Dewoycean Idealism

Relatively few people accepted Josiah Royce’s absolute idealism during his own lifetime. Fewer people accept Royce’s absolute idealism now. Yet, there is still something about the spirit of idealism animating his absolute idealism that is worth preserving. Here is how Royce described this spirit in 1915:

The experience that I get if I get it dissatisfies because it is a particular experience; that isn’t the whole of what I want. One must go beyond. I have never found Being at any moment. It is the essence of Being that it is always the object of a quest. I never find it; I am always in that position that I am profoundly dissatisfied with the experiments upon what it is to Be that I make. They are all particular and special. What I want is Life, the whole of Life, not defined in terms of virtual entities, not defined in terms of sense-presence in experience, but Wholeness in some other sense.

(Royce, Metaphysics 251)

Royce thought that this spirit required one to conceive of “the whole of Life” as being an actually existing chronosynoptic life, or a life in which every event and every individual is appreciated in its uniqueness even as all events are experienced as simultaneously occurring by that same life. Royce called this chronosynoptic life the “all-seeing Universal Consciousness” in The Religious Aspect of Philosophy. He called this life “Absolute Experience” in his 1895 essay, “Conception of God.” He often called this life the “Absolute” in his two-volume The World and the Individual, and he called it “the Interpreter” of the Community of Interpretation in The Problem of Christianity.

I realize that one can be an idealist without accepting Royce’s interpretation of “the whole of Life.” However, can one be a Roycean idealist if one chooses to interpret “the whole of Life” in terms other than as a chronosynoptic life? Yes, we can, or so I will contend in this article. Such Roycean idealists would need to philosophize in the spirit of idealism, but they would not be obligated to accept Royce’s belief that we need to believe in an actually existing chronosynoptic life for our judgments and actions to be meaningful. Perhaps a Roycean idealist can contend that the supertemporal life Royce postulates is just that, a postulate. This postulate can function as a regulative ideal motivating people to develop more inclusive scientific and moral communities that seek to promote human well-being and betterment. I think John Dewey’s early idealism, as it is articulated in his 1887 Psychology, can provide us with one or two resources to re-imagine Royce’s conception of Life’s wholeness as a regulative ideal constructed by humans. In this article, I will call the resulting idealism Dewoycean idealism and call a proponent of this idealism a Dewoycean idealist.

Before we can understand Dewoycean idealism and how it is a response to Royce’s absolute idealism, we need a better idea of why Royce chose to adopt absolute idealism in the first place. We can think of his absolute idealism as his solution to a problem—namely his early philosophical commitment to postulationism. I am using the terms “postulationist” and “postulationism” in the sense that Robert Burch uses them in his 1987 article “A Transformation in Royce’s View of Kant.” A postulationist, according to Burch, is “a theorist for whom genuinely external objects are reachable, not by any sort of deductive or quasi-deduction transition, but rather only by means of assumptions or hypotheses of a scientific or quasi-scientific sort. Such hypotheses, or postulates, are undertaken in the service of a more harmonious practical existence, and they serve practicality by furnishing the best explanations of our sense experience” (Burch 560).¹

Royce explains the nature of his early postulationism during one of the lectures in his 1915–1916 Philosophy 9: Metaphysics course at Harvard: “We are in a position of postulates, voluntary attitudes, will attitudes towards the world, and our purpose as philosophers is to reflect on these and to bring them into some kind of union and also to attach them...