Tuesday, June 2, 2015
Making Moments, Monumental
But right right from the start, I want to make clear that this isn't just about Royce - this is about Royce's passion, as he described in his The Hope of the Great Community:
"I should confess to the charge of having been, during my German period of study, a good deal under the influence of the Romantic School, whose philosophy of poetry I read and expounded with a good deal of diligence. But I early cherished a strong interest in logic, and long desired to get a fair knowledge of mathematics. When I review this whole process, I strongly feel that my deepest motives and problems have centered about the Idea of the Community, although this idea has only come gradually to my clear consciousness. This was what I was intensely feeling, in the days when my sisters and I looked across the Sacramento Valley, and wondered about the great world beyond our mountains. "
- I've volunteered to speak, with some other Grass Valley Royce enthusiasts, at the West Coast meeting of the American Philosophical Society. Ahem.
It's not my intellectual erudition, that anybody will be seeking, but a general flavor of the kind of citizens abounding in and about Royce's birthplace, today. Does a place have a meaning for the person? Do like-minded people, congregate? I'd say yes. So what we are now, in Nevada County, CA, flows from our historical past and the persons who were born here, always remember her fondly ...
Royce remembered Grass Valley. When he was receiving the "grand lesson" that the community teaches, (when you're "red-haired, freckled and countrified") when the family relocated to San Francisco, I'm sure his recollection then of the familial foothill home was fond and intense. Who wouldn't miss the pure country air, the peace and growth of nature as opposed to the mean city of coal-fired confusion? No wonder then, that the memory of Grass Valley was imprinted upon Josie's soul so that in his later years he identified himself with the small country town in which he was born:
"The wide prospects when one looked across the Sacramento Valley were impressive, and had long interested the people of whose love for my country I heard much. What was there then in this place that ought to be called new, or for that matter, crude? I wondered, and gradually came to feel that part of my life's business was to find out what all this wonder meant."
If my thesis is chosen, amongst those to be presented at the apa meeting, it will be upon the communal need for monument. And the monument I have in mind is the one I conceived so many years ago, in Gary Graham's mural art class - a mural to Royce, and the community of Grass Valley. A mural that would put Royce's image in the center, and an array of livlihood styles in a great circle. The circle would be divided into quadrants - representing the four main peoples who made this particular Gold Country Community what it is, the Nisenan, the Hispanic, the Cornish and the Chinese -- these were the ethnic groups that made up the evolving communal arrangements at this particular piece of geography.
The Civic Monument
A phenomenon we're all familiar with - The Town Square Cannon, tank or statue of a great leader, commemorating.... what? Usually our warriors - the heroes of conflict, but also our pioneers and those who deserve recognition for what they've accomplished. It was such a monumental naming, in 2005, that renamed the downtown Grass Valley Library to the Royce Branch. If you note the original resolution, you'll find that the library was NOT named the Josiah Royce Library, but the Royce library, so as to include Sarah Royce and at the original naming, a skit with an actor portraying Sarah Royce was performed in honor of the occasion. A gender-sensitive move that I'm sure Royce himself would have approved. Nobody is a feminist like the guy with three older sisters. But interesting trivia aside, it is the association of Royce's name with a civic monument, that made me aware of him. None of my teachers at college had ever mentioned him, and I was a philosophy major for goodness sake. I'd been actively involved in a discussion group that studied William James a great deal, but nobody had ever mentioned James' great debating partner and friend Royce! It's a puzzling thing, really. Bruce Kuklick, whose intellectual history of Royce was my introduction to Royce's philosophy, commented in his preface upon his wife's antipathy toward Royce (That Theist!) and gives her credit for the impetus to finish the book when she went away for a visit! A humorous look into the homelife of the intellectual. Thanks to my wife, for leaving me, so I could get this work done.
One of the things about Royce that makes his name magical - amongst those who appreciate him - is that he comes out of nowhere. Stories of "How I found out about Royce" abound amongst academic enthusiasts and they always are told with a delight that comes from finding something unexpectedly good, unlooked-for. It creates a certain camaraderie amongst us enthusiasts that I relish, but overall, is this a good thing? Surprise implies a hiddeness. And why is our good, hidden? What is it that makes men choose to follow after selfish expediency, rather than the good of the commons? For that's what the hidden-ness of Royce comes down to.
