The relevance of Royce 9780823255313, 9780823255283

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THE RELEVANCE OF ROYCE

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AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY Douglas R. Anderson and Jude Jones, series editors

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THE RELEVANCE OF ROYCE

ED Edited by KELLY A. PARKER

JASON BELL

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK 2014

Copyright © 2014 Fordham University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. The editors gratefully acknowledge financial support for this project provided by Grand Valley State University, Mount Alison University, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the publisher. Printed in the United States of America

161514 54321 First edition

Contents

Introduction: The Continuing Relevance of Josiah Royce 1 Kelly A. Parker and Jason Bell ParT I. HISTORICAL EXPLORATIONS

1 Josiah Royce: Alive and Well 15 John J. McDermott 2 A Report on the Recent “Dig” into Royce’s

MSS in the Harvard Archives 23

Frank M. Oppenheim, S.J., Dawn Aberg, and John J. Kaag

3 Goodbye, Idealist Consensus; Hello, New Realism! 34 Dwayne Tunstall

4 On Four Originators of Transatlantic Phenomenology: Josiah Royce, Edmund Husserl,

William Hocking, Winthrop Bell A7 Jason Bell

5 Loyalty, Friendship, and Truth: The Influence of

Aristotle on the Philosophy of Josiah Royce 69 Mathew A. Foust and Melissa Shew

6 Complex Negation, Necessity, and Logical Magic 89 Randall E. Auxier

7 Race, Culture, and Pluralism: Royce’s Logical “Primitives” 132 Scott L. Pratt { vii }

Vint CONTENTS ParT II. PRACTICAL EXTENSIONS

8 Individuals Ain’t Ones: Who We Are in Royce’s World 151 Douglas R. Anderson

9 Racism, Race, and Josiah Royce: Exactly What Shall We Say? 162 Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley

10 Enlightened Provincialism, Open-Ended Communities, and Loyalty-Loving Individuals: Royce’s Progressive

Prescription for Democratic Cultural Transformation 190 Judith M. Green

11 Josiah Royce and the Redemption of American Individualism 203 Richard P. Mullin

12 Royce’s Relevance for Intrafaith Dialogue 213 Frank M. Oppenheim, S.J. 13. Necessary Error: Josiah Royce, Communities of Interpretation,

and Feminist Epistemology 227

Kara Barnette

14 Communities in Pursuit of Community 246 Mary B. Mahowald Notes 265 References 303

List of Contributors 315 Index 321

THE RELEVANCE OF ROYCE

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INTRODUCTION The Continuing Relevance of Josiah Royce Kelly A. Parker and Jason Bell

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If ncentury, his ownJosiah day, at Harvard University at the turn of the twentieth Royce was one of America’s premier philosophical exports, as well as a prominent interpreter of European and Asian thought

to a domestic audience. Royce and his colleague William James were

probably the two most prominent figures in American philosophy. Indeed, the arguments between Royce and James were played out for an

international audience in numerous lectures, publications, and classrooms (the dialogue is evident, for example, in their respective Gifford Lectures, delivered between 1898 and 1902).' But after Royce’s death, and

after two world wars, the topics dear to him—loyalty, idealism, and systematic metaphysics among them—faded from mainstream philosophical discussion. Part of the reason for this eclipse is that Royce baptized no disciples, preferring instead to engage his students and readers in the provocations of dialectical exchange. Then, too, the vagaries of history and intellectual fashion intervened. Just as the “new realist” challenges to his core positions were gaining ascendancy Royce passed away, at age sixty-one, without having offered a proper published response.’

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2 KELLY A. PARKER AND JASON BELL His closest philosophical colleagues, James and C. S. Peirce, had preceded

him in death; John Dewey, whose inclinations were decidedly nonRoycean, became the public face of pragmatism and American philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century. And of course pragmatism itself was soon eclipsed by other approaches. The new schools of logic and linguistic analysis imported from Europe as “analytic philosophy”

dominated American philosophy in later decades; phenomenology, existentialism, and their postmodern successors occupied generations of European scholars. Royce’s vigorous but sympathetic critiques of pragmatism; his efforts to develop pragmatist-inspired tools of logic and linguistic analysis; his soaring explorations of such themes as loyalty, sorrow, and the modern significance of Christian faith; and his forays into what would later be recognized as “applied ethics” all came to be regarded as obsolete. Thanks, however, to the work and dedication of a

small number of scholars—among whom we must mention John E. Smith, John J. McDermott, Frank M. Oppenheim, John Clendenning, Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley, Mary B. Mahowald, and Bruce Kuklick— Roycean themes never completely disappeared from the philosophical landscape. Now, a hundred years after Royce’s heyday, we witness an upwelling of

articles, books, and conferences dedicated to exploring the meaning of his thought. The recent rediscovery of the most prominent American proponent of idealism may signal a rebirth of idealism in American philosophy. Perhaps it signals that contemporary American philosophy has reached a mass sufficient to support a more thorough exploration of its heritage. Or it may be part of a movement back to the future, what Robert Cummings Neville has called a search for “the highroad around modernism,”’ a return to philosophical sources that were abandoned by the analytic and continental philosophical traditions alike. Whatever the reason, it is clear that a reexamination of this complex philosopher is under way. The present volume is a collection of perspectives from contemporary philosophers engaged in exploring Royce’s work with a fresh eye. The reader will quickly see that while common themes emerge in the chapters of this volume, there is no unified “party line” of thought animating the

current Roycean revival. Several contributors focus on Royce’s ethics as his chief contribution to philosophy. Others address his importance

INTRODUCTION 3 for race theory, highlighting the conflict that has arisen in interpreting the significance of his various writings and utterances regarding race. Some point to Royce’s overcoming of Absolute Idealism as his most important achievement, whereas others say the Absolute is the key to understanding Royce’s pragmatic metaphysics and ethics—but still others deny that Royce is much of a pragmatist at all. One identifies his previously unrecognized importance as an earlier practitioner and influential figure for phenomenology. Finally, two authors point to Royce’s logical innovations as the reason for his relevance. Of course we do not intend this volume as a study in mere disagreement; it is also a study of the higher agreements that are possible when scholarly perspectives, questions, and disciplines peacefully meet in the spirit of honest inquiry. An important reason for Royce’s recent reemer-

gence—his commitment to the potential of interdisciplinary work in academia—is visible in the broad disciplinary scope that this volume provides. Those who seek virtuous historical exemplars of interdisciplinary phil-

osophical work can learn much from Royce’s teaching and writings. Royce himself was an interdisciplinary maestro. His undergraduate degree was in the classics, and he maintained a lifelong interest in languages and literature (including the study of Sanskrit). He was elected

president of both the American Philosophical Association and the American Psychological Association; he was an instructor in English at the University of California before he was a professor of philosophy at Harvard; his work on the history of California is regularly cited by contemporary American historians; he published a historical novel set in California; he was invited to give lectures on scientific method by prominent scientific societies; and at his logic seminars at Harvard, “Royce enlisted the aid of colleagues from many disciplines, especially the sciences. As his guests they could come to its meetings to read their newest papers and to debate with one another and with him the philosophical principles of their work. Like him, they were seeking terms of unity.” His purpose in these famous seminars was to see whether and what the methodological connections were between geology and chemistry, physics and astronomy, psychology and philosophy. Royce’s interdisciplinary approach in this project was no mere ornament; it was absolutely central to his beliefs about the ideal of inquiry itself, and to his arguments

4 KELLY A. PARKER AND JASON BELL about the contributions that academic philosophers could make to the furtherance of interdisciplinary inquiry. For Royce, the philosopher in the modern academy had what he termed a “business ethic,” a duty of

interdisciplinary labor in the corporation of the academy. Writes Royce, “Philosophy itself, in so far as it is a legitimate calling at all, may in

fact be compared to a sort of Cook’s [travel] bureau. Its servants are taught to speak various languages—all of them ill—and to know little of

the inner life of the numerous foreign lands to which they guide the feet, or check the luggage of their fellow men.” For Royce as for Socrates,

the persistent posture of the questioning student is the philosopher's specialization, allowing one to identify common problems and solutions across specialized boundaries. In Royce’s 1902 presidential address to the American Psychological Association, he observed that one consequence of increasingly precise specializations within science, as within the twentieth-century academic system, was that researchers were less able to understand one another’s

questions and methods—not just between sciences, but even within individual disciplines such as psychology. Here is a force that hinders interdisciplinary inquiry. To help unify the purpose of inquiry itself, Royce called for a “new science,” the “comparative morphology of concepts” that would “occupy a borderland position,” so as to “offer large ranges of what one may call neutral ground, where philosopher and psychologist, special student and general inquirer, historian and sociologist, may seek each his own, while a certain truce of God may reign

there regarding those boundary feuds which these various types of students are prone to keep alive, whenever they discuss with one another the limits of their various territories, and the relative importance of their different tasks.”° For Royce, this meant that neither the logical nor the empirical were

reducible to the other, but the common test of organic improvement meant that advances could be begun or felt on either side: “As a fact, I cordially accept, for myself, the view that the central problems of the logician and of the psychologist are quite distinct, and that the logician is not responsible for, or logically dependent upon a psychological theory of the thinking process. Yet I am unable to doubt that every advance upon one of these two sides of the study of the intellectual life makes possible, under the new conditions to which all our human progress is naturally subject, a new advance upon the other side.”’

INTRODUCTION 5 The justification for the “comparative morphology of concepts” is a pragmatic test of predictive success: [T]his effort to justify scientific theories solely by their success in producing conceptual constructions that correspond in definite and controllable fashion with the phenomena, leads to a sort of practical theory of the business of thinking which closely relates the point of view of the logician to that of the psychologist. For the latter must view the thinking process as one of adjustment to the environment;

and he must suppose the mental motives which determine the choice of one rather than another way of thinking to be in the long run determined, as to their natural history, by the success of one method of adjustment as compared to another.®

Such interdisciplinary and evolutionary success helps show that the categories of thought are indeed plastic (Royce, like other postmodern thinkers, forsakes a Kantian rigidity of categories) and that leading ideals and theories do decay and die,’ but the test of “improvement in relation to the environment”!? remains the ultimate organic test of our ideas.

For Royce, the fecundity of interdisciplinary criticism revealed that knowledge is not merely a matter of percept and/or concept—that is, of old-fashioned epistemologies attached to preevolutionary versions of realism and idealism—but also of a third activity; namely, the comparison of ideas between specialized modes of inquiry: All such processes of comparison are equally characteristic of the cognitive activity which goes on during our explicitly and literally social life and of the cognitive activity which is needed when we think about our relations to our own individual past and future. In brief, neither the

individual Ego nor the Alter of the literal social life, neither past nor future time can be known to us through a cognitive process which may be defined exclusively in terms of perception, of conception, and of the ideal “leadings” of the pragmatists. The self, the neighbour, the past, the future, and the temporal order in general become known to us through a third kind of cognition which consists of a comparison of ideas—a process wherein some self, or quasi-self, or idea interprets another idea, by means of a comparison which, in general, has reference to, and is more or less explicitly addressed to, some third self or idea."

Science, knowledge, and understanding are the product of comparison and interpretation by a community of investigators. While each inquirer

6 KELLY A. PARKER AND JASON BELL may possess different disciplinary expertise, they all share a commitment to open inquiry guided by logic. This shared language is the province of philosophy. So, for Royce, any data are relevant to philosophy in its role of critically comparing ideas and consequences; and each discipline conducts its

own affairs, so long as it always loves the truth more than it fearfully guards its own disciplinary borders, beyond which other researchers cannot cross, and beyond which it cannot cross. This means that philosophy is not “dependent on psychology for its worldview’; nor is philosophy the king or queen of the academic disciplines. It is the servant and mediator of all, seeking to bring to light the capacity of inquiry to improve human life. It is thus a servant and mediator of inquiry itself, lifting it above the darkening stultification of jealously guarded disciplinary walls.

The chapters of this volume are intended to be an interdisciplinary resource for scholars interested in tracing both the historical importance and the contemporary relevance of Josiah Royce’s thought, in terms of

its theoretical underpinnings, its historical context, and its practical applications. Scholarship undertaken from the perspectives of various disciplines is here included, so that this book will be of service to philosophy, religion and theology, history, politics, educational psychology, and medical ethics. In Part I of the book, “Historical Explorations,” seven authors address Royce’s historical place in philosophy. These pieces collectively serve as the chronicle of an important period in the history of American philoso-

phy, when realism and idealism mingled in the creation of American pragmatism. They also trace out the importance of these debates to the broader tradition of philosophy, both in Royce’s time and in ours. In the opening chapter, John J. McDermott makes the case for Royce as a voice to which contemporary philosophers must attend. While our knowledge of any historical figure’s life and thought is inevitably sketchy and infused with our own concerns, in this Presidential Address to the Josiah Royce Society, McDermott demonstrates how Royce’s concerns do indeed dovetail with our own. Royce is an exemplar of what is now a rare kind of professional philosopher: one whose systematic explorations and critiques are simultaneously directed toward developing public and personal wisdom. McDermott quotes Royce’s observation, born of his

own experience of tragedy, that “Grief is our greatest opportunity for creation.” The message from Royce is that out of the hard circumstances

INTRODUCTION / of fate and suffering, we may find the resources to build stronger, more connected selves and communities. The caution is that there is nothing inevitable about such a response—if we are to improve things, “pedagogy is necessary.” McDermott presents us Josiah Royce, assuredly “Alive and Well,” and an assuredly relevant philosopher for our day. From July 2008 to September 2009, a team of three scholars scoured the Royce papers in the Harvard University Archives in a project affectionately known as the “Dig” (this name was a nod to a major tunnel-building project, the “Big Dig,” which was under way at the time in nearby Boston). In Chapter 2, Frank M. Oppenheim, S.J., Dawn Aberg, and John J. Kaag report

on their completion of the “Dig,” the goal of which was realized with online, open-access publication of the 800-page Comprehensive Index of the Josiah Royce Papers in the Harvard University Archives. This Comprehensive

Index, along with the separate, more general “Finding Aid” recently prepared by the Harvard Archives staff, represents an important first step toward the eventual publication of a critical edition of Royce’s writings. Oppenheim, Aberg, and Kaag convey the circumstances and support that made this ambitious project possible; they describe their methods for managing the work flow and information their search generated; they report on an initial nineteen exciting discoveries within the Royce papers; finally, they describe the content and organization of the Comprehensive Index itself. Their account of the “Dig” will assist future editors and users of the Comprehensive Index and of the Harvard Archives “Finding Aid”; their report of initial discoveries will inspire the entire community of Royce scholars to make use of these important new research tools. In Chapter 3, Dwayne Tunstall presents Royce in his own milieu, arguing against the view that Royce’s idealism was essentially defenseless against the assault of the New Realists, led by his Harvard colleague Ralph

Barton Perry. Tunstall advances Royce’s argument that knowledge is creative and telic, and logically comprehensible as such, “far from being

a passive witnessing of a ready-made world.” Tunstall reconstructs Royce’s response to the New Realists’ most serious criticism, that of the

“ego-centric predicament,” based on arguments Royce presented in his 1915-16 Philosophy 9 course. This reconstructed argument, which highlights fundamental metaphysical issues, is in Tunstall’s view quite relevant to the realist-antirealist debates of our own time.

Jason Bell presents a view of a significant new dimension to our understanding of the early twentieth-century origins of phenomenology

8 KELLY A. PARKER AND JASON BELL in Chapter 4. While there have been a number of studies that explore the thematic and historical connections between classical American philos-

ophy and European phenomenology, Bell identifies the Canadian philosopher Winthrop Bell not only as a significant phenomenologist himself but also as the crucial mediating interpreter between Edmund Husserl and the Americans Josiah Royce and William Hocking. With this historical connection in mind we can begin to appreciate the fruitfulness

of viewing Royce’s works as genuinely phenomenological writings (as Royce himself sometimes characterized them). Royce was an excellent student of the history of philosophy; among his most familiar influences

was German idealism. Mathew A. Foust and Melissa Shew explore the direct influence of ancient Greek thought on Royce’s works in Chapter 5, focusing in particular on Aristotle’s legacy. They identify three distinct areas of Aristotelian influence on Royce: his views on truth and reality, his philosophy of loyalty, and his philosophy of community. Aristotle’s

influence can be explicitly seen in all three of these areas: the first reflecting Royce’s adaptation of Aristotle’s realism, the second and third reflecting his embrace of Aristotle’s theory of friendship and his account of social life.

The last two chapters in Part I present studies of Royce’s logic. These chapters, by Randall E. Auxier and Scott L. Pratt, represent explorations of what is at this point the least well-understood area of Royce’s philosophical work. Royce’s first published book was the Primer of Logical Analysis for

the Use of Composition Students, which he had written for his students in California in 1881. For the first volume of The World and the Individual, he wrote a long “Supplementary Essay” that addressed the more technical logic and mathematics behind the metaphysics of his 1899 Gifford Lectures. Thereafter, and largely under C. S. Peirce’s influence, Royce continued to develop his understanding of logic in creative and sophisticated directions. While Royce did publish several encyclopedia articles on logical concepts, as well as a long systematic essay on “The Principles of Logic,”’* his unpublished papers include thousands of pages of additional work on logic.

In “Complex Negation, Necessity, and Logical Magic,” Randall E. Auxier explains the way that Royce used alternative concepts of logical negation to frame his metaphysical inquiries. Prior to the innovations of Frege and Russell, logic afforded no fewer than seven forms of negation. While their revolutionary simplification made negation much easier to manage in a formal system, Auxier argues that it came at the loss of

INTRODUCTION 9 considerable subtlety in thought. Moreover, a proper understanding of Royce’s work requires us to understand how he used these richer predecessor conceptions of negation to make his case for the Absolute. The notion that our logical system shapes and determines available ways to think about problems is carried further by Scott L. Pratt in Chapter 7. Pratt proposes a Roycean logic as an alternative to the dualistic logic of oppression that underlies colonialist and racist thought. He argues that we need a nuanced logical system that can simultaneously accommodate plu-

ralism and differences among people, but can do so without ossifying such differences into the fixed categories and hierarchies of a rigid logic. In Royce’s work on the logic of taboos, and in his more general view of logic as the general science of purposive action, Pratt finds a promising framework for postcolonial thought. This pioneering work suggests that for Royce (as for Hegel, though their logical systems are very different indeed), logic functions not merely as a technical tool for scientists and mathematicians, but is indeed a fundamental stratum of social life. Part II of the book, “Practical Extensions,” focuses on practical applications of Royce’s theories. Royce was deeply concerned with the practical relevance of philosophical theories. Two examples of Royce’s many

forays into the arena of public debate were his correspondence with business leaders on questions of ethics related to the insurance industry,

and his public advocacy of American intervention in the Great War against Germany’s military aggression against Belgium and neutral ships at sea. This volume relates Royce’s work to practical social problems, in terms of applied psychology (Douglas R. Anderson writes on Royce’s theory of the self, particularly as it applies to education); social and political ethics (with essays by Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley on race theory, Judith M. Green on democracy in the United States after 9/11,

and Richard P. Mullin on the rethinking of American individualism in light of Royce’s account of loyalty); religion and theology (Frank M. Oppenheim, S.J., describes Royce’s efforts at rapprochement between

the Christian Church and other religious traditions); and problems of knowledge and practice (Kara Barnette’s chapter brings Royce’s thought into the context of feminist epistemology concerning the place of error in practical attempts to find the truth, and Mary B. Mahowald advances Royce’s philosophy of community in contrast with contemporary communitarianism, in regard to the question of prenatal testing for disability).

10 KELLY A. PARKER AND JASON BELL An introductory chapter by Douglas R. Anderson opens this section. Anderson discusses Royce’s metaphysical understanding of the origins of individuality through creative labor, in light of its possibility to improve popular culture. Writes Anderson, “Our individuality is what we aim to achieve; it is not a simple ontological trait with which we are born... . To become individuals we must learn to express our own meaning; we cannot be reducible to antecedent causes.” This, for Anderson, is a thesis with

practical application, as for instance in terms of pedagogy, where a Roycean conception holds that individuals can be educated as unique and creative contributors to culture rather than as mere component objects of it: “Despite much lip service to treating students as individuals or persons, the majority of texts for teaching teachers still employ a baseline behav-

iorism that treats students as effects to be caused or as objects to be manipulated. The take of the Roycean teacher would be quite otherwise. One would need to find ways to elicit and enable self-expression.”

In Chapter 9, Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley engages anew the ongoing debate over Royce’s 1905 essay “Race Questions and Prejudices.” A variety of interpretations of Royce’s own views on race, as disclosed in the essay

and in other of his writings, have been previously offered by Tommy J. Curry, Dwayne Tunstall, Marilyn Fischer, and Kegley herself. Here Kegley surveys the controversy, discusses some of the more problematic aspects

of understanding historical discourse concerning race, and responds to Fischer and Curry’s charges that Royce’s writings reveal white supremacist and colonialist sympathies. Kegley notes in her conclusion that there is yet more work to do on the issue of Royce and race, and on concrete measures to address racial justice in our own time. Her chapter provides an important framework for moving both of these projects forward.

Judith M. Green’s focus is on dangerous antipathies within the American body politic. “In recent years, the United States has been dominated by what Royce called a dangerous “mob spirit,’ arising from deep feelings about September 11 as these have been stirred up and directed by some of our political leaders and our mass media, leading to unquestioning majority support for a pre-emptive war in Iraq instead of a clearer, wiser thinking about how to transform the root causes of these dreadful events.” Green writes that Royce’s three-part “progressive prescription” of enlightened provincialism, open-ended community, and loyalty-loving individuals cures the disease of xenophobic clannishness and turns the

healthy body politic toward a “higher provincialism.” For Green, the

INTRODUCTION 11 healing of the divided United States “will require that justice-minded Catholics and justice-minded Baptists (and justice-minded Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, and Native American traditionalists) reach out to each other, while bravely challenging those within their own communities who betray their founding spirit by rejecting a wider ‘loyalty to loyalty’ while

insisting on a narrow, hierarchical orthodoxy within their communal interpretative process.” Many social and political theorists have identified American individual-

ism as a problematic construct; feminist and communitarian thinkers alike have called for an alternative view of the self-in-community that more accurately reflects the facts of the socially and historically embedded

life. In Chapter 11, “Josiah Royce and the Redemption of American Individualism,” Richard Mullin develops a nonatomistic view of the human person based on Royce’s conception of loyalty. Mullin focuses on Royce’s explicitly Christian notion of a “Doctrine of Life” as the organizing idea for the highest form of loyalty, and he asks whether this powerful ideal should or could be embraced by those outside the Christian faith. Mullin’s essay addresses the question—-so pressing in a pluralistic, global world—of whether all people can legitimately regard themselves as members of the Roycean Great Community or if it is an inherently limited vision. Frank M. Oppenheim, S.J., explores the potential for Royce’s writings

and efforts to serve as interreligious bridges between Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and other religious traditions. For Royce, “A comparative and scientific study of the social influences of the ereat religions is not needed to make us think well of Christianity, or of our own civilization, but will help us most, if it helps us at all, by assuming as far as possible, a highly judicial, an impartially appreciative attitude, and by telling not so much who has done best, but what each civilization in question has done to meet its own problems.” Royce’s specific efforts in the comparative criticism of religious practices incorporate the psychological fact of temporally narrow consciousness, and show “how by habit, memory, and abstraction we strive to indirectly enlarge the narrowness of our human span of consciousness. The judgments we subsequently make appeal unavoidably to a higher kind or kinds of consciousness in order to make the truth or error of those judgments possible and also actual.” In Chapter 13, Kara Barnette continues the project of Part IT by interrogating, extending, and applying a central Roycean theme in the context of contemporary philosophy. Barnette explores the role of error in Royce’s

12 KELLY A. PARKER AND JASON BELL philosophy and shows how emphasis on its positive aspect can help inform contemporary feminist epistemology (in particular, the feminist standpoint theory developed by Sandra Harding). Barnette illustrates the practical implications of taking error seriously through a consideration of a class of legal investigations and inquiries—interracial acquaintance rape—that involve particularly difficult differences in standpoint. The

enhanced error sensitivity allowed by a Roycean account of inquiry promises to enhance our search for truth in a variety of situations. The final chapter in this volume, by Mary B. Mahowald, shows Royce’s relevance in contemporary medical ethics, the paradigm field of “applied

ethics,” or practical philosophy. Mahowald describes the cooperative practicality of Royce’s idealistic pragmatism and of Peirce’s community of inquiry as being better exemplified in the care of patients than in many philosophy departments. “Unlike health care workers, professors often seem to ply their trade individualistically, as if each was separately capable of achieving optimal intellectual results.” But just as individuals isolated from communities fail to make a difference, so too a community undifferentiated by individual communities fails to make a positive difference. Mahowald uses Royce’s notion of loyalty to loyalty to critique communitarianism, since communitarians “tend to ignore the fact that people simultaneously belong to diverse communities whose interests and priorities are occasionally at odds. Identifying or defending the moral values of particular communities affords little help in resolving these conflicts for individuals who belong, as we all do, to multiple communities.” For Mahowald, the principal of respect for individual loyalties, when they come into conflict (as she discusses in regard to the issue of prenatal testing for disabilities), means that “The ideal of Community . . . is best approximated through a strategy by which the participation of communities commonly excluded from participation is maximized.” As should be evident, Josiah Royce’s work is a veritable treasure trove for contemporary philosophers, logicians, theologians, psychologists, historians, social scientists, educators, and students of the methodology of inquiry. The essays presented here provide a starting point for those who wish to better understand this central figure of the American philo-

sophical tradition. We hope it also offers a starting point for further investigation into the areas that Royce himself considered centrally important for understanding and improving life in the modern world.

PART ONE

HISTORICAL EXPLORATIONS

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ONE

JOSIAH ROYCE: ALIVE AND WELL Presidential Address delivered to the Josiah Royce Society in honor of the 150th anniversary of Royce’s birth, 2005 John J. McDermott

Our form of consciousness is one of our chief human sorrows. —Josiah Royce, The Sources of Religious Insight

I If am pleased to be here as the president of the fledgling Josiah Royce

Society. The feathers of this bird are new to flight, but Iam confident that they shall lift off erelong, especially since this society features the presence of several of us who have a long history of professional society initiations. As this is a banquet talk, or as I prefer an “Address at the Banquet,” I take the liberty of beginning with acts of gratitude. Although the scholarly works on Josiah Royce do not match the girth of those devoted to the philosophy of William James, C. S. Peirce, and John Dewey, it is appropriate that we recall the earlier and influential work of J. Harry Cotton and John E. Smith. And, I add here our gratitude to Ignas Skrupskelis for his magisterial annotated bibliography of Royce’s published work.! Happily present in this very audience are the towering figures of contemporary Royce scholarship, Frank

Oppenheim and John Clendenning, who have cast a very bright light, indeed, on the often opaque life and work of Josiah Royce. Not only has Oppenheim given us an extensive explicato de texte on behalf of Royce, in his 115 5

16 JOHN J. McDERMOTT latest book he has woven a fabric of thoughts and events as a mosaic of the relationships between Royce, Peirce, James, and Dewey.’ As for Clendenning he has given to us a deeply reflective, superbly informed, and exquisitely presented biography of Josiah Royce.’ Granted that one can never recapture the life of another with a full degree of certitude, Clendenning offers us a full-bore visit to the recesses of Royce’s life, cast through the persons and events he embraced and which embraced him. To my mind, it is a primary

desideratum in the study of a thinker, inclusive of philosophers, to be apprised as to how it went, with them, for them, around them and against them. I am aware that this judgment is out of favor and subject to dismissal by both the analytic mode and varieties of postmodernism. See, for example, Richard Rorty’s dismissal of Jay Martin’s biography of John Dewey.* For

me, no story—no person. Now I am not saying that rampant clarity is the result of even the most thorough biography. Obviously, such clarity is not available when I am not clear, at all, about my own biography. Recall Royce’s telling of the anecdote about Schopenhauer, who taken for an eccentric by public park personnel was asked, “Sir, who are you?,” to which Schopenhauer replied, “I wish you would tell me.” I take seriously that this exchange is found in the very last paragraph of Clendenning’s biography of Royce.

Still, in a masterful biography there comes to be considerable and important clearing up, as when Clendenning reconstructs his version of Katherine Head, Royce’s wife, in his second edition. Along the way, alas, precious stories about the protagonist in any biography can be reframed,

squashed to the innocuous, or even rendered apocryphal. This process of revarnishing stories was brought home to me by the recent biography

of William James written by the distinguished biographer, Robert Richardson.’ Richardson sent me a manuscript of 800 pages and asked me to vet it. I did so. Every page and every line was given scrutiny. He knew some stories that I did not. On occasion I had a William James story of which he was unaware. More significant and even startling was that with regard to the stories we both knew, his telling of them evoked an ambiance which was unrecognizable to me. The same event, the same person, the same philosophical work took on a characteristic of either adumbration or narrowing. So obvious was this that I recalled a line in James’s Notebook: Life is a “muddle and a struggle, with an ‘ever not quite’ to all our formulas and novelty and possibility leaking in.”° I know

something of the life of Josiah Royce and still more about the life of

JOSIAH ROYCE: ALIVE AND WELL 17 William James, and yet there is a perpetual “un tentativo” about all of my judgments. In this way, I heed Royce himself. While on his recuperative

“Voyage Down Under” he wrote the following to William James in response to a question from the captain of the ship, then in “The Southern Ocean—out of Melbourne,” May 21, 1888, as to whether Royce taught his Harvard students about the reality of the heavens, Royce replied: “Even so, Captain,” say I, “I teach at Harvard that the world and heavens, and the stars are all real, but not so damned real, you see.”

We may not know the full conversation between Royce and the ship’s captain, but we do know that Royce wrote that line in a letter to William James. We have the letter calendared, in volume 6 of The Correspondence of William James, page 603.’

Those of us who write, teach, and think about the thought of Royce should not forget that line, for it is “damned real.” IT

I return now to the title of this address, “Josiah Royce—Alive and Well.” This phrase is admittedly shopworn, but I rescue it here to describe

that marvelously serendipitous discovery of two notebooks containing the reportage by Harry Todd Costello of Royce’s Harvard Seminar offered

in 1913-14. Costello told our old friend and colleague Max Fisch, he of sacred memory, how this “find” happened: When a shed on the back of my property in Richmond, Indiana was torn down to build a garage, I was brought a dust-covered box. It

contained my Harvard notes and papers which I had forgotten, including two stout notebooks on [Royce’s| seminar. I opened at random and found Royce and [T. S.] Eliot in debate.®

Namely and directly, Royce—Alive and Well. Of this Seminar I wrote a review for The International Philosophical Quarterly forty years ago, and I believe that my judgment still has viability.’ It would, of course, be very difficult to summarize the contents of this

work. Methodology itself is a broad topic, and within its confines the members of the Seminar raised a host of interdisciplinary problems. Costello tells us that “it was said of Royce in this Seminary that he put out a challenge to anybody who had some idea to come in and fight.”

18 JOHN J. McDERMOTT In addition to the nine student members, faculty guests such as Lawrence

Henderson (biological chemistry), Elmer Southard (neuropathology), and Frederick Woods (Portuguese history) saw to it that the Seminar had an encyclopedic reach. This is to say nothing of Royce himself, whose prodigious learning is omnipresent as he ranges over the history of ideas, while making pertinent correlations with the pressing issues of his time. Opening up with a development in Boolean algebra, Royce guides the Seminar through a maze of problems such as the concept of fitness, relativity, value theory, system, the nature and limitation of explanation, symbols, causality, and the difficulties of interpretation. Perhaps more to be savored than analyzed, these notebooks do yield two pertinent generalizations. First, they not only indicate the range and depth of Royce’s interests but they cast light on his attempt to develop what

could be called an inductive system. Royce, after all, was no absolutist, but rather one who sought a methodological consistency in handling a plurality of gathered particulars. James, Peirce, and his scientific contemporaries had impressed upon Royce the irreducible significance of data and the philosophical importance of operationalism or a logic of method. But it is also true that Royce had set his sights on a more inclusive whole. In his introduction to the Dover edition of The World and the Individual, John Smith stated that “Basic to Royce’s thought is the approach to the nature of things through analysis of the nature of knowing. Unlike essentially critical philosophers for whom the theory of knowledge is an end in itself, Royce studied the relation of an idea to an object for the purpose of discovering in that relationship a clue to the general nature of Being.”

Perhaps it can be said that the work of his last years, particularly as reflected in the Seminars, show Royce to be involved in literally every discipline, seemingly in an effort to empirically ground those more extensive insights found in The World and the Individual.

A second conclusion to be drawn from the publication of these Seminar notes pertains to the significant role of philosophy in the devel-

opment of an interdisciplinary approach to problems of method and inquiry. While few could hope to match the extraordinary grasp of multiple disciplines that characterized Royce, the contemporary scene should emulate his effort to make philosophy relevant to the wide range

of problems that bind together the community of inquiry. At the very least, such a concern would be in full continuity with the classical and, as yet, most seminal phase of American philosophical thought.

JOSIAH ROYCE: ALIVE AND WELL 19 My last turn here is to the head text, written by Royce in the last section of The Sources of Religious Insight, in a chapter entitled “The Religious

Mission of Sorrow”: “Our form of consciousness is one of our chief sorrows.”'° This line, notably italicized in the text, masks transparently the single philosophical, personal, and spiritual issue that haunted Royce for his entire life. That issue is variously cast as the relation between the indi-

vidual and the infinite God, between the single, the particular, and an infinite series, and between human frailty both caused by us and visited upon us and an ostensibly caring divine providence. Royce’s word for these tensions is suffering, perhaps intractable. My word for this is that we

are ontologically ill-at-ease, and it is intractable. Dewey would say get over it and do something to help. Or, we could go back to William James and indulge ourselves by adopting an intriguing complex form of prag-

matic overbelief, known to most as “The Will to Believe.” For James, however, it was the risk of belief. No such way out appealed to Royce.

I interpolate here a remarkable text from Charles Hartshorne on Gabriel Marcel on Josiah Royce. Hartshorne writes:

I have in common with Marcel a deep interest in Royce, whose Problem of Christianity led me (at the age of nineteen) to see the social

structure of reality as the philosophical key. . . . I agree too with the rejection of Royce’s theodicy, his monstrous albeit heroic attempt to justify a divine choice of the particular evils in the world as

necessary ingredients in the supreme good at which the Absolute aims. This view either turns the creatures’ freedom into a sham, reduces the absolute will to the sum of the creatures’ wills, or—so confused is the doctrine—somehow manages to do both at once. But on one point I may perhaps be more sympathetic than Marcel to Royce’s theodicy. I accept the eloquently expressed Roycean doctrine

of divine appropriation of our sufferings. Here Berdyaev and Whitehead, as divergent as they were on many things, were at one, presumably in complete independence of one another. God does not simply “know” of our suffering but takes it into her (his) own life incomparably more completely than the most sympathetic friend among creatures ever could."!

Josiah Royce held fast to this doctrine of divine appropriation of our suf-

ferings, as no doubt he had to, given the inexplicable and tragic mental

demise of his son, Christopher. After committing Christopher to the Danvers State Hospital, Royce writes a letter to William James. His opening

20 JOHN J. McDERMOTT sentences are poignant. “We have fought our fight, and lost. We shall keep on fighting (although lost) and try not to make any outcry.” Royce contin-

ues, “I don’t ask for comfort. The only comfort to look for is not of this visible world. But at least, I am not a ‘shallow optimist,’ nor do I take more

than the necessary “moral holidays,’ nor do I change my mind as to our problem of evil because I am hard put—but the poor boy will never see any of the light that I had been longing and fighting to have him see. And the way is a long and dark one for us all.”!” I note that I have a friend of more than forty years who has two children afflicted with paranoid schizophrenia, one of whom has been committed to an institution for more than thirty years. He has written me from the beginning of this horrific tragedy, much as Royce wrote to James. There is one signal difference, however. My friend, as he evokes dramatically and admittedly in his letters, is consumed by an abiding rage. The difference between my friend and Royce is the existentially grave question pertaining to the doctrine of specific providence. On this matter, James fudged with rhetorically brilliant punts. Dewey did not believe in a doctrine of specific providence but he was decidedly not in a rage. Royce was tortured lifelong by this oscillation between abandonment and healing. He held evil and suffering to be opaque and not subject to what I calla “canopy of ultimate explanation.” Still, Royce writes that “grief is our greatest opportunity for creation.”'’ This, in a letter to Hocking, who had just experienced the death of his infant son, expressing therein his belief in the divine appropriation of suffering. For the record, I do not believe in the doctrine of specific providence but I am not as spiritually healthy as John Dewey. I need Royce as well. Still, what do they, what do I know for certain. Nothing! Nothing pertaining to anything as deadly serious as is the rivening and riveting presence of implacable evil, to the existence of which Royce returns over and again, philosophically and personally.

In 1908, Royce was on his knees. John Clendenning contends that despite the imminent publication of The Philosophy of Loyalty, Royce felt that he had been passed over. To that end, Clendenning cites a letter written by Royce to the Australian statesman, Alfred Deakin: As for me, Iam an oldish professor, [Royce was 52] who stoops a little,

and carries too many books about, and plans many books that I do not write. I am already supposed by younger colleagues to be an old fogey. The “Pragmatists” wag their heads and mock when I pass by. My colleague James, who although so much my senior, [15 years] is eternally young, has all the interest on his side,—even although now

JOSIAH ROYCE: ALIVE AND WELL 21 he is an emeritus professor. I am rapidly passing into an early but a well-earned obscurity of professorial old-age.’*

Not so! Royce was still driven and vivified by the “wonder” he sensed as a boy when scanning the pockmarked mining camps set against the lush vistas of the Sacramento Valley. On December 29, 1915, less than a year before his death on September 14, 1916, Royce had spoken of this early experience as follows: My earliest recollections include a very frequent wonder as to what my elders meant when they said that this was a new community. I frequently looked at the vestiges left by the former diggings of the miners, saw that many pine logs were rotten, and that a miner’s grave was to be found in a lonely place not far from my own house. Plainly men had lived and died thereabouts. I dimly reflected that this sort of life had apparently been going on ever since men dwelt in that land. The logs and the graves looked old. The sunsets were beautiful. The wide prospects when one looked across the Sacramento Valley were impressive, and had long interested the people of whose love for my country I heard much. What was there then in the place that ought to be called new, or for that matter, crude? I wondered, and

gradually came to feel that part of my life business was to find out what all this wonder meant.»

Within the year of the self-abnegating letter to Deakin, 1908, he pub-

lished a book of essays on Race Questions, Provincialism and Other American Problems. Surrounded by a multiplicity of essays on community, logic, education, and William James, he published the trenchant Sources of Religious Insight in 1912. In 1913, Royce completed the linchpin

for his life’s work, The Problem of Christianity. Having lived in much deeper water than that floating his Religious Aspect of Philosophy or The

Conception of God, Royce brings to the fore both the depth and the Maimonidean “perplexity” of the religious question, seen by Royce as a “problem.” In The Problem of Christianity (1913) there occurs the section on “Atonement” by which he casts a searing secular light on the perfidy of betrayal and both the need and the necessity of healing by community and by community alone.

In 1914, at the outbreak of the First World War, Royce returned to

Berkeley. He gave an address to The Philosophical Union of the University of California, repeating his visit there in 1895. In this address

he proposed his then radical plan for “International Insurance,” a

22 JOHN J. McDERMOTT program for indemnification at the behest of war, replete with the systemic violence visited upon the innocent. (Little did he know of the visitation of violence so characteristic of the twentieth century. ) Given the comparative novelty of insurance as a corporate endeavor, Royce’s specific suggestions, although informed, were halting by our perspective. Philosophically, however, he was onto something, something very important, indeed. First, two persons cannot sort out their rancor, nor can two nations, nor two of any deeply oppositional stripe. Indebted to Kant, Royce writes that “A pair of men [women] is what I may call an essentially dangerous community.”’© Consequently, I use this term advisedly following a pragmatic watch and warning—a third person, nation, or triadic presence is necessary if there is to be amelioration and mollification. Second, spiritually, politically, and pragmatically, it is of

no moment, no help and indeed is countervailing and destructive to offer, to claim that “it” is not my fault. Indemnification does not depend on blame. It has no truck with revenge or retribution. Indemnification has to do with healing, refurbishing, and the reintroduction of hope to

the community. Need I say more about this Roycean approach to the existential urgency of the contemporary national and world situation? I think not. Herein is one task for our Josiah Royce Society. I urge us to pursue further this bequest from Royce.

Aeschylus, a beloved figure in the early life of Royce, wrote in the Agamemnon that “wisdom comes only through suffering.” Royce, himself, wrote that “Grief is our greatest opportunity for creation.”’” Allow me to warn ourselves that suffering does not necessitate wisdom, nor does grief necessarily entail creativity. If the mantras of Aeschylus and Royce on suffering and grief are to be heeded, pedagogy is necessary. A triadic presence if you will. Pedagogy is what I do. A teacher is who I am. And I am pleased and honored to say that I have had a teacher and I still have a teacher. His name is Josiah Royce.

TWO

A REPORT ON THE RECENT DIG’ INTO ROYCE S MSS IN THE HARVARD ARCHIVES Frank M. Oppenheim, S.J., Dawn Aberg, and John J. Kaag

T he “Dig” team (Frank M. Oppenheim, S. J., Dawn Aberg, and John J. Kaag) investigated the papers of Josiah Royce (1855-1916) at the Harvard University Archives between July 2008 and September 2009. Our goal was to create a Comprehensive Index! of these writings, which would serve as an indispensable basis for approaching the National Endowment for the Humanities to help fund a critical edition of Royce’s writings. The present report offers: (1) Background, (2) Digging, (3) Finds, and (4) Results: First Fruits from the Dig.

Background

In spring 2007, five members of the Josiah Royce Society John J. McDermott, Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley, John Clendenning, Randall Auxier, and Frank Oppenheim) met at the Harvard Pub to concur on the steps needed to create a critical edition of Royce’s writings. These five wanted to start the process. All the other works of all the other classical

American philosophers were already in final editions. Royce’s work 1 23 }

24 F. M. OPPENHEIM, D. ABERG, AND J. J. KAAG needed its own web-based showcase that gave easy access for scholars to test the worth of the work of Royce’s entire life.

This group of five, representing the Royce Society, soon met with pertinent Harvard officials: its librarian, its director of Archives, and the archival specialist in charge of electronic Finding Aids.* This specialist and her team had already started to put together a Finding Aid for Royce. Soon, our volunteer “Dig” team would work in the Archives to create a Comprehensive Index of the Josiah Royce Papers. The clear question for this meeting was, How can these two groups work together at the same time on the same papers?

After a clarifying discussion, all present finally concurred. Let the Archives’ special team proceed to create its Royce Finding Aid’ according

to its archival standards. It would be free from the necessarily biased suggestions of any single philosopher. When this team came to nearly finishing its work, they would circulate its near-final version to the Royce Society's Editorial Board. The latter would offer suggestions toward the final form of this Finding Aid. Meanwhile, the Royce Society’s “Dig” team, keeping in communica-

tion with the Finding Aid team, aimed to work independently in the public area of the Archives. The Archives’ office staff would supply the “Dig” team’s needs. In this way the special team for the Royce Finding Aid would proceed unimpeded with its own work in a nearby office. Our financial plans for this “Dig” encountered problems. By teaching at Harvard University for thirty-three years, Royce had brought it renown and more. Yet neither Harvard’s Philosophy Department (which had received and controlled his papers) nor its Library or Archives saw fit to offer financial support for the “Dig.” The Royce Society’s fund-raising committee— largely Professors Kegley, Kimberly Garchar, and Oppenheim—had to turn elsewhere. They identified eight appropriate foundations and approached them in order. Again their endeavors evoked the response, “Fine idea, but outside our scope.” Finally, this committee saw that no “Dig” would occur unless the entire Josiah Royce Society (JRS) and the entire Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy (SAAP) officially and jointly supported the “Dig.” This meant that the friends and members of the JRS and SAAP would have to dig into their own pockets.

Thanks to some major benefactors—including Professors Kegley, McDermott, and others, conjoined by the Jesuit Province of Chicago—and

THE RECENT “DIG INTO ROYCE’S MSS 25 many individual members of the JRS and SAAP, two-thirds of the $67,000

budgeted for the “Dig” was gathered. To all these benefactors we offer our continuing thanks. The operational budget for the life of the “Dig” was covered for at least its first ten months. Only by repeated appeals that these people dig still deeper into their pockets did funding arise to further the last five months of operation. Again, we extend our enduring thanks to hearts proven so generous.

Digging

The team actually started digging into the Harvard Archive Royce Papers (HARP) in July 2008. In the first week of the “Dig,” Ms. Dawn Aberg started

as Prof. Oppenheim’s research assistant. Professor Oppenheim relates the following encounter, which occurred that same week: A stranger approached me in the Archives with the unusual question, “May I be your apprentice?” I blinked, thinking inside, “Am I meeting a medieval person?” He partly cleared up my confusion, “I’m inter-

ested in your project and want to help.” I was still puzzled by this complete stranger, and thought inside, “Wonderful offer, but what will this do to our budget?” Grasping why I hesitated, he replied, “I’m simply volunteering; no pay involved.” I felt a sunburst of joy inside.

Thus John Kaag began his work on the “Dig.” By its close, Professor Kaag had dedicated four summer months of faculty time to enrich the “Dig.” In this way the three of us—Dawn, John, and Frank—became the “Dig” team. Our target was clear. The Royce Papers consisted of 155 boxes—the old familiar 98 “Folio Volumes” (now called “boxes”)* and the new boxes,” numbers 99-155. That was our target, all 155 boxes, generally averaging 250 manuscript (MS) pages per box, or about 38,750 MS pages. The purpose of the “Dig” team was clear: to describe, date (where pos-

sible), and evaluate the manuscripts (MSS) in these boxes for possible critical edition quality. (Digitization of these massive materials was a goal not achieved to any great extent either by the “Dig” team or by the Harvard Archives.)

How did we handle the flow each week of these MSS from the 155 boxes, while trying to be judicious yet exploratory? As Oppenheim’s research assistant, Dawn Aberg, sat to his right at her computer, he was

26 F. M. OPPENHEIM, D. ABERG, AND J. J. KAAG often reading to her a lecture by Royce while she scanned a printed form of it. She caught gaps occurring between the MS form and the printed

form. She also added valuable analytic insights at crucial moments of investigation. At 100 words a minute, she typed the notanda, excisions, and evaluations. She did the same with Oppenheim’s dictations. And, averaging about once a week, we hit upon something we judged was important enough to be noted both by the Critical Edition Committee and by Royce students. To some of these discoveries we now turn. Finds

1. Some of Royce’s MSS in boxes 52 and 68 puzzled the “Dig” team. We discovered that Royce’s five “Theism” lectures (of early 1896) and his

“Problem of Job” lecture (of late 1896) had become mismounted and thus mixed in these two boxes. We identified this confusion. As a result,

students can read Royce’s now-rectified series of his five “Theism” lectures as they were delivered. They can focus especially on that series’ lecture V, “The Theistic Interpretation of Nature.” In it Royce criticized as logically inadequate the attempt to infer God from Nature. Here, too,

his approach to the God question differs notably from the one he had employed at Berkeley only several months earlier in his more widely known “Conception of God” address.

2. The “Dig” gradually gathered a quasi-photo album of about 40 “self-photos” of Royce. These vignettes from Royce’s own writings appear in Appendix A of our Comprehensive Index now online. They offer some rich, “self-revealing glimpses” of this shy, rarely self-disclosing

philosopher. It may jolt the reader to discover the texts of some of these samples.

3. In his “The Doctrine of Signs,” Chapter 14 of The Problem of Christianity (hereafter referred to in text as PC), Royce reaches the deepest ethical point of his entire presentation. Why, then, did he here withdraw 24 MS pages from publication in this critically vital chapter?° In the published version of PC at p. 350, this large gap is neither noted nor noticeable. 4. Like Kant’s first Critique, is Royce’s Religious Aspect of Philosophy a “scissors and paste job”? Might Royce have constructed more than half of RAP from “clippings” from his previously published articles and from

THE RECENT “DIG INTO ROYCE’S MSS 27 his earlier unpublished MSS? Ignas Skrupskelis has carefully identified nine such clippings.’ From Royce’s unpublished writings we can add some more. For one instance of the latter, see Royce’s early unpublished MS, “The Work of the Truth Seeker,” from about 1878 to 1882.° This MS offers preludes to at least four kinds of materials found in RAP:

(a) Senior O. W. Holmes’s “6 ‘people’ required for a 2-person conversation,’ drawn from his The Aristocrat of the Breakfast Table. (b) Evidence that Royce read Francis Galton in Nature (July 1880). (c) Royce’s early grasp of different people’s “different worlds [of consciousness|” and “different orders of truth.”

(d) Royce’s way of dealing with skepticism and how to make oneself a determined “truth seeker.”

5. Within a folder entitled “Various Correspondence to Josiah Royce,” and amid a heap of other miscellaneous letters, we found one to Royce, dated 1897, from Scotland’s G. F. Stout. Royce had just published a long review of Stout’s Analytic Psychology in the journal Mind. In his response, Stout courteously thanks Royce yet claims Royce has substantially mis-

understood Stout. Ordinarily, just as one robin does not make a spring, so one letter does not tell the full story. However, this interchange soon involved R. B. Perry, William James, and eventually C. S. Peirce.’

6. The third MS in HARP Box 61, which Royce entitled “The Conception of Immortality,” turned out to be a never-published MS of 110 pages. Although its title sounds identical to others, this MS is neither Royce’s Ingersoll Lecture of the same title (1900) nor his 1906 “Immortality” lecture, published later in his William James and Other Essays. Instead, this third MS in Box 61 seems a wholly new and unpublished address—one probably delivered in Britain during the period of Royce’s Gifford Lectures.

7. The “Supplementary Essay” in the first volume of Royce’s The World and the Individual (hereinafter referred to in text as WI) contains Royce’s famous and lengthy refutation of F. H. Bradley’s position on the One and the Many. If a person tries to read this “Essay,” he or she discovers that it consists of 115 pages printed in special small font. This length and the barely readable type may well have made the reader wince and squint.

28 F. M. OPPENHEIM, D. ABERG, AND J. J. KAAG

The “Dig” team, however, found that Royce, by means of three excisions—one of them massive—had mercifully pulled back from Macmillan publication of 30 other MS pages of his “Supplementary Essay.” The manuscript of his final draft clearly reveals all 30 of the pages that Royce excised. In this instance, then, Royce proved that at times he could counter his tendency to be prolix.

8. Royce’s “Problem of Truth” address is well known.'° His MS, “Outline” and “Sketch” for this address have turned up in HARP Box 104, Folder 4. 9. In Royce’s Nachlass we found a MS entitled “Notes for the revised Berkeley Address, Aug. 14, 1914.” This MS provided Royce with a steppingstone for his lecture, “War and Insurance.”

10. Many know of Royce’s confession that he felt “a failing at heart” when he “first had to throw overboard [his] little old creed.”! Yet in Folder 2 of HARP Box 127, the team found a 3” x 5” notebook

entitled “Lecture IV.”"” In it, besides his fuller description of that experience, Royce portrayed his passion for truth seeking. This drove

him to search responsibly, seeking and weighing the pertinent pros and cons of creedal belief in general and of specific creedal beliefs in particular. 11. Antonio Rosmini’s Origin of Ideas (published in English in 1886) did not escape Royce’s study.'? Here he found significant Rosmini’s metaphor of the “pre-natal glimpse of the divine essence.” This glimpse supposedly seeded humans’ deep lifelong thirst for God and pointed to a erain of truth in the position of the mystic—one that Royce called the “Second Historical Conception of Being.”

12. In HARP Box 131, Folder 19,'* is preserved the Royce Family “Hymnal,” used by the family circa 1870. The book is boldly inscribed “Royce, Pew 121, First Congregational Church, Oakland.” 13. Royce saw his Philosophy of Loyalty (PL) published in 1908. As for

PL’s final MSS, the “Dig” team found yet another mismounting—this time between Boxes 27-28 and Boxes 102-3. Since the MSS for PL in Boxes 27-28 are positioned amid Royce’s MSS for the books he published,

most researchers of PL would assume that here, too, are to be found the final MSS on which publication of PL was based. However, the team found that the final MSS for PL (upon which it was published in 1908) lie chiefly in Box 102 and partially in Box 103. The

THE RECENT “DIG INTO ROYCE’S MSS 29 PL MSS in Boxes 102-3, then, possess greater authenticity for the critical

edition than do Boxes 27 and 28, which until now have been most frequently cited and taken as final. 14. The heart of Royce’s World and the Individual lies in its Lecture VII,

“The Internal and External Meaning of Ideas.” Royce sent the final MS for Lecture VII to G. P. Brett, Macmillan’s editor. Later, however, Royce became convinced that “judgment and the truth of judgments” were so central to his argument in lecture VII that he created 71 more MS sheets on this topic as an insert to be added to lecture VII. Editor Brett concurred by publishing this insert within Lecture VII. If a person compares the extant form of this MS with its published version, one finds evidence of this massive insertion." 15. Royce’s early turn to “spirit” as indispensable for his way of philosophizing permeates his writings and becomes more intense during the last decade of his intellectual development. Four instances taken together offer evidence: (a) In1879 Royce planned a never-completed work of twelve “Meditations before the Gate.” In the twelve titles for these Meditations, he employs the term “Spirit” as key to four of them.'® (b) In 1892, he entitles his major work, The Spirit of Modern Philosophy.

Then, in his middle period he seems reticent about using the term “spirit,” lest he appear departing from experience. (c) Yet in his late religious works, Sources and Problem, the “spirit’s” work and presence are pervasive. (d) Royce’s sixtieth birthday was celebrated at the close of 1915. There he summarized the overall endeavor of his philosophical life by delin-

eating it “as a fondness for defining, for articulating, and for expounding the perfectly real, concrete, and literal life of what we idealists call the ‘spirit.’”” 16. The “Dig” team emphasizes that Royce students will find much help in Appendix C of its Comprehensive Index. This Appendix—mostly the work of Dawn Aberg—offers 127 single-spaced pages and surveys all of HARP’s 155 boxes. Since she was not bound by the strict protocols of archivists, Dawn went a step further and offers more descriptive information and context about Royce’s individual MSS than can be found in the Harvard Archives’ “Finding Aid to Josiah Royce’s Writings.”

30 F. M. OPPENHEIM, D. ABERG, AND J. J. KAAG 17. What did Royce’s library at home look like? Report has it that after

his death many of his books were sold. A set of three clues, however, directs us toward something of a picture of what Royce’s library at 103 Irving Street looked like around the turn of the century.

(a) The team unearthed a list of books that Royce wanted rebound during a particular year, along with a list of periodicals he wanted discarded that same year.'® These lists provide solid hints about what the overall tone and character of Royce’s home library had to have been. (b) Harvard’s Robbins Library contains many books from Royce’s home library; for example, the works of Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and so on. John Kaag has photographed the marginalia Royce inserted into these works; for example, Royce on Husserl, on Kant, on Hegel, and on other philosophers.

(c) Then, too, during John Kaag’s investigation of W. E. Hocking’s Library at Madison, New Hampshire, he discovered books that Hocking had inherited from Royce, works by such philosophically significant authors as Spinoza, Opera 1 & 2; Descartes, Opera Omnia 1 & 2; Auguste Comte, Positive Philosophie; and George Simmel’s Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft, and of a different class, The Imitation of Christ.

18. Royce planned his Problem of Christianity and drafted it in quite different ways. Searching for a new and still better way, he repeatedly forged into a path different from and somehow better than his most recent plan. This led him to create at least eight different plans, one after another, before reaching the one he would settle on for the Problem. Yet even when he finally reached the outline of “Topics” for his Oxford audience,’’ he allowed the “spirit” to guide him in adding or omitting items of that outline. After such careful revisions of his plans, Royce bought four tickets in

summer 1912 for four trips, each of two weeks’ length, on a banana freighter leaving Boston for Costa Rica via the Caribbean and Panama Canal.

Seated in the quiet of the stern amid warm sea breezes, Royce mused interpretively and penned carefully at least the first four, perhaps seven, of his lectures for his Problem of Christianity. Each lecture averaged between 80 to 95 fresh pages of MS, with hardly any redrafting needed.

THE RECENT “DIG INTO ROYCE’S MSS 31 In brief, Royce’s planning had been probing, serial, and open-ended and required at least eight endeavors. By contrast, his drafting of those 16 lectures was simple, steady, and usually required one draft only. 19. A delightful discovery occurred near the close of the team’s work.” For our team, Box 143 seemed a catchall for miscellaneous stuff. Yet the Archives’ Index to Royce’s papers directed us there to a MS in Folder 2 entitled “Fairy Tales, the Greeks, etc.” What we found in Folder 2 was one frail sheet of old folded paper, penciled front and back—and in the young Royce’s handwriting. At about fifteen years of age, Royce had penciled this kind of a threefold MS.?’ After a slow search of his text and with more than one reexamination of it, we decoded what our hands held. Here was an outline, and a partial first draft, and a final draft of a whole careful work by “high-schooler” Royce.

In this essay, one precocious lad took a “deep dive” and unearthed a “pearl” of an ethical question: How do conventional “oughts” differ from everlasting moral “oughts”? In response, Royce employed his reading of the classical Greek story of Antigone and King Creon as the experiential basis to support his analysis. With amazing insight, he grasped the critical difference between the limited authority of an individual king’s decrees and the unlimited authority of the “eternal” law of nature for all peoples.

First Fruits from the “Dig”

The main result of the “Dig” lies in the publication online of the Comprehensive Index of the Josiah Royce Papers in the Harvard University Archives. This Index, after an Introduction and two Tables of Contents—

one general, the other more detailed and informative—consists of three

major Parts and three Appendices. It amounts to approximately 800 single-spaced pages. It describes, dates (where possible), and at times evaluates for Roycean researchers the hundreds of Royce’s MSS extant in the Harvard University Archives. Part I focuses on those published books of Royce of which the Harvard

Archives possesses the MS form. Part II supplies a chronologically arranged, nonexhaustive listing of 332 writings by Royce, most in MS form: his articles, essays, lectures, and fragments (published and unpublished). This list extends well beyond our Index’s Part I, which surveys

32 F. M. OPPENHEIM, D. ABERG, AND J. J. KAAG

the Archives’ MSS for Royce’s published volumes, theoretical and practical. It also offers researchers a basis for their online tracking of var-

ious topics in Royce’s intellectual growth. In general, here are listed Royce’s philosophical writings that did not make it to book form. This is especially the case with Royce’s numerous unpublished lectures, which

he delivered either outside Harvard or within its walls. The list also extends well beyond Jacob Loewenberg’s 1917 list of Royce’s unpublished writings.”*

Part III handles the “new” archival arrangement of boxes from numbers 99 to 155. The contents of these boxes are arranged through a series of folders, and the latter at times by a series of “documents.”” These boxes are generally grouped according to Royce’s philosophical MSS (beyond those gathered in Boxes 1-99), then his “Logicalia,” plus his incoming correspondence, family genealogy, family correspondence, and photographs. The three Appendices present: (a) biographical and autobiographical data; (b) excerpts from MSS and Notes; and (c) Dawn Aberg’s Appendix

to HARP, generally a more informative and helpful document for Royce scholars than is the Harvard Archives’ “Finding Aid to the Royce Papers,” which was constructed according to more generic archivists’ norms. Finally, an early fruit arose conjointly from the “Dig” team’s work and from that of Mathew Foust.” For years, Oppenheim had puzzled over the

significance of Royce’s “Pittsburgh Lectures,”*? and over what their origin, date, and site might have been. During the “Dig” he learned of a letter to William James, dated Feb. 20, 1909. It stated that Royce had lectured at Pittsburgh. He passed that hint to Mathew, who used the clue to sleuth his way to an important discovery. In a not particularly promising box in HARP, which contained an unmarked miscellany of Royce’s MSS, there lay a previously unnoticed fragmentary slip of 4” x 3” paper written in Royce’s hand. Yet in this fragment, thanks to Mathew’s previous research experiences, he detected Royce’s own direc-

tions to himself—just how Royce would, upon arriving by train in Pittsburgh, reach the exact place of his lectures. Following Royce’s footsteps, Mathew discovered the exact site, audience, and the three specific dates on which Royce presented his Pittsburgh Lectures. These lectures represented a post-1908 development of Royce’s philosophy of loyalty, set in three practical lectures on the art of loyalty.*°

THE RECENT “DIG INTO ROYCE’S MSS 33 To close, then, no one yet knows how many other “finds” lie in these 155 boxes of the Harvard Archives Josiah Royce Papers, or what will be discovered in the overall work of the “Dig” team, now accessible online and ongoing through its Comprehensive Index of the Josiah Royce Papers in the Harvard University Archives.”

THREE

GOODBYE, IDEALIST CONSENSUS; HELLO, NEW REALISM! Dwayne Tunstall

ED

D uring the last few decades of the nineteenth century and the first

decade of the twentieth century, there was what we could call an idealist consensus among most US philosophers. This idealist consensus emerged in the late 1870s as American postsecondary education underwent a profound transformation. As research universities emerged from

1875 until 1910,’ philosophy transitioned from being a subject studied primarily in the senior seminar in moral philosophy, and often taught by the

president of a college, to being an autonomous discipline which trained professionals who were qualified to teach the main areas of philosophy (e.g., logic, metaphysics, and ethics). Those trained professionals teaching at research institutions were also responsible for advancing philosophical knowledge. Many idealist philosophers performed these two tasks by conceiving of philosophy in post-Kantian terms. As such, they often regarded philosophy “as an architectonic science, criticizing the

assumptions of the special sciences, and supplementing the latter by building up their results into a complete Weltanschauung.”? t 34 §

GOODBYE, IDEALIST CONSENSUS; HELLO, NEW REALISM! 35

Philosophers as diverse as George Holmes Howison, George Trumbull Ladd, Hugo Miinsterberg, George Herbert Palmer, Borden Parker Bowne, Mary Whiton Calkins, James Edwin Creighton, and Charles Sanders Peirce agreed that philosophers ought to approach their studies of reality and of human existence as thinkers who engage in metacriticism of the natural sciences and of the emerging social sciences. Then, these thinkers should construct an architectonic philosophy that is able to unify the insights of various disciplines and create a coherent account of reality. When constructing these coherent accounts of reality, how philosophers interpret reality is more important than merely giving descriptive accounts of reality or attempting to solve perennial philosophical problems. Some of these idealist philosophers were more successful in creating coherent accounts of reality than others. Royce was the idealist philosopher who most successfully created an architectonic philosophy during this time period. His twovolume Gifford Lectures, The World and the Individual (1900-1901), is a testament to his ability to create such a philosophy. Once those volumes are combined with his early masterpiece, The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885), his history of California (California: A Study of American Character, from the Conquest 1n 1864 to the Second Vigilance Committee in San Francisco [1886]), The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892), and his later texts on psy-

chology, religion, ethics, logic, race and ethnic relations in the United States, international relations, conflict resolution, and education, we can see that Royce covered most of the major areas of philosophy. Perhaps the only area he did not cover sufficiently was philosophical aesthetics.

It is no wonder that contemporaries of Royce, such as Frank Thilly, identified Royce as being the representative of the idealist consensus during the first decade of the twentieth century. In 1914, Thilly wrote in his book A History of Philosophy: “The idealistic philosophy, partly through

the mediation of English Neo-Hegelianism, and partly through a direct study of German thought, has also won a large following in the United States, counting many professors of philosophy in the universities among its adherents, with Josiah Royce at their head.”’ He was not alone in identifying Royce as the symbolic head of the idealist consensus. Many of Royce’s former students and realist colleagues (e.g., Ralph Barton

Perry and William P. Montague) would also identify Royce as being the representative of the idealist consensus. They did not regard Royce’s position as representative of this consensus to be praiseworthy, though. They sought to overthrow the very philosophical consensus that their teacher and

36 DWAYNE TUNSTALL colleague represented. It might have taken them nearly a decade to overthrow this consensus, but by the 1909 American Philosophical Association (APA) meeting, realists had assaulted this consensus long enough to openly denounce it in a series of papers, the most (in)famous of them being Perry’s “Ego-Centric Predicament.” By 1912, a prominent faction of realists, calling themselves the New Realists or neo-realists,* had outlined their alternative to

the idealist consensus in a series of papers given over the course of three years at the APA (1909-11), in their 1910 “Program and First Platform of Six Realists,” and in their 1912 book New Realism. They regarded the idealist consensus as being a defunct research program that needed to be replaced

with a more fruitful research program; namely, direct realism. They also thought that philosophers should take up the Lockean role of under-laborers who remove the unenlightening speculations of the idealist metaphysicians, which obstructs scientists’ pursuit of scientific knowledge, and who help scientists clarify their theoretical concepts and theories.

Despite this coalition of New Realists not lasting beyond 1920, their realist alternative prepared the way for the subsequent realisms that have dominated the American philosophical landscape ever since. The New Realists coalition also prepared many professional philosophers in the United States to accept a scientific-oriented philosophy whose principal

task is to assist scientists in clarifying their concepts and theories. So, when logical empiricism was formally introduced to professional philosophers in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s, many of them were already prepared to adopt that conception of philosophy. While the aforementioned account of idealism’s eclipse and marginalization seems plausible, I am uncomfortable with how easily the idealist consensus was replaced by philosophical realism. After comparing the criticisms New Realists made of Royce’s idealism with Royce’s criticism of realism, I became perplexed by how the New Realists could spearhead a movement that overthrew Royce’s idealism. I became even more perplexed once I compared Royce’s idealism to the New Realists’ direct real-

ism. It became clear to me that the idealist consensus, as represented by Royce, was never adequately refuted by the New Realists. Rather, the New Realists seemed to have persuaded enough professional philoso-

phers that realism was a more fruitful approach for conducting philosophical inquiries than post-Kantian idealism. For the remainder of this chapter, I will characterize the Royce-New Realist debate not as an overthrowing of an obsolescent philosophical

GOODBYE, IDEALIST CONSENSUS; HELLO, NEW REALISM! 37

view with a better one, but as a series of profound disagreements over the nature and purpose of philosophy.® While this chapter can neither be an exhaustive account of Royce’s idealism, nor can it include a comprehen-

sive statement of the mature New Realist position, as expressed in the Introduction to The New Realism, it can at least examine and evaluate how their profound disagreements over the nature and purpose of philosophy expressed itself in the form of significant metaphysical disagree-

ments. As for the scholars of this period of American realism (e.g., Cornelis de Waal) who contend that Royce never directly defended his idealistic position against the New Realists’ assault during his lifetime, I would like to respectfully disagree with them. As we cover some of Royce’s major disagreements with the New Realists, we will see how he

responded to his New Realist critics. He just didn’t respond to them directly in print after 1910.’ We should begin our evaluation of the Royce—New Realists debate by evaluating Royce’s idealism and his published critique of New Realism.

