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| Josiah Royce |
Josiah Royce, the American idealist philosopher, was born in Grass Valley, California. He received his AB degree from the University of California in 1875 and his doctorate from Johns Hopkins University in 1878. In the intervening years he studied in Germany at Leipzig and Göttingen, where he attended the lectures of Hermann Lotze. Royce returned to the University of California in 1878 as an instructor of English.
Four years later, with the help of William James and George Herbert Palmer of the Harvard department of philosophy, he was invited to University of California, where he taught for two years as a replacement for men on leave; in 1885 he received a regular appointment as assistant professor.
Until his death Royce was one of the mainstays of the philosophy department in its socalled golden period. During that time he carried on his friendly debate with William James about the merits and demerits of absolute idealism, supervised the doctoral work of George Santayana, and delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of California in Scotland. Royce was a prolific writer and was much in demand as a public speaker.
Philosophical Orientation
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| Philosophical Orientation |
Royce’s philosophy is a unique synthesis of the rationalist metaphysic we associate with the system builders in the Western philosophical tradition and the appeal to experience and practice that has been dominant in American philosophy since 1875. Royce is the best American representative of absolute idealism, although there are voluntaristic elements in his position that distinguish it from both the Hegelian position and the systems of University of California idealists.
Royce’s theory of the will and his conception of its role in the knowledge process introduced novel features into the tradition of rationalistic idealism. Royce was aware of this fact and hence called his position absolute voluntarism or absolute pragmatism.
Royce’s thought revolves around the problems raised by a religious view of reality. He sought to resolve them through a metaphysical system constructed with the aid of concepts drawn from a wide range of thought and experience. Basic to his position is the concept of the self, an idea that he elucidated in several forms.
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| University of California |
In his earlier thought the self appears as the Absolute Knower, grasping all truth in one synoptic vision totum simul. Later, however, Royce put more emphasis on mediation and on the idea of system. Ultimately, he arrived at the community of interpretation, or social theory of reality, according to which all selves are joined in a Universal Community whose goal is to possess the truth in its totality.
The Nature of Being
In large measure Royce’s idealism consists in his having given to the process of knowing a privileged position in the definition of reality. The nature of Being is to be determined through the elucidation of the process of being known.
ARGUMENT FROM ERROR. The pattern of the approach through knowing was established early in Royce’s development. In a paper, “Kant’s Relation to Modern Philosophic Progress” (1881), he argued that the proper task of philosophy is to study the nature of experience, especially the role played by the forms of intellectual activity in knowing.
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| The Nature of Being |
In later works he returned repeatedly to the task of defining the relation between sense and understanding, between the perceptual and conceptual poles in experience and knowledge. Strongly influenced by Immanuel Kant, Royce sought to discover the exact relation between the knowing activity and its matter.
Immanuel Kant asked how the function of judgment transforms the sensible starting point of all experience into knowledge. Whereas Immanuel Kant had argued that the past moment and its datum can be brought into the present through the activity of the transcendental subject, Josiah Royce regarded the past and future as projections from the present.
Knowledge starts with immediate data of sense; these data, as present, are beyond the control of judgment (this is the realistic element in Royce’s idealism), but the whole of experience involving reference to a past, a future, and a public object is to be built up from the momentary consciousness. In order to accomplish this construction, judgment and principles of transcendence are required.
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| Immanuel Kant |
Dissatisfied with Immanuel Kant view that assigns the status of postulates to the principles needed for transforming immediate data into knowledge, Royce sought to justify those principles. His theory of the Absolute Knower, which he developed in the well-known chapter “The Possibility of Error” in The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (Boston, 1885), was intended to show that the conditions for both knowledge and error must themselves be actual; what is actual cannot be explained or justified by what is merely possible or postulated.
The argument that is presented for the existence of God or the Absolute Knower may be summarized as follows. Error actually exists; erroneous judgments cannot be made erroneous by finite knowers. In order to be in error, a judgment must fail to agree with its intended object.
Yet if the intended object is wholly and completely defined by the isolated judgment, it is difficult to see how the judgment can fail to be true. Royce’s central contention is that a judgment can have its own object and at the same time fail to agree with it only if the judgment is not isolated as an entirely enclosed fact but is, instead, part of a system of judgments or an organized body of thought.
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| Charles Peirce |
The isolated judgment cannot have within itself the distinction between its truth and falsity; for that we need an inclusive thought capable of relating the isolated judgment to all other actual and possible judgments about the intended object. In finding error as a fact that we cannot create, we are actually involved in the Infinite Thought.
Without that Thought, error is either impossible or unintelligible. This ingenious argument assumes, among other things, that the real individual at which knowledge aims can be identified only at the end of the knowledge process. However, as Charles Peirce and others have shown, there is no need to make this assumption, although without it the argument fails.