So my proposal to create a public monument to Royce, and Royce's Community, comes down to an ongoing process that he himself saw, and devoted his life to fostering - the idea of the Great Community. It may be hidden at first, but it grows. It grows and it acts as leaven in bread, unseen, but all-powerful and in this Community, I trust. I'll have to talk to Iven about the business end of things. Monuments take money and I'm not a money person, but I know in this age of internet fund-raising and open-source financing, anything is possible. The community has power now, in information sharing, beyond the dreams of when men were creating right here in the gold fields, the world's first internet.
Anything is possible to an idealist.
Wednesday, May 27, 2015
This blog is about the great American Philosopher and Californian Historian, Josiah Royce. It's been a long time coming and I apologize for the delays, to those of you who have been expecting anything. It was quite a while back, that I took that Community College class with Lu and Em, and discovered Josiah Royce. More than seven years, I'd guess. I'll have to ask Lu.
I've been reading and thinking, which is always a good excuse for any ne'er-do-well, nominative "philosopher", and since I am one, I'll use it. But also, good things take time and Royce connects up with some deep issues, for me, the deepest of all - community. Royce takes the understanding of community to a whole new level, for me and amongst the consequences of reading Royce, especially the Problem of Christianity, is that the importance of actual community in my life - which I'd always avoided, has come to be very important and you don't have as much time for writing about community when you're actually doing it.
I'd always been an outsider; my childhood was spent attending Seventh Day Adventist Schools but since my parents didn't believe in practicing the SDA lifestyle, or go to church, I didn't quite fit in with the whole "church family" thing. However an outsiders is not somebody who is completely isolated and independent; to be an outsider, you need something to be outside of. The community defines the individual and makes her what she is - no matter whether the individual is in or out. The moral purpose of the outsider, then, is the same as the insiders - to build up and uphold and improve the community. And to do that, you have to become an insider, with an outsider's perspective.
A conundrum. One that has taken some time to work out.
I discovered the man who helped me realize all this - Josiah Royce - working on an art project, a mural downstairs in the children's section of the Josiah Royce library. It was highly apropos to discover Royce in the way I did; to find out about Royce through a Community College project.
Royce's great purpose in life was serving the idea and fact of the Great Community. The way the mural art class was run by Gary Graham at Sierra College, was based upon an explicit community building model. Gary was a deep student of the community process through the empirical process of actually going through the task, every year, of guiding a class full of young and old, into a communal art form meant for public space. They'd done some wonderful work at the Laura Berman center for mental health, and other places in town. The way Gary told it, the art of bringing people together into a single vision is the highest art of all and one I'd long been fascinated with since purchasing a copy of M. Scott Peck's, A Different Drum, on my honeymoon in Fort Bragg. Gary was glad to discuss my ideas, and invited me to be part of the class project, even though my artistic talent is nil. My construction background came in handy with scaffolding and drop cloths and there were heavy book shelves to move around. Plus I could clean brushes. Thus I became part of an artistic project. Thus I became an insider in the guild of artistic talent.
The mural was a great success and the idea was bandied about at the end of the semester was that maybe we might do something upstairs? The librarians were open to the idea so a group of us brainstormed and I suggested looking at the guy the building was named for- Josiah Royce. I went upstairs, checked out a few books and pow! Fell in instant love. The first thing that hit me, was his philosophy of community. But other things about him hit me hard as meaningful coincidence.
He perfectly aligned with a modern day philosopher/novelist, Robert M. Pirsig. Pirsig 's Caring and Royce's Loyalty to Loyalty serve the same function in their metaphysical schemes, and they both criticize modern realism in much of the same ways but the real light bulb went off, when Royce defended his absolute on the basis of the incontrovertible support for the existence of error. Pirsig comes at it from the other end of the spectrum, with his arguments for the existence of Quality, (through a reductio ad absurdum process ) in his most popular work - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - but it wasn't the technical aspects that I found so similar, rather it was the struggles they went through to get there - the emotional content of their language and their tone at "finding the answer". Both philosophers see the metaphysical fundament to be moral in nature and indefinable in character. Pirsig, growing up as he did with the analytical school to contend with (and tending in that direction himself, on a personal level) associated such indefinability as mysticism, whereas Royce was a more perceptive and thorough-going (and well-trained) metaphysician. Also fascinating in the Pirsig comparison were other shared traits -
Both went through a period of mental breakdown
Both lost a son named Christopher, - both sons suffering from schizophrenia, and both died around the same age - 24.
