John said to Mary:
And I don't want you to think I'm doing this because of you Mary. You just
helped me to think it through more carefully and see where I was going wrong.
The realization came more through dmb's response to your suggestion because in
the beginning, I was hoping to recreate the dialogue between Royce and James
with Dave and me, but let's face it, that's a no-win situation through and
through.
dmb says:
For whatever it's worth, I grabbed an anthology off my shelf and took a look at
the introduction to the section on Royce. It's written by your pal Jacquelyn
Ann Kegley. She quotes Royce describing himself as "both a pragmatist and an
absolutist". She says Royce's THE WORLD AND THE INDIVIDUAL is "his most fully
developed argument for idealism" although the central themes of that work also
appear in THE RELIGIOUS ASPECTS OF PHILOSOPHY and THE CONCEPTION OF GOD. This
is the sort of thing that sets off alarm bells. Here's how Hildebrand frames
it...
"Idealists were motivated to restore the moral and religious worth of the
individual. ..The metaphysical and epistemological strategy for doing this
meant delivering 'reality' from reductive materialistic and mechanistic
definitions and redescribing it as dynamic, ultimately spiritual, processes.
This cosmic setting - in contrast to the Cartesian-Newtonian world of dead
rocks - could champion spirituality as the unique and dignifying trait of man.
...The metaphysical systems of absolute idealist such as T.H. Green, F.H.
Bradley and Bernard Bosanquet in Great Britain and Josiah Royce in America were
most immediately responsible for the development of the realist movement
discussed in this chapter."
I think you can see that pragmatism agrees with the rejection of
Cartesian-Newtonian world of dead rocks but it goes a different way than
idealism does after that. And this motivation to save the moral and religious
worth of the individual was also largely about saving christianity. This sort
of thing always makes me suspicious and sometime I'm even suspicious of James
on that count. You saw how Pirsig reacted to Bradley and so you know that he
likes it even less than I do.
My point? I realize Royce is in the neighborhood and that there are important
points of agreement but the differences are big enough to make them
incompatible. There is a reason why religious people tend to think they'll find
some comfort here, namely we have a common enemy in "value-free" scientific
materialism. But there are just too many people around these days who are
perfectly willing to bash Darwin or Einstein just because they think it gets in
the way of loving Jesus and Royce seems a little too close to this sort of
thing. I'm sure he's ten times better at it and a hundred times more credible
but that's still not saying much.
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