[MD] Appreciation and Description: DQ and sq

[John Carl]

This is all from Kuklick's intellectual History of Royce, which I started
digging into when Magnus posed me some questions regarding Royce's attempt
to logically weld the world of description with the world of appreciation.

first, the world of description, is, simply put, objective reality.  He
starts with a provisional criterion of objectivity - what we call all
experience, and what is permanent, using pragmatic criterion.

So far, the objectively real is that which is describable.  How then do we
conceptualize that which is not describable?  The private, the fleeting,
those aspects of our inner life which are in his sense, indescribable?
Royce calls this world of feelings, the world of appreciation.  It is what
makes a moment dear to us, the moments value:  those experiences which we
might ordinarily call personal; we do not share them; others do not verify
them.  Of course, Royce's decision to label the world of appreciation as
"unreal" is only tentative.  Appreciations would be real--objective-- if
they were sharable.  Since we exist as finite beings, we share only the
external and describable.  But if all moments of human lives were directly
appreciable, that is, felt by us together and at our pleasure, then the real
world would have a different character from the World of Description .  The
real world would be a world "such as the organic Self in his wholeness
might have present to him at a glance, or such as the community of a
conceived group of spiritual mind-readers might share."

For Royce, the real is the metaphysically real, and a likely candidate for
this office are the entities of science--permanent, external objects.  But
for an idealist this approach can never be final, and although Royce never
urges that the World of Description is unreal, he attempts to prove that it
is a finite aspect of the World of Appreciation.

He advances three arguments to persuade us that the World of Description
cannot be ultimate:

The first is based on the science of his day and asserts that scientific
hypotheses become incoherent when they try to account for the universe as a
whole.

The second is a philosophical argument designed to show that the World of
Description logically presupposes the World of Appreciation.

The third  is based on the teleological emphasis in his epistemology.

I won't go into the details of all that just now, it makes my head hurt and
Pirsig is easier to read, but the consequence of his argumentation is the
world of science cannot be the "ultimately real world" only a "seeming world
whose anomalous character is due to our private and human point of view."

The World of Description embodies a conception that we cannot generalize
without contradiction.  In all probability, Royce says, this conception