dmb says: It looks like you already know more about Royce than I do, but "the desire to see things whole" is quite common. And if you can image how to design a mural that depicts an "interpretation of existence that affirms the fundamental intelligibility, meaningfulness, and goodness of human life and gives guidance for our moral striving" then you are a full-blown genius. John replies:
As an individual, I fall short of "genius". But what is inadequate in an individual is a possibility in the context of Community - which was Royce's idea throughout his life and his main thrust near the end of his life - the philosophy of Community. And is the thrust in our mural class. For it's a community of artist coming together to share talent and ideas; each contributing the best he or she has to offer to the collective whole and the group mind of the collective judging each individual's efforts as to inclusion, followed by more inspiration and so on. Royce claimed that his philosophy of community was inspired by his study of the new communities in the gold fields of the west - their successes and pitfalls illustrating deeper truths about the way humans band together and make things happen. Right now, I'm trying to come up with ideas to illustrate this central theme. In Grass Valley, my home town, we had Native Americans, Chinese, Cornish miners and many others all coming together to form a new cohesive community, which offers rich potential for illustration I suppose, but illustrating the idea of transcendant community out of all this chaos is the true challenge. I like the idea of a mandala. Community mandala? "It is Royce's thesis that the ideal of holding together a plurality of views in unity or harmony is one that can stand secure. No matter how extensive skepticism may be, this ideal emerges out of the phenomenon itself. All that is required to turn this idea into our fundamental moral ideal is to interpret the conflicting views as human wills. When this is done, the ideal to be aimed at is a harmony of wills where the full reality and integrity of one's fellows are recognized and where a maximum of self-expression is coupled with a minimum of destructive conflict." Royce analytically rejected SOM in his philosophy early on - showing that the best you could do with the various convictions about reality, including the common sense notion that the world is made up of a variety of independently existing objects and persons besides oneself is use them as ungrounded postulates. And it is from this stance he goes on to more solid ground, starting with Plato: "The first European thinker who seems to have discussed the present problem was Plato, in a too-much-neglected passage of the "Thaetetus", where Socrates, replying to the second definition of knowledge given by Thaetetus, namely, knowledge is True Opinion, answers that his great difficulty has often been to see how any opinion can possibly by false. The conclusion reached by Plato is no very definite one, but the discussion is deeply suggestive. And we cannot do better here than to pray that the shade of the mighty Greek may deign to save us now in our distress, and to show us that true nature of error." John Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
