Time, Will, and Purpose: Living Ideas from the Philosophy of Josiah Royce by Randell E. Auxier (review)

In Time, Will, and Purpose, Randell Auxier seeks to revise John E. Smith's account of the Peirce-Royce relationship, which he sees as onesided—showing only Peirce's influence upon Royce. Instead, he wants to modify this story into one that describes this relationship as bidirectional. Their relationship saw sawed back and forth, up and down. Sometimes Peirce played the influencer and Royce the receiver; at other times Peirce was the receiver of Royce's influence. Moreover, during its more than forty years, the affective tones of this relationship also saw sawed. Sometimes their relationship grew cold and distant, at other and more peaceful times, their relationship waxed warm and supportive with the fellowship of friends, tried and true.

In this review I will look at a number of Auxier's claims. When correcting Smith, Auxier points in several ways, claiming Royce knew that the ideas of "mediation thru interpretation … were always central" to his thought. I think that Auxier needs to tie this claim to a half-dozen of Roycean texts, ranging from 1872 to 1910. This would help him trace just how present "mediation thru interpretation" actually is. If needed, let him draw sample texts from Royce's PhD dissertation, articles and letters. Such evidence would give future students of Royce a quasi Richter scale of cases where the degree of presence of "mediation thru interpretation" is measured. Is it 1) explicit and direct; 2) clearly implicit; 3) questionable; or 4) clearly not present? It is noteworthy that with some of Auxier's references to "mediation thru interpretation" he often appends a cautionary judgment. He notes that Royce in his final decade was moving away from philosophical idealism and towards a pragmatism which involves some tenets of realism. Gabriel Marcel made a similar observation in Royce's Metaphysics, as regards the final decade of the development of Royce's mind.

Next, we can focus on Auxier's claim that Royce's idea of the ethical Absolute (the Whole, viewed as an intrinsic system of ethical and sacred Order) was present from the start; it did not emerge within the final decades of Royce's intellectual development. This contradicts Smith's proposed view that Royce underwent major shifts in his view of the Absolute.

I think Auxier needs to further buttress and refine his claim here. In doing so he would benefit on this point from pre-Smith interpretations of Royce. Is Royce's Absolute internally absolute, as portrayed by Gabriel Marcel, William E. Hocking, Jacob Loewenberg, Wade L. Robison, Mary W. Calkins, and especially J. Harry Cotton? Do these pre-Smith Roycean scholars concur with Auxier's claim that Royce's ethical Absolute always includes its temporal dimension? For, as Auxier indicates, the Absolute's temporality shines out in the irrevocability of any deed by any human individual and by this deed's inescapable belonging to the Whole. Or, did Royce always embrace a non-temporal, Eternal Absolute?

Moreover, since Royce's corpus is immense and difficult to master, even very conscientious post-Smith scholars have adopted Smith's framework as a 'field guide' into their own studies of Royce. Auxier proclaims, "This has been disastrous," and he goes on to explain:

There are no major shifts in Royce's development involving the abandonment of an earlier position and the adoption of new ones. There is an enrichment, and elaboration, and varying applications of the basic insights that unify his thought from the beginning. There is also no change in emphasis or successions of definitions in his major concepts.

(21–22)

In reply, this reviewer points out that Auxier claims that Royce had his "basic insights … from the beginning," and that thereafter there occurred in his intellectual development "no major shifts … (that forced) the abandonment of earlier positions and the adoption of new ones" (ibid). So, according to Auxier, Royce's subsequent mental development can fittingly be described "as...