dmb quotes wiki: Wiki says that Royce, "conceived the Absolute as a unitary Knower Whose experience constitutes what we know as the 'external' world",
John said: There's no "transcendance" in Royces definition. His Absolute IS Experience itself! You say that's not "much different" than a reality that's beyond experience, and I don't know what's wrong with your reading and reasoning powers... dmb says: Oh, I see. Well, if you've ever said that before I missed it. Do you have any source to cite on that? I can't just take your word for it, especially since my sources say otherwise. That's a reasonable request, no? and John reasonably points to his "source": Your own wiki-thinking Dave. A unitary knower whose experience constitutes the "external" world. The "unitary knower" is the absolute, the experience of the knower is the world, and our experience of the world is the experience of the Absolute's Experience and since Being and Being's Experience are ultimately the same, our experience is Royce's Absolute. It's all in the definitions. But more careful exposition is called for and thus, I oblige: The most important feature of Royce's Absolute, to him anyway, is that is not religiously derived. "We do not believe in the world of the absolute Self because we merely long for something spiritual: the doctrine is the outcome of a rigid logical analysis." His purpose, as stated in the The Spirit of Modern Philosophy, is "to remove from idealism... this reproach of being a mere poem of moral enthusiasm." When he becomes a devotee of symbolic logic at the end of the century, this formulation is explicit. Religious - perhaps more broadly social and ethical - concerns remain predominant, but they are conceptually subordinate to logic. In a wider sense, the thorny, stony and arid way, but the only way to lead to the Absolute is the way of logic. It is in this way that Royce's Absolute cannot be understood unless his logic is understood. A second prelimanary point which Kuklick mentions to clarify his own confusions (and ours) is that like many who followed them (Royce and James) at Harvard, Royce was committed to a version of phenomenalism. The finite knower is directly aware not of a physical object but of what is momentarily present. We can best speak about this "given" by statements like "This appears white to me". From this slender basis Royce proposes to demonstrate that we can have knowledge of a more extensive realm - the external world. Often he expresses his theses by saying that this external world consists of contents of consciousness, or equivalently, of actual and possible experience. But his cardinal principle sis that in experience we are given ideas and it is of these ideas that the external world is made. We must account for this external world in ideal terms, that is, in terms which rule out an independently existing externality. Royce traces aspects of his heritage to Berkeley and sets up the argument for his absolutism by formulating the Berkeleyan claims for idealism. There are two aspects of idealism, the first, which Berkeley made famous, has no "absolute character" about it, but attempts only to show that our world is an ideal one. Royce restates this argument, as I will upon request, but more interesting is what he does with the results. to be continued.... 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/md/archives.html
