Josiah Royce in Focus

5. Developing Genuine Individuals and Communities

5 Developing Genuine Individuals and Communities Royce’s reflections on concrete problems of the human community provide a framework for a new approach to social and political issues. First, Royce fully engages the central issue of individualism versus collectivism, the individual versus the demands of social order. Like Nietzsche, Royce honored the individual, noble, courageous self who could transcend narrow interests, mediocrity, and the powerful draw of social conformity in order to live as “captain of one’s own soul,”1 possessed of one’s unique moral value in the face of the chaos, the hardships, and the struggles that such dedication entailed. Royce asserts that one sin for a human self is self-loss, becoming part of the crowd, a “they” instead of an “I”; however, Royce is equally concerned about community. Thus, near the end of his life, he noted that his task as a teacher was to teach “that we are saved through community .”2 Parallel to the sin of “self-loss there is the sin of self-sufficiency,” of the individual who “goes it alone” and believes that genuine selfhood can be achieved in this manner. Royce notes that Nietzsche’s great limitation was his failure to see that real power for the genuine self lies with the “true life of cooperating individuals ,” and he did not deal with “the great problem of reconciling the unique individual with the world order.”3 Further, Nietzsche did not appreciate enough the richness and core of wisdom that could be obtained from one’s personal and cultural past. The aspect of the individual-social concern is summarized well in the words of George Herbert Mead, a student of Royce: “We wanted full intellectual Developing Genuine Individuals and Communities 99 freedom, and yet, the conservation of values for which had stood Church, State, Science, and Art.”4 For Royce, individuality and community, individual and social interests are inextricably bound together; each is uniquely valuable, and each arises out of their mutual interaction in a creative, ongoing, and infinite process. This individual-social conflict and interaction is a theme that flows throughout each of the works and issues discussed in this chapter. Second, Royce asserted that communities are, in their own right, “persons,” with histories, future goals, and temporal continuity, and thus originators of actions that can be judged on their social and moral merits. This view allows judgments to be made upon the goals and loyalties and actions of communities, whether they are corporations, cities, or even nations. It was from this conviction as well as from his concern for loyalty and sorrow at betrayal of the human community that Royce wrote a scathing condemnation of Germany and the war in the last years of his life. Contrary to popular opinion, these statements were not the emotional outbursts of a tired and disappointed idealist, but thoughtful reflections based on his developed philosophical views. In the same vein, Royce argues for an international community that honors the uniqueness of each nation and for provinces that seek their own identity, but that, at the same time, honor the identities of other provinces. Communities, as persons, must develop unique goals and seek to live in harmony with other communities with different goals, but also with the common goal of broadening the human community. Third, Royce provides us with a set of conditions or criteria for achieving consciousness as a genuine community. These, in turn, provide us with a valuable set of tools for assessing communities, including parasitic, dysfunctional, and immoral ones. Since these conditions are for developing the genuine, beloved community , they also set goals for existing communities. Indeed, Royce utilized these conditions indirectly in his history of California, although his explicit statement of them occurred in his later philosophy, and they play a role in his statements on Germany and the war as well. In concert with his conditions for developing community consciousness, Royce also provides us the principle of loyalty to loyalty as a standard for assessing communities’ loyalty: there are loyalties that are immoral and damaging. Finally, Royce, through his extensive work on interpretation and mediation, provides a solid basis for creating community out of conflict, whether it is at the level of the family, state, or nation, or in work to build a global community. Indeed , interpretation has built into it ethical demands, and it plays a central role in Royce’s philosophy; it is a key for understanding self, community, and the universe itself. Royce’s plan for...