Royce Josiah (1855–1916), American philosopher best known for his pragmatic idealism, his ethics of loyalty, and his theory of community. Educated at Berkeley, at Johns Hopkins, and in Germany, he taught philosophy at Harvard from 1882.
Royce held that a concept of the absolute or eternal was needed to account for truth, ultimate meaning, and reality in the face of very real evil in human experience. Seeking to reconcile individuals with the Absolute, he postulated, in The World and the Individual (1899,1901), Absolute Will and Thought as an expression of the concrete and differentiated individuality of the world.
Royce saw the individual self as both moral and sinful, developing through social interaction, community experience, and communal and self-interpretation. Self is constituted by a life plan, by loyalty to an ultimate goal. Yet selflimitation and egoism, two human sins, work against achievement of individual goals, perhaps rendering life a senseless failure. The self needs saving and this is the message of religion, argues Royce (The Religious Aspects of Philosophy, 1885; The Sources of Religious Insight, 1912).
For Royce, the instrument of salvation is the community. In The Philosophy of Loyalty (1908), he develops an ethics of loyalty to loyalty, i.e., the extension of loyalty throughout the human community. In The Problem of Christianity (1913), Royce presents a doctrine of community that overcomes the individualism–collectivism dilemma and allows a genuine blending of individual and social will.
Community is built through interpretation, a mediative process that reconciles two ideas, goals, and persons, bringing common meaning and understanding. Interpretation involves respect for selves as dynamos of ideas and purposes, the will to interpret, dissatisfaction with partial meanings and narrowness of view, reciprocity, and mutuality. In this work, the Absolute is a ‘Community of Interpretation and Hope,’ in which there is an endlessly accumulating series of interpretations and significant deeds. An individual contribution thus is not lost but becomes an indispensable element in the divine life. Among Royce’s influential students were C. I. Lewis, William Ernest Hocking, Norbert Wiener, Santayana, and T. S. Eliot. J.A.K.K.