Josiah Royce (; November 20, 1855 – September 14, 1916) was an American pragmatist and absolute idealist philosopher and the founder of American idealism. His philosophical ideas included his joining of pragmatism and idealism, his philosophy of loyalty, and his defense of absolutism.
Royce's essay "A Word for the Times" (December 1914) was quoted in the 1936 State of the Union Address by Franklin Delano Roosevelt: "The human race now passes through one of its great crises. New ideas, new issues – a new call for men to carry on the work of righteousness, of charity, of courage, of patience, and of loyalty. [...] I studied, I loved, I labored, unsparingly and hopefully, to be worthy of my generation."
Life Royce, born on November 20, 1855, in Grass Valley, California, was the son of Josiah and Sarah Eleanor (Bayliss) Royce, whose families were recent English emigrants and who sought their fortune in the westward movement of the American pioneers in 1849. In 1875 he received a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley (which moved from Oakland to Berkeley during his matriculation), where he later accepted an instructorship teaching English composition, literature, and rhetoric.
While at the university, he studied with Joseph LeConte, Professor of Geology and Natural History and a prominent spokesperson for the compatibility between evolution and religion. In a memorial published shortly after LeConte's death, Royce described the impact of LeConte's teaching on his own development, writing: "the wonder thus aroused was, for me, the beginning of philosophy" (p. 328). After studying logic under Hermann Lotze at the University of Göttingen, he returned to the United States to finish his doctorate at Johns Hopkins University, where he was awarded one of the institution's first four doctorates, in philosophy in 1878. At Johns Hopkins he taught a course on the history of German thought, which was “one of his chief interests” because he was able to give consideration to the philosophy of history. After four years at the University of California, Berkeley, he went to Harvard in 1882 as a sabbatical replacement for William James, who was Royce's friend and philosophical antagonist. Royce's position at Harvard was made permanent in 1884, and he remained there until his death on September 14, 1916.
Royce was an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the United States National Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.
Historiography Royce stands out starkly in the philosophical crowd because he was the only major American philosopher who spent a significant period of his life studying and writing history, specifically of the American West. “As one of the four giants in American philosophy of his time […] Royce overshadowed himself as historian, in both reputation and output” (Pomeroy, 2). During his first three years at Harvard, Royce taught many different subjects such as English composition, forensics, psychology and philosophy for other professors. Although he eventually settled into writing philosophy, his early adulthood was characterized by wide-ranging interests, during which he wrote a novel, investigated paranormal phenomena (as a skeptic), and published a significant body of literary criticism. Only as historian and philosopher did he distinguish himself. Royce spread himself too thin, however, and in 1888 suffered a nervous breakdown which required him to take a leave of absence from his duties.
John Clendenning's 1999 book is the standard biography of Royce. Autobiographical remarks by Royce can be found in Oppenheim's study. In 1883 Royce was approached by a publishing company who asked him to write the state history of California, “In view of his precarious circumstances at Harvard and his desire to pursue the philosophical work for which he had come east, Royce found the prospect attractive […]. He wrote to a friend that he was ‘tempted by the money’”. Royce viewed the task as a side project, which he could use to fill his free time. In 1891 his historical writing career came to an end, but not before he had published several reviews of California’s historical volumes, and articles in journals to supplement his history. Royce is also mentioned in the book The Unseen Guest by Joan Darby.
Philosophy The years between 1882 and 1895 established Royce as one of the most eminent American philosophers. His publication in 1885 of The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, and in 1892 of The Spirit of Modern Philosophy, both based on Harvard lectures, secured his place in the philosophical world. The former of these contained a new proof for the existence of God based upon the reality of error. All errors are judged to be erroneous in comparison to some total truth, Royce argued, and we must either hold ourselves infallible or accept that even our errors are evidence of a world of truth. Having made it clear that idealism depends upon postulates and proceeds hypothetically, Royce defends the necessity of objective reference of our ideas to a universal whole within which they belong, for without these postulates, "both practical life and the commonest results of theory, from the simplest impressions to the most valuable beliefs, would be for most if not all of us utterly impossible".The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, p. 324
The justification for idealistic postulates is practical (a point Royce made repeatedly in his maturity, accepting the label of pragmatist for himself), to the extent that it embraced practical life as the guide and determiner of the value of philosophical ideas. Royce accepted the fact that he had not and could not offer a complete or satisfactory account of the "relation of the individual minds to the all-embracing mind” (see RAP, p. 371), but he pushes ahead in spite of this difficulty to offer the best account he can manage. This stance is called fallibilism by the philosophers of his generation, and Royce's embrace of it may be attributed to the influence of Charles Sanders Peirce and William James.
Royce is typically labeled an absolute idealist, but it is debated whether he holds a contrary viewed called personalism—i.e., “The ambiguous relation of the conscious individuals to the universal thought...will be decided in the sense of their inclusion, as elements in the universal thought. They will indeed not become 'things in the dream' of any other person than themselves, but their whole reality, just exactly as it is in them, will be found to be but a fragment of a higher reality. This reality will be no power, nor will it produce the individuals by dreaming of them, but it will complete the existence that in them, as separate beings, has no rational completeness”. (RAP, pp. 380–381) This is an unavoidable hypothesis, Royce believed, and its moral and religious aspect point to the existence of an Absolute.
Absolutism and temporalism The “Absolute" Royce defended was quite different from the ideas of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and F. H. Bradley. Royce's Absolute is the ground and originator of community, a personal, temporal being who preserves the past in its entirety, sustains the full present by an act of interpretation, and anticipates every possibility in the future, infusing these possibilities with value as the ideal of community. The principal difference between Royce's Absolute and the similar idea held by other thinkers is its temporal and personal character, and its interpretive activity. This divine activity Royce increasingly came to see in terms of the notion suggested by Charles Sanders Peirce of “agapism”, or “evolutionary love”. Royce believed that human beings do have experience of the Absolute in the irrevocability of each and every deed we do. To confront the way that our acts cannot be undone is to meet the Absolute in its temporal necessity. The philosophical idea of the Absolute is an inevitable hypothesis for a coherent system of thought, Royce argued, but for practical purposes and a meaningful ethical life, all human beings need is an ongoing "will to interpret". The temporal ground of all acts of interpretation is "the Interpreter Spirit", which is another name for the Absolute, but a philosophical understanding of such a being is not required for successful interpretation and ethical life.
The "conception of God" debate A benchmark in Royce's career and thought occurred when he returned to California to speak to the Philosophical Union at Berkeley, ostensibly to defend his concept of God from the criticisms of George Holmes Howison, Joseph Le Conte, and Sidney Mezes, a meeting the New York Times called “a battle of the giants”. There Royce offered a new modal version of his proof for the reality of God based upon ignorance rather than error, based upon the fragmentariness of individual existence rather than its epistemological uncertainty. However, Howison attacked Royce's doctrine for having left no ontological standing for the individual over against the Absolute, rendering Royce's idealism a kind of pernicious impersonalism, according to Howison. Royce never intended this result and responded to Howison's criticism first in a long supplementary essay to the debate (1897), and then by developing the philosophy of the individual person in greater detail in his Gifford Lectures, published under the title The World and the Individual (1899, 1901). Simultaneously Royce was enduring a resolute assault on his hypothetical absolutism from James.
Royce later admitted that his engagement with the philosophy of Bradley may have led to a more robust engagement with the Absolute than was warranted, and it might be added that his persistent reading of Spinoza might have had similar effects.
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 “timespans”, 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)