Professor Royce was an American metaphysical philosopher. He was a representative of a Golden Age of American Philosophy, which also included: Charles Sanders Peirce and William James. They all differed as to their approach to philosophy: Peirce largest contribution to philosophy was logic, Royce ethics and James psychology.
W. James was interested in how religion can be useful and Royce chided him for relegating theological conceptions. According to Royce, on the way of salvation Christianity is the closest. Also, a man cannot achieve salvation by himself. “But we can look forward to a time when the work and the insight of religion can become as progressive as is now the work of science.”
No one, in fact, is a philosopher, who has not first profoundly doubted his own system, as Royce humbly noted. Philosophy lives upon the comprehension of the meaning of its own doubts.
In his book, “The Philosophy of Loyalty”, published by The Macmillan Co., N.Y. 1908 Lecture I, page 3, he says “One of the most familiar traits of our time is the tendency to revise tradition, to reconsider the foundations of old beliefs and sometimes mercilessly to destroy what once seemed indispensable.”
On page 4, Royce observes, “Individualism as a movement begun in Germany by Nietzsche – the tendency towards what that philosophical rhapsodist called the ‘transmutation of all moral values’ – has in recent years made popular the thesis that all the conventional morality of the past, whatever may have been its usefulness, was in principle false, was a mere transition stage of evolution and must be altered to the core. ‘Time makes ancient good uncouth’ – was his motto.”
On page 172, Royce says, “But loyalty brings the individual to full moral self-consciousness.”
Further on page 213, Royce states, “But the moral dangers of our American civilization are twofold. First, loyalty is not sufficiently prominent amongst our explicit social ideals in America. It is too much left to the true-hearted obscure people. It is not sufficiently emphasized. Our popular literature too often ignores it or misrepresents it. This is one danger, since it means that loyalty is too often discouraged and confused, instead of glorified and honored.”
Later on page 285, he points out “ Loyalty wants the cause in its unity; it seeks, therefore, something essentially superhuman. And therefore, as you see, loyalty is linked with religion.”
Further on page 306, he notes “So far we have defined the moral life as loyalty and have shown why the moral life is for us men the best life.”
On page 363 he speaks of experience, “The real world is therefore not something independent of us. It is a world whose stuff, so to speak, - whose content, - is of the nature of experience, whose structure meets, validates and gives warrant to our active deeds and whose whole nature is such that it can be interpreted in terms of ideas, propositions, and conscious meanings, while in turn it gives to our fragmentary ideas and to our conscious life whatever connected meaning they possess.”
Royce reiterates on p. 364, “There is then, no merely theoretical truth and there is no reality foreign in its nature to experience. Whoever actually lives the whole conscious life such as can be lived out with a definitely reasonable meaning, - such a being, obviously superhuman in his grade of consciousness, not only knows the real world, but is the real world. Whoever is conscious of the whole content of experience possesses all reality. And our search for reality is simply an effort to discover what the whole fabric of experience is into which our human experience is woven, what the system of truth is in which our partial truths have their place, what the ideally significant life is for the sake of which every deed of ours is undertaken. When we try to find out what the real world is, we are simply trying to discover the sense of our own individual lives.”
Professor Royce ends his ethical treaty with the note on page 376, “The loyal then are truth seekers.”
He elaborates more on experience, Realism and metaphysics in his work, “The World and the Individual”, vol. 1, 1898 –1900, see http://www.giffordlectures.org.
“Nur in der Erfahrung ist Wahrheit, (only in experience is truth) said Kant. I not only accept this thesis, but insist upon it.” Says J. Royce.
Realism asserts, that to be real means to be independent of ideas and that the world of Fact, is independent of your knowledge of that world.
For Royce, a being is indifferent to our mere ideas. “From this point of view Realism would mean only that an object known is other than the idea, or thought, or person, that knows the object. But in this very general sense, any and every effort to get at truth involves the admission that what one seeks is in some way more or less other than one's ideas while one is seeking; and herewith no difference would be established between Realism and any opposing metaphysical view. “
This realistic world is a world of Independent Beings. On Realism’s own terms, there are many real Beings and One Reality or else ideas, apart from reality.
He comments further, “Then, necessarily, there has arisen the question why, despite the isolation of the real Beings, this, our own world of experience, seems so full of interrelationships, of mutual connections, of laws that bind soul to soul, and sun to planet, and all things to space, to time, or to God. To meet such demands, Realism has in just such pluralistic systems resorted to various paradoxical secondary explanations. Pre established harmonies, illusory forms of unreal linkage, or assumptions of intermediating principles, —assumptions such as lead the philosopher into a hopeless, because unreasonable, complexity,—such are the devices whereby Realism has in such cases sought to join again the sundered fragments of its disintegrated universe, like a careless child tearfully trying to mend a shattered crystal.”
Consistent with Royce, ultimate realities are universals, namely, valid possibilities of experience, he reinstated the Individual as the only ultimate form of Being. “Being validates or disproves ideas and object is experience.”
On the metaphysical note he states, see “The World and the Individual”, Lecture 8, The Fourth Conception of Being. “I have thought beforehand of my object, namely, of my friend's coming destiny (death). …but we have not said that death is by itself a Whole object. Death, as far as it comes into our experience, is indeed a glimpse of fact, but in the moral world it is the most fragmentary of such glimpses of reality. Whoever faces it faces nothing that he finds as an individual and present reality. What he observes is the absence of precisely what he himself defines as the Whole of Being that he seeks, —the very longing of an unfulfilled idea, which defines the Other, and looks elsewhere for the reality.
Now our theory merely consists in asserting that in every such case the reality sought is a life, and a concrete life of fulfillment, and that this reality is, and is in its wholeness, elsewhere than at this fragmentary instant of human experience. Human experience offers, so far as it goes, only a confirmation of this our view. For we have said that true Being is essentially a Whole Individual Fact, that does not send you beyond itself, and that is, therefore, in its wholeness, deathless. Where death is, Being in its wholeness is not.”
Royce criticized philosophy, which seemed to place usefulness ahead of truth and argued that pragmatism cannot be regarded as true. He was introducing his new ideas into the world of philosophy.
© Art Wielgus 2008
