Idealism through a Past Darkly: La métaphysique de Royce

This living connection which binds Royce’s thought to the universal drama whose conclusion can still be for us only an article of faith, though not at all prediction, would be enough to justify the length of this study.

—Gabriel Marcel, Royce’s Metaphysics xvii

Introduction

The philosophy of Josiah Royce was neither well known nor well understood in French philosophical circles at the time of his death in 1916. Although Marcel could not “remember precisely what led [him] during the First World War, to undertake a comprehensive study of Royce’s thought” (Marcel, Royce’s Metaphysics ix),¹ Royce scholars are most grateful that he did. No less a figure than William Ernest Hocking, Royce’s best-known student, described La métaphysique de Royce as “the first, and still in my judgment most substantial and prescient, discussion of Royce’s entire metaphysical outlook” (Hocking vi).²

Marcel was well equipped to account for the course of Royce’s thought. He had written on the relationship between Coleridge and Schelling in 1909, in addition to reading Bradley and Hocking. At the time of preparing the Royce essays, Marcel was at an early stage of philosophical maturation, in the process of arriving at some of his most profound philosophical insights. “Les conditions dialectiques de la philosophie de l’intuition”³ had been published in 1912—marking the beginning-of-the-end of his idealistic phase. By the time of the Royce writings, Marcel’s faith in the possibility of complete metaphysical synthesis had seriously waned. By Marcel’s own account, he “remained too faithful to the notion of totality and the possible inclusion of appearance in the whole” (Marcel, Metaphysical Journal xii). The brilliance of La métaphysique de Royce lies in Marcel’s ability to critically meet Royce’s idealism “head-on”—leveraging firsthand experience garnered while embracing an idealist approach—providing an opportunity to engage “the scrupulous technical conscience of Royce from the standpoint of an equally scrupulous technical conscience” (Hocking, vi). Marcel’s engagement with Royce’s philosophy, however, was not limited to critical assessment. Marcel was also deeply appreciative of the value of Royce’s empirisme spéculatif and its ability to search for “solutions wheresoverer [Royce] found authentic and profound intellectual experience” (Marcel, Royce’s Metaphysics xvi). Marcel’s interpretation of the Roycean corpus will be considered through three important lenses: the limits of dialectical reason, the constitutive importance of praxis, and the nature of spiritual existence.

The Limits of Dialectic Reason

Marcel was an idealist for about a decade—roughly 1905 to 1915.⁴ His idealistic writings stand in stark contrast to his later works. Marcel’s later writings offer clear, detailed descriptions of concrete situations. His idealist writings, on the other hand, consist of abstract analyses exhibiting uneven degrees of clarity. Marcel clearly recognized the disparities existing between his idealist and post-idealist writings:

Today I would be incapable of reading what was later to become the first part of the Journal métaphysique, and if I forced myself to do so, it would not be without experiencing at almost every page a feeling of irritation that I would not be able to master successfully. . . . But what strikes me is how this research that is so abstract and so awkward depended in the end on the safe and comfortable conditions in which I first found myself.

(Marcel, Awakenings 82)⁵

Marcel’s rejection of idealism stemmed from a growing suspicion concerning the transparency of the cogito. The cogito is an unsuitable point of departure: “a philosophy that begins with the cogito runs the risk of never getting back to being” (Marcel, Creative Fidelity 65).⁶ Descartes believed that through rigorous attention to the ideational content of the Cogito—the cogitate—a rigorous connection could be established between the “self-certainty” of res cogitans and the world of res extensa—an assumption that has come to be viewed as problematic. Reality, for Marcel, reveals itself precisely at the moment it surpasses static forms of representation—any condition of pure thought risks becoming “lost in a sort of dream...