Josiah Royce - The World and The Individual

The World and The Individual

The First Series of Gifford Lectures made the case against three historical conceptions of being, called “realism,” “mysticism,” and “critical rationalism,” by Royce, and defended a “Fourth Conception of Being.” Realism, according to Royce, held that to be is to be independent, which mysticism and critical rationalism advanced other criteria, that to be way to, immediacy in the case of mysticism and objective validity in critical rationalism. As hypotheses about the fundamental character of being, Royce shows each of these falls into contradiction. In contrast Royce offers as his hypothesis that “to be is to be uniquely related to a whole.” This formulation preserves all three crucial aspects of being, namely the Whole, the individual, and the relation that constitutes them. Where previously Royce’s hypotheses about ontology had taken for granted that relations are discovered in the analysis of terms, here he moves to the recognition that terms are constituted by their relations, and insofar as terms are taken to refer to entities, as we must assume, we are obliged to think about individuals as uniquely constituted by a totality of relations to other individuals and to the Whole that are theirs alone. In the Second Series of Gifford Lectures Royce temporalizes these relations, showing that we learn to think about ideas like succession and space by noting differences and directionality within unified and variable “time’spans,” or qualitative, durational episodes of the “specious present.” Royce explains, “our temporal form of experience is thus peculiarly the form of the Will as such.” (The World and the Individual, Second Series, p. 124) Hence, for Royce, the will is the inner dynamism that reaches beyond itself into a possible future and acts upon an acknowledged past. Space and the abstract descriptions that are appropriate to it are a falsification of this dynamism, and metaphysical error, especially “realism,” proceeds from taking these abstractions literally. Philosophy itself proceeds along descriptive lines and therefore must offer its ontology as a kind of fiction. But ideas, considered dynamically, temporally instead of spatially, in light of what they do in the world of practice and qualities, do have temporal forms and are activities. The narrative presentation of ideas, such as belongs to the World of Appreciation, is “more easily effective than description . . . for space furnishes indeed the stage and the scenery of the universe, but the world’s play occurs in time.” (WI2, pp. 124–125). Time conceived abstractly in the World of Description, although it can never be wholly spatialized, provides us with an idea of eternity, while time lived and experienced grounds this description (and every other), historically, ethically, and aesthetically. Since philosophy proceeds descriptively rather than narratively, “the real world of our Idealism has to be viewed by us men as a temporal order,” in which “purposes are fulfilled, or where finite internal meanings reach their final expression and attain unity with external meanings.” Hence, for Royce, it is a limitation of conceptual thought that obliges us to philosophize according to logic rather than integrating our psychological and appreciated experience into our philosophical doctrines. There is ample evidence for supposing a parallelism between our conceptual and perceptual experiences, and for using the former as a guide to the latter, according to Royce, particularly with regard to the way that the idealization of our inner purposes enables us to connect them with the purposes of others in a larger whole of which we have no immediate experience. We can appreciate the sense of fulfillment we find in serving a larger whole and form our characters progressively upon the ways in which those experiences of fulfillment point us ever outwards, beyond the finite self, but we are not so constitute as to experience the greater Whole to which our experiences belong. We cannot help supposing that there is some experiencer within whose inner life the Whole exists, but only the inevitability of the assumption and not any experiential content assures us of the reality of such an experiencer.