Josiah Royce in Focus

1. Royce as a Frontier Californian and Intellectual Pioneer

1 Royce as a Frontier Californian and Intellectual Pioneer Forging Self and Thought in a New and Developing Land This biographical sketch of Josiah Royce will focus on some of his ideas and character traits, centered on two themes: Royce as a bridge builder and as a seeker of “insight.” These foci include exploration of the following sub-themes: (1) philosophy as reflection on life as experienced in all its richness, variety, conflict, and unity; (2) philosophy as personal and as a philosophy of life; (3) enrichment of life and thought through the critical exchange of ideas; (4) the philosopher as a “frontiersman”; (5) forging a life and self as a narrative with a central cause or ideal as a theme; (6) the prime importance of the temporal, of history, and of the irrevocability of the past; (7) nature as part of life and as a philosophy. This approach will, first, set a general context for understanding Royce’s thought because, in my view, he lived out his philosophy in his own life. In modern parlance, he “walked the talk.” Second, Royce strongly believed that the best sources for understanding a person were reading their books and essays and observing their thought in action. Royce remembered his beloved teacher and mentor, Joseph Le Conte, as his inspiration for this belief.1 In his tribute to William James, Royce puts his view succinctly: “A great philosophy expresses an interpretation of the life of a man and a view of the universe which is at once personal and, if the thinker is representative of his people, national in its significance .”2 Thus, our biographical sketch will focus mostly on how details of his life 2 Josiah Royce in Focus illuminate his thought and actions. I believe Royce’s thought was also representative of “his people,” and thus has broader significance. This approach is in concert with Royce’s view of the goal of philosophy. He writes: Philosophy . . . has its origin and values in an attempt to give a reasonable account of our own personal attitude toward the more serious business of life. You philosophize when you reflect critically upon what you are actually doing in your world. What you are doing is of course, in the first place, living. And living involves passions , faiths, doubts and courage. The critical inquiry into what all these things mean and imply is philosophy.3 All of the sub-themes enumerated above, in fact, follow from this view of philosophy . Thus, Royce believed his task as a philosopher—although he also believed it was everyone’s task4 —was to forge a “philosophy of life,” and if the philosopher was representative of his people (and, in Royce’s view, the great philosophers of history were), the philosophy would be “national” in significance. Royce argues that the philosophy of William James is “national in significance.”5 Royce uses the phrase “philosophy of life,” primarily in 1911, but I believe it describes well what his life and thought is all about. Royce defines “philosophy of life” as the task of “learning to see life as it is, to know the world as we men know it, and to guide our purposes as we ought to guide them.”6 In terms of his time Royce saw this task as “the effort to see whether and how, you can cling to a genuinely ideal and spiritual interpretation of your nature and duty, while abandoning superstition, and while keeping in close touch with the results of modern knowledge about man and nature.”7 In 1911, Royce’s advice to the graduates of Simmons College in molding a philosophy of life was “Be loyal; grow in loyalty.”8 Life, believed Royce, was a tremendously complicated affair, and thus no one individual could possibly bring to light its inexhaustible treasures. Such richness and depth would produce a variety of views, seemingly conflicting and certainly expressed via an endless variety of modes, whether it be poetry, science, or philosophy . Thus, Royce sought to learn from a broad range of experiences, including the poetic, literary, and musical, and from various fields of science. Doing this was, for him, a necessity. Also important was his readiness to share his fund of experience with others. Central to his life and thought was the task of bridge building, seeking harmony and synoptic vision, believing that “the seeming opposing assertions about the world may, in a deeper sense, turn out to be equally true.”9 Royce thus sought enrichment also...