Loyalty, Community, and the Task of Attention: On Royce’s “Third Attitude of the Will”

I

Toward the end of his late magnum opus on The Problem of Christianity, Josiah Royce identified loyalty with a “third attitude of the will,” contrasting it with two other attitudes that he had previously described based on his reading of Schopenhauer. Neither a simple affirmation nor a denial of the will to live, loyalty, as portrayed by Royce, is a “positive devotion of the Self to its cause.” Anyone who properly understands the “meaning of this third way,” Royce announced, “will therefore be better prepared to grasp the foundations upon which the metaphysics of interpretation rests.”¹ This discussion of loyalty occurs within the much broader context of a detailed and extended treatment of Charles S. Peirce’s “doctrine of signs.”

The first purpose of this essay is to expose the deep roots of Royce’s concept of loyalty in that Peircean, semiotic terrain. Achieving such a goal will require a brief investigation of certain metaphysical perspectives that both philosophers shared, also an analysis of how they conceived of the special relationship between volition and attention. In the second half of the essay, I want to turn from this exegetical task to a more properly constructive exercise. I want to ask and begin to answer the question: How does thinking about loyalty in the way that Royce did facilitate our understanding of the contemporary task of building stronger, healthier communities? Two kinds of communities in particular concern me. In the first place, I share Royce’s deep interest in religious communities, ultimately and ideally, in what he sometimes referred to as the “Beloved Community.” And so there are certain “theosemiotic” implications of his account that need to be evaluated in my essay. Secondly, I am intrigued by Royce’s claim that every “student of the humanities” should be inspired and animated by a certain “will to interpret.” This raises additional, related questions: In what sense are colleges and universities, or even more narrowly, specific humanities classes, properly to be regarded as “communities of interpretation?” What sort of loyalty does participation in such a community require of its members? How ought they to understand such participation as consisting in a series of volitional acts building up genuine relationships of loyalty? The constructive exercise in the second part of my essay will take the form of entertaining potential answers to such questions, toward the end of sketching a contemporary Roycean prescription for creating more vibrant religious and intellectual communities.

II

Royce’s indebtedness to Peirce for ideas relevant to the development of his argument in The Problem of Christianity is announced early on in the preface to that work,² but becomes clearly visible only in the book’s second part. There Royce draws explicitly from several of Peirce’s articles, most notably, three essays published almost a half a century earlier in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy; he also makes reference in the book’s conclusion to Peirce’s 1908 article on “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God.”³ My concern here is not to revisit the task of commenting on the relationship between Peirce’s and Royce’s thought, more broadly understood.⁴ Nor do I want to argue here for the claim that Royce underwent a dramatic Peircean “conversion” in the writing of this book toward the end of his life, with the influence of Peirce’s thought on earlier publications having been negligible.⁵ I want to focus instead much more narrowly on how they each understood the role of attention in shaping semiosis, beginning with the sort of attention involved in performing acts of comparison. (This will lead to a brief examination of some of their shared metaphysical assumptions.)

For both philosophers, the comparison of any two things involves a third thing, something that mediates between the things compared and so brings them into relation. On comparison, two different things will be perceived as both similar and dissimilar in certain relevant respects. Royce observed that in some cases it is the “shock of difference that first awakens our attention...