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.