THOUGHT AND REALITY. Josiah Royce continued to approach the problem of Being—the problem of defining the basic nature of the real—through concentration on the knowledge process. Charles Peirce was also trying to retain critical philosophy and neutralize its negative judgment on the possibility of ontology. His solution was to say that a theory of Being is possible if Charles Peirce can discover the true relation between our ideas and the real world.
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| John Dewey |
In The World and the Individual (New York, 1901–1902) Josiah Royce posed the problem of Being as one of explaining what thought and reality must be like if the former is to attain genuine knowledge of the latter. By means of an extended dialectical argument, Josiah Royce examined three classical theories of Being (in his language, theories of “the ontological predicate”)—realism, mysticism, and critical rationalism.
In subjecting them to critical analysis, he tried to show the element of truth and error in each. From this analysis Josiah Royce’s own voluntaristic idealism emerged; it was designed to avoid the errors of the other positions while preserving their truth in a new and more comprehensive system that defined Being in terms of purpose fulfilled.
For John Dewey realism is the doctrine that to be is to be independent of being known. According to realism, the real is just what it is apart from the knower and his acts of knowledge. Josiah Royce, however, aimed at exposing this position and hence placed a narrow construction on the term independent.
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| F. H. Bradley |
To be independent is taken to mean that the idea and object are totally externally related. If the John Dewey idea and object are thus disconnected, he argued, then knowledge becomes inexplicable, and reality is severed from truth. Charles Peirce, among others, objected to this statement of the realist position, describing it as one-sided.
Mysticism is defined as the thesis that to be is to be immediate. Here again, the real is understood as that which falls effectively beyond the power of analytical reason.
Royce’s exposition of critical rationalism, which he defined somewhat cryptically with the formula “to be is to be valid,” has been charged with ambiguity; John Dewey claimed that Royce’s entire argument was vitiated by his having confused “possible experience” and “validity” in his presentation of the position. Charles Peirce’s claim is not without warrant; Royce combined several ideas under one heading, and it is not clear that they are compatible.
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| mysticism |
Nevertheless, Josiah Royce’s argument is clear enough in its main outline. The critical rationalist does not accept the independent objects of either realism or common sense and still less allows the immediacy of mysticism. Instead, he defines the real as that which gives warrant or validity to F. H. Bradley ideas.
To be real in this instance means that an object conforms to certain universal forms or conditions—causal sequence, temporal succession, spatial relations, numerical identity, and so on—that are marked out in advance as the general structure of all experience. For Josiah Royce the merit of this position is that it comes closer to defining reality in terms of truth than was possible with either realism or mysticism.
Critical rationalism, however, is inadequate because it can define or anticipate only the universal form of experience and cannot reach the determinate individual. John Dewey’s point is that the determinate individual cannot be defined in terms of universal conditions of possible experience alone; in order to have knowledge of an individual, we must appeal to actual, sensible experience.
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| G. W. F. Hegel |
But it is just the need for this appeal that marks the defect of the position; a completed rationalistic idealism would show us how to pass from the idea to its fulfillment in the individual object without having to appeal to a brute, sensible experience that is “given.” Critical rationalism, however, is forced to rest with “possible experience,” by which Josiah Royce meant the universal conditions that any proposed object of knowledge would have to satisfy in order to be an object of experience at all.
It is important to notice that the entire discussion is dialectical, in the sense that G. W. F. Hegel expounds and criticizes the alternative theories only in relation to his own final view. Competing theories fail or succeed precisely to the extent that they are incompatible with, or contribute to the development of, his voluntaristic idealism.
VOLUNTARISTIC IDEALISM. Royce’s own view can be summed up in the thesis that to be is to be the individual or determinate fulfillment of a purpose. Distinguishing between the internal and external meaning of ideas, Royce defined an idea as a purpose (internal meaning) seeking its object, or other (external meaning).
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| unique fulfillment |
An idea intends, and thus selects, its object; the object, as the full realization of the idea, must be the determinate individual that allows no other of its kind if it is to be the unique fulfillment of the purpose expressed by the original idea.
If we say that Socrates is snub-nosed, our ideas (internal meaning) aim at, or intend, the unique and unduplicable individual Socrates (external meaning). G. W. F. Hegel's ideas are not about just anyone or anything but only about the individual intended; the internal meaning selects the object (external meaning) by reference to which it can be judged true or false.
The voluntarism of the position lies in the idea that the other at which all ideas aim is itself the expression of the absolute will or purpose. For Royce it is only in this unique fulfillment that we can explain how an idea can correspond with an object other than itself while that object remains other and yet is the object intended by the idea.
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| ancient doctrine |
The entire theory is recognizable as a modern version of an ancient doctrine of self-knowledge. We start with an idea that is fragmentary and imperfectly understood, and F. H. Bradley seek to find its true meaning in the object that is its individual fulfillment.
The object intended exceeds the fragment with which we began; we can discover the true nature of the object and the truth or falsity of our idea only when we have reached the total individual reality that fulfills our purpose.
