Josiah Royce in Focus

2. The Self

2 The Self Living Views for Today Royce’s psychological and philosophical reflections provide us in the contemporary philosophical scene a wealth of fruitful and relevant ideas. Royce’s ideas resonate well with the current concern for basing philosophical reflections on empirical matters arising out of the psychological and biological sciences. Royce was recognized in his time for his work in psychology by being elected president in 1901 of the American Psychological Association, and much of his work in this field can be considered cutting-edge. He engaged in psychological experiments and employed empirical and phenomenological methods to study consciousness and the human self. Further, Royce was intimately acquainted with evolutionary theory, using aspects of it for his own philosophical reflections, while providing insightful criticism of some of its conclusions and practical applications.1 Royce had a pervasive interest in the concrete and experiential aspects of human experience: he believed that philosophical reflection must draw on and be in touch with this base. I believe that Royce was more empirically based than most of his contemporaries, who often dismissed his thought, falsely perceiving his work as that of an abstract idealist.2 In fact, I suggest that Royce was even more empirical than many philosophers today. The first section of this chapter will discuss Royce as a psychologist. This ex- 22 Josiah Royce in Focus position itself does not do full justice to the rich treasure in Royce’s psychological works, and scholars would find this material well worth pursuing as a separate endeavor.3 We will establish Royce’s credentials as a psychologist and note the ways in which he was a pioneer in this field, doing new and significant work ahead of Freud and many of the social psychologists of his day. In Royce’s psychology , he gives us a clearly novel approach to mental life; namely, he discards the old “faculty” psychology, which divides mental life in terms of three faculties of mind: reason, will, and feeling. In its place Royce discussed three aspects of human mental life: sensitiveness, docility, and originality. This exposition demonstrates the deep riches of mental life as well as the interrelationship and interconnections of its aspects, not an artificial separation that is perhaps good for some philosophical discussion, but clearly inadequate for capturing human experience . Royce justifies this new approach on the grounds that it demonstrates the particularly close interconnection between intellectual and voluntary processes .4 Further, sensitiveness, docility, and originality play a significant role in ethical choice. Like James, Royce gives a key role to selective attention in conscious experience ; this aspect of mental life is, for Royce, crucial to the role of will and to moral choice, but also to choices in other domains, such as science and even philosophy . In addition, Royce, like Baldwin, emphasizes the role of imitation in self-development, but he goes beyond Baldwin, emphasizing its role in intellectual experience, including the formation of general ideas: a human ability crucial to moral and other evaluation as well as to scientific investigation. In this context, we will see his advocacy for both activity and passivity at all levels of human experience, even the most basic. This emphasis, among others, places him as a forerunner of phenomenology. Further, in a novel and insightful manner, Royce reinterprets feeling in terms of a twofold distinction, adding restlessness/ quiescence to the old pleasure/pain dichotomy, with the feelings of restlessness and quiescence playing a key role in attention, in initiative, and in moral life. Finally, I treat Royce’s phenomenology of human inner time-consciousness. This temporality introduces a sense of unity into human experience and grounds the notion of the self as a temporal process rather than something discoverable either intuitively or by reflective introspection. The self is to self always a question, and meaning is discovered in time and in a social context. The next section presents a more extensive overview of Royce’s views on the human self and the development of his social psychology. Here I make a clear distinction between four terms: the empirical ego, the self, the person, and the individual. The first term, in this context, is primarily psychological; the The Self 23 second relates to sociology and common understanding; the third is ethical; and the fourth deals with the metaphysical, namely, the topic of individuation and uniqueness. The topic of the individual will be treated only as it impacts on ethical...