:
A Love Story, and his discussion of
Royce, that eventually caught my
attention. “I had come to Chocorua, New
Hampshire, in 2009, to help plan a
conference on William James…”

It’s a memoir of discovery, both personal and
professional: he discovers that life becomes truly worth
living when he recognizes the inadequacy of a philosophy
of total self-reliance, and opens himself to community. In
his personal/family life, he discovers the joy of new love.
In his professional life, he discovers the joy of a
community of scholarship that transcends time and place.
The catalyst for both discoveries is the long-neglected
personal library ("West Wind") of philosopher William
Ernest Hocking (1873-1966), which Kaag and his
colleague Carol (now his wife) work to restore and
catalog.

William Ernest Hocking
(1873-1966)
Hocking's Gifford Lectures,
1938-9... A Hocking
Reader...
The Meaning of God in
Human Experience: a
philosophic study of religion
(1912)

Lately I’ve noted Royce’s name in the air, and in other books.
For instance,
“Consider the fact that we care deeply about what happens to
the world after we die. If self-interest were the primary source
of meaning in life, then it wouldn’t matter to people if an hour
after their death everyone they know were to be wiped from
the face of the earth…
The only way death is not meaningless is to see yourself as
part of something greater: a family, a community, a society. If
you don’t, mortality is only a horror. Loyalty, said Royce,
‘solves the paradox of our ordinary existence by showing us
outside of ourselves the cause which is to be served, and
inside of ourselves the will which delights to do this service,
and which is not thwarted but enriched and expressed in such
service’…” Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What
Matters in the End

Suppose you knew that, although
you yourself would live a normal life
span, the earth would be completely
destroyed thirty days after your
death in a collision with a giant
asteroid. How would this knowledge
affect your attitudes during the
remainder of your life?
...few of us would be likely to say…
‘So what?’ Samuel Scheffler, Death
and the Afterlife

“Rippling does not necessarily mean leaving behind your image or your name.
Many of us learned the futility of that strategy long ago in our school curriculum
when we read these lines from Shelley's poem about a huge shattered antique
statue in a now barren land: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings/Look on
my Works, ye Mighty, and despair.
Attempts to preserve personal identity are always futile… Rippling, as I use it,
refers instead to leaving behind something from your life experience; some trait,
some piece of wisdom, guidance, virtue, comfort that passes to others, known
or unknown.” Irv Yalom, Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death

The centre of gravity of philosophy must therefore
alter its place. The earth of things, long thrown into
shadow by the glories of the upper ether, must
resume its rights. To shift the emphasis in this way
means that philosophic questions will fall to be
treated by minds of a less abstractionist type than
heretofore, minds more scientific and individualistic in
their tone yet not irreligious either…” William James,
Pragmatism lec. 3 - Some Metaphysical Problems
Pragmatically Considered
“...see, I say, how pragmatism shifts the emphasis and looks forward into
facts themselves. The really vital question for us all is, What is this
world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself?

“The solid meaning of life is always the
same eternal thing,— the marriage, namely,
of some unhabitual ideal, however special,
with some fidelity, courage, and endurance;
with some man’ s or woman 's pains.—And,
whatever or wherever life may be, there will
always be the chance for that marriage to
take place.” WIlliam James, What Makes a
Life Significant
Marriage to a cause: that’s loyalty.

My essay drew heavily on Royce's The
Spirit of Modern Philosophy, before I really
had any clue about who Royce even was.
But in grad school I learned that he was
William James's friendly antagonist,
colleague, and neighbor, an expositor of a
perspective in philosophy that James found
reprehensible and that our age has all but
forgotten. Many of my own colleagues
have worked tirelessly to revive and extend
Royce's legacy. Until now, I've been
content to leave them to it while I continued
mostly to circle James's pedestal...

https://jposopher.blogspot.com/

...Also this weekend: Monty Python turned 50,
Naomi Klein was on BookTV, the Cards lost twice
to the Braves... and Augustine, Boethius, Anselm,
and Aquinas remained long dead, though not
forgotten.
Not quite so long dead, but largely forgotten until
a recent small revival of interest got him a shout-
out from David Brooks in the Times, is Josiah
Royce...

