In the spirit of bringing Royce to the MoQ: I was intrigued to see that over the years of dialogue with James, Royce evolved intellectually from Absolute Idealism to what he termed Absolute Pragmatism.
CALIFORNIA PHILOSOPHIZING By PETER CONN; PETER CONN, WHO TEACHES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA, IS THE AUTHOR OF ''THE DIVIDED MIND: IDEOLOGY AND IMAGINATION IN AMERICA, 1898-1917.'' BRILLIANT, argumentative and prolific, Josiah Royce was a leading member of Harvard University's philosophy department during its legendary golden age. In the early years of the 20th century, Royce and his colleagues, who included such men as George Herbert Palmer, William James and George Santayana, first brought American philosophy to international notice. When Royce died in 1916, he was eulogized as one of the major philosophers of his time. Royce came to this eminence from unlikely beginnings. He was born in Grass Valley, Calif., a raw new settlement spawned by the gold rush. Like all frontier towns, Grass Valley was devoted to money and quick profits, not books and ideas. As described in John Clendenning's new biography, ''The Life and Thought of Josiah Royce,'' the town had more saloons than churches and no library. Such intellectual guidance as Royce received came from his mother, who was the central figure in his childhood. His father, an improvident man who sometimes worked as a traveling salesman, was more often absent than present. Royce spent his life escaping from California, but he always acknowledged its formative influence. He once wrote, ''You get a sense of power from these wide views, a habit of personal independence from the contemplation of a world that the eye seems to own.'' Not altogether fancifully, Royce thought of his books as efforts to translate the wide views and personal independence into philosophy. [John] Now that grabs me right there - the philosophy explicitly as an expression of geography [Peter Conn] Royce was the pre-eminent American representative of absolute idealism. He established his position in his first book, ''The Religious Aspect of Philosophy,'' published in 1885. Over the next 30 years, he held firm to his idealist principles, though he modified a number of his opinions, including his conceptions of will and of Christianity. Some of these revisions resulted from his long and celebrated debate with William James, his Harvard colleague for 25 years. Under the pressure of James's pragmatist criticisms, Royce altered his system; after about 1900, he used the term ''absolute pragmatism'' to describe his thought. Nonetheless, as late as 1906, in a lecture, Royce could still declare that ''every finite life finds its fulfillment in an Absolute Life, in which we live and move and have our being.'' Therefore, idealism ''is not merely a collection of eccentric opinions but is . . . the expression of the very soul of our civilization.'' Such statements now sound archaic, if not downright quaint. And, indeed, today, just 70 years after his death, Royce has become a marginal figure in philosophy. Few of his books are still read, and the reputation of his work has shrunk to the vanishing point. The reasons for Royce's declining influence are straightforward. The philosophical systems he pro-posed - indeed, the very questions he asked - have proved irrelevant to the course of 20th-century philosophy. Royce died on the eve of America's entry into World War I, and the date symbolizes the distance between his ideas and the preoccupations of later thinkers. In sum, Royce was a man of the 19th century. Diligently working to blend evolutionary science and religious belief and basing his ethical formulas on the notion of loyalty, Royce was in many ways an old-fashioned Yankee sage. In the past half-century, philosophy has traveled in directions that have led away from Royce's ideas. Logical positivism, existentialism, phenomenology, linguistic analysis: these are some of the movements that have passed Royce by. Royce's rise to prominence seemed to enact a kind of intellectual Horatio Alger tale - from shabby frontier obscurity to international prestige. Mr. Clendenning's impressive research reveals a more complicated story. From his childhood on, Royce was lonely, sensitive, embarrassed about his background. Mr. Clendenning draws a sharp contrast between the success Royce enjoyed in his profession and the continual frustrations he experienced in his private life. His pugnacity disguised his insecurity, and his insistence on the ultimate rightness of the universe was a therapeutic response to his own doubts. THE evidence of his letters and the testimony of acquaintances suggests Royce was unhappily married and uncomfortable inside the domestic circle. His passion was reserved for philosophical debate. Here he was master. Yet the public discourse may itself provide clues to the inner anxiety. For example, the language of journey and quest appears frequently in Royce's books and articles, and Mr. Clendenning interprets this discourse rather literally. According to him, Royce's elevated serenity concealed an anxious seeker, and his reiterated references to pilgrimages and journeys had an autobiographical source. In particular, Mr. Clendenning sees Royce as engaged in a lifelong search for a father, someone who could replace the man who more or less abandoned him in his youth. 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/