Both were largely ignored or rejected by the modern philosophical establishment.
In other ways, they were polar opposites - Royce was a highly successful philosopher who tried his hand at novel writing and failed and Pirsig was a highly successful novelist who couldn't get admitted into academic circles. Royce was a communitarian and Pirsig was strongly individualistic and almost Randian in his "individualistic realization of DQ". There's a whole thesis, in the comparison of those two, gestating in my innards someplace.
Some other striking coincidences I found with my own family. Josiah was a red-headed son of moral and upright teacher of a mom - the backbone of the family and the youngest brother of three older and highly influential sisters whose dad was a flakey ne-er-do-well who tried different things in life and never really succeeded at any thing. My son Josh ( a derivative of Yeshua, like "josie") is a red-headed boy, the youngest brother of three influential older sisters and a moralistic mom who works as a church school secretary and is the backbone of our family while I'm something of a ne-er-do-well dad who has tried different things without any economic success. :)
But under it all, I'm a philosopher and philosophers don't have to be successful, to be successful, if you know what I mean. In fact, you don't even have to produce a great deal of brilliant and original philosophy yourself, if you're smart enough to love the right writers and thinkers, then you can be a success at the philosophy game because the game is won through loving wisdom, not only producing it.
Through this process of falling in love with the right writers, I've made many friendly connections and my life has been transformed, repeatedly. The community building process is truly and constantly a regenerative process and its led me from M. Scott Peck's Community Building Workshop to the early days of the internet to involvement with online communities like the MoQ.org and meeting all kinds of people, online and off. When I found Royce through the books in the library - there was plenty to learn and explore but there were few people to talk to about this amazing man. My first real exposure to another was a video on the internet - Dr. Kegeley at the Harvard 100th anniversary talk on the great debate between Pragmatism and Idealism, or as they saw it then, James vs. Royce. Nowadays I think this was the wrong way to view the matter. The issue was actually, America vs. Europe. And on our side, we had James, Royce and Peirce. James and Royce weren't antagonists in an intellectual wrestling match. they were friends and teamates in a tag-team contest with, mainly, Germany. This intellectual bout would turn into a very violent and prolonged conflict, right at the end of their time, so you can't say philosophy is unimportant or insignificant. Ideas can have significance beyond their immediate appearance and of all ideas, the Great Community is the most significant - whether you call it by Royce's name for it, or Peck's (True Community) or Jim Corbett's (the Peaceable Kingdom) or by Christ's (the Kingdom of Heaven). It's all basically the same idea and in it lay, like secret leaven, the salvation of the world.
I've been reading and thinking, which is always a good excuse for any ne'er-do-well, nominative "philosopher", and since I am one, I'll use it. But also, good things take time and Royce connects up with some deep issues, for me, the deepest of all - community. Royce takes the understanding of community to a whole new level, for me and amongst the consequences of reading Royce, especially the Problem of Christianity, is that the importance of actual community in my life - which I'd always avoided, has come to be very important and you don't have as much time for writing about community when you're actually doing it.
I'd always been an outsider; my childhood was spent attending Seventh Day Adventist Schools but since my parents didn't believe in practicing the SDA lifestyle, or go to church, I didn't quite fit in with the whole "church family" thing. However an outsiders is not somebody who is completely isolated and independent; to be an outsider, you need something to be outside of. The community defines the individual and makes her what she is - no matter whether the individual is in or out. The moral purpose of the outsider, then, is the same as the insiders - to build up and uphold and improve the community. And to do that, you have to become an insider, with an outsider's perspective.
A conundrum. One that has taken some time to work out.
I discovered the man who helped me realize all this - Josiah Royce - working on an art project, a mural downstairs in the children's section of the Josiah Royce library. It was highly apropos to discover Royce in the way I did; to find out about Royce through a Community College project.
Royce's great purpose in life was serving the idea and fact of the Great Community. The way the mural art class was run by Gary Graham at Sierra College, was based upon an explicit community building model. Gary was a deep student of the community process through the empirical process of actually going through the task, every year, of guiding a class full of young and old, into a communal art form meant for public space. They'd done some wonderful work at the Laura Berman center for mental health, and other places in town. The way Gary told it, the art of bringing people together into a single vision is the highest art of all and one I'd long been fascinated with since purchasing a copy of M. Scott Peck's, A Different Drum, on my honeymoon in Fort Bragg. Gary was glad to discuss my ideas, and invited me to be part of the class project, even though my artistic talent is nil. My construction background came in handy with scaffolding and drop cloths and there were heavy book shelves to move around. Plus I could clean brushes. Thus I became part of an artistic project. Thus I became an insider in the guild of artistic talent.