In his most sustained (and, I daresay, persuasive) critique of realism in the World and the Individual,® Royce argues that all historical realisms neglect the purposefulness of our ideas and emphasize an epistemology in which our acts of perception and cognition, respectively, perceive and conceive extra-mental objects without modifying them in any way whatsoever.” According to Royce, realists of all stripes, including the New Realists, ignore the internal meaning of our ideas, or the telic component

of our ideas. This telic component of our ideas involves the intentional stance (e.g., our affective dispositions, personal projects, life commitments, and interests) that we take toward extra-mental objects and states of affairs in the world. They, instead, dedicate all their attention to what Royce calls the external meaning of our ideas, “which is the internal

meaning’s reference beyond itself to an object to which it refers.”’° Consequently, realists contend that our ideas about extra-mental objects and states of affairs only have a descriptive function; that is, they do not change the ontological identity of the object known in an essential way. Royce thinks that the realists are wrong on this point. He thinks that our ideas about extra-mental objects do add something to them; that is, our ideas about something become part of its essence. To demonstrate how Royce could say such a thing, first I will quote a lengthy passage written by Charles Sherover to explain Royce’s notion

of an idea, as Royce articulated it in The World and the Individual.

38 DWAYNE TUNSTALL Then, I will give what I consider to be a persuasive realist objection to Royce’s notion of an idea, as articulated in Sherover’s passage. This objection will draw on John Searle’s realism. Finally, I will give a Roycean

reply to this concise yet persuasive New Realist argument. First, the Sherover passage:

I can only judge the aptness of a description—as, for example, a map—in terms of what I want to do with it, how it describes an area of interest in terms of my particular interests. A geological map of Pennsylvania, though fully accurate, does not meet my need if my

interest in that map is to use roads to get to State College. Any particular description 1s always a description for a given purpose and can only be evaluated in light of its animating purpose. Insofar as the purpose must come first, external description or descriptive meaning is but the expression of its teleological intent, and must be judged by how well it fulfills that intent. ... Any meaningful idea must refer to something beyond itself, must claim to describe its referent—which is distinct from itself—for a purposive reason; the truth-claim of that description is that it meets the criteria set forth in the purposive act, the internal meaning of its initiating idea."!

A New Realist could agree with Royce that we give different descrip-

tions and interpretations of states of affairs (1.e., events) and objects depending on the life commitments, goals, and interests we have at the time we make them. Yet, the New Realist would deny that our acts of describing or interpreting an event or an object change the described or interpreted event or object in any way. Montague’s critique of Royce’s criticism of historical realism is based on such a denial.'* When confronted with Sherover’s map passage, a New Realist could claim that the fact that a person can draw a geological map of Pennsylvania, and that I can use that map to navigate the Pennsylvania countryside, does not change that countryside in the least. For the New Realists, and most contemporary realists, saying anything else is at best counterintuitive.

One of those contemporary realists is John Searle. If we just read Searle’s arguments against social constructivism and other contemporary antirealist positions in Construction of Social Reality’? and compare them to the arguments against idealism in the Introduction to The New Realism, their similarities become obvious. One of these similarities involves their usage of the fallacy of the egocentric predicament, first articulated by Perry,

to argue against their nonrealist philosophical opponents.

GOODBYE, IDEALIST CONSENSUS; HELLO, NEW REALISM! 39

Accordingly, both Searle and the New Realists argue that, of course, we

encounter the world and learn facts about it only through our perceptions and our conceptual schema; however, this does not mean that our perceptions and our conceptual schema are part of the world in any essential way. Searle puts this realist contention as follows: Take a corner of the world, say, the Himalayas, and think of it as it was prior to the existence of any human beings. Now imagine that humans come along and represent the facts [about the Himalayas] in various different ways. They have different vocabularies, different systems for making maps, different ways of counting one mountain, two moun-

tains, the same mountain, etc. Next imagine that eventually the humans all cease to exist. Now what happens to the existence of the Himalayas and all the facts about the Himalayas in the course of these

vicissitudes? Absolutely nothing. Different descriptions of facts, objects, etc., came and went, but the facts, objects, etc., remained unaffected. (Does anyone really doubt this?)'*

Searle argues, like the New Realists before him, that our perceptual and cognitive relations to extra-mental objects are accidental properties of the Himalayas. That is to say, all the properties and facts about the Himalayas exist independently of any and all human cognitions and perceptions. Nevertheless, Royce could reply to Searle’s (new) realism thusly: Just because something is counterintuitive from a realist standpoint does not

mean that it is not true, metaphysically. To enter into any cognitive relation with a geological map of Pennsylvania, and thus indirectly with the actual Pennsylvania countryside, is to modify both the map and the countryside because both of these entities are changed in some way by

our act of cognition. This is a difficult concept to take seriously for most, if not all, realists. For when they think of identity, they think of physical identity; when they think of modifying something’s or someone’s identity, they think of altering the physical structure of that thing or person. Then again, perhaps realists are too obsessed with modification in the sense of physical modification of an object to appreciate just how we intentionally modify an object. Of course, Royce would agree with realists, including New Realists, that we do not alter the physical structure of the map or the Pennsylvania coun-

tryside by merely thinking about them or seeing them. However, unlike realists, Royce would willingly contend that we do alter what they are (1.e., their ontological identity) by entering into a new relation with them. Our

40 DWAYNE TUNSTALL acts of “seeing-the-map” and “thinking-about-the-Pennsylvania-countryside,” for example, become part of what the map is and what the Pennsylvania countryside is. In other words, once I see the map and think about the countryside, my acts of seeing the map and thinking about the countryside become part of the ontological identity of these entities. All of

this, in turn, presumes that everything is connected somehow; namely, that every relation is an internal relation—an assumption that the New Realists would reject and that I, along with Royce, would affirm. Even though I like Sherover’s map passage, I do not think that it sufficiently demonstrates Royce’s point that all relations are ultimately internal relations to anyone who is already skeptical about Royce’s idealism. Here is another example to illustrate Royce’s point that might do a better job than

Sherover’s example. Prior to me seeing a Pontiac GTO at the West Huntington, West Virginia, Walmart parking lot at time T, it has its own ontological identity, independent of my seeing it. However, once I see that particular Pontiac GTO in that particular Walmart parking lot, that car’s identity includes my act of seeing it. In counterfactual terms, it is necessarily true of that car that it was seen by me at the West Huntington Walmart parking lot at time T and that the statement, “I might not have seen that car there at time T,” is false. Royce’s position, following this example, is compatible with an open-ended type of contemporary possible-world logic, where the truth-value of statements about past and present states of affairs in the world are determinate while the truth value of statements concerning future states of affairs in the world are indeterminate; that is, these future-oriented statements are neither true nor false until they actually occur or fail to occur.”

While some might say that it seems much more plausible simply to contend that I might not have seen that car in West Huntington,”° saying “I might not have seen that car is possibly true” would be absurd for Royce because part of what it means to be that car is that I saw it in West

Huntington at time T. To clarify my points, perhaps I should rephrase my last point this way: I can think to myself, “I might not have seen that car,” but once I actually see that car, it is always true of that car that it was seen by me at a specific place at time T and necessarily false that I might not have seen that car at that specific place at time T.

The preceding example might seem too abstract, so let me flesh out its details a little more: Let time T in the above example refer to, say,

GOODBYE, IDEALIST CONSENSUS; HELLO, NEW REALISM! 41

11:30 a.m., December 28, 2003. Once I saw that particular Pontiac GTO at the West Huntington Walmart parking lot at 11:30 a.m. on December 28,

2003, my act of seeing it is part of the ontological identity of that car. Or, if I had not seen that Pontiac GTO at the West Huntington, West Virginia, Walmart parking lot at 11:30 a.m. on December 28, 2003, then it would be a completely different car than it is now, since one of the things that makes it what it is, is that J saw it. In addition, that specific Pontiac GTO’s ontological identity is constituted by when it was manufactured; by where it was manufactured; by the

specific auto workers who assembled its components; by the welding machines that weld most of its mental parts together; by the machinists who produced its precision metal parts; by the engineers who designed its engine, transmission, brakes system, suspension, and other material com-

ponents; by the machinists, engineers, and software programmers who created the welding machines and other machines on the automobile assembly line at the plant where it was manufactured; by the workers who manufactured the steel, rubber, glass, plastics, and other materials used to create its components; and so forth. Without any of these people, places, or things, the Pontiac GTO I saw in West Virginia would not be what it is. If this example does not concretely demonstrate Royce’s position that

all relations are ultimately internal relations in some way, then here is another example, stated initially in the form of a question: Would Josiah’s

pet cat, William, be the same William if Josiah did not own him? We could construct the counterfactual, “In a world where Josiah does not own William, William would still be himself—a cat who is male with the identical phenotype and genotype as William, the pet cat. Nothing is dif-

ferent about William except that Josiah does not own him.” But could there be a cat with the identical phenotype and genotype as William, which is not owned by Josiah but is still William? No, not for Royce, because he would contend that an essential part of being William is William’s history, which includes the fact that Josiah owns William. We could extend this line of thinking to a human person’s ontological identity. In fact, Royce does just that in many of his writings.'” For example, Royce writes concerning human persons: But now one of the central facts about life is that every deed once done is ipso facto irrevocable. That is, at any moment you perform a given deed or you do not. If you perform it, it is done and cannot be undone. This difference between what is done and what is undone is,

42 DWAYNE TUNSTALL in the real and empirical world, a perfectly absolute difference. The opportunity for a given individual deed returns not; for the moment when that individual deed can be done never recurs.'®

That is to say, our ontological identity includes everything that we do and

everything that has happened to us up to the present. When we think about what we might have done in the past, we are thinking about something that we cannot in fact undo, and which thus partially constitutes who we are. Add this fact to Royce’s apparent affirmation of the doctrine

of internal relations, and we get the contention that everything we undergo in the present, everything that we have done in the past, and everything that has occurred to us up until now is all part of who we essentially are. Royce even includes what might have occurred to us but did not actually occur,'? what we might do in the future, and what might

happen to us in the future”? as parts of our ontological identity. Regrettably, discussing these aspects of Royce’s thought in more detail is

beyond the scope of this chapter; however, it is interesting to glimpse how complicated Royce’s conception of an entity’s ontological identity actually is. Now it is time for us to evaluate the New Realists’ objections to Royce’s

critique of realism in The World and the Individual. J also think it would help if I stated a few of the central features of the New Realism. That way, it will be easier to show how New Realism differs from Royce’s idealism and appreciate better why they reject Royce’s critique of realism. Once | do this, we will return to Royce’s critique of the New Realists’ position,

and more specifically his posthumously published critique of Perry’s egocentric predicament argument during the last year of his life. First, and foremost, the New Realists think that philosophical inquiry should proceed like inquiries conducted in the sciences, particularly the natural sciences. We as philosophers, then, should attack one philosophical problem at a time instead of doing traditional synoptic and systematic philosophy.”' In other words, the New Realists think that philosophers ought to adopt the methodology and mind-set of a specialized scientist

when conducting philosophical inquiry. The methodology that New Realists practice in their own philosophizing is the method of conceptual analysis. One way the New Realists articulate their method of philosophical analysis is in the statement: “For the purposes of knowledge it is not necessary to put Humpty Dumpty together again, but only to recognize

GOODBYE, IDEALIST CONSENSUS; HELLO, NEW REALISM! 43

that Humpty Dumpty is not himself unless the pieces are together.”” Stated differently, the purpose of philosophical analysis is to determine which relations of an object are internal and which ones are external. In the process we discover how the world really is independent of any and all of our intentional stances and the cognitions, perceptions, and interpretations that accompany them. The New Realists’ method of analysis, then, is an extension of their metaphysical position that there is a reality that is actually independent of any of our intentional stances, with our intentional stances—whether they be the purposive component of our perceptual, conceptual, or interpretative acts—being merely externally related to extra-mental objects. Taken together, these realistic positions are a major reason why the New Realists disagreed with Royce so profoundly. Second, New Realism as a philosophical position is incomplete. As Victor Harlow writes in A Bibliography and Genetic Study of American Realism: “It has no inevitable answer to such questions as mind and body, teleology, the good and freedom; there is no general realistic philosophy of life.”’> Nevertheless, the New Realists, as of 1912, contend that “the foundations and the scaffolding of the realistic universe are already built; and it is even possible for some to live in it and feel at home.” Following William James’s lead,” one of the pillars of New Realism is the contention that reality is only a collective name for all the actual discrete objects that exist. These objects already have a mind-independent internal structure that would exist independently of any and all of our cognitive and perceptual acts. Moreover, we experience their internal structure when we have a perceptual and/or conceptual experience of them, and we can uncover at least some of their internal structure via a posteriori propositions and observations.”° Partially due to the incompleteness of New Realism as a philosophy, the New Realists had no patience for Royce’s idealism or its cosmic teleology. They could not accept any philosophical position, like Royce’s, which placed such significance on the intentional component of cognitive and perceptive knowing, and extends this sort of intentionality to some absolute, all-inclusive mind or experience that knows everything. From the New Realists’ vantage point, Royce’s later talk of the Beloved

Community only confirmed their suspicions about him. These suspicions included the belief that Royce did not care about solving traditional philosophical problems in a responsible—that is, scientific—manner. To

44 DWAYNE TUNSTALL their dismay, it appeared to them that Royce cared about advancing his own ethico-religious vision of the world and imposing it on others more than doing “legitimate” philosophical analysis.”’ A third central feature of New Realism is its dependence on Perry’s fallacy of the egocentric predicament to establish that realism is a viable philosophical alternative to idealism.** Perry’s fallacy of the egocentric predicament “consists in the impossibility of finding anything that is not known.””’ As a proposition concerning extra-mental objects, this pre-

dicament could be either (1) an innocuous tautology stating that all known things are known by someone, all desired things are desired by someone, all sensed things are sensed by someone, et cetera, ad nauseam or (2) a fallacious proposition because we cannot infer from the fact that we come to know actual things in the world only by our acts of perception and conception to the conclusion that everything in the world must be perceived or conceived by some mind for it to exist.°’ Either way, one interprets Perry’s fallacy of the egocentric predicament, a central argument for most nineteenth-century idealisms—that is, the contention that all things must be known by some mind to exist at all—was undermined. This third feature of New Realism strengthens the first two features. Their contention that extra-mental objects have certain features, characteristics, properties, or qualities that exist independently of being sensed or thought about by any mind. For instance, Perry’s egocentric predicament lets the New Realists argue that it does not follow that an object, say, a red apple, is red because we conceive-it-as-red, sense-it-as-red, or

imagine-that-it-is-red. For the New Realists, when we perceive a red apple as it is, under normal lighting and atmospheric conditions, there is no mental representation that mediates between us and the apple; we are experiencing the redness of the apple, directly. Most American critical and scientific realists later rejected the New Realists’ model of direct perception of extra-mental objects in favor of an epistemological dualism for a variety of reasons, among them being the failure of New Realism to give an intelligible account of how perceptual error is possible if we perceive extra-mental objects directly. Despite this fact, all subsequent American realists agree with the New Realists that objects have certain characteristics that are mind-independent. Yet, Royce thought that Perry’s egocentric predicament did not lessen the validity of his idealism at all. Here we should take a few moments to reconstruct Royce’s response to Perry’s egocentric predicament because

GOODBYE, IDEALIST CONSENSUS; HELLO, NEW REALISM! 45

this is one of the only explicit responses to New Realism that he made during his lifetime. Even though Royce did not respond to it in any of his published works, he did respond to it in his 1915-16 Philosophy 9 course at Harvard, published in 1998 under the title Metaphysics. In it Royce tells

his students that he has no problem agreeing with Perry that there are many things that exist independently of any finite-minded beings (e.g., human persons) or even independently of entire communities of finiteminded beings. In more realist terminology, we could say that Royce would agree with Perry that there are innumerable extra-mental objects and states of affairs existing independently of any human intentional stance toward those objects and states of affairs. Nevertheless, Royce does not think that we should restrict the notion of intentional stances (and its intimate relation to human cognitive, perceptual, and interpretative acts)

to that of finite self-conscious-minded beings, like the New Realists advocated. Instead, he contends that there is some all-inclusive, transhistorical, and superhuman interpretative process that “interprets” all enti-

ties into a coherent cosmic Whole. This superhuman, transhistorical, and all-inclusive process’s interpretative acts are beyond all human intentional stances and the acts of cognition, perception, and interpretation accompanying these stances.°' Yet this process includes each and every intentional stance and perceptual interpretative act performed by a finite-minded being, as Charles Sanders Peirce would call these finite interpreters. Moreover, Royce cannot agree with Perry and the other New Realists that “although . . . the self-conscious activities of the being who thinks about this world are necessary for him, they don’t throw any light on the nature of the world. If the world is always known as the world is known, we don’t find out what the world is by that.”** For Royce, knowing—far

from being a passive witnessing of a ready-made world—is always a novel, creative process. Furthermore, unlike the New Realists, Royce does not think that we can separate an object’s existence from its essence. That

is, a part of what an object is, is that it exists, rather than not exist, at a particular time, in a particular space, with its particular history.*? Nor can we separate, even logically, the essential attributes of an object from its accidental attributes.°* Hence, we could interpret Royce as saying that while an innumerable number of objects and states of affairs in the world exist independently of us, we still should not engage in the New Realists’

project of knowing what extra-mental objects and states of affairs are

46 DWAYNE TUNSTALL beyond our intentional stances because to do so would exclude the most important component of our knowing and experiencing in general—its purposiveness.”° Despite the strengths of Royce’s idealism and of his critiques of realism and New Realism, the entire idealist consensus had unraveled by Royce’s death in 1916. Philosophy had achieved the status of a nascent profes-

sional academic discipline, one that model itself after the sciences. Philosophers were to pursue “research programs” that contribute to solving “philosophical problems.” If their philosophical inquiries led to insights that could help people live meaningful lives in an intelligible cosmos, then that was fine. However, such applicability of philosophical inquiries to our lives was secondary to solving philosophical problems. This is what happened when philosophers in the 1910s said goodbye to the idealist consensus and hello to realism. What is left for those of us living a century after the eclipse of the idealist consensus? I admit that I am still awed by the idealist consensus even

though I am not an idealist, technically speaking. I fell in love with this

erand vision of philosophy as an undergraduate philosophy major at Christopher Newport University. I learned from experience, though, that if a present-day philosopher still yearns to work within the idealist con-

sensus, then that person would probably have to study post-Kantian European philosophy outside of the mainstream Anglo-American tradi-

tion or leave professional philosophy altogether for more hospitable intellectual environments. Then again, if enough professional philosophers are willing to rediscover this tradition, enough people will see its worth that a second idealist consensus can emerge—one more intimately connected to who we are today: intelligent creatures who are able to transcend our brute physicality by creating meaningful worlds using the tools of human culture, namely cultural mores, social norms, institutions, and symbolic systems.

FOUR

ON FOUR ORIGINATORS OF TRANSATLANTIC PHENOMENOLOGY: JOSIAH ROYCE, EDMUND HUSSERL, WILLIAM HOCKING, WINTHROP BELL Jason Bell

a>

T he forthcoming first publication in Husserliana-Dokumente of the 1914 dissertation by Winthrop Bell on the relevance of Josiah Royce’s

theory of knowledge to Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, a thesis directed by Husserl, calls our attention to a surprising network of historical relations that connect not only Royce and Husserl, but which further

connect the golden ages of American philosophy at Harvard and of German phenomenology at Gottingen. We will here consider four principal figures in this transatlantic exchange of ideas, listed here in their order of arrival as scholars at G6ttingen: Josiah Royce (1855-1916),' Edmund

The author thanks the German-American Fulbright Commission, the Marjorie Young Bell Fund, the President’s Fund at Mount Allison University, and the Social Sciences and Humanities and Research Council of Canada for providing generous research funding that has permitted the research and writing of this chapter; and he personally thanks Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley, Kelly A. Parker, and Jessica Bell for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter, and Hayden Kee for his assistance with compiling the endnotes. 1473

48 JASON BELL Husserl (1859-1938), William Hocking (1873-1966), and Winthrop Bell (1884-1965). Yet it may be best to first consider the figure and writings of Bell, Husserl’s first English-language doctoral student, as a particularly promising place at which to begin our investigations, given that Bell’s text

is the single most detailed record of the encounter of Roycean and Husserlian thought.

Husserl praised Bell’s work, Eine kritische Untersuchung der Erkenntnistheorie Josiah Royce’s, as an “distinguished, excellent introduction

in the phenomenological theory of knowledge” (“ausgezeichnet . . . excellente Einleitung in die phanomenologische Erkenntnistheorie”).” Eight years after the completion of the dissertation, Husserl in 1922, reporting to Bell that his dissertation “has much that is very nice” (“hat viel Schénes”)° was finally—after the disruption of war and national economic disaster—in a

position to offer to publish the work in his renowned Jahrbuch fiir Philosophie und phdnomenologische Forschung.* When Bell declined the invitation, Husserl responded: “It is a pity that your dissertation should remain unpublished. It is here serving me as teaching material” (“Es ist doch schade, dass Ihre Dissertation liegen bleiben soll. Hier dient sie mir gele-

gentlich als Lehrmittel”)—indicating a route by which Royce’s teaching became felt by the broader phenomenological circle.’

Other internationally prominent philosophers, like William Ernest Hocking, sought to convince Bell to bring this work to press. Like Husserl,

they did not succeed. Why did Bell refuse these chances, and why has such an important work, likely the finest bridge yet built between the American and European phenomenological movements, remained, until now, unpublished? Further, why have Bell’s important contributions been almost entirely unrecognized in the history of philosophy? The answer to both questions involves the remarkable story of war, betrayal, imprisonment—and, in the end, Bell’s humility. Certainly relations between European and American phenomenology, and between Husserlian and Roycean phenomenology, and Bell’s crucial scholarly contributions to this interpretation, would be far more widely acknowledged had Bell completed his dissertation on an ordinary day, and had this work been published in the Jahrbuch as Husserl had hoped. However the conditions on August 7, 1914, when Bell passed the oral defense of the dissertation, were quite far from ordinary, and these circumstances in turn have much to do with the reason that Bell, eight years later, turned down Husserl’s publication request. The first extraordinary

ORIGINATORS OF TRANSATLANTIC PHENOMENOLOGY 49

fact: The dissertation defense was conducted during a time when Bell was under arrest. Bell’s words may best tell this story: “I was caught in Germany by the outbreak of the First World War. In

fact, my oral examination took place after the war had broken out, and under most unusual circumstances. I was in ‘protective custody,’ having been hauled out of bed in the middle of the night when England declared war.”°

Bell continues the narrative, discussing the unusual conditions of his dissertation defense, and how his initial “protective custody” soon turned into something more serious and enduring: The professors with whom I was to have my examination enquired and found that there was no actual rule that a candidate must be examined in the Aula and must wear formal attire (“Frack’) for it, so they, together with the distinguished man who was to be chairman of the affair, came to the place of my detention (“Haft”) (a school building in the town) and examined me there. After two or three days I was

allowed to return to my own rooms, reporting twice a day to the Police and keeping within the municipal area (“Weichbild”) of the town. A couple of weeks later I was arrested on a charge [amounting] to incitement to disaffection on [a] public street, and the whole affair was silly in the extreme. At any rate, from then on I was in and out of prisons—“in” except for one brief interlude.

Despite the loyal work of Husserl and the dissertation committee, the “enemy citizen” Bell was not soon to be graduated. As Bell’s friend Edith

Stein recounts in her autobiography, the conservative German press turned its furor upon Husserl and Gottingen’s university for daring to promote a citizen of an enemy nation.’ Perhaps owing to this public backlash, a majority of Gottingen’s faculty turned against its Canadian student, overruling Husserl and the committee. Bell relates the events that unfolded: One result of the whole affair was... that the faculty voted “To annul your doctorate” (“Thr Doktorat zu annulieren”) and actually repaid me (while in prison) the fees I had already paid. Of course, there had

not been time to get the dissertation printed, let alone have [the] diploma printed or the like.*

Removing Bell from the student rolls not only meant that Bell would

not be permitted to receive the Ph.D., but also that he was no longer

50 JASON BELL under the protectorate of his friend Carl Runge, G6ttingen’s rector. By majority vote, the larger G6ttingen faculty’s betrayal of its student Bell, who had clearly done nothing worthy of the penalty (and its simul-

taneous betrayal of Husserl and the dissertation committee, who had seen fit to pass Bell with honors), also meant that Bell’s dissertation could not be immediately printed, as ordinarily would have been the case. But

yet betrayal was far from universal, and the incarcerated Bell became himself a cause of loyalty—for instance, Runge was able, for a time near the beginning of the war, to organize Bell’s temporary release from jail,

and Stein rallied the community of phenomenological researchers around her friend, making sure that he remained in dialogue with the most recent research in the field. Bell had still other allies in G6ttingen, as Bell continues: Several years after the end of the war, when some of the men whom I had known as a young Dozent or Assistant were beginning to be of influence in the University, it was intimated to me that if I would submit the then obligatory summary of my dissertation for printing the other records of my work would be revived and the degree con-

ferred. And this, then, took place. Consequently my dissertation appeared only in that summary, and not until 1922, where it had been accepted in 1914.’

Bell’s life was not uneventful in the eight years between the completion of the dissertation and the conferring of the degree. Spending most

of the war as a civilian prisoner of war at the Ruhleben prison camp outside Berlin, he read, wrote, and lectured extensively in phenomenology’? and helped facilitate a kind of unofficial university there, where fellow prisoners were, in alternating roles, the professors and the students. Bell’s original phenomenological writings from this period survive in the Mount Allison University Archives, and demonstrate Bell’s own contributions to the field of phenomenological research, including studies of Husserl’s Logical Investigations and work in phenom-

enological value theory—while unpublished, this research was shared through his friendships within the community of phenomenological researchers. Released from prison at the end of the war in 1918, Bell did not return immediately to academia. Instead, he returned to Germany in 1919, working for British Intelligence, and the press agencies Reuters and Ritzau to

ORIGINATORS OF TRANSATLANTIC PHENOMENOLOGY 51

document the political and economic conditions of postwar Europe."! Finally, in 1921, he returned to academic life, teaching philosophy at the University of Toronto and then at Harvard, thereby becoming the first trained Husserlian phenomenologist in North America, both in Canada and the United States. Nineteen twenty-two was an eventful year for Bell—he took a position at Harvard, his Ph.D. was finally awarded by G6ttingen, and Husserl offered to publish his dissertation. And yet, as we have seen, Bell turned down the publication opportunity. Why? At least much of the answer hinges upon humility about his youthful accomplishments. While it is all but certain that he would have published the work in 1914, if he had then had the opportunity, between this date

and the awarding of the Ph.D. in 1922, he conducted a great amount of philosophical research, particularly during his time as prisoner of war, when he had little to do other than to read and study. Thus, by the time Husserl was finally in a position to offer space for Bell’s dissertation in the

sixth volume of the Jahrbuch, Bell no longer felt comfortable with his relatively youthful stylistic formulations. And, as we shall soon see, he

also apparently wanted to soften the critique of Royce and to bring his work into dialogue with Husserl’s, Stein’s, and Max Scheler’s most recent research. As he became further removed in time and space from his original Gottingen context, and increasingly involved in other work, these revisions would not come to pass.

Husserl’s and Husserlian Interest in Royce

In addition to the value of Bell’s work in itself, it gives us some important clues about Husserl’s interest in Royce. For instance, in their 1912 discus-

sion of a dissertation topic, Husserl, in Bell’s phrase, “pounced on” Royce’s name as the one he wanted Bell to write on, and indeed, Husserl “would have nothing else” than a dissertation on Royce." As Bell reports: “Husserl’s intention was that [my dissertation] should be, for readers who were familiar with Royce, a bridge to the understanding of Husserl!”’’ This is a significant fact, as Royce was, from 1879, the first American phenomenologist,'* and, in 1902, the first to publicly comment on Husserl in the United States. And yet, this mutual readership between the founding American and founding German phenomenologist has remained nearly invisible in the history of philosophy.

52 JASON BELL As Bell later told William Ernest Hocking, who, like Bell, had been a eraduate student of both Royce and Husserl, Husserl’s respect for Royce was “considerable”: |Husserl] evidently come to have considerable respect for Royce. I recall one occasion where he took exception to a passage in my essay

that he thought was not respectfully enough written. He remarked

that I must alter that: “Royce is an important thinker, and one must show him the greatest respect even in the deepest critique.” (“Herr Royce ist doch ein bedeutender Denker, und man muss ihm auch bei tiefgehendster Kritik der griéssten Respekt erweisen.”)'°

The beginnings of Bell’s dissertation indicate that he identified with the realist branch of Géttingen phenomenology, and this is the motivating force of many of his dissertation’s criticisms. Yet Bell apparently later took Husserl’s defense of Royce to heart, writing to Hocking in 1957:

“If I had ever finished the book I at one time had partly written, what is

valuable in my dissertation would have been incorporated therein— though, of course, not at all as arising out of a critique of Royce.”'® Whether Bell had been convinced by this critique as of 1914 remains an open question—it appears at least strongly likely that Husserl rushed Bell to the dissertation defense before the political situation turned still worse; if this is the case, it would explain why Bell’s planned edits did not occur in the summer of 1914. As we read Bell’s dissertation, we will encounter strong reasons to use

the Royce-Husserl connection as one of the best points of relation between the American and German philosophical traditions. Indeed, the theoretical relation between Royce and Husserlian phenomenology has

been of interest to a growing community of international scholars for over a century, beginning at least as early as 1902 with Royce, Husserl, and

their mutual graduate student Hocking (an important year of interaction which we will return to study at length later in this chapter). For instance, Edith Stein cited Royce in her first book, Zum Problem der Einfiihlung (1917), first written as a dissertation under Husserl’s direc-

tion, in which she praised Royce (and Husserl) for rediscovering for modern philosophy the importance of empathy to epistemology, and among French phenomenologists, Gabriel Marcel wrote extensively on Royce,’’ and Paul Ricoeur favorably discussed Royce’s philosophy of loyalty.'* Among recent commentators, Mohanty finds “no better means

ORIGINATORS OF TRANSATLANTIC PHENOMENOLOGY 53

of explicating Husserl’s point” on the internal relation of intention and fulfillment in external meaning than in Royce’s “well-known doctrine...

[which] comes as near to Husserl’s doctrine as any other view held by any other philosopher.”’’ Kegley describes “important phenomenological themes in Royce’s thought,” showing how his Gifford Lectures of 1898 advance a “phenomenology of judgment,” and notes strong similarities between Royce’s and Husserl’s critique of the mathematization of

nature and their studies of the temporal nature of consciousness.”° Goicoechea writes: “With a process which is much like Husserlian free imaginative variation [Royce] focuses on the notion of the independence of idea and reality as the core of realism. Through conceptual analysis he sees that independence cannot mean that reality is ‘outside the mind’ or ‘other than mind.’”*! Others, like Hocking,”* Tunstall,” Apel,** Vessey,” Stikkers,*° and Corrington’’ have made fascinating comparisons between Royce and the Husserlian phenomenological tradition. Still, Bell’s disser-

tation remains the deepest and broadest theoretical comparison between Royce and Husserl yet accomplished, more extensive than all other published accounts on this topic combined, while also adding considerable depth to our understanding of the historical relation of Royce and Husserl. A Canadian in Husserl’s Court Arriving in Gottingen in 1911, Bell found himself an active participant in

the phenomenological circle that gathered around Husserl during the crucial years of the creation of European phenomenology surrounding Husserl’s composition and publication of the Ideen, and when Bell’s professors Scheler and Reinach issued some of their most important publications. A letter from Bell gives an excellent description of the intellectual intensity in Gottingen at this time: My experience was just at the time of some of [Husserl’s] most intense absorption in his own work, in 1912-13, when he was writing the first

installment of his Ideen for the forthcoming Jahrbuch. He even, if I remember aright, had his meals served to him in his study, so that his trains of thought should not be interrupted by the conversation at the family table.”®

Bell’s observations from this period, found in his personal correspon-

dence, provide a fascinating portrait of the activities of the early

54 JASON BELL phenomenological community. But besides his talent for descriptive portraiture, who was Winthrop Bell? While his name often appears in published lists of Husserl’s Gottingen students, little has been written about

his place in philosophy other than just this barest fact—that he was among those present in the phenomenological circle that gathered around Husserl, when Bell engaged in his dissertation studies in Gottingen between 1911 and 1914.

Our reappraisal might begin at the point of Husserl’s estimation, as when Husserl successfully recommended Bell for a position at Harvard University:

A word of warmest recommendation. In fact no word is strong enough to adequately testify in his favor. I proudly count him among my friends, and thank the fate which has brought him to me. I know him very well, and stand by these words: he is one of the most noble and greatest personalities that I have met in this life, one who allows

me to maintain my faith in humanity. And not only pure and great as a personality, but also fundamentally capable, solid, and promising as a philosopher. It is a pity that his dissertation on Royce’s philosophy has not been able to come to print... Were Harvard to take him

on... his excellent powers would have a wonderful effect on your students.””

This letter of Husserl’s was addressed to the Harvard professor Hocking, who had earlier, in 1902, been Husserl’s student in Gottingen (prior, however, to the origins of the phenomenological movement). Hocking soon wrote back to Husserl with news of Bell’s hire at Harvard, writing: “I was rejoiced at what you said of Bell; and your word came at the right moment.””°

At Harvard, Bell became the first Husserlian phenomenologist to teach in the United States, from 1922 to 1927.°! Working together in the philosophy department, Bell and Hocking, who had both been Royce’s eraduate students at Harvard as well, influenced a second generation of

Harvard students to travel to study with Husserl at Freiburg.°* Their efforts ensured the continuity of the English language phenomenological

movement, and Harvard’s place as the American headquarters of this movement. Even before his introduction of phenomenology to the United States at Harvard, Bell had become the first to teach Husserlian phenomenology in North America in Canada, at the University of Toronto, from 1921 to 1922.°°

ORIGINATORS OF TRANSATLANTIC PHENOMENOLOGY 55

A year later, as Bell prepared to teach the new Husserlian phenomenology in the United States at Harvard, Husserl wrote to Bell: “You must certainly be an excellent teacher of phenomenology, in your very clear English speech and precise formal expression.”** Husserl referred to Bell as his “wise mentor and coworker!” (“weiser Mentor und Mithelfer!”)°° and sought Bell’s advice on a number of writing and lecturing projects. They remained in correspondence until the end of Husserl’s life.°° And after Husserl’s passing, Bell remained a close friend of the Husserl family,

sending food packages to them in Europe during the desperate times after World War II (a service that he performed for other members of the community of European phenomenological researchers as well). We might easily come to share Husserl’s esteem for Bell. More than being lucky to be at the right places at the right times, Bell helped to build these places and times: importing Royce’s pragmatic phenomenology to

the Gottingen phenomenological circle during a crucial period of the development of German phenomenology, importing the new German

phenomenology to Harvard, and serving as a foremost interpreter between pragmatism and phenomenology, and American and European phenomenology, during crucial early stages of their formative development. Even a brief summary reveals the impressive breadth of his work:

1. Bell was the only scholar present for an extended period of time at both the “Golden Age” of American philosophy at Harvard (first as a graduate student at the Harvard of Royce, George Santayana and William James’’ between 1908 and 1909, and then returning to teach

there between 1922 and 1927, teaching alongside and befriending such philosophical luminaries as Alfred North Whitehead, C. I.

Lewis, William Hocking, and Charles Hartshorne) and at the “Golden Age” of German phenomenology at Géttingen (where he studied with Husserl, Max Scheler, Adolf Reinach, and Leonard Nelson, and interacted with the remarkable group of students who were participants in the early phenomenological circle, including Dietrich von Hildebrand, Gustav Htibener, Alexandre Koyré, Jean Hering, and St. Edith Stein). Given this network of relations, Bell was in an utterly unique position to interpret between German and American philosophy during crucial moments of the early-twentiethcentury development of phenomenology, pragmatism, and process philosophy, in company with major founders of these movements.

56 JASON BELL 2. During his graduate studies at Gottingen, Bell served from 1912 as Husserl’s voluntary assistant, recording Husserl’s seminars and presenting course summaries at the end of the semester.*® Later, in North America, Bell assisted Husserl with translations,*? reviewed manuscripts,’ sent him difficult-to-find English language philosophy texts, and gave Husserl advice which Husserl considered to be very valuable.*!

3. Bell’s detailed records of Géttingen philosophy seminars from 1911 to 1914, preserved in the Mount Allison University Archives, appear

to give the only existing documentation of several important seminars by Husserl, Scheler, and Reinach from crucial years surrounding the major public unveiling of the phenomenological method.” 4. Bell remained a diligent original phenomenological researcher during World War I, during his internment in the Ruhleben prisoner-of-war camp, and maintained extensive correspondence with other phenomenological researchers, including Husserl and Stein, during this time.*” 5. While historical accounts of Husserl’s English-language influence typically commence with a focus on the 1930s, when Husserl’s 1920s

Freiburg students, Marvin Farber, Dorion Cairns, and Charles Hartshorne began their teaching careers in the United States, it was the Canadian Bell who was the acknowledged expert on Husserl’s phenomenology in the Harvard faculty in which these three were eraduate students—and it is certain that Bell taught at least Cairns and Hartshorne. While Husserl’s friend Hocking taught at Harvard

during this time, too, and, with Bell, helped to arrange the travel of Harvard students to G6ttingen, yet, because Hocking studied with Husserl in 1902, before Husserl began to center his research program on phenomenology, we may justly say that Bell was the first

North American phenomenology professor who was personally trained by Husserl. 6. In addition to writing a dissertation on Royce’s relevance to phe-

nomenology under Husserl’s direction, Bell reports having lent Husserl all of Royce’s major works (at least those published by Royce

before Bell commenced writing the dissertation in 1912),** which Husserl had in his possession for a period of years.* Thus Husserl

ORIGINATORS OF TRANSATLANTIC PHENOMENOLOGY 57

had, during the major period of the composition of his magnum opus, the Ideen, not only Bell’s interpretations of relations between Royce’s and Husserl’s phenomenology and Bell’s translations of Royce into German, but also firsthand access to the writings of the philosopher who founded the field of American phenomenology in 1879.

7. Bell’s interpretation of Royce’s phenomenology found its way to the broader G6ttingen phenomenological community at a crucial stage of its activity: For instance, Bell’s friend Stein wrote a several thousand word summary of his dissertation,*° and she favorably cited Royce at an important point of her book Zum Problem der Einftihlung.*’

8. Bell was a major financial supporter of the phenomenological community, particularly during the difficult economic conditions that faced the German academy after both world wars. For instance,

Bell’s 7,000 mark contribution to Husserl in 1920 assisted in the publication of the fifth volume of the Jahrbuch, the first volume to appear after the war; contributed to Martin Heidegger’s philosophy library; and supported the research of Husserl’s students Mahnke and Clauss.*® Later, Bell donated difficult-to-obtain English-language

philosophy texts in support of phenomenological researchers at Freiburg and Gottingen.” While it is difficult to say which of these accomplishments is individually

the most important, Bell’s interpretation of G6ttingen’s philosophical

movement to Harvard and Harvard’s philosophical movement to Gottingen was surely an important moment in the history of philosophy. Hocking recognized this in petitioning Bell, three decades after Husserl’s initial request, to publish his dissertation, writing: “Your essay would have the special point of relating Royce to Husserl”°’—an acutely needed service, Hocking wrote. In response, Bell again announced his lack of interest in having the dissertation published but sent Hocking a copy of the dissertation’s abstract. Hocking, deeply impressed by what he read, passed over Bell’s first refusal, writing: [Publication] is an enterprise worth contemplating. Your contact with Husserl belongs to the period which some of his followers regard

as the most authentic—surely the period in which his distinctive “phenomenology” was in full swing. [Your] remarks .. . on such

58 JASON BELL themes as Wesensschau, Evidenz and Evidentheit, the a priori, Intentionalitaét, are of lasting significance. And your criticism of Royce’s assumption that knowing, as an act, is in some privileged sense within a thinking subject; and that knowledge of knowledge implies a regressive Kette, which in turn implies [an] Absolute, pointing

out that the Kette is possible but its later members are unnecessary, “der Regressus ist also unschdadlich” ... all this deserves a fuller treatment,

and is absolutely contemporary in pertinence.”!

Bell responded: I should not feel, to-day, like putting into English, for publication, any

portions of my old dissertation as they stand. Not that I disagree in any essentials with what I tried to set forth there. If I had ever finished the book I at one time had partly written, what is valuable in my dissertation would have been incorporated therein—though, of course,

not at all as arising out of a critique of Royce... . That abstract [that I mailed to you] was written some seven or eight years after the dissertation itself had been accepted... . In the intervening years I had worked hard at philosophy, and while the abstract does not cheat at all, I was able by that time to express more effectively some of my contentions. In other words:—had I then been re-writing the whole dissertation I should have made my points better. They would have been the same points I had been making seven or eight years earlier; but that earlier expression of them is not something I should want to put out to-day.’

For clues about the revisions that Bell had once intended to make, we may consult the copy of the dissertation that he had with him during his years at Ruhleben, now housed at Mount Allison University. During his years as prisoner, he continued to work on the manuscript, writing notes indicating points where he wanted to bring the work into dialogue with Scheler’s, Stein’s, and Husserl’s recent publications. These revisions,

however, would not come to pass. While most authors would hope to improve their work after years of further dedicated study, the truly remarkable intervening events in Bell’s life, and further, the great physi-

cal distances that arose between himself and his advisors during that time, would have made revision a far greater task than if he had been able to accomplish the revisions immediately upon completion of the work. Bell left professional philosophy in 1927 to pursue careers in business, government, and academic service, and to engage in independent scholarly

ORIGINATORS OF TRANSATLANTIC PHENOMENOLOGY 59

research—serving as president of the Nova Scotia Historical Society, and regent of Mount Allison University. He was well published in history and yet left almost no trace of publication in philosophical journals. Despite

his long separation from academic publishing, he nearly returned to scholarly philosophical writing in the late 1930s. Again, war intervened. In 1938, Husserl’s later student Marvin Farber, then a professor in New

York, requested Bell’s contribution to a planned book celebrating Husserl’s philosophy. Farber wrote to Bell: Shortly after Edmund Husserl’s death, Fritz Kaufmann and I discussed plans for a memorial volume. After further consultation with [Dorion] Cairns, Felix Kaufmann and Gerhard Husserl, we are prepared to go on with the project. In view of the fact that you are the first of Husserl’s Anglo-American Ph.D.’s, and because of your own further work in phenomenology, your collaboration would be especially appropriate. . . . “Husserl and Royce,” or something in value-theory would fit in well, for example.”

After Bell’s initial refusals and Farber’s perseverance, Bell finally, in March 1940, conditionally offered to contribute to the volume (an article which would compare Husserl, Santayana, and Whitehead on the concepts of “Wesen” and “essence.”) The condition, however, was one that

ultimately precluded the possibility of Bell’s contribution to Farber’s volume: “But... it will depend upon other things, indirectly connected with the fact that Canada is at war.”°* In fact, Bell became fully occupied with the war effort and found no time to write the piece for Farber; instead, he worked long hours far from home in Canada’s wartime aviation industry after having offered his services to the Canadian government.

While Bell was not swayed by petitions to bring his original philosophical work to print, he cheerfully and fully answered queries about his time with Husserl from a number of scholars who wrote him at his home in Nova Scotia. These letters are at many points revelatory of Husserl’s work and personality, and on relations between American pragmatism and German phenomenology. As a result of one such exchange, Herbert Spiegelberg, the renowned chronicler of the history of phenomenology, informed Bell that he was “the most important witness about Husserl’s

attitudes about Royce,” and asked Bell whether Royce was a bridge between Husserl and Peirce, the founder of American pragmatism: “C. S. Peirce mentions ‘the distinguished Husserl’ in 1906, without any

60 JASON BELL additional reference. Could Royce, who at that time was in good contact with Peirce, be the link[?]”°° Spiegelberg was quite likely correct that it was Royce’s interpretations of Husserl that inspired the most intensive period of Peirce’s interest in phenomenology, as Peirce’s 1906 comments on Husserl, to the effect that Husserl had not yet, as of the time of Logical Investigations, sufficiently separated the fields of logic and psychology, closely resemble Royce’s discussion of Husserl in his 1902 presidential

address to the American Psychological Association, “Recent Logical Inquiries and their Psychological Bearing,” when Royce became the first American philosopher to comment on Husserl.°’ Toward a Transatlantic Phenomenology and a Historical Understanding of American Pragmatism in Relation to Continental Phenomenology

As the Spiegelberg-Bell and Hocking-Bell correspondence suggests, our inquiry into the relation of German and American philosophy does not

cease with Bell’s time in G6ttingen—rather, it invites us to consider still deeper relations between the phenomenological movements of two continents, and of the relation of American pragmatism and European phenomenology. Thus we may turn now to consider several aspects of Royce’s phenomenology that were likely unknown to Bell during his time

with Husserl, but which may be considered as important for understanding the relation of Roycean and Husserlian phenomenology—first, that Royce began developing what he termed “the New Phenomenology”

at an early date, between 1878 and 1880, in his hitherto unpublished “Thought Diary,” composed primarily during his first year as a professor, written soon after his own studies in Leipzig and Gottingen, two institutions which later hosted Husserl.”® Let us pause for a moment to discuss Royce’s “New Phenomenology,”

the founding document of American phenomenology, a handwritten text which has hitherto remained unpublished as a coherent whole.” Here is a document that Bell certainly could not have known about, but it shows the development of an idea in Royce’s thought whose later developments brought Royce to the attention of Husserl. In the “Thought Diary,” Royce, after studying the phenomenology of German Roman-

ticism, became convinced that philosophy, when it had bothered to attend to the phenomenal world, had placed phenomenology in a subsumed position, rather than at the honored place of the most universal

ORIGINATORS OF TRANSATLANTIC PHENOMENOLOGY 61

fact of consciousness. “The New Phenomenology” considered phenom-

enal consciousness as a third way between doctrines of realism and idealism, as in the phenomenon a real present given moment interacted with an ideally posited past and future. Royce, in his handwritten April 1879 notebook entry, wrote: “The New Phenomenology.” . . . Every man lives in a Present, and contemplates a Past and Future. In this consists his whole life. The Future and Past are shadows both, the Present is the only real. Yet in the contemplation of the Shadows is the Real wholly occupied; and without the Shadows this Real has for us neither life nor value-—No more universal fact of consciousness can be mentioned than this fact, which therefore deserves a more honorable place in Philosophy than has been accorded to it. For it is in view of this that all men may be said to be in some sense idealists.

Rather than attempting to show that the real was “merely” phenomenal, and subsumed to the ideal, or that the ideal was “merely” phenomenal, and subsumed to the real, Royce sought for a “New Phenomenology” focusing on the phenomenon as the conscious, intersubjective, temporal interaction between the real and the ideal, at the creative origins of life and value. And, as a result of the interaction, neither the real nor the idea could remain quite the same. First, as Royce wrote several days after his proposal for “The New Phenomenology,” the real given, the relatively passive, becomes relatively active, idealized in time: “This day may be noticed as one wherein a new experience, of emotional character, has so

entered consciousness that much result for thought may be in future expected.” A week later, Royce noted the corresponding principle, the process by which the ideal becomes, in time, real: “Yet a new phase, wherein the abstract becomes concrete.” As Royce later wrote, in a passage that Bell translates in his dissertation: “Ideas can be quite as stubborn as any particular facts, can outlast them, and often, in the end, abolish them.”

Royce saw, three weeks later, that the phenomenon, as the scene of interaction between individual and formal unities, was genuinely creative, irreducible merely to that which preceded it. As with the objective real

and the formal ideal in their phenomenal interaction, so too with the individual person and the community in their phenomenal interaction: The difficulty in the explanation of complex phenomena may be said to have its foundation herein, that the combined effect of the

62 JASON BELL individuals is more than the sum of the individuals operating. This surplus it is that makes the phenomenon in question complex rather

than compound, an organism instead of an aggregate; and this surplus is the problem for explanation.

In addition to the phenomenology of time consciousness, of individ-

ual consciousness, and of social consciousness, we find in Royce’s 1878-80 “New Phenomenology” a first-person study of the perspectival nature of appearance, and first appearances of Royce’s phenomenology of empathy—whose later developments were cited, as we have seen, by Stein in the dissertation she wrote under Husserl’s direction on the topic of Einfithlung.®'

Bell almost certainly could not have known of the earliest origins of American phenomenology contained in Royce’s unpublished 1878-80 “Thought Diary.” However, his dissertation discusses Royce’s first major book, The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, published in 1885—a text that

Royce termed, in the introduction, a “Phenomenology of the religious consciousness.” This work can at many points be traced as a development from his 1878-80 unpublished writings. Royce’s 1885 work is both a phenomenology of consciousness and of religious consciousness, focusing

largely on what might be termed a phenomenology of error, analyzing how the fact that ideas may be in error logically necessitates a move beyond epistemological idealism and to objectivist idealism. Here was a surprisingly realistic idealism, but an idealism nevertheless, for the idea can be true or false only in relation to its chosen object, and the object is only an object for the idea. Again we see a middle position between traditional subjective idealism, in which the single consciousness entirely

constitutes the object, and traditional discrete realism, in which the object is strictly independent of the idea. As object for an idea, the object is neither discretely separate from nor totally enclosed within the idea. Symbolic consciousness at once reveals

and conceals its object, as Bell’s dissertation translates from Royce’s The World and the Individual: |The] Individual Determination itself remains, so far, the principal character of the Real; and is, as an ideal, the Limit towards which we endlessly aim. ... Being is not an object that we men come near at will to finally observing, so that while we never get it wholly present in our internal meanings, we can come as near as we like to telling all that it is. But the Real, as our judgments and empirical investigations seek it,

ORIGINATORS OF TRANSATLANTIC PHENOMENOLOGY 63

is that determinate object which all our ideas and experiences try to decide upon, and to bring within the range of our internal meanings; while, by the very nature of our fragmentary hypotheses and of our particular experiences, it always lies Beyond.”

On these grounds, Royce opposed his phenomenology both to discrete realism, since ideas can enter into transformative relation to the real, and to strictly epistemological idealism, on the grounds that truth and error cannot logically consist solely of the agreement or disagreement of ideas,

without reference to the objects that the ideas intend, and for this truth relationship to occur, the ideal and real component are both needed. And in this sense, in which the ideal and real are alike within phenomenal consciousness, Royce finds that the phenomenon is far more widely distributed than the Kantian or Hegelian phenomenology, which took

the phenomenon to be applicable only within the sphere of human reason. The phenomenon is not a mere fact for us, but a deeper fact of the world, as Bell translates from Royce’s The Philosophy of Loyalty: I can only define my real world by conceiving it in terms of experience. ... For what I mean by a fact is something that somebody finds. Even a merely possible fact is something only in so far as somebody actually could find it. And the sense in which it 7s an actual fact that somebody could find in his experience a determinate fact, is a sense which again can only be defined in terms of a concrete, living, and not merely possible experience, and in terms of some will or purpose expressed in a conscious life. Even possible facts, then, are really possible only in so far as something is actually experienced, or is found by somebody. .. . In all my common sense, then, in all my science, in all my social life, I am trying to discover what the universal conscious life which constitutes the world contains as its contents, and views as

its own. Whether we choose to date the origins of Royce’s phenomenology from the unpublished “The New Phenomenology” of 1878 to 1880 or Royce’s published “Phenomenology of the Religious Consciousness” of 1885, we will have placed the onset of Royce’s phenomenology decades prior to what Spiegelberg took to be the origins of American phenomenology, which he argued in The Phenomenological Movement only began with C. S. Peirce’s use of the term in 1902—a date which forbade, for Spiegelberg (among other reasons, as he argued), efforts to find formative mutual relations between American and German phenomenology.™

64 JASON BELL Yet, while Spiegelberg knew of Husserl’s interest in Royce, as is indicated in his publication The Phenomenological Movement, which for decades

served as the only published historical analysis of Husserl’s study of Royce, he was unaware of Royce’s pioneering writings in phenomenology, and unaware of Husserl’s interest in Royce as a phenomenologist—two

facts which make a profound difference in interpreting the HusserlRoyce relation, and, indeed, the relation between phenomenological and pragmatic philosophy. In addition to the fact that Bell did not report on the term “phenomenology” itself as used by Royce, his dissertation also does not indicate that he was aware of Royce’s growing influence on the European continent. While Bell was aware that from 1898 to 1900, Royce presented the pres-

tigious Gifford Lectures in Scotland, which largely focused on the “phenomenal Self of the inner life,”®’ he did not seem to be aware that, several years prior to Bell’s arrival in Germany, Royce was the only Englishlanguage philosopher to present a plenary lecture at the World Congress of Philosophy in 1908 at Heidelberg, in the honored position as first speaker, after the president of the Congress, Wilhelm Windelband (a person known to both Royce and Husserl), spoke words of introduction.

In his Heidelberg address, “The Problem of Truth in Light of Recent Discussion,” Royce, in the midst of a very heated argument at the Congress

between the emergent American pragmatism versus the established Kantian idealism,°° offered phenomenology as a reconciliatory position, arguing that the “individual phenomena’ is linked, by the creative activities of the individual consciousness, in a world of intersubjective experience, subject to absolute conditions. Here Royce used phenomenology to make place for both pragmatism’s a posteriori and idealism’s a priori, for both the will to truth and the universal intellectual conditions of truth: The meaningful conscious phenomenon contains at once both aspects. Further, Royce’s Heidelberg lecture pointed to the study of the phe-

nomenon as an emergent but still-incomplete Kantian movement— while Kant had the insight as to the importance of the phenomenal in regard to our special form of consciousness, new research in logic, particularly semiotics, pointed beyond Kant’s insights in this regard, to a broader world of consciousness in which the ding an sich was for knowledge, rather than unknowable. Royce’s argument in his 1908 Heidelberg lecture was thus a further development of what he had termed, in 1879, the “New Phenomenology,” as the phenomenon moved from being a

ORIGINATORS OF TRANSATLANTIC PHENOMENOLOGY 65

subservient means to some other end or in a strictly conscribed position, a place it had long held in the philosophical tradition, to a central place of honor. A third fact that was likely unknown to Bell, and likely unknown to Royce and Husserl as well, is that Royce and Husserl shared significant educational influences in common, including Fichte, Kant, Windelband,

Lotze, Peirce, and James—and they were both in the 1870s actually students of the founding psychologist Wilhelm Wundt at Leipzig (so too, in 1910-11, was Bell, just prior to arriving in Gottingen).°’ Sharing this

sroup of common influences who pioneered research on the practical bearings of knowledge, and who shared an appreciation of psychology that nevertheless forbade the psychologizing of logic, here is another reason why Husserl’s and Royce’s work may have sounded mutually agreeable, such that Royce became interested in Husserl’s thought, and Husserl in Royce’s thought, long before most of their Continental compatriots. Further, Royce and Husserl both were also scholarly residents in

the philosophy department at Gottingen, where Lotze’s presence was strongly felt—Royce personally studied with Lotze there as a graduate student in the 1870s; and Husserl lectured on Lotze there in 1912; and at

Harvard, Royce convinced Santayana to change his dissertation topic from Schopenhauer to Lotze; and both make important references to Lotze in their published and unpublished work. Next, Bell was quite likely unaware of the origins of Husserl’s interest

in Royce. In the text that remained for decades the only published historical account of the Royce-Husserl relation, Spiegelberg reports Bell’s belief that it was he, Bell, who introduced Husserl to Royce’s thought circa 1911. Yet, five decades after Bell commenced the dissertation, and soon after the publication of Spiegelberg’s text, Bell came to realize that Husserl had likely been aware of Royce’s thought nearly a

decade prior to Bell’s arrival in G6ttingen. While the difference of a decade might seem at first glance like a small difference, the chronology in fact makes a great difference to the possibility of establishing the presence of dialogue between the modern English language and German lan-

suage phenomenological movements nearer their origins, rather than late in their respective development. Let us then pause to examine Bell’s shift in historical interpretation with an analysis of Bell’s correspondence

in the 1950s with Spiegelberg and Hocking, beginning with the BellSpiegelberg correspondence in support of Spiegelberg’s research for

66 JASON BELL his book The Phenomenological Movement. In these letters, Spiegelberg

immediately recognized the theoretical and historical significance of Bell’s report of Husserl’s interest in Royce:

The most important part of your letter was the one dealing with Husserl’s attitude toward Royce. So he actually expressed interest in the American idealists, became interested in Royce through you, even was in contact with his works and defended him against you. I can well see that in those days of his fast-growing transcendental idealism this was water on his reversed mills, especially after his disappointment

over James. Spiegelberg here makes an important theoretical point. But a historical error enters when The Phenomenological Movement cites the following letter from Bell:

I can say with considerable confidence that Husserl [in 1911] knew nothing of Royce. He knew something of William James... I had an idea of quite a different topic for my dissertation. But when I went to be formally accepted by Husserl to work under him for a degree (in the Fall of 1911) I found that he had his heart set on my doing, instead of what I wanted, an analysis (“Auseinandersetzung” ) from

[a] phenomenological point of view with a dominant American direction (“Richtung”) in philosophy. [Husserl] said, in effect, something like this: “There seems to be some doctrine known as ‘Idealism’ which is dominant (‘herrschend’) there. William James’s philosophical ideas seem to have developed as a hostile reaction to that—but of course from entirely the wrong angle. I know nothing about the actual teachings of the ‘Idealism’ or its leading representa-

tives. But could you not take up one or more of those in the way I would have in mind?” When I began to say something about the subject, and mentioned Royce’s name, he, as I recall it, recognized it

as one he had heard of as the leading figure in that American ‘Idealism’, and began asking me about Royce. Having sat under Royce at Harvard a couple of years earlier I was able to talk more or less enlighteningly on his name. Husserl asked to see some of his works. ... I had some of Royce’s books in Germany with me, and ordered the others, and was able to take Husserl, before long, the whole imposing heap of Royce’s publications. Husserl then would have nothing else than that I should do my Doktorarbeit on Josiah Royce.”

ORIGINATORS OF TRANSATLANTIC PHENOMENOLOGY 67

Here is a wonderful portrait of Husserl’s mind-set in the time surrounding the major period of his composition of the Ideen, showing the founder of German phenomenology taking an interest in the founder of American phenomenology, Royce. More than an idle interest, Husserl would “have nothing else” than a Doktorarbeit on Royce. From this passage, we learn that Husserl swayed Bell from his intended topic to write

on Royce’s relevance to phenomenology; that he had an interest in American idealism in connection with the pragmatism-idealism debate; that Husserl had an interest in taking Royce’s side against James’s in this debate; and, perhaps most significantly, that Husserl already knew— from somewhere—of Royce’s name. While Bell’s published report is revelatory in its details about Husserl’s eagerness to learn more of Royce, it is difficult to reconcile two of his ideas: on the one side, that Husserl “knew nothing of Royce” prior to Bell’s work; on the other side, that Husserl recognized not only Royce’s name but also the major direction and dialectic of his thought, and that Husserl was sufficiently motivated in his interest that he would have “nothing else” than a dissertation on Royce. The problem is intensified when we read Bell’s 1962

letter to Hocking, where he reports that in the crucial meeting between advisor and advisee on a dissertation topic, that Husserl “pounced on” Royce’s name, “obviously as an impressive one.”’? Surely Husserl must have had some earlier experience of Royce’s philosophy. But where? In subsequent years, Bell realized that his report to Spiegelberg likely misdated the origins of Husserl’s knowledge of Royce. Unfortunately, however, this information was not reported to Spiegelberg, but only to Hocking

in private correspondence, and so the historical record has remained unchanged. After The Phenomenological Movement appeared in print, Bell read an article that Hocking sent him, “From the Early Days of the “Logische

Untersuchungen,” which described Hocking’s time with Husserl in G6ttingen in 1902. In this article Hocking writes that, while reading Husserl’s

Logische Untersuchungen with Husserl in Géttingen, he was “reminded... at once of Royce’s doctrine of the Real as ‘fulfillment of a purpose.’. .. The distinctions between Royce and Husserl were not slow in making themselves felt.”’* Following Hocking’s clue, Bell wrote to Hocking, in 1962: Professor Spiegelberg had some correspondence with me while he was

writing his book on “The Phenomenological Movement,” and has quoted part of one of my letters. In that letter I told him how Husserl

68 JASON BELL had set his mind on my doing an “Auseinandersetzung” with a dominant strain in American philosophy for my doctoral thesis; and how, when I began to mention names and came to Royce’s, he pounced on it as one he had heard of, obviously as an impressive one. After reading your paper I should infer that it had probably been from you, ten years earlier, that he had become familiar with Royce’s name.”

Bell’s inference here is almost certainly correct. This allows an important chronological correction to the historical record, and one that alters

more than just a single date. It means that Royce’s phenomenology was present to Husserl both during the early development of Husserl’s phenomenology in 1902, prior to the origins of what may be termed a “phenomenological movement,” by way of Hocking, and at its full flowering as a movement, at the composition and publication of the Ideen, by way of Bell. The year 1902 likewise marked the onset of Royce’s public discussions of Husserl and Peirce’s first noted interest in phenomenology as well, showing that there was a crucial dialogue between the central founders of American and German phenomenology near the origins of

these movements, even as there is no indication yet that Royce and Husserl actually met (we do not know, for instance, whether Husserl attended the 1908 Heidelberg gathering at which Royce presented his

lecture). Thus, while Bell’s dissertation, forthcoming in Husserliana as the first

dissertation by a student of Husserl published in this series, cannot alone provide the full context of the Royce-Husserl relation, it gives us a crucial first clue that drives us to seek for other clues. We may begin to seek to unify in a single vision the diverse narratives that have until now been left unconnected—theoretical similarities between European and North American phenomenology, Royce’s study of Husserl, Husserl’s

study of Royce, and the robust Harvard-G6ttingen and HarvardFreiburg philosophy exchanges during the “Golden Age” of American philosophy and German phenomenology. Each by itself is a curious fact. Considered together, however, they give us compelling reasons to bring German and North American phenomenology into robust dialogue— and, further, to confidently set about creating dialogue between the phenomenological side of Harvard pragmatism, and the pragmatic side of Géttingen phenomenology.

FIVE

LOYALTY, FRIENDSHIP, AND TRUTH The Influence of Aristotle on the Philosophy of Josiah Royce Mathew A. Foust and Melissa Shew

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hile scholarly attention has been paid to the influence of German

W idealism on the thought of Josiah Royce, few scholars have

examined the relationship between Royce and Greek philosophy. When sustained attention has been given to this relationship, the focus has been on connections between Plato and Royce.! It is undeniable, however, that Royce also engaged the thought of Aristotle throughout his philosophical career.” In fact, some of his earliest writings, from his undergraduate days at the University of California at Berkeley, attest to Royce’s interest in Aristotle. “The Aim of Poetry” (1875) and “The Life-Harmony” (1875) are

short essays, each published in the Overland Monthly, in which Royce takes up Aristotle’s aesthetics, drawing explicitly from On Poetics.’ Also, in his graduate school days at Johns Hopkins University, Royce belonged to a club in which members met to discuss the art of the novel. As detailed

by John Clendenning, author of the definitive biography of Royce, “An outgrowth of one of [Charles D’Urban] Morris’s classes, the group first met in the evening to discuss Aristotle’s ethics.”* As will be seen, Royce’s preoccupation with Aristotle’s aesthetics and ethics continues 1 69 $

/O MATHEW A. FOUST AND MELISSA SHEW

well beyond the time of his formal studies. These and other aspects of Aristotle’s thought remain in Royce’s focus throughout his career, contributing along with other influences to shaping his own original thought. Here, we discuss Aristotle’s influence upon Royce’s philosophy of loyalty. The first section, “The Metaphysics of Loyalty in Aristotle and Royce,”

considers Aristotle’s influence on Royce’s thinking about truth and reality, ultimately taking shape in Royce’s metaphysics of loyalty, which we take to be the foundation of Royce’s ethical philosophy. The relationships conceived by Royce among loyalty, truth, and reality bear the imprint of Aristotelian philosophy as conceived by Aristotle in his Metaphysics. We substantiate these claims by examining Aristotle’s text along with several of Royce’s. We focus primarily on The Philosophy of Loyalty (1908) but also

consider several pertinent unpublished or otherwise obscure lectures and essays. The second section, “The Ethics of Loyalty in Aristotle and Royce,” considers Aristotle’s influence on Royce’s thinking about friendship, ultimately taking shape in Royce’s ethics of loyalty. Here we argue that an Aristotelian influence may be found considering Royce’s notion of loyalty

in conjunction with Aristotle’s notion of friendship (philia) in the Nicomachean Ethics. To see how, we examine the nature of friendship and possibility in Aristotle in addition to Royce’s thought in The Philosophy of Loyalty and William James and Other Essays on the Philosophy of Life (1911).

