The Place of "The Problem of Job" in the Philosophy of Josiah Royce

I. Misplaced Fame: The History of "The Problem of Job"

Dear Mr. Royce,

"In what magazine was your article on the book of Job published . . . ?"

Letter from Richard Cabot to Josiah Royce, January 20, 1897²

At first glance, the answer to this question seems rather simple: Josiah Royce published "The Problem of Job" in the sixth issue of The New World in 1897, and later made very slight revisions to the article when he selected it as the lead chapter in his Studies of Good and Evil, published with Appleton and Company in 1898. Within weeks of the note from Cabot, Royce must have directed his student in finding the article since Cabot writes another letter describing the way in which the short piece affected him. Describing "The Problem of Job," Cabot writes to Royce that "whenever you write of optimism and pessimism you strike home—for me—as no other man does or has done."³ Cabot is not alone in his assessment of the importance of this piece of writing. When one surveys the anthologies of classical American philosophy, which usually include the philosophies of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and Jane Addams, there are often a handful of Royce's writings that make the cut. "The Problem of Job" is always in this handful of excerpts and articles. Its popularity can be attributed to two related facts. First, it is one of a few places where classical American philosophers took up the central philosophical issue around which every Wisdom Tradition has circled, namely the problem of evil. As American philosophy came into its own in the 1870s, there was a move away from traditional metaphysical systems and from the questions, like the problem of evil, that attended these systems. Royce, however, took the problem seriously: what account of God can we give in light of the fact that innocent individuals suffer apparent injustices on a near-constant basis? I believe that the second reason that "The Problem of Job" remains in wide circulation has to do with its place in Royce's corpus and the way that it enlarges the possibilities of philosophical idealism. It is often regarded as evidence that Royce, unlike other idealists of the time, took the strenuous, tragic character of life as real and pressing in the lives of individuals and their communities. John McDermott and Cornell West, each in his own unique valence, have concentrated on this fact. Since the publishing of the Basic Writings of Josiah Royce in 1969, McDermott has argued that Royce's own acquaintance with the pitfalls of human finitude led him to tailor his idealism to the difficult realities of evil and error. In Keeping Faith (1993), West makes the same point, suggesting that Royce is the "one great American philosopher" who struggled to square social, political, and religious with the uncomfortable fact of human suffering. Indeed, in West's words, "Royce's systematic post-Kantian idealism is primarily a long and winding set of profound meditations on the relation of a deep sense of evil to human agency."⁴ "The Problem of Job" is often regarded as one of several points in Royce's thinking where West's point is born out, the others, McDermott suggests, being his earlier essay on Pessimism (1879, 1881) and "The Religious Mission of Sorrow" in the Sources of Religious Insight (1912).⁵

I believe that the question of how to place the "Problem of Job" in Royce's works could have been more thoroughly answered if we had access to Royce's answer to the question that Cabot poses in 1897. Where was the "Problem of Job" first featured? I believe that we now have this answer. I will argue that "The Problem of Job," in its original incarnation, was not a stand-alone piece of writing. This is to say that it was neither first featured in the New World in 1897 nor presented as a single twenty-three page analysis of the relationship between God and a suffering world. Archival materials reveal that the second...