The mural was a great success and the idea was bandied about at the end of the semester was that maybe we might do something upstairs? The librarians were open to the idea so a group of us brainstormed and I suggested looking at the guy the building was named for- Josiah Royce. I went upstairs, checked out a few books and pow! Fell in instant love. The first thing that hit me, was his philosophy of community. But other things about him hit me hard as meaningful coincidence.
He perfectly aligned with a modern day philosopher/novelist, Robert M. Pirsig. Pirsig 's Caring and Royce's Loyalty to Loyalty serve the same function in their metaphysical schemes, and they both criticize modern realism in much of the same ways but the real light bulb went off, when Royce defended his absolute on the basis of the incontrovertible support for the existence of error. Pirsig comes at it from the other end of the spectrum, with his arguments for the existence of Quality, (through a reductio ad absurdum process ) in his most popular work - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - but it wasn't the technical aspects that I found so similar, rather it was the struggles they went through to get there - the emotional content of their language and their tone at "finding the answer". Both philosophers see the metaphysical fundament to be moral in nature and indefinable in character. Pirsig, growing up as he did with the analytical school to contend with (and tending in that direction himself, on a personal level) associated such indefinability as mysticism, whereas Royce was a more perceptive and thorough-going (and well-trained) metaphysician. Also fascinating in the Pirsig comparison were other shared traits -
Both went through a period of mental breakdown
Both lost a son named Christopher, - both sons suffering from schizophrenia, and both died around the same age - 24.
Both were largely ignored or rejected by the modern philosophical establishment.
In other ways, they were polar opposites - Royce was a highly successful philosopher who tried his hand at novel writing and failed and Pirsig was a highly successful novelist who couldn't get admitted into academic circles. Royce was a communitarian and Pirsig was strongly individualistic and almost Randian in his "individualistic realization of DQ". There's a whole thesis, in the comparison of those two, gestating in my innards someplace.
Some other striking coincidences I found with my own family. Josiah was a red-headed son of moral and upright teacher of a mom - the backbone of the family and the youngest brother of three older and highly influential sisters whose dad was a flakey ne-er-do-well who tried different things in life and never really succeeded at any thing. My son Josh ( a derivative of Yeshua, like "josie") is a red-headed boy, the youngest brother of three influential older sisters and a moralistic mom who works as a church school secretary and is the backbone of our family while I'm something of a ne-er-do-well dad who has tried different things without any economic success. :)
But under it all, I'm a philosopher and philosophers don't have to be successful, to be successful, if you know what I mean. In fact, you don't even have to produce a great deal of brilliant and original philosophy yourself, if you're smart enough to love the right writers and thinkers, then you can be a success at the philosophy game because the game is won through loving wisdom, not only producing it.
Through this process of falling in love with the right writers, I've made many friendly connections and my life has been transformed, repeatedly. The community building process is truly and constantly a regenerative process and its led me from M. Scott Peck's Community Building Workshop to the early days of the internet to involvement with online communities like the MoQ.org and meeting all kinds of people, online and off. When I found Royce through the books in the library - there was plenty to learn and explore but there were few people to talk to about this amazing man. My first real exposure to another was a video on the internet - Dr. Kegeley at the Harvard 100th anniversary talk on the great debate between Pragmatism and Idealism, or as they saw it then, James vs. Royce. Nowadays I think this was the wrong way to view the matter. The issue was actually, America vs. Europe. And on our side, we had James, Royce and Peirce. James and Royce weren't antagonists in an intellectual wrestling match. they were friends and teamates in a tag-team contest with, mainly, Germany. This intellectual bout would turn into a very violent and prolonged conflict, right at the end of their time, so you can't say philosophy is unimportant or insignificant. Ideas can have significance beyond their immediate appearance and of all ideas, the Great Community is the most significant - whether you call it by Royce's name for it, or Peck's (True Community) or Jim Corbett's (the Peaceable Kingdom) or by Christ's (the Kingdom of Heaven). It's all basically the same idea and in it lay, like secret leaven, the salvation of the world.
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