Yes, But Not Quite: Encountering Josiah Royce's Ethico-Religious Insight

1. The ‘‘Conception of God’’ Debate: Setting the Stage for Royce’s Personalism

one the ‘‘conception of god’’ debate Setting the Stage for Royce’s Personalism This book advances a thesis that is contrary to the majority opinion in Royce scholarship: I hold that Royce’s late metaphysics of community1 is not an extension of Royce’s epistemological and logical concerns but rather an articulation of a living ethico-religious insight , an insight that serves as the animating force behind his entire philosophy.2 Even Royce’s earliest philosophical treatise, The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885), and its central argument for the existence of an Absolute Thought was not primarily an epistemological or a metaphysical defense of the Absolute’s ontological status as the most real being in existence, but his initial attempt to describe the Absolute as a living logos that unites persons with each other, with every other finite being, and with the Absolute, while preserving their individuality. That is, the apparently absolutist metaphysics of Royce’s early philosophical career—spanning from his rejection of epistemic skepticism and acceptance of reality as a ‘‘divine Whole’’ guided by the {  }  josiah royce’s personalism ‘‘World-Spirit,’’ who serves as an omniscient, omni-benevolent person that we yearn to commune with, as the essential component of his philosophy in 18833 to the publication of The Conception of God (1895)—is his early attempt to delineate a metaphysics of community, of describing the mutual interdependence between the Absolute and finite individuals without reducing the latter to being simply modes of the Absolute manifesting himself,4 temporally. I say ‘‘apparently absolutist metaphysics’’ here because Josiah Royce’s Absolute never was a Hegelian Absolute, where the Absolute was the only real Individual . Royce always thought of the Absolute as the preserver of all particularities who lets them retain their ontological uniqueness. For Royce the Absolute is an individual, even though he is the eternal one who transcends the temporal-span of all other individuals and ‘‘preserves’’ all of them in their uniqueness within himself.5 A Royce commentator who neglects the ethico-religious aspect of Royce’s thought is Murray G. Murphey in his chapter on ‘‘Josiah Royce’’ in A History of Philosophy in America;6 a contemporary one is Bruce Kuklick. Both Murphey and Kuklick focus too much on Royce’s epistemology and logic in their interpretations of his philosophy , neglecting the most significant aspects of Royce’s philosophy: his philosophy of religion, his metaphysics, and his ethics.7 Even when these commentators discuss such works as The Problem of Christianity and The Sources of Religious Insight, they tend to emphasize his logic, using it to interpret his late metaphysics of community and philosophy of religion instead of regarding it as an extension of his metaphysics and philosophy of religion.8 Oppenheim mentions Kuklick’s tendency to interpret Royce’s late metaphysics of community and philosophy of religion as derivative of his logic when he writes that, along with two other shortcomings in Kuklick’s perspective on Royce, ‘‘Kuklick so emphasizes the logical aspect of Royce’s philosophy that he decentralizes its ethico-religious interest into simply another area of applied logic.’’9 Oppenheim offers a corrective to such an interpretation of Royce’s late philosophy: ‘‘[A]lthough Royce employed his logic through the Problem [of Christianity]—even if he kept it from the view of his ordinary audience—the Problem stands the ‘‘conception of god’’ debate  primarily as a work in ethics and philosophy of religion rather than a work in logic.’’10 This interpretation of Royce’s philosophical development also differs from Kuklick, Murphey, and John Smith in that I do not contend that Charles S. Peirce was the principal philosopher who forced Royce to jettison his earlier absolute idealism and construct a metaphysics of community with a modified version of Peirce’s theory of interpretation .11 I will admit, though, that Peirce gave Royce the terminology to express his metaphysics more forcefully and clearly than he had prior to immersing himself in Peirce’s logic. Royce admits as much in The Problem of Christianity.12 Nor does this view lessen the philosophical influence that philosophers such as Joseph LeConte, William James, Arthur Schopenhauer, Plato, G. W. Leibniz, Benedict de Spinoza , G. W. F. Hegel, and Hugo Münsterberg had on Royce’s intellectual development. Yet, I contend, along with such contemporary Royce scholars as Randall E. Auxier, that the philosopher who was most influential in getting Josiah...