The third section, “The Metaphysics and Ethics of Community in Aristotle and Royce,” considers the culmination of the Aristotelian influence upon Royce’s thought, in the form of his philosophy of community. We are here suided by later texts in Royce’s career. Of those Royce saw published in his lifetime, The Problem of Christianity (1913) is the text upon which we focus most closely; however, the lecture notes for his 1915-16 Extension Course

on Ethics prove at least as useful in shedding light on the Aristotelian influence upon this area of Royce’s thought. The Metaphysics of Loyalty in Aristotle and Royce

Chapter 1 of Book II of Aristotle’s Metaphysics begins with the claim that

the beholding of truth is both difficult and easy. “A sign of this is that, while no one happens to be capable of it in an adequate way, neither does anyone miss it, but each one says something about nature [phiisis].” Not

only does each say something about nature, but “one by one they add little to it,” and “from all of them put together something comes into

LOYALTY, FRIENDSHIP, AND TRUTH J1 being with a certain stature.”° In short, none of us is able to entirely know

or understand the whole of everything, but each of us does know or understand it partially, and in addition to this, each of us 1s a part of, and contributes to, the being (and thus, what might be beheld as truth) of that reality. Aristotle continues: “And it is right to feel gratitude not only to those whose opinions one shares, but even to those whose pronouncements were more superficial, for they too contributed something, since before us they exercised an energetic habit of thinking.”° In other words, Aristotle encourages interrogation of previous thinkers’ ideas, for those ideas help shape his and our own. As Aristotle instructs, “we have inherited certain opinions from certain people, but others have been responsible for bringing them about.”” And what precedes our own thinking is itself a matter for philosophical investigation, given that we are each part of, and contributors to, reality. For this reason, Aristotle concludes this section by saying, “what each thing has of being, that too it has of truth.”® For Aristotle, truth pertains to our own individual contributions to it while simultaneously denoting something beyond our individual capacities: “Therefore also,” Aristotle says, “what is responsible for the being-true of derivative things is more true than they are. For this reason the sources of the things that always are must be true in the highest sense.”’ Here we can note the twofold nature of truth in Aristotle: On one hand, each of us, insofar as we are individual beings, contributes to truth as such. On the other hand, the nature of truth is such that it surpasses any of our own individuated capacities to grasp the whole of it. An example of this idea in Aristotle’s own thinking occurs near the beginning of the Metaphysics,'° where Aristotle provides a lengthy discussion of the pre-Socratics regarding both their contributions to philosophy and their philosophical shortcomings. As Aristotle says in this discussion,

the earliest philosophers support materialist causes of nature (Thales, in saying that the source of all is water; Anaximenes and Diogenes in deeming the source to be air; Hippaeus and Heraclitus in submitting fire; and Anaxagoras in suggesting indefinite materiality [apeiron] ). What they do well, according to Aristotle, is address the nature of causes in the

universe in the first place. But they err because a materialist account of the universe cannot account for change.'' Thus, these philosophers’ successors improve upon a purely mechanistic account of nature by introducing the importance of intellect or mind (nots) in contemplating the sources and causes of what is (Hesiod, in locating the cause of all as

J2 MATHEW A. FOUST AND MELISSA SHEW love and chaos, but mainly love; Empedocles, in saying that the source of all is friendship and strife among elements; Leucippus and Democritus, who emphasize an impure materiality in their ideas about atoms and the

void by stressing the shape, order, and position of things; and the Pythagoreans, who deem the source of all to be number). Aristotle continues in this manner through Plato (who, in Aristotle’s view, correctly

attributes a manifold sense of cause to the discussion of nature and being),’* pointing out what is sufficient and deficient from his predecessors so that “we might understand from these people both what they set down as causes, and how they fall in with the kinds of causes described.” As Royce attends to the history of philosophy before him, so too does Aristotle, for as we have anticipated, the truth of what is has its social aspect to which rigorous thinking contributes." Royce refers to Aristotle as a “profound lover of nature,” and familiar-

ity with Aristotelian philosophy easily demonstrates this point. But of interest next is the way in which this Aristotelian love is found in Royce’s own philosophy, both in terms of his caution against wholly nonphilosophical scientific worldviews and the ways that Royce’s own thinking demonstrates a profound endorsement of Aristotelian vitalism.'? To the first point, in an unpublished manuscript, “Nature in Modern Philosophy” (1910), Royce urges caution when one purports to advance scientific knowledge at the peril of understanding nature itself. Royce says, “[O]ur growth in the scientific knowledge of nature leaves us still in a position in which we are not much beyond those crude speculations of the Greeks” regarding what nature is.'° Moreover, Royce warns, “the vast advances of our natural sciences do not, of themselves, suffice to answer those questions about what really lies at the basis of nature which were present to [people’s] minds at the very origin of philosophy.” Royce continues: Do not think then of our relation to the Greek philosophy of nature merely in this way, viz., that the Greeks were crude while the natural sciences have taught us what the natural world is. No, the sciences have taught us a vast mass of truths regarding how nature behaves and

appears. But they have only taught us more and more how ignorant we are as to what is behind all this and no advance in mere observation and experiment serves to tell us what the ultimate essence of natural things is. If our modern philosophy has advanced beyond Greek philosophy in the direction of enabling us to treat in new ways

LOYALTY, FRIENDSHIP, AND TRUTH 73 those questions about the real meaning of the natural world which the Greeks asked, then the advance must have depended, at least in part, upon considerations which belong to philosophy proper, and not merely to the results of the observations and experiments of our special sciences. And, on the other hand, our vast advance in the natural sciences is not, by itself, any sufficient measure of the extent to which we have advanced, if indeed we have advanced at all, towards a knowledge of what Heraclitus, and Empedocles, and Plato, and Aristotle and the Stoics wanted to find out about the natural world.'”

In other words, according to Royce, for all of its successes in detailing

the appearance of nature, modern science nonetheless fails to answer original Greek philosophical questions regarding nature itself. For Royce, Greek philosophy—and Aristotle in particular, as we shall see—combats a nonphilosophical materialistic worldview not unlike the seventeenthcentury mechanical worldview that inaugurates modern philosophy. To this end, the groundwork for Royce’s own philosophy and rejection of a purely mechanical worldview can be seen as indebted to these notes on the Greek philosophy of nature. Royce concludes, “[a]t the culmination of Greek thought, both Plato and Aristotle turned vigorously away from

materialism, made light of its arguments, and conceived of nature in a way that treated the moral world, the world of ideals and values, as the truly real world of which nature is either a manifestation, or else such an imitation that whatever is good and abiding and genuine about natural things gets all its intelligible characters from a sort of participation in the world of purposes, of ideal models, and of significant truths.” As Royce says, ~[t]he result in a word is this: Greek philosophy tries on the whole to unify the natural and the moral world, and to conceive of nature as in the main purposeful, significant.”'® Royce’s conception of a Greek philosophy of nature does entail a teleological conception of nature, but more important, nature’s purposiveness is not located beyond or outside

of itself. This purposiveness is instead a sophisticated and creative vitalism that bears significant truth about nature and begins to satisfy a philosophical (in contrast to a scientific) understanding of it. However, this understanding cannot sever metaphysics from ethics entirely; rather,

as our essay aims to demonstrate, Aristotle’s influence is seen upon Royce’s own thinking insofar as for Royce metaphysics and ethics are not of two separate worlds. Instead, they are two aspects of one world,

74 MATHEW A. FOUST AND MELISSA SHEW considered in different respects—a point that receives further treatment in the third section of this essay. An examination of Royce’s 1914 essay, “The Mechanical, Historical, and the Statistical,” contains explicit engagement with Aristotle concerning the downfalls of materialist and mechanical philosophizing about nature that help to enhance his dedication to Aristotle regarding metaphysical aspects of his philosophy. This essay, first delivered to a group of “scientific men” and subsequently published in Science, revisits the nature

of scientific inquiry from a philosophical perspective. In order to do so, Royce considers himself a “travelling agent” among different branches of scientific inquiry in the interest of pursuing comparative studies in science.’” He starts his discussion by detailing how Aristotle in his own time responded to materialism and a naive vitalism, which is like the landscape of scientific inquiry in Royce’s own day. In fact, Royce concludes this essay by offering cautionary words to scientists regarding what can be

known about nature when relying too heavily on a mechanistic view of nature, and he does so in a way that recalls what a mature position, like Aristotle's, might offer science. According to Royce, unsophisticated discussions about Greek vitalism tend to miss an important point—namely, that mature vitalistic positions, like Aristotle’s, understand nature to be purposive in a way that requires neither consciousness of nature’s own plan from nature’s perspective nor

utter reliance on an unnatural will to direct nature’s movements. As Royce says, “[t]he Greek vitalists well knew that nature, however wise she seems to be, does not show signs of deliberating like an architect before he builds a house, or of piecing together her works as a carpenter devises

a chest or a bed. For the Greek vitalist, and, in particular, for Aristotle, nature fashions, but not as a human mechanic fashions—piecemeal and by trial and error.””’ For Royce, this point is not only crucial to understanding Aristotle, but also to understanding the philosophy of Royce’s own day. Consider Royce’s following remark: “For even our human art is, as Aristotle remarks, partly guided by a skill which is not conscious and is not deliberate. That which, in recent years, Bergson has called élan vital—the creative vital power, was well known, in their own way, to the Greeks.””! Two points stand out: First, Royce corrects interpretations of Aristotle that would have Aristotle subordinate all activity, both human and natural, to a supreme will or deliberative consciousness. Second, Royce fixes our attention to the creative activity at the heart of Aristotelian

LOYALTY, FRIENDSHIP, AND TRUTH 75 natural philosophy as it connects with philosophers in his own time. As Royce also says, “[t]he designs which nature expresses are therefore for Greek vitalism not the conscious designs of anybody—either God or man. They are the creative tendencies which embody themselves in the material world.”** These tendencies hold for Royce as they do for Aristotle

and can be explained through Royce’s thoughts about the science of his day, which we next consider. Royce’s comments about Aristotle inform his own endorsement of a scientific position deemed “statistical.” Drawing from the vocabulary of physicist Clerk Maxwell and the philosophy of Charles Peirce, Royce concludes that the statistical method, which takes into account not just physical properties of things but also the nature of the whole that results from discrete entities (in organic bodies the same as in communities of people), is “an expression of a very positive, although only probable and approximate, knowledge, whose type all of the organic and social sciences, as well as most aspects of the inorganic sciences, illustrate.”* In fact, this statistical method is offered as a response to competing views of science from nascent Greek vitalism on the one hand and both the preSocratic and seventeenth-century mechanical reductionism on the other. This way “will show how nature may well tend to appear in certain aspects

more and more teleological, and to manifest what Greek vitalism found in nature. Whether or not the whole world is ultimately and consciously

teleological or not, this view of nature would of course be unable to decide. But it would lay stress upon the thought that what is indeed most vital about the world is that which also characterizes the highest life of the spirit, namely, the fecundity of whatever unites either electrons or souls or stars into streams or into other aggregations that, amid all chances, illustrate some tendency to orderly cooperation.” In light of these comments, we can see that not only does Royce’s own thinking demonstrate Aristotelian influence insofar as Aristotle himself takes issue with preSocratic thinkers who fail to see creativity in nature, but Royce himself endorses a view that is Aristotelian in spirit. In fact, Royce concludes this essay by saying that the statistical method will lead to a “philosophy of nature” that “will show how nature may well tend to appear in certain aspects more and more teleological, and to manifest what Greek vitalism found in nature.””? Keeping in mind that the view Royce holds is of a mature vitalism that denies purposiveness outside of nature itself, we can clearly see Aristotle’s influence on Royce’s own thinking in this essay,

76 MATHEW A. FOUST AND MELISSA SHEW from his explicit engagement with Aristotle to his cautionary words about science in his own day, which is strongly informed by Aristotle’s natural philosophy. Returning to the social aspect of truth in light of Aristotle’s dialectical

engagement with his predecessors and Royce’s approval of Aristotle’s thinking, we can now see that this conception of the relationship among persons, truth, and reality, is one that is advanced by Royce in his thinking about loyalty. “Loyalty has its metaphysical aspect,” Royce states. “It is an effort to conceive human life in an essentially superhuman way, to view our social organizations as actual personal unities of consciousness, unities wherein there exists an actual experience of that good which, in

our loyalty, we only partially apprehend. If the loyalty of the lovers is indeed well founded in fact, then they, as separate individuals, do not constitute the whole truth.””° Recalling that the goodness of a cause is not exhausted by its goodness for the individual loyal to it, but that the cause is good independent of one’s private existence, we can see how the point

made above by Aristotle concerning truth maps onto the point Royce here makes concerning loyalty. For example, the loyalty of lovers—as in any loyalty, given loyalty’s social aspect—implies a unity of consciousness of which each loyal individual is partially constitutive. As Royce explains, “Social causes, social organizations, friendships, families, countries, yes, humanity, as you see, must have the sort of unity of consciousness which

individual human persons fragmentarily get, but must have this unity upon a higher level than that of our ordinary human individuality.””’ Royce is aware that this way of speaking of loyalty might be accused of smacking of the mythical,*® but insists that to the loyal, the relationships

that he has articulated as obtaining among loyalty, truth, and reality appear entirely ordinary. While the loyal seek successes and experience joys in service of their cause, insofar as the loyal are mortal and thus finite, these successes and joys are transient and thus fragmentary. The metaphysic of loyalty is such that the experience of each individual is “bound up in a real unity with all experience—an unity which is essentially good, and in which all our ideas possess their real fulfillment and success. Such a view is true,” Royce claims, “simply because if you deny its truth you reaffirm that very truth under a new form.””’ The argument Royce is advancing echoes that of “The Possibility of Error” in The Religious Aspect of Philosophy.°° If we believe that the facts

of the world are what they are, and that reality exposes our errors and,

LOYALTY, FRIENDSHIP, AND TRUTH // indeed, renders our errors as such, we appeal to a conspectus of experience in which our experience is included. “I am in error,” explains Royce, “only in case my present ideas about the true facts of the whole world of experience are out of concord with the very meaning that I myself actively try to assign to these ideas. My ideas are in any detail false, only if the very expe-

rience to which I mean to appeal, contains in its conspectus contents which I just now imperfectly conceive.”’! Therefore, truth is possessed by the whole of experience, never by any individual constitutive of that whole. Should I claim it to be error to think this is so, I merely affirm that it is so by making appeal to the truth contained by the conspectus of experience.

What the possibility of error implies about truth and reality, the possibility of unsuccessful loyal action implies about loyalty. Just as any idea one might have may be false, any deed one performs in the name of loyalty may fail, and any cause to which one has been loyal may become, “to human vision,” a lost cause.** That a loyal deed may fail and that a cause may be lost, suggests that our experience of being loyal is bound up in a unity with all experience. Royce refers to this whole of experience as

an “eternal truth,” signaling that the whole of experience includes all temporal happenings, be they past, present, or future. So, if I am loyal, I understand my cause as partaking “of the only truth and reality that there is,” and view my life as “an effort to manifest such eternal truth, as well as I can, in a series of temporal deeds.”°’? Thus, Royce’s finished definition of loyalty: “Loyalty 1s the will to manifest, so far as 1s possible, the

Eternal, that is, the conscious and superhuman unity of life, in the form of the acts of an individual Self.”**

In the last lecture course that he delivered, Royce says, “For Aristotle, the world consists of individuals; each individual exemplifies some form or essence, or is a combination of some sort of essence with some matter, some means whereby some form is exemplified. That which goes on in the world involves a change according as now this, now that essence is exemplified. Aristotle was always conscious that he differed from Plato as to the sense in which the realm of possibilities have themselves a place in being.”*? While Aristotle “is proud of the fact that for him everything that is is individual,”°° as Royce notes, it is also true that the individual, for Aristotle as for Royce, appeals to something beyond his or her own individual ontology—that is, an individual person is loyal not just to herself, but also to her communities and the causes to which she dedicates her life.>”

78 MATHEW A. FOUST AND MELISSA SHEW The Ethics of Loyalty in Aristotle and Royce

We note that Royce recognizes the limits of loyalty; loyalty is the will to manifest the Eternal so far as 1s possible. Such is Royce’s understanding

of truth, too, and the first section of this essay indicates that Royce’s understandings of truth and loyalty are compatible with Aristotle’s understanding of truth. But what of Aristotle’s notion of loyalty? Loyalty is not explicitly discussed in Books VIII and IX of the Nicomachean Ethics, which are devoted to “friendship,”’® and we submit that Royce’s empha-

sis on the need for the loyal to manifest the Eternal so far as 1s possible

seems a reiteration of Aristotle’s thinking about the highest kind of friendship. That Aristotle dedicates two of the final books of the Ethics to friendship signifies the necessity of it in becoming good or virtuous. But, for

Aristotle, one does not just “have” friends as one might simply have dishes in one’s kitchen; rather, what it means to be a friend and to have friends requires action with the friend such that friendship emerges between two people. It is a fundamentally creative act, striking at the difference between acquisition and action, and for Aristotle, the emphasis in the Ethics is on action as it pertains to human flourishing (eudaimonia). That is, merely “having” virtue (aréte) is insufficient for being excellent or

for creatively interpreting the world; one can sleep through life while “having” aréte, and thus fail to have it at all. Furthermore, for Aristotle, friendship requires generosity. The gener-

osity of a true friend never hinges on what a person thinks she herself deserves, but pertains rather to her willingness to freely give what is possible to a friend. Aristotle speaks to the importance of this generosity in

turning from friendship to philosophy: “[I]t seems to be this way too with those who have shared in philosophy, for its worth is not measured in money and no honor could be of equal weight with it, but perhaps it is enough, as with gods and one’s parents, to give what is possible.”*? In

other words, what one recetves—be it from the gods, one’s parents, friendship, or philosophy—can never be fully repaid or returned, for the gifts are too large. Thus we must give what is possible, but what is possible is not a matter of, say, tithing accordingly; rather, what’s possible is persuasive, and ought to persuade us beyond ourselves. Put otherwise,

this possibility demands that we must give ourselves fully, without asking for our “just desserts” in return, even if our individual actions are

LOYALTY, FRIENDSHIP, AND TRUTH 79 intractably incomplete. Aristotle repeats this idea of giving what is possible throughout the end of the Ethics. For example, he says, “|F]riendship seeks after what is possible, not what is deserved” (to dynaton gar hé philia epizétei, ou to kat’ axian).”’ As the greatest of external goods,

(ta ekta),”' friends are necessary for a flourishing life.** Countering those who would say that the self-sufficient and blessed do not need friends, Aristotle here reminds us that a complete life is one that suffices not for oneself alone, but requires others in order to flourish; we come to

be in and through our relations to others. For this reason, no person alone is self-sufficient, but must thrive with others, emerging in the process to speak to what is possible.

Aristotle amplifies this point later in the Nicomachean Ethics, when he says, “[T]he complete good seems to be self-sufficient. And by the self-sufficient we mean not what suffices for oneself alone, living one’s life as a hermit, but also with parents and children and a wife, and friends and fellow citizens generally, since a human being is by nature meant for a city.”*° That is, for Aristotle, the solitary life of a hermit runs contrary

to human nature insofar as human beings belong with other human beings, in a city. Aristotle reinforces this point, saying, “And perhaps it is absurd to make the blessed person solitary, since no one would choose to have all good things by himself, for a human being is meant for a city

and is of such a nature as to live with others.”“ In other words, a true sense of self-sufficiency requires more than what suffices for oneself alone (and thus demands, e.g., friendship and a city). Self-sufficiency requires something other than our sheer will or desire to flourish; in many ways, it comes from another. Thus, when Aristotle says that it is impossible or not easy (adynaton) to act beautifully if a person is not equipped for doing so, we can take him to be speaking to basic requirements for a flourishing life, if such a thing is possible for us. External goods (ta ekta) are necessary for such a life, if there is to be any possibility of eudaimonia at all. Ta ekta simply means “outside,” or “that which stands outside,” and perhaps we can rewrite the passage as follows: In order to live a self-sufficient and choice-worthy life, and in order to work toward eudaimonzia, which itself is a kind of excessive being-at-work, we must recognize the ways we are impoverished or ill-equipped to do so on

our own; a life in solitude cannot be said to flourish. External goods, then, seem to make all the difference regarding what kind of life is possible for a person.

80 MATHEW A. FOUST AND MELISSA SHEW These things said, Aristotle’s list of what is included in ta ekta is decidedly strange, ranging from wealth and good looks to corrupt children and

dead friends, all of which either help or hinder a person’s capacity for eudaimonia. He says, [M]any things are done, as if by instruments (organon), by means of friends and wealth and political power. And those who lack certain things, such as good ancestry, good children, and good looks, disfigure their flourishing (eudaimontkos); for someone who is completely ugly in appearance, or of bad descent, or solitary and childless is not very apt to flourish, and is still less so perhaps if he were to have utterly

corrupt children or friends, or good ones who had died. So as we said, there seems to be an additional need (prosdeisthat) of this sort of prosperity, which is why some people rank good fortune (eutychia) on the same level as eudaimonia.

While this passage brings consternation to contemporary virtue ethicists who point to an imbedded elitism emergent in Aristotle’s thought,* Aristotle’s concern here is to emphasize the ways in which human life is already caught up and bound to its emergence in the world, standing one way or another in relation to all these things. To this end,

what interests Aristotle are the ways in which ta ekta contributes to a flourishing life, not what might make such a life impossible. Each of the goods listed here—insofar as they potentially contribute to eudaimonia— requires something on behalf of the person’s relationship to these goods, an attunement or receptivity to acknowledging these goods as good.

If this is true, then we can recall Aristotle who, in a discussion of friendship in Book IX of the Nicomachean Ethics, says, “those who give freely to one another for their own sake are free of complaints (for friendship in accord with aréte is of this sort), and one ought to make a return in accord with one’s choice (since this is characteristic of a friend as well as aréte).”*© But, Aristotle warns, “most people are forgetful lamnémones]|, and aim at getting something good rather than at doing good.”*” Again we can note the creative action in doing good that is required for complete friendship, according to Aristotle. Too, we might say that giving what is possible is what one can do in a certain manner of being at work, and the ways that this possibility culminates in forcing one into the open demands that we must give ourselves fully to another, without asking for our “just desserts” in return.

LOYALTY, FRIENDSHIP, AND TRUTH 81 In speaking about the nature and necessity of friendship and what it means to be loyal to it, Royce reiterates this point: But with such true loyalty your friendship becomes, at least in ideal, a new life— a life that neither of you could have alone; a life that is not the mere sum of your separate and more or less pleasant private lives;

a life that is not a mere round of separate private amusements, but that belongs to a new type of dual yet unified personality. Nor are you loyal to your friendship merely as to an abstraction. You are loyal to it as to the common better self of both of you, a self that lives its own real life. Either such a loyalty to your friendship is a belief in myths,

or else such a type of higher and unified dual personality actually possesses a reality of its own—a reality that you cannot adequately describe by reporting, as to the taker of a census, that you and your friend are two creatures, with two distinct cases of a certain sort of fondness to be noted down, and with each a separate life into which, as an incident, some such fondness enters. No; were a census of true friendship possible, the census taker should be required to report: Here are indeed two friends; but here is also the ideal and yet, in some

higher sense, real life of their united personality present—a life which belongs to neither of them alone, and which also does not exist merely as a parcel of fragments, partly in one, partly in the other of them. It is the life of their common personality. It is a new spiritual person on a higher level.*®

In short, friendship, as a form of loyal relation, cannot be exhaustively described as a sum of its individual parts, the particular friends. The loyal

bond between friends might be described as involving an emergent property, for each person may be understood as an individual friend, but at the same time, a friendship is not simply the pairing of one entity with another. While each friend values the other, this is not all that each values; each values the bond itself. Royce draws this distinction explicitly in describing the loyalty of lovers as “not merely to one another as sepa-

rate individuals, but to their love, to their union, which is something more than either of them, or even than both of them viewed as distinct individuals.”” As we have seen, according to Royce, such is the case of those who are loyal. For Royce, as for Aristotle, friendship cannot exist only in abstraction

any more than it can be satisfied through a self-centered appreciation for the friend. Rather, one is loyal to a cause that surpasses one’s solitary self.

82 MATHEW A. FOUST AND MELISSA SHEW And this loyalty to a cause requires courage and self-sacrifice. Consider what Aristotle says about courage, in one of the most beautiful passages of the Ethics: [D]eath and injuries will be painful to the courageous person, who will undergo them unwillingly, but will endure them because it is a beautiful thing, and not to do so would be a shameful thing. And to the extent that one is most excellent | mallon tén aretén| and flourishes |eudaimonesteros|, the more will one be pained at death, for to such a person living is most worthwhile, and this person will be deprived of the greatest goods [megiston agathon], and this is painful.°°

Here Aristotle points to a courageous life having its end in something other than a stingy disposition toward one’s life; the telos of courage is a kind of excellence for the sake of which a courageous person faces death, though doing so is painful.

The impression of Aristotle upon Royce’s thought concerning the simultaneous finitude and potential of loyal agents is further seen in Royce’s explicit reference of Aristotle when discussing lost causes: “In the ereat days that have passed away—in the days before the cause suffered

defeat—there was indeed tragedy; but there was glory. Legend, often truer—yes, as Aristotle said of poetry, more philosophical than history— thus reads into that past not what the lost cause literally was but what it meant to be.”*' For Aristotle, tragedy, as a remarkable instance of poetry (poiésis), speaks to that which is concurrently awesome and awful about

human life in demonstrating the full range of actions in the universe. According to Aristotle, tragedy is “an imitation [mimésis], not of human beings, but of actions [praxeos] and of life [biou].”°* For this reason, tragedy can guide one’s soul (psychagogei).°° After all, the task of the poet is to say what might come to be, not to report what has already passed. In this way, Aristotle says, poiésis is more philosophical than history, for while the historian speaks of what has merely happened, the poet speaks to what is possible, and “the possible is persuasive.”°* So, while history may recount particular instances of causes failing to be fulfilled, poetry envisions those causes in flower.°°

Friendship, or loyalty, remains one such vital possibility for both Aristotle and Royce. For Aristotle, friendship is the virtue “most necessary for our life.”°° For Royce, loyalty is “something which we all, as human beings, need,” and is “chief amongst all the moral goods of . . . life,” loyalty

LOYALTY, FRIENDSHIP, AND TRUTH 83 satisfies our cravings for purpose by providing a reason for our existence,

a way in which we are needed.’ While Aristotle supposes that “no one would choose to live without friends even if he had all the other goods,”°* for Royce, loyalty is “the finding of a harmony of the self and the world—such a harmony as alone can content any human being.””

In calling us to be loyal, and perhaps especially in the case of being loyal to a lost cause, Royce relies upon precisely the persuasiveness of possibility. “If we believe in a lost cause,” Royce indicates, “we become directly aware that we are indeed seeking a city out of sight.”°° While the city may exist out of sight, it is nonetheless a horizon to be pursued, if only to be glimpsed from our finite perspective. For both Aristotle and Royce, loyalty to truth, friendship, and as we will next see, community, lies in recognizing that despite our finite nature, both harmony between self and world and personal contentedness are possible.

The Metaphysics and Ethics of Community in Aristotle and Royce

One aspect of community that Royce continually underscores is its ontological status not as a collection, but as a whole. Putting the point succinctly—and crediting his theoretical forebears—Royce states in The Problem of Christianity, “communities, as both Plato and Aristotle already observed, have a sort of organic life of their own, so that we can compare a highly developed community, such as a state, either to the soul of a man or to a living animal. A community is not a mere collection of individuals. It is a sort of live unit, that has organs, as the body of an individual has organs.”°! This notion of the community as a cohesive, singular entity is central to much of Royce’s philosophy at the end of his career. This may be seen not only in his subsequent published works, War and Insurance (1914) and the posthumously published The Hope of the Great Community (1916), but also in notes for lecture courses taught during this period. Most explicit in revealing the Aristotelian influence upon Royce’s philosophy of loyalty, as it bears on his thought concerning community, are the lecture notes for his 1915-16 Extension Course on Ethics.© Of the opening lecture, only a fragment is extant. Fortuitously, this fragment contains the closing words of that lecture, summarizing the scope of the lectures to follow. Asserting that all problems of ethics call for the analysis of two particular problems, Royce outlines these as the

84 MATHEW A. FOUST AND MELISSA SHEW

subject of his students’ investigation: “The first question runs: What states of consciousness are most worth seeking? The second question is:

What is the place of each person in relation to his fellows; that is, for whom should he seek the highest good, for himself or for his neighbors, or how much for himself, and how much for his neighbors?” Among the texts Royce assigned toward the task of answering these

questions was Graham Wallas’s The Great Society: A Psychological Analysis. A word of clarification concerning this title is in order. Wallas notes that economists have coined the term “The Great Industry” to refer

to the economical aspect of the transformations brought on by the Industrial Revolution; “sociologists may conveniently call the whole result “The Great Society.’”® With the “practical purpose of bringing the

knowledge which has been accumulated by psychologists into touch with the actual problems of present civilised life,” Wallas aims to “deal with general social organisation, considered with special reference to the difficulties created by the formation of... the Great Society.” Summarizing Wallas’s approach, Royce notes, “Wallas, in many respects, follows Aristotle’s views about both the nature and the pursuit of happiness,” his thought involving “certain features which Aristotle emphasized in his famous treatise on Ethics—a book of which Wallas makes a great deal of use.”®° Royce’s observing the influence of Aristotle upon the thought of Wallas is significant, for Royce’s continued summary of Wallas’s thought reads uncannily as a description of his own: Happiness depends upon what Aristotle called a certain harmonious activity of the whole nature of the happy [person]. Happiness also depends in part upon social conditions. Aristotle greatly emphasized some of these. A [person] without a country, a social animal (and, as Aristotle insists, [a person] is essentially a social animal), who has no social order, no ties, no city-state in which he feels at home, a [person]

who is or has become through and through an alien, cannot, in Aristotle’s opinion, be happy.°”

Royce’s description of the Aristotelian nature of Wallas’s thought clearly matches that which he could have given of his own, as formulated and published before Wallas’s text. For example, Royce, too, holds that

happiness depends upon harmonious activity of the whole nature of the happy man. In The Philosophy of Loyalty, Royce argues that loyalty establishes selfhood in harmonizing human tendencies toward self-will

LOYALTY, FRIENDSHIP, AND TRUTH 85 and self-sacrifice, stating, “We are by nature proud, untamed, restless, insatiable in our private self-will. We are also imitative, plastic, and in bitter need of ties. We profoundly want both to rule and to be ruled.” Loyalty simultaneously accommodates these natural desires by providing us with a cause that we have freely chosen (self-will) to which we devote thoroughgoing service (self-sacrifice). Causes are, for Royce, always at least potentially social, so loyalty to a cause involves the willingness to cooperate with others in the context of a community. Such cooperation often requires self-sacrifice, but such self-sacrifice is in no way corrosive of the individual. On the contrary, the loyal individual conceives of the

cause as worthy of the burdens that come with loyal service. Loyalty achieves a harmonious balance between aspects of human nature that are, on the face of it, in conflict. That Royce highlights a similar idea in Wallas’s treatment of the Great Society, explicitly pointing out to his students its Aristotelian influence, we may interpret as indication of what Royce would recognize as an Aristotelian aspect of his philosophy of loyalty.

Also significant is Royce’s pointing to Aristotle’s insistence that a person who is not a social animal cannot be happy. In fact, because Aristotle holds that a person is a social animal [is by nature meant for a city], it would be true to say that for Aristotle, a person who is not a social

animal may be incapable of flourishing. As true as these points are for Aristotle, so too they are for Royce, who insists that humans cannot estab-

lish a meaningful sense of selfhood without forming a “plan of life,” a unity of purpose established in the choosing and loyally serving of a cause. “[T]his I certainly know,” Royce states resolutely, “if a | person] has made no choice for himself of the cause that he serves, he has not yet come to his

rational self, he has not yet found his business as a moral agent.” Supposing that one has made a choice for oneself of the cause that one will serve, one has thus come to one’s rational self and found one’s business as a moral agent (or at least a coherent plan of life that could possibly serve as one’s business as a moral agent). More important, Royce denies that one can form a plan of life in isolation from others, stating, “T, left to myself, can never find a plan of life. I have no inborn ideal naturally present within myself. By nature I simply go on crying out in a sort of chaotic self-will, according as the momentary play of desire determines.””° Once one has forged a plan of life, one begins to feel, as Royce often

puts it, “at home” in the world. Note that Royce explicitly describes

86 MATHEW A. FOUST AND MELISSA SHEW

membership of the individual in a city-state in terms of “feeling at home.” It is not surprising that Royce employs one of his favored tropes (being at home, as contrasted with being lost or wandering) to describe the Aristotelian point. For Royce, “the loyal indeed are always at home. For however they may wander or lose, they view their cause as fixed and as worthy.””’ The opposite of feeling at home is feeling

alien, or estranged. As the Extension Course in Ethics continued, Royce continually set before his students instances of “problems of estrangement,” which he hoped that students could “find a way out of” with the help of the ideas engaged in the course, finding their way “towards the reconciliations which Loyalty seeks and prizes.”’* Just as Aristotle would say that a person who has become isolated from others likely can not flourish, so would Royce. One of Royce’s most persistent laments is the existence of what he calls the “detached individual,” the estranged individual who “belongs to no community which he loves and to which he can devote himself with all his heart, and his soul, and his mind, and his strength.”” In at least one instance, Royce specifies that the individual is morally detached, holding, “The “morally detached’ individual, who has not found the community to which

to be loyal, or who, having first found that community, has lost his relation to it through an act of deliberate disloyalty, is . . . wholly unable, through any further individual deed of his own, to win or regain the true goal of life.””* Thus, to be isolated from a community

or to lack a sense of belonging with others not only diminishes the possibility of a person flourishing, but also can result in an ethically impoverished life. These ideas have roots in Aristotle. When a person lives with others, she has the chance of flourishing. Moreover, it is in communities that friendship is possible,’”? and friendship helps shape communities in turn. As Aristotle says, “[f]riendship consists in community [koin6énia].”’° This point has ethical consequences as well, for virtuous deeds can result from

the highest kind of friendship: “[T]he complete sort of friendship is that between people who are good and are alike in virtue, since they wish for good things for one another in the same way insofar as they are good, and they are good in themselves. ... [S]o the friendship of these people lasts as long as they are good, and virtue is enduring.”’’ That is, in a complete

friendship, each person takes as good the other person’s well-being, which results in loyalty to that person as well as to the bond that ties

LOYALTY, FRIENDSHIP, AND TRUTH 87 them—friendship itself. So long as friends demonstrate ethical attributes, the friendship will endure within a community. Too, Aristotle reinforces

this point by saying that “perhaps it is absurd to make the blessed person solitary, since no one would choose to have all good things by himself, for a human being is meant for a city and is of such a nature as to live with others.””* For this reason, “it is necessary for the happy person to have friends,”” for as we have seen, a good life in solitude is no good at all for Aristotle. But what of an individual friend, or person? If friends are loyal to each other in communion, how does one of the friends relate to his own life? To answer these questions, Royce again recalls Aristotelian themes about the relationship between a person and his community. Returning to the

Extension Course, Royce describes Wallas as holding, again under the influence of Aristotle, that happiness is “something that we estimate, partly in terms of our memories and of our expectations, and partly in terms which involve various sorts of idealized and often highly imaginative views and reviews of our lives and of their experiences.”*” Royce surely

must have seen in Wallas’s words an echoing of his own, expressed most explicitly in The Problem of Christianity, in which Royce describes communities as “communities of memory” and “communities of expectation” or “communities of hope,” insofar as they are bound by the common identification with some past and/or future event as a significant part of their lives: “Now when many contemporary and distinct individual selves so interpret, each his own personal life, that each says of an individual past or of a determinate future event or deed: “That belongs to my life;’ “That occurred, or will occur, to me, then these many selves may be defined as hereby constituting, in a perfectly definite and objective, but also in a highly significant, sense, a community.”*’ This thread tying Aristotle, Wallas, and Royce is particularly significant, for the difficulty with which each thinker was grappling, a difficulty that Royce wanted his students to face, is that of seeking happiness, as individuals and communities, in the midst of an increasingly complex world in which the flourishing of individuals and communities alike is subject to submersion. Conclusion

Of Aristotle, Royce says, “[no person] has come nearer . . . to the great human ideal of seeing the world for himself, on the basis of reasonable

88 MATHEW A. FOUST AND MELISSA SHEW

and systematic investigation, of seeing vast numbers of details in that world, and of yet never losing a sense of the whole connection of things, and of the whole meaning of life.”** Later in this lecture, Royce says, “[w]e all owe to such philosophers as Plato and Aristotle very much more than we are accustomed to know. We use namely their ideas and many of their terms without knowing the source whence these words and thoughts come.”®’ Of these terms and words, both technical metaphysical ideas (e.g., Aristotelian vitalism) and ethical commitments (e.g., Aristotelian ideas about friendship and community) hold particular sway in Royce’s own philosophy. Further contextualization of Royce’s Aristotelian influence within the

larger scope of Greek philosophy is found in a lecture entitled “Shop Talk’ [The Relation of the Literary Artist to Philosophy].” Here Royce states, “all that lives and grows in the world of our European inquiry, all our research, our thought, all this spirit of the free pursuit of truth—all this is in origin Greek.”** At the end of this lecture, Royce concludes with advice for those who might be inclined to philosophical thought, saying, “[t]he essential matter is to go to the sources. Do not hope to get much by reading about the great philosophers. What will most help you is to

get into touch with some of these great philosophers in some of their deepest, their most vital, their most human expressions.”® This essay has aimed to do precisely what Royce advises—to get in touch with a vital philosopher, Aristotle, and examine his imprint on Royce’s philosophy.

SIX

COMPLEX NEGATION, NECESSITY, AND LOGICAL MAGIC Randall E. Auxier

Individuals Old and New

Fk or Royce the problem of individuals took on pointed significance

after his “Conception of God Debate” with George Holmes Howison and others in 1895.' Howison argued that Royce’s absolutism left inade-

quate metaphysical space for genuine individuals, and Howison, as a radical pluralist, would have sooner given up on the unity of God than to

sacrifice even a smidgen of individuality. Obviously the connection between metaphysical and logical individuality has generally been thought to be a strong relation, and for some philosophers it has been the

sround of the concept of identity; namely, there can be no difference between logical and metaphysical individuality. Royce was taken off guard, I think, by Howison’s charge. He so strongly assumed the (relative) metaphysical independence of individuals that it had not occurred to him, perhaps, that the abstract structure of his logic could pose any threat to the status of individuals in his overall philosophy. He certainly did not believe his Absolute was a threat to individuality, but 1 89 5

90 RANDALL E. AUXIER it was hard to deny that people were making this claim and it was being believed—indeed, it still is made and still is believed. This led Royce to an

awareness that his convictions about the (relative) metaphysical independence of individuals was driven by practical experience and had not found adequate expression or clarity in his formal philosophy. Something had to be done. After the debate, Royce went seriously to work on the problem of individuals, researching its entire history. The result was a serious treatise on individuals, which became the “Supplementary Essay” to the published version of the debate in 1897. What Royce discovered was that not a great

deal had been done with the problem of individuals since the Middle Ages, and he decided that the time was ripe for a new account—logical, metaphysical, ethical, experiential, practical, and psychological. The new focus on individuals came to characterize the rest of Royce’s work as he attacked every facet of the problem. Royce believed that individuals were temporally emergent achieve-

ments of social process rather than metaphysical givens and that a description of this process of emergence, whether formal or narrative, could and should be offered at psychological, phenomenological, and metaphysical levels. Some of the phenomenological work had been done in his Religious Aspect of Philosophy, but the psychology, the metaphysics, and the logical work remained to be done as 1897 gave way to 1898. It was

at this time that Royce began to study logic with Peirce, by correspondence. Obviously the main bulk of the psychological work is contained in Outlines of Psychology, while the metaphysics is in The World and the Individual. The logic of individuals in Royce is not as well known as the

metaphysics, or even as familiar as his neglected psychology, partly because the logic is largely implicit in the metaphysics and the phenomenology. Eventually Royce would develop a new logic, but initially he was working with a post- Kantian but traditional kind of logic. Royce regarded ethics as First Philosophy and metaphysics is the clarification of ethics by the use of generalizations. Logic is the normative science of how we ought

to reason (not the empirical study of how we actually do reason, and think, which belongs to psychology). Although Royce was a creative logician, as is widely known, the relationship between his logical work and the rest of his philosophy has not been widely studied.’ I am contributing a chapter to that study here, and

I want to focus specifically on some of the implicit logical structure in

NEGATION, NECESSITY, LOGICAL MAGIC gl

Royce’s thinking. The relationship between individuals, at all levels of analysis, and negation (which is the ground of necessity for Royce) is the

key to this analysis. For Royce, individuality is born of individuation, and individuation is simultaneously a tragic and productive process. The tragedy I will discuss briefly in a moment, but the producing of individuals, which are always concrete, while individuating them more deeply at increasingly rarefied levels, allows us to treat modes of negation as complex unities, held together abstractly, that presuppose the concrete unity of the living, temporal individual. It is this relation, the complex unity of a temporally produced individual, that I will explain in this essay. To maintain a consistent idea of the concrete individual across levels of generality—from psychological experience, through practical action,

and all the way up to universal, necessary metaphysical relations— requires that our account of negation, and its product, the feeling of necessity, be equally maintained, such that for any level of individuality there will be an account of negation that produces that kind of individ-

ual. Conversely, wherever we move from one level of abstraction to

another with regard to individuals, we must be able to specify the mode of negation that accompanies (and “produces,” but not strictly in the sense of “causation”) that individual. The point is that there is no

production of individuality without negation, but it does not follow that negation causes individuals, nor does it follow that all negation produces individuals. Royce is very clear that a bare possibility may allow us to enter bare negations, but none of it has any claim on the temporal process. Felt Necessity

I will here summarize the account of negation offered in Chapters 9 through u of The Religious Aspect of Philosophy. Phenomenologically speaking, individuality emerges from the way that activity expresses perspective in attending, while attending requires selection, which is an inclusion and exclusion at the same time. The activity of selection implies that we have neglected that which might have been the focus of attention

but is not. Combining what we have selected with what we have not selected constitutes the phenomenological field of possibility, and the activity of attending creates a periphery and a center.’ Royce is very clear

92 RANDALL E. AUXIER in stating that the background or fringes of attention are not entirely lost, not entirely excluded in the act of selection. He says: the boundaries of our consciousness are crowded with unknown impressions—unknown, because not attended to; but yet in some inexplicable way a part of our consciousness, since an effort of attention serves to bring them, any one of them, clearly into mental vision. At this instant you are looking at something. Now, without moving your eyes, try, by merely attending to your visual impressions,

to say what is now in the field of vision, and where is the boundary line of the field of vision. The experiment is a little hard, because our eyes, condensed embodiments as they are of tireless curiosity, are always restless, and rebel when you try to hold them fast. But conquer them for an instant, and watch the result. As your attention roams the

artificially fixed field, you will at first, indeed, be confused by the

vagueness of all but the centre; but soon you will find, to your surprise, that there are more different impressions in the field than you at first can distinguish. One after another, many various impres-

sions will appear. But notice: you can keep your attention fixed on only a portion of the field at a time. The rest of the field is always

lost in a dim haze. You must be receiving impressions all the time from all points of the field. But all of these, except the few to which you pay attention, nearly or quite disappear in the dim thickets that seem to surround the little forest-clearing made by our attentive consciousness. A like experiment can be tried with the sense of hearing.*

Our first experience of necessity, so far as it bears on forming a philosophical theory, is not pure negation or total exclusion but rather of a kind of vague (but very real) limit to our selective powers. I cannot select

for attention the whole phenomenal field. Even Kantian determinate judgments, the more or less mechanical subsumption of particulars under universals, depend on attention and upon a concrete spontaneity that precedes (temporally) the activity of cognizing an object or an endmeans relation. In understanding, only a portion of the sensuous manifold is synthesized in the ‘I think.’” Phenomenologically, the whole manifold or field is positively available to me, as a field of possible attention, and that my first experience of “negation” (really of necessity as limitation) comes from the effort of selection. A mature person can attend with greater

perspicacity, and also more broadly, to the phenomenal field than can a child. But while no one can select the whole field, we can yet experience it.

NEGATION, NECESSITY, LOGICAL MAGIC 93

Our limitations brought to bear on the phenomenal field separate the selected portion from the temporal flow. Royce says that “recognition” and “construction” fill out and temporalize the phenomenal field, bringing to it not what is only vaguely present

but even what is entirely absent; that is, the past and the future of the selected portion of the field, which together become an “object” of attention. The selective activity of attention itself is temporal because whatever it selects becomes for it a center that may become an “object,” while what is not selected is temporally deferred in the mode of possible centers not selected (or explicitly neglected). The experience of limit that accompanies any effort to expand the center of attention toward the full phenomenal field is the primordial experience of necessity, or as I would call it, the “impossible-to-include,” which is a mode of the possible, not of the necessary. The experience of inclusion is a primordial “yes,” and it brings with it recognition and construction, the completion of the object of cognition. Thus the possible precedes the necessary, which is experienced as a “no” only as we rebound from our repeated efforts to include. Objects are not yet individuals, however. They are candidates for individuality, and we can safely rely on the principle that what cannot become for us an object will not be counted by us as an individual (even if it is an individual in the experience of a god or a superhuman being). Therefore, what Hermann Cohen, Ernst Cassirer, and others call the “objectivation” process, the effort or energy expended in making for ourselves something to cognize or to act on, conditions our practical action and thus our metaphysics and logic. There is variation, from one human being to the next, in the modalities and extent of the resulting exclusion. Indeed, by repeated effort, such as concentration or meditation, we can expand the center of attention, both temporally and spatially. The chess master, for example, not only “sees the board” in a way that the novice cannot but also sees combinations of future possibilities and remembers classic games and moves in ways that amaze us all. We are impressed by the powers of inclusion that have been won with hard effort at pressing against the limits that define both the experience and the reality of exclusion. This experience leads us to believe that our most devoted efforts are not wholly in vain.

To give another example, the highly refined proprioception and exteroception of the NFL quarterback or the powerful act of “seeing” the movements of possible receivers as against the countering movements of

94 RANDALL E. AUXIER defensive backs, lurking linebackers, and leaping linemen requires an expansion in the nexus of attention but a temporal contraction such that only very short-term constructions are applicable, while the habits of both groups of players remain latent but active as attention searches its phenomenal field. This may be contrasted with the broad and supple (and hence inclusive) range of the meditating guru, whose temporal expansion of attention renders “place” functionally irrelevant. These are among thousands of examples that might be given, but all illustrate the way that inclusion and the mode of possibility precede exclusion and the first experience of necessity, which is converted from whatever proves to be impossible for the experiencer.

For Royce, this order of possibility and impossibility, the priority of the former over the latter, has to be preserved at all levels of generalization, up to and including universal postulates. To do otherwise is to treat negation and necessity as though they preceded positive experience (the possibilities combined with the actualities), which they never do, or

at least not so far as our powers to descry our own experience may extend.” This completes the phenomenological account of negation for

our purposes. But notice that the outcome is not an individual. It is merely an object. It Is Doubtful There is a novelty item called Magic 8 Ball. This is a plastic sphere the size of a large grapefruit, made to look like a giant billiard ball. It’s filled with water and has a transparent window on it. Inside, floating in the water, is

a twenty-sided solid object with epigrams printed in a ghostly white on each of its surfaces. The idea is to ask a yes-or-no question, then turn the 8 Ball so that an answer to the question appears in the window. I haven't had a Magic 8 Ball since its inception in the 1970s, but if memory serves, I believe the answer comes to yes on over half of the twenty sides and no on about five, with the rest being vague. I also recall that one surface reads “It is decidedly so” whereas another reads something like “It is

doubtful.” Being a budding young philosopher during that time, I remember thinking in the second instance, “What the hell isn’t?” But to be honest, I quickly learned to phrase my questions so as to maximize my odds of a positive prophecy. “Does she like me?” I ask. “It is decidedly so” comes the answer. “Will we be married?” Shake, turn. “It is doubtful.”

NEGATION, NECESSITY, LOGICAL MAGIC 95 This is not a bad analogy for the process by which objects become individuals in Royce’s philosophy. Selective “activity” becomes “action” in human experience as the objects it selects, recognizes, and constructs become the patients of our “acts.” While a long story can be told about the difference between activity and action, it will suffice here to say that action concretizes fully and makes permanent the eliminations of selective attention. Action turns peripheral and vague inclusion into practical exclusion. To undertake an action is to make permanent, to become practically invested in what was once an object but is now an individual. Another example might be deciding what to order from a menu. Until the waiter is tapping his pen on the pad, inclusions and exclusions are present but not permanent. In ordering, we “act.” In that moment, what is doubtful becomes decidedly so.

The rebound of actions of this kind on our self-interpretation is the creation and accumulation of something we eventually call the “will.” The will is not originary for Royce, not a cause of any action, but an effect

of self-interpretation as applied to past action and future prospect of action. The will is the product of inclusion as it relates to past effort expended, and it is negatively defined—given its limits and boundaries— by what is practically excluded. To have willed x is actively to be responsible for having excluded y, and then (and only then) is ~x is identified with y. The identification is contingent and voluntary, but it is deeply felt. We have become invested in the equivalence of ~x and y. Once the human will begins to employ the recognized and constructed objects of our attention for the formation of plans of action, the limitation we experience in selection comes to be expressed as “doubt.” Doubt is an affliction of the will, a weakness of self-interpretation, like changing one’s order at the restaurant or asking the 8 Ball again until the answer is

satisfactory. This is not a creature belonging to the phenomenological level of experience. Attention does not suffer a hesitation in selecting and

we do not (unless we are philosophers) doubt whether our recognized and constructed objects are the genuine objects of our subsequent inter-

pretation and knowledge. It is more complicated than that. Doubt depends upon freedom at least as muchas selection depends on freedom— we need not complete the objects of attention we have before us in just

the way we have; we can alter those objects with different activities of recognition and construction and by attending to the phenomenal field

96 RANDALL E. AUXIER differently. We may ask ourselves: “Is the object upon which I plan to act, in this way rather than that way, the object I need or want?” Perhaps so,

perhaps not. Ask the 8 Ball. Ask the waiter for a recommendation. We will not know with any assurance until the action has been (irrevocably) performed. According to Royce, facing this doubt requires that we form postulates, which is not first and foremost an intellectual act. It is a volitional

task, a second order response not to an object, but to an individual, framed for the sake of dealing with the possibilities for action that have been excluded. He says: Postulates are not blind faith. Postulates are voluntary assumptions of a risk, for the sake of a higher end. Passive faith dares not face doubt. The postulate faces doubt, and says: “So long as thou canst not make thyself an absolute and certain negative, I propose to act as if thou wert worthless, although I do well see thy force.”. . . The postulate is deliberate and courageous volition.®

Postulates are second order responses to our finitude. Postulating is a deliberate act of the will that is at bottom a moral activity. Having asked “Does she love me?” and receiving from the 8 Ball “It is doubtful” calls forth something that contains but is not exhausted by the phenomenal field. We postulate: “Thou art a toy” or “Thy prognostication is false” or

some other deliberate response. We negate the negation. It counters doubt. One notes that the willed plan and the unwilled possibility converse in the mode of intimacy, the address of “Thou” (I have copied Royce’s language in my own example). This exclusion, this negation of living possibilities, is undertaken freely and in intimate awareness of the real possibilities of alternative courses of action and ways of constructing the object of attention. Unchosen (and therefore unwilled) possibilities are transformed into “might-have-beens,” irrevocably, as soon as action is taken, but they are excluded reverently, by the deliberate act of the will in the presence of doubt. There is the acknowledgement of the sacrifice in the molding of an individual. The will uses postulates to frame, to enclose a plan of action. Here the experience of necessity is a practical necessity; we cannot pursue every available course of action. Some plans we might have formed will be left undone, and thus there is risk, and with the risk comes the doubt about

NEGATION, NECESSITY, LOGICAL MAGIC 97 whether we have proceeded adeptly. Genuine doubt, as Peirce had called it, confronts genuine risk in dealing contingently, but irrevocably, with possibilities for action. To fail to confront the reality of possibilities, especially positive possibilities, as unchosen plans of action, is to act in “blind

faith,” to behave as though one had only a single available course of action to which one was inexorably compelled. It wrongly treats necessity

as the dominant mode, places it over possibility, and refuses to take responsibility for its own valuations and willing. “Blind faith is emotion, and often cowardly emotion.”’ Is it possible that extensional logic, logic

that pretends to ontological necessity, is a logic of regret and denial? I think it a reasonable conjecture, in light of the human tragedy all around us that is the outcome of our history, that Russell’s and Frege’s logic are not achievements but excuses for what we have done with our freedom, especially in light of what we might have done if we have been a bit more courageous. There is no point in pretending that negation isn’t an act of will.®

Necessity is, for Royce, and for all serious temporalists, a possibility, not vice versa. We come to be uniquely related to the whole (however it is conceived) by forming our own objects of attention and adopting

our own plans of action relative to those objects, thereby producing individuals. At every level, to be is to be uniquely related to a whole, but when the will is planning, in certain instances only one possible object will suffice, and when all others are deliberately excluded—that is, when we love that one object, uniqueness is in evidence, which carries with it an imperative that we experience as necessity. The difference between objectivation and individuation is irrevocable action, and the extreme

of action is loving the object, and hence, individuating it. Royce’s

new principle of individuation is the work of loving the object into uniqueness, forsaking all others. For the will, it always means something like “I cannot be the individual IJ am without this object”—

and of course, where the will is mature, the unique object is always another person or other persons (and here, the term “person” includes communities).’

Yet, the choice of that one object, now an individual, and the acceptance of no substitute, remains a choice, and one for which we are responsible. The ground of necessity is an unwillingness to act otherwise, even though we technically could, up until we have acted. This kind of relation may be raised to still another level, when those other irreplaceable

98 RANDALL E. AUXIER individuals—now “persons’—are united by a cause, an ideal which they serve in common, but for now the point is that the experienced necessity carries a strong feeling of negation, that none other shall be acceptable. This wholly negates other genuine possibilities by means of the maximum effort of the fully formed will. Having chosen to eat it, I cannot still have my cake, one might say, or more appropriately, having married my for-

tunes to those of another, I cannot forsake the other without in some fundamental way forsaking myself. The priority of possibility to necessity is an entirely temporal relation, with the result that necessity is derived first from neglect and then from

interpretation, followed by an act of will that temporalizes it. Formal necessity is even more abstract and still further divorced from concrete experience. Formal necessity depends on the existence of genuine individuals and is abstracted from their choices. This detachment of necessity

from actuality, and grounding necessity in choice and in the feeling of negation it brings, is the central move of all temporalist philosophies, in my view. One finds varied accounts of possibility among temporalists, but the demotion of necessity to an abstract and dependent modality is the mark of temporalist philosophies. For Royce, there is a level of general philosophical description that elaborates and explains practical life and that is sufficient to show what type of temporalism he defends. I will not go into the metaphysics of the possible and the actual here.'° It is sufficient to say that our act of postulating has temporal actuality, that what we may call “negation” (a term that now includes all the eliminations we have discussed and is productive of individuals) comes from experiences of this kind, but possibility is

an irreducible temporal modality without which there can be neither truth nor knowledge, and possibility is not reducible to or exhausted in any finite actuality. In short, we derive necessity from possibility, and the derivation is a rather long one. Where the experience of possibility is

concrete and lively, the process by which possibility becomes logical necessity is torturous and (evolutionarily) improbable. That there ever should have existed a race of beings who conceived of logical necessity is beyond being unlikely and borders on miraculous. Yet, what is actual is certainly possible, and here we are, thinking about necessity. It is certainly a kind of negation. That this is not commonly understood among philosophers is not as much a testament to the subtlety of nature as to the thickheadedness of philosophers.

NEGATION, NECESSITY, LOGICAL MAGIC 99 I do not assert either the priority of possibility or the “independence” of possibility from actuality. Rather, I point to the experiential ground of necessity in limitation and then exclusion, and move now to a consideration of logical functions of negation. Royce says: Time, to my mind, is an essential practical aspect of reality, which derives its whole meaning from the nature and life of the will. Take away from your conception of the world the idea of a being who has a will, who has a practical relation to facts, take away the idea of a being who looks before and after, who strives, seeks, hopes, pursues, records, reports, promises, accomplishes; take away, I say, every idea of such a being from your world, and whatever then remains in your conceived world gives you no right to a conception of time as any real aspect of things."’

This is a genuine individual, and it will serve as the basis for logical indi-

viduality in Royce’s thought.'* Not only does Royce make clear the scope of what he means by “the life of the will,” which is inclusive of all intentional modalities, but he also draws upon a dialectical sense of negation, which is the hypothetical operation of exclusion—take away this (hypothetically) and you are not entitled to that (hypothetically), which is the form of his argument here. Royce often uses this dialectical form. But now the discourse operates at the level of excluding concepts from an account, for thinking is itself also an intentional activity, a part of the life of the will, but it includes and excludes concepts dialectically by means of hypotheses.

The manner of generalization exemplified here, and characteristic of Royce’s thought, is excluding possible concepts and settling upon others

for the purpose of creating an account; in this case, a philosophical account, but such generalization proceeds along similar paths for scientific or historical or other types of accounts, according to different rules and for different purposes (and with different norms). How we eliminate some concepts and settle upon others is one of the uses of negation. In every case, whether historical or scientific or philosophical, we are deciding

what to think—which is also an instance of deciding what to do (since thinking is an action). Royce continues saying that “the time regions [ past, present, and future] get their distinct types of reality solely from their diverse relations to a finite will, and, for us, to our own finite will.”’? Royce

makes explicit here a generalization from the individual perspective and

100 RANDALL E. AUXIER experience to a generalized conception of “will,” although this is still not

“Will” in the sense of affirming a universal proposition about the Absolute. This will is the active will of including and excluding, not of the more abstract negating and affirming of a universal proposition. He proceeds to a demonstration of how any finite will must come to terms with past, present, and future, concluding that “in terms, then, of my attitude of will, and only in such terms, can I define time, and its regions, distinctions, and reality.”'* Having stated dialectically the practical requirements of our concept of the will, and restricting it to a concrete, temporal orientation on experience, Royce then moves to generalize his account in the direction of metaphysics, after which he asserts his general dialectical principle: Time then is, I should say, a peculiarly obvious instance of the necessity for defining the universe in idealistic terms—that is, in terms of life, of will, of conscious meaning. ... [W]e are prone to forget that it is the human will itself which defines for us all such concepts, which

abstracts them from life, and which then often bows to them as if they were indeed mere fate. If you look beneath the abstractions, you find that time is in essence the form of the finite will, and that when I acknowledge one universal world time, I do so only by extending the conception of the will to the whole world."

Royce’s philosophy as a whole, his voluntarism and the produced and productive nature of temporal will, especially with respect to the feeling of necessity, is in this passage. Here he indicates the dialectical sense of necessity, which is useful and practical, and rejects of the overarching necessity associated with “fate,” which treats the produced concept as though it were the necessary ground of the temporal process. In short, Royce rejects what James calls the philosopher’s fallacy of substituting abstractions for real experience and reversing the commonsense order of their authority. The general dialectical principle is not a universal proposition, at this point, but is a creation of the finite will, asserting “one universal world time,” or what he elsewhere calls a “world of truth,” a world shared by all finite wills. If, subsequently, there is to be a concept of an Infinite Will,

we also have to conceive of it in temporal terms, at least insofar as the concept was formed by a temporal process. The basis of universals lies in an act of acknowledging the reality of a universal world time—by which

NEGATION, NECESSITY, LOGICAL MAGIC 101

Royce means a shared past, a shared present, and a shared future, in which my deeds have the effect of individuating me. Then and only then do I extend (generalize) my conception of the will to the whole world.

Such extension is a matter of acknowledging what I am not, that is, the extension of my will to the universal world time originates from my finitude, which is a third order negation. What is not me come first, then what is me, and then what I am not. This is the dialectical and temporal process by which my phenomenological experience of vague nonselection becomes a metaphysical principle of negation. The formation of the finite will, of which time is the form, is the middle term, so to speak, in the creative process. For Royce, without will there would be no “negation,” in any useful sense. Logic of Action

To affirm the primacy of the phenomenological experience of selection and neglect, and to hold fast to this experience as the ground of negation, is the basis for what I have called “the intentional stance” in Royce’s philosophy.’° Examining his logic requires that we bear in mind that logical reasoning is intentional, voluntary, and has a living, temporal character. The process that leads to negation involves real loss, genuine exclusion of

courses of action—and thinking itself is a course of action. Action requires decision and decision requires not only that a path be followed in our thought, but that genuinely available paths be forsaken. But the latter remain active in our thinking process as negations. In short, logical negations are temporal, produced dialectically, and voluntary (at least in the sense that they are not intelligible without reference to the will). Should I generalize everything I understand and can understand about time in such a way as to avoid the result that the world will has as its form our common time? To do so is to negate the intentional stance itself, to

use the will to negate its own form. Most logicians have assumed or actively believed that the whole point of logic was to escape this temporal order. In time we do not know what is lost by our acts of neglect, exclusion, or logical negation. So traditional logic sought to (or pretended to)

overcome that catastrophic ignorance (of what might have been but is not) by generalizing over it and treating the genuine options in our past experience that were negated as if they never existed at all and as if there were nothing to know about them. For Royce, that approach is

102 RANDALL E. AUXIER self-defeating. One might succeed in reasoning clearly about such matters, but no course of action would be indicated by this kind of abstract reasoning, since nothing that could be an object of cognition was forsaken. The hidden cost of this view is that no genuine necessity attaches to what is known, since the ground of negation is given no active role in determining what is cognized. In short, traditional logic, nontemporal and nonvoluntary, deals only in what Royce calls “bare possibilities,” and no good logic can arise from such trade. Only the intentional stance provides us with the means of generalization that take us to the point of abstraction that we can do any meaningful logic. Why follow the path of will, and its structure, up to the very brink of

a metaphysical concept and then suddenly drop it? This is what many interpreters have accused Royce of doing, but it is incorrect, no matter how often it is repeated by those who have not taken the time to understand Royce’s temporalism in relation to his habits of thinking. When generalizing we must include the ground of our generalization unless we wish

to lose our bearings and our very reason. If time is the form of the finite will, and the dialectical account carries dialectical necessity, why would anyone who believes that frame a universal proposition about the world which is ungrounded in the same type of necessity? And why would any such thinker refuse to acknowledge that the most abstract sense of necessity, logical necessity, is derivative of dialectical necessity and its temporal presuppositions? To assert that there is a world, but that it has no will is to deny that it is a temporal world in any sense we can genuinely understand.

But what is perhaps of the greatest importance in the passage from “Immortality” above, and its analysis, is the way it illustrates the principle of continuity in Royce’s thought. The first maxim we can extract from this movement of generalization from psychological and empirical, to practical, to dialectical, to logical, is that one should retain, as a norm in philosophizing, a continuity of meaning through the process of generalizing. Call this the Maxim of Meaning.’” According to this way of framing a starting place to interpret Royce’s logic, the forms of thinking (relations of possibility and many derivative modes of necessity) are refined, from selection,

to valuing, to choosing, to excluding objects, to excluding concepts, to deducing logical consequences, all with an idea to preserving their “conscious meaning.” The Maxim of Meaning leads to the principle of the intentional stance, and this is how I read the passage above and I hold it to be wholly consistent with everything Royce ever wrote.

NEGATION, NECESSITY, LOGICAL MAGIC 103 A second maxim is negative: One should not take the derivative results of a generalization process to be the ontological or necessary ground of a lower stage of generalization. This is just a way of avoiding what James called the “philosopher’s fallacy,” and what Whitehead called “misplaced

concreteness.” The abstraction is not the explanation or the ground of the concrete experience from which it arises. And because, in this instance, we seek to grasp the sense in which experienced time, in the dialectically generalized sense, is continuous with the experience of time for the nonfinite will, we are given only one option, according to Royce, for its proper

(in the normative sense) generalization: the employment of the intentional stance, or “extending the conception of the will to the whole world.” Thus, the principle of the World Will is arrived at by combining the first

maxim with the second. If will (1.e., time and desire) is the basis of our activity of reasoning, then the preservation of conscious meaning both requires that the will should be positively found at every stage, while the

second maxim prohibits us from excluding the will at any stage on pain of being guilty of substituting vicious abstractions for real (and normative) processes. We see here a crucial case of generalization constrained by varying levels of ever-tightening necessity, the type of tightening that eventually produces our ideas about logical necessity. As we move away from phe-

nomenological attention, through practical action, into the action of thinking, the maxims converge and constrain our thinking into ever more formal exclusions and inclusions. It follows that: If we would conceive of time as meaningful and continuous at all, as something shared, we must generalize it as the form of the will. To do otherwise leaves us without a ground, in Royce’s view. Now that we have grasped this movement of generalization in thought, with regard to the proper generalization of time, other continuities will appear. In particular, “activity” (phenomenological and physiological/ psychological), “action” (practical and ethical), and “actuality” (logical and metaphysical) form a continuous chain of generalization of the experience of the “act.” The act is the generic term for the way positive possibilities in embodied experience become possible actions, and possible actions

become plans, and eventually, plans can become “purposes,” when undertaken socially by individuals capable of love (and at the highest level “loving the world”). These are further continuities that arise from the proper generalization of our temporal experience.

104 RANDALL E. AUXIER Types of Negation

My purpose in the foregoing sections was to explain in summary fashion the process by which logical reason arises and the sense in which is has a normative claim on both our actions and our purposes. Far more can be said about actions and purposes, and I refer readers to my longer treatment of those subjects in Time, Will, and Purpose. My summary here has been undertaken with a special eye to the production of “individuals” in

experience that can be treated as logical individuals without reducing these individuals to ungrounded abstractions. An individual, for Royce, isa what anda that simultaneously, a being uniquely related to the Whole."®

We must avoid at all costs reducing individuals either to their external meaning as a that, or their internal meaning as a what. Uniqueness, which is to say, individuality (including but not limited to its logical character), is a productive relation of whole and part. Thus, readers should keep in mind that, for Royce, retaining the living, interpreting and interpreted individual, and noting how it rises through

levels of generality, is crucial for good reasoning. Individuals, both as experienced and as conceived, do not explain or justify a metaphysics, they presuppose a metaphysics.’” Logical individuals exist to clarify concrete, living individuals, and they are elements in what Royce calls the “science of order.”*? They cannot be separated wholly from the acts of selection, negation, and exclusion that have produced them. For the present, I aim to attempt a clear formalization of this process in Royce, showing how some portions of his logical work may be understood, and how those portions fit with the foregoing account of his philosophical aims and methods. The implications of this interpretation pose all sorts

of interesting questions for contemporary logical thinking, while they also put the lie to much of what has been said of Royce’s metaphysics by those who do not grasp his method and specifically his logic. The idea that his logic is absolutist in the Hegelian or Bradleyan sense is mistaken.”! The Absolute in Royce, insofar as it has a logical function, is derived from

experience, and the “necessity” it illustrates has no special ontological purchase. Rather, it serves as a norm for our thinking, once we have srasped the matter of how individuals are related to the Absolute. Royce argues that there are several senses of “negation” and they do not all operate on the same level of generality. Keeping separate the operative levels of generality at which each sense of negation is applicable will yield

NEGATION, NECESSITY, LOGICAL MAGIC 105 surprising and even magical results. Of course, there is nothing unusual in

the least about Royce, or anyone prior to the rise of Frege and Russell, taking negation to be complex. Every philosopher prior to 1900 assumed that there were at least four categorical, complex, relational ways to say no: contrariety, contradiction, subcontrariety, and subalternation. Carrying as they do differing senses of necessity, each excludes certain (otherwise) live options for constructive relations among logical individuals.

AE

All S is P. No Sis P.

>< IO

some S is P. Some S is not P. In using the square of opposition, we must keep in mind that the logical subjects are always “individuals” in the sense I have explained above (and sometimes predicates may also be “individuals,” when they can be distributed**): They are the products of negation already abstracted

to the logical level, which is to say, they are the product of neglect and selection, dialectically generalized to the level of metaphysical and logical

exclusion; they are uniquely related to a temporal whole. The entire process of individuation lies beneath the square. Now we examine the square in abstraction, to discover what features are revealed, relationally, among logical individuals at this level of generality. In addition to these categorical exclusions (contrariety, subcontrariety, etc.), there is the negation of a “term” (a logical individual) as distinct

from the universal negation that can operate as a quantifier (with full distribution, as in an E-proposition). The latter negation is not itself a

106 RANDALL E. AUXIER logical individual, for Royce, and neither is the propositional complex it negates (S is P), although that complex contains at least one logical indi-

vidual, and may even contain two (since the predicate term in an E-proposition could be a logical individual, whereas the predicate term in an I-proposition cannot be a logical individual, while the predicate term in an A-proposition must be a logical individual, and indeed, the same logical individual as the subject term*’). Then there is the tantalizing sense of negation in which a predicate term can be negated in a particular proposition (the O-proposition), which seems to have implications for distribution of the predicate class but not for the subject class. In addition to all these logical senses of negation, there are shades of mean-

ing associated with negation that may have semantic and pragmatic implications which either can’t or might affect logic, depending on how one construes the normative status of logic.

The revolution in logic introduced by Frege and Russell took its impetus in part from a massive reduction of logical negation to two forms, excluded middle and contradiction. Excluded middle reduces all hypothetical negations (or senses of necessity) to an indicative disjoined pair—concern with vague or partial truth is eliminated with bivalent truth functions that supposedly exhaust the possibilities and demonstrate some of the most peculiar and unintuitive equivalencies in human history (DeMorgan’s theorem, for instance). Now, strictly logical truth becomes truth-preserving substitutions, and the study of truth conditions becomes the preoccupation of anyone who wants to turn a logical result into a claim about the world. Noncontradiction reduces the categorical (that is, indicative or nonhypothetical) functions of contrariety, subcontrariety, and subalternation to the single relation of contradictoriness. The smuggling in of a second level of generality to the sense of contradiction, such that it is possible to negate both a term and a compound proposition with a single logical function, while ignoring the difference in generality, completes the picture so that a truth-functional, bivalent logic emerges to replace the old, complex negation. The issue of levels of generality does not appear as a problem until one attempts to examine a negated existential quantifier—the negated universal quantifier is also interesting, since it appears to have unprecedented and almost mystical powers over the predicate class within its scope. (These powers look less impressive when one remembers that both the subject term and the predicate term are distributed in an E-proposition,

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or to put it in more Roycean language, that the predicate term in an E-proposition might be a logical individual in addition to being a class; e.g., No things that are Socrates are things that are Plato.) My point is that before Frege and Russell changed logic, everyone knew and took for eranted that negation was highly complex and that a philosopher could not afford to simplify it without risking all sorts of bad reasoning. The senses of negation I enumerated above were reminders of what moves one cannot safely make without risking an undetected error, especially errors of distribution and those that result from shifting from one level of generality to another—categorical exclusions are more general than using a negation as a quantifier, and that is more general than the negation of a complex proposition, which is more general than the negation of a term (unless the term is a singular individual, in which case it functions as a fully distributed universal). Obviously the “revolution” was useful and predicate logic, properly deployed, prevents the worst categorical errors, since the restrictions on logical movement in the square of opposition are embedded in the standard inference rules for predicate logic. Logicians in Royce’s day, especially Royce, Peirce, and Bradley, were doing dynamic and interesting logical work that may not be of much use in programming computers, but is of great use in solving other kinds of problems, especially philosophical problems. Oversimplifying philosophical problems is not a good path to solving them. The structure of reflection may not be something we can capture fully in a formal logic,

but I am confident that we can create norms for reflection that can become habituated to our great benefit. Royce and Peirce believed we can do that. In short, I am saying that logic is normative—not a description of how we do think, but of how we can think and, as applicable, how we should think. If formalizing our thought processes to train our judgment

were not valuable, pragmatically and morally, there would be no good reason to do it, but in fact it 1s valuable and we should do it.

How did Royce contribute to this process? He had a hypothetical ontology that permitted a surprising, even magical, path from particular to universal judgments, and an interpretation of universal propositions as types of negations—even the A-proposition (the “no-other” interpretation Royce gives it**), where “All S is P,” is a negation, to precisely the degree it conveys necessity. Let us go through the path of Royce’s reasoning from particular experience to the Absolute (“All experience is part of the Absolute experience”) to show how one can, without hypostatizing

108 RANDALL E. AUXIER and without making a single questionable move in reasoning, arrive at a fair confidence in the need for an Absolute experience, if the particular experience is to be credited. This path does not lead to certainty—which Royce has no interest in*-—but rather to a norm for philosophical reflection in which all of us who wish to reflect well ought to be interested. Simple Negation

The best way to demonstrate the result Royce achieved is to revert historically to the square of opposition and its two distinct senses of simple negation (leaving aside for now complex and relational negations like contrariety, etc.): (1) negation ofa predicate, asin “Some Sis not P” (the O-proposition). (2) negation in the quantifier, as in “No S is P” (the E-proposition);

These simple negations are said to characterize the “mood” or “mode” of the proposition as “negative,” while the I- and the A-propositions are

“affirmative.” But there is no reason to assume that the negation of a predicate and the negation of a quantifier operate at the same level of generality. Indeed, if we take S to be a logical individual, then clearly (2)

is universal (it negates the proposition S is P; it doesn’t just block the copula by positing a class called “No S”), while (1) is more particular, negating only the predicate. So we must remember that just because the presence of either one of these simple negations leads us to classify the mode of the proposition as “negative,” the paths to that mode are not at all the same, not equally informative, and not equally fruitful in the logical sense. To postulate the truth of (1) tells us nothing about (2), while postulating the truth of (2) does tell us something about (1) as a whole proposition (see below), although it does not tell us much about either the subject or the predicate of (1), taken individually, since their relation in (2) is simple (but total) exclusion. Especially, the truth of (2) does not tell us whether the predicate of (2) is a logical individual, in Royce’s sense, but we do know that this predicate will not be treated as a logical individual in the corresponding O-proposition, since there can be no simple negation of a logical individual (only of a predicate). Thus, the subalternation relation of the E- and O-propositions is one in which the entailment of the O by the E comes at the cost of eliminating what might be a logical individual from consideration; that is a dangerous inference until

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one has verified that the predicate term in the E-proposition is not a logical individual.

There is a third sense of simple negation that is not quite the same as the negated universal quantifier or the negated predicate, and that is the negation of an entire proposition with the hypothesis of “it is false that,” or “it is not the case that.” Obviously this kind of negation can be entered with respect to any of the four forms of propositions, A, E, I, and O. To illustrate this kind of simple negation, I will use the proposition

that Royce uses to address the problem of solipsism. Affirming the I-proposition “Some experience is mine” does not, in and of itself, imply anything at all, except that it cannot also be true in the same sense that

“No experience is mine,” which must be false, on the hypothesis that “Some experience is mine” is true. One can also see how the hypothesis that “Some experience is mine”

is false, then, in this sense of simple negation, is slightly more fruitful logically, if perfectly absurd. It implies that “No experience is mine” is true, which implies that “Some experience is not mine” is true, which implies that “All experience is mine” is false. When we follow a simple negation of the full proposition around the square, with each move compelled by the categorical relation that these propositional types have with each other, we maintain the simplicity of the negation of the proposition,

and we also maintain the transitive generality of simple negation itself. Our movements around the square are compelled by higher level concerns that cannot be reduced to a single level of generality, but the negation itself of the first proposition remains the same kind of simple negation, the negation of a subject-predicate complex taken as a unit, even as we move around the square. But supposing “Some experience is mine” to be false is a very silly place to start reasoning; Descartes seems to

have hit upon the comparative certainty that this proposition is true in every particular instance in saying “Cogito ergo sum.” But “Some experience is mine” is a much more careful assertion, both logically and ontologically,

although it seems to carry as much existential force. We can plug in a more plausible hypothesis, using, in this case (as is appropriate to Royce’s argument about acknowledging the experience of others as a condition for the existence of “a world of truth”), “Some experience is not mine,” as an O-proposition, and still assert hypothetically that this proposition is “false”—that is, we place a negation operator outside

the whole proposition. The entire so-called problem of other minds

110 RANDALL E. AUXIER derives from such a hypothesis: how can I show either that it cannot be false that “Some experience is not mine,” or that it is true that “Some experience is not mine’? In the logic that took over after Royce’s time, DeMorgan devised a way to move a negation from within a proposition to being outside the proposition, but those simplistic transformations

hold only when noncontradiction and excluded middle have been adopted as having authority over all forms of logical necessity, and hence,

the ideas of contrariety, subcontrariety, and subalternation have been rendered subordinate (or wholly insignificant) as forms of negation. We will not make that unnecessary move here.”

Preserving the richness of the senses of negation, along with their commonsense limitations, and not rushing to collapse various distinct levels of generality, is what recommends the sense, the validity, and the persuasiveness of Royce’s argument. The hypothesis about the truth or falsity of a proposition is more general, as a negation, than the negative quantifier, if there is one, or the negated term, if there is one. So the nega-

tion of an entire proposition will be taken as a distinct type of simple negation. It has a peculiar independence of the first two types because it

can be added or removed by hypothesis, and once the hypothesis has been registered, further negations at that same level of generality will follow (e.g., if we hypothesize that an O-proposition is false, no matter what the proposition says, we have already determined that the corresponding A must be treated as true, by the same hypothesis, and that the corresponding I cannot be treated as also false, etc.). In the example above, I filled in the square using “experience” as the subject and “mine” as the predicate, and registered simple negations as hypotheses about any one of the propositions. Some hypotheses don’t tell

us very much, just in virtue of their formal place in the square, while others do, depending upon where we start making a hypothesis. Not all hypotheses about a given proposition in the square render such innoc-

uous results as supposing an I-proposition to be true. But the subject term itself played a role in our example as well, since having experience is

a condition of logical individuality, and logical individuality is what erounds our reasoning and provides our hypotheses as voluntary acts of the will. Whether the subject or predicate of a negated propositional complex is or is not a logical individual has decisive effects on whether our hypotheses are meaningful (recalling the Maxim of Meaning from above). Where the subject of the I-proposition “Some experience is

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mine” is a logical individual, I can think of no (meaningful) reason to hypothesize that the proposition is false. This feature of our proposition has something to do with the term “experience” and the term “mine,” and with the way logical individuality can block simple negations, of all three types. One cannot meaningfully enter just any hypothesis or negate just any term, or employ just any negative universal qualifier without sacrificing meaning. Further, the logical subject “experience” and the predicate “mine” have some of the same odd logical characteristics as “Cogito” in Descartes’s argument and as “God” (or “that than which nothing

greater can be conceived”) in Anselm. But this Roycean argument is more sober, pragmatic, and is arrived at by not jumping across levels of generality rather than by doing so. The path by which we arrive at the idea of a logical individual in Royce is careful, and thus, the limitations upon which hypotheses we can reasonably entertain are sober limits.

These special terms, “experience” and “mine,” present, therefore, interesting and extra formal limitations that cannot be called semantic, although they may be “pragmatic” in both James’s and Morris’s sense of that term. They certainly bear on the difficult question of how the pos-

sible and the actual are logically related, and whether that relation has formally interesting characteristics. Even simple negations are not very simple. They are achievements of the temporal process. The point is that we can register simple negations as hypotheses, under certain limitations, the most important of which is that we respect logical individuals and the severe limits they place on our negations. Here we aim to reason about things that we experience and to limit our generalizations

to those that conform to the temporal character of what we can act on, and hence, what we can will. This is the outcome of the analysis I offered in the first part of this chapter. What follows from hypothesizing a prop-

osition to be false has no immediate effect on the atomic propositions that are the objects of the hypothesis (1.e., inside the parentheses). This is a kind of group or class logic that Royce would work out later.

Here we are dealing with this group: All experience is mine, Some experience is mine, No experience is mine, and Some experience is not mine. This group remains the same regardless of whether we commence our reasonings by supposing that one or another proposition is true or false, although, as we shall see, we cannot begin just anywhere. The group is held together as a group by the constant positions of the subject and the

predicate, an ordered tetrad in which whatever is a logical individual in

112 RANDALL E. AUXIER one proposition at the very least could be (and for Royce must be) treated

as a logical individual in all others. The interesting thing here is that “mine” is a predicate that may be a logical individual, but need not be; it is at least a mode of the world of experience, but may also be a genuine individual. As everyone knows, when we attempt to switch the order of the subject and the predicate in classical propositions, sometimes we can

do it without changing the meaning (as in converting E-propositions where both subject and predicate could be logical individuals), and some-

times we cannot do any such thing (as in converting O-propositions, where the predicate term really cannot be a logical individual in any but a nascent or indeterminate sense), but those restrictions are utterly independent of entering a hypothesis about the truth value of an entire proposition. The search for logically equivalent propositions is affected by both (1) and (2) as types of negation, but the process of reasoning about complete propositions in light of their hypothetical (i.e., possible) truth or falsity is a different, and more general type of thinking. Let us then say

without further explication that there is a third and still more general type of simple negation (even if Royce never said it just this way): (3) conditional negation of whole propositions (first by hypothesis and then in succeeding implications, one at a time)

The difference between the complex and relational negations (contrari-

ety, subcontrariety, contradictoriness, and subalternation) and these simple negations corresponds to the direction of reasoning. The complex negations, which I will discuss in a moment, are intensional creatures, contentless generalities searching for quatrains of particulars and universals to organize as groups. But the simple negations determined by the entry of a hypothesis are serially ordered, apprehended one-by-one; that is, thoroughly temporal and voluntary. We can infer their values one at a time, without reference to the rules of contradictoriness, and so forth, by reasoning about the subject-predicate relation itself. To know that from the claim that it is false that “some experience is mine,” it must be true to say “no experience is mine” does not require that contradictoriness be a rule, only that I understand what has been asserted and can infer from

it the next required act of the will. That can be done from the Maxim of Meaning alone. Likewise, having supposed it to be true that “some experience is mine,” I then infer that I cannot say in a meaning-preserving

NEGATION, NECESSITY, LOGICAL MAGIC 113 way that “No experience is mine” is true, and similarly for any other subject-

predicate pair I wish to plug in. The result may be the same when reasoning with complex negations, but the process of thinking is different, and differently governed when

one employs complex negations. The process of reasoning by simple negations, the apprehension of implications in sequence, is far closer to empirical and scientific reasoning than is the relational group function of

complex negation, and indeed, Royce calls the former “induction.” But the kind of necessity involved is, I believe, deductive, or perhaps it would be clearer to call it “extensional.” Royce’s name for it assumes the maintenance of logical individuals throughout the reasoning process; however, and he could barely have imagined, I think, how insane the world of logic would become when everyone wanted to ignore individuality and treat all logical reasoning as extensional. It was basic to Royce as a philoso-

pher and a pragmatist that the whole motive for endeavoring to think logically is to preserve what is robust in our experience as we generalize about it. Reasoning is far more than successfully “picking out” the extension of a subject term. All this is not to say that complex reasoning is not subject to sequences of thinking, but only that those sequences may not follow all the same rules as those we are obliged to follow in simple negation. The rules of complex negation are limited by the aim of maintaining logical individuals as well, but for more severe reasons. At the level of simple negations it is relatively easy to recognize when we have hypothesized something absurd, and it is also possible to recognize when our reasoning has come to a dead end. Complex negations are not so easily assessed—common sense no longer suffices.*’ Most important, without a clear understanding of what is transpiring with the logical individuals involved, we are unable to detect bad reasoning when we have engaged in it. If it were easy to

discover such errors, Royce would not have needed to show what the problems were with realism, mysticism, and critical rationalism. Very sophisticated philosophers have made these mistakes throughout history, both East and West. Each of these three “conceptions of being” (as Royce calls them) affronts the logical individual in some way, and each fails to detect its error, and that is because each employs a form of complex negation while neglecting the effects of that type of negation on the logical

individuals it holds to be real. The effect is not that no self-consistent system of reasoning is created—they are indeed created, and they can be

114 RANDALL E. AUXIER negotiated consistently. The problem is that their individuals are not genuine individuals, not logical individuals in Royce’s sense.

Complex Negation

There are at least four types of relational negation operative in the differing concepts of contradiction, contrariety, subalternation, and subcontrariety. These types of negation involve the relations among whole propositions

belonging to an ordered group, a quatrieme, but considered in pairs. As a result, their application is highly specific (contrariety applies only to an A-E pair, subcontrariety only to an I-O pair, contradiction only to A-O and E-I pairs, and most complex is the ascent from I to A and O to E where the first proposition is hypothesized to be false**), but their form is more general than (3), since it always ranges over two propositions rather than a single proposition. Thus, we have: (4) the negation in which two propositions cannot be simultaneously true (contraries) (5) the negation in which two propositions cannot be simultaneously false (subcontraries) (6) the negation in which two propositions must have opposite truth values (contradictories)

The seventh sense of negation is subalternation, which is so complex, philosophically speaking, that I will not attempt a formal characterization of it in this paper; I will draw only on the most obvious features.”’ Far from operating at the same level of generality, each of these senses of complex negation occupies its own. The reason is that different hypotheses are compelled in (4) and (5) in order to gain a determinate value for

the other member of the pair. To make use of (4) one must enter a hypothesis of “true” from level (3) above. To hypothesize a proposition is false in the type of negation (4) provides no further information about its partner, since both can be false and they are permitted also to have opposite truth values. It is the reverse with (5), where one must hypothesize that one proposition is false even to use this kind of negation.

Hypothesizing that something is true is very different from hypothesizing that something is false.°° To confirm the type of hypothesis required by (4), one needs at least the possibility of verification, while (5) requires the possibility of falsification. One cannot reasonably treat

NEGATION, NECESSITY, LOGICAL MAGIC 115 these two types of hypothesis as interchangeable, and therefore, one cannot

treat the scope and applicability of a contrariety relation as being on the same level of generality as a subcontrariety relation. It is worth noting that in ontology it is easy to verify and impossible to falsify a proposition, while in empirical investigation, it is impossible to verify but not so difficult to falsify a hypothesis. This points back to what I said above about deductive (apprehended) and intensional (comprehensive) reasoning. Which is more general, as a form of negation: (4) or (5)? There are two ways to look at it. If one emphasizes only the logical form of what is being

excluded, (4) looks to be more general, since the propositions being related as contraries are both universal in form. And by this criterion, (5) would be less general because both propositions are particular. But this is not the best way to think about the generality of these relations. The reason is that falsification is more within our hypothetical grasp than is verification, at least where particular experience is concerned. That is to say, since we cannot verify an A or an E empirically, they are destined

to remain hypothetical, except as they are acted on by propositions of the I and E form. This is actually a logical definition of radical empiricism, at least as a norm for thinking that way. Royce is not a radical empiricist, as we shall see, because he discovered a bit of unempirical logical magic to which he was willing to wed his philosophy. When we see

that Royce held that a certain hypothesis about experience can be maintained in all the relevant ways for all the logical individuals involved in our particular experience, and when we consider the position he takes about logical individuals relative to A-propositions, we will have understood the Absolute, and the logical magic by which it is demonstrated.

But that deviation from radical empiricism does not mean Royce would have rejected entirely the norm we see in affirming: that A- and E-propositions are empty abstractions until some hypothesis is registered about an I or an O with the same logical individual as the subject. Propositions negated as in (5), subcontraries, actually yield results whenever we successfully falsify either the I version or the O version of the proposition. Having falsified, say, an I-proposition, we know that its corresponding O cannot be false. And this prohibition is not forced on us by the mechanical rule of contradiction. We don’t know directly that the corresponding O 1s true—we haven't done the work yet, as asserting it on the basis of (3) requires—but indirectly (1.e., at a more general level) we know that it cannot be false, and our inability to verify it at this moment

116 RANDALL E. AUXIER is of secondary concern, since we have very good reason to think that it will be verified eventually, at least to the extent a particular proposition admits of verification according to an inference that proceeds from (3). Thus, the simple negation by hypothesis (3) brought to bear on the complex negation in (5) is empirically and logically fruitful in a way that the simple negation in (3) when brought to bear on (4) is not. We are thus best advised to begin our inquiries by hypothesizing that either an I or an O 1s false, seeking to show that it 1s false, and then concluding that its partner cannot be false, and thus seeking to show a verification of it. The inquiry proceeds along the lines of apprehension by the temporal path described when I considered (3), but the reason for our hypothesis is complex; that this O or this I is false comes from what we understand

about complex negation at level (5), and how it is more fruitful than complex negation at level (4). Thus, the determinateness of the exclusion

implied in (5) is broader because it ranges over an indirect but implied procedure of verification as well as a direct falsification procedure. That means that (5) will always imply a broader range of activities than (4), and that makes it more general in an important sense. This brings us to (6), contradiction, which is, of course, the most mechanical type of complex negation. Wherever one starts in the quatrieme, this type of negation never has less generality than the power to determine one other proposition (and thereby to determine indirectly whatever follows from this mechanical action), but in two general and important cases: (a) when a true hypothesis is given to a universal proposition (A or E); and (b) when a false hypothesis is given to a particular proposition (I or O),

we get a complete set of truth values (all four values are determined). We

have names for these types of inquiry: (a) is traditional ontology and (b) is science, at least after Peirce, when these types of inquiry were first distinguished clearly enough to prevent their further confusion. Hence, we could claim, reasonably, that the type of complex negation found in contradiction is “universal,” with certain qualifications. The power of contradiction as a relation is obvious, then, since it would seem that the type of negation defined by the contradiction relation provides us with a path to, apparently, a completely settled epistemic situation, at least formally settled (i.e., we seem to know all the possibilities, given just this

NEGATION, NECESSITY, LOGICAL MAGIC 117

subject and just this predicate), and even limits the sorts of hypotheses that will bring us to that point of completeness in our reasonings. The trouble is that (a) tells us nothing about the logical individuals involved, while (b) does.

The (a) approach is the sort of ontology one finds in Hartshorne’s mature works, for example.*! It is obvious why logicians such as Frege

and Russell were tempted to subsume all forms of negation under contradiction—its scope and power are undeniable, and of course, the logicians of extension immediately set to work on what to do with logical

individuals (the entire meaning/sense/reference debate can be understood along these lines). Adopting noncontradiction as the only relevant court of appeal for negation did a lot of violence to ideas like individual, scope, term, and even proposition,” while completely burying the subtlety of negation itself, as an act of consciousness, or saying no as a social act, or attending to x rather than non-x in our psychological experience, or choosing one course of action forsaking all others. The extensional move rendered logic irrelevant to our reasoning about all such matters. It was, in my view, too high a price to pay.

It turns out that we cannot get from logic what we need by relying wholly on (6), even if there are applications of our reasoning that are remarkably useful deriving from an emphasis on (6), such as simple computer programming. It was certainly worth a try to see whether logic might be serviceable on that simpler schema, and the effort has produced some amazing results. I am not surprised it has taken us a hundred years

to assimilate these results into the world and into philosophy. But the limits of this approach have been showing for some time now, and it is time to revisit the interesting problems that were under discussion in the time of Peirce and Royce so as to relearn the richer tools they developed for confronting them. Many of our contemporary philosophical problems disappear, and along with them the charge of the irrelevance of philosophy, if we revive these subtler tools and learn to use them. In fact, we lose one of the most powerful types of inquiry when we

reduce (5) to (6), because there is one instance in which a hypothesis about (5) yields a complete set of truth values driven not by contradictoriness, but by subcontrariety. In short, this is an alternative type of formal analysis that need not address the problems with semantics and informal analysis—at least not in the first instance. I am saying that there is an

important instance in which subcontrariety tells us something that

118 RANDALL E. AUXIER cannot be falsified but seems verified in every experience, something that contradiction cannot provide. And I believe Royce discovered it and used it in his case for the Absolute. The power of this relation is surely greater than I will demonstrate here, but I will not attempt to do more than show how Royce did what he did, or, more precisely, how the thing he did can be schematized logically. Also, even though I believe much can be learned

by examining the relationship between (1) and (2) above, especially in light of (4)—(6), that is not my task in this essay.

If we consider subalternation the seventh, there is an eighth sense of negation, which is the most general and the most important kind. That is the sort of negation that is embedded in registering a hypothesis at

all. All reasoning begins with a hypothesis, and, as I argued above, hypotheses respond to doubt, the unsettled situation. Every hypothesis carries that doubt forward and has the status of being itself a negation because it imposes necessity in the form of bivalence on a proposition. “All S is P,” taken alone, is neither true nor false until someone enters

a hypothesis—that is, asserts that it is either true or false. But we all

know that, as stated, it may be both or neither, depending upon whether it captures or fails to capture its subject matter (and this is not simply a question of whether the predicate really inheres in the subject,

although that is a small part of this larger capturing). Propositions containing no logical individuals are not, in fact, either true or false because they are not about anything that belongs to the “world of truth.” Even if a logical individual does appear, the proposition may be ill formed—in ways that Gettier counterexamples might reveal. (That

would be an interesting and potentially fruitful way to employ such examples, for a change.) Recognizing this limit, that logical individuals must be our subjects, we push ahead into the doubt and hypothesize anyway, and the hypothesis will be treated as both not yet verified and not yet falsified, with the expectation that at least it can be one or the other; and reasoning is underway, and variously so, depending upon what sort of proposition we begin with. Reasoning from a hypothesis about an A is not like reasoning from a hypothesis about an E or an I, and so forth. Since our reasoning depends on the idea that it is at least possible in principle to verify or falsify the hypothesis (otherwise it is not a hypothesis), we impose a broad bivalent necessity upon any subject matter we reason about formally. This is the

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cost, so to speak, of formalizing our thinking: We treat what is really simply possible with exclusionary prejudice, demanding that it must be in principle verifiable or falsifiable so that we may carry out some reasoning. In so doing, we know very well that the proposition may not be verifiable or falsifiable, even in principle, but we ignore this caveat for the sake of thinking clearly about our doubt. This hypothesizing is not the same as negation of type (3), which only denotes that whole propositions can be negated as distinct from having terms negated or negative quantifiers. (8) The imposition of bivalence by hypothesis.

Obviously, type (8) negation is complex and universal in character, since it allows no possibility to go unnecessitized; that is, it universalizes doubt in order to circumscribe the problematic situation and enter an assertion about the whole of it. This hypothesizing in thinking is analogous to acting in the temporal world: The possibilities for action are all negated except the one possibility that is the act itself.

We are now ready to do some Roycean reasoning. We have, then, eight types of negation, three simple, four complex, and one holistic, or functionally universal (yet simplified so as to preserve complexity at lower levels of generality). The most general type of negation is that implied by the act of hypothesizing. Perhaps it is obvious, but it must be said: as far as we know, only logical individuals can accomplish (8) as an

act. Yes, this is circular. That does not bother Royce—or me. That we are the ones reasoning when we reason is the basis of common sense, and that we seek to preserve that bit of commonsense from our reasoning at any point is the norm of good reasoning. It insures both fallibilism and that necessity will not be misused. But that principle does not guarantee that the logical individuals in (1)—(7) will be treated with the respect they deserve. A Rule to Preserve the Simple and Complex Senses of Negation

The following demonstration is schematic and simplified. If it should fail

to capture the essence of my argument above, then I encourage some future inquirer to improve on the schema. I need to set down a rule so that in our reasonings we will be able to keep track, in at least a rudimentary

120 RANDALL E. AUXIER way, of which type of negation we are using and the way that, having used one type before, we must not try to extend ourselves beyond its genuine scope. Here are rules of notation that will suffice for this paper (there are more sophisticated rules for a more general use of this system of negation, but I will not develop them here; each of these rules is the outcome of a demonstration). Set out a square of opposition:

AE dt O Denote a hypothesis with HT (hypothesis that the proposition is true) or HF (hypothesis that the proposition is false). Although it presupposes doubt and the negation of type (8), and must be entered by a logical individual that must be preserved throughout our reasoning, this is an instance of simple negation (3) above. For example:

AE

| (HF)O Rule A (the preservation of particularity): When dealing with contraries

or subcontraries, retain the letter you began with and add a tilde as you move across the square of opposition:

(Hypothesis = T) > (Contrary = H~(T)) (Hypothesis = F) — (Contrary =?) (Hypothesis = T) — (Subcontrary =?) (Hypothesis = F) — (Subcontrary = H~(F)) For example (thick arrows show the direction of reasoning):

AE

(H~F)I €& (HF)O

This rule reminds us when we have moved across the square horizontally.

NEGATION, NECESSITY, LOGICAL MAGIC 121

Rule B (the preservation of universality): When dealing with contradictories, change the letter you began with as you move diagonally down or up on the square of opposition: (Hypothesis = HT) — (Contradictory = HF) (Hypothesis = HF) > (Contradictory = HT) For example:

(HT)A E y

I (HE)O This rule reminds us when we have moved across the square diagonally downward; it is a kind of determinate exclusion. Rule C (the preservation of generality): When you begin with A or E, you

must retain its form of expression (All S is P). Simple negations of type (3) are added to these expressions by hypothesis only. This is done instead of changing the quantifiers. Where traditionally one might change an “All” toa “No” ora “Some,” we avoid this by keeping quantifier negation logically quarantined from conditional negation (type (3)). Thus, for instance, if you enter the hypothesis “It is false that All S is P,” and you are interested in the effect of this hypothesis on the O-proposition

corresponding to it (this is a case of contradiction of course), you will express that effect: HF(AII S is P) — HT(Some S is not P). Or, on the Square:

(HE)A All S is P E s)

| (HT)O Some S is not P Notice that there is no particularity to preserve here, so none is preserved. It is also impossible to determine whether this piece of reasoning is about any logical individuals, although we know a logical individual entered the first hypothesis. The usefulness of such a hypothesis is itself more doubtful than the genuine doubt that gave rise to it. Similarly, if you want to express the effect of a hypothesis of a true A or E on its corresponding I- or O-proposition by subalternation downward from an A or an E, it is expressed thus: HT(AII S is P) — HT(Some S is P).

122 RANDALL E. AUXIER (HT)A All S is P E

v (HT)I Some S is P O The same can be done with contrariety, where contrariety has a determinate value:

IO

(HT)AAUSisP =» (HEF)E No Sis P

As with the previous example, it is impossible to determine whether any of this reasoning involves a genuine logical individual, even though

the whole of it presupposes a logical individual. One more matter of terminology is that we need to designate a way of indicating a universal whose truth value has been indirectly determined (requiring more than

one move to obtain the value) or determined directly by a particular proposition, by the relations of contrariety or subcontrariety. This is to say that these propositions, although universal, carry the stigma, if you will, of having been determined by the particulars. This is a type of intensional reasoning, of course. It preserves logical individuals. We will say: Rule D (the preservation of intensional reasoning): A universal proposition whose truth value has been determined (whether by subalternation or contradiction) by a value assigned beforehand to a particular, is nei-

ther T nor F, but rather is either “unverified” or “unfalsified.” (This is not to be confused with the status of a hypothesis entered by a logical individual at the beginning of our reasoning.) So an HF(Some S is not P) does not render its corresponding A-proposition true; rather that proposition is “unfalsified” (UF), which is another way of saying its truth value is necessitated by the hypothesis and approachable only through that hypothesis, in this instance.

(UF)A All S is P E LS

I (HF)O Some S is not P Similarly, an HF(I) does not render its corresponding E true, but “unfalsified.” On the other side, an (HT)I does not make its E false, but makes the E “unverified” (UV), just as an (HF)O will make a (UV)A and a (UF)E, as we move up the square. In each case the value is determined

NEGATION, NECESSITY, LOGICAL MAGIC 123

by the particular (under hypothesis). The words “false” and “true” are preserved in the universal instances to show the path of determination, while the path of determination matters to the level of generality of the operative complex negation. These negations covered by Rule D are generalizations of an intensional sort—it is not that they pick out or exclude their corresponding universals; rather, the particulars indicate the presence of a logical individual that has in some way failed to find a satisfactory determinate concept or universal and is seeking full determination in accordance with its presupposed metaphysical status. The logical indi-

vidual has been universalized, but at the cost of indeterminacy in this example. Much could be said about this sort of schema, especially as it applies to

our reasoning about subjects in metaphysics. This schema allows for a rudimentary type of modal logic, for example, but allows no counterfactuals and tames necessity by connecting generalization from the particular with indeterminacy, while allowing that deductive reasoning still works as it always has, but at the cost of being empty, as far as we know, of genuine logical individuals. The aim for the present is only to demonstrate how this kind of thinking applies in Royce’s philosophy, especially regarding the status of the Absolute. This procedure yields an interesting case of settled inquiry that is lost

when all negations are subsumed under contradiction. It shows a general proposition that is “good enough,” if not complete. It is not that the final outcome of the argument is changed—one still arrives at an A or an O or an I or an E, but the path by which one arrives, as conditioned by the character of the original hypothesis, makes a difference. If

the outcome of one’s reasoning is a (UV)A, that has the interesting character of being contrary to a (UV)E. Both cannot be UV in exactly the same respect. But a (UV)A might be consistent with a (HT)E, even if the subject and predicate terms are the same. For example, if (UV)A “All Americans are seasick” is the outcome of (HT)O “Some Americans are not seasick,” that (UV)A might be consistent with the claim (HF)E “No Americans are seasick,” since the second case might not involve any logical individuals, and hence might not be falsified by any particular experience. We would immediately recognize the variance as being

due to the fact that different inquires are underway, and the simple notation of (UV) warns us that this result is tied to an earlier hypothesis. Such examples provide a useful, but also logical, path by which the central claim can be defended in very different, more persuasive ways,

124 RANDALL E. AUXIER when the argument for it takes the form of (5) determining the value of (6). In short, not all points of entry for our hypotheses are equally fruitful or advisable. Hypotheses entered at the level of the universal propositions only demonstrate possibilities for our reasoning, and while they presuppose the existence of genuine logical individuals, those individuals have negated themselves in entering the first hypothesis. The same is true when logical individuals enter a particular hypothesis, namely, that they negate themselves formally, but not existentially; particular experience is presupposed and the difference is that in making a particular hypothesis, logical individuals do represent themselves, as presupposed existences, and then do not remove that representation from their subsequent thinking. Only one of these procedures is consistent with Royce’s style of fictional ontology (he doesn’t claim to know that the subject term in his particular reasonings is a genuine individual, he knows only that he is obliged to idealize it as such).°° Apart from this interesting feature of such reasoning, there is a formal

characteristic that has to be noted, and this is what happens when one starts one’s reasoning process as (HF)O. Suppose “Some S is not P” is false. It would follow by subcontrariety that “Some S is P” cannot be false. Under Rule A, we show it this way:

(CO) A E (H~F)I € (HF)O

The logical individual is represented in the subject term of the O-proposition. It is preserved in the I-proposition, but now finds itself only particularly determined, not universally subsumed. If that is so, then we also see that “No S is P” is, in this case, not known to be outright false, because the E-proposition has been indirectly determined by a particular (requiring more than one move). The E is not made false by the functionally true I; rather, it is as yet unverified, but we expect it to be verified but shall treat it as functionally false (guilty until proven innocent) in order to preserve the logical individual in I, and because it is determined as UF by the O-proposition in the mode of subalternation.

(B) A (UV)E a

(H~F)I € (HE)O

NEGATION, NECESSITY, LOGICAL MAGIC 125 Now, the corresponding A, “All S is P” is treated as unfalsified as determined by the initial (particular) hypothesis.

(Y) (UF)A (UV)E RA

(H~F)I €& (HEF)O This argument sequence is actually a version of reductio ad absurdum, because if we cannot, for some reason, treat this version of “All S is P” (the A-proposition) as “true in this case,” and we do expect it to be verified, and if we haven’t equivocated at any point, it will follow that our original hypothesis is not a good one—it makes no difference in such a case what the subject and predicate actually are. The point is

that maintaining the integrity of the logical individual has cost us any genuine access to a universal, and such will always be the case when we begin by hypothesizing a false O. What I have done, here, however, is illicit reasoning because I started from the same place twice (i.e., the O-proposition), once to get the value of the I, and a second time to get the value of the A. That move is not cricket in Royce’s world. The reasoning process is temporal and its model should be as well. The act is irrevocable, in particular reasoning. In universal reasoning it makes very little difference, since no logical individual

is there to be preserved. Particularized reason requires that one take a single path in order to preserve the logical individual (and the represented reasoner). This yields the last rule. Rule E (the law of irrevocability): When entering a hypothesis about a proposition in the particular form (I or O), one must proceed according to a single line of reasoning and cannot retrace one’s steps. Naturally this is a nonmonotonic logic, as is typical of intensional reasoning. Such particularized reasoning of this kind takes on truly interesting characteristics when we consider one further logically important matter. I will show why the reality of error, or of ignorance, provides a compelling reason to conclude that it is not unfalsified that there is an Absolute experience. But before I do that, I need one more set of distinctions. The World of Postulates and the Logical Magic

If we are to begin our reasonings around the square of opposition with a hypothesis that one or another proposition is either true or false, some

126 RANDALL E. AUXIER further guidance about the way these postulates work is needed. I have given a formal example of what happens when one enters a hypothesis that an O-proposition is false and assumes monotonic reasoning can be used. The results are interesting, but not really practical. The reductio never is—it demonstrates that there is a problem with our reasoning,

not that our hypothesis is in and of itself true or false. Although the particular affirmative (the I), which was determined by our initial hypothesis (that the O was false), and although the I assisted us in finding a value for the universal negative of unverified, we expect it to be false; and that was the end of our path. The only way we could find the value of the universal affirmative (the A) was by direct determination, under contradiction, from our initial hypothesis, and indeed, that gave us a complete set of values for the quatrieme, but only at the expense of pretending that we could repeat the O, as in monotonic logic. Neither action nor thinking permits that retrograde motion. It is an abstraction. It should also be clear now that there are unbalanced relations on the square, and starting in some places, with some hypotheses, yields sterile results, while other starting places with other hypotheses can be interesting. The differences are largely due to the rules we made to preserve logical individuals. As I mentioned above, starting with a hypothesis that a certain universal proposition is true will yield a complete set of truth values for the other three propositions. But nothing about that reasoning is very interesting. Inquiry, as spurred by genuine doubt, never begins with a hypothesis about a universal. Doubt arises in particular experience. Let me then divide the possible hypotheses according to some categories that will assist us in forming the correct expectations about certain kinds of hypotheses. There are four types of hypotheses that a logical individual can assert: Contingent: The hypothesis that a proposition in particular form (an I or an QO) is true. Yield: its contradictory is unverified. Given that we expect it to be falsified, it implies nothing further by either contrariety or subalternation. Only one line of reasoning is available, and only by direct determination. The logical individual is easily preserved, but doesn’t learn anything new. Necessitarian: The hypothesis that a proposition in universal form (an A or an E) is true. Yield: its contrary is false, its subaltern is true, and its contradictory is false. The lines of reasoning are numerous and monotonic, but no logical individual is determined.

NEGATION, NECESSITY, LOGICAL MAGIC 127 Hyperbolic: The hypothesis that a proposition in universal form (an A or an E) is false. (This hypothesis is not knowable by a finite being, hence its name.) Yield: its contrary is indeterminate, its subaltern is false, and its contradictory is true. The lines of reasoning are numerous and monotonic, but no logical individual is determined. Possibilist: The hypothesis that a proposition in particular form (an I or an QO) is false. Yield: there are two available lines of reasoning.

First, its contradictory unfalsified (meaning we expect it to be verified), the contrary of the unfalsified universal is unverified (meaning that we

expect it to be falsified), and thus, the contradictory of the latter is not unverified (which is to say that it is likely to be true, or is probable). Obviously there are two versions, depending on whether one starts with the O or the I.

(d) (UF)A » (UV)E Riz

(~UV)I (HF)O (€) (UV)A © (UF)E WA

(HF)I (~UV)O The logical individual is preserved in both courses, and one ends up either with a not unverified “Some S is P” or with a not unverified “Some S is not P.” In the case of (6), there is an unfalsified A-proposition, All S is P. Remember that when we use the term “unfalsified,” it means that

we do expect the proposition to be verified, but we are not entitled to claim that it really is verified. We take as our instruction to look for evidence that it is in fact true, as far as we know (though never completely

verified). In short, we expect we have found a law or rule or objective principle, and indeed, our hypothesis is a fair maxim and has pointed to a principle. Assuming the evidence can be or will be found, we continue our reasoning. The next step is to an unverified E-proposition, meaning that we expect the E to be false but are not entitled to assert it, but we are expecting no exceptions to our principle, and recognizing that our reason for thinking so is not the evidence for the true A, but because of the formal relationship our A-proposition has with this E on which we have now perched in our non-monotonic path. This “No S

128 RANDALL E. AUXIER is P” is deeply embedded in our reasoning. Even more embedded, then, is our inference that it is not unverified that some S is P, which is our conclusion in (0). What does that mean? “It is not unverified that some S is P”? When we look at where we began, with the hypothesis that it is false that some S is P, and knowing as we do to expect that subcontraries cannot both be false, we will not be surprised to learn that our conclusion should mean, in some deeply embedded sense, that “some S is P” is true-ish. In fact, it does suggest that. It is a vague inclusion of the logical individual with which we began and which we carefully preserved. It has survived the journey intact, along with its predicate. If our verification and falsification efforts turn out as we expect them to, among other results we will find that it is genuinely true that some S is P, at least to the extent that such a thing can be known by formal reasoning alone. An analogous result follows when we look at argument (€), except that we end up with the expectation that “It is not unverified that some S is not P” and that means, in some deeply embedded sense, that “some S is not P” is true-ish. This result is slightly more interesting because even though our logical individual survives, this process leads us to expect the exclusion of the predicate with which we began will be the case. The predicate does not survive the journey because we expect the E-proposition to be verified. Thus, if our logical individual were in this case “experience,” and the predicate “mine,” the hypothesis in (6)—that it is false that some

experience is not mine—leads to the idea that some experience is mine. Now, obviously, that is easy enough to verify directly, but it is interesting that we need not appeal to the subjective condition of our consciousness to see the sense in which supposing the experience of others does not count throws us back upon our own resources: the representation of the logical individual with which we began is what we find at the end. But, by contrast, the supposition that it is false that some experience is mine, as in (€), leads to the idea that it is true that some experience is not mine. Instead of being a silly hypothesis, then, as it appeared earlier, this shows that the logical individual can survive such a hypothesis that it seems to have no experience, and that is surprising. One would think that the logical individual would have been sacrificed right off, in the hypothesis, but it is not so sacrificed. Instead, we discover the world of other experience by holding our own under momentary suspension by means of a postulate. What kind of postulate is this? It is possibilist, not necessitarian or

NEGATION, NECESSITY, LOGICAL MAGIC 129

contingent or hyperbolic. That is just the sort of postulate we would expect to yield interesting results. Such is the character of Royce’s postulate about individual error and ignorance. We have not asserted that the subjective self has no experience, we have exercised the will of the logical individual and have done so without yielding to bare abstractions.

Contingent hypotheses may be very fruitful for empirical inquiries, but they are logically uninteresting, and hence metaphysically uninteresting. We may learn much from this sort of thinking, but whether what we

have learned is, in the end, true, we will never learn (with that sort of hypothesis). Error in our definitions of the subject and/or predicate is not discoverable by this sort of hypothesis. We can preserve logical individuals with contingent hypotheses by following the rules, but we never find fully determinate concepts to subsume them. Necessitarian hypotheses are unfruitful for inquiry, since their forms determine every outcome, and thus, error in the definitions of the subjects and predicates are not only not revealed, they are actually concealed. These hypotheses are also logically uninteresting, being only automatic subsumptions. There are no logical individuals involved, as far as we can ever tell. This is sterile reasoning. Hyperbolic hypotheses are interesting only in the vague and empty observation that they leave us without anything we must say about their contraries. But having supposed that it is false that, say, “All humans are mortal,” having it suggested that I do not yet know on that basis whether it is true or false that “No humans are mortal,” I am left with a very abstract argument

about the immortality of the soul and whether it can be made sense of without embracing universalism, and what would compel me, logically, to accept one side or the other. Unfortunately, just this sort of argument has been occupying philosophers for a very long time. If the sheer length and unproductive character of these disputes is not a strong recommendation against framing hyperbolic hypotheses, I don’t know what would be.

The interesting discussions will form around possibilist hypotheses, with a rich and varied—as well as complete—set of implications. When we preserve the nuances of the levels of the negations employed in reasoning on the basis of this kind of hypothesis, we are in a position to make some headway in our reasoning. Our hypotheses address genuine doubts and we are assured of speaking about individuals that could exist. We are aware of our limitations and we are in a position to catch our mistakes. The fact that a lot of pragmatists are wary of possibilist reasoning doesn’t make it unpragmatic.

130 RANDALL E. AUXIER If this schema of hypotheses bears a resemblance to the distinctions Kant makes that give him synthetic a priori knowledge to pursue, then that is because this is a reworking of that schema. But there is a huge dif-

ference. This schema is not driven by subject-predicate relations. That was left behind in (1) and (2) above. The senses of “hypothesis” outlined here will be analyzed in accordance with the three types of complex negation explained in (4), (5), and (6), and the results are different from the worn out debates over analyticity and so on.

A Magical Proposition

“Some experience is not mine” is a magical proposition: It is a sort of particularist Cogito ergo sum, or Anselmian logical subject (“that than which nothing greater can be conceived”), but without mistaking existence for a predicate. The magic does not come from the O form, but because of the way possibilist hypotheses lead to nonmonotonic paths of reasoning. Royce’s assertion of the Absolute is not properly understood as a bald A-proposition, subsuming all individuals. It is the final step in a

path of reasoning that preserves particular experience and the logical individual represented in that finite experience, an individual engaged in an act of generalizing the form of his own will to accommodate a single, universal world time. The outcome is that it is true-ish that “All experience is mine,” but here we really mean that, assuming that I must preserve the representation of myself as a logical individual presupposed in the act of postulating, and given that the postulate could be in error, I can see that it is not unverified that all experience is mine. Royce says over and over that the reality of error, or of ignorance, or of fragmentariness, implies a larger world of truth relative to which the error is an error. The logical individual is a finite will, the form of which is time. For there to be a world time, that finite will must lack some genuine experience, but it is apparently helpless to demonstrate that truth logically, metaphysically—until it realizes that it may enter a hypothesis that could only be bivalent, right or wrong, in relation to a larger complex of relations, the essential ones of which we find on the square of opposition and reveal in the proper order by following the rules I specified. It reveals that there is an Absolute experience that is in some sense mine and in some sense not mine.

NEGATION, NECESSITY, LOGICAL MAGIC 131 In light of the reality of an Absolute experience, as it is discovered from my action of hypothesizing, I can learn what is partial or fragmentary in my representation of the logical individual with which I began, and indi-

vidual that it is not the whole world, that cannot be the whole world, unless I am the Absolute. If my experience were other than fragmentary, I could experience no genuine doubt and could not respond with postulates. I would have no need of wondering about experience other than my own, indeed, could never do so, perhaps. The magical result is that I can discover my error, my fragmentariness, my partialness in a wider world, and that I can do so formally. Only possibilist hypotheses are analyzable according to this standard. The other three kinds of hypotheses either lack a logical individual or merely generalize from the logical individual to the sorts of predicates one might or might not expect to find associated with them. But a possibilist hypothesis opens up a course of reasoning that would be simply empirical, if all we considered was whether we were correct; but in considering that we know we can be wrong, we see the larger context of complex negation. If our reasoning leads us to solipsism, while preserving the logical indi-

vidual presupposed in our reasoning, then it seems like it wouldn't be possible for us to be wrong in our conclusion, “it is not unverified that All experience is mine.” And yet, the hypothesis was not forced on us. We chose it, and we could be in error. The alternative, and indeed, the only alternative is that the logical individual presupposed in the hypothesis is the same as the logical individual represented in the conclusion, minus

the possibility of error. What I have really discovered is not that I am

included in the Absolute, it is that it is impossible that I should be excluded. This is Royce’s critique of realism, because realism hypostasizes

external relations until it threatens the reality of a world of truth and a single, universal world time—undermining what Whitehead would call the togetherness of the world.

SEVEN

RACE, CULTURE, AND PLURALISM Royce’s Logical “Primitives” Scott L. Pratt

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n The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon describes the state of | oppression in a colonized land as one “obedient to the rules of pure Aristotelian logic.” Here the natives—the original people of the land— and the settlers—the colonizers who now control the land—“follow the principle of reciprocal exclusivity. No conciliation is possible” because the exclusion affirms the settlers and rejects the natives (Fanon, Wretched, 38-39). “At times,” he says, “this Manichaeism goes to its logical conclu-

sion and dehumanizes the native, or to speak plainly, it turns him into an animal” (42). In this land, “The settler’s work is to make even the dreams of liberty impossible for the native. The native’s work is to imagine all possible methods for destroying the settler. On the logical plane, the Manichaeism of the settlers produces a Manichaeism of the native. To the theory of the ‘absolute evil of the native’ the theory of the “abso-

lute evil of the settler’ replies” (93). The result, the violent response of the colonized people, comes to “bind them together as a whole, since each individual forms a violent link in the great chain, a part of the great organism of violence which has surged upward in reaction to the settler’s { 132 }

RACE, CULTURE, AND PLURALISM 133 violence in the beginning” (93). Violence, he says, “is an action all inclusive and national” (94) and aims to rid the land of the colonizers. Fanon was born on Martinique in 1925 and in 1943 volunteered with the Free French in World War IJ in their resistance against German occu-

pation of France. After the war he studied medicine and psychiatry at Lyon and in 1953 became Head of Psychiatry at a major hospital in Algeria.

In 1956, he resigned his post in support of the rebellion against France during the Algerian Revolution. Fanon died of leukemia in 1961—Algeria

gained independence in 1962. Fanon is best known for two books, Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. Both recognize

the centrality of the logic of settler society. Against attempts to understand the problems faced by blacks in terms of fixed racial categories, Fanon argues in Black Skin, White Masks that “The Negro problem does

not resolve itself into the problem of Negroes living among white men but rather of Negroes exploited, enslaved, despised by a colonialist capitalist society” (Fanon, Black Skin, 202). Rejecting the black/white, evil/good, primitive/civilized distinctions, Fanon claims that “the Negro lives an ambiguity” (192) and so “For my part, I refuse to consider the problem from the point of view of either/or” (203). Despite its power, the process of colonization, according to Fanon, is

not totalizing. “A colonized people is not alone,” he writes in The Wretched of the Earth. “In spite of all that colonialism can do, its frontiers

remain open to new ideas and echoes from the outside world” (Fanon, Wretched, 70). At the same time, while the process of decolonization unifies native people, it also differentiates them: “underdeveloped countries ought to do their utmost to find their own particular values and methods and a style which shall be particular to them” (99). From this perspective, even as the process of colonization employs a logic of exclusion and resistance employs the same, the practices of liberation affirm a pluralism of

particular peoples and lands and the possibility of interaction across porous boundaries. The commitment to challenge the logic of the settler and the commitment to maintain porous boundaries and diversity, however, suggests that the process of decolonization, as Fanon presents it, is at odds with itself. Colonialism, he concludes, “is in fact the organization of a Manichean

world, a world divided up into compartments” (Fanon, Wretched, 84). Yet, decolonization seems at best to be the preservation of the very world that has been divided into compartments by Western logic, except good

134 SCOTT L. PRATT and evil have changed places. How is it that decolonization escapes the confines of “pure Aristotelian logic’? What is called for is a better understanding of the process of division, the logic of classification or, more generally, the process of ordering experience. What seems to be needed is a logical theory in service of pluralism that can support the exclusions necessary for the existence of different peoples and lands and also can

support ongoing resistance to the fixed categories and hierarchies of colonialism and its attendant oppressions. One theory of logic that provides resources to sort through this issue can be found in the logical work of Josiah Royce. Royce is, perhaps, an unlikely source. Although politically liberal for his time, he nevertheless associated with some of the leading racist theorists of his day (see Curry, “Royce, Racism, and the Colonial Ideal” and Fischer, “Locating Royce’s Reasoning on Race”; for a response to these views, see Kegley, Chapter 8 in this volume: “Racism, Race, and Josiah Royce: Exactly What Shall We Say?” ), and so might not seem to have the credentials of someone who could offer a logical theory compatible with decolonization and libera-

tion. Still, his later work, I will argue, provides a potentially valuable resource, especially for those who accept the critical demands of Fanon and contemporary American Indian philosophers and whose philosophy of liberation is framed by a demand for a pluralistic conception of selfdetermination. Such a demand involves no simple conception of logic or processes of ordering but instead involves a logical theory that recognizes the risks and problems of any effort to order human lives and recognizes, in particular, the ways in which European-descended philosophies have served as weapons of colonization and oppression. Royce’s logical theory,

I will argue, can provide resources to understand the kind of change sought by Fanon. It may be that the real potential of Royce’s logical theory is not what it will add to the philosophical frameworks of indigenous people in support of their efforts to achieve self-determination. Its real potential may be what it can add to the self-criticism of those of us raised in the European tradition who have been a part of a system of oppression that in North America actively fostered the extermination of indigenous peoples and the acquisition of their lands. As part of a dominant culture, many of us have failed to see our role in the history of the lands we occupy. For better or worse, Royce’s logical theory may open the shades a bit to allow us to see our responsibility and failures as well as the conditions under which

RACE, CULTURE, AND PLURALISM 135 we can go forward. As Native American philosopher Taiaiake Alfred observes, “Change will happen only when Settlers are forced into a reckoning with who they are, what they have done, and what they have inherited” (Alfred, 154).

When Royce began his logical research in earnest in the late 1890s, he recognized that the implications of logic were found in human practices

and the order they bring at once to our thinking and to the world. In his 1902, “Recent Logical Inquiries and their Psychological Bearings,”

Royce surveyed what he took to be the cutting edge research in the field of logic. The paper, presented at the American Psychological Association as Royce’s presidential address, discussed the work of Franz Brentano, J. F. Herbart, and Edmund Husserl as well as the particular

recent psychological studies by Karl Marbe and Théodule-Armand Ribot. For Royce, this recent work had taken a bad turn by trying to separate psychology—which studied the operations of thought—from logic or (as he would call it later) the science of order. The problem, he believed, was that logic is continuous with the operations of thought such that thought, in particular acts of will, connected human desire and purpose, action in the world, and the experience of others. He concluded “Those who have studied abstract ideas as Ribot has done, or judgments as Marbe has done, have therefore attacked the problems of the thinking

process at the wrong end. They have tried to examine the corpse of a dead thinking process” (Royce, “Recent Logical Inquiries,” 131-32). By considering classifications as given, these theorists had considered the end of the process of actively ordering the world. “Live thinking,” he continued, “is the process of classifying our objects by suppressing, in their presence, certain of our possible motor acts, by welcoming, emphasizing, or letting go certain of our other acts, by becoming aware, some-

how, i.e., in some conscious terms, of these our positive tendencies and inhibitions, and by them regarding the objects in the light of the deeds that thus we welcome or suppress” (131-32). For Royce, the proper starting point for ideas is in the action of agents for whom an idea serves

an ordering purpose. In order to understand the process of ordering, theorists must try to understand “when, how far, and under what conditions, inhibition becomes a conscious process’ (132). One such process, he

proposes, is the practice of taboo, of establishing prohibitions and boundaries as well as modifying them and setting them aside. Taboo, as a widely shared practice, could be taken as an example of thinking shared

136 SCOTT L. PRATT across human groups and, as a result, is “significant from the humane point-of-view” (132).

In 1913, Royce returned to the topic of taboos in a paper titled “Primitive Ways of Thinking with Special Reference to Negation and Classification,” published in The Open Court. In this paper, he argued that human judgment, even in its most “primitive” form, is logical and framed by the operation of exclusive disjunction. His argument rests on his analysis of the practice of taboo, that is, the exclusion of certain things, places, or practices from use. Royce’s view stood against many of the dominant anthropologists and psychologists of the day, including Herbert Spencer (1891), F. B. Jevons (1896), Alexander Francis Chamberlain (1900), Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1910), and Franz Boas (1911) among others who argued that

taboos represented a block to knowing the world and evidence of the “pre-logicality” of “primitive” thought. Instead, Royce held that taboos were a means of “beginning, and even to some extent of educating, a certain formal exactness of thinking which was, in its place, an intellectual acquisition of serious worth and of momentous consequences” (Royce, “Primitive Ways of Thinking,” 579-80). The practice of taboos, he held,

“is merely one notable case ... of this general type” that serves as the foundation for all manner of human judgment, including the judgments of science.

Even as taboos establish exclusions, Royce also observed that taboos are not always permanent and never simply given. Instead, taboos are a kind of experimental development in response to circumstances, and so, he suggested, it would be worthwhile to study how taboos are “taken off,” what ordering conditions become relevant to their application, and how these become principles of change. At the same time, taboos are not the product of a single agent but rather of a community and its interests. It is not enough for a single person, for example, to mark a particular place as forbidden. It is rather that a group comes to adopt long-term practices that recognize the excluded place and the way that exclusion fits into the life of the community. The resulting system of taboos, while elements of it are subject to change and elimination at times, also leaves room for the activity of individuals and the maintenance and development of the

community as a whole. At its center, the practices associated with a taboo involve intellectual processes “that consist in making negative judgments, in opposing one plan of action to another, in denying, in forbidding, and also in doing upon occasion the precise opposite of all

RACE, CULTURE, AND PLURALISM 137 these things, that is, setting aside negations, conflict, or prohibition” (Royce, “Primitive Ways of Thinking,” 580). Taken together with other systems of classification (e.g., classes of spells, charms, divinations, and omens as well as social classes and other classifications that organize experience), “their origin is psychologically explicable . . . in terms of the fact that when one seeks for decisive answers, ‘yes’ and ‘no,’ to practical

questions, or for spells to force a decision, ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ upon one’s social or natural world, one is first led to draw sharp lines between the friendly and the unfriendly in nature, the lucky and the unlucky in occurrences, the way to success and the way to failure in one’s own life... .

The result is that one forms the habit of defining classes with sharp

boundary lines” (598). The habit then supports the development of refined practices of making “sharp distinctions” and classifications “upon which a great deal of the logical structure of our sciences now depends” (580). On this view, taboos and other practices of exclusion and

inclusion provide the means for the differentiation of individuals and sroups as agents and the possibility of self-control, control over others, and resistance to control.

The idea that thinking is to be understood as a purposive action emerges in Royce’s work in The World and the Individual where “rational”

is associated with “purposive.” “At any moment your ideas, in so far as they are rational, embody a purpose. That we have asserted from the outset” (Royce, World and Individual, vol. 1, 441-42). “And so, we say, the empirical world is a whole, a life fulfilling the purposes of our ideas. It is

that or it is nothing. You labor in vain. The net of truth enmeshes your doubts” (368). The idea is in part drawn from the idealism in which Royce was trained and also, I would argue, from the pragmatism that was central

to Royce’s earliest work and then developed in his discussions with William James. In the supplementary essay to The Concept of God, Royce focuses on the act of choice as key to both the formation of the self and to the action through which a self is expressed (see Royce, The Concept of

God, 307ff.). An agent is individuated through the choice of a purpose that, in turn, serves as a guide in terms of which further actions are taken. Ideas emerge from this context of decision making in which an agent, for good or ill, must take action and where not taking action is nevertheless among the possibilities and likewise marks a choice that is compatible or

incompatible with the purposes at hand. This constituting relation between purposes and actions has its root in a disjunctive relation.

138 SCOTT L. PRATT In The World and the Individual Royce proposes that, “with regard to the constitution of the empirical world, . . . every contradictory opposition which the ideas can express, has its correspondent decision, yes or

no, in the facts of the truly real empirical world” (Royce, World and Individual, vol. 1, 367-68). This analysis is a key component of one of the two major interpretations of logic at the time: one framed by idealism in the work of F. H. Bradley (1905) and B. Bosanquet (1911) and the other framed by W. Stanley Jevons (1880), G. R. T. Ross (1903), and Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell (1910).! The former interpreta-

tion placed judgment and its “yes/no” and “either/or” determinations at the center of logical concern and identified the exclusive disjunction as the basic logical operation. Bradley wrote: “Disjunction means ‘or,’ and, viewed psychologically, ‘or’ stands for Choice. ... Where something is desired, where there are various ways of realizing this end, and where I find that I can not have all of these as a whole or at once—and where, by

this negation, action has been suspended—the result may be choice” (Bradley, 137).

The other line, manifested best in Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica, took inclusive disjunction as the basic logical operation and rejected the idea that judgment, with its dual emphasis on the will and action, was properly part of the study of logic at all. Royce entered the discussion as he attempted to work out the relationship between individuals and groups or parts and wholes. Inspired by Peirce’s work on the logic of relations and his reading in contemporary philosophy of math and geometry, Royce aimed to give an account of the relational character of individuals that at once preserved their character as agents—as rational or purposive beings—while at the same time recognized individuals as dependent parts of larger wholes and finally of an Absolute whole. He thought the answer could be found—or perhaps illustrated—through a formal system that included infinite discrete parts that were unified in a single complete system, what he came to call System ». Setting aside

the details and the problems with his formulation of his system in its initial form, it is useful to note that in his effort to build the system, he found the work of an obscure amateur mathematician, A. B. Kempe, who developed the so-called “betweenness” relation as the central operation for a logical theory of classes. This relation became for Royce the

“obverse,” or O-relation, that described mutually incompatible terms or actions.”

RACE, CULTURE, AND PLURALISM 139 Royce’s formal system was originally proposed in the supplementary essay attached to the first series of Gifford Lectures delivered in 1899 and published as The World and the Individual. Using the work of Cantor and Dedekind, Royce proposed an infinite self-representative system that, as a whole, is a single unified “act” but which also contains an infinite diversity of parts, each a distinct individual and defined by a recursive function that “represents” itself.’ In the second series of lectures, however, Royce sets aside the self-representative function as the central logical operation and focuses instead on the generative character of the betweenness relation as a means of understanding the emergence of individuals and their relation to larger and larger wholes. Betweenness here is the operation that both divides and connects two terms. As Royce describes it, “The generalization here founded upon Mr. Kempe’s paper will show us that contrast and comparison involve, in general, a relation of at least three objects, viz. a and b, and something else that helps us to keep them apart, or that illustrates the point wherein they differ, or that helps to determine the sort, degree, or direction of their difference’ (Royce, World and Individual, vol. 2, 80). While Kempe was primarily interested in terms as

fixed elements of an abstract system, Royce saw the discrimination between terms as itself an act of selection or classification. At the same time, the divided terms, a and b, also marked not simply discrete objects presented to an agent, but potentially distinct actions that could be taken by the agent. So a might be the option of staying at home while b might be the option of leaving. Regardless of the particular actions, the between-

ness relationship identified the general character of choice between things (ice cream or cake) and between actions (staying or leaving). In each case, some third thing or action stands between the alternatives and

this relation captures the structure of judgment, of making choices between incompatible alternatives. Significantly, for Royce, the options or terms taken as discrete are not solely the product of a single agent but are themselves relational products of other acts of judgment by this and other agents. While the emergent third element of the obverse relation marks the connection and disconnection between the related terms, it also takes on a peculiar logical character. This is best captured by an example proposed by Peirce in his 1898 lectures Reasoning and the Logic of Things. Consider,

Peirce asks, a clean blackboard on which a line of chalk has been drawn.

There are two fields now present: the slate and the chalk. But, Peirce

140 SCOTT L. PRATT observes, a third thing has also been introduced with the chalk, a division

between the two fields. Given, however, that there are only two things present, the character of the division must at once be slate and not slate and at the same time chalk and not chalk. If so, however, given the usual meaning of the conjunction, it would also be correct to say that the division is at once both slate and chalk and, at the same time, neither chalk nor slate. In effect, the division or boundary, from the standard perspective in which noncontradiction is required, is logically ambiguous or

indeterminate. From another perspective, the boundary is perfectly determinate as between the chalk and blackboard. Such a description can be applied as well to the will whose action classifies or divides a and b in the first place and suggests that the judgment, even as it is constrained

by the context at hand, nevertheless is both not fully determined and determined at the same time. As not fully determined, the will or agent is

indeterminate in the action it will choose until action is taken. At the same time, the agent is determined in that the agent is between the alternatives. The obverse relation—or the exclusive disjunction—becomes for Royce the central logical operator and, in his 1905 paper, “The Relation of the Principles of Logic to the Foundations of Geometry,” becomes the operator he uses to reframe System >, and, in his later work, serves as the foundation for his reformulation of the notion of agency.’ The same starting point, the idea of agency, serves to frame the ontological dimension of Royce’s system. In his 1895 paper, “Self-consciousness, Social Consciousness and Nature,” Royce makes a case for the presence of

diverse agents in the universe, each marked by different habits and interests. In general, self-consciousness emerges in relation to other conscious agents when, at a certain point, one begins to take on her or his own pur-

poses. Social consciousness marks the unification of purpose among diverse individuals. Nature marks the intersection of diverse agents and purposes that, through their own activity, condition the context in which human purpose is carried out. In the second series of The World and the Individual he concludes, “Nature would thus be the sign of the presence of other finite consciousness than our own, whose time-span was in general very different from ours, but whose rationality, whose dignity, whose significance, whose power to will, whose aptness to pursue ideals, might be equal to or far above our own” (Royce, World and Individual, vol. 2, 228).

Nature, in this sense, is made up of agents—relational beings with

RACE, CULTURE, AND PLURALISM 141 purposes—whose activities order experience and can be understood in part in terms of the betweenness or O-relation. In the last iteration of System >, Royce makes the centrality of agency clear. In his 1914 Principles of Logic he wrote, “Yet, whatever else the world

contains, if it only contains a reasonable being who knows and intends his own acts, then this being is aware of a certain relation, the relation between performing and not performing any act which he considers in advance of action” (Royce, Principles of Logic, 363). Further, “every sort of

action determines a kind of classification of some world, physical or ideal” and so “[determines] the existence and the meaning of types of orderly activity’ (364). The activities of agents as agents, he continues, display regular characteristics or modes of action that can serve as general logical principles that ground a system of logic in terms of which agency can be understood. These principles emerge inductively through attempts

“to presuppose that these modes of activity do not exist” (365) and the resulting principles can provide insight into how one should understand, for example, the relations of “yes/no” and “either/or.” The principle of negation, for example, the requirement that agents rule something out in order to act as agents, emerges by supposing that negation is not neces-

sary for agency. Of course, given that the supposition itself proposes to use the principle of negation in order to set aside the principle of negation necessarily reinstates the principle in action. The resulting test of such principles is not a transcendental argument in the usual sense, but rather a matter of action. The result is not a formal contradiction but a performative one that emerges in the attempt to set aside a particular activity. Significantly, the recognition and reality of pluralism is also necessary

for agency. Action with a purpose without distinct alternatives would not be action. Or rather, to suppose no alternative but then to act with

a purpose would reinstate a division between the act taken and its obverse. At the same time, since Royce supposes that all actions occur in a universe of agents, if there are alternatives, there must also be active relations between other agents and not fixed objects. To deny that there are distinct agents would also be to deny the existence of alternatives. And to act—even the act of denying pluralism—would practically affirm its necessity. Pluralism, from the perspective of the logic of agency, is inescapable.

142 SCOTT L. PRATT In sum, human individuals and human groups as agents differentiate

themselves and order their experience through a process framed by exclusive disjunction. The disjuncts, however, are not given, fixed or unchanging. Rather they are selections—acts of judgment conditioned by

past judgments and interests—made by agents and leading to consequences, anticipated and unanticipated. To recall the discussion of the practices of taboo, human beings are from the start agents who cannot escape exclusions and inclusions, but who also constantly find themselves between alternatives and indeterminate as to what will happen next.

It is perhaps surprising that Royce pays little attention to issues of pluralism in his work. Despite the necessity of pluralism within his logic

of agency, his treatments of experienced diversity seem narrow and conservative, often affirming the stereotypes and prejudices of the day. He had the opportunity here, for example, to affirm the making of diverse communities, ethnicities, and races in the United States, to acknowledge the agency and diversity of American Indian peoples, the relevance of logic for reform and revolution. He does none of this. Yet despite his own neglect of these issues, I want to conclude by briefly discussing how Royce’s logical theory may open up a set of resources that can serve as diagnostic tools on one hand, and on the other as guidelines for challenging oppression and instating and reinstating the sovereignty of indigenous communities. Royce provides, in fact, a theory that is consistent with the dual (and apparently contradictory character) of the process of decolonization central to Fanon’s liberatory project. Even as Royce sought to establish a formal logic that captured the processes with which agents ordered the world, dominant logical theory actively joined with the developing social sciences to establish a formal framework that would control both the policies of settler society and the means by which settlers and natives alike would understand themselves and their own liberation. On the side of logical theory, the advent of new college curricula and increasing interest in formal systems in mathematics and science fostered new attention to logic and the publication of key books that sought to settle what it meant to reason in a world of rapid industrial, economic, and scientific progress. William Stanley Jevons, author of a number of widely read books on logic (including several popular textbooks) summarized in his 1870 work, Elementary Lessons in Logic: “Before the reader proceeds to the lessons which treat of the most common forms of reasoning, it is desirable that he should give a careful

RACE, CULTURE, AND PLURALISM 143 attention to the very simple laws of thought on which all reasoning must depend” (Jevons, Elementary Lessons in Logic, 117).

These “laws” both define the Manichean world of the settlers as described by Fanon and, according to Jevons, “describe the very simplest truth, in which all people must agree, and which at the same time apply to all notions which we can conceive” (Jevons, 117). The laws are (1) Identity

(“Whatever is, is”); (2) Contradiction (“Nothing can both be and not be”); and (3) Excluded Middle (“Everything must either be or not be”) (117; emphasis in original). It is significant that Jevons actually presents the

laws as ontological statements rather than statements about propositions. The assumed connection between how things are and claims about them is central to the scope of the laws and their implications for the possibility of life outside settler society. If the only reality is one captured by settler logic, then even the hope of an alternative world outside settler society seems groundless. Agency in a world constrained by the laws of thought takes on a similarly narrow aspect. Jevons concludes, “All acts of reasoning

proceed from certain judgments, and the act of judgment consists in comparing two things or ideas together and discovering whether they agree or differ” (121). John Venn’s work a few years later (1881) carried Jevons’s work further

arguing for a commitment to develop formal systems beyond the traditional study of the syllogism and practices of argument. Venn demonstrated

the possibility of multiple logical systems framed by the basic relations among the categories central to traditional logic. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the idea of perfectly general formal systems developed

from the basic commitments of traditional logic became the goal of twentieth-century logic. Its ground in the Manichean commitments set out by Jevons and others meant that it also defined the formal starting point for understanding pluralism—logical and otherwise—as a pluralism bound by consistency and rigid boundaries.

At the same time, in the social sciences these same commitments became the justification for ruling out broad conceptions of agency of the sort Royce advocated. Perhaps the best example of this transformation is found in the seminal work of James Mark Baldwin. Royce himself was quite familiar with Baldwin’s work and frequently referred to Baldwin’s idea that one’s sense of self emerged through a process of interaction and imitation of others. “The theory of the social basis of self-consciousness,”

Royce writes in the introduction to Studies of Good and Evil (1898),

144 SCOTT L. PRATT “is a theory which has many points in common with the views already published by Professor Baldwin in his well-known works on Mental Development in the Child and in the Race” (Royce, Studies of Good and Evil, x). The development of self-consciousness, on Baldwin’s account, is modeled on the widely accepted idea that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. “A similar analogy,” according to Baldwin, “when inquired into on the side of consciousness, seems on the surface true, since we find more and more developed stages of conscious functions in a series corresponding in the main with the stages of nervous growth in animals” (Baldwin, Mental Development, 15). This analogy leads him to affirm four

“epochs” in the development of “the race” and in the development of individual consciousness. The first, second, and third “epochs” involve the development of “sense processes,” motor adaptation, memory, imita-

tion, defensive action, complex motor coordination, “conquest, .. . offensive action, and rudimentary volition” (16), taken together as the “epoch of objective reference.” Finally, self-conscious emerges last in the “epoch of thought, reflection, self-assertion, social organization, union of forces, co-operation; the ‘epoch of subjective reference’” (17). The result is a genetic account of the emergence of “thought and things” which led

Baldwin to present a comprehensive theory of human reason as an evolutionary outcome. Not surprisingly, he adopted as the outcome the conception of thought offered by Jevons but also placed it in relation to the wider social relations that he sought to understand.

Human development, Baldwin argued in his three-volume study, Thought and Things (1906, 1908, 1911), required the progressive adoption of a logical framework that supported objective reference. The key to this adoption was not memorization of a set of logical rules but the rejection

of a particular (and “primitive”) conception of subject and object. Although devised independently, Baldwin and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, a French philosopher and anthropologist, each argued that “primitive” or “savage” people—natives from a Fanonian perspective—were “prelogical”

people because they adopted a view in which the world was populated by agents of all sorts who were capable of acting with purpose, joining seamlessly with others, and changing shape and character. Based on his examination of ethnographical data regarding diverse indigenous peoples, Lévy-Bruhl concluded “T have been able to show that the mental processes of ‘primitives’ do not coincide with those which we are accustomed to describe in men of our own type; I believe I have even been able

RACE, CULTURE, AND PLURALISM 145 to discover wherein the difference between them lies” (Lévy-Bruhl, 14). The difference, he insisted, was not a matter of logic: “from the logical point of view, [the human mind] is always exactly the same at all times and in all places” (18). And so, also from a logical point of view, the norms

of thinking are universal—the problem is “to find out . . . the way in which mental functions exactly like ours have been able to produce these [primitive] representations and their connections” (18). The “way” that

made for the difference was that “Primitive man .. . lives and acts in an environment of beings and objects, all of which, in addition to the properties that we recognize them to possess, are endued with mystic attributes”; they are, in short, agents (65). Rather than facing people whose world or at least ways of living in it are incommensurable with the ways of thinking and acting by “men of our own type,” “the mentality of inferior peoples, though not so impenetrable as it would be as if it were regulated by a logic different from our own, is none the less not wholly comprehensible to us” (71). Properly understood, then, “primitive people”—non-Europeans—“may be called prelogical with as good a reason as [they] may be termed mystic” (78).

Lévy-Bruhl rejects the idea that such thinking is either antilogical or alogical. Rather it marks a state antecedent to one where individuals have become logical. “By designating it ‘prelogical’ I merely wish to state that it does not bind itself down, as our thought does, to avoiding contradiction. It obeys the law of participation first and foremost” (78). Baldwin,

in summarizing his agreement with Lévy-Bruhl, defines the law of participation as accepting “different things as being one and the same, as occupying the same place at the same time, and [failing] to discriminate between the self and objective things” (Baldwin, Thought and Things, vol. 3, xil).

For Lévy-Bruhl and Baldwin, a view that accepts the possibility of an indeterminate or ambiguous position—a location, subject, or object that is both “different” things and the same—does not involve the adoption of a different logic, but the adoption of a prelogical ontology that is both a stage of development to be passed through and, as such, an “inferior” position. Baldwin concludes that Lévy-Bruhl’s law of participation “only confirms the thesis of the oneness and continuity of development of the

human mind; it does not suggest radical differences of nature or even abrupt differences in degree between primitive and civilized man. The race has passed, just as the individual passes, through the ‘prelogical’ as

146 SCOTT L. PRATT preliminary to and leading on to the ‘logical’” (Baldwin, Thought and Things, vol. 3, xiii). To become logical, on this account, is to modify both a particular ontology and a set of logical principles, replacing the principle of participation with the principles of settler logic. The development of proper agency then depends on a process of “cognitive ‘limitation’”

where communal principles dependent upon one’s community or tribe are replaced by principles that are universal and necessary. Through

this process of limitation, “the logical principles of contradiction and excluded middle emerge and the system of logical implication is developed” (78, n3). For Baldwin and Lévy-Bruhl, to be a member of civilized society—to be part of settler society—one needed to reject the idea of agency as conceived by Royce and its associated ordering principles and adopt the significantly narrower notion of agency in which one’s ability to act with a

purpose is radically constrained by impermeable boundaries and the elimination of difference. However, despite his agreement with Baldwin on the social origins of self-consciousness, Royce’s conception of agency marked his dissent from the developing conception of a savage/civilized

continuum. From the perspective of Baldwin and developing social science, the ability to understand others (and one’s self) must occur in a context where proper agency is well behaved and stable. Diversity, while not ruled out, becomes a diversity of parts within a single systematic whole. When policy questions were raised, as they were for American Indians in the 1890s and into the twentieth century, the problems could only be understood, as Fanon would predict, through a lens of settler logic. Worse still, many of the oppressed, who sought to transform the circumstances of their people but were also trained within the settler’s academy, could only engage the process of liberation through a system predicated on the rejection of sharp cultural differences. Royce’s logic, though not used as a resource at this time, nevertheless offered a radical alternative within the dominant culture to recognize a different notion of agency, broader in its outlines and greater in its potential for the recognition of others. On this account, it was no accident that C. I. Lewis—a student of Royce, a leading twentieth-century logician, and the first to develop a formal modal logic—claimed that Royce’s logic made possible new continents of meaning.” As I said at the beginning, Fanon identified the character of a colonized land as one framed by a Western logic of exclusion. The categories of

RACE, CULTURE, AND PLURALISM 147 native and settler are historical products in service of the power and interests of European imperialism. From the agential perspective developed here, Fanon’s critical view makes sense. The divisions or compartments of the colonized world are not the product of something natural and inevitable. Oppression and poverty are the products of the actions of agents. Oppression is a practice that involves judgments that establish species of difference and then imposes values on them. As Fanon argues, throwing off an oppressive system of order is not a process that does away with order but rather one that reverses the order by force. Still within the frame of an exclusive logic, natives may come to overthrow the settlers, take back their lands, and reclaim their sovereignty. But such a reversal is not necessarily change, and it certainly does not eliminate the logical

inheritance of the West. What moves in that direction is, in a sense, movement beyond a system of given classifications and relations of inclusion and exclusion toward a dynamic system that recognizes the place of agency and its reliance on the relation of betweenness. The first recognition marks the presence of responsibility in the construction of classes. The second recognition affirms that boundaries are porous and the source of new ideas and that the sovereignty of the people implies a world of other agents and peoples, also sovereign, who must now interact with each other. This is a key development. To follow Royce’s logic by way of explanation, Fanon recognizes both the character of boundaries and the need for exclusive relations both as conditions for pluralism. The unusual character of logical boundaries anticipates the unusual character of lived boundaries in the context of lived pluralism. There are a number of objections, but if the goal is to establish sovereignty one might object, in particular, that the Roycean framework would affirm the boundaries that would permit and encourage the flourishing of “native intellectuals’—the sellouts, according to Fanon—who have adopted the settler mentality, entered their institutions, become professors and entrepreneurs and so sacrificed the sovereignty of the people. The same objection might include the observation that such boundaries would also affirm the possibility of settlers intervening in the sovereign concerns of the oppressed and so preserve the power of the settlers and obstruct the liberation of the people. Such objections would be correct. Yet boundaries are by nature disordered and nondirective. That they create space to establish sovereignty is as much a part of their character as is the fact that they create space to destroy sovereignty. Royce’s logic

148 SCOTT L. PRATT does not save the settler from revolution or the native from oppression. By itself, it provides a ground map of agency that includes the bad news that agents are responsible for the systems in which they live: the settlers for the evil they bring and the natives for the violence they choose or set aside. But as purposive agents all, the logic of agency points toward things

that can be recognized and done to foster the future. For example, on a Roycean account, at issue in any judgment is a context conditioned by other agents who, as agents, can be treated with respect or not—but in any case will be agents and will, as agents, judge for themselves. From this perspective, values that serve as norms, species, classes, hated groups, and

loved ones are all part of a world of judgment and interaction. What Royce adds to the discussion is recognition of agency and responsibility. Rejecting Royce does not change the fact that agency begins with exclusion, but rather confirms the conclusion that the logic of agency is at the

root of both oppression and liberation. A consequence for today of recovering Royce’s logic is that it has the potential to set the stage for a liberatory politics of agency in an increasingly pluralistic world.

PART TWO

PRACTICAL EXTENSIONS

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EIGHT

INDIVIDUALS AIN’T ONES Who We Are in Royce’s World Douglas R. Anderson

ED

If use the colloquial expression in the title to bring to mind a story Josiah Royce occasionally told to his students. In the story, two brothers are

riding a train and the younger points skyward and asks, “What’s out beyond the sky?” The older brother answers that there “ain’t nothin’ out there.” After puzzling for a moment, the younger one asks, “What is it that ain't?” One aim of the story is to show the democracy and ubiquity of metaphysical wonder—it’s a natural and ordinary human phenomenon.

This theme is appropriate to my present task inasmuch as I believe Royce’s metaphysical speculations have practical import for our everyday experiences, and this is in part what I hope to show in what follows. The idea underwriting the life of this volume is that Royce’s thought

holds some meaning and import for our present experience—meaning and import that are of more than historical interest. My aim, therefore, is to give expression to one feature of this idea—to show the meaning Royce’s conception of an individual might have for us in the twenty-first century. To accomplish this I will begin with a somewhat technical, though brief, foray into Royce’s World and the Individual to see what he {151 $

152 DOUGLAS R. ANDERSON believes an individual is. I begin by pointing out that Royce, in describing God as the Individual of individuals, flirts with what Charles Peirce called

“Nominalistic Platonism.” Just how Royce avoids such nominalism is what makes his conception of an individual both striking and relevant to our own present experience. In making my case, I will draw on Peirce’s thought, since, as Frank Oppenheim has clearly shown, Royce’s connecting an account of the individual with his rejection of nominalism was in part catalyzed by Peirce’s response to Royce’s work in the Conception of God and by Royce’s presence at Peirce’s 1898 Cambridge lectures.' This relevance is especially clear in considering finite individuality. To bring the ontological considerations back to earth, I will conclude with a look at some specific ways in which Royce’s notion of individuality might be considered to be important for our own popular culture.

I Sami Pihlstr6m maintains that Royce “developed a mixture of pragmatism and Hegelian idealism . . . that was closer to Peirce’s views than were most other classical formulations of pragmatism.”* Royce acknowledged his debts to Peirce and, as John Hermann Randall suggests, Peirce pointed Royce in the direction of two central ideas: “the mathematical notion of an infinite series, and the notion of a community of interpretation.”° This is true enough, but embedded in both are elements of Peirce’s scholastic realism—the notion that generals and vagues are real. As Oppenheim argues: When Royce is deliberately vague and general at the start of the Problem [of Christianity], the contemporary reader may tend to accuse

him of slack thought. Such a judgment would overlook the mature Royce’s discipleship under America’s “Exact Logician,” Charles S. Peirce, who argued that we must cultivate vagueness and generality to

achieve the indeterminateness our minds also need. If a person confuses being clear with being determinate, he insulates himself from Peirce’s insight that our minds have a rhythmic need to be both determinate and indeterminate.*

Oppenheim is referring specifically to Royce’s work in The Problem of

Christianity and in his later logical writings. I want to suggest that this insight was incipient, if not fully developed, in Royce’s conceptions of God and persons in The World and the Individual. Furthermore, I want

WHO WE ARE IN ROYCE’S WORLD 153 to suggest that this insight provided Royce’s notion of individuality with a richness not well matched in the rest of American thought of the twentieth century. IT

On the ontological side, Peirce’s scholastic realism, in some ways, merged

well with Royce’s idealistic commitment to the reality of relations, classes, and communities. As Oppenheim points out, Royce’s 1915-16 course on metaphysics is laden with such realist claims as, “To me, a social group may be a reality, an entity, which is just as real as an individual human being can be.”” However, in The World and the Individual Royce argued that we inquire because we seek “a passage to absolute determinateness” and part of our quest is “to know what the whole individual Being called the World is; and who the Individual of Individuals, namely, the Absolute, or God himself is.”° The immediate temptation is to think that Royce has returned to a fully Augustinian or Berkeleyan conception of God—fully determinate and fully determining. This was precisely Peirce’s worry about the nominalistic Platonism he attributed to Berkeley. As an idealist, Berkeley seems open to the reality of generals through the reality of God’s ideas as archetypes. But what he appears to provide is withdrawn in his nominalistic conception of God. Berkeley

overcomes materialism only by making God—and God’s ideas— determinate “things” which are characterized by secondness or radical individuality and otherness. The difficulty is that God, or God’s mind, remains an external entity, a thing—like matter, it stands over against our minds with no clear route of access. Here Peirce, framing a Berkeleyan ontology, found the epistemological dimension of Berkeley’s nominalistic Platonism: In the usual sense of the word reality, therefore, Berkeley’s doctrine is that the reality of sensible things resides only in their archetypes in the divine mind. This is Platonistic, but it is not realistic. On the contrary, since it places reality wholly out of the mind in the cause of the sensations, and since it denies reality (in the true sense of the word) to sensible things in so far as they are sensible, it is distinctly nominalistic.’

We can see, then, that conceiving of the “Absolute himself” as “the highest fulfillment of the very category of Individuality, the Individual

154 DOUGLAS R. ANDERSON of Individuals” might be problematic from this Peircean perspective (W1 1:39). There are two claims at work. First, we tend to align individuality

with oneness such that whatever is individual is whole by itself and bears no real internal distinctions or external continuities. This was Parmenides’s point in making his “it is” a unified whole. In the second part of “The Way of Truth” Parmenides seems to equate Being and Idea or Thought. However, whatever fruitfulness this equation suggests is quickly withdrawn when Parmenides, pursuing the logic of asserting being, maintains that there can be no internal distinctions, negations, or movements within “it is’—we are left with a fixed “one” with no avenue to differentiation or change. The second claim, and one that Royce embraces, is that individuals are unique and, as such, are distinguishable from each other. Now, if our conception of entities or things is nominalistic, we will consider uniqueness to mean that all individual things are other to each other—they are at best externally relatable. Therefore, an Individual of the highest order would still be other than lesser, finite individuals and there would be an ultimate fragmentation of individuals. Depending on one’s conception of the whole of things, there would be either an external discontinuity or an internal differentiation. To call God an individual, then, seems to lead us in the direction of nominalistic Platonism and all the ontological—not to mention practical—problems that entails. Interestingly, however, Royce

reconceives what it means to be individual and in so doing embraces some important features of Peirce’s realism. Royce begins by dissociating his conception of individuality from the tradition of Eleatic oneness. He argues that “by calling a real Being One,

[the Eleatic view] mean|[s] that this being is perfectly simple, having no parts or passions, no internal variety of nature, no complexity about

it” (WI 1:21). Thus, there is no room for finite individuals within the One. Another way of putting this is that the One is fully and finally determinate; in Parmenides’s thought, as we noted, it is “full” with no room for more or less, no capacity for change or variety. From a Peircean perspective such a one is thoroughly “second” and therefore bears no marks of living—pure secondness is death. For these reasons, Royce steadfastly resisted the Eleatic version of individuality as oneness. It was simply an early version of nominalistic Platonism. Interestingly, in Jamesian fashion Royce subjected logic and reason to experience at this juncture. For Royce, an individual is precisely that which exhibits life

WHO WE ARE IN ROYCE’S WORLD 155 and variety. And to do this, it must be defined not by its oneness but by its uniqueness. Uniqueness, therefore, must not be misconstrued. Our tendency is to make uniqueness the measure of external otherness. But this is not what Royce has in mind. In The World and the Individual Royce remarks: “Whatever is unique, is as such not causally explicable. The individual as such is never the mere result of law” (WI 1: 467). Uniqueness thus means

that the individual is not reducible to antecedent conditions and that its difference is a matter of will, not merely of intellectual description. Furthermore, irreducibility to antecedent causes is not equivalent to being unsituated or without context. There is no need for the unique to be unrelated—indeed, as Royce sees it, outside of being related and situated, one would not notice “uniqueness.” As Oppenheim points out, Royce wanted to insist “on the ‘relations of life’” for individuals.* Without

them we would again be in a realm of Eleatic oneness. Gabriel Marcel

provides insight into Royce’s position by asserting that for Royce the individuality of the Absolute is to be found in the Will.’ God’s indi-

viduality is thus marked not by radical otherness but by God’s selfexpression. “The Absolute,” Marcel points out, “is unique and expresses itself in the concrete and differentiated individuality of the universe.”’° Two important upshots follow: that the individual of individuals is creative and that it is, in its individuality, multifaceted. Creative expression reveals individuality. At this juncture, I return for a moment to Peirce’s realism that defends the reality of the vague and the general. What we colloquially call “things” are not essentially concretized seconds but are general in nature. This is perhaps especially true of persons. As John Boler points out: “As to the ordinary notion of a person or ‘thing’ as an individual, Peirce more or less denies it. The person or thing is a ‘cluster’ of potentialities, and therefore a habit or law itself.”'’ Royce makes a similar claim by rethinking what it means to be an individual. Royce’s individual, unlike the Eleatic One, must embrace and embody both the vague and the general. To be creative is to engage in a selective actualization of the possible—and the possible is that which, in part at least, is inherently vague. The precision (or precising) of the vagueness is an activity of self-expression or self-creation; that is, to be creative is to express oneself in specific ways, in concrete productions out of the background of a vague or general idea. Seen in this way, individuality is something being achieved. It is vital and ongoing.

156 DOUGLAS R. ANDERSON Second, to be an individual, for Royce, is to hold together a plurality: The “world of a Self... is in its principal form of expression embodied in a discrete series of acts, of individual expressions, of stages of self-representation

and of self-revelation” (WI 2:105). This is what Peirce suggested, for example, with his semeiotic conception of the self—an individual is a developmental continuum that enables us to comprehend and apprehend its constitutive aspects or features. Getting at this issue, Marcel directs us to Royce’s repeated use of a melody as exemplary of individuality. “Individuality,” he says, “belongs only to that which has a meaning.

And if we wish to understand Royce’s thought completely, we should think of the original quality of a melody which constitutes a unique whole.”’* But to be many in unity is precisely what Peirce meant by real generality. A law, for example, holds together multiple instances; a kind governs a set of particulars; and an idea—a living idea for Peirce—exhibits what he called in his essay “The Law of Mind,” a “developmental tele-

ology.” This developmental teleology is a living general and it best expressed, so Peirce thought, what we mean by personality. Royce’s conception of the individual can be understood in much the same way—that is, his individual, while unique, is a living general that is able by its will to

express itself through its internal diversity. Indeed, its uniqueness is revealed through its self-expression. Thus vagueness and generality are both brought to life by Royce, especially in his fourth conception of being, just insofar as individuality is non-Eleatic and non-nominalistic.

I In moving from the Absolute to the finite individual, we lose completeness but not the other Roycean traits of the individual. And it is here, I think, that Royce’s thought remains especially significant for our contemporary culture. Like the Absolute, we finite individuals achieve and

identify our individuality through selective attention, affection, and activity. As Marcel notes, “it is not a question of having, but of being, i.e., of making ourselves.” Our individuality is what we aim to achieve; it is not a simple ontological trait with which we are born. We are “works in progress” and “unfinished business.” Individuality is something we

can achieve for better or worse, or it is something we can altogether fail to achieve. For Royce, as for his friend and antagonist William James,

WHO WE ARE IN ROYCE’S WORLD 157 we finite individuals are both at risk and responsible—life is not completed or lived a priori. Though finite, we live with the same stakes as the Absolute. To become

individuals we must learn to express our own meaning; we cannot be reducible to antecedent causes. As Royce put it, “we finite beings live in

the search for individuality, of life, of will, of experience, in brief, of meaning” (WI11:42). Such searching is not passive but active. Alternatively

stated, when it is passive, it expresses a chosen passivity. In short, we must attend, search, create, and work to establish our individuality. This precarious and adventurous endeavor of “individualizing” ourselves

involves “the unique significance of the present expression of our will” (WI 1:468).

Royce’s understanding of self-expression is importantly subtle. For

the modern or enlightenment thinker, the question is usually put in the following way: “Is this individual ego the cause of this particular action?” For Royce, in contrast, causal efficacy is not the essential factor

in establishing individuality. The individual indeed does not appear except as the expressed, unique meaning: “not by virtue of its potency as a physical agent is our human action a free cause,” Royce argues (WI 1:468). And he adds, “We do not say, Your free will creates your life.

For Being is everywhere deeper than causation. What you are is deeper than your mere power as a physical agent” (WI 1:469). You are your

expression, not merely an external cause of it. Peirce’s scholastic realism again comes into play. The finite self is not an ontologically isolated “one” in a causal series; it is rather the general, developmental purpose that is expressing itself in its history or career, using causality for its own ends. As suggested above, Peirce’s own account of personality works well in concert with Royce’s conception of finite individuality. Peirce says:

But the word coordination implies somewhat more than this; it implies a teleological harmony in ideas, and in the case of personality this teleology is more than a mere purposive pursuit of a predeterminate end; it is a developmental teleology. This is personal character. A general idea, living and conscious now, it is already determinative of acts in the future to an extent to which it is not now conscious."

The key for both Royce and Peirce is that this developing telos, or purpose, is both open and constrained—it defines its possibilities by its

158 DOUGLAS R. ANDERSON erowing purpose, but the purpose and its specific acts are open to revision as one lives. Thus, too, Royce’s finite individual is, like God the individual, a many in a one, but not just in an aggregate way. We might describe an individual, for example, as a series of causes over time. Even if true, this

is incomplete. It misses the meaning that transcends the moments of the series and gives the series its uniqueness, its sense of self. It is this meaning that, as Royce suggests, calls our attention to the “individual”

and in a primordial way beckons us to “name” the individual. Thus, when one succeeds in being individual, one becomes like a melody in creative development. My uniqueness is not ultimately found in fixed traits, but in the temper, tone, and quality of my evolving identity. In The Return of Martin Guerre, it is this uniqueness that finally makes a differ-

ence in distinguishing the original Martin Guerre from his stand-in. Again in Peircean language, Royce’s individual is not one-categoried but involves all the categorial modes: the generality of thirdness, the uniqueness of secondness, and the vagueness and spontaneity of firstness.

In The Problem of Christianity and his later lecture courses, as Oppenheim and John Smith have sufficiently shown, Royce more thoroughly develops the notion of the individual, demonstrating the importance of its social dimensions. Because of the potential richness of

individuals in communities, our understanding of them “is a process capable of simply endless variation, growth, and idealization.”!? But even in the earlier work to which I have been attending, the conception of the individual is unique and provides a challenge to those of us who would like to consider ourselves individuals. Royce’s challenge is as follows: (1) we are not born individuals, but must achieve such status; (2) we cannot

achieve individuality by causing particular objects or events, but must continually express our unique meaning (our developing telos) in such a way that when others encounter us they will be forced to attend to us as individuals; and (3) we must understand that we are always at risk of becoming a nominalistic entity, of fading into anonymity and isolation in a causal series. In short, Royce challenges us to identify and express our

angle of vision on the world, and to act on this angle of vision—in Jamesian terms, he challenges us to be different in such a way as to make

a difference. As James put it in “The Importance of Individuals”: We “pick our heroes from history . . . in imagining as strongly as possible what differences their individualities brought about in this world.”'® Finally, Royce puts us on notice that our individuality in its growing

WHO WE ARE IN ROYCE’S WORLD 159 generality and in its creative vagueness, is always open to failure. Contrary

to what some readings of Royce claim, his finite individual is not consumed by a pantheistic Absolute. Rather, the individual’s developing purposiveness helps explore the variety of ways in which the Absolute’s own growing purposiveness might be met. To sharpen the import of Royce’s view, we can contrast it with Richard Rorty’s conception of the strong poet who engages in ongoing self-revision.

The essential difference is that Rorty’s nominalistically described poet simply changes—its revision is not developmental but is the arbitrary changing of identities according to the contingent shifting of one’s desires.

Rorty’s self-revision is modeled on Kuhn’s notion of a paradigm shift where there need be no translatability from one paradigm to another. On such a scheme one can literally remake oneself with no concern for one’s past. In contrast, Royce’s realistically conceived individual develops continuously such that it expresses a meaning; its changes occur against

the background of its already defined career and its generally expressed purpose. These are differences that make a difference in how we interact with the strong poet or the Roycean individual respectively. IV Royce was a philosopher’s philosopher—he knew the arguments, he read the tradition very closely, and he seemed willing to argue with all comers. At the same time, as John McDermott has routinely reminded us, Royce

was a Californian with an abiding affinity for the practical side of life. Even his philosophical writings often pushed in this direction. In his Presidential Address to the American Philosophical Association, he said, “Whatever may be our interest in theory or in the Absolute, we are all accustomed to lay stress upon practical considerations as having a funda-

mental, even if not the most fundamental, importance for philosophy; and so in a general, and, as I admit, in a very large and loose sense of the term, we are all alike more or less pragmatists.”'’ What practical effects might we find, then, in Royce’s conception of the individual? In bringing my remarks to a close, let me suggest several avenues we might pursue in answering this question. Let us consider first what it would mean—and not mean—to teach a

Roycean individual. Most notably, we would not be led to treat such students as objects in a causal series. This may sound obvious, but it is the

160 DOUGLAS R. ANDERSON fact that it has not been obvious to Western educational theorists for some years that makes Royce’s account of the individual so immediately pressing. Despite much lip service to treating students as individuals or persons, the majority of texts for teaching teachers still employ a baseline behaviorism that treats students as effects to be caused or as objects to be manipulated. The take of the Roycean teacher would be quite otherwise. One would need to find ways to elicit and enable self-expression. Students would need to be allowed and encouraged to explore their own meanings and to work to develop and act on these meanings. The teacher would not, however, fall into simply allowing students to do as they desired— this would be more in line with Rorty’s notion of revision. Royce’s individual grows in an historical and social context of which the student must be aware to begin to find her own meaning. The aim is not to have the student become a mere functionary of the world, God, or the Beloved Community, but to be a unique contributor to the world’s creative development. The differences may seem subtle, but for anyone who has spent

much time teaching, the actual effects have little subtlety. On the one end, we have encountered students who wait passively for something to

happen or for someone to interest them in something. At another extreme, we experience students who simply want their way without any commitment to work—they “express” but without a constraining sense of purpose. As Roycean teachers, we would look for ways to encourage our students to live in between these disempowering extremes. Exploring ways to bring students to their individuality would entail that what has come to be called “assessment” in teaching would be radically altered. As Royceans, we could not focus on specific tests, exams, or outcomes. In addition to tests and other such common measures, we would need to engage in individualized conversations concerning what a particular student means—her aims, capacities, accomplishments, limitations, and so forth. We would also need to place emphasis on the student’s tools of self-expression in all fields: math, science, humanities, and arts. I am well aware that some resist this sort of assessment as soft, nonrigorous, or hopelessly “subjective.” But as any athletic coach well understands, the rigor is not a function of quantification; rigor lies in the attitude of the assessor and the relationship established between the assessor and the student. If rigor were simply a function of quantification, we would be

hard pressed to understand how great figure skaters or ballet dancers are developed through training and teaching. The same is true more

WHO WE ARE IN ROYCE’S WORLD 161 generally for learners of all kinds. We, as teachers and assessors, need to

speak at length about a student’s purpose, or telos, in its developing expression to “assess” a student—we need to meet students in their unique individualities. A second place I would turn to explore the upshots of Royce’s conception of the individual is creative endeavor. Under Royce’s conception of the individual, creativity would be neither the sheerly contingent causing of new phenomena nor a deterministic working out of fully determinate

ends. This is the point of Oppenheim’s remark quoted at the outset, when he asserts that the human mind aims at once for both determinacy and indeterminacy. This nicely describes creative endeavor. Our selfexpression is determinate just insofar as it works toward an end with a purpose. But the end and purpose are general not specific—they might

be fulfilled in a variety of ways. Moreover, the finite creator is in a position to alter the very nature of her purpose and end as she goes. The very vagueness of the purpose leaves it open to modest revision over the

course of the creative process. Thus, from a Roycean point of view we will fail at creative expression precisely when we overdetermine or underdetermine our actions; again, this simply reflects how we might lose our individuality. Understanding creativity in the way of the Roycean individual enables us to avoid the frustrations and limitations of one who tries to be radically novel or of one who is stymied by thinking novelty is not at all possible. It is just the uniqueness within the continuity of the world and of social conditions that marks out what is creative for human creators.

The practicality of Royce’s conception of the individual might be pursued in a variety of other venues—coaching, managing, effecting political transformation, and so forth. What difference, for example, would it make to how we conceive of a perpetrator or a victim of a crime? How might the legal definition of a “person” be affected? How might it affect our conception of the possibility and responsibility of role models? What would it mean for child rearing? How might it affect medical decisions involving questions of euthanasia? It is, I think, an idea that makes a difference—and it makes a difference to the way we conduct our lives here and now. Given the ontological looseness with which we tend in the popular world to think of each other, it would be useful to hear Royce’s voice even if, in the end, we are not convinced by his claims.

NINE

RACISM, RACE, AND JOSIAH ROYCE Exactly What Shall We Say? Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley

ED

osiah Royce, like other American philosophers of the first decade of

| the twentieth century, stressed the importance of philosophy for human affairs.' Royce argued ethics grounded all philosophy’ and, like William James and John Dewey, he believed that one of philosophy’s tasks was to clarify social issues and to facilitate formulation of effective solutions to personal and social problems. One of the critical problems of his time was racial conflict, a problem that continues to be critical in

our time. In 1908, Royce published a book called Race Questions, Provincialism and Other American Problems,’ which contains among its essays one entitled, “Race Questions and Prejudices,” an essay that focuses specifically on the race problem in America in his time.* This essay has been the subject of various interpretations and some controversy.” Some interpreters argue that this essay identifies Royce as standing out among his contemporary philosophical colleagues, particularly the classical pragmatist school. Thus, Shannon Sullivan writes that “with the exception of W. E. B. Du Bois and perhaps also Jane Addams, no other { 162 }

RACISM, RACE, AND JOSIAH ROYCE 163 major figure associated with pragmatist philosophy substantially addressed issues of race and racism in his or her written work, nor did so as early in the twentieth century as Royce did.”° In a book dedicated to the topic of pragmatism and the problem of race, it is asserted that the writings of the

founders of pragmatism reveal little interest in racial questions, and Michael Eldridge, in his fine essay on Dewey in Pragmatism and the Problem of Race, writes: “For some Dewey is a moral as well as a philosophical hero. They, I should think, are embarrassed by some of Dewey’s statements and actions in regard to racial matters .. . in matters of race he was sometimes out front (his analysis of race as a practical but not a biological reality, the founding of the NAACP and the Odell Walker case) but he was often less than heroic (the NAACP address, his failure to write for Crisis, and his lack of intimacy with African Americans).”” Thus, Charlene Siegfried criticizes Dewey’s NAACP address as lacking in deep understanding of the fundamental reality of racism as a problem for African Americans.® A much more critical stand is taken by other interpreters toward the views or actions of philosophers whether they are pragmatists or of another perspective. This is particularly the case with Tommy Curry, who believes that praising white thinkers for their ideas on race, especially

if they promote assimilation and colonialism, adds to the “ideo-racial apartheid” of philosophy, a discipline that categorically excludes the contributions of black thinkers from philosophical conversations on race.’ I entirely agree with Curry that philosophy as a discipline has excluded numerous voices from its field of “respectable” discourse and scholarship, and certainly most egregiously, black voices. It is my hope, however, that philosophers of any race or background be willing to engage racial issues. Tackling crucial social issues and seeking possible solutions, even if temporary, is a significant task of philosophy. All of us are “raced,” and thus we bring different experiences to discourse about race. As Shannon Sullivan has aptly demonstrated, though, many identified as “white” seem to maintain an ignorance or detachment in this regard, and they often do not even understand their own race, mixed race, or other complex background. And all of us are products of our time and background, as were Royce, Dewey, and others. This does not excuse or explain, but it does point to the complexities of the race question, the problems of distance and abstraction, and the need for a more nuanced understanding of race as a constituent of experience."°

This essay seeks to address some of the criticisms raised against Royce’s view on race. These criticisms focus around the following

164 JACQUELYN ANN K. KEGLEY questions: (1) Is he really attacking the scientific racism in his time?; (2) Is

his discussion of Japan in his article a reflection of racial views in his time?; (3) Does his use of the case studies of Jamaica and Trinidad in his “Race Questions” and his relationship to Sir Sydney Olivier demonstrate that he is a “white imperialist?”; (4) Does his discussion of “assimilation” in the “Race Questions” essay and other works indicate that he is a white

supremacist?; and (5) What is his understanding of the phrase “antipathies”? However, before turning directly to these questions, I offer some reflections on the complexities of dealing philosophically with “race questions.” Complexities and Quandaries in Discussing the Race Question

Complexities beset the question “Is this philosopher a racist?” To determine any definitive answer to whether a certain philosopher was or is “racist” is quite difficult given the changing parameters of this question throughout different historical times and places and because “racism” comes in a variety of forms. There is “personal racism”; that is, a particular person’s attitudes about the abilities of an individual or group, asserting, for example, that this individual or group has intellectual or moral

deficiencies. Here there is stereotyping of an individual or group; for example, as “lazy” or “sexually immoral.” Thus, a person devalues another individual or a group—at the most extreme they are not viewed

as human at all, but rather as “subhuman.” Included in this category

would be derogatory remarks about individuals or hate speech. Individuals who fall into these areas presumably would be deemed “racist.” Thus, was Royce or are other philosophers “racists” in this sense?

Derogatory remarks about persons of a certain race might indicate that this is the case, but how definitive is this evidence in light of changing philosophical views and a philosopher’s more developed and total philosophical position? Ultimately it is not so clear what a person’s “personal” views really are."! A more insidious form of racism is “institutional racism,” also called

“structural” or “systemic” racism. This occurs within institutions such as governmental bodies, courts, private business corporations, religious institutions, and various educational institutions, such as universities. This kind of racism assumes differences in abilities or failure to meet certain

requirements such as those of citizenship, and it results in differential

RACISM, RACE, AND JOSIAH ROYCE 165 access to the goods, services, and opportunities of society. Did Royce advocate a form of “institutional racism” or was he unaware of the implications of certain of his political views (i.e., his apparent support of British

colonialism) that would seem to promote this kind of racism? In what follows I will address this and other questions about the classification “racist” as applied to Royce. As for history, especially US history, one needs also to note that US society has racialized different minority groups at different times: Native Americans, blacks, Mexican, Japanese, Chinese, and Eastern European

immigrants as well as certain religious groups, including Jews and Muslims. And it probably would not be an overstatement to say that most of these groups, if not all, still suffer from degrees of both personal and

institutional racism.'* One cannot miss the irony of two articles in the New York Times on August 23, 2011, that point to the conflicting aspects of racism in America: one discusses an apparent racially motivated killing in Mississippi and the other announces the opening in Washington, D.C., of the Martin Luther King Memorial.’”

Naomi Zack adds a further dimension to the complexity of dealing with the race question in her book The Ethics and Mores of Race.* Two themes of her book are very relevant here. The first is to distinguish

carefully, especially in treating the race question, between ethics and mores; ethics is a theoretical inquiry neutral of time and place while mores are concretely historical and tied to groups practices such as religion, tradition, and family. This important distinction helps us to understand gaps between ethical pronouncements and actual behavior.

Plato and Aristotle, in Zack’s view, initiated this distinction, but nevertheless both “legitimized elitisms that later supported false and racist taxonomies.”!? Secondly, in probing the history of philosophy in terms of ethical theory and race issues, she argues that philosophical ethics has been limited in its ability to deal with injustice and inequalities because of the historical interweaving of political theory, of ideas of

government, with its work in ethics. For example, Zack finds certain problem areas in the political views of various philosophers such as elitism, a lack of a notion of human equality, and an overvaluation of the form of property ownership without regard to what may be owned.'®

She argues for a more cosmopolitan view in building an ethics of race'’—a view for which, I believe, Royce’s later philosophy provides excellent grounding.’® I find both of these points and, indeed, Zack’s

166 JACQUELYN ANN K. KEGLEY historical analyses significant for any future exploration of the race question. Another complexity in any discussion of race questions concerns the understanding of what the concept “race” actually means. There has been an ongoing debate in philosophy of race about the reality of the concept of race, a question that has changed as the concept itself has evolved. “Race” has been asserted to be a scientific or biological notion—objective, inherited, and fixed. Various philosophers such as Kant and Hegel seem

to have advocated this view’? and even today many members of the public still hold to this idea of race. Changes in the field of genetics and evolutionary theory have refocused the question as “Does ‘race’ exist?” There are those who strongly argue that concepts of race and ethnicity do not correspond to anything real outside the mind and therefore the

concepts need to be abandoned. It is argued that genetic differences between races are minuscule compared to what is common; that there is not strict correlation between genotype and phenotype; and that “racial and/or ethnic” groups are not homogeneous.”” Confusing the issues still further, in a manner relevant to Royce’s time, was the view of Lamarckian evolutionists that certain characteristic traits acquired through historical

interaction with the environment were heritable. Anthropologists in Royce’s time often adopted this view. Thus, it is difficult to know what denying that “race” is a scientific concept means. And, it is undeniable that “race” has been and is a powerful social idea that has real social and psychological impacts. All of this sets the stage for my remarks on Royce and race. Is Royce a “racist”? Is this reflected in his selection of topics and sources of evidence for his arguments? Is he a racist relative to present standards? I believe that although Royce is associated with recognized racist theorists, he did not wholly accept their claims and he does call on resources that are less clearly racist. Another possible charge against Royce is that his theories are racist. Tommy Curry seems to take this position. I believe that Royce’s

theory of community, as developed in his later philosophy, is one that is not clearly racist in that it emphasizes cultural differences against biological and promotes a vision of racial coexistence. Loyalty to loyalty is, as a logical and ordering principle that seeks to foster diverse loyalties,

to criticize those that are problematic, that create barriers to the ideal of building a broader Beloved Community.*! Unfortunately, I cannot develop these claims in this paper but hope that they will be addressed in

RACISM, RACE, AND JOSIAH ROYCE 167 the near future by me and other scholars.” I still hold that Royce’s work offers much insight for dealing with both contemporary philosophical and social issues, but I remain open to the possibility raised by Curry t that Royce’s “philosophy has absolutely no theoretical merit in regard to the race problem.”*’ Although I have not come to such a strong conclusion on the matter, I also leave it to others to make their own judgments. Varieties of Racism

Racism in all its forms—personal, biological, environmental, institutional,

and internalized—is an issue that must be addressed by philosophers who believe, as many in the American philosophy tradition do, that one of philosophy’s primary tasks is to critically address social issues and problems that make our world one of injustice and unjustified inequality and suffering. In drawing on the resources of the founding thinkers of the

American tradition, however, one must not exalt these individuals as exemplars when they are not, nor promote ideas that were in their time and ours “wrong,” either morally or in other ways. Our work is to recon-

struct worthy insights from their work in a manner that can facilitate addressing more adequately contemporary problems including the race problem.” Further, this should be done in a way that also draws on the insights of other philosophical traditions and voices, but especially those neglected or discounted in contemporary philosophical discourse. An urgent task in Royce scholarship and on the question of race is to confront openly and honestly the criticisms leveled against those of us who have drawn on Royce for insights on the race question, particularly the criticisms of Tommy Curry and Marilyn Fischer. As indicated earlier, this essay is my attempt to undertake this task. In what follows I address various aspects of the criticisms against Royce’s view on race: (1) the value of his criticism of the scientific racism of his time; (2) his commentary on Japan; (3) his relationship to Sir Sydney Olivier and his use of the cases of Jamaica and Trinidad; (4) his understanding of “assimilation” and its role in colonization; (5) his understanding of provincialism as a key to

social order and advance; and (6) his understanding of the phrase, “antipathies.” Marilyn Fischer also has argued that Royce should be seen as a supporter to the “Lost Cause” movement that developed in relation to the Civil War and the South’s defeat. I will address this claim only briefly because it would involve a more extensive discussion of this concept in

168 JACQUELYN ANN K. KEGLEY his total philosophy and the limitations of this paper do not permit that discussion. Indeed, in undertaking the discussion of “Royce and Race” it is crucial to deal with specific texts written by Royce, with the ideas about “race” prominent in his time, but also to give attention to his total philosophy. In his introduction to the new edition of Race Questions, Scott Pratt takes this approach when he discusses the essays in the volume

in the context of Royce’s Philosophy of Loyalty.*?Although Royce published this work in the same year as Race Questions, some of the key

essays in the latter volume (“Race Questions and Prejudices,” 1906; “Provincialism,” 1902) were published at an earlier time. The much-cited article, “Some Characteristic Tendencies of American Civilization,” not included in the original volume, was published in 1900. In dealing with the value of Royce’s views for social philosophy, and perhaps even for the race questions, one must take into account his total philosophical corpus, but especially The Problem of Christianity (1913);°° War and Insurance (1914);*’ and The Hope of the Great Community (1916).”° One must also be

cognizant of the fact that, for Royce, philosophical ideas were always in process and changing as he dealt with both the criticisms and the ideas of others.

Scientific Racism

Some of the controversy about Royce’s views on race centers on his views of scientific racism and, in fact, Marilyn Fischer argues that Royce can be classed as a “racial conservative.””’ Racial conservatism is defined by Joel

Williamson as the view that took the inferiority of blacks to whites as a given and saw the task for society as needing to establish a social order where blacks and whites had a place and knew their place.*° In arguing for this classification, Fischer focuses on the views expressed by Joseph

Le Conte, who was considered by historian George Fredrickson as “the South’s most distinguished natural scientist.” He also identifies Le Conte’s 1892 essay, “The Race Problem in the South,” as “probably the

decade’s most sophisticated application of Darwinian theory to the American race problem.””! Fischer points out correctly that Royce fondly recalled Le Conte as his beloved science teacher at Berkeley who intro-

duced him to the beauties of science, and they remained lifelong friends. Le Conte called his view “scientific sociology,” holding that soci-

eties and races develop through stages from barbarism to civilization.

RACISM, RACE, AND JOSIAH ROYCE 169 More important, he argues that “the Negro race as a whole is certainly at

present incapable of self-government and unworthy of the ballot; and their participation without distinction in public affairs can only result in disaster.”°* Fischer wants to argue that Royce and Le Conte generally agreed in their views on race, particularly on the view of mind as evolv-

ing from primitive to civilized and that different races have differing capacities for civilization, although Royce expresses doubts about the fairness of the “civilization” test. Fischer admits she cannot “say precisely to what extent Royce shares Le Conte’s views,” but she does claim that Royce’s critique of science and race is not directed at the dominant scientific positions of the day, and he does not challenge the racist dimensions of these theories.°°

In my original essay on Royce, I identified him as an “antiessentialist.”°* In making this identification, I was not unaware, as some would imply, that one can be a racist on grounds other than biological; for example, seeing cultural factors as determinative of differences in races and especially in seeing some races as superior or inferior on these erounds. In this context, Fischer focuses on the racists of Royce’s time who were Lamarckian evolutionists operating with the “assumption that characteristics acquired through interaction with a given environment could become heritable and this process was a central factor in racial evolution.”*° She argues that Royce himself endorsed Lamarckian evolution in his 1898 piece, “The Pacific Coast,” when he claims that “the outer aspect of nature unquestionably moulds both the emotions and customs of mankind, insensibly affects men’s temperaments in which we know, somehow or other tend to become hereditary, however we may view the vexed question concerning the heredity of acquired characteristics.””° I would ask readers to note the cautionary phrases in Royce’s statement,

namely, “moulds,” “somehow or other tend.” He certainly held that climate and environment played an important role in molding human habits, ideas, and lifestyle. However, from my reading of his own writings on science, I am not convinced that there is adequate ground for labeling him a Lamarckian evolutionist. Royce did write on evolutionary theory and he taught this in his course

on “Natural Philosophy.” There is good evidence in his writings that he supported Darwin’s views, which would seem to raise doubts about the validity of calling Royce a Lamarckian. Royce also wrote a critique of the social, evolutionary views of Spencer and a piece on John Fiske, an

170 JACQUELYN ANN K. KEGLEY evolutionary philosopher whose views on cosmic philosophy had some similarities to Royce’s own views on nature (which posited an overall consciousness in nature, as expressed in his major work, The World and the Individual, vol. II).°’

Finally, in relation to science and racism, Fischer argues that Royce

does not discuss the dominant theories of the day regarding racial science. Fischer claims that Royce only names two popular scientists of the day—Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Lafcadio Hearn. She rightly names both of them “popularizers” and does not see them as serious

scientists. About Chamberlain she notes his exaltation of Teutonic, Germanic culture and his anti-Semitism and after castigating Royce for not mentioning the text’s anti-Semitism, she asks, “Given Royce’s allegiance to Anglo-Saxon forms of civilization, is he primarily irritated by Chamberlain’s exaltation of the Germans?”*® This question strikes me as somewhat bizarre given evidence of Royce’s great admiration for German culture and philosophy, an admiration that led to his deep consternation in the Lusitania affair.’ It is also not true that in his race article, Royce only refers to these two scientists. There is indirect reference to theories about skulls, a reference to Samuel George Morton’s Crania Americana, which was a highly influential book

that influenced such prominent racist scientists as Joseph C. Nott. It is certainly clear in the essay that Royce finds all present scientific theory unreliable. He cites as a discrediting factor the marshalling of all the resources of their science to “prove” that their own race prejudices are infallible. He likens the spirit of these theories to the conversations in The Jungle Book or Mowgli’s remarks addressed to Red Dog.*” These he says may be good natural histories; that is, observations of interactions of animals in their environment, but they are not science. Royce also cites the work of Adolf Bastian, one of the pioneers of the concept of the “psychic unity of mankind.” This is the idea that all humans

share a basic mental framework, an idea that probably influenced Carl Jung in his development of the idea of the collective unconscious. Bastian argued that mental acts of all people everywhere are the product of physiological mechanisms characteristic of the human species; the minds of all people, regardless of race or culture operate in the same way. Bastian also

argued that the contingencies of geographic location and historical background create different local elaborations of the “elementary ideas”

RACISM, RACE, AND JOSIAH ROYCE 171 he called “folk ideas.” But for Bastian these folk ideas were secondary to the underlying elementary ideas and could be studied to provide evidence for the universal ideas. Thus, Bastian’s work is the precursor to scientific, cross-cultural psychology. I believe Royce finds these ideas very attractive and, indeed, his “Pacific Coast” piece might be seen in this context. In his “Race Questions” article, Royce also cites James George Frazer, a Scottish social anthropologist influential in the early stages of modern studies of mythology and comparative religion. His most famous work, The Golden Bough (1890) documents and details similar magical and religious beliefs across the globe. He posited that human belief progressed through three stages: primitive magic, replaced by religion, in turn replaced by science. In his “Race Questions” essays Royce uses these references in his argument for commonality of the human race, speaking of “brothers in error and ignorance,” and he castigates civilization for its ability to burden the human race, to create evil, and to debase a group of people. He cites the increased mental illness in his time and it is in this context that he posits the fate of the German civilization if they had been “civilized” or taught by our “modern” methods of providing unlimited supplies of rum, rifles, and of machine guns. This tongue-in-cheek condemnation speaks to Royce’s time as well as ours, and does not seem to me to exalt the dominant white race that engages in these practices. Indeed, in his article on the “Squatter’s Riot,” Royce speaks of the avarice of the Anglo-Saxons for land, the claims of aggressive individualism,

and the notion of Manifest Destiny. Royce argues that the squatters viewed the Mexican land grants as un-American, a creation of base people,

and argued that conquest should make “American ideas” paramount in the country. Royce describes the view as follows: “Providence, you see, and manifest destiny were understood in those days to be on our side, and absolutely opposed to the base Mexican.”*' Royce drew a number of lessons about loyalty from this episode. Among these were (1) the difference between healthy and diseased states of social activity; (2) the prejudice of

the Americans toward the Mexicans, showing further the injustice in our

treatment of them and their rights and needs; and (3) the dangers of a wrongheaded idealism exemplified by Dr. Charles Robinson, who portrayed the issue in terms of the abstract “rights of man” and divine justice of the United States against the evil justice of the old, dark Spanish days. In light of Royce’s whole corpus of writings and philosophy, it is difficult

for me to see him as a wholehearted advocate for white supremacy, or

172 JACQUELYN ANN K. KEGLEY even just for Anglo-Saxon civilization—though he did admire key ideals of the British. I will turn to the contention about Royce’s exaltation of Anglo-Saxon civilization shortly in my discussion of the essay, “Some Characteristic Tendencies of American Civilization.”*“ The Case of Japan

First, however, I turn to Royce’s references to Japan in the “Race Questions” article. In the article, Royce notes the change in views about the Japanese people—that first, they were seen as “Plainly men of the wrong race,’ and then later as imitators, “a plastic race of wonderful little

children.” However, says, Royce, he found in his Japanese students a steadfastness in their own ideals. They were open to learning, but they made it clear that they “meant to use their learning for their own purposes.”*? Royce is making two points in his discussion of the Japanese.

The first he states clearly: that we have misjudged these people and done so on the basis of appearance and reports of travelers to his land (this I take to be a jab against Hearn, cited by Fischer and discussed below). We have, says Royce, judged them ignorantly and falsely and this teaches a broader lesson, namely, “the fallibility of our race judgments.”“* The second lesson that Royce would draw from this discussion is the one identified by Shannon Sullivan: “Royce’s comments about his

Japanese students’ learning style complement his earlier advice in ‘Provincialism, (written in 1902) about how to develop the provincial spirit... . Genuine provincialism enables one to develop loyalty to a local community that does not reply upon hostility toward other, and especially national, communities. One important way to nurture a genuinely provincial spirit ... is to have relationships with communities other than one’s own and to use what they learn from others to further the life of their own group.”* This point will be discussed further later in this article.

Fischer, in discussing the Japan example, notes Royce’s reference to the writings of Hearn, who plays on his travels in the Far East to portray himself as an expert in Japanese culture. Hearn apparently had nostalgia

for Japanese feudal customs and exotic aspects of Japanese culture. I have already indicated that Royce does not give validity to this work,

as evidenced by his reference to “reports of travelers who visit his land.” Fischer also cites Royce’s statement that “some of us may live to

RACISM, RACE, AND JOSIAH ROYCE 173

see Japanese customs pervading our land” as evidence that Royce considered the Japanese to be “inassimilable.” She does not cite the rest of the phrase, namely, “and all our professional imitators trying to be Japanese.” My interpretation of this set of statements is that it is Royce’s “tongue-in-cheek” criticism of the whole business of making judgments about the Japanese on the basis of certain stories, or appearances or even events—that they were exotic, that they were imitators, and now, after

the war that “they might be our superiors.” Again, Royce would say that this fluctuation of beliefs only demonstrates how fallible our race judgments are.

Curry also comments on Royce’s example of the Japanese. Curry asserts that Royce’s statement about being “no worshipper of any new fancy or distant civilization, merely because of temporary prominence” is “purposely directed at the myth that the recent emergence of an Eastern

power refutes the legacy of Western domination.”*° I cannot find any evidence in the text that this is such a reference—there is absolutely no discussion of that idea in the passage; it concerns rather our “false images”

of the Japanese. Curry then cites Royce’s statement: “The recent war shows us what Japan meant by imitating our Western ways, and also what ancestral ideals have led her sons to death in battle, and still hold the nation so closely knit to their Emperor.”*” Curry concludes: “What Royce

learned to admire in the Japanese was not novel at all, since he (along with many white intellectuals) saw in Japan the ideal of progress and civilization that up to that point was exclusive to the West.”** Royce does not say this in the text nor is there evidence that he sees Japanese modernization as the result of its imitation of Anglo-Saxonism. He, in fact, criticizes the notion of Japanese imitation. His remarks about the war are again about exemplification of the loyalty of citizens to their cause and to their emperor and their willingness to give their lives for such. One must

remember that Royce argues for respect of loyalty of others to their causes—this does not, in itself, say anything about the validity of the cause. This is also true, I believe, in his references to the loyalty of the Southern soldiers to their cause. And, in terms of Fischer’s assertion that Royce supported the “Lost Cause” movement, I would direct everyone to read his discussions of “Lost Causes,” which he primarily associates with Israel and Christianity and which he uses to illustrate the importance of a cause as ideal and perhaps never fulfilled, but operating as a goal as well as a test of hope and courage.

174 JACQUELYN ANN K. KEGLEY Jamaica, Olivier, and White Imperialism

In seeking lessons about moral and social problems, Royce, throughout his career, developed the comparative method, holding that it is by comparison that we learn. This idea fits also with his notions of how to build communities, namely, to learn from others and to thus improve one’s own community, a practice he finds admirable in the Japanese. Thus, in his “Race Questions” essay, he turns to two examples of places where race

relations were an issue, Jamaica and Trinidad. Before discussing this, I wish to address another point, namely, Royce’s use of “questions” in his essay. These, I believe, are to be taken as genuine questions and not assertions about the issue; rather they are ways of setting out the main question

at hand. Further, with Shannon Sullivan, I note that the main question Royce wants to deal with is “the urgent one faced in the US South at the turn of the twentieth century: how can white and black people live side by side with a minimum of ‘friction’?” One notes also that he sets this question in the context of the situation; namely, what is actually going on in the South at the time and the assumption made in the United States by many people that “the negro is in his present backward state as a race, for reasons which are not due merely to circumstances but which are quite innate in his constitution.” Royce clearly states this as a provisional assumption:

“For the moment, let that view pass as if it were finally accepted.” He promises, and does, return in the final sections of the essay to whether or not this perception of innate backwardness is correct. Royce finds the methods the South used to deal with race relations— insisting on white superiority over blacks and harsh methods of control—counterproductive because they increase racial hatred and unrest. Although he does not claim that conditions in Jamaica are ideal, there

appears to be much better relations among the people and a lack of fear about each other. In probing why this is the case, Royce raises the question of race mixture. Royce acknowledges that there has been race mixture in Jamaica and he acknowledges the existence of the mulatto race. However, Royce does not believe the motives behind such mixing

have been directed to racial equality. He writes: “It was the social inequality of the plantation days that began the process of mixture.” Further, he writes: If the often-mentioned desire to raise the “color” of their children, has

later led the colored population to seek a further amalgamation of

RACISM, RACE, AND JOSIAH ROYCE 175 the two stocks, certainly that tendency, so far as it effective, has been due to the social advantage of the lighter color—and not due to any motive which has decreased the ancient disadvantages under which the darker race has had to suffer. If race-amalgamation is indeed to be viewed as always an evil, the best way to counteract the growth of the evil must everywhere be the cultivation of racial self-respect and not of racial degradation.”

In light of this careful statement on race mixture by Royce, I am puzzled

by Curry’s statement that “whereas Royce views race amalgamation as evil, Olivier argues that it is, in fact, race amalgamation—what he later call race fusion—that has defused the race problem in Jamaica.”°® Clearly

Royce does not claim race amalgamation is an evil, but rather states the whole fact in an “if-then” way. Further, his concern here is to point out that much of the rationale for race amalgamation in the United States was about inequality, not equality or racial respect. Before turning specifically to Royce’s discussion of Jamaica, I will discuss Curry’s use of Olivier to castigate Royce on the colonial question. Royce and the Fabian scholar Sir Sydney Olivier (intermittent governor of Jamaica) did discuss Royce’s “Race Questions and Prejudices” piece and as a fact Olivier includes extensive quotations from Royce’s article in his own book, White Capital and Coloured Labour.*' In the first edition of his book, his main theme was the need for racial convergence through the interbreeding among different races. The second edition

of the book turned more to the theme of imperialism, with what one commentator calls an almost “Lenin tone.”°* Olivier, in the book, was arguing against the dominant “Dual Mandate Thesis,” namely that colonialism was about reciprocally related concerns, namely, the nation’s

own industrial interests and the progress of native races to a higher plane. Olivier argues: “No nation has ever colonized, annexed, or established a sphere of influence from motives of disinterested philanthropy

toward a native people.””? Olivier thought colonialism had proved harmful to the native populations. Olivier’s argument was that the Africans of the tropics could not accommodate to the European system

of monotonous, uninterrupted labor, which also involved separation from home. He thought the imposition of this alien economic system would tend to have a disintegrating effect upon the social fabric of the tribal life, bringing about demoralization, destitution, and finally social disintegration.”

176 JACQUELYN ANN K. KEGLEY Concerning the situation in South Africa, Olivier believed racism was endemic to southern Africa, its origin in the institution of slavery, and perpetuated by European capitalism, which created the black proletariat in direct competition with the white workers, who felt threatened by this new source of competition and thus responded by supporting various Color Bar Laws. Indeed, Olivier noted that it was the class of poor whites who were the most partisan supporters of South Africa’s racist policies. He regarded the South African whites as “the most dunderheaded white community in the world.”°? These comments are very perceptive and predictive of what was and did happen in the US South. Curry’s judgments about Olivier and his comparison to the so-called blatant racism and “imperialism” of Royce seem overdrawn in light of the context of Olivier’s work. Although Fischer is incorrect that Royce’s account is based on Olivier’s (“Race Questions” was quoted in Olivier’s work, not vice versa), she is correct in noting that Curry presents Olivier

as more “enlightened about race and more opposed to imperialism than Royce,” and yet, she argues, “these statements should be read in the context of Olivier’s socialism, his Lamarckian, and his presupposition of a three-tiered rather than a two-tiered racial caste system. Once these are taken into account, it becomes clear that Olivier and Royce were fairly close in their basic position.””° This leads me directly to Royce’s solution to addressing the problem of how the two races can live together without major friction. The answer, says Royce, is English administration and English reticence. The English gave the islands “good courts, which gave square treatment and gained the confidence of the blacks.” (Perhaps race relations in the United States would have been better if this had been true, either in the post—Civil War days or even now.) In addition, the civil service, the police, and the health system were organized in a way that also promoted confidence and, more important, allowed blacks to gain places in these organizations, albeit only in terms of serving blacks. The black population now became “conscious helpers” in maintaining good social order. And, argues Royce, they also gained self-respect. In addition to good administration, the English did

not flaunt their assumed superiority but remained reticent about this. “Superiority,” says Royce is “best shown by good deed and by few boasts.”””

Royce also draws the following lesson from his comparison of Jamaica and the South and his discussion of Japan: “In estimating, in

RACISM, RACE, AND JOSIAH ROYCE 177 dealing with races, in defining their supposedly unchangeable characteristics, in planning what to do with them we are all prone to confuse the accidental with the essential... . We are disposed to view as a fatal and over-whelming race-problem what is a perfectly curable accident of our present form of administration. If we are indeed of a superior race ourselves, we shall, however, best prove the fact by learning to distinguish the accidental from the essential in our relations with other races.”°® We were wrong, suggests Royce, in our views about the Japanese, and we

are wrong in our estimate of the blacks and in the belief that the race problem cannot be solved except by control and terror. What, then, about Royce’s supposed imperialism and his advocacy for a colonial type situation? I shall return to this as I discuss the essay on

“Some Characteristic Tendencies of American Civilization,” but first I will discuss Royce’s critique of the “test of civilization” argument preva-

lent in his time as well as his use of the term “antipathies.” This has already been somewhat addressed when I discussed his citing of Bastian and Frazer. I stand by my original conclusions in my previous essays on this topic that Royce does not see the test of “civilization” as having been fairly applied nor does he believe we can credit any people with the origin of civilization. He clearly states: “We do not scientifically know what the true racial varieties of mental type really are. No doubt there are such

varieties. . . . We are at present very ignorant regarding the whole

matter.” In the last section of “Race Questions,” Royce turns to the notion of “antipathies.” These he calls “fears” and notes that they have existed in different forms throughout human history, for example, between the Russians and the Poles. These he argues are “extremely capricious” and “suggestible.” Here I am reminded of a recent book by neuroscientist Susan T. Fiske, entitled Envy Up, Scorn Down.®” In this book, based on some of her experiments, she finds a strong suggestion that certain social

groups are perceived by human brains as quite simply, “less typically

human.” This and other data support her central argument that we humans constantly compare ourselves to one another and our group to other groups. (Royce argues that this kind of comparison involving interactions of praise and criticism is a crucial part of the development of a self.°') Fiske argues that the two emotions that result from these comparisons—envy and scorn—lie at the heart of a vast number of interpersonal, societal, and international problems. These, combined with the

178 JACQUELYN ANN K. KEGLEY concepts “competence” and “warmth” and societal stereotyping, lead to problematic societal relations and relationships of inequality. Turning back to Royce’s discussion of “antipathies,” his discussion would fit well into the discussion of Fiske’s research. He cites numerous

features that arouse our sensitivities and fears, including oddities of feature or complexion, strange dress, a scar, a limp, and any peculiarities in the mind. Royce argues that we are all instinctively more or less sensitive to such characteristics because we are doomed “to be interested in all facts that may prove to be socially important.” But then these become names, imitated, and insisted upon; made into a sacred revelation of truth—these have won a “name and a social standing.” And as they achieve this, these antipathies become the “phenomena of racial

hatred, of religious hatred, of class hatred, and so on indefinitely.” Sullivan argues, rightfully, I believe, that Royce is advocating that we as a society engage in changing these habits, these stereotypes and antipathies. They are “illusions.” Indeed, says Royce, what he has discussed in his article are “human illusions,” which should not be sanctified by the name of science. It is strange to me that Fischer finds evidence for

her conclusion that in referring to “antipathies” and to capriciousness Royce considers “race friction, as manifest in ‘lively and intense irritation, and race hatred as enacted by lynch-mobs, to be accidental and eliminable to a British colonial pattern of administration.” She is also wrong, I believe, in her statement that these are embedded deeply in our evolutionary inheritance. What is embedded in our evolutionary inheritance is the tendency to compare and to have envy or scorn; it is society that translates these things into sacred things and hatreds of various sorts. Further, Fischer connects Royce’s statement about “mobs” to a supposed belief that reason and habit alone could not control racial instincts. I find this connection shaky at best. Royce discussed “mob” behavior extensively in his essay on “Provincialism” and based his view on Le Bon’s research on this phenomenon. He is arguing for a genuine community that allows critical assessment and diversity, not emotional and unreasoning unconscious sympathy, and that thus seeks to engage in informed and intelligent action. Royce would agree with Fredrickson that “racial

prejudice is evident in the white response to the freedom of blacks”; he would not agree that it is inevitable or unchangeable. Indeed, this is his

RACISM, RACE, AND JOSIAH ROYCE 179

point about assuming that things are essential and not accidental. He would urge the building of better social relations and communities, “genuine provinces.” Fischer also uses her discussion of “antipathies” to bolster her argument that Royce is a “racial conservative.” I would agree with the label “conservative” and point to the excellent article by Randy Auxier on Royce’s conservatism,” but I do not agree with the label “racial conservative” in that it includes the notion that “blacks are inferior to whites” and that the task is to establish a stable social order “where blacks and whites each had a place, and knew their place.” Colonialism and Assimilationism

Curry, and to a lesser extent, Fischer, want to charge Royce with “blatant

white supremacy” and “rampant colonialism.”® In making this charge these two scholars focus on two essays, “Some Characteristic Tendencies of American Civilization” and “Provincialism.” In the “Tendencies” essay, delivered before the Aberdeen Philosophical Society, Royce is again engag-

ing in a process of comparison that he believes can help us attain new “forms of self-consciousness.” This is, in one sense, the “learning from others” he praises in the Japanese and in “enlightened provincialism.” In this essay he is comparing the ways in which Britain and the United States have developed their political territories. The first comparison he

makes concerns the way in which each country expanded. The United Kingdom, he notes, has grown in part by “direct colonization.” “The United Kingdom has reproduced itself—its general constitutional organization, its political ideals, its social order—by a process, so to speak, of

budding, whereby, in Australia, in New Zealand, in Canada, new Commonwealths have either originated, or else, during the century, have grown into strong communities, children and similitudes, in great and essential respects, of the mother country.”°’ The United States has grown somewhat similarly but with the difference of a general written constitu-

tion and a central government and “a far more centralized system of national control.”®* Further, in the United States, until recently, says Royce, there has been physical continuity of the regions, all existing in one

large territory. Notice that the emphasis here is on sharing of political ideas—the constitution and the form of social order of the nation.

180 JACQUELYN ANN K. KEGLEY Royce next turns to the question of the government and protection of “alien races.” This problem, he notes, is relatively new to the United States. But, he continues, the common task that both nations shared was to “attempt to make the political traditions and the social arts, whose origin lay in Great Britain, suit the needs of peoples to whom this civilization was in greater or less degree originally alien.” Again, the emphasis is on political order and ideas.

Royce then turns to a controversial area of his essay. He notes that in contrast to the United Kingdom, the United States has generally had alien populations closer to the original European stock, but then with the North American Indian, the Chinese, and the Negro, the United States has failed in its task—of incorporation into the social fabric of the country—the

relationship with the Native American has been badly managed, the Chinese were expelled, and relationships with the Negro remain problematic.°” He notes that the United Kingdom has incorporated a very “varied collection of people of a very distant type and civilization” and has taken up what people call the “white man’s burden.””° In contrast, the United States has adopted the method of assimilation—linguistic, political, and moral. The end of this process, says Royce, is “the organization into one close-knit nationality of the diverse types and regions of our country.””!

Here it is clear that Royce is addressing the central problem of how a community (region, province, nation) can be both culturally (ethically, racially) diverse and at the same time unified. Royce now refers to the present problem of the United Kingdom, represented in the Boer Wars. Royce sees this problem again as one of “how to learn to live together,” how to build a social unity from a situation of divisiveness and sectionalism, to build a more unified civilization. He sees this problem as parallel to our Civil War, where both sides fought with heroism and endurance for a cause they believed in. The fear was that the country would survive with one great section of our country as a

“subjected region,” “estranged from us in heart,” and “permanently embittered by defeat.” The outcome, says Royce, “has been a measure of

true assimilation of North and South, without any merely destructive confusion or simple mingling of their types of civilization.”’* Royce argues that what has resulted is a true assimilation of social tendencies that at first seemed to be in hopeless conflict. He hopes that in the future South African battlefields may send the message that “your heroes there offered up their lives for the common cause of human unity, of organized

RACISM, RACE, AND JOSIAH ROYCE 181 civilization, of fraternal peace... that race hatred might be made to cease and not be perpetuated ... that your Empire might become... the “object of a common loyalty.’”’”? The emphasis is on a “common loyalty,” but Royce also refers to the ceasing of “racial hatred.” Royce’s discussion of the Civil War is, of course, disturbing for it seems to gloss over the ways in which welcoming back the South into the Union allowed new forms of racial discrimination and terror to develop, and for the issue of black freedom to be basically forgotten as a central issue in the war. As we know from history, there were many who did not want to accept the South back into the Union; there were those who wanted the

South maintained under tight control, and did not want to forget, as acceptance tended to advocate, the main issue of the war—namely

slavery and black freedom. I certainly think that the race freedom issue was forgotten and this remains a tragedy and blight in American history. With Royce’s emphasis on unity and social order, all of this appears to be lost, whatever his views on the race issue were. Is peace

and unity to be at any cost? Royce is certainly to be faulted for his clear disregard of these issues. Is his emphasis, here, or his neglect of the “real” issue, however, a strong enough reason to assert he was a white

supremacist or a blatant racist? I do not believe it is and to make these assertions is not appropriate. And what about the assimilation issue? He goes on to discuss how many different groups came to America with languages, customs, traditions, and religious interests very different from those of the Anglo-Saxon

settlers. He points out that most of these, by the second generation, have assimilated to American speech, customs, and ways of life. He notes

that the French Canadians, though politically loyal, have kept true to their type and maintained their social consciousness, have resisted assimilation. Royce sees that there is no parallel in the United States, but

I find no condemnation of the French Canadians in this regard. This would make sense in light of Royce’s emphasis in his “Provincialism” essay on the need to maintain one’s identity as a province and retain loyalty to that province, though also seeking to respect the loyalty of other provinces and to expand loyalty and community. However, the real

question is the implications of his strong emphasis on assimilation in the US story.

Royce’s discussion of the Catholic Church, in this essay, is most instructive in this regard. He argues that the Church has come to respect

182 JACQUELYN ANN K. KEGLEY the principle of assimilation and has not, like the Church in Canada, proposed to interfere in political life. (Here, I believe, Royce may be naive,

and he certainly seems to be advocating the principle of neutrality in matters of religion and separation of church and state.) One of the more offensive statements about the role of the catholic Church is that “it keeps sreat masses of our foreigners under a conservative control while we are

engaged in the work of making American citizens out of them” (235). Royce’s conservatism is definitely at work here, and again the emphasis is on political issues; namely, becoming citizens. Thus, we note the statement “We remain ourselves, and we bring the foreigners to our own type of customs” (235). This is a derogatory statement about the customs of others, and although Royce in theory is committed to diversity as well as unity, this indicates a willingness to allow assimilation to trump

difference. This issue needs to be addressed in more detail as other scholars enter the discussion. Royce then turns to a discussion of his native California and the question of assimilation in its development. The main conflict here, he notes, was that between northern and southern types of American ideals and institutions, and this was fought at the level of arts and traditions and not wars. The result, he argues, is the “development of a new type.” “The Californian is neither Northern nor Southerner in his general character, but he is distinctly American, and neither the older Mexican traditions nor the foreign immigrants have decided what manner of youth California should bring forth” (235). Again this statement may be seen as “offensive” in its disregard of both the Mexicans and others. Royce then goes on to discuss the material and ideal causes operating in this assimilation process. The material causes are physical continuity, eradual extension of settlement from place to place, the large develop-

ments of modern industry which have led to a constantly increasing connection of the life of one part of the country with the life of another—

all helping to make a unity of consciousness (236). Among the ideal causes he names the English system of common law, the English language

and its great literary treasures, and the ideals about human freedom, individuality, and tolerance toward strangers and toward all strange conditions (237). In addition, Royce discusses how California came to form a cohesive community through the stability of the essential conditions and institutions of civilization (such as families, churches, and schools), and finally

RACISM, RACE, AND JOSIAH ROYCE 183 through the establishment of a constitutional government. He concludes: “The chief cause of the vast assimilative power of the American civilization has been, as I hope you may now see, the fact, that the strong national consciousness, the pride in being one great and independent people has joined itself in every case with local pride, and then with that large heritage of ideas which we have from you” (242). This kind of union of these elements has enabled the United States to extend its realm very widely, without having the portions of that realm grow apart as the mother coun-

try, Britain, and her colonies, have in many instances grown. It has enabled foreigners to join regardless of type as long as they respect these essential customs. Finally, Royce discusses the educational system and the growth of universities in America and asks: “Does your public yet suf-

ficiently observe that political unity depends upon assimilation more than upon physical power, and that assimilation is a matter, above all, of

the power of idea... ?” Here, of course, Royce sees a vital role for the universities in building a unity of ideas centered on common law, lansuage, literature, and, particularly, on the ideas of freedom, individuality, and tolerance. One needs to view Royce’s other discussions on the role of the university and education to know whether the emphasis is strongly on the “common” or ona rich unity of ideas and, above all, on the critical

interactions and enrichment achieved by true dialogue and encounter between various traditions. It is also unclear what Royce’s position might be on respect for language, although he cites the French Canadian situa-

tion without condemnation. Royce does, in this essay, indeed, refer to Anglo-Saxon civilization, but I find his understanding of it centered in the aforementioned ideas of common law, language, and social/political ideas of freedom, individuality, and tolerance. There is no reference to “white supremacy” or “imperialism” in the essay, though one has to grant that he is talking about England as an imperial nation. Royce’s emphasis on assimilation again is about building community and about linking people to common “American ideals,” but it does not suggest that one has to reject the customs and mores of one’s inheritance. It does not necessarily equate to

racism. Let me turn to explore more of this topic to his essay on “Provincialism.” I am not going to enter the debate between Curry and Sullivan about using Royce’s provincialism to create an “enlightened whiteness.” I find Sullivan’s thesis very intriguing but need more time to examine her ideas in detail as well as Curry’s criticisms of these ideas.

184 JACQUELYN ANN K. KEGLEY Following Scott Pratt, I see this in the context of Royce’s own California experience and how in this new place people were able to form a provincial consciousness. At first those who came to California, primarily miners and adventurers, came to make a “fast buck”; they did not intend to stay or build a home. But as things developed, histories developed,

people gained a sense of geology, geography, and climate and began to develop a sense of the region as home. Stability came with families and church and eventually with the establishment of a constitutional government. In reflecting on this experience, Royce focuses on this question: How do we develop a wise provincialism? He believed this to be essential to a healthy nation in a time when there was a leveling tendency at work through the papers and popular fads and a tendency to mob mentality rather than thoughtful action. Provincialism was meant to address these two evils and a third, namely, the problem of unassimilated strangers. Royce saw the dangers of those in the early days of California in those “wanderers” who did not form any loyalty to

their communities. He speaks about the importance of making the stranger, the newcomer welcome—to give him a fair chance. Royce sees newcomers as a boon and to be welcomed into the community, but he also sees that their failure to be assimilated constitutes a source of social

danger, because a community needs well-knit organization. He does not recommend forced assimilation but thinks that in “the development of a strong provincial spirit amongst those who already constitute the centralized portion of the community... thus a dignity is given to the social order which makes the newcomer long to share in its honors by deserving its confidence.””* There must be a sense of pride, which Royce enhances when he later urges the province to “seek its own adorn-

ment.” “Local pride ought above all to centre, so far as its material objects are concerned, about the determination to give the surroundings of the community nobility, dignity, beauty.” The newcomer wants to be part of the province and share in its beauty and benefits. And it is important to the unity of the community. It is the willingness to nur-

ture the new home and place as well as unity of organization that is Royce’s concern. Another central concern of Royce in this essay is individuality and the ability to be critical of one’s community and nation. This is revealed first in his criticism of the “leveling tendency in society.” He notes that imitation is a good thing and crucial to civilization, but he then says: “Imitation is

RACISM, RACE, AND JOSIAH ROYCE 185 not man’s whole business. There ought to be some room for variety.” About the province, Royce writes, it is better in proportion as it remains self-possessed—proud of its traditions, not unwilling indeed to learn, but also quite ready to teach the stranger its own wisdom. And in similar fashion provincial pride helps

the individual man to keep his own self respect even when the vast forces that work toward industrial consolidation, and toward the effacement of individual initiative, are besetting his life at every turn. .. . Give him the local community that he loves and cherishes, that he is proud to honor and serve—make his ideal of that community lofty—give him faith in the dignity of his province—and you have given him a power to counteract the leveling tendencies of modern civilization.”

Healthy provinces are also needed to contend with the evils of the “mob.” Here again Royce emphasizes diversity, individuality, and the ability

for critical, intelligent action. He writes about the men who take counsel together in small groups, who respect one another’s individuality, who meanwhile criticize one another constantly and earnestly, and who suspect whatever the crowd teaches. In such men there need be no lack of wise sympathy, but there is much besides sympathy. There is individuality, and there is a willingness to doubt one another and themselves. To such men, and to such groups, popular government ought to be entrusted.”

But Royce is equally concerned to extend beyond one’s community to build broader community and above all he urges the province to learn

from others. He writes: “It is one thing to make ideal values in some unique sense our own, and it is quite another thing to believe that if they are our own, other people cannot possess such ideal values in their own equally unique fashion.”’’ He argues that the way to earn independence is to learn freely from abroad, though insisting upon one’s own interpretation of the common good. In this context, he returns to the example of the Japanese, noting that it seemed a generation ago that the Japanese

were adopting European customs and ideals, and they appeared to be purely imitative. Now, however, argues Royce, we see that the Japanese are courteous and respectful learners, ready to learn if you have anything to teach. However, writes Royce, he remains as absolutely his own master with regard to the interpretation, the use, the possession of all spiritual gifts, as if he were the

186 JACQUELYN ANN K. KEGLEY master and you the learner. He accepts the gifts, but their place in his national and individual life is his own. .. . [L]et the Japanese give us a lesson in the spirit of true provinciality. Provincialism does not mean a lack of plasticity; an unteachable spirit; it means a determination to use the spiritual gifts that come to us from abroad in our own way and with reference to the ideals of our own social order.’®

This reaffirms, I believe, my interpretation and that of others of Royce’s discussion of the Japanese in “Race Questions.” Royce goes on

to urge the province to encourage its young people to have relations with other provinces and to learn from them. In other works he develops the principle of “loyalty to loyalty,” which means (1) being loyal to one’s own community but respecting the loyalty of others as a worthy action, but also to be critical and to take action if you perceive the other community to be engaging in denigrating others’ loyalties and/or harming human relations and community and (2) seeking to build broader and wider communities of loyalty, resulting finally in seeking a world community and a “Beloved Community” of all individuals in a spiritual unity.

What, Then, Do We Conclude?

As we have moved forward in this discussion, where does this lead us in deciding the proper label for Royce’s views on race and whether any of his views are valuable for moving forward with race relations today? I, and others such as Pratt and Sullivan, believe Royce’s views have some merit. As evident in this piece, I disagree with Curry’s very forceful condemnation of Royce as a blatant racist and white supremacist imperialist. I also disagree with the label of “racial conservative,” proposed by Marilyn Fischer. Royce is definitely a “conservative” in his views of society and

social changes, as is so well demonstrated by Randy Auxier. I am not convinced that Royce fully falls under the label of “racial conservative” in his views of the Negro and other races, however. Marilyn Fischer’s suggestion that Royce has affinities with the views of Sydney Olivier may well be a good path for further exploration on this

question. In Chapter VIII of his White Capital and Coloured Labour, Olivier seeks to substantiate his judgment that there are better relations

RACISM, RACE, AND JOSIAH ROYCE 187

between races in Jamaica than in the United States by citing two authors, Mrs. Ella Wheeler Wilcox and Josiah Royce. Olivier, in fact, includes in his book the total section about Jamaica from Royce’s “Race Questions” article. The best summary of Olivier’s intent is provided by the following statements from the article by Mrs. Wheeler Wilcox: There is no question but the coloured man is more evenly developed and better treated, better understood on this island than anywhere in America. ... Nowhere has the man with coloured blood in his veins a better opportunity to rise in the world than right here. Stay here— and prove to all doubting Thomases what the coloured race can do. It is miraculous to think what it has accomplished here in sixty-eight years since slavery was abolished. ... What may it not achieve in the next half century?”

Olivier makes three important points on race relations in his book. The first is that in places like the United States, South Africa, and India, the majority of white inhabitants truly believe that white and black can blend no more than oil and water, but they are confronted with the fact both of the black person and that under a system where they are allowed education and wage labor they will advance. The black person will not only advance but will achieve a level of understanding and self-reliance in which he will not accept a “negrophobist” theory of exclusion. This will lead to an increasingly unstable society unless race prejudice (antipathies) and race discrimination are mollified. Secondly, Olivier argues for an assimilation policy, at first to argue for racial mixture, but secondly for including the blacks in key roles in society’s institutions (also advocated by Royce). Finally, Olivier clearly holds that the environment was the

principal reason that Negroes have not developed at a higher level of civilization. He, with other African observers and scholars of his time, cites the following reasons: isolation of other cultures; conflict with parasitic diseases; vagaries of African rainfall; intertribal warfare; raiding and

pillaging; and “more than anything else, the incessant slave-taking prompted by Christian and Moslem peoples.” However, he asserts, “the Negro is progressing, and that disposes of all the arguments in the world that he is incapable of progress.”®° Francis Lee, in his book on Olivier, makes two interesting assessments

that are quite relevant to our discussion of Royce. First, he compares Olivier to John Stuart Mill, arguing that “Olivier’s socialism was based

188 JACQUELYN ANN K. KEGLEY upon ethical considerations, rather than on its alleged technical superiority

over capitalism. ... What capitalism lacked, was any sense of purpose, community, or brotherhood, and this is precisely what attracted him to socialism. For socialism, with its emphasis on fraternity seems to offer at least a chance of creating the ‘good society.’”*' This adds additional credence to Dwayne Tunstall’s affirmation of an affinity between Royce and Mill.** I believe this is an interesting and probably correct assessment and urge Royce scholars to probe this in further depth.

Lee continues with his judgment about Olivier’s position when he writes: “A high-tory paternalist, he believed that the colonial people should be educated and guided, and that the developed nations were charged with carrying out this historic task. He also adhered to natural rights. . . . It is questionable whether paternalism and libertarianism, so much a part of Olivier’s ideological makeup would ever mix at a practical

level.”®? Royce did not believe in “natural rights” because he did not believe ethics could be founded on these grounds. He did, however, believe in and advocate for communities that fostered genuine individual erowth and fulfillment, and he did promote the principle of loyalty to loyalty to encourage the building of broader communities. As Tunstall has shown in his 2009 book, Royce’s “Beloved Community” and that of Martin Luther King have similarities and connections. However, Tunstall

raises questions about contradictions in Royce’s thought based on his charges of disloyalty against the Germans and his advocacy for the war. Although I have disagreed with Tunstall on this point, I do want to end with an observation in a review of his new book by Mathew A. Foust. Foust writes: Tunstall’s remarks concerning Royce and race are important and are profitably read alongside other recent accounts of whether Royce’s stance on race should be understood as progressive. Tunstall admits to not having fully worked through the implications of what he calls Royce’s anti-essentialist racism, for the validity of Royce’s ethicoreligious insight. I wonder to what extent Tunstall finds this internal contradiction analogous to that which he locates in Royce’s stance on World War I. Perhaps diagnosing these issues together could prove to be a useful approach.™

All of us are fallible and probably often conflicted in our views as Royce himself often argued. Royce also argued for learning from continual

RACISM, RACE, AND JOSIAH ROYCE 189 dialogue, interchange, and the criticisms of others. On the issue of Royce

and race, there may be much more work to do. I encourage others to engage in this if they believe it profitable. I believe we need to turn to reflections that facilitate concrete actions for racial justice, informed by insights from the American and other traditions and, above all, of those who have suffered from this unacceptable situation.

TEN

ENLIGHTENED PROVINCIALISM, OPEN-ENDED COMMUNITIES, AND LOYALTY-LOVING INDIVIDUALS Royce’s Progressive Prescription for Democratic

Cultural Transformation Judith M. Green

The Relevance of Royce in Our Twenty-First-Century Situation

A n important aspect of the relevance of Royce’s philosophical vision

for the twenty-first century grows from the great potential of

his three-part progressive prescription for democratic cultural transformation—enlightened provincialism, open-ended communities, and loyalty-loving individuals—if all three parts are developed together and

interactively. This will not be easy: Many forces and habits within American society and other nations and cultures to which we are closely linked by economy, communications media, productive and transport-

ive technologies, and ways of living have profoundly antidemocratic implications.! Nonetheless, with some critical modifications to reflect subsequent social and technological developments, Royce’s three-part prescription is both feasible and desirable—even necessary—in twentyfirst-century America, if we are to preserve and more fully actualize our democracy, our distinctive communities, and our individual experiences of meaningful living. 1190 }

ENLIGHTENED PROVINCIALISM 191 Royce on Higher or More Enlightened Provincialism

In recent years, the United States has been dominated by what Royce called a dangerous “mob spirit,” arising from deep feelings of fear and anger about the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the global financial crash of September 15, 2008, as these have been stirred up and directed by so-called conservative political leaders and mass media outlets, leading to the rise of the tea party on the ideological right and, in reaction, a patchwork of cautious half-measures from the Obama administration instead of clearer, wiser thinking about how to transform the root causes of these dreadful events. Royce defined a mob as “a company of people who, by reason of their sympathies, have for the time being resigned their individual judgment, collectively lacking due social wisdom because they are sympathizing rather than criticizing, under the influence of atavistic ideas that belong to earlier and cruder periods of civilization” (Royce, “Provincialism,” 333). Sympathy per se is neither good nor bad, in Royce’s view; it is “a sort of neutral basis for more rational mental development... the noblest structures may be reared upon its soil,” but we must be wary of it, because “the basest absurdities may, upon occasion, seem to be justified, because an undiscriminating sympathy makes them plausible” (335). Most if not all Americans and many others worldwide felt a deep sympathy with the families of those who were murdered

on September 11, while experiencing at the same time an ontological wound at the deepest levels of their own being: not only an acute sense of

personal insecurity that for many has hovered as a fog of anxiety and dread over the deep roots of their lives ever since, but also a sense of direct damage to a communal aspect of their existence—their lives as Americans—that most had casually assumed and some had actively denied had meaning for them before that awful day.’ Barack Obama’s election as the first black President of the United States shortly after the 2008 global financial crash in part reflected the fear and anger of many Americans at the economic policies of President George W. Bush and his

Republican Party that helped to create this terrible mess, but it also reflected their frustration with the prolonged post-9/11 wars he initiated as well as a desire for cultural change and for shared social hope. At the same time, the racial fears of many white men may have denied Obama their votes,* and leaders of the Republican Party immediately announced that denying him reelection would be their primary goal. Thus, after a

192 JUDITH M. GREEN few short months in which President Obama spent his political capital on passing mandatory insurance-based health care legislation and bailouts for the largest banks and the American automotive industry, politicians

and pundits on the right whipped up a widely shared antigovernment sentiment that gave birth to the tea party, cost the Democratic Party its majority in the House of Representatives, and made the two years prior to the 2012 elections a time of antipathy politics, legislation blockage, and profound cultural division. It is hard to remember now that the immediate and authentic feelings of sympathy we shared on September 1, 2001, and in the weeks that followed were both comforting and directive for the American people as we emerged from shock, leading strangers to generous acts like giving blood,

making sandwiches for rescue workers, and sending money for relief efforts. However, the Bush administration and the American mass media

almost immediately corralled and redirected American sympathies toward allegedly “patriotic” purposes to which many of us did not give our democratic consent, including two wars (instead of an international criminal pursuit) and a “Patriot Act” that actually limited our hard-won civil liberties; yet throughout the Bush years, dissenters were largely silenced by challenges to our patriotism from our own government and news media. Moreover, the continuing power of these well-orchestrated “patriotic” feelings in combination with this silence, dread, and anxiety

allowed for the reelection of the president who had led our country into these lingering and costly wars, in spite of increasingly widespread misgivings about whether the Iraq War was justified or could assure democracy in Iraq. I am glad to report that such an unquestioning bellicose “patriotism” was not universal among the American people in our 2004 national elections. We were divided into red states, in which the majority of voters acted from such a mob-spirited “patriotism,” and blue states, in which the majority resisted it, with the presidency being decided by some 60,000 people in the state of Ohio, both because of irregularities in the administration of the election by state officials and because of the peculiarities of what many people claim is our antiquated Electoral College, which determines the final outcome of our national elections. From my own blue state perspective, a worrisome feature of a narrow majority's electoral support for President Bush was that unquestioning “patriotism” in the

red states frequently was conjoined by voters with so-called moral

ENLIGHTENED PROVINCIALISM 193 issues°—opposition to abortion, genetic engineering, and homosexual marriage—as these were thematized and politicized within hierarchically structured faith communities that often rejected contemporary scientific evidence as well as historical-critical studies of the Bible and personal reflection in favor of unquestioning reliance on literalist or traditionalist interpretations of the Bible’s meaning and guidance by their churches’ leaders.

The red states and the blue states continued their struggle in the 2006 congressional elections, when the blue states won control of both houses of Congress, and in the 2008 presidential election, when the blue states retained control of both houses and also succeeded in electing President Obama. However, with new energy from the tea party “mob” reflecting economic frustration and perhaps racial and gender fears, the “red states”

gained control of the House of Representatives in the 2010 elections,

using this victory as opportunity to block and demonize not only President Obama, but their “blue state” opponents as well. With these rival cultural-and-political positions having been hardened over the twelve years since the Supreme Court decided the 2000 presidential elec-

tion in Bush v. Gore, the 2012 presidential elections focused on multi-

billion-dollar efforts of both political parties to draw a handful of undecided voters in a few media-blasted “swing states” into their own red

or blue camp so as to win a majority in the Electoral College—even though it became clear that the winner of could not hope to govern such a divided people effectively and would be blocked at every turn. In order to understand and transform this profound cultural division for the sake of our nation’s democracy, as well as for the welfare of our various regions and the quality of life of their respective residents, it may help us to think of our red states and blue states as different “provinces,” to use Royce’s neutral term, each expressing particular kinds of “provincialism.”° The divisive differences within twenty-first-century American national politics and between our regional cultures might lead some to

think that we must work to overcome our provincialisms per se, but Royce’s still-resonant analysis suggests that doing so would not be desirable, even if it were possible. We continue to need distinctive provinces

and some form of locality-specific provincialism, not just the kind of “falsely provincial” national identity Richard Rorty called us to reclaim in Achieving Our Country.’ However, as Royce argued, we need to replace “false forms of provincialism” with “higher” or more enlightened forms.®

194 JUDITH M. GREEN Royce rightly argued that human beings need smaller, more localized geocultural units with which they deeply identify in order to develop their active powers and their moral orientation toward service and leadership. Provinces and “higher” or more enlightened forms of provincialism play important roles in what Royce calls the “ideal life of an individual”

(331). Genuine individuals have unique moral destinies, he affirms, yet they learn and adjust to their environment by imitation to a great extent. Therefore, instead of emerging out of a homogeneous national identity like the democratic one Rorty encourages us to create by telling a shared national story and waging a cooperative campaign to actualize it, genuine individuals require conditions of variety, even in trivialities, to begin the process of developing independence of insight and conviction. At the same time, well-developed American “provinces” and the local leaders whose individual powers they bring to active life are important checks on a national “mob spirit” and on those antidemocratic forces who seek to benefit from arousing and directing it to their own ends. What we need to cultivate, Royce persuasively argues, is “a higher provincialism,” which involves a local spirit and pride, fostered by members of “the higher kind of social group,” at dispersed locations through-

out our nation and our world, drawing upon our human needs and tendencies toward imitation and community loyalty while fostering individuality and appreciation of variety in ways that lead to greater collective wisdom than any individual possesses, and also to localityspecific translations of common goods that can be shared with other communities in ways that are uniquely locality-specific to them as well (328ff.). People initially need incentives to creativity in order to discover this key aspect of their own nature. “Higher” provincial communities can be hotbeds for initiation into this process, countering the suppression of “dividuality in modern mass society. Moreover, an individual life needs the action-motivating inspiration of striving to attain ideal goals, even if these are beyond our life’s scope, because such efforts lead to higher forms of self-consciousness that emphasize ideals, not just temporal attainments (337). Ongoing localized efforts for civic and ecological improvement can create sites for individuals to develop their critical and creative capacities

in interaction with others in committed projects focused on mutual interests, concerns, and possibilities for local, national, and world betterment. “My thesis,” Royce wrote in 1908, “is that, in the present state of

ENLIGHTENED PROVINCIALISM 195 the world’s civilization, and of the life of our own country, the time has come to emphasize, with a new meaning and intensity, the positive value, the absolute necessity for our welfare, of a wholesome provincialism, as a saving power to which the world in the near future will need more and more to appeal” (327). Moreover, Royce claimed, “Every one... ought, ideally speaking, to be provincial... . The man of the future must love his province more than he does to-day. His provincial customs and ideals

must be more and not less highly developed, more and not less selfconscious, well-established, and earnest” (328). According to Royce in this essay, the key to developing such a “higher” or more enlightened provincialism is the “higher kind of social group” —

“the small company of thoughtful individuals who are taking counsel together” (333ff), respecting one another’s individuality even while demand-

ing each other’s loyalty, and criticizing one another constantly and earnestly while together doubting and opposing the mob-spirit. Royce did not look to America’s national political parties or broad social movements to criticize and correct the excesses of “mob spirit,” seeing these as more likely to be whipping it up and manipulating it. Instead, he looked to small eroups of thoughtful, committed, active people who could be counted on

to think for themselves, to keep each other mentally alert, and to get things done on the local scale of their necessarily limited collaborative powers. These are the people to whom Royce believed popular government should be entrusted: “In the rightly constituted social group where every member feels his [or her] own responsibility for his [or her] part of the social enterprise which is in hand, the result of the interaction of indi-

viduals is that the social group may show itself wiser than any of its individuals” (334). What rouses my concern here is a whiff of elitism that has no place in

this mining camp Californian’s democratic social vision, and perhaps was not part of his intention even as he wrote—though at least one of his brilliant and influential students, Alain L. Locke, wrote an early essay that gives a clearly elitist reading of the meaning of “higher social group” and the role of such groups in social uplift. In my own view, the greater, still unfulfilled potential within American regional cultures does not depend

for its flourishing upon the exclusive leadership of an intellectual vansuard or a social elite, but rather on fostering the educative participation and value-enriching contribution of all community members in progressive efforts to plan together for their future while acknowledging their

196 JUDITH M. GREEN complex past, and at the same time, democratically valuing the diversity within their present members’ modes of living—subjects on which Royce and Locke offered very helpful insights in later works. Royce’s description of the kind of individuals who have shown themselves to be capable

of fulfilling the responsibilities of democratic self-governance seems especially applicable to the members of a face-to-face network of local people committed to improving their community life, even in poor neighborhoods like those in Chicago that Barack Obama, in his autobiography Dreams from My Father, describes as having become highly effective.’ In the same way, it can apply to networks of Cornel West’s kind of active, service-oriented “public intellectuals,” including philoso-

phers, whose common project can be to tailor the best work going on worldwide in their respective intellectual fields to the needs of their regional and national communities.’ This is what it might mean for us now to emulate the early-twentiethcentury Japanese thinkers Royce praises as practicing a higher provin-

cialism: learning from other peoples’ philosophical traditions and the contemporary projects that grow out of these, while “bringing it all back home” in a multicultural American philosophy that reflects appreciatively on differing interactive bodies of regional experience while drawing in a provincially situated way on values, past achievements, and creative capabilities to contribute something local, distinctive, and valuable to our shared national life, and also to a wider world. In both kinds of cases, it is the enlightened or ideal-driven aspect of the provincialism that makes it a valuable motivator of diverse localized experiments in reconstructing our natural, built, and social environments—experiments that may turn out to have wider applicability. My own experiences in urban planning, as well as in collaboratively framing and teaching multicultural approaches to American philosophy,'' have shown me that, just as Royce predicted, the struggle to achieve cooperatively created actualizations of an ideal vision can motivate people to sacrifice their time and energy to that particular cause in ways that deepen their characters and protect their efforts from the kind of narrowness that silences diversity and enforces a thoughtless conformity: “No provincialism will become dangerously narrow so long as it is constantly accompanied by a willingness to sacrifice much in order to put in the form of great institutions, of noble architecture, and of beautiful surroundings an expression of the worth that the community attaches to its own ideals” (338).

ENLIGHTENED PROVINCIALISM 197 Royce on Open-Ended Communities and Loyalty-Loving Individuals

Both of these kinds of “higher” or enlightened provincialisms—localized improvement efforts of face-to-face communities that give rise to distinctive, place-specific excellences and justified regional pride, as well as culturally reconstructive efforts of interdisciplinary communities of service-oriented

public intellectuals working together to revitalize their whole nation’s intellectual life, to wake their neighbors up, and to recall them from a sympathy-abusing, misguidedly patriotic mob mentality—are promising but insufficient elements of a much-needed progressive time-process of twenty-first-century democratic cultural transformation in America, and in other nations with whom we share our world. In addition to cultivating such expressions of “higher,” or enlightened, provincialism, we need to cultivate wider, open-ended, translocal communities and ideal-directed social movements, while living as individual role models of what Royce called “loyalty to loyalty.” In The Problem of Christianity (1913), Royce’s particular example of the kind of wider, open-ended community I have in

mind here was the Christian Church, understood not in terms of some particular denomination’s “local” history, but more broadly: as a movement like translocal community of memories and hopes guided by loving and loyal commitment, not only to one’s fellow members and the source of their being, but also to nonmembers because of their shared humanity. The “Holy Spirit” that makes this possible, in Royce’s view, is Christianity’s

founding, and yet its still-growing and, thus, open-ended ideal vision, which makes all humanity precious to those who progressively though never finally understand and actualize its meanings through a process of interpretive linkages and leaps over time and into the future. The classical philosophical problem of “the one and the many,” as Royce takes it up in The Problem of Christianity, is the problem of how a multitude of people(s) can be deeply conjoined in their motivations and understandings, even though they are separated by times, places, cultures, and individual differences. Following Wundt, Royce cites languages, customs, and religions as examples of real, achieved unity amidst multiplicity. Moreover, he suggests, marketplaces, political gatherings, mobs, and the street life of modern cities, as well as our daily experiences of thinking and acting within ordinary community life, show us that there is a kind of oneness that we must acknowledge and explain. In Chapter IX, “The Community and the Time Process,” Royce argues persuasively that

198 JUDITH M. GREEN such ordinary experiences of interconnections with others are the result

of particular shared histories that continues to have meaning for all they touch.’ Contemporary conservative Christians in the red states in the American South are members of two or more such communities of valued memories that intersect in them. What we in the northern blue states must realize about our fellow citizens in the southern red states is that their valued

memories include much more than a regional history of racism, antiCatholicism, and anti-Semitism, and that their members are much more today than descendants of the generation that lost the American Civil War. Some of our red states neighbors have helped in the struggle for social equality in every generation since America’s founding, sometimes against the opposition of change-fearing citizens of the “blue states.” Most

of them, like most of us, hope for a more just and peaceful future for themselves and their children. Moreover, the Christian heritage so many of them share with so many of us can be and has been abused, but as Royce

pointed out, it includes resources for its own self-correction through the revival of a sense of individual responsibility, through its communicative process, and through ongoing collaborative efforts to feed the hungry, to liberate the captive, to welcome the wayfarer, and to strive actively for peace that grows out of the example of its founder. As Royce argued, the multiple, interweaving strands of a rich, pastlooking history that mingle in these red states neighbors are part of an ongoing time process that includes and supports a forward-looking sense of a shared hope that is expressed in our present beliefs and actions.'” In both the red states and the blue states, individual people’s experience of the importance of both memory and hope in defining who they are to themselves, and how others understand who they are, is located within such a time stream. A self is, by its very essence, a being with a past... . My idea of myself is an interpretation of my past—linked also with an interpretation of my hopes and intentions as to my future. ... Precisely as I thus define myself with reference to my own past, so my fellows also interpret the sense, the value, the qualifications, and the possessions of my present self by virtue of what are sometimes called my antecedents. (Royce, PC, 245)

Thus, instead of being essentially mystical unions, communities are constituted and maintained in a time process by individuals who share

ENLIGHTENED PROVINCIALISM 199 both past and future events as self-constituting, as belonging to their individual lives, thus creating shared dimensions of their experiences as a “community of memory” and as a “community of hope” (248). In the next three chapters of The Problem of Christianity, Royce adds

further detail to this insightful analysis of the deep interconnections between community membership and individual growth and flourishing. In “The Body and the Members” (Chapter X), he explores how communal unity is created through mutual incorporation of shared memories, hopes, ideals, and tasks into various differing people’s selfinterpretations (256). Love, which he earlier called “loyalty,” is their binding force, he argues (260-68), a force that ultimately is “divine” in origin (269-70), immanent within yet transcending particular historical moments and locations. In “Perception, Conception, and Interpretation” (Chapter XI), Royce persuasively argues that the interpretive process

involved in this mutual. Love-and-loyalty inspiring incorporation of memories and hopes into our individual lives involves more than perception, conception, or a synthesis of the two; it is a nonsymmetrical, triadic relation linking interpreter, object interpreted, and the persons to whom the interpretation is addressed (286-88). It is through interpretation so understood, Royce argues, rather than through perception or conception, that we know the time order that is a necessary dimension of our time-located self-creation of ongoing construction of communities of memory and of hope (294). For example, as a member and outpost of the translocal communities that meet and mingle in me, I am more than a “blue state” Catholic, Gospel-music-singing feminist-pragmatist woman and public intellectual—I am also a site and source of nonidentical reproduction and revitalization of each and all of these communal strands of memory and hope, adding freshness and variety to their meanings by the diversity I add to their growing bodies of interlinked family resemblances.'° Such processes of interpretation are part of what we seek in social and spiritual relations, Royce argues, since they are necessary to the achievement of self-understanding and of a sense of fullness of life. This is an essentially social process, emerging from con-

versation, rather than a lonely process; our communication is organized by immanent projects of seeking out the fuller meanings of valued ideals we experience as not-yet and greater than each of us (289-91). In the following chapter, “The Will to Interpret” (Chapter XII), Royce argues that every ideal good attainable through human social cooperation

200 JUDITH M. GREEN depends upon love-and-loyalty-bound interpretive communities that interlink together three kinds of selves: an interpreter, a mind addressed, and a mind interpreted (315-18). The ideal circumstance of the conjoint

realization of particular ideal goods to which we are attracted by our experience of the inner logic of our own conception of them, as well as by our practical experience of the differing ideals of differing communities, is the community of those who are loyal to loyalty itself, which extends

beyond and critically contextualizes our loyalty to our own particular communities of memory and of hope. This community of those who are “loyal to loyalty” is what Royce and Martin Luther King, Jr.’° call “the Beloved Community,” which is also a translocal world-inclusive interpretive community, as well as Royce’s ultimate solution of the problem of the one and the many in our experience of ourselves within social life and within nature (318). Perhaps the most relevant passage in Royce’s analysis in The Problem

of Christianity for our present purposes focuses on the evaluative and transformative dimensions of interpretive communities: “The concept of the community depends upon the interpretation which each individual member gives to his own self—and to his own past—and to his own future. ... How rich this community is in its meaning, in value, in membership, in significant organization, will depend upon the selves that enter into the community, and upon the ideals in terms of which they define themselves, their past, and their future” (248-49). Royce’s phenomenological analysis here contains comparative and normative aspects that

can be used to critically evaluate any particular community of memory and of hope (including one’s own), to intentionally interconnect existing communities on terms of mutually enhanced richness and effectiveness in realizing some of their most cherished traditional hopes, and to create new communities growing out of diverse, even contentious historical roots, by focusing in their present lives on shared hopes that go beyond the kinds of experiences that have been actualized or even hoped for before: “If great new undertakings enter into the lives of many men [and women], a new community of hope, unified by the common relations of its individual members to the same future events, may be, upon occasion, very rapidly constituted, even in the midst of great revolutions” (249). Thus, Royce suggests, constructive convergence of communal efforts and self-understandings is possible without losing diverse constituent

ENLIGHTENED PROVINCIALISM 201 communities’ defining memories and hopes—provided that these are creatively reconstructed as necessary to remove those flaws, omissions, and distortions that will in any case block actualization of their deepest dreams, because of the presence in the world of communities of others who also remember, and who also act to realize their own deep hopes. Some Preliminary Conclusions: Democratic Cultural Transformation Is Possible

Following and building on Royce’s insights, I believe that we can celebrate, enjoy, and learn from our human diversity when our differing translocal, open-ended communities share “loyalty to loyalty,” especially when this is accompanied by a history-chastened sense of the imperativeness and the difficulty of cooperatively building a just and peaceful future. Bringing such a Beloved Community into being on regional, national, and worldwide levels will require critical yet loving transformations in all of our existing communities, which we as their members must challenge, change, and weave together from within. This will require that we, as

individual community members, leaders, and role models for others, become exemplars of the change we would bring about more broadly: We must live as wellsprings of loyalty-loving critical openness to variety and creative renewal within and between our own treasured communi-

ties. It will require that loyal intellectuals in the blue states reach out to and cherish loyal intellectuals in the red states, and vice versa. It will require that justice-minded Catholics and justice-minded Baptists (and justice-minded Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, and Native American Traditionalists) reach out to each other, while bravely challenging those

within their own communities who betray their founding spirit by rejecting a wider “loyalty to loyalty” while insisting on a narrow, hierarchical orthodoxy within their communal interpretative process. It will require stirring up our own and others’ higher or more enlightened pro-

vincialisms while interweaving these within translocal, open-ended communities and democratic social movements that are both incited and disciplined by loyalty to loyalty. When this process really gets going in America, we will experience the kind of democratic cultural transformation that our founding ideals— still precious in both the red states and the blue states—have always called

202 JUDITH M. GREEN us to progressively actualize within our ideal-guided time-process of becoming a beacon of hope to the world. If Royce is right that loyalty is contagious, then all we need to do now is to strike a few matches— provided that we light them within the right kind of provincial tinder, properly placed to reignite those translocal, open-ended communities of memory and hope—existing or about to be born—that many of us already do (or will) embody as grassroots leaders and flame-fanning members.

ELEVEN

JOSIAH ROYCE AND THE REDEMPTION OF AMERICAN INDIVIDUALISM Richard P. Mullin

r ‘ he specter of centrifugal forces, which threaten to tear our country apart, has haunted us throughout our history. Josiah Royce stands out as one of our most perceptive critics and the creator of a philosophy that could heal the dangerous tendency toward fragmentation and disintegration. Royce’s work lies before us as a national treasure, but mostly a buried treasure. His situation reminds one of a remark that novelist Walker Percy made about Charles Sanders Peirce: “Most people have never heard of him, but they will.”! Josiah Royce’s Philosophy of Loyalty remains little known outside of specialized American philosophy, and even there it is not well understood. I propose here to present Roycean loyalty in a way that is understandable even beyond

the pale of professional philosophers and to show that it constitutes the thinking that America needs now as much as it did one hundred years ago. The American Problem

Born in California in 1855 and spending his boyhood and youth there, Royce witnessed firsthand the emergence of the United States as 1 203 }

204 RICHARD P. MULLIN a transcontinental power. He saw California as the last and least mature

stage in the quest for national identity. When he wrote a history of California, he observed that many towns experienced a boom followed by rapid decay and then disappeared. These communities exhibited an attitude of greed and corruption in which individuals sought more and more money for private pleasures, vices, and power. The communities that took root and flourished respected the common good and fostered “reverence for the relations of life.”* Royce understood California and a wide range of American life in the context of each other. How can a nation

that emphasizes the prominence of free and equal individuals generate the loyalty necessary for its own survival?

The American problem found its most memorable expression in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address when he asked “whether a nation conceived

in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal .. . can long survive.” Although Lincoln was of course talking about the threat that regionalism posed for the nation, there is another less deadly but more long-range threat that emerges from liberty and equality. It is the awareness that we are created free and equal, which can

generate a kind of individualism that devalues the national community and perhaps all communities. Royce himself paraphrased Lincoln by pointing out that “in all nations, but particularly in America, we need in this day to work together to the end that loyalty to the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”° The primacy of the individual can be taken to mean that there is no such

thing as a common good, a position held today by some individualists.* While they grant that individuals need the association with others to achieve

their own sense of happiness, these associations must be voluntary and temporary. For example, employers and employees come together so that each can meet their respective needs, but the relationship easily dissolves when it no longer suits either one.” Each person has the same relationship to an organization as he or she might have with a health club or a membership in Sam’s Club. You might join for six months but have no obligation

to stay. Marriage, in this view, constitutes a voluntary association for expected mutual benefit, but should be easily undone if either party finds it for any reason no longer beneficial. Most individualists concede that governments with their police power and taxing authority constitute a necessary evil in order to protect the citizens from crime and foreign intrusion,

but insist that governments and taxes ought to be held to a minimum.°

ROYCE AND AMERICAN INDIVIDUALISM 205 The above description sounds like a caricature, which of course it is, but it is an accurate caricature of some individualists. From this point of view,

the flourishing of the individual is the sole good, and each individual need only rightly pursue his or her own self-interest, while avoiding force or fraud that would hinder another individual. There need be no devotion to any cause other than the individual’s own happiness. However, individualists may be blind to the reality of their own lives.

As Royce argues in The World and the Individual, the human person develops by means of a tension between his or her own self-interest and the need to conform to society.’ By itself, the human organism has many inherited drives, needs, and desires. Apart from social training, a human would be a collection of diverse and sometimes conflicting characteristics that would fail to constitute an identity. Without an identity, a unified self, to govern the conflicting aspects of one’s personality, there could be no autonomy. Each person would be a mere product of nature. Each of

us needs social support to develop the individuality that enables us to pursue our own self-interest. But the very power that individuality enables us to wield may entice us to assert our individuality over and against the social institutions. This is

especially true in America because our social formation includes an appreciation and often glorification of individual achievement. However, we cannot find our worth in our isolated selves, which are meeting places of both natural and cultural impulses that may be conflicting and transient. So we seek a cause, something larger than ourselves, which adds stability and coherence and unity to our lives.® Individualism itself may emerge as a cause. In seeking some cause, any cause, the dark side of loyalty intrudes. We may easily find and identify with communities that exist primarily in opposition to real or imagined enemies.’ Royce believed that such communities are built on hate. The hate is generated not so much by what he called the graver vices, but rather results from the misunderstanding that prevails because we understand each other so little and with so much difficulty. Our ordinary social life is marked by inevitable tension and natural disharmony. The result as Royce describes it: Man need not be, when civilized, at war with his fellows in the sense of raising the sword against them. But he comes to self-consciousness as a moral being through the spiritual warfare of mutual observation,

mutual criticism, of rivalry—yes, too often through the warfare of envy and of gossip and of scandal mongering and of whatever else

206 RICHARD P. MULLIN belongs to the early training that many people give to their own con-

sciences, through taking a more or less hostile account of the consciences of their neighbors.'°

While many Americans find it difficult to pledge loyalty to something as large and impersonal as our national government, we find it easier to identify with a particular and more limited aspect of our national life. We see this limited and divisive loyalty today in much of the rhetoric and actions of conservatives against liberals, tea partiers against those whom they perceive as “elite,” fundamentalist Jews and Christians united against Muslims, straights against gays, and natives against immigrants. When Royce argues that each of us needs a cause to which we can give a voluntary, practical, and thoroughgoing loyalty, he is not advocating that we choose one of the communities of hate against another. A dogmatic and inflexible approach, even to a cause that begins well, can lead to hostility toward those who disagree. We can overcome the hostility of exclusiveness only through a higher social consciousness that requires a continually deepening insight and ongoing moral training.

Social training provides the language, culture, and skills by which we can develop a unique self-awareness in opposition to the very social conformity that enabled each of us to establish a self. As we grow from childhood to maturity we experience ways in which family, school, laws,

government, and work restrain our desire for personal freedom. In youth we may find a degree of autonomy to influence, challenge, change, or attack our social structures. But if our response to society is merely to assert our own personal desires, then we remain products of

instinctive natural forces, although these natural inclinations have been sharpened and strengthened by the skills learned through social imitation. To be truly autonomous, we need a basis for choosing which desires we will follow and which we will relinquish. For example, young

men and women often find themselves attracted to many communal pursuits, such as sports, science, music, or social service, along with many enticing social distractions such as drinking, sex, shopping, and “hanging out.” They must choose, and their choices will indelibly impact the development of their selves. Royce argues that the self is not ready-made but rather constitutes a task that the person must achieve by choosing some purpose to live for and a life plan for attaining the beloved purpose."

ROYCE AND AMERICAN INDIVIDUALISM 207 Loyalty as the Basis of Identity

If our purposes and life plans are themselves arbitrary, we still lack autonomy. We stand in need of some basis for choosing; we need a standard of morality. Of course, our social training is rich enough in moral precepts, but we see these precepts as imposed from outside and contrary to our desire for autonomy. The paradox of morality, duty versus auton-

omy, emerges. Initially, it appears that our need to express individual autonomy and the moral imperative to devote our lives dutifully to moral principles stand in opposition to each other.

To overcome such conflict, we need to discipline and evaluate our

desires around some good that does not depend on our desires. If the good is merely a product of each person’s imagination, it would not overcome the arbitrary nature of caprice. Royce finds the solution to the paradox of morality in loyalty to a cause that subsists objectively apart from the person who chooses it. The cause must be larger than any individual and have value apart from any one follower. The loyal person must have at least potential fellow servants of the cause, and there must be real work that they strive to accomplish. But the devotion to the good must be something that comes from within the person rather than something imposed from outside. The choice of a cause and the life plan to serve the cause flow from the autonomous person. In his 1907 book, The Philosophy of Loyalty, Josiah Royce took on the task of establishing a basis for the whole of morality. He considered this the crucial need of the time, since neither religion nor science has any worth unless there is a genuine standard by which to measure their worth. Royce proposed loyalty as the ultimate standard. His thesis as stated in the opening chapter is “In loyalty, when loyalty is properly defined, 1s the fulfillment of the whole moral law.”'* Royce set as his task to give the proper definition of loyalty and then to show that it can serve as the basis and the fulfillment of morality. Many listeners, in Royce’s time as well as ours, pointed to the evil

causes that have attracted the loyalty of persons causing disastrous wars and crimes. Some turn away and refuse to listen any further. Such reaction is very unfortunate, because those who allow themselves to be put off by a fear of loyalty miss the richness of Royce’s thought. Royce does not mindlessly praise loyalty. Instead he acknowledges that a cause

might be evil, and he offers a criterion for discerning a good cause.

208 RICHARD P. MULLIN To understand Royce, we need to first look at why loyalty appears as a good, from the viewpoint of the individual, even though the particular cause may be evil when seen from a larger perspective. Next, we can consider what makes a cause evil followed by his criterion for a good cause. In Royce’s view, loyalty to a good cause constitutes the basis for all morality. For Royce, loyalty consists of “The willing and practical and thoroughgoing devotion of a person to a cause.” '’ The willing aspect of the definition

means that we must choose our cause. It cannot be something that is forced on us or which we inherit without personal thought and decision. Its practical nature means that we cannot have it merely as a warm feeling

or as a kind of spectator sport in which we cheer from the sidelines. Thoroughgoing devotion entails the making and carrying out of a plan to do what is in our power to promote our cause. Aside from the objective value of the cause, and whether the cause is

good or bad, having a cause appears to the loyal person as good. Our natural state of isolation spawns caprice, hesitancy, and distraction. We experience the world as fragmented and unstable, making it difficult if not impossible to act autonomously. For us to overcome the chaos of our genetic and environmental nature and achieve autonomy, we need a self-chosen cause around which we can integrate all of our choices and behavior. The chosen cause stands out as the most important aspect of our quest for autonomous individuality. Therefore, the best thing that we can do for other people is to enhance their loyalty to a cause. We find meaning by devoting ourselves to causes such as improved public and personal health, art, science, education, economic prosperity, environ-

mental stewardship, and legal justice, to mention a few. Work on the aforementioned pursuits can enable others to promote their various causes. The loyal person recognizes the value of the other person’s loyalty and so will avoid harming the other person’s cause and will help when possible. Royce describes the attitude of respect for all loyalty as “loyalty to loyalty.” Such loyalty leads us to treat ourselves and others with utmost

respect and fairness and to the promotion of individual and social integrity. For this reason, Royce maintained that loyalty can be the basis for all morality. Loyalty to loyalty enables us to recognize bad causes. If enhancing loyalty is the best that we can do for others, the worst thing we can do is to destroy their loyalty. Royce contends that while a good cause promotes

ROYCE AND AMERICAN INDIVIDUALISM 209

the loyalty of others, an evil cause is one that destroys the loyalty of others. Loyalty that promotes a cause that is oppressive, violent, or destructive, such as a tyrannical political party or a criminal gang, is disloyal to the larger human community.'* Royce’s examples of evil causes included loyalty to such things as a band of robbers and a family engaged

in a murderous feud. Contemporary readers might think of loyalty to Stalinism, Nazism, or a military dictatorship in a developing country. More examples may be brought to our attention as the “Arab Spring” unfolds. The danger and reality of bad loyalty awakens us to the need for deeper insight into the moral needs of human nature. Loyalty to loyalty is the basis for all of the qualities that we rightly rec-

ognize as virtues. Truthfulness, justice, benevolence, and courtesy are ways in which we express our loyalty to other human beings and to the common ties that connect us. For example, applying the idea of loyalty to business ethics, Royce observed: “In the commercial world, honesty in

business is a service not merely and not mainly to the others who are parties to the single transaction in which at any one time this faithfulness is shown. The single act of business fidelity is an act of loyalty to that general confidence of man in man upon which the whole fabric of business rests.”!°

Regarding loyalty, Royce saw some specifically American problems that stand the test of time. The national government does not inspire

much passion for loyalty. From our perspective in history we might argue that there was some such passion during the two World Wars and

during the Cold War. But it does not seem likely that any politician could stir the hearts of the American people today by appealing to loyalty

to the government. True, this could change if there were a credible enemy to threaten the survival of the government. The enemy could be

real or imaginary, foreign or domestic. But at present the degree of sophisticated cynicism is such that Royce’s philosophy of loyalty will not readily resonate on first hearing. Royce’s philosophy met the same problem in his time that it does in ours. In explaining the problem facing America, Royce cites Hegel’s description of the Roman Empire and the absolute monarchs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe. Hegel called this the Spirit estranged

from itself.'° This means that the social reality seems foreign to the people who make it up. They do not see it as their own; they do not feel at home with it. It is something outside, which is controlling their lives.

210 RICHARD P. MULLIN Even when we see it as beneficial, it is impersonal and does not awaken a sense of loyalty. This is also true of the economic forces, which are seen as forces of nature. “They excite our loyalty as little as do the trade winds or the blizzard.”"” Of course the ultimate object of our national loyalty, from a Roycean

perspective, ought not be any particular administration, political party, ideology, interpretation of the Constitution, or even the government itself. But the object of loyalty can be the idea of the Republic in which we all live under a rule of law that fosters each individual while promoting “a

more perfect union.” Royce’s Doctrine of Life

Royce contends that the full understanding of our moral need requires a doctrine of life. He calls his insight the “Christian Doctrine of Life” but argues that the doctrine is not limited to historic Christianity. Rather, it constitutes a universal insight that Christianity discovered and put into a specific historical religious context. If his interpretation is correct, the doctrine of life can guide not only Christians but also those who do not share the faith and practice of historic Christianity. The doctrine of life makes us aware of the natural poverty and failure which beset our ordinary existence, and undertakes to show us some way of salvation. The supremely valuable form of life is the “Beloved Community,” the universal community of all humanity. In religious terms it is called “The Kingdom of Heaven.” But the problem of human life consists of our being isolated from each other, and from the Beloved Community, by a tendency toward egoistic disintegration; in religious terms: sin. Atonement,

as a universal secular purpose, means overcoming our isolation and working to create in reality (on earth) the Great Community that is presented to us as an ideal (in heaven). Royce contrasts Christianity with his understanding of Buddhism, which is also a religion of salvation. Christianity calls not for the extinction of the individual, but rather assigns the individual infinite worth. The infinite worth of the individual in Christianity can join with and redeem the glorification of the individual in American culture. Part of “the problem of Christianity” consists in determining whether the Christian notion of the individual and the secular American notion are compatible. For Christianity, the infinite value of the individual stems from his or her

ROYCE AND AMERICAN INDIVIDUALISM 211 membership in the Great Beloved Community.'® The American ideal, by

contrast, affirms the priority of the individual and sees all associations

as secondary, consisting of autonomous individuals who choose to compose them. If the task of teaching loyalty consists of redeeming the American glorification of the individual with the Christian notion of the individual, it would seem to come easily and naturally to American Christians. But peoples’ religious beliefs are often divorced from secular beliefs. Those

who are members of a Christian community, at least nominally on Sunday, may be radical individualists during the work week. Their individualism, more than their Christianity, may dominate their views and behavior in business, politics, and even their family lives. Christians, who

understand the communal nature of their religion, as presented in the New Testament, can find in Royce’s interpretation a way to actively live out their beliefs while making common cause with non-Christians who also follow what Royce calls the “Christian Doctrine of Life.” While a challenging question asks whether Christians can be moti-

vated to adopt Royce’s “Christian Doctrine of Life,” a more daunting question is whether non-Christians should even care. But Royce believes

that his “Christian Doctrine of Life” is a universal truth that can be adopted without accepting the beliefs and practices of historic Christianity.

The reason that the Christian and non-Christian individualist do well to understand and develop a doctrine of life is that without it, all individuals may fall into insignificance.’’ There is a rebuttal that asks, “If I am here to serve others, what are others here for?” This quip may be posed as an appeal to egoism. Each of us does best by fostering the well-being of that individual whom we know and love best, our own self. If we all strive to flourish while avoiding force or fraud, we do the best that it is possible to do. But within this frame of mind, there is no basis for attributing infinite value to myself or the other. Royce uses the term infinite in its literal sense of ‘unlimited.’ Because each individual is destined for membership in the Universal Beloved Community, a person’s worth is not limited to his or her biological life and personal achievements. *° The choice of egoism or altruism reflects a false dichotomy. Royce’s doctrine of life holds that both I and the other are valuable because we are at least potential members of the Great Community. Egoism exhibits disloyalty by denying or even opposing the Great Community; collectivism shows disloyalty by denying the infinite value of the individuals who

212 RICHARD P. MULLIN compose the community. Even altruism may be disloyal if it stunts the

erowth of individuals. A false sense of altruism could, for example, hamper a person’s growth if she spent her life “helping others” in trivial ways to the neglect or exclusion of her own potential. Royce’s exemplar of the loyal person is the lighthouse keeper, Ida Lewis.*' In her career, she saved many sailors, not only by keeping the light burning, but by going

out in her boat in times of shipwreck to personally rescue survivors. Royce contends that a loyal person such as Ida Lewis is not selfless. She works to develop her boating skills and is rightly proud of them. The

more self she has, the more she can bring to the distressed sailors. The loyal person is a strong and well-developed individual with an equally strong social sense. The example of the lighthouse keeper applies to any meaningful human behavior. We cannot contribute to the social good without developing our self; and we cannot develop our self without contributing to the social good. This idea applies to almost every area of human activity, including government, business, education, religion, the arts, science, sports, social life, and family life.

Summary The “Christian Doctrine of Life,” stated in secular terms, requires that we first recognize that we are capable of membership in a community that we absolutely need in order to achieve our autonomous, individual self.

But we are victims of natural and social impulses that prevent us from being autonomous and pose the danger of missing out on achieving our

autonomous individuality. We may be tempted to find the solution in communities of hate, which appear to rescue the individual but are themselves the product of chaotic human impulses. To find salvation, we need to find a cause that we can be loyal to, a cause that also expresses loyalty to loyalty. In doing so, we can achieve simultaneously an autonomous individuality and participation in the quest for the Great Community.

TWELVE

ROYCE S RELEVANCE FOR INTRAFAITH DIALOGUE Frank M. Oppenheim, S.J.

Orientation

W arm-up pitches can help us start.' I write in this paper as a philoso-

pher of religion examining statements Royce made about intrafaith relationships. I use the term “intrafaith” to indicate the interpersonal relations between members of the world religions—Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, etc.* Then, too, in 1912 what Royce did not know about “the historical Jesus” contrasts sharply with today’s far more nuanced and subtle treatment of that topic. In addition, Royce used the term “Christian” in two senses, each determinable from its context. Sometimes he spoke of “Christian” in the narrow sense of a person baptized with water who professes Jesus as his or her savior. Frequently, however, Royce used a broad sense of “Christian” to refer to anyone dedicated to a genuine cause, what-

ever be his or her creed or lack thereof. In brief, Royce’s broad sense of “Christian” referred to any genuinely moral committed person. We live amid natural disasters, wars, terrorist attacks, and economic colonialism. Some of these touch us deeply but as mere individuals we { 213 }

214 FRANK M. OPPENHEIM, S.J. can do little to combat such massive evils. To solve or at least alleviate these problems cooperatively requires significant changes in both the

world’s traditional cultures and in the world religions under-girding these cultures. As Hans Kiing put it tersely, “No world peace without peace between the religions.”’ And no peace between the religions with-

out intrafaith dialogue. An awareness is slowly growing that to attain world peace and security, world health and basic human rights, we must promote a unity of spirit and an effective cooperation between world religions. In this paper I investigate whether Josiah Royce yearned for this goal.