"The ability to give or withhold assent"
based on reason and evidence, not
arbitrary preference or whim, is what
makes rational animals potentially
logical. Exclusive devotion to logic,
though, can seem to deny our humanity.
All of us, like Spock, are at least half
human. (But some humans ain't human,
says John Prine.) We must cultivate our
emotional intelligence too. As young
Josiah Royce learned, "emotion cannot
be deleted from life, even the coldest
opinions are motivated by feelings... the
life of reason is partly emotional."
A new Stoicism

“...surely the climax of this phase was the publication of his fourth major work, The
Spirit of Modern Philosophy.” John Clendenning, The Life and Thought of Josiah Royce

The Spirit of Modern Philosophy is history
with a thesis: "You philosophize when you
reflect critically upon what you are actually
doing in your world. What you are doing is
of course, in the first place, living. And life
involves passions, faiths, doubts, and
courage. The critical inquiry into what all
these things mean is philosophy.”
Clendenning 178

How strange a worldview, which denies the need (in this, of all worlds) to employ
able and willing hands in ameliorating the conditions of life and growth, and in
altering the "normal" course of events. But James lived and worked among some
of the most adamant and undaunted metaphysical absolutists in the history of
Western philosophy, in their hey-day. While he would therefore agree that their
worldview was "strange," it was, a century ago, anything but odd or unfamiliar to
him or anyone else to whom philosophy mattered. They were the mainstream
traditionalists, not he. And James befriended most of them, even sponsoring the
fledgling career of possibly his most intractable opponent, Josiah Royce, who had
utter confidence in a "Plan" of rational, absolute, universal salvation.
So, here’s the sort of thing I was prone to say as a committed Jamesian who
assumed that a Roycean must necessarily take up a sharply contrary position. My
present project is to moderate these statements, in search of common ground.
(Your suggestions welcome.)

And
Those of us who relish the fight and fire of James's polemics are glad for the
resistance that ignited his philosophical passion: concepts and philosophical
fashions whose vogue is mostly long past and which can seem to exude a
certain quaint mustiness that fails to match James's fire: monism, absolute or
transcendental idealism, monolithic "block universe" cosmologies, and so on.
Yet, we see the absolute temper and disposition still, in contemporary garb. It
might even be argued that some of the neopragmatists and so-called
postmodernists who would lay claim to James's intellectual legacy are, in
some ways, representatives of the very patterns of rigidity and a priorism
that James derided...

And
In the end, James is concerned not so much to
battle the talkers as to offer an alternative to the
snares and seductions of intellectualism, or the
habit of forgetting and losing ourselves in talk that
misses what is real. "Over-subtle intellects" want
a conceptual understanding of self and the world
not as a supplement and aid to primary perception
but as a substitute for it; but we should not fool
ourselves into thinking that Royce, Bradley, et al.
are the only over-subtle intellects in James's
purview. His point is that we are all over-subtle
intellects until we learn to attend our own
experience with minimal preconception.

And
How do we break down our preconceptions about
the world's real elements, and overcome doubts
about our own perceptual and cognitive abilities
to encounter them directly? How do we disabuse
our intellects of overweening subtlety? James's
answer is that first we must resist the temptation
to find an intellectual--or an intellectualist--
solution. Rather than thinking our way around
skepticism, he proposes that we just allow
experience to run its course and that we not
impose artificial roadblocks in the form of
stipulated theoretical expectations to which
our experience must then conform, or else be
disavowed...

And
Curiously, the editors of this volume identify Royce as one of
the "developers" of pragmatism, and there are subtleties of
scholarship that might vindicate the claim in some limited
respects. But Royce's absolute idealism was largely
antithetical to Jamesian pragmatism. More startling is the
editors' claim that "the philosophical tradition to which James
actually belongs is [not English empiricism but] to a lineage
that is more uniquely American and underived; namely, that of
Swedenborgian and transcendentalist thought. . . .

And here are some of the kinds of things I rediscover in Royce’s Spirit that incline
me to consider a more sympathetic interpretation.
“A future humanity will, if civilization healthily progresses, inherit the old
kingdom, and re-embody the truly essential and immortal soul of its old life…”
Common ground with James: the human future is not presaged, healthy progress
not guaranteed, “Shipwreck” is possible.
“...the philosopher's work is not lost when, in one sense, his system seems to
have been refuted by death...”
Personal identity does not endure. Good work “ripples” (see Irv Yalom, above).

“This game of reflection is like all the rest of our insight, indirectly valuable
because from it all there is a return to life possible,”
Return to life is a phrase I associate with James. “The return to life can not come
about by talking,” etc. I’ll bet James and Royce talked about it.
“...the optimist, who declares this world to be divine and good, and the
pessimist, who finds in our finite world everywhere struggle and sorrow, and
who calls it all evil, may be, and in fact are, alike right, each in his own sense…”
But both are bettered by the meliorist’s commitment to applied philosophy’s
practical gains.

“...the truth of the spirit remains an inexhaustible treasure house of
experience; and hence no individual experience, whether it be the momentary
insight of genius recorded in the lyric poem, or the patient accumulation of
years of professional plodding through the problems of philosophy, will ever
fully tell all the secrets which life has to reveal.”
We need to gather all the experience there can be, to get a full account of the
reality of things. We must remain open to new experience, not block the way of
inquiry or draw premature conclusions. “What has concluded, that we may
conclude…? Etc.