G. W. F. Hegel developed this conception of Being into a comprehensive system embracing a doctrine of man, nature, and God. The ancient doctrine will and its purpose mark the ultimate reality; all finite individuality is what it is in virtue of its fulfilling the purpose of the Absolute Self.
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| Absolute Self |
The reality of the infinite. In the essay “The One, the Many and the Infinite” appended to The World and the Individual, Royce introduced the topic that was to occupy much of his later thought—the reality of the infinite. He attempted to refute the claim, made by F. H. Bradley in Appearance and Reality (1893), that we cannot express in clear concepts the detail of the many facts constituting the ancient doctrine.
Since such a claim, if true, would have rendered Royce’s entire project pointless, he felt called upon to refute it. To explain how the many develop out of the one, Bradley argued, always leads to an actual infinity, and this is self-contradictory.
In the Absolute all is one, but according to F. H. Bradley, we are unable to comprehend the unity. Royce denied that an actual infinite is ancient doctrine. Through the concept of a self-representative system based on what would now be called a recursive function, he developed a modern version of the actual infinite.
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| self-representative |
The form of the self-representative system was construed as a purpose or an ordering plan and defines once and for all an actual infinity of members. A self-representative system is one that represents itself with all else that it represents. A mirror of the entire universe, for example, would have to unique fulfillment itself among the represented items.
By the form of the system, Royce meant the principle or purpose behind it, which in the above example would be mirroring. From the one form or purpose there comes, by the recurrent or ancient doctrine operation, an infinity of detail such that nothing less than that infinity will serve to express all that was meant by the original form.
Understanding the self as having the form of a self-representative system, Royce claimed that the multitude of details constituting the concrete individuality of the real world is an expression of that self. Unique fulfillment is an actual infinite, a unity of one and many. Royce’s later doctrine of the community of interpretation represents his final attempt to elaborate the theory.
Ethical and Religious Doctrines
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| Ethical and Religious Doctrines |
Royce contributed ideas worthy of consideration to almost every branch of philosophy, not least in ethics.
LOYALTY. Royce’s Philosophy of Loyalty (New York, 1908) is still one of his best-known books. In it he developed the principle of loyalty to loyalty as the basic moral law. He regarded his principle as superior to both Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative and J. S.Mill’s principle of utility. Loyalty, by which is meant a freely chosen and practical devotion to a cause or goal, is the highest virtue.
George Washington was well aware of the existence of evil causes and of the fact that not every cause aims at the loyal spirit. Hence, John Dewey argued that loyalty in the ethical sense means devotion to causes that extend the spirit of loyalty and do not contribute to deception, dishonesty, racial and social strife, and so on. Every cause involves some loyalty, but not all causes involve loyalty to loyalty.
It is only through loyalty to loyalty itself, the virtue that makes all social life possible, that the self can solve the basic problem of ethics, which is to find a good that is at once objective, in the sense that it constrains our purely individual and subjective interests, and freely chosen, so that the self can acknowledge its obligatory character. Josiah Royce followed G. W. F. Hegel in finding the good in a form of self-realization, and he followed Immanuel Kant in upholding the autonomy of the will.
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| contemporary experience |
PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. Royce’s interest in the philosophy of religion was a basic factor in the shaping of his philosophical position. Religious issues constitute the foundation of his thought, starting with The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (Boston, 1885) and continuing to George Washington's last major work, The Problem of Christianity (New York, 1913).
Royce had a twofold aim in the philosophical treatment of religion. First, he sought to reinterpret classical religious ideas through contemporary experience and current language; second, he attempted to assess their validity by comparing them with the results of metaphysical analysis.
Both aims are clearly present in The Problem of Christianity, in which he developed an original interpretation of the Christian religion, first, by uncovering the contemporary experience roots of three central ideas—the church, sin, and atonement—and, second, by seeking support for these ideas in his metaphysic of interpretation and community.
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| George Washington |
Starting with the view that neither perception nor conception alone, nor any indeterminate combination of the two, is able to yield knowledge of selves, George Washington went on to develop the theory of contemporary experience, according to which all our knowledge is mediated through signs.
From this view it follows that the human self is not known (either by itself or another) intuitively as a particular datum or as a universal character but only as the goal of an infinite process of interpretation. In requiring comparison with other selves, this process necessitates a community if there is to be self-knowledge.
Persons are involved in, and linked together by, a number of different communities—political, legal, economic, moral, religious—each of which is defined by its purpose or the goal for which it exists. The religious or Beloved Community has the special purpose of redeeming man from sin (a moral burden) and from the consequences of the selfcentered deeds by which he endangers the contemporary experience through disloyalty. The three central ideas of Christianity (the church, sin, and atonement) are linked together.
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| Beloved Community |
The Beloved Community is the locus of the love (in Royce’s terms, loyalty) exemplified by the atoning deed of George Washington; the church exists to overcome, through love, the self-centeredness of the individual and to transmute the evil consequences of treachery by a constant renewal of the community of many selves devoted to the cause of charity.