Surely he emphasized the doctrines of humankind’s Great Beloved Community and of atonement as a key step toward that community. In this context, humankind’s gradual maturation into further commitment

to genuine moral living becomes indispensable. Each person must increase their dedication to moral growth and development in themselves and others and do the same in their communities.* For Royce this dedication transcends individualistic self-assertion and individualistic self-withdrawal from community—those two other basic “attitudes of

will” which lack genuine commitment and harm oneself, others, and community. Only genuine dedication produces authentic personal and communal moral growth and development. These latter benefits are the fruits produced by what Royce calls the deeds of Pauline charity

and atonement. Our much alienated world badly needs the many reconciliations that only atoning deeds inspired by genuine dedication can effect.

Biographically, Royce seems not to have become an active participant

in the incipient ecumenical and intrafaith movements of his time. He wrote no speech for such events as the Parliament of World Religions, which met in Chicago and Evanston in 1893. Nor in 1910 did he contrib-

ute to Edinburgh’s significant World Missionary Conference. Royce put his stress on meanings rather than on meetings of religious groups. So, to search for his ways of thinking about intrafaith relationships, we turn to the way he worked out ideas concerning relationships between

Christians and members of other world religions. So, our overall problem becomes this: As a secular prophet, did the late Royce lead us into intrafaith dialogue and cooperation? If so, does that make Royce

relevant today for advancing the unity of the human family’s Great Community?°

ROYCE AND INTRAFAITH DIALOGUE 215 Initial Survey of Royce’s Early and Middle Writings

First, I will briefly notice some ideas and texts excerpted from his early and middle periods—from 1875 to 1897 and from 1898 to 1911. After this

brief sampling, my main concern will focus on the concluding chapters of Royce’s Sources of Religious Insight and his Problem of Christianity.° Since my inquiry amounts to an initial scouting investigation, it remains a clearly limited effort. The religious tone of Royce’s thinking is obvious; some would say off-putting. The trajectory of his intellectual development reveals an initial wandering in positivistic skepticism (1875-82). His discovery of the truth of an All-knower, a judge constitutive of all truths and all morally good choices constituted the start of his early period (1883—98).’ This led

him after his 1888 nervous breakdown into a healing period during his round-the-world trip. Consequently, his view of the All-knower grew more nuanced and balanced. It also became an All-willer, All-experiencer, All-sufferer and All-perfecter, and stayed so even throughout his middle period (1898-1912). Royce did not use the phrase, “intrafaith dialogue.” Yet I believe its reality became an increasing concern for him. He sensed the importance of discussions between qualified leaders of world religions provided they tended toward cooperative deeds. He knew that what he called “life in the unity of the spirit” lay beneath all these religions. Some hints of this from his middle period may supply initial evidence. In his The World and the Individual* Royce wrote of intending to be the “thoroughgoing critic of the foundations of our faith,” to study “the fundamental problems of the Metaphysic of Religion,” and within religious traditions to recognize that “the inward life of thinking for one’s self the meaning within or behind the tradition constitutes the very coming of the Spirit of Truth himself [sic] into our own spirits; and that coming of the Spirit, in so far as it occurs at all, never seems to any of us dreary”? (WI 1:5-8). Here aspects of lived mysticism presented themselves. Four years later, when serving as appraiser of a manuscript on com-

parative religion, Royce required that the book “be both scientific and judicial in spirit and in method,” that it avoid any partisan glorifying of one’s own religion, and that a more concrete title like, “The Social Influence of the Great Religions,” might be preferable. Royce continued, “Of course we all can thank God that we are not as other men, such as

216 FRANK M. OPPENHEIM, S.J. the Chinese, the Hindoos, the Siamese, the Turks, and the other poor devils of misbelievers.” For Royce all such boasting was irreligious. While his friend, William James, was laboring in his Varieties of 1902 to promote a “Science of Religions,” Royce in 1903 offered his own rather parallel view:

A comparative and scientific study of the social influences of the great religions is not needed to make us think well of Christianity, or of our own civilization, but will help us most, if it helps us at all, by assuming, as far as possible, a highly judicial, an impartially appreciative attitude, and by telling not so much who has done best, but what each civilization in question has done to meet its own problems.'°

Pragmatist Royce wanted to test a religion by its success or failure in dealing with the real problems of its civilization. Eight years later, when preparing to address the Providence Association for Religious Education, Royce stressed his best-known theme, community: We are members one of another. It is the spiritual community that first of all lives... the invisible church of all the faithful....Itis...in the order of being as well as in the order of worth [that] has the true primacy. ... Now religion, on its higher levels, is a consciousness of this over-individual unity of the life of the spirit. And the problem of religion is the problem: In what sense are we men, in all our endless individual variety, still in essence One—not One in so far as our individuality is lost—but one in so far as we are members of one spiritual body, citizens of the universal city of all those who live in the spirit,

companions of the great companion whose life is the significant conscious unity of all our lives."

The Sources of Religious Insight

After these glimpses of concern for intrafaith issues in the early and middle Royce, I turn seeking my main evidences from his Sources and the Problem. In the Sources, his general approach to a philosophy of religion,

I focus on the final chapter entitled “The Unity of the Spirit and the Invisible Church.” Here my main focus will be on Sections II-V, even while acknowledging the foundational nature of Section I.” Royce undergirded his work in the Sources by stating that his early “religious insight” into the truth of the real All-knower played an enduring role in the Sources. Accordingly, he wrote that we cannot define the

ROYCE AND INTRAFAITH DIALOGUE 217 reality of the universe unless we presuppose and depend upon the reality

of the All-knower’s “inclusive and direct grasp of the whole sense of things” (SRI 266). Royce saw that if a person rejects this principle, he or she falls into a performatory contradiction. On this basis, then, Royce started his Sources by identifying people’s religious interest as their “need to be saved from some vast and universal burden’—whether that burden be sin, fate, unreasonableness, misery, unworthiness, or evil (SRI 8). For him this “being saved” (or salvation), the central achievement of religion, lay in an ongoing process rather than in a single event (SRI 166). In the Sources Royce took as his guides “those who .. . actually live in the spirit” (SRI 167). This fact shows that he focused not on denomina-

tional lines but was already reaching out beyond explicitly Christian boundaries. In doing so he invited his audience to follow him in his search for those most basic relationships that exist between human beings as well as those between people of different world religions. In the last chapter of Sources Royce started from the psychological fact

of how narrow our conscious span is and how by habit, memory, and abstraction we strive indirectly to enlarge the narrowness of our human span of consciousness (SRI 259). The judgments we subsequently make appeal unavoidably to a higher kind or kinds of consciousness in order to make the truth or error of those judgments possible and also actual. Thus the late Royce’s world of minded beings consists in a world of both human and higher-than-human consciousnesses. In this context Royce defined his key phrase, “the unity of the spirit” as “simply the unity of meaning which belongs to these superhuman forms of consciousness’ (SRI 271). So, if Jews, Buddhists, naturalists, or Christians try to harmonize their knowing and willing with the unified meaning of these (eminently moral) superhuman forms of consciousness, they are the genuinely moral people. With surprising intrafaith awareness, Royce

soon stated, “I forthwith point out that, to the higher religious life of mankind the life of the visible church stands related as part to whole; and that very vast ranges of the higher religious life of mankind have grown and flourished outside of the influence of Christianity” (SRI 278).

Next, because Royce used the term “church” with many different qualifications in his 1912-13 writings, some introductory clarification of the ways he used “church” in the concluding chapters of his Sources and Problem seems needed.

218 FRANK M. OPPENHEIM, S.J. As we saw, Royce began by clarifying that the relationship between the

visible and the invisible Church was not that of a sharp separation but rather that of a part to a whole. He wrote, “I point out the fact that the visible church is as precious as it is because it is indeed devoted to the unity of the spirit, that is, because it is a part and an organ of the invisible church”’’ (SRI 293). Accordingly, Royce defined his Invisible Church as “the community of all who have sought for salvation through loyalty” (SRI 280). Then, from a slightly different perspective, Royce put it this way, “And by the invisible church I mean the brotherhood consisting of all who, in any clime or land, live in the Spirit” (SRI 280). Finally, from a still different angle, Royce added, “The invisible church, then, is no merely human and secular institution. It is a real and superhuman organisation [sic]. It includes and transcends every form of the visible church” (SRI 281).

Looking back to that early visible Church in Corinth and its squabbling factions, Royce wondered whether its conflicting groups foreshadowed the lack of mutual understanding and cooperation found in twentieth century world religions. Aware of the vast differences which prevented a perfect parallel here, Royce described the world scene which confronted him as “a world where faith does not understand faith, where the contrasts of opinion seem to the men in question to exclude community of the spirit, where the fighting blood even of saintly souls is stirred by persecutions or heated by a hatred of seemingly false creeds” (SRI 296). Soon Royce pointed out “the difficulty that the visible church, in all

its forms, has had to unite loyal strenuousness of devotion to the truth that one sees with tolerance for the faiths whose meaning one cannot understand” (SRI 296). For this exacting task he called upon “loyalty to universal loyalty,” adding: Such loyalty loves loyalty even when race or creed distinctions make it hard or impossible for us to feel fond of the person and practices and

opinions whereby our more distant brethren embody their spiritual gifts. Such loyalty is tolerant. Tolerance is what charity becomes when

we have to deal with those whose special cause we just now cannot understand. Loyalty is tolerant, not as if truth were indifferent, or as if there were no contrast between worldliness and spirituality, but is tolerant precisely in so far as the best service of loyalty and of religion and of the unity of the spirit consists in helping our brethren not to our own, but to their own. Such loyalty implies genuine faith in the abiding and supreme unity of the spirit.'* (SRI 296-97)

ROYCE AND INTRAFAITH DIALOGUE 219 The Problem of Christianity

Turning to The Problem of Christianity to complete my investigation, I employ a preliminary survey and then focus on its final pages. Royce broke many a reader’s habitual expectations of what he meant by the so familiar term “Church.” He told them, “The Church... must mean the company of all mankind” (PC 379). Here he started with an all-inclusive sense by identifying “Church” with “the company of all mankind.” Yet he quickly added a highly qualifying “in so far as” clause, which further specified: “The Church... must mean the company of all mankind, in so far as mankind actually win the genuine and redeeming life in brotherhood, in loyalty, and in the beloved community.” Given the sinfulness of even the most dedicated human groups, that “actual winning” of the genuine and redeeming life constitutes no small achievement. Royce meant that while some groups may practice such a genuine and redeeming life as radiates brotherhood, loyalty, and the Beloved Community, nevertheless, all mankind seems not “actually [to] win the genuine and redeeming life” of the Beloved Community. For Royce, then, the term “Church” points not to every human being, but to all of them who are in real union with the Spirit’s superhuman consciousness and with the as yet unrealized ideal of the invisible church. Toward that ideal most of us limited, yet only sometimes fully dedicated, human beings usually strive but have yet to attain. As a result, Royce stated that “the true Church is represented on earth by whatever body of men are most faithful, according to their lights, to the cause of the unity of all mankind” (PC 379). About Royce’s “true Church,” notice his phrase, “is represented on earth.” For Royce, whom Charles Peirce called “our American Plato,” the true Church is present on earth only representatively, like an embodied Platonic Form, but it finds its authentic presence in the world of superhuman consciousnesses and their ideal goals. Filling out his picture of “church,” Royce both acknowledged that to

the Church “has been committed the greatest task of the ages,” even though the “Christian churches and nations...have done as yet but the very least fragment of what it was their task to accomplish; namely, to bring the Beloved Community into existence” (PC 380). For him the “official church” and the “sects of the church” are characterized by “those [people who] ignore the larger human hopes and the

220 FRANK M. OPPENHEIM, S.J. universal mission of the apostolic Church” to all humankind” (PC 378). Royce also disturbed many a Christian’s self-complacency by adding that if what we now know as a civilization alien or hostile to Christianity

comes to undertake the task of unifying mankind, and succeeds therein,—then that strange new civilization will never be more remote, we may be sure, from the life of the Pauline churches, and from the spirit which dwelt in them, than we now are. (PC 381)

In brief, Royce distinguished between the church visible and invisible without separating them into two churches. From this basic distinction flowed many of his subordinate distinctions. His “invisible church” was the “true and only church universal,” the Beloved Community (PC 380-81).

For him any particular church lacks the fullness of truth and that uniqueness of the Universal Community as graced; that is, of the Beloved Community (PC 125). Yet wherever a group believes explicitly, or implicitly by its works, that the Divine Spirit who saves humankind dwells in

their assembly, there one finds some spiritual presence of the Beloved Community, like some genuine if limited realization of a Platonic Form (PC 376).

To move beyond this initial survey of quotations from the Problem, I need to focus more carefully on its pair of final chapters. There I search

for further clues that Royce did or did not point toward intrafaith dialogue.

Already in his Preface to the Problem Royce had emphasized three times the importance of its pair of concluding chapters. He described this pair as simply summaries, thus hinting that they needed further development (PC 37, 40). As for the final four pages of his last chapter, he confessed writing them as briefly as he could, again hinting that, had time allowed, he would have fleshed out this bare outline of a summary (PC 401). Royce had started his Problem of Christianity with a working definition

of that problem; namely, “In what sense, if in any, can the modern man consistently be, in creed, a Christian?” (PC 62). Royce’s “modern man” is a person abreast of scientific thinking and enriched with the world’s

wisest traditions. Royce held, “In the past the teaching of Christian doctrine has generally depended upon some form of Christology. In recent times the traditional problems of Christology have become... increasingly difficult and perplexing” (PC 402). So Royce recommended

ROYCE AND INTRAFAITH DIALOGUE 221

simplifying Christology by deemphasizing tradition-bound, inwardfacing Christological formulae and emphasizing Christianity’s contem-

porary, outward-looking, pneumatological center, the Logos-Spirit. All those committed to genuine morality need to express this pneumatol-

ogy by their deed-doing acknowledgment of the Logos-Spirit of the Universal Community and by testing every practical enterprise with the question, “Does this help towards the coming of the universal community?” (PC 404-5). Royce went on to assert that we can simplify our central problem of

Christianity by simplifying the traditional problems of Christology, of dogma in general, and of the true interests between philosophy and religion (PC 44). He called Christian thinkers to break through the traditional formulas of Christology by finding the core intent of these formulas and by emphasizing their intent in practical deeds. After this recommendation, Royce gave practical direction to his Problem of Christianity by enunciating two maxims. First, “Simplify your traditional Christology, in order thereby to enrich tts spirit. The religion of loyalty has shown us the way to this end” (PC 402). And second: Look forward to the human and visible triumph of no form of the Christian church. ...|W|hat I mean is that since the office of religion is to aim towards the creation on earth of the Beloved Community, the future task of religion is the task of inventing and applying the arts which shall win men over to unity, and which shall overcome their original hatefulness by the gracious love, not of mere individuals, but of communities. (PC 404)

If Royce’s simplification of Christology is the fitting way of proceed-

ing, what should the peoples of the world do to further “our common religious interests” (PC 390)? He used this phrase, “our common religious interests,” to refer to humankind’s “need for salvation” under-

stood in its deepest and broadest senses. “Our common religious interests” constitute that network of religious needs, memories, expectations, affects, and valuations found in all humans. For they yearn for freedom from that inescapable burden created by society’s cultivation of their social selves—a cultivation that turns people into ever more fiercely rebellious individualists. All around the world human beings “cry out of the depths” for the light that makes sense of life. By “our common religious interests,” then, Royce was clearly going beyond the

222 FRANK M. OPPENHEIM, S.J. common ecumenical interests of Christian groups separated from each other. He was embracing the religious concerns of the whole human

family, those needs for cooperation and dialogue between both the members of the world’s different religions and also those outside those religions. In this global scene of common religious needs and interests, what role should Royce’s invisible church play—the church he defined as “the community of all who have sought for salvation through loyalty” (SRI 280)?

Royce replied that the invisible church must witness to all persons of our globe that salvation lies available to them all. Specifically, the invisible church accomplishes such witnessing by deeds of love and atonement. By such deeds it brings about salvation to those who freely cooperate with this witnessing (PC 379).

So, is Royce saying that his “true and universal church”—the invisible—promotes the unity of the human race by bringing about a unity of spirit among the globe’s so many diversified peoples? It seems so. For Royce surely says that by dwelling in the Church, in the Church as invisible and visible, the divine redeeming Spirit is saving humankind. In other words, for Royce the Spirit is that Logos-Spirit found in John’s Gospel, who effects salvation by bringing humankind to “live in the unity of the spirit” (PC 34-35). By this lapidary phrase, Royce

means living with one’s mind and will working in harmony with the Spirit’s superhuman consciousness (SRI 271). This harmonization with the higher provides the ever-sustaining support for Royce’s intrafaith concern and intent.

As we saw, the outcome of Royce’s dealing with the problem of Christianity was a “simplification of Christology.” As his final pages show, he intended this result to help heal relationships between world

religions and to facilitate intrafaith dialogue (PC 402-4). As a truth seeker, Royce firmly resisted that mere repetition of doctrinal formulas about Christ done by rote, tenaciously, without searching for their inner meaning. He pointed up the importance of getting into harmony with the spirit underlying the letter of Christological formulas. In other words,

what Royce said here was that we must reformulate our traditional Christological formulas far more simply. For instance, aware that in the fifth century the Council of Chalcedon defined Christ as “homoousios,” that is, “having the same substance as the Father,” Royce did not say, “Scrap the Nicene and Chalcedonian creeds.” Rather he recommended

ROYCE AND INTRAFAITH DIALOGUE 223 placing these fourth- and fifth-century formulas in the context of their ever-evolving interpretations. Royce claimed that whenever in past ages Christian believers had used the name “Christ,” what they meant was that this name was “the symbol for the Spirit in whom the faithful—that 1s to say the loyal—always are and

have been one” (PC 403). In other words, in the name “Christ” all the genuinely loyal—whether or not baptized with water—possess a symbol of the Spirit who unifies all the genuinely loyal, whatever their creed or lack thereof. Accordingly, if the communities of world religions and their members focused on this Spirit, they could and would come together

in unity—especially, if together they did deeds of practical service to the human family. Individual Christians, in Royce’s narrow sense, will personally and powerfully support the unification of all genuinely ethical persons—“Christians” in Royce’s broad sense—if in their practice they acknowledge the Spirit of the universal community by testing whether their choices tend to promote human unity (PC 403). If with responsible dedication these Christians in the narrow sense were to deal with their brother and sister Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and good-willed

naturalists and atheists, one can, with a bit of imagination, assess the effect of this Roycean “practice of acknowledging the Spirit.”

In these final pages of the Problem, Royce distinguished the vital core of peoples’ religion from those accidental accretions accruing to them. He invited them to focus on the core.'® Accordingly, he set aside as “illuminating but capricious” whatever was “the accident of your special

race or nation or form of worship or training or accidental personal opinion, or devout private mystical experience” (PC 404). Moreover, as regards Christianity, Royce also bypassed “the person of the individual founder,” his sayings, and the “traditions of Christology” because these were not quite central enough, even though often excessively emphasized. Of Jesus, whom Royce considered Christianity’s founder in one sense, Royce stipulated: Whoever asserts that, at one moment of human history, and only at that one moment, an unique being, at once an individual man, and at the same time also God, appeared, and performed the work which saved mankind,—whoever, I say, asserts this traditional thesis, involves

himself in historical, in metaphysical, in technically theological, and in elementally religious problems, which all advances in our modern sciences and in our humanities, in our spiritual life and in our breadth

224 FRANK M. OPPENHEIM, S.J. of outlook upon the universe, have only made, for the followers of tradition, constantly harder to face and to solve. The first of our practical maxims is: Simplify your traditional Christology, in order thereby to enrich its spirit. The religion of loyalty has shown us the way to this end.'’ (PC 402)

And finally, by transcending the level of individuals, Royce announced

the result of his simplification of Christology: “The core of the faith is the Spirit, the Beloved Community, the work of grace, the atoning deed, and the saving power of the loyal life. There is nothing else under heaven

whereby men have been saved or can be saved” (PC 404). Hence, the question arises, Does this Roycean “core of the faith” provide a basis for unifying world religions? His “core of the faith” presupposes that all its accidental accretions and unbalanced individualistic foci can be safely downplayed since these latter are not sufficiently central and vital.

In the end Royce set down two bedrock principles for inter-faith dialogue and cooperation. The one crowning office of all human religion is to aid people become members of, and grow in the one invisible church (PC 404). As we saw, he described this church as “the community of all who have sought for salvation through loyalty” (SRI 280). Secondly, Royce asserted, “Since the office of religion is to aim towards the creation on earth of the Beloved Community, the future task of religion is the task of inventing and applying the arts which shall win men over to unity, and which shall overcome their original hatefulness by the gracious love, not of mere individuals, but of communities”!® (PC 404). It seems, then, that Royce emerges as a pilgrimaging prophet leading us into and through the wilderness of intrafaith dialogue and cooperation to further advance the unity of the human family’s Great Community.

Summary and Some Critical Questions So, is Royce relevant for intrafaith dialogue today? The hints from Royce’s

early and middle period, and the positions found in the final chapters of his Sources and Problem tend toward a positive answer. For the late Royce has presupposed his metaphysical doctrine of the two levels of being—indi-

vidual and community—and that graced life of commitment to universal commitment as the life-giving bond between individual and community. Here we found Royce using his definition of “the unity of the spirit” as merely “the unity of meaning that belongs to these superhuman forms of

ROYCE AND INTRAFAITH DIALOGUE 225 consciousness” (SRI 271). Royce’s central phrase indicates the unified meaning of those sign-sending minded beings on the super-individual level of reality. These minds affect truth-seeking human individuals by using their integrated meaning to draw these humans into greater harmony with that meaning, while they also correct such human individuals as are not concerned with seeking more truth. We also found Royce using his definition of “invisible church”—“the community of all those who have sought for salvation through loyalty” (SRI 280)—as his means of bonding all truly moral persons to his higher level of reality. Royce endeavored to lift his audience’s eyes from the fences separating institutional religions and onto that ethico-religious core of true dedication. In it he finds what he calls “the core of the faith” —

“the Spirit, the Beloved Community, the work of grace, the atoning deed, and the saving power of the loyal life” (PC 404).

Royce brought his Sources to a conclusion by pointing out that its seven sources of religious insight “are themselves the working of its [the invisible church’s] spirit in our spirits” (SRI 297). This statement alerts his audience to attend more carefully to discerning the spirits working within their hearts and minds. So Royce’s relevance for today’s urgently needed intrafaith dialogue lies,

yes, in his late metaphysics and ethics, but also, more largely than often presented, in his insistence of the social arts of interpersonal relationships. He animated these with the tolerance that comes into play especially when we find it hard to keep listening to a position different from our own and then seeking not to advance our own view but rather to help our seemingly contrary partner to grow toward fuller truth. Royce’s social arts also included a call for restraint from a forthright proposal of one’s own confessional position—say, that of a narrow-sense Christian—without first making the psychological leap into the heart and mind of one’s dialogue partner—say, a Buddhist or Muslim—to appreciate the possible block or wound an inconsiderate confessional statement may cause there. Some Critical Questions

1. I am not a trained biblical scholar who might easily compare Royce’s 1912 language about Jesus with the more refined and subtle language of contemporary research into the “historical Jesus.” Yet since contemporary research seems to find a place for the “historical

226 FRANK M. OPPENHEIM, S.J. Jesus,” we can ask the following question: Are there parallels between Royce’s theory of the Logos-Spirit and theories of a “cosmic Christ”

(nascent, for example, in Teilhard de Chardin, and come of age in Jacques Dupuis)?'? If so, such theories may show how a Logos-Spirit or Cosmic Christ may be relevant for other religions which give little or no notice to the historical Jesus. 2. A methodological question arises, occasioned by Royce’s attempt to define the “core of the faith.” The religion of human beings relates them with an invisible world and an inscrutable deity. So, can limited humans form an adequately inclusive definition of “the core of the faith’? Or may there be more in reality than one’s philosophy can dream of?

3. Is the pragmatist Royce so forward-looking that he dismisses too readily the preresurrection Jesus as just an individual human? Specifically, Royce downgraded the individual man and historical

life of the preresurrection Jesus. Does this not result in a loss of Christianity’s particularity—a particularity rooted largely in the particular Jesus, who is different from, though not necessarily contradictory to, Buddha, Moses, and Muhammad?

4. Finally, Royce makes quite tenuous the linkage between the individual man Jesus and the Logos-Spirit. Does this weak linkage make the mortal Jesus other than God incarnate, and simply just another

of our world’s great religious leaders and prophets, on a par with Moses, Muhammad, and the Buddha? Yet if Christians were to acknowledge that God is saving human beings not only through Jesus but also through such religious leaders as Buddha, Moses, and Muhammad, this would fly in the face of much traditional Christian teaching—evangelical and pre-Vatican Roman Catholic, but not post—Vatican II teaching.”° Yet would it do any of the following?

Would it clearly contradict the Christian scriptures? Diminish commitment to Jesus? Make Christians weaker disciples of Jesus, less given to following his message, even unto death if need be?

THIRTEEN

NECESSARY ERROR Josiah Royce, Communities of Interpretation, and Feminist Epistemology Kara Barnette

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T hroughout his works, Josiah Royce maintains that error is a crucially important philosophical issue. The existence of error provides us with proof that there is a reality outside of ourselves and establishes the need for us to come together to engage in communal inquiry. Error is also inevitable. As long as we remain finite, we will always err. However, when we come together and strive for a better understanding of the world around us with loyalty to inquiry and loyalty to loyalty itself we can often recognize error and do our best to eradicate it. In this paper, I argue that Royce’s concept of error is a potent resource for feminist epistemology. Feminist epistemologists, most notably feminist standpoint theorists, such as Sandra Harding, often argue that better knowing relies on taking

a wider perspective than traditional epistemologies and knowledgeseeking methods can provide. In particular, feminist standpoint theory relies on the claim that those who are oppressed by structures of power

can communally develop epistemologically privileged perspectives because they can learn to recognize the extent to which sexism, racism, homophobia, classism, and colonialism play a role in what is considered | 227 }

228 KARA BARNETTE knowledge. As a result, better knowing requires acknowledging one’s own standpoint, taking into account the larger social context of information, and building knowledge-gathering communities that include a wide and diverse range of perspectives. However, because structures of power are multifaceted and people are not always oppressed for the same reasons or in the same ways, people who occupy different epistemologically privileged standpoints can come

into direct conflict over their views of a particular incident. Public and legal perceptions of alleged incidents of interracial sexual assault involving African American men and white women have often relied upon and perpetuated harmful myths about the sexuality of both parties. In the

depictions of these incidents, both white women and African American men have been oppressed and both white women and African American men may acquire epistemologically privileged standpoints in relation to this issue. However, acknowledging this does not provide a community with a means of adjudicating between these perspectives. Hence, I argue that situations such as these require that communities develop methods of error sensitivity that can enrich concepts of epistemological privilege. Royce’s account of error provides a way of understanding how even epistemologically privileged standpoints can contribute to limiting, and there-

fore error-generating, accounts if the community is not continually striving for a larger perspective. Moreover, his concept of communities of interpretation can provide a model for the process of detecting error while taking the effects of systemic oppression into account.

Royce and Error-Sensitive Inquiry

In his 1912 “Error and Truth,” Royce defines error as the problem of a limited, finite perspective asserting itself as the perspective of a whole: “An error is the expression, through voluntary action, of a belief. In case of an error, a being, whose ideas have a limited scope, so interprets those ideas as to bring himself into conflict with a larger life to which he himself belongs.”’ He even notes that error stems from a conflict that “is at once

theoretical and practical,” and the practical understanding of error is that it is a process in which a finite agent is either unwilling or unable to recognize its limitations.? Although the definition of error in Royce’s later works is the most useful for addressing contemporary epistemological concerns, it is founded on

NECESSARY ERROR 229 many of the same principles and ideas as his earlier definitions. In par-

ticular, Royce’s conceptions of error consistently incorporate the aims or purposes of claims and ideas, the limits imposed by human finitude, and triadic relationships among knowing subjects. In his 1885 The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, Royce introduces the first of these attributes when he claims that error occurs when a judgment does not agree with its object. All judgments have an aim, and for those who are trying to make an accurate judgment about something in the world, the

aim of the judgment is to present the subject of the judgment as it is in reality. Scott Pratt clarifies this in “‘All Our Puzzles Will Disappear’:

Royce and the Possibility of Error”: “there are two conditions that are necessary for an act to be an error, whether the act is an assertion, a judgment of value, or an attempt to realize some result: First, the actor or

agent must have some intention or purpose in mind. Second, the claim made must say something about the thing or relation or result that does not hold.” If I make a judgment that the dog outside my window is a golden retriever, my judgment is in error if the dog is actually a yellow

Lab. My judgment of the dog as a golden retriever disagrees with the reality where the dog is a yellow Lab. Although referring to a yellow Lab as a golden retriever could just be a lie or an otherwise false statement, if the aim of my judgment was to say something about the real dog outside my window, my judgment is in error.

According to Royce, the truth or error of judgments cannot have any meaning in isolation. Sitting by myself in front of my window, I have no way to determine if my judgment is in error or not. I have an idea of the dog in my mind, and this idea might change if, for example,

I get a better look at the dog; at the outset, however, I have access only to my own thought of the dog. I can disagree with my earlier thought and now make a judgment that it is a golden retriever, but with-

out any other account of the dog, I am left with no way of knowing whether or not I am in error. Alternatively, if I call down to the woman walking the dog and ask if the dog is a golden retriever, she can give

me some insight into my error. She presumably has a fuller view of the dog, since she is closer, is the dog’s caretaker, and has access to the dog’s American Kennel Club (AKC) records that contend that the dog

is a registered purebred yellow Lab. She can compare my judgment that the dog is a golden retriever with her own judgment that the dog is a yellow Lab.

230 KARA BARNETTE Hence, Royce claims that the possibility for meaningfulness in either truth or error only arises through the addition of a third party into a situation of judgment (in the example above, the woman becomes the third party in a situation involving myself and the dog). An individual, alone

in her own thoughts, is unable to attain any kind of judgment: “The substance of our whole reasoning about the nature of error amounted to the result that in and of itself alone, no single judgment is or can be an error. Only as actually included in a higher thought, that gives to the first its completed object and compares it therewith, is the first thought an error.”* In addition to noting that a judgment cannot be in error until it is “included in a higher thought,” Royce explains that, in order to be in error at all, the object in question has to be one with which we are already familiar.

Royce uses an example of two people knowing each other to illustrate this concept of error. By first claiming “mere disagreement of a thought

with any random object does not make the thought erroneous” and “the judgment must disagree with its chosen object,” Royce explains that if two people are placed in a room together and asked to make judgments

about each other on no other basis than their individual experience at that moment, then they will never be able to make either a truthful or erroneous account of one another.’ This is because when the first person—in Royce’s account, “John”—makes a judgment about the second person, “Thomas,” he is not making an assessment of truthfulness or error in regard to the real Thomas, but rather in light of his own immediate idea of Thomas. In this case, John singly expresses the idea he has of Thomas relative to that very idea. It cannot be in error since it is only a report of what John already believes. For John to be in error about Thomas, there needs to be a third perspective, a spectator who can compare John’s claims to Thomas, not just to John’s idea of Thomas.°® In his early work, Royce describes the ultimate spectator as the Absolute,

and he relies upon the Absolute to provide meaning for the notions of truth and error. In order to understand why Royce moves to the Absolute for error’s meaning, it is helpful to return to the example of the yellow Lab. If I ask the dog’s caretaker if her dog is a golden retriever, she can correct me and say, no, that it is indeed a yellow Lab. This woman’s situation as the dog’s

caretaker will give her a fuller view of the dog than I am able to attain from my window. However, even as the dog’s caretaker, this woman’s

NECESSARY ERROR 231 view of the dog remains incomplete and, therefore, fallible. If this woman lacks a complete knowledge about the characteristics that mark a yellow Lab, she might overlook a variation in the dog’s coloring, or a height that is taller than is common with yellow Labs. Moreover, if the paperwork from AKC had been forged by the seller of her dog when she bought it as a puppy and she never discovered this deceit, she could be unaware of the

dog’s actual lineage. No matter how much more she knows about her own dog than I do, she will always have, in some way, an incomplete view of the dog and may, in fact, never become aware that, in reality, her dog is an Irish wolfhound and border collie mix.

Human finitude prevents anyone from having a complete account of any idea, whether that idea be of the real Thomas, of a dog that is not

a yellow Lab, or of a scientific claim. Therefore, while a third party might be able to lead an observer to a better, fuller account of an idea, no

human insight will ever be enough to fully decide if a judgment is in truth or error. Thus, Royce claims in The Religious Aspects of Philosophy that our ability to be in error requires the existence of an Absolute unity of thought: [L]et us overcome all our difficulties by declaring that all the many Beyonds, which single significant judgments seem vaguely and separately to postulate, are present as fully realized intended objects to the unity of an all-inclusive, absolutely clear, universal, and conscious thought, of which all judgments, true or false, are but fragments, the whole being at once Absolute Truth and Absolute Knowledge. Then all our puzzles will disappear at a stroke, and error will be possible, because any one finite thought, viewed in relation to its own intent,

may or may not be seen by this higher thought as successful and adequate in this intent.’

For Royce at this point, the concept of the Absolute is an inevitable conclusion. Practically speaking, error must be possible, but no “single significant judgment” is self-contained enough to be assessed with any definitive finality. Every “higher thought” against which it is possible to evaluate the “fragments” that constitute initial judgments simply points toward an even higher thought. Thus, if judgments are only true so long as they reach the intended aim of their objects (usually to portray a subject as it actually is in reality), then there must be a final destination, an Absolute, for “truth” to have any meaning.

232 KARA BARNETTE After contending that truth and error are only meaningful if an Absolute contains the unified sum of all judgments, Royce goes on to elaborate the qualities of an error: “What, then, is an error? An error, we reply, is an incomplete thought, that to a higher thought which includes it and its intended object is known as having failed in the purpose that it more or less clearly had, and that is fully realized in this higher thought. And without such higher inclusive thought an assertion has no external object, and is no error.”® In this passage, Royce continues to discuss error in terms of an initial judgment’s relationship with a higher thought while introducing some of the terms that will characterize errors in his later work. First, by referring to an error as “an incomplete thought,” he suggests that thoughts have their own impetus toward completion. Although he does not address it here, this idea implies that it is possible for finite humans to

cause errors when they interrupt a thought’s drive toward completion. Second, by using the term “purpose,” Royce clarifies that the “intended object” of a judgment is not necessarily prescribed; instead, his language implies that there must be an agent making the judgment, a knowing subject with a reason, or purpose, for doing so. Finally, by reiterating that the absence of a “higher inclusive thought” means there is “no external

object” that can establish truth and error, Royce restricts the range of judgments that can be in error. He is not interested in evaluating nonsense. He is interested in how judgments made in earnest fail to reach their aims. In “Error and Truth,” Royce builds upon his earlier definition by outlining the meaning of “error” under the correspondence theory of truth, the pragmatic concept of truth, and finally under Absolute Idealism. After dismissing the correspondence theory and pragmatism’s accounts of error,

Royce goes on to base his own account of error in the theory of truth offered by Absolute Idealism. Under this account, truth and falsity are not fixed categories or two sides of an opposing dichotomy, but rather truth is a process of attaining the largest possible view of an idea. Royce claims, “[i]f one accepts such a theory of the ‘degrees of truth and falsity,’ and of truth as the harmony or organic unity between a partial view and the ideal whole of experience or of reality, the essence of error—that is, of false opinion must receive a new interpretation.”’ In this regard, a view is false to the extent that it is partial, but it transforms from a false view into an error when the partial view mistakes itself for the whole view. Truth, under this account, happens when the partial view is put into harmony with the total view of experience. At this point, Royce claims that this modern idealist

NECESSARY ERROR 233 approach itself is incomplete, and he ends “Error and Truth” with seven conditions for a possible solution to the problem of error. First, a satisfactory theory of error must maintain a sharp distinction between formally true propositions and their corresponding formally false contradictions. Second, this theory of error must “take account of the actual unity of the cognitive and volitional processes.”!° Royce claims

that both pragmatists and Hegel do this when they argue that “every insight or opinion is both theoretical and practical” and that generally insights and opinions are tested by how they are successful in life.'! Third,

a successful theory of error must acknowledge that the meaning of a proposition is related to the experience of the idea and the meaning of

a proposition is not defined by a relationship with objects outside of experience entirely. Fourth, Royce argues that a satisfactory theory of error must place the success of ideas, hypotheses, and opinions in relationship to the whole of experience and the whole of life as much as possible. Fifth, a successful theory of error must understand that error, evil, individuality, and conflict are all the inevitable result of finitude. Sixth, “[t]heoretical error cannot be separated from practical error.”'” Finally, Royce argues that a successful theory of error will combine Hegel’s dialectical method with pragmatism and the methods of logic to address the problem of error. When these three accounts are combined, people are seen to be in error when their limited ideas force them into conflict with their larger life. Ultimately, Royce’s works present a uniquely pragmatist idealist approach to the concepts of truth and error. This approach holds considerable value

for any contemporary epistemologists who want to avoid slipping into absolute relativism while maintaining a commitment to pluralism. In particular, Royce’s community-oriented approach to generating perspectives, and thereby avoiding error, suits the goals of feminist epistemologies, which focus on making the knowledge-creating process more inclusive. As

a result, feminist epistemologists could draw upon Royce’s theories in their responses to competing claims within pluralist communities. Sandra Harding and the Idea of Epistemic Privilege

In Sciences from Below, Harding notes that “the feminist standpoint mantra” is “start off research and politics from women’s lives.” !° She puts

this mantra in contrast to “the conceptual frameworks of the research

234 KARA BARNETTE disciplines.” '* Conventional, authoritative models of knowing fail to the extent that they remove knowledge from these situations or ignore the insights of those whose knowledge-making processes have never been accredited by traditionally lauded institutions of knowledge. This work supports Harding’s earlier arguments that conventional research within racist, sexist, and heterosexist societies will reproduce the vision available to those in power. Conventional research in these instances is not only partial but also distorted by the effects of the dominant power structures.

Thus, Harding argues that those outside of the “view available to the rulers” can develop standpoints of epistemic privilege. When socially disadvantaged people are allowed some level of freedom from conventional structures of power, Harding argues that they are able to come together as groups and use their own experiences to develop a standpoint with epistemic privilege. This standpoint “requires collective inquiry, discussion, and struggle” through which “a marginalized group [can] “come to voice’ as a self-consciously defined group for itself (instead of only an ‘objective’ group in the eyes of others).”!” Harding’s further elaborations continue to emphasize that this standpoint is the result of collective struggle, rather than an automatic result of individual experience: “Thus a standpoint is an achievement, not an ascription; and it is a group achievement, not something an individual can achieve apart from an emancipatory social movement or context.”!° Harding’s focus on the achievements of the group highlights not only her resistance to traditional, individual-focused forms of epistemology but also her understanding of epistemology as a crucial component of social justice. When the standpoints of disadvantaged peoples become part of larger

institutions, these institutions will begin to aim toward developing knowledge to improve the lives of those on the peripheries of power, and larger institutions will develop richer, “less-false” accounts of the lives

of those outside systems of power. By taking into account a feminist standpoint, Harding claims that feminist researchers will develop more accurate accounts than conventional researchers: “Feminist standpoint theorists argue that not just opinions but also a culture’s best beliefs— what it calls knowledge—are socially situated... . It is [knowledge claims from women’s situations] which are not used by conventional research-

ers, that enable feminism to produce more accurate descriptions and theoretically richer explanations than does conventional research.”!” In this regard, the purpose of standpoint epistemology is not just to improve

NECESSARY ERROR 235 the lives of oppressed peoples; instead, it provides everyone with better knowledge.

While feminist standpoint theory historically focuses on women’s experience as the starting point of more objective inquiry, the same principles that underlie the move to look at the standpoints of women also

mean that good inquiry ought to look toward the standpoints of those oppressed by structures of power other than patriarchy. For Harding, any standpoint of oppression has some epistemic privilege. However, those of privilege can achieve greater objectivity by adopting what Harding calls “a view from below.” In order to adopt this view, researchers must

accept working in collaboration with others and foregoing the social privileges afforded by ideologies of white supremacy, patriarchy, and heterosexism.

Sexual Assault and the Case for Women’s Epistemic Privilege

Although Harding’s work focuses on reforming scientific research, her arguments in favor of standpoint theory implicitly promote reform in how legal inquiries are conducted, because both scientific research and legal inquiries emphasize gathering empirical evidence in order to arrive at a value-neutral conclusion. Where scientific researchers observe phenomena in nature and objects in laboratories, judges, juries, and legal advocates witness conflicts in society. In both situations, institutions of power will influence the ostensibly neutral knowledge-making process through the distribution of funds, the perpetuation of cultural myths, and control over education and professional certification (1.e., being a board-certified physician or a member of the American Bar Association). The influence of patriarchy on the legal system is particularly evident in cases that involve crimes which disproportionately harm women, such as domestic violence and sexual assault. Harding briefly discusses the relationship between sexual assault and a feminist standpoint in Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Here, Harding states, “It is from the perspec-

tives of women’s interests that certain situations can be seen as rape or

battering which from the perspective of the interests of men and the dominant institutions were claimed to be simply normal and desirable social relations between the sexes.”'® In order to develop better accounts

of sexual assault, community and government institutions ought to take up a feminist standpoint in order to respond to the ways in which

236 KARA BARNETTE individual sexual assaults are part of a larger framework of patriarchal violence against women. According to Carole Sheffield in “Sexual Terrorism,” sexual assault represents one of the defining pillars of patriarchy. Female sexual assault

survivors share an understanding that their accounts will likely not be believed, that prosecuting their victimizers will likely lead to their own lives and virtue being put on trial, and that as women they are always potential victims. Understandably, feminist scholars have argued that, in cases of sexual assault, women share an epistemic privilege and that insisting on this privilege is crucial to undermining the oppression of women. The high incidence of sexual assault and its correlation with overarching structures of patriarchy has meant that women’s own testimonies and experiences of rape have been downplayed, dismissed, and ridiculed in both social and legal settings. In particular, victims of assaults deemed “acquaintance rape” have had a hard time getting their experiences of sexual assault prosecuted or accounted for. In “Women’s Voices, Women’s Words: Reading Acquaintance Rape Discourse,” Molly Dragiewicz claims

that the terms “acquaintance rape” and “date rape” entered the public lexicon as a way of acknowledging the experiences of sexual assault victims whose assaults did not fit the common understanding of rape: “The expe-

rience of these terms reveals the substance of dominant ideas about rape. ... If acquaintance rape were not part of the cultural vocabulary, however, women would currently have no term available to them to describe any rape that differs from dominant connotations of rape (usually a violent

rape committed by a stranger).”’’ In instances of acquaintance rape, instances that account for the vast majority of all rapes committed, accounts of women’s experiences of victimization are often disregarded by law enforcement agents, peer groups, and the media as not being “as bad” as “real rape.”

The example of acquaintance rape offers one of the most important examples of the need for accounting for the epistemic privilege of women’s standpoints. Because sexual assault is such an important tool for maintaining existing structures of patriarchy, men, especially men in power, have an investment in maintaining ignorance about the staggeringly high rates of sexual assault against women. If acquaintance rape and other forms of sexual assault can remain an unacknowledged disciplinary power against women, then there will be few public and political actions

NECESSARY ERROR 237 taken that could reduce its occurrence. That men have an interest in maintaining high levels of sexual assault points directly to one of Harding’s arguments in favor of privileging oppressed standpoints; in cases of rape, women have fewer interests in maintaining ignorance around rates of sexual assault and, thus, would be more likely to consider a wide range of research methods on sexual assault.

Moreover, dominant research methods that stem from patriarchal interests will maintain the dominant myth of rape as primarily strangerdriven assault. The only way to move beyond this myth would be to look to the experience of women’s lives. The research methods that uncovered

high rates of acquaintance rape on college campuses were driven by female researchers who asked women in-depth questions about their experiences rather than surveying police reports, medical records, or other official tallies, or even using surveys that asked women simply if they had ever been sexually assaulted. When women were asked several questions about their experiences, researchers found much higher rates of instances of sexual intercourse without consent, (i.e., instances that would fulfill the legal definition of rape) than previous studies.”° In this example, discovering the extent of acquaintance rape on college campuses required looking at women’s experience, not simply at their rates of identifying themselves as having been raped. Without much more indepth accounts that considered that women themselves might not have access to the language they require to be recognized as victims of sexual assault, this information would not be available. By granting women’s testimonies about acquaintance rape epistemic privilege, a progressive justice system could not only encourage more women to come forward with

accounts of sexual assault but also develop better accounts of incidents described by the women who do come forward. Although a focus on helping female victims of sexual assault successfully prosecute their cases is essential, this focus alone fails to rid the justice system of all harmful stereotypes, and in some cases fails to account for all of the power structures in place in a specific case. While the vast majority of rapes are intraracial, interracial sexual assault cases in which the alleged victim is white and the alleged perpetrator is a man of color present a particular challenge for feminist epistemology. While feminist epistemologists such as Harding, Lorraine Code, and Patricia Hill Collins have all advocated that better knowing requires privileging a view from below, instances of alleged interracial sexual assault place two differing

238 KARA BARNETTE and opposing views from below in conflict. Adjudicating these cases requires not only adopting a view from below but also being sensitive to the potential for error in both sets of claims. Competing “Views from Below” in Incidents of Interracial Acquaintance Rape

While sexual assault has been one of the most effective forms of social control of women, myths surrounding sexual assault have also been used as a means of socially controlling men of color. Even though the vast majority of sexual assaults involve members of the same race, the myth that

men of color are violently promiscuous has worked to justify violence against African American men.*' In Black Sexual Politics, Patricia Hill Collins argues that African American sexuality has been controlled in the

United States by racism. A history of lynching created a subjugated knowledge in African American men that is similar to the subjugated knowledge about sexual assault in women. Just as women know that their

accusations about acquaintance rape will be derided and dismissed, African American men know that their pleas of innocence in sexual assault cases involving white women will be disregarded. While interracial rape cases are rare, specific cases of alleged black-on-

white interracial rape have garnered media attention and perpetuated multiple myths about both race and women’s sexuality. These cases often

become symbols for the policing of women who somehow step out of

bounds by being alone in public and for the white justice system’s response to African American men’s alleged violent promiscuity, which

Collins, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and others have labeled “the myth of the Black rapist.” In “Whose Story Is It Anyway?” Crenshaw claims, “In feminist contexts, sexuality represents a dominant narrative trope. In antiracist discourses, sexuality is also a central site upon which the repression of Blacks has been premised; the lynching narrative embodied as its trope.”** Often in these cases, myths surrounding feminine virtue

and propriety and myths of racism came into competition with one another. Cases where the victims and the prosecuted are differently oppressed leave anti-racist feminists in a difficult situation. To grant ereater epistemological privilege to female sexual assault victims involves disregarding the significant role racist myths play in the American Justice system and media. Similarly, to unequivocally grant greater epistemological

NECESSARY ERROR 239 privilege to accused men of color continues the trajectory of disregarding the personal experience of female sexual assault victims, while perpetuating oppressive standards for acceptable women’s behavior. In these cases, both parties are oppressed by existing myths and power

structures. Both racism and sexism are perpetuated in the prosecution and in media representations of these situations, and conscientious communities and institutions are left in the difficult position of determining how to respond to potentially competing sources of epistemic privilege. On the one hand, a feminist standpoint may focus on the ways in which women’s accounts of sexual assault are likely to be disregarded by authorities. On the other hand, an antiracist standpoint may focus on the ways in which institutions like the legal system have perpetuated the myth that any African American man who is accused of sexually assaulting a white

woman is guilty. In and of itself, the act of trying to rank oppression carries harsh social consequences. In “Toward a New Vision,” Collins explains why ranking oppression is a dangerous proposition: “Adhering to a stance of comparing and ranking oppressions—the proverbial, ‘I’m more oppressed than you’—locks us all into a dangerous dance of

competing for attention, resources and theoretical supremacy.”” Moreover, in the example of interracial sexual assault cases, the oppressions of patriarchy and race act concurrently. For both white women and African American men, their sexuality is essentialized in the incident. The incident becomes a lesson for white women about what happens to those who not only failed to attend to their own sexual virtue properly enough but also disrespected the purity of their whiteness by fraternizing

with men of color in the first place. With regard to African American men, the accusation of rape acts to confirm the myth that men of color are hypersexual and violent. At the same time, outcries over the supposed action reinforce the idea that they are stepping out of line by taking the sexuality of white women, the assumed domain of white men.

Furthermore, instances of acquaintance rape are less likely to be resolved on the basis of things like DNA evidence and other seemingly straightforward matters of fact than are cases that involve stranger rape. Instead of focusing on the identity of the rapist or the question of whether or not sexual contact occurred, cases involving acquaintance rape center on the much more nebulous question of what constitutes consent and whether or not it was provided. Thus, in such cases, epistemic privilege alone does not provide a means of determining what happened, what the

240 KARA BARNETTE significance of the occurrence is, or what the community’s response should be to the incident. Whatever choices the community makes will potentially perpetuate the harmful view that patriarchy and racism are separable in cases of sexual assault. Yet a decision must be made. Those accused of rape cannot go on indefinitely without either being sentenced or cleared, and their accusers require that some kind of communal condemnation take place.

Hence, I claim that in these cases, feminist epistemology needs a method of error sensitivity that takes into account the epistemic privilege

of oppressed standpoints. Error sensitivity, the ability to recognize when claims are in error, requires the ability to look beyond one’s own perspective or the perspective of one’s community, even if that community has struggled to attain an epistemically privileged standpoint. In order to be error sensitive, communities must resist making assumptions about the epistemic privilege of either white women or African American men at the onset of evaluating an instance of possible sexual assault; instead, they must interpret these situations on a case by case basis. This requires acknowledging that either side can make claims that are in error with regard to the events in question and a communal commitment to the continuous work of interpretation. Error Sensitivity as the Core of Interpretation

While Royce’s theories are compatible with the foundations of feminist epistemology, incorporating them fully into a model of feminist inquiry requires identifying the strands of both Royce’s theories and feminist epistemology that situate error sensitivity at the core of interpretation. In

order for us to begin developing error sensitivity, we need a form of inquiry that accepts truth as incomplete and growing. Accepting this requires both that communities commit themselves to the ongoing pro-

cess of interpretation and that they develop an unwavering focus on trying to be as inclusive as possible without sliding into assimilation. While Royce rejects the skeptical argument that truth is relative and instead holds firm to the claim that truth and error need to have meaning, he contends that finding the truth and producing knowledge must be antidogmatic acts. Because we need others in order for truth and error to have meaning, the process of changing truth or allowing truth to grow is always a social endeavor. It is the ongoing process by which we correct

NECESSARY ERROR 241 our limited engagement with others. In this regard, Royce’s account of

truth is ideally suited to be situated within a discussion of feminist inquiry. Truth is not fixed and accessible by pure reason, but it is also not relative. There are better and worse accounts of the world for Royce. Yet,

the act of interpreting the world, of understanding the truth, must be a never-ending process. For feminist standpoint theory, better knowing always marks a fuller account of the world. In particular, feminist standpoint theory gives us a less false account of the world than traditional epistemology because it actively incorporates marginalized perspectives to get a fuller view of concepts like racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism. Worse accounts

of the world are not accounts that fail to be reasonable per se or miss a pure truth; worse accounts are those that provide no room for, or actively exclude, marginalized perspectives. Hence, Royce’s account of good interpretation and feminist accounts of good knowing share something in common: Accounts of the world are better when they are inclusive. However, Royce’s account of truth as ever expansive and incomplete also provides the basis for a method of error sensitivity that could enrich feminist standpoint theory. In particular, Royce’s account of truth presents a mechanism for motivating communities, even epistemically privileged communities, to look beyond themselves and their limitations through a

continual process of interpretation. If truth is ever expansive and ever srowing, anything that blocks interpreters’ recognition of this expansion is in error. Because truth is infinitely expansive and human communities,

including communities of interpretation, are finite, all interpretation is destined to produce error to some extent. Nonetheless, when truth is understood as ever expanding and growing, then the aim of interpretation, Royce’s “Will to Interpret,” will always be focused on getting as expansive of a view as possible in order to make it possible to recognize existing errors and avoid future errors.

An incomplete, expanding truth demands a commitment from communities to a constant process of interpretation. When communities do not acknowledge the ongoing process of interpretation or accept an interpretation as a fixed truth, they inhibit their ability to recognize error because they make it possible for a partial view to pass as a complete view.

In “Border Communities and Royce: The Problem of Translation and Reinterpreting Feminist Empiricism,” Celia Bardwell-Jones claims that when there “is no interpretive process to translate the cultural differences

242 KARA BARNETTE between the two speakers . . . incommensurable experience becomes assimilated unreflectively.”** Her claim highlights Royce’s argument that

it is destructive to only look at perception and conception as ways of creating knowledge because these accounts are based on dyadic structures and provide no means of completely sharing our perceptions with others; yet, they enable us to make the mistake of believing that our neighbor’s process of conception is identical to our own. Believing that our neighbor’s process of conception is identical to our own is one manner of committing the error of misrepresenting our own partial view as the whole view of ourselves and our neighbors. For Royce, when we take interpretation seriously and try to recognize the differences between our processes and those of our neighbors, we undertake an active spiritual endeavor because the process of creating knowledge in communities through acts of interpretation is always occurring whether or not we acknowledge it. Thus, when we take the process of interpretation seriously, we also recognize something beyond our finite capacities: “We try to solve the problem of learning how to exchange the values of our own lives into the terms which can hope to pass current in the new or foreign spiritual realms whereto, when we counsel together, we are constantly attempting to pass.”*? Without an account of interpretation, we still make interpretations, such as interpreting our neighbors’ process of conception as our own; however, we are unable to reflect upon

this interpretation as a new and creative action. As a result, instead of aiming toward the most inclusive account possible and building a relationship with those whose knowledge or experiences we are interpreting, we quickly assimilate their unique perspectives into our own. In cases of cross-cultural communication, this inclination to assimilate others’ views into our own is not only an example of bad knowing but also serves as the basis for oppressive action.

Maintaining a communal commitment to an ongoing process of interpretation is impossible without a concerted effort to develop an increasingly inclusive view. For Royce, developing the Will to Interpret is

the greatest act of love that an individual can perform for the community.“° Genuine interpretation for Royce always has to be an action of loyalty and dedication to the community. Interpretation is vital to the community because it is the key process for moving individual communities toward the largest, all-inclusive community, which Royce calls “the Beloved Community.” He states, “We can readily see that the Beloved

NECESSARY ERROR 243 Community, whatever else it is, will be, when it comes, a Community of

Interpretation.”’’ In this way, interpretation aims toward an ultimate community while utilizing finite communities as the means of getting at a larger perspective. Striving for the Beloved Community makes error sensitivity possible

and necessary by directing the focus of interpretation away from the desire for specific preconceived goals. These goals may manifest as abstract

ideals, such as the most logically coherent interpretation, the most com-

pelling interpretation in an adversarial context, or the interpretation most consistent with an existing, dominant model of rationality. They may also manifest as concrete ends to communal inquiries, such as interpretations that support existing patriarchal or racist myths and interpretations

that reward assimilationist mentalities. Instead of focusing on specific preconceived goals, communities of interpretation must seek the largest perspective of the issue that is being interpreted. Seeking the largest perspective requires not only involving as many parties as possible but also abandoning codified restrictions on what constitutes knowledge and accepting traditionally marginalized viewpoints that draw upon emotions and experiences as potentially valuable sources of knowledge. In order to involve as many parties as possible in the knowledge-making process and seriously consider traditionally marginalized viewpoints, communities of

interpretation cannot accept the generalizations that lead to a limited view s standing in for the whole. Likewise, communities of interpretation striving for the widest view possible will always create new triads as they

resolve initial interpretations, encounter new parties, and invite new mediators. By constantly seeking new, creative interpretations from fresh triads, communities avoid falling into the assumptions that could prevent them from recognizing the errors produced by deeply ingrained myths. Since Royce’s model of triadic interpretation with its corresponding error sensitivity can help communities recognize harmful myths, it is the ideal mechanism for adjudicating between conflicting claims from below,

such as those presented in the example of an interracial sexual assault case. In these cases, the triadic model of interpretation helps to adjudicate between claims without ignoring the incommensurable positions of the

accuser and the accused. All cross-cultural encounters include a level of incommensurability and, therefore, can easily become places of assimilation and error. In an example of an interracial sexual assault case, there are multiple levels of incommensurability. The effects of the black rapist

244 KARA BARNETTE myth may not fully translate to a white audience, and the way in which sexual assault and the fear of sexual assault construct white femininity might not be fully understandable to a male audience. However, these are necessary considerations for gaining a larger view through interpretation. Instead of making assumptions about the epistemic privilege of either white women or African American men at the onset, communities must interpret these situations on a case-by-case basis. This requires acknowledging that either side can make claims that are in error with regard to the events in question.

By accepting the purpose of identifying error, the court shifts its agenda away from judging the accused’s guilt or innocence and toward judging what is in error in accounts of the event in question. In an example of a white woman accusing a man of color of rape, a community of interpretation may judge the accuser’s testimony to be in error if it determines that the woman only believed she had been raped after feeling pressure from her community to disavow a sexual identity that involves interracial relationships. In this instance, her error results from a limiting racist perspective of sexuality. In another instance, a community of interpretation may judge the accused’s testimony to be in error if it determines that he believed that, having consented to a sexual encounter once, the woman had tacitly consented to further sexual encounters. In this instance, his error results from a limiting patriarchal perspective of what constitutes a woman’s consent. By considering these claims in the context of the largest view available, the court, acting as a community of interpretation, develops the means to identify these kinds of errors in competing claims.

When the court as a community of interpretation delivers verdicts in these instances, it must not attempt to conform to preexisting understandings of sexual identity or consent. If the judge and jury are acting as interpreters for the community, they must also make decisions that reflect a creative knowledge-making process. Thus, while they strive for the widest view possible to determine errors and lies, the decisions handed down remain judgments made at a moment in time; they call for certain kinds of actions, but do not record fixed truth that can never be reexamined. One implication of this might be that the court may decide that it is better for the community to privilege the woman’s testimony. The court might conclude that her perspective is more accurate because the man’s perspective is in error as a result of the restrictions to his perspective that

NECESSARY ERROR 245 patriarchy has caused. However, this decision is far different than assuming, before taking into account both parties’ testimonies, that the perspec-

tive of the woman is always more accurate in circumstances of sexual assault. Furthermore, this decision does not establish a basis for adopting the same perspective in the future because the ongoing process of interpretation will always develop a new, wider perspective for each subsequent case. For Royce, interpretation is an infinite process that only stops with

arbitrary interruptions: But interpretation both require|s] as its basis the sign or mental expres-

sion which is to be interpreted, and calls for a further interpretation of its own act, just because it addresses itself to some third being. Thus interpretation is not only an essentially social process, but also a process which, when once initiated, can be terminated only by an external and arbitrary interruption, such as death or social separation.”®

By recognizing its judgments as arbitrary interruptions in the ongoing

process of interpretation, the community will be able to avoid falling into error of presenting its judgments as the whole view of the issue. Recognizing this requires that communities look to their pasts and continue examining the judgments that mark arbitrary interruptions in the process of interpretation. In this regard, far from establishing precedents for future judgments, existing judgments establish the basis for the creation of new knowledge.

FOURTEEN

COMMUNITIES IN PURSUIT OF COMMUNITY Mary B. Mahowald

ED

A s a philosophy graduate student in the 1960s, I was struck by the

statement of Royce that his entire philosophy was encapsulated in his conception of community. Initially, my interest was sparked by the fact that I lived in a small community, and the term, as I understood it, identified an appealing ideal of how human beings in general might live or aspire to live together. I also thought, perhaps naively, that this ideal could be practically implemented, at least in part. So I wrote my dissertation on Royce, tracking how a pragmatic element intertwined with idealism in the development of his philosophy, and I entitled it An Idealistic Pragmatism. ' When I moved from a philosophy department to a medical setting in 1982, I felt, rightly or wrongly, that I was implementing this idealistic pragma-

tism, practicing philosophy as Socrates did, and pragmatism as Jane Addams did—by being in and not just thinking or writing about the setting in which important ethical decisions are made. By then I had studied Peirce more carefully, and I was surprised to observe that his account of a com-

munity of inquiry was more prevalently practiced in the care of patients than I had observed it in philosophy departments. Unlike health care 1 246 }

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workers, professors often seemed to ply their trade individualistically, as if each were separately capable of achieving optimal intellectual results. Through the years, I persisted in my idealistic conception of community and kept trying to see how it might be pragmatically implemented, or at least approximated. Eventually I identified a theoretical framework and strategy by which to approximate my ideal. This framework is egalitarian in its starting point as well as its end point; as such, it is consistent with the egalitarianism of Amartya Sen.’ The starting point involves an

attribution of the same value to every person, regardless of differences among them, those who hold dominant positions in society as well as those who don't. The end point is an ideal of mutual flourishing, based on each one’s different mix of abilities, disabilities, and capabilities. The strategy through which my ideal of community can, I think, be best approximated involves employment of diverse standpoints; this approach is consistent with the pragmatism of Peirce, James, and Dewey, as well as

Royce. Because it explicitly demands the inclusion of nondominant standpoints, it is also consistent with what feminists have recently described as “standpoint theory.”*

The term “communitarianism” has been used to designate theories that focus on community membership as determinative of moral values for individuals. Advocates of “communitarianism,” who vary in their renditions of it,’ critique the individualism and emphasis on individual freedom in American culture. In doing so, they tend to ignore the fact that people simultaneously belong to diverse communities whose interests and priorities are occasionally at odds. Identifying or defending the moral values of particular communities affords little help in resolving these conflicts for individuals who belong, as we all do, to multiple communities. How, for example, does a member of the academic community negotiate conflicts that arise between her responsibilities to her colleagues and her students, and her responsibilities to her family members or to her ethnic community or country? How does a political figure resolve conflicts that surface between causes pursued by the community who elected her and those of the religious body to which she is also committed? How does a physician scientist resolve conflicts between the priority of research and the priority of patient care, both causes to which she is committed through membership in both communities?

Another example of conflicting causes arises in the context of two communities to which I belong—advocates for people with disabilities

248 MARY B. MAHOWALD and advocates for women. Both communities pursue equality for a nondominant group who have been discriminated against historically and currently, and both pursue causes intended to eliminate or reduce the inequality or disadvantage associated with this discrimination. But advocates for people with disabilities and advocates for women also pursue specific causes that are contradictory with regard to the issue of prenatal testing. One community opposes prenatal testing for disability because it expresses discrimination against people with disabilities; this has been called “the expressivist argument.”© The other community supports women’s decisions to undergo prenatal testing for any reason; this may be called “the feminist argument.”’ Communitarianism doesn’t satisfactorily address the apparent conflict between these causes, or for that matter any conflict that arises from multiple community memberships. In this essay I want to explicate a conception of community based on Royce and supplemented by an egalitarian framework and standpoint strategy through which this type of conflict may be resolved—not necessarily in all cases, but at least in some. I will start with Royce’s conception of community and revisit the thesis developed in my earliest paper on the

topic—that is, particular communities serve as means to the end of Community. Central to this account is Royce’s critique of individualism,

which is also found in Peirce and Dewey. If an egalitarian ethic is embraced, as I believe it should be if justice is given the priority it deserves,

the ideal of Community defended in my initial thesis is best approximated through a strategy by which the participation of communities commonly excluded from participation is maximized. Finally, I will discuss how this strategy is applicable to the conflict between communities of advocates for people with disabilities and advocates for women with regard to prenatal testing for disability. Community as End; Communities as Means

Community, for Royce, involves three essential elements by which groups of people that are not in fact communities are distinguishable from those that are.® The first element is an integrated individuality or uniqueness on the part of each member. This factor distinguishes a community from

a collectivity, that is, from a group of individuals who are the same or are treated as such without regard for their individuality or uniqueness. Royce construes the autonomy of individuals as necessarily tied to their

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individuality; this is why he calls himself a voluntarist.’ Important, however, is that individuality not to be confused with individualism, which Royce defines as the solitary pursuit of self-development. Individualism is an inevitably fruitless endeavor that arises from the false assumption that individuals can flourish without community. Being individualistic thus impedes individuality, whereas participation in community enhances it. Moreover, each community to which individuals belong has an individuality of its own, based on the cause or causes that each community pursues. On Royce’s account, the individuality of particular communities is enhanced through their interactions with other communities in pursuit of acommon cause. To the extent that these communities seek to develop themselves individualistically—that is, apart from interaction with other communities—they impede the development of their own individuality.