“...when you study philosophy, you have to be tolerant, receptive, willing to look
at the world from many sides, fearless as to the examination of what seem to be
even dangerous doctrines, patient in listening to views that look even abhorrent
to common sense. It is useless to expect a simple and easy account of so
paradoxical an affair as this our universe and our life.”
Look at the world from many sides = (rudimentary) pluralism
“...this variety, better studied, is on its more human side largely an expression of
the liveliness and individuality of the spiritual temperaments of strong men...”
Temperament places us where we are on the tough-and-tender spectrum.

“It is the union of many such insights that will be the one true view of life…”
Pluralism.
“All the philosophers are needed, not merely to make jarring assertions about it, but
to give us embodiments now of this, now of that fragment of its wealth and its
eternity.”
"The pluralistic form takes for me a stronger hold on reality than any other
philosophy I know of, being essentially a social philosophy, a philosophy of 'co'"-
William James

“...the whole universe, including the physical world also, is essentially one live
thing, a mind, one great Spirit…”
A large unverifiable claim, but --like James Lovelock’s earth-scale Gaia
Hypothesis-- a useful proposal whose value a pragmatist will weigh in terms of its
fruits.
“The justification of consciousness is the having of it.”
“...a serene and childlike confidence is justified,”
“...plunging back again into life.”
Jamesian attitudes.

“...a noisy atheist would be, of course, a cause of scandal, and might even bring
philosophy into discredit.”
I’ve been teaching a course called “Atheism & Philosophy” for many years, more
or less quietly. No scandal yet, or discredit to our vocation. On my reading,
James was a quiet (but eagerly-receptive) atheist.
“We are too frequently disposed to fancy that the philosophy of the period of
Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel is something very remote from the philosophy of our
own day.”
Already, in 1892? But if we perceive their question as being whether ideas (good,
bad, honest, fake…) contribute to the creation of perceived reality, what could be
less remote from 2019?

“...if you were young, and were anybody at all, you were a genius. The only
question was what sort of a genius…”
A very stable one? But, you had to be young?
“Only a poet can understand nature…”
Because nature includes us, and we include the poets. Our best philosophers
understand that.

“...to study nature is to sympathize with nature, to trace the likenesses between the
inner life and the magnets, the crystals, the solar systems, the living creatures, of
the physical world. It is the part of genius to feel such sympathies with things; it is
the part of philosophy to record your sympathies.”
Royce the transcendentalist? “Declare your intuitions, though no one share them”-
William James liked the attitude.
“Feeling is an indispensable guide to reason.”
Not quite reason’s master, but this is a major concession from a rationalist.

"The deepest truth known to me is that erelong my present truth will change.”
Against rigid dogmatism.
“..man is indeed simply an evolution from nature”
Indeed!
“...a theory of the evolution of consciousness is needed as a complement to
Fichte's theory.”
Any theory.

“...the way from nature to spirit must be as possible as the reverse way.”
At least.
“To complete the undertaking of idealism, you need a theory of the facts of
nature.”
And you need the facts themselves.
“Schellingian sketch of a process of evolution which, proceeding through the
animals, culminates in us.”
Evolution doesn’t culminate in anything, but it leads to (and through)...

“The end and crown of this whole process is man, in him the spirit comes to
himself..”
“What has concluded…?” etc. But, the focus on evolution is exactly what I must
have found compelling about Schelling. I have a personal history with evolutionary
contention dating to my first landlord, a Scopes witness who used to pull dollars
from my ears. (Ask me to elaborate, it’s one of my favorite topics.)
“Therefore religion I forsake, All superstitious ties I break, No church will I visit to
hear them preach… in my heart am I freed from fear, Instead of losing my way in
the air, Here on the earth, in her blue eyes see The deepest depths that exist for
me…”
The earth of things must resume its rights...

..."You philosophize when you reflect critically upon what you are actually doing
in your world. What you are doing is of course, in the first place, living. And life
involves passions, faiths, doubt, and courage. The critical inquiry into what all
these things mean and imply is philosophy." And, as his biographer
summarizes,
"We live like those who stand on the shore of a limitless ocean of appreciation;
we describe a pebble and a wave or two, but know that vast depths, solitudes,
and storms remain beyond unexplored. The meaning is seen only as waves
breaking on the beach, as evidences of a restless life. We call these waves
evolution, but to the extent that we are in touch with our own depths, we
know also that much remains undescribed."
Thursday, October 17, 2019
CRISPR, STEAM, and science for the sake of happiness

“Much remains undescribed” is a good note to end on (but not “conclude”). Much
remains to learn and discover. The “philosophy of ‘co’” needs all hands on deck,
Jamesians and Royceans alike. As John Kaag quotes Royce, “What worth could
you find in an independence that should merely isolate you, that should leave you
but a queer creature, whose views are shared by nobody?” Or by nobody but
others of your tribe? We must grow the tribe. The spirit of Royce’s Spirit is
inclusion, and collaboration. It too is a philosophy of ‘co’.

Royce

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