The second condition for community is communication among the various members. This is not something that happens automatically; rather, as Aristotle suggests with regard to friendship, community requires that the members are not only capable of communication but ongoingly engaged in it.!° What makes communication necessary is the individuality or uniqueness of the members, that is, their differences from one another. If they were all alike, communication would not be necessary, but then

the first condition for community, individuality or uniqueness, would be unmet. The third condition of community for Royce is the principle of unity through which members share a common past or a common future. He describes this principle as “the most widely variable, and the most important of the motives which warrant us in calling a community a real unit.”'! It empowers the members to act as individuals as well as participants in the community, and in so acting they each achieve a personal reality over and above their isolated individualities. A group that constitutes a real community is therefore more than the mere sum of its parts. Royce calls the principle that unites members of a community loyalty to

a cause that they pursue together.'* The principle that unites diverse communities is loyalty not only to their particular cause but also to a cause common to all of them. Collecting the conditions required for community in Royce, we have the following general definition: Community is a reality constituted by

unique individuals who communicate with one another in voluntary pursuit of a common cause. While this definition facilitates recognition

250 MARY B. MAHOWALD of genuine communities, an obvious problem with it is that the causes pursued by some apparent communities are at odds with the causes of other communities. Groups of thieves or of terrorists come to mind in this regard. For Royce, however, the loyalty that unites individuals in pursuit of specific causes is ultimately oriented toward a Cause that also tends to unite different communities. This is impossible for terrorists or thieves, despite their loyalty to their own cause. Whether a group of people pursuing a specific cause together satisfies Royce’s definition is thus measurable by the extent to which its members serve not only the cause of their own group but also a Cause that unites rather than divides them from communities that pursue other causes. This, for Royce, is the Beloved Community, a Community of communities. This account fits well with Royce’s absolute idealism and, as such, is highly amenable to religious interpretation. Consider, for example, his account of the Church as an invisible community of those devoted to a common religious cause, viz., the Absolute. For Royce, the only ideal capable

of uniting individual communities is an Absolute Cause, which supports the mutual flourishing of particular communities. Just what flourishing entails for particular communities and the human community in general

is admittedly a matter of dispute.'’ To support the ideal or end of Community, however, we need only to acknowledge the possible compatibility of causes pursued by particular communities. And to support the claim that communities meet the requirements outlined by Royce,

we need only to acknowledge the possibility that they are capable of pursuing, in addition to their particular causes, a Cause that unites them all. This need not be a religious cause, at least in any sectarian sense. In

fact, Royce applied his conception to the secular world through his account of the “Great Community.” He articulated this conception in the

context of current world affairs through a practical recommendation regarding implementation of his ideal. Anticipating Woodrow Wilson’s proposal of the League of Nations, he proposed formation of a world

community based on a mutual insurance model through which the common interests of nations would be promoted more effectively than could be achieved as separate nations. Royce’s account of community merits comparison with Peirce’s account of the religion of science and Dewey’s conception of a common faith.” Peirce views science as “religious” to the extent that it involves an altruistic

commitment to Truth, a dedication that eschews the individualism that

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Royce and Dewey also abhor because failure to collaborate with others inevitably renders individuals more subject to mistakes. Through his doctrine of “fallibilism,” Peirce affirms that “our knowledge is never absolute but always swims, as it were, in a continuum of uncertainty and of indeterminacy.”’° Investigators can reduce the uncertainty and inde-

terminacy by pursuing knowledge together through disinterested exchanges that lead to shared beliefs about the empirical consequences of alternative responses to questions that motivate inquiry. Peirce not only imputes this methodology to science but argues, in addition, that its “logic” extends to all of our human affairs. “We are driven to this,” he writes,

that logicality inexorably requires that our interests shall not be limited. They must not stop at our own fate, but must enhance the whole community. This community, again, must not be limited, but must extend to all races of beings with whom we can come into immediate or mediate intellectual relation. It must reach, however vaguely, beyond this geological epoch, beyond all bounds. He who would not sacrifice his own soul to save the whole world, is as it seems to me, illogical in all his inferences, collectively. Logic is rooted in the social principle.'®

The meaning of “truth” in Peirce is comparable to Royce’s characterization of the ultimate Cause or ideal of communities as the Absolute. While most of us consider truth the goal of our search for knowledge, Peirce uses instead the term “belief” as a “plan of action” for the resolution of doubt, and reserves the term “truth” for the ultimate end of inquiry by a community of investigators.'’ Royce also characterizes the Absolute as “Truth.”’® Interestingly, he uses a more concrete term than loyalty for the principle of unity in the Beloved Community. Through an analogy with human friendship, he proposes “love” instead:'? “Think of the closest unity of human souls that you know,” he writes. “When friends really join hands and hearts and lives, it is not the mere collection of sundered organisms and of divided feelings and will that these friends view as their life. Their life, as friends, is the unity which, while above their own level, wins them to itself and gives them meaning.”’? A key point here is that the community formed through the unity of its members moves them “above their own level,” that is, beyond their individuality, separately construed.

Community is thus central to Peirce and Royce, as democracy is central to Dewey—a means for all three by which to overcome the perils

252 MARY B. MAHOWALD of individualism. Peirce and Royce each develop a doctrine of “interpretation” by which to further explain the process of communication

that is indispensable to human knowing and interactions. For both, interpretation involves signs through which individuals exchange mean-

ings, forming what Royce calls communities of interpretation.*’ The second essential element of community in Royce, communication, is a process of interpretation. Communities can neither be formed nor sustained without interpretive communication, which requires recognition and utilization of the different standpoints of their members. No one ever completely understands what another sees from her unique perspective, but one can partially understand it by listening to the other’s articulations, whether verbal or nonverbal, of what she sees from that perspective. This applies to the different perspectives of different communities as well as individuals. Although what one sees may be misinterpreted, the mere fact that someone sees something different from what I see does not insure that either one of us is wrong or right.** But the more sides or perspectives there are and the more | listen to what others credibly tell me they see from sides to which I lack access, the more likely I am to increase my understanding or knowledge. I have a favorite metaphor by which to characterize the perspectival

nature of human communication: myopia, or nearsightedness, which can only be relieved through the lens of other people’s standpoints.”? We

put on these lenses by forming communities of interpretation, that is, communities whose members recognize differences between themselves and those they interpret, and communicate across these differences in

recognition of their own limitations. Every community that satisfies Royce’s definition of community is a community of interpretation whose members pursue a common cause.

Just as individualism obstructs the development of individuality, it also obstructs the knowledge and progress achievable by communities that work collaboratively rather than competitively. Team sports is an example of both. Each team member’s loyalty to the same cause, pursued in different ways by each player, is compatible with every other member’s loyalty; the relationship between the members, therefore, is collaborative

rather than competitive. The relationship between teams, however, is competitive. Loyalty to the same cause is impossible between them unless another, more basic cause is pursued by each and defined more broadly than winning games—e.g., by supporting the rules of the game

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or practicing good sportsmanship for the good of all of the teams involved. This notion of collaboration, as opposed to competition, is consistent with Dewey’s account of democracy. The faith that he imputes

to all human beings is faith in their capacity, both separately and in communities, to transcend the tendency to promote their separate, individualistic causes by pursuing a cause common to all human beings, that of mutual flourishing for everyone to whom the same value is imputed. The ideal of community developed by Royce and supported by Peirce’s notion of inquiry and Dewey’s account of democracy, sounds utopian, even as Marx’s ideal of communism may be described that way. As such, it may be critiqued as unrealistic and impractical. While I agree that the ideal cannot be fully realized, this does not imply that it is impractical or useless to pursue. On the contrary, positing a specific end, a target, so to speak, is the only way by which one can reduce divergences or distractions from its partial achievement, and partial fulfillment of the ideal of Community is surely preferable to no achievement of it. If partial fulfill-

ment of the ideal of Community is good, then the establishment and expansion of communities that advance or promote the ideal is a practical strategy for approximating its fulfillment as much as possible. Crucial, then, to assessment of whether communities promote the ideal

of Community is determination of whether or how much their causes are consistent with the final Cause that unites members of the Beloved Community, that is, a unity of communities, each of which possesses a certain individuality. Recognition of the importance of the individuality of particular communities sets us up for a discussion of a strategy by which the myopia associated with the individuality or particularity of communities may be reduced. Standpoint Theory and Community

As developed by Nancy Hartsock and Donna Haraway,” standpoint theory is a way of acknowledging and utilizing the individuality of communities whose differences from other communities tend to be ignored or denied; for example, the poor, minorities, women, people with disabilities, and so forth. These nondominant communities meet Royce’s conditions for community to the extent that they are composed of distinct

individuals with a common past, who communicate with one another and are united by their commitment to a common cause. The standpoint

254 MARY B. MAHOWALD or perspective of people in these communities is inevitably limited, as is the standpoint of anyone or any particular community, including those that are dominant. Nonetheless, each standpoint is also valid because of its individuality. The validity I mean here is not simply the correctness of the reasoning process, regardless of the truth status of the premises; rather, it refers to the reliability and adequacy of the premises to which logically

correct reasoning is applied. Standpoint theory argues that policies formulated by dominant communities are invalid in this sense if they fail to incorporate data or input from nondominant communities into the premises employed in their reasoning. To the extent that a dominant community enacts policies without this input, its premises are weakened and the recommendations developed from its arguments are inadequately informed. If the community’s members consider themselves capable, by themselves, of totally objective knowledge about data relevant to policies that affect people unlike themselves, the fallibility of their knowledge

increases in direct proportion to their intellectual arrogance, which Haraway calls their “pretense of objectivity.””°

Standpoint theory thus entails a critique of the assumption that objectivity or impartiality is an achievable and desirable goal for those

who make decisions for others or develop policy recommendations they believe ethically justified for everyone. Thomas Nagel, for example,

maintains that ethics begins with the ability “to think about the world in abstraction from our particular position in it.””° He belongs to the dominant community of philosophers, wherein each member apparently

believes he has exercised this ability to think about the world without

being influenced by his position in it. Nagel purports to prescind from his own standpoint and even that of his community of like-minded philosophers in developing positions on moral matters. He may achieve greater proximity to impartiality than others, and his views may acquire greater legitimacy to the extent that he does so, but thinking so utterly abstractly is never fully achievable for anyone or any particular community. Moreover, prescinding entirely from one’s perspective is, arguably, not

desirable even if it were possible.’ In contrast to Nagel and his ilk, classical pragmatists have lent support to a perspectival view of knowledge that anticipated what is now called

“standpoint theory.” For example, although his biography suggests otherwise, Peirce must have had a certain intellectual humility to insist, as he did, on a community of inquiry as crucial to reduction of individual

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limitations in pursuit of knowledge.** A standpoint strategy provides a corrective to the nearsightedness or fallibilism of separate perspectives, which is why Peirce said it is illogical and unscientific to be individualistic. In other words, our myopia can only be alleviated by seeking and listening to the views of others. This argument also applies to particular

communities, whose members pursue causes different from those of other communities. Only to the extent that they simultaneously pursue a cause that unites all of them can the nearsightedness of individual communities be reduced so that they are brought closer to the ultimate end of inquiry.”

More recent critics of assumptions or claims about objectivity in ethics include John Ladd, who distinguishes between objective and subjective standpoints. Ladd equates the standpoint of those who assume that they have achieved objectivity with the perspective of “social engineers,” people who see themselves as “sincere and dedicated public servants selected on the basis of their professional expertise,” to formulate policies that affect everyone.*’ They regard their own perspective, Ladd says, as overwhelmingly superior to those of ordinary individuals whose lives their decisions affect. Their supposed superiority stems from the assumption that they alone can provide a true and adequate account of “the way things are,” that is, objectively.°! Participation in the process by those who see the world subjectively, from their own different but nondominant perspectives, is then viewed as an impediment to the development of policies that are good for everyone. The critical question that Ladd’s “objectivists” fail to identify, let alone address, is “Who is to decide?” This question, he says, is even more important today (1975!) than in the past because those who make decisions are further removed than ever from those to whom their decisions apply. As

proof of a long-standing tendency to ignore the question, Ladd offers examples of old men who decide that young people should kill innocent people in war, rich men who decide what kind of welfare the poor should receive, and white men who decide who should police the streets in a black neighborhood. All of his examples are pertinent to standpoint theory, as are some he doesn’t mention—women, people with disabilities, gays and lesbians, and assorted other communities whose members join in loyalty to causes different from those of the dominant community. Aware that a supposedly “objective approach” threatens the auton-

omy of less powerful or nondominant communities, Ladd maintains

256 MARY B. MAHOWALD that their participation in decision making is a means of reducing the alienation that members of these communities often experience. He credits minorities, students, and workers for contributing to “disalienation” through their demands for participation, and thus imputes to them a position of ethical as well as epistemological privilege.** Consistent

with this critique, Hartsock incorporates the notion of privilege into her

interpretation of standpoint theory, offering a strategy by which to reduce the nearsightedness of the usual (dominant) policy makers. Members of nondominant communities, she maintains, are capable of seeing beneath the surface of the social relations they experience. The standpoint thus achieved allows them to see beyond present structures to

possibilities that the members of the dominant community, which designed the structures according to their lights, are unable to envision.

Hartsock would grant privileged status to the nondominant point of view because it constitutes a means of reducing the limitations of the dominant standpoint. Both communities are advantaged through the reversal of privilege: Members of the dominant community are empow-

ered to correct and expand their vision; members of the nondominant community are empowered to participate meaningfully in decision making that affects them and others. The epistemological rationale for standpoint theory is thus based on

two factors: recognition that the experiences on which knowledge depends are incomplete and partial, and desire to reduce this limitation through communal inquiry. Implementation of the theory cannot totally overcome epistemological limitations or liabilities because nondominant communities and their members are also subject to nearsightedness and to distortive influences on their perspectives through socialization and cultural pressures. However, imputing privileged status to them does not imply that their views are immune to critique by the dominant community or by others who are nondominant. The input of multiple nondominant communities as well as the dominant community remains necessary to minimize epistemological limitations. In addition, the perspective of those who are dominant may provide knowledge that is unavailable through others, especially if it comes from long-term observations and interactions with them. Imputing privileged status to the participation of nondominant communities in the development of policies affecting them is not only a remedial strategy for reducing the myopia of the dominant community; it is

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also a practical way of facilitating achievement of the end of Community. For the strategy to be effective, however, the end or ideal of Community

must conform to the egalitarian framework mentioned earlier. In the next section, therefore, I will consider further what this entails. An Egalitarian Ethic

As already suggested, the cause common to all human beings and communities is their mutual flourishing. Various scholars, especially virtue

theorists such as Alasdair MacIntyre and Martha Nussbaum, have defended this notion as grounds for policy making, and delineated, with

varying degrees of success, essential features of human flourishing. Notably, what flourishing means for each individual and each community depends on, and is a function of individuality, that is, each one’s different

set of abilities and disabilities and the different circumstances of their lives.°? Using Sen’s terminology, the circumstances coupled with the abilities and disabilities together determine capability for flourishing.”

The egalitarian ethic that I consider most conducive to the ideal of Community imputes the same value or worth to everyone while acknowl-

edging differences in their capabilities, and calls for efforts to reduce inequalities associated with these differences, so that the flourishing of everyone is maximized. This rationale also applies to particular communities. Diverse communities contribute to the common cause of mutual flourishing to the extent that they support flourishing not only for themselves but also for other communities. This is possible only if the same value or worth is attributed to those who are nondominant as well as those who are dominant. According to Sen, even theories commonly considered antiegalitar-

ian subscribe to some conception of equality. The libertarianism of Robert Nozick, for example, supports equal distribution of individual liberty. Although this is prevalently taken to imply that other goods cannot be distributed equally, Sen argues that this interpretation is a “category mistake.” Liberty, he says, is but one “among possible fields of application of equality, and equality is among the possible patterns of distribution of liberty.”°° The field and the pattern are simultaneously supportable. The egalitarian ethic I support is consistent with Sen’s account: Liberty is one of the goods to be distributed equally to people with disabilities

258 MARY B. MAHOWALD and to women, but other goods, such as access to the means by which to flourish, can and should be distributed equally too. This does not imply

that the same resources should be distributed to everyone; rather, the resources required for maximization of mutual flourishing depends on each one’s and each community's individuality, that is, their unique capabilities. Within this framework, conflicts between the causes of particular communities are resolvable if and only if the causes they pursue

are consistent with an ethic that attributes the same worth to different people. Communities in Pursuit of Community

To illustrate how an egalitarian ethic and standpoint strategy can help to resolve the inevitable conflicts that arise because of multiple community memberships, let’s return to the issue mentioned at the outset, the apparent clash between advocates for people with disabilities and

advocates for women. Both communities pursue equality for their constituencies—that is, equality for women with men, or equality for people with disabilities with those who are currently able. In either case,

this means equality for people in a nondominant group with those in the dominant group. But both communities also pursue specific causes that are incompatible with regard to prenatal testing for disabilities: one opposing it and the other supporting it. The expressivist argument that opposes the practice proceeds from the premise that prenatal testing for disabilities implies discrimination against people born with disabilities. The feminist argument that supports the practice proceeds

from the premise that women’s choices regarding prenatal testing should always be respected. Neither of these premises is sustainable if an egalitarian ethic and standpoint strategy are employed. However, if these are employed, both premises can be reformulated so that the specific causes of these communities are compatible. Both communities then serve as means through which the ideal of Community is practically promoted. Consider, then, the central premise of the expressivist argument:

that prenatal testing for disabilities implies discrimination against people born with disabilities. This claim is refutable on grounds that it ignores the multiplicity of reasons why women seek prenatal tests for disability. Beyond the fact that some undergo these tests with no intention

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of terminating their pregnancies, other reasons for the tests include the following:

1. Inadequate or inaccurate information regarding the impact of specific disabilities on those born with them 2. Lack of adequate social and economic supports to care for children with disabilities

3. Family or social pressures 4. Obligations to those already born, especially other children Ignoring reasons such as these leads to inadequate analysis of moral justification of prenatal testing for disability. If the strategy proposed by standpoint theory were utilized, however, these reasons would be uncovered. By

imputing privileged status to the input of pregnant women facing such decisions, a more adequate premise may then be developed. A reformulation that would remedy the flaw of the original premise is the following: Prenatal tests for disability discriminate against people born with disabilities if and only if that is the reason for the test.

This reformulation not only acknowledges the fact that women have other-than-discriminatory reasons for prenatal decisions about disabil-

ity; it also facilitates recognition of other reasons for prenatal tests, including discriminatory practices for which people other than pregnant women are responsible—for example, legislators who refuse to fund adequate support or access for people with disabilities, clinicians whose prenatal counseling lacks informed input from those who have lived with the detectable disabilities, and family members who pressure women to act in accord with uninformed or discriminatory judgments.

Nonetheless, the reformulated premise is still incompatible with the feminist premise because the latter affirms that women’s prenatal choices

are justified even if they are based on discrimination against people already born with disabilities. Let’s examine more carefully, therefore, the feminist premise. The claim that women’s choices regarding prenatal testing should always be respected is consistent with a libertarian version of feminism but not with the egalitarian version that I defend. On the latter account, individual autonomy does not have absolute priority; the autonomy and welfare of others should also be weighed to reach a conclusion compatible with an egalitarian version of justice. The standpoint of other nondominant

260 MARY B. MAHOWALD communities, including that of advocates for people with disabilities, should be included in formulating a feminist position on prenatal testing, and other nondominant standpoints deserve privileged status in developing positions supported by egalitarian feminists. To take account of

these standpoints, the original feminist premise may be reformulated as follows:

Women may choose prenatal tests as long as doing so does not disproportionately obstruct the choices or welfare of others.

The term “disproportionately” introduces the question of how to weigh different choices, burdens, and benefits with regard to those affected. A

standpoint strategy facilitates this weighing, albeit imperfectly, so that decisions or policies may be formulated as equitably as possible. Laws in the United States and elsewhere address the fact that the burden of pregnancy, childbirth, and caring for a child falls disproportionately on women by giving priority to their autonomy in these contexts.°” An egalitarian ethic does not focus exclusively on women but requires that

the standpoints of those whose capabilities are most limited by the disproportionality be given privileged status. This reformulation of the feminist premise still leaves open the question of who counts as the others whose choices or welfare may be dispro-

portionately obstructed through the woman’s decision. If fetuses are considered others in this context (i.e., as individuals with the same value as born persons), prenatal tests for any reason that might lead to termination of the pregnancy are morally objectionable. On that account,

however, the objection is based on concerns about ending the life of any fetus for any reason, rather than on discrimination against people born with disabilities.

Some people who advocate for people with disabilities as well as women argue that the specific causes pursued by both communities are compatible on grounds of a radical discontinuity between embryos or fetuses and those already born.”® But this claim has to be defended in its own right, and informed accounts of human development (e.g., the fact that some fetuses are more developmentally mature than some newborns) makes it implausible. The expressivist’s opposition to prenatal testing for disability is empirically supportable by the continuity of human development, but this does not constitute an adequate defense of the position. Birth may still be a morally crucial threshold for determining whether a

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developing human entity has a right to life, regardless of whether it has been tested for disability. But the egalitarian ethic and standpoint strategy I have proposed cannot resolve conflicts between parties on opposite sides of the abortion issue. Hence, my only goal in this essay is to show how causes pursued by feminists as well as by advocates for people with disabilities are compatible if they conform to an ethic that attributes the same value to all individuals who have the same value as one another regardless of their differences in gender, age, race, class, sexuality, abilities, disabilities, or other circumstances. Not all feminists and not all advocates

for people with disabilities subscribe to this notion of equality or give priority to it; to the extent that they do not do so, they do not match the notion of communities as means to the ideal of Community, as mutual flourishing. Despite the limitation to individual autonomy that an egalitarian ethic

demands, people are free to make bad decisions or immoral decisions about many things. We are even free, in an important sense, to break most laws, but this doesn’t mean that we avoid the consequences of breaking them, or that we ought to be free do so in every case. As philosophers sometimes put it, “is” doesn’t imply “ought.” Women are free, therefore,

to make prenatal decisions based on discriminatory reasons, but this doesn’t imply that we should be free to do so, or that doing so is separable from consequences of a law that says we shouldn't. Laws in our country and elsewhere oppose discrimination against people with disabilities, but

they don’t oppose prenatal testing and termination to avoid the birth of children with disabilities. The illegality of one practice and legality of the other is defensible on grounds that fetuses are not legally persons. As I’ve already mentioned, however, this is not an adequate ethical response to the expressivist argument.

Admittedly, some women choose prenatal tests for discriminatory reasons. However, until and unless other reasons why women choose prenatal tests are ruled out, the conclusion of the first version of the expressivist premise is not compelling. If pregnant women had adequate

social and economic support; if they were fully informed about the fact that the great majority of people with disabilities, even severe ones, value their lives and contribute to the lives of others; if social stigmas about disabilities were overcome; if family or others’ pressures to test

and terminate for disability were removed; and if already-established obligations to others would not be compromised by added responsibilities

262 MARY B. MAHOWALD of care for someone with a disability, surely some would not seek prena-

tal tests to avoid having a child with a disability. To yield a true as well as valid conclusion, the expressivist argument needs to take account of these individuating circumstances of women’s lives by enlisting their standpoints. If it does, the cause of equality pursued by advocates for people with disabilities is compatible with the cause pursued by egalitarian feminists, and both communities support the ideal of mutual flourishing. Each community then serves as means to the end of Community. Summarily, by examining Royce’s views on the matter, I’ve delineated what community means and argued that particular communities contribute to the end of Community as mutual flourishing if their individuality is utilized in collaboration with that of other communities. I’ve also proposed a framework and strategy by which human flourishing can be maximized and the limitations of individual perspectives reduced. To illustrate, I’ve examined the apparent dilemma faced by people who

belong to multiple communities whose causes seem incompatible. [ve critiqued arguments that show this incompatibility with regard to prenatal testing for disability, and reformulated the central premises of these arguments by applying an egalitarian framework and standpoint strategy. The reformulated premises are not only compatible with but supportive of the account of community developed in the first part of the paper: communities that meet the requirements for community in Royce, are means through which the ideal of Community, a Community of communities, is best approximated. Postscript

When I entitled my first book An Idealistic Pragmatism, I thought this paradoxical designation captured the pragmatic element that I believed present in Royce’s absolute idealism. Forty years later, my claim that communities are means to Community still strikes me as an example of idealistic pragmatism. If my account is more idealistic than pragmatic, however, “pragmatic idealism” might describe it more accurately. Some people probably think an idealistic conception of community fails to confront impediments to human flourishing that occur in nondominant communities. I believe the opposite is true, and that an idealistic conception of community provides grounds for critiquing the self-defeating

COMMUNITIES IN PURSUIT OF COMMUNITY 263

individualistic interests of particular communities. Through this conception I join Peirce in his account of the practicality of generality, and Royce, in his insistence that our ideas and ideals are practically purposive. Only if the ideal of community really exists in people’s minds can there be sustainable progress toward the causes of particular communities whose members belong to multiple communities, as we all do.

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Notes

ED INTRODUCTION: THE CONTINUING RELEVANCE OF JOSIAH ROYCE Kelly A. Parker and Jason Bell

1. These Gifford Lectures were published as Josiah Royce, The World and the Individual, 2 vols. (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1976), and William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, The Works of William James, ed. Frederick Burkhardt (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985). 2. In Chapter 3, Dwayne Tunstall argues that Royce did develop an unpub-

lished response to the “ego-centric predicament” argument advanced against him by Ralph Barton Perry. This response was presented in his Philosophy 9 course at Harvard, the notes for which were published many years later as Metaphysics: His Philosophy 9 Course of 1915-1916, ed. Richard Hocking and Frank Oppenheim (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998).

3. Robert C. Neville, The Highroad around Modernism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992). 4. Josiah Royce, Josiah Royce’s Seminar, 1913-1914, ed. Grover Smith (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1962), 2.

5. Josiah Royce, The Basic Writings of Josiah Royce, 2 vols., ed. John J. McDermott (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 2:712 (hereafter cited in text as BW). 6. Ibid., 2:657. 7. [bid., 2:661. 8. Ibid., 2:673. 9. Ibid., 2:775-76. 10. Ibid., 2:673. 11. Ibid., 2:747—48.

12. “The Principles of Logic,” Royce’s Logical Essays: Collected Logical Essays

of Josiah Royce, ed. D. S. Robinson (Dubuque, Iowa: W. C. Brown Co., 1951), 310-78.

| 265 }

266 NOTES TO PAGES 15-22 1. JOSIAH ROYCE: ALIVE AND WELL John J. McDermott

1. Ignas K. Skrupskelis, “Annotated Bibliography of the Published Work of Josiah Royce,” in The Basic Writings of Josiah Royce, 2 vols., ed. J. J. McDermott (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 2:1167—1226.

2. Frank M. Oppenheim, Reverence for the Relations of Life (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005). 3. John Clendenning, The Life and Thought of Josiah Royce, 2nd ed. revised and expanded (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1999). 4. Richard Rorty, “The Invisible Philosopher,” review of The Education of John Dewey, by Jay Martin, New York Times, March 9, 2003, Sunday Book Review,

https://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/09/books/the-invisible- philosopher. html.

5. Robert Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006).

6. William James, “Manuscript Lectures,” The Works of William James (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 326. 7. William James, The Correspondence of William James—A Critical Edition, 12 vols. 1992-2004, eds. Elizabeth Berkeley and Ignas Skrupskelis (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998), 6:603.

8. Josiah Royce, Josiah Royce’s Seminar 1913-1914: As Recorded in the Notebooks of Harry T. Costello, ed. G. Smith (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1963), 14.

9. John J. McDermott, review of Chauncey Wright and the Foundations of Pragmatism, by Edward H. Madden, and Josiah Royce’s Seminar, 1913-1914, ed. by Grover Smith, “Briefer Book Notices,” International Philosophical Quarterly 5 (May 1965): 317-21.

10. Royce, The Sources of Religion (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2001), 262. 11. Charles Hartshorne, “Marcel on God and Causality,” in The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, The Library of Living Philosophers, vol. 17, ed. P. Schilpp and L. E. Hahn (Chicago: Open Court, 1984) 365-66. 12. Clendenning, The Life and Thought of Josiah Royce, 295. 13. Ibid., 296. 14. The Letters of Josiah Royce, ed. J. Clendenning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 522. 15. -Words of Professor Royce at the Walton Hotel at Philadelphia December 29, 1915, in The Basic Writings of Josiah Royce, ed. J. J. McDermott (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 31-32. 16. Josiah Royce, War and Insurance (New York: Macmillan, 1914), 30. 17. Josiah Royce to W. E. Hocking, Jan. 22, 1908, The Papers of William Ernest Hocking, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Cited in Clendenning, 296.

NOTES TO PAGES 23-28 267 2. A REPORT ON THE RECENT “DIG INTO ROYCE’S MSS IN THE HARVARD ARCHIVES Frank M. Oppenheim, S.J., Dawn Aberg, and John J. Kaag

1. Frank Oppenheim, with the assistance of Dawn Aberg and John Kaag, Comprehensive Index of the Josiah Royce Papers in the Harvard University Archives

(Institute for American Thought, Indiana University—Purdue University, Indianapolis, 2011), http://royce.iat.iupui.edu/OppenheimIndex.

2. These electronic tools guide researchers around the work of some Harvard “worthy.” 3. The Archives’ Royce Finding Aid is available as “Royce, Josiah, 1855— 1916: Papers of Josiah Royce: An Inventory,” (HUG 1755) (Cambridge, Mass.:

Harvard University Library, 2009), http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL. ARCH:hua16003. Readers should note that there are in effect now two Finding Aids to Harvard Archives’ Royce Papers. The first is the more informative one in Dawn Aberg’s Appendix C of the Comprehensive Index, cited in note 1 above; the second is the Harvard archivists’ more general one, available via the URL just given. 4. The “old” boxes contained the MSS which in 1940 a Harvard Ph.D. candidate, E. F. Wells, had glued one MS sheet of India-thin paper after another— onto stiff paper backing and mounted these into hard-backed Folio Volumes. When the work was completed in the 1940s, these volumes totaled 98. In 2008, the Harvard Archives wisely decided not to alter these 98 volumes but to allow the many already published references to items numbered in the “old” boxes to remain valid. 5. In 2008, and starting mostly from loose-lying MSS, the Archives’ “Finding Aid” team arranged the MSS left over from Royce himself and his extended family. The team ordered these Roycean materials serially into the following categories: Royce’s leftover writings, then his “Logicalia,” his letters, family genealogy, family correspondence, and photographs. 6. See Harvard University Archives, Royce Papers (HARP), Box 37, 2nd MS, bottom of p. 16 to p. 39. As yet, neither John Clendenning nor Frank Oppenheim can explain why this excision was made. 7. Basic Writings of Josiah Royce, 2 vols., ed. John J. McDermott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 2:1178. 8. HARP, Box 125, Folder 6. 9. See HARP, Box 125, Folder 3. 10. Delivered at the Third International Congress for Philosophy at Heidelberg in 1908 and published in Royce’s William James and Other Essays in the Philosophy of Life (New York: Macmillan, 1911), 187-254.

ul. The Letters of Josiah Royce, ed. John Clendenning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 103-6.

268 NOTES TO PAGES 28-34 12. Our “Dig” team does not yet know whether this “Lecture IV” was a fourth in one of Instructor Royce’s own lecture series at Berkeley or a fourth in a series of “town and gown” talks to a club in Berkeley. 13. See HARP, Box 102, Folder 14. 14. Folder 19 derives from the Ingraham Collection at HARP, through the gift of the Nancy Hacker family to the Harvard Archives.

15. See Josiah Royce, The World and the Individual, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1899-1900), 1:270-300 (sections II-III). All these thirty printed pages (in parallel with the seventy-one pages of the MS) are lacking in the MS of WI1 as found in Box 11. If further search were made, the MS of this insert might be found in HARP Box 105, Folder 3 or 4. 16. See HARP, Box 126, Folder 1, p. 116. 17. Josiah Royce, The Hope of the Great Community (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 131.

18. See HARP, Box 101, Folder 14, pp. 330-48.

19. Josiah Royce, The Problem of Christianity (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2001), pp. 51-54. 20. See HARP, Box 143, Folder 2. 21. About a century later, how were archivists to entitle this puzzling sheet of fragile paper, penciled on both sides? It seemed at least the work of a lad too poor

to waste paper. They settled their quandary simply. They would use key words which Royce had used in his opening lines? As a result their title became: “Fairy Tales, the Greeks, etc.” 22. See Jacob Loewenberg, “A Bibliography of the Unpublished Writings of Josiah Royce,” Philosophical Review 26 (1917): 578-82.

23. For example, a reference to “HARP, Box 105, Folder #3, Document #11” guides a researcher to Box 105, “Papers of Josiah Royce,” Folder # 3, “Unarranged Fragments,” and Document # 11 “Preliminary draft of Royce’s mid-year exam.”

24. Alongside the “Dig” team for several weeks, Mathew carried out his research on Royce. 25. These lecture are preserved in HARP, Box 82.

26. See Mathew A. Foust, “What Can I Do for the Cause Today. . .?” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 47 (2011): 87-106.

27. Oppenheim, Comprehensive Index. The online “Comments” box on the site invites viewers to help update the Comprehensive Index. 3. GOODBYE, IDEALIST CONSENSUS; HELLO, NEW REALISM! Dwayne Tunstall

1. James Campbell, A Thoughtful Profession: The Early Years of the American Philosophical Association (Chicago: Open Court Press, 2006), 105.

NOTES TO PAGES 34-40 269 2. Morris Raphael Cohen, “The Conception of Philosophy in Recent Discussion” (1910), quoted in Campbell, 133. 3. Quoted in Campbell, 105.

4. The New Realists were Ralph Barton Perry, William P. Montague, Edwin B. Holt, Walter T. Marvin, Walter B. Pitkin, and Edward G. Spaulding. The New Realists were also known as “neo-realists” or “presentative realists” by their contemporaries. 5. Campbell, 128-31.

6. Most of the content appearing from this point onward is revised content from my unpublished presentation, “Josiah Royce and the New Realists: Seeing Their Metaphysical Differences Up-Close,” given at The Relevance of Royce: A Conference, Nashville, Tenn., April 10, 2005. 7. For example, in A Bibliography and Genetic Study of American Realism

(Oklahoma City: Harlow Publishing Co., 1931), Victor E. Harlow could confidently write in 1931, “Apparently the great Royce never replied to the challenge of young Perry.” 8. Josiah Royce, World and the Individual, Volume 1: The Four Conceptions of Being (New York: Macmillan, 1899), 91-138.

9. See Josiah Royce, Metaphysics, ed. Richard Hocking and Frank Oppenheim (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 218-32. 10. Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley, “Royce and Husserl: Some Parallels and Food for Thought,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 14 (Summer 1978): 189.

Royce’s notion of the external meaning of an idea is roughly equivalent to the traditional philosophical notion that our ideas either refer or do not refer to some reality beyond our intentions and purposes. This means that our veridical perceptions, evaluative judgments, and other referential acts (e.g., interpretation) are verified and/or validated by their relation to a reality transcending ourselves. 11. Charles M. Sherover, From Kant and Royce to Heidegger: Essays in Modern

Philosophy, ed. Gregory R. Johnson (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2003), 95.

12. See William P. Montague “Professor Royce’s Refutation of Realism,” Philosophical Review 11 (1902): 43-55.

13. See John R. Searle, Construction of Social Reality (New York: Free Press, 1995).

14. Ibid., 164. 15. Here is an excerpt that briefly mentions the temporal modality of futurity from Royce’s most mature articulation of his metaphysics: “The future isn’t yet, and tomorrow is a day that [has not come] yet; but how real the future [is] from acertain point of view” (Royce, Metaphysics, 33). Later, on page 129 of Metaphysics, Royce says that the future has an as “yet expected character;” thus, we can only

270 NOTES TO PAGES 40-46 speak of future occurrences as probabilities (that is, potentialities) and not as actual, existent entities. Coupled with his earlier discussions, e.g., in The World and the Individual and The Philosophy of Loyalty, we have reason to contend that Royce thought that the future is indeterminate. 16. I thank Pat Manfredi for alerting me to this objection. 17. See Josiah Royce, The World and the Individual, Volume 2: Nature, Man, and the Moral Order (New York: Macmillan, 1901), 275-77, for an example of human identity that resembles my Pontiac GTO example. 18. Josiah Royce, Sources of Religious Insight (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2001 [1912]), 153-54. 19. See Royce, Metaphysics, 12, 237-42. 20. See Jacob Loewenberg, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Fugitive Essays (Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1968), 23-24. 21. E. B. Holt, W. T. Marvin, W. P. Montague, R. B. Perry, W. B. Pitkin, and E. G. Spaulding, “Introduction” in New Realism (New York: Macmillan, 1912); reprinted in Realism and the Background of Phenomenology, ed. Roderick M. Chisholm (Atascadero, Calif.: Ridgeview Publishing Co., 1980), 177 and 18off. 22. Chisholm, 171.

23. Harlow, 55. Harlow notes further, “Montague. . . calls attention to the fact that the neo-realists never intended it as a complete philosophy: ‘Our realism was thus not a philosophy; it was rather a prolegomenon to philosophy and a declaration of independence that would make it possible to investigate the nature of things on their own merits without dragging in the tedious and usually irrelevant fact that they could be experienced by us’” (Harlow, 55n1). 24. Holt et al., 180. 25. See William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996 ), especially James’s essay, “The Thing and Its Relations,” 92-122.

26. Holt et al., 184. 27. Ibid., 181. 28. de Waal, xvii. 29. Holt et al., 160.

30. Ibid. 31. References to such all-inclusive interpretative processes are numerous in Royce’s writings, especially in the second volume of The World and the Individual, Sources of Religious Insight, and Metaphysics. 32. Royce, Metaphysics, 242. 33. Ibid., 266-67. 34. Ibid., 268.

35. See Josiah Royce, “Types of Order,” in Basic Writings of Josiah Royce, vol. 2, 797-800 and 811-14.

NOTES TO PAGES 47-51 271 4. ON FOUR ORIGINATORS OF TRANSATLANTIC PHENOMENOLOGY: JOSIAH ROYCE, EDMUND HUSSERL, WILLIAM HOCKING, WINTHROP BELL Jason Bell

1. I have recently discussed the contents of Bell’s dissertation in “The German Translation of Royce’s Epistemology by Husserl’s Student Winthrop Bell: A Neglected Bridge of Pragmatic-Phenomenological Interpretation?” The Pluralist 6, no. 1 (2011): 46—62. In the present chapter, I will examine Bell’s text as shining a light on more extensive relations between American and German phenomenology in their early development. 2. English words and phrases followed by German in parentheses indicate my translations from the original. See Husserl’s letter to Bell of May 14, 1922. Husserl’s surviving original letters to Bell are housed in the Mount Allison University Archives’ Winthrop Bell Fonds. This correspondence has been published in Edmund Husserl, Briefwechsel: Band III: Die Géttinger Schule, ed. Karl Schuhmann (The Hague, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994). The Bell-Husserl correspondence will be cited by the date listed in the Briefwechsel and follow Schuhmann’s transcriptions. It should be noted that Winthrop Bell’s letter registers, housed at the Mount Allison Archives, document an extensive correspondence with Husserl that includes numerous letters that are not currently included in the Winthrop Bell Fonds; hopefully these letters will be discovered in the near future. 3. Husserl, Briefwechsel, September 30, 1922. 4. Ibid., May 14, 1922. 5. Ibid., December 13, 1922.

6. Bell to Spiegelberg, September 25 1955; Mount Allison University Archives, Winthrop Bell Fonds. 7. Edith Stein, Lifein a Jewish Family, trans. Josephine Koeppel (Washington, D. C.: ICS Publications, 1986), 301-3. 8. Bell to Spiegelberg, September 25, 1955; Mount Allison University Archives, Winthrop Bell Fonds.

9. Ibid. 10. Bell was one of the very few scholars in a position to engage in intensive phenomenological research during the war years, as most were forced to turn their attention to national or humanitarian service. Bell’s original writings from this period are extensive, and at least much of his work from this period survives in his collected papers housed at Mount Allison University. uu. “Winthrop Pickard Bell: Man of the Maritimes, Citizen of the World,” accessed February 22, 2011, http://www.mta.ca/wpbell/chron.htm. 12. These quotes will be more fully cited in following passages.

272 NOTES TO PAGES 51-53 13. Bell to Hocking, February 12, 1957; Harvard University Houghton Library, William Ernest Hocking Collection. Husserl, learning from Bell of Royce’s death, responded to Bell that Royce’s loss was “ein grofser Verlust” (Husserl, Briefwechsel, August 23, 1920).

14. Royce wrote on “The New Phenomenology” in his 1878-80 “Thought Diary,” located in the Harvard University Archives, HUG 1755, Box 126, Folder 1. 15. Bell to Hocking, February 12, 1957; Harvard University Houghton Library,

William Ernest Hocking Collection. Bell’s report to Spiegelberg is similar, and records Husserl’s rebuke as: “Herr Royce ist doch ein bedeutender Denker und darf nur als solcher behandelt werden.” September 25, 1955; Mount Allison University Archives, Winthrop Bell Fonds. 16. Winthrop Bell to William Hocking, April 22, 1957, housed with Hocking’s papers at Harvard University. 17. Marcel’s articles on Royce, first published in Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale in 1917-18, were subsequently published in book form in Gabriel Marcel,

La Meétaphysique de Royce (Paris: Aubier, 1945); translated by Virginia and Gordon Ringer as Royce’s Metaphysics (Chicago: Regnery , 1956). Marcel’s introduction to the English translation is especially revelatory for its praise of Royce’s

foundational discussion of the I/Thou relation. 18. Paul Ricoeur, Philosophie de la volonté (Paris: Aubier, 1988), 72. 19. Jitendranath Mohanty, Edmund Husserl’s Theory of Meaning (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), 48. 20. Jacquelyn Ann Kegley, “Royce and Husserl: Some Parallels and Food for Thought,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 14 (1978): 184—99.

21. David Goicoechea, “Royce and the Reductions,” in Phenomenological Perspectives: Historical and Systematic Essays in Honor of Herbert Spiegelberg, ed. P. J. Bossert (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975), 31-46.

22. William Ernest Hocking, “From the Early Days of the ‘Logische Untersuchungen,” in Edmund Husserl 1859-1959: Recueil Commémoratif Publié a l’Occasion du Centenaire de la Natssance du Philosophe, ed. H. L Van Breda and J. Dordrecht Taminiaux (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959), 2-115 William Ernest Hocking, “On Royce’s Empiricism,” The Journal of Philosophy 53, no. 3 (1956): 59-60. 23. Dwayne Tunstall, Yes, But Not Quite: Encountering Josiah Royce’s EthicoReligious Insight (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009). 24. Karl-Otto Apel, Transformation der Philosophie (Frankfurt, 1976), 205. Also see Apel’s Der Denkweg von Charles S. Peirce (Frankfurt, 1975), 204. 25. David Vessey, “Philosophical Hermeneutics,” in A Companion to Pragmatism,

ed. John R. Shook and Joseph Margolis (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2006), 211. 26. Kenneth W Stikkers, “Royce and Gadamer on Interpretation as the Constitution of Community,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 15, no. 1 (2001): 14-19.

NOTES TO PAGES 53-55 273 27. Robert S. Corrington, “A Comparison of Royce’s Key Notion of the

Community of Interpretation with the Hermeneutics of Gadamer and Heidegger,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 20 (1984): 279-301.

28. Bell to Hocking, January 6, 1962; Harvard University Houghton Library, William Ernest Hocking Collection. 29. My translation from Husserl’s original: “Ein Wort warmster Empfehlung. Eigentlich ist kein Wort stark genug, es zu seinen Gunsten auszusprechen. Ich rechne thn mit Stolz zu meinen Freunden und danke dem Schicksal, dass es thn mir zugefiihrt hat. Ich kenne thn genau und stehe fiir diese Worte ein: Es ist eine der edelsten und bedeutendsten Persénlichkeiten, die mir in diesem Leben begegnet sind, einer der Menschen, die meinen Glauben an den Menschen aufrecht halten. Und nicht nur rein und bedeutend als Persénlichkeit, auch grundtiichtig, gediegen, vielversprechend als Philosoph. Schade dass seine Dissertation iiber Royce’s Philosophie nicht zum Drucke kommen konnte, mit der er in Gottingen promovieren sollte. Die Fakultat hatte sie schon als “valde laudabile” angenommen, das Examen rigorosum fand auch noch statt—in der Internierungsstatte (August1914!), nachher wurde es aber als rechtsungiltig erklart: und so hatte Bell das Géttinger Doctorat regelrecht gemacht und ist nun doch

nicht Doctor! Wiirde sich Harvard seiner annehmen und ihm eine Stéitte der Wirksamkeit bieten, so hatte es an thm eine treffliche Kraft, die herrlich auf die Jugend

wirken wiirde.” Original letter housed at Harvard University Houghton Library, William Ernest Hocking Collection. Also published in Husserl, Briefwechsel, 164-65. 30. Husserl, Briefwechsel, 167. 31. At least, Bell was the first English-speaking professor personally trained in

the method by Husserl. 32. Husserl reported to Bell on the progress of these three students, Marvin Farber, Charles Hartshorne, and Dorion Cairns. Husserl, Briefwechsel, November 10, 1925.

33. Again, at least the first personally trained by Husserl. For Husserl, Bell was the right person to introduce his phenomenology to North America, writing to Bell: “Nun soll diese Urkraft in Toronto der Phinomenologie und Philosophie zu

Gute kommen. Sie kénnen nicht nur mit Hacken und Spaten umgehen, Baume fallen, Hauser bauen, sondern auch mit feinen geistigen Scalpellen, Sie haben auch feine Finger—und vor allem eine unbestechliche Vorurtheilslosigkeit und reinen Wahrheitswillen bis aufs Letze.” Husserl, Briefwechsel, September 18, 1921.

34. “Sie miissen doch ein famoser phanomenologischer Lehrer sein, in Ihrer librigens echt englischen anschaulichen Sprache und prdcisen Linienfiihrung.” Husserl, Briefwechsel, May 14, 1922. 35. Husserl, Briefwechsel, 30.

36. While their published correspondence and the Winthrop Bell Fonds at Mount Allison do not include their last letters, Bell’s correspondence register demonstrates a more extensive correspondence.

274 NOTES TO PAGES 55-56 37. This was shortly after James’s retirement from Harvard, but as he remained an active emeritus professor. 38. It is at least a certain fact that Bell performed this service at Husserl’s request in Husserl’s 1912 Lotze seminar, and the evidence at least strongly indicates that he did this in later semesters as well. 39. See for instance Husserl’s letter to Bell, January 29, 1922. Husserl, Briefwechsel. 40. Ibid., June 11, 1922.

41. See for instance Husserl’s comments to Bell, “Thre briefe sagten mir viel. Thre Rathschlage hatte ich mir auf eigene Blatter herausgeschrieben, so wichtig nahm ich sie.” Husserl, Briefwechsel, December 13, 1922; and “Waren Sie mir

naher, dass ich Ihnen von den grossen Fortschritten in der Klarheit iiber Sinn Methode, Problematik einer phanomenologischen Philosophie erzahlen, Ihre Kritik héren und an Ihren eigenen Fortschritten theilhaben kénnte. Und wie schon Sie fiir die Phaénomenologie wirken. Sie weckt aber auch die Seelen und die Jugend merkt bald, wie Grosses—reine Wahrhaftigkeit, letzte Redlichkeit—wir von thr verlangen und welchen Arbeitsernst!” Husserl, Briefwechsel, April 8, 1923.

42. Among the seminars Bell recorded at G6éttingen include Husserl’s “Grundfragen der Ethik und Wertelehre,” “Logik und Einleitung in die Wissenschaftslehre,” and “Kant und die Philosophie der Neuzeit”; and Scheler’s “Ethik,” “Geschichtsphilosophie,” and “Phaénomenologie und die positiven Wissenschaften.”

43. We may deduce this from Bell’s letter registers and from surviving correspondence.

44. Bell to Spiegelberg, September 25, 1955; Mount Allison University Archives, Winthrop Bell Fonds. It does not appear that Bell had access to Royce’s 1913 The Problem of Christianity at the time he wrote his dissertation, having arrived in Germany in 1910.

45. It was likely 1912 when Bell delivered Royce’s books to Husserl. To ascertain the end date of the loan, we may refer to Bell’s letter to Hocking, of September 17, 1923, when, as colleagues at Harvard, Hocking and Bell planned to

send books to support the phenomenological movement in Freiburg and Gottingen at a time when the German academy was suffering tremendously from the economic aftereffects of war. Bell, responding to his colleague’s question about which texts Husserl needed, wrote of Royce’s books that: “I think

I got them all back [from Husserl] after the war.” (This letter is housed with William Hocking’s papers at Harvard University.) Since it is unlikely that Bell had these books returned to him immediately at the end of the war, as it appears he left Germany to visit his family in Canada as soon as he was able after his long

imprisonment, it is more likely that he had his loan returned during his visit to Germany in 1919. This would mean that Husserl had direct access to nearly all

NOTES TO PAGES 56-57 275 of Royce’s writings for approximately seven years, including during what might

be termed the most crucial period of the composition of Husserl’s magnum opus, the Ideen—in addition to having access to Bell’s extensive translations of Royce’s phenomenology into German that were given in the dissertation. And it is not merely that these books sat on Husserl’s shelves, unused—as indicated

from Bell’s report that Husserl, after encountering them, “came to entertain considerable respect for Royce” and would have “nothing else” than a dissertation on Royce. Given Hocking’s and Bell’s efforts to send English language philosophy

texts to the phenomenological circles at Freiburg and Gottingen, it is quite possible that Husserl was able to remain in direct contact with Royce’s works at his university library. For instance, while it is difficult to know precisely when they were acquired, or if they were part of a Hocking/Bell donation, Freiburg’s library houses an impressive collection of Royce’s texts that had been published by the time of Husserl’s tenure at Freiburg, including Fugitive Essays, the two volumes of The World and the Individual, the two volumes of The Problem of Christianity, The Sources of Religious Insight, The Philosophy of Loyalty, California, and The Religious Aspect of Philosophy.

46. Stein’s unpublished manuscript on Bell’s dissertation is housed at the Edith Stein Archives, K6ln. 47. Stein writes: “Were I imprisoned within the boundaries of my own individuality, I could not get beyond ‘the world as it appears to me.’ At least it would be conceivable that the possibility of its independent existence, that could still be given as a possibility, would always be undemonstrable. But this possibility is

demonstrated as soon as I cross these boundaries by the help of empathy and obtain the same world’s second and third appearance which is independent of my perception. Thus empathy as the basis of intersubjective experience becomes the condition of possible knowledge of the existing outer world, as Husserl and Royce present it.” (Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, trans. Waltraut Stein |The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964], 59-60). In making this point, Stein cites Royce’s 1895 article “Self-Consciousness, Social Consciousness, and Nature’”—an article wherein Royce extensively analyzes the “phenomenon” and

the “phenomenal.” This article, as Stein correctly understood, placed Royce as an originator of epistemological studies of empathy. This, in turn, helps us to understand Royce’s and Husserl’s place as originators of contemporary philosophical interest in systematic studies of “Otherness,” “Alterity,” and “Intersubjectivity.” 48. See Husserl’s letter to Bell, Briefwechsel, September 18, 1921 and December 19,

1921 (2) for an accounting of Husserl’s use of Bell’s donation. 49. See Husserl’s letters to Bell of September 18, 1921, December 7, 1921, January 22, 1922, and May 10, 1922 (in the May 10, 1922 letter, Husserl reports

276 NOTES TO PAGES 57-60 having received Bell’s donation of texts written by Bell’s Harvard colleague Alfred

North Whitehead, one of the most important founders of process philosophy), Briefwechsel. See also Husserl’s letter to Masaryk of March 2, 1922. Further, the Bell-Hocking correspondence housed at both Harvard’s Houghton Library and Mount Allison University’s Archives documents Bell’s and Hocking’s cooperative efforts to send philosophy texts to the phenomenology seminars at Gottingen and Freiburg. 50. Hocking to Bell, February 8, 1957; Harvard University Houghton Library, William Ernest Hocking Collection. 51. Hocking to Bell, April1, 1957; Mount Allison University Archives, Winthrop Bell Fonds.

52. Bell to Hocking, April 22, 1957; Houghton Library, William Ernest Hocking Collection.

53. Farber to Bell, November 11, 1938; Mount Allison University Archives, Winthrop Bell Fonds. 54. Bell to Farber, March 25,1940; Mount Allison University Archives, Winthrop Bell Fonds.

55. Spiegelberg to Bell, April 16, 1960; Mount Allison University Archives, Winthrop Bell Fonds. 56. Ibid., September 19, 1955. 57. Royce’s remarks on Husserl in his 1902 address are as follows: Many students interested in the theory of the thinking process have tended, in more recent discussion, to choose one of two opposed directions. Either they have been disposed to relieve themselves altogether of any responsibility for settling psychological problems, by drawing a technically sharp line between Logic and Psychology, by devoting themselves to the former, and by leaving out of the logical

inquiry all consideration whatever of the descriptive psychology of thinking; or else, choosing rather the psychological road, they have attempted to reduce the problems in question to some shape such as would make possible a more exact introspection of the details of the thinking process by causing these to occur under experimental conditions. The former of these two ways of dealing with the prob-

lem of the nature of the thinking process has recently been formally adopted, amongst other writers by Husserl, in his Logische Untersuchungen. Husserl has vigorously protested against all psychologisirende Logik. Logic, he insists, must go

its own way, yet Husserl, in his still unfinished and very attractive researches, yet lingers over the problems of what he now calls the “phenomenological analysis”

of the thinking process, and his farewell, as a logician, to psychology proves to be a very long one, wherein the parting is such sweet sorrow that the logician’s escape from the presence of psychology is sure to lead to further psychological complications. As a fact, I cordially accept, for myself, the view that the central problems of the logician and of the psychologist are quite distinct, and that the logician is not responsible for, or logically dependent upon a psychological theory of the thinking process. Yet I am unable to doubt that every advance upon one of these two sides of the study of the intellectual life makes possible, under the conditions to which all our human progress is naturally subject, a new advance upon the other side. I believe in not confounding the tasks of these two types of inquiry. But I do believe that a mutual understanding between the workers will be

NOTES TO PAGES 60-63 277 of great importance; and I feel that we need not discuss at very great length, or insist with exaggerated strenuousness upon the mere separation of provinces in a world of inquiry wherein to-day there are rather too many sunderings.” (Josiah Royce, “Recent Logical Inquiries and their Psychological Bearings,” Psychological Review 9 [1902): 111-12] )

Peirce’s discussion of Husserl in 1906 appears as quite similar: How many writers of our generation (if I must call names, in order to direct the reader to further acquaintance with a generally described character—let it be in

this case the distinguished Husserl), after underscored protestations that their discourse shall be of logic exclusively and not by any means of psychology (almost

all logicians protest that on file), forthwith become intent upon those elements of the process of thinking which seem to be special to a mind like that of the human race, as we find it, to too great neglect of those elements which must belong, as much

to any one as to any other mode of embodying the same thought. (Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933], 10)

Various passages from Husserl’s 1913 Ideen suggest that he, too, came to adopt a similar critique of his earlier labors in the Logische Untersuchungen. It is quite possible that Husserl would have already encountered Royce’s discussion, by way of their mutual graduate student Hocking, who arrived in Gottingen in the fall of 1902, later in the same year that Royce presented these public comments.

58. Royce’s unpublished “Thought Diary” is housed in the Josiah Royce collection at the Harvard University Archives, HUG 1755. 59. I have recently transcribed this text, and hope to arrange for its publication in the near future.

60. Bell, Erkenntnistheorie, 11; Josiah Royce, The World and the Individual, vol. 1 (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1976), 287. 61. It is at least quite likely that Stein came to this awareness of Royce by way of her friend Bell and her adviser Husserl. 62. Bell, Erkenntnistheorie, 255; Royce, The World and the Individual vol. 1, 297-98.

63. Bell, Erkenntnistheorie, 43; Josiah Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995), 170-71.

64. Spiegelberg writes, “Until the late thirties, phenomenology in today’s sense of the term was for American philosophy a “foreign affair.’ To this general-

ization there is only one possible exception: the phenomenology of Charles Sanders Peirce. True, the mere absence of the word from the works of other American philosophers does not prove the absence of the thing so designated. Thus the psychology of William James and the philosophy of George Santayana contain many phenomenological ingredients without the trademark.” Herbert

Spiegelberg, “Husserl’s and Peirce’s Phenomenologies: Coincidence or Interaction,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research XVII, no. 1 (1956): 164-85.

Here it should be noted that Santayana was Royce’s student; that Royce collaborated with both James and Peirce (both of whom extensively commented upon

278 NOTES TO PAGES 63-68 Royce’s work); and that Royce’s 1879 work does contain the trademark. Spiegelberg

continues, My point of departure will be the following remarkable coincidence. In 1901 the second volume of Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen appeared under the title of Untersuchungen zur Phanomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis, a book in which Husserl used the word “Phanomenologie” prominently for the first time. The following year, 1902, seems to be the label for a branch of his new classification of the sciences and of philosophy in particular. Yet, while Husserl not only continued using it, but even made it the official label of his philosophy, Peirce, as will be shown in a later section, abandoned the term after about two years, to replace it by several neologisms, among which “phaneroscopy” is the one best known. What was behind

this striking though temporary terminological parallel?” (Herbert Spiegelberg, “Husserl’s and Peirce’s Phenomenologies: Coincidence or Interaction,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 17 [1956]: 164—65)

Spiegelberg surmised, in correspondence with Bell, that Royce was the source of Peirce’s knowledge of Husserl’s phenomenology, but he was not aware of Royce’s own original phenomenology and his study of the history of phenomenology.

65. See, for instance, Josiah Royce, The World and the Individual vol. 2 (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1976), Lecture 6, entitled “The Human Self.”

66. As numerous firsthand accounts of this Congress reveal, “heated” may well be too mild a word. Contemporary accounts describe the exchange of bitter, unparliamentary language, and the need for conference organizers to separate the arguing groups. See, for instance, A.C. Armstrong, “The Third International Congress of Philosophy,” The Philosophical Review 18, no. 1 (January 1909):

48-58; George Stuart Fullerton, “The Meeting of the Third International Congress of Philosophy, at Heidelberg,” The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 5, no. 21 (October 1908): 573-77; and Oskar Ewald, “German Philosophy in 1908,” The Philosophical Review 18, no. 5 (October 1909): 514-35. 67. At Leipzig, Royce and Husserl were only an academic year apart. Royce, a

graduate student, left Leipzig in the spring of 1876 for his studies with Lotze in G6ttingen, while Husserl, an undergraduate, arrived in Leipzig for the fall semester. 68. Spiegelberg to Bell, September 30, 1955. Mount Allison University.

69. Bell to Spiegelberg, September 25, 1955; Mount Allison University Archives, Winthrop Bell Fonds. 70. In his letter of January 6, 1962, which will be cited at greater length in a moment. 71. Hocking, “From the Early Days,” 2-11. 72. Ibid., 3. 73. Bell to Hocking, January 6, 1962; Harvard University Houghton Library, William Ernest Hocking Collection. 74. Itis of course fully possible that Royce and Husserl had studied one another’s thought earlier than 1902—but we may rest content, for the moment, with the ability to look much earlier than 1911 for a conversation between Husserlian

NOTES TO PAGES 68-72 279 and Roycean phenomenology, and, by way of Hocking, prior indeed to what is usually termed the origins of the modern phenomenological movement. 5. LOYALTY, FRIENDSHIP, AND TRUTH: THE INFLUENCE OF ARISTOTLE ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF JOSIAH ROYCE Mathew A. Fust and Melissa Shew

1. See Melissa Shew and Mathew A. Foust, “Loyalty and the Art of Wise

Living: The Influence of Plato on the Moral Philosophy of Josiah Royce,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 48 (2010): 353-70, and Glidden, “Josiah Royce’s Reading of Plato’s Theaetetus,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 13 (1996): 273-86. 2. Frank M. Oppenheim lists Aristotle among “significant dialogue-partners”

of Royce’s, ranked below “maximal” and “major” dialogue-partners. See Oppenheim, Royce’s Mature Ethics (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), 178. Whether or not one adopts Oppenheim’s rubrics, we contend that Aristotle should be considered a major influence upon Royce’s thought. 3. A related unpublished manuscript fragment, ca. 1875, is also extant. It is titled, “Certain Points in Aristotle’s Treatise of Poetry Considered in Relation to the Light Thrown on the Subject by the Developments of Modern Poetic Art,” Josiah Royce Papers, Harvard University Archives, HUG 1755, Box 80 (18752). 4. John Clendenning, The Life and Thought of Josiah Royce, rev. and exp. ed. (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1999), 66. 5. Metaphysics, 993a30—93b. 6. Ibid., 993b11-15. 7. Ibid., 993b18—-19.

8. Ibid., 993b31. 9. Ibid., 993b26—27. 10. Ibid., I.3—I.4 (983a25—85b). uu. Ibid., 984a15—84a25.

12. Ibid., 988a1o. 13. Ibid., 986a13—15.

14. The Metaphysics is not the only Aristotelian text that is dialectical with Aristotle’s predecessors. For example, Aristotle begins his Peri Psyché (On the Soul) with an extended discussion of how previous thinkers have considered material aspects of psyché; likewise, the Nicomachean Ethics engages Heraclitus and Plato, among others; and the Poetics opens with thinking the difference between Homer and Empedocles regarding history and tragedy. This method bears upon the nature of truth in Aristotle’s thinking, for all of these figures contribute to what is possible for him. 15. Josiah Royce, “What Is Philosophy and Why Study Philosophy,” Josiah Royce Papers, Harvard University Archives, HUG 1755, Box 78 (19102), 16, 82.

280 NOTES TO PAGES 72-79 16. Josiah Royce, “Nature in Modern Philosophy,” Smith College Lectures, Josiah Royce Papers, Harvard University Archives, HUG 1755, Box 77 (1910), 16. 17. Ibid., 18-20. 18. Ibid., 23-24 19. Josiah Royce, “The Mechanical, the Historical, and the Statistical,” Josiah Royce’s Late Writings: A Collection of Unpublished and Scattered Works, vol. 1, ed. Frank M. Oppenheim, S. J. (Bristol, U.K.: Thoemmes Press, 2001), 63, 84, 147. 20. Ibid., 151. 21. Ibid.

22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 160. 24. Ibid., 165. 25. Ibid.

26. Josiah Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty (Nashville, Tenn. Vanderbilt University Press 1995), 144.

27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., 145. 29. Ibid., 161. 30. See Josiah Royce, The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958), 384-435. 31. Royce, Philosophy of Loyalty, 159. 32. Ibid., 160. 33. Ibid., 161-62. 34. Ibid., 166 (emphasis in original).

35. Josiah Royce, Metaphysics: His Philosophy 9 Course of 1915-1916, ed. Richard Hocking and Frank Oppenheim (Albany: State University of New York Press), 103.

36. Ibid., 104. 37. Ibid. 38. The term rendered as “friendship” is philia. In this text, however, in addition to describing the bond that we customarily attribute to people who we call “friends,” philia describes various bonds that are not typically, or not primarily,

described in terms of “friendship.” Philia pertains to the relations between parent and child, hosts and guests, erotic lovers, cities, and ruler and ruled (Nicomachean Ethics 1156a—58b). With philia, then, Aristotle clearly means some-

thing broader than what we tend to mean by ‘friendship,’ although what we tend to mean by “friendship” instantiates philia. Philia seems very closely related to “loyalty” as Royce uses the term, and we will see that Royce’s positions on loyalty are closely aligned with Aristotle’s on “friendship.” 39. Nic. Ethics, 1164b3-7. 40. Ibid., 1163b16.

NOTES TO PAGES 79-82 281 41. Ibid., 169b10. 42. “|I]t is necessary for the happy person to have friends” (ibid., 1169b24). 43. Ibid., 1097a8—11.

44. Ibid., 1169b17-19. This point has Platonic origins as well. For example, in Plato’s Republic, Socrates tells Adeimantus and Glaucon that “[e]ach of us is not

self-sufficient, but in need of much” (Rep. 369b4—c). Occurring at a pivotal moment in the dialogue, these words mark a change from considering justice in an individual soul to seeing how it comes about (gignetaz) in a city through an account (logos, Rep. 369a3-5) of it. To this end, Socrates says that considering the ways in which each person is in need of much requires also a consideration

of which kind of city is best-suited to respond to these needs, speaking to a fundamental human disposition as requiring others (or a city). 45. See, for example, Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Claudia Card, The Unnatural Lottery: Character and Moral Luck (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996); and

implications of these interpretations for contemporary ethical thought in Thomas Nagel, “Moral Luck,” in Mortal Questions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Representative of much contemporary discourse concerning Aristotle’s “ethics” and Aristotelian elitism, Nussbaum says that “[t|he first and most striking defect is the absence, in Aristotle, of any sense of universal human dignity, a fortiori of the idea that the worth and dignity of human beings is equal” (xx). The consequences of such a position, according to Nussbaum, 1s that Aristotle, in lacking a modern political viewpoint, relegated to necessity or chance things that human beings should work harder to change: “the suffering was perhaps not necessary, and... if we had worked harder or thought better we might have prevented [the tragedy in question]. At the very least it means that we had better get ourselves together to do whatever we can to avoid such things in the future” (xxxv). The goal, for Nussbaum, is to protect a rational view of the self over and against whatever happens to it; passages like this one from Aristotle trouble Nussbaum on account of their tendency to destabilize an insular sense of self characterized by rationality alone. 46. Nic. Ethics, 1164a33—64b2.

47. Ibid., 1167b27-28. 48. Josiah Royce, William James and Other Essays on the Philosophy of Life (New York: Macmillan, 1911), 74-75. 49. Royce, Philosophy of Loyalty, 11. 50. Nic. Ethics, 1117b7—-14.

51. Royce, Philosophy of Loyalty, 131-32. 52. Poetics, 1450a17.

53. Ibid., 1450a34-35. Differentiated from praxis as that which has its end in itself (e.g., the action is the thing done), poiésis importantly has its end in another

282 NOTES TO PAGES 82-84 (tés men gar poiéseds heteron to telos, Nic. Ethics, 1140414). In speaking of the similarities between praxis and poiésis in the Ethics, Aristotle says that both pertain to things that are capable of being otherwise; both require hexeis (active conditions); both are particularly human events. However, poiein pertains to

things that are in the process of coming into being, and to participate in this activity is “also to consider how something capable of being or not being, and of which the source is in the one who makes it and not in the thing that is made, may come into being” (Nic. Ethics, 1140a11—14). 54. Poet,. 1451b16—17.

55. An example of Royce’s particular amenability to this description can be considered through Royce’s mention of Swiss patriot, Arnold von Winkelried’s rushing on the Austrian spears in the Battle of Sempach. Although this event is of questionable historicity, it is nonetheless a dramatic instance of a historical recording of a particular individual loyally giving what is possible to a cause (namely, liberty) and failing to bring that cause to fruition. Of course, much poetry (before and after Winkelried) has partaken in imagining liberty writ large. For Royce on Winkelried and the cause of liberty, see Philosophy of Loyalty, 153. 56. Nic. Ethics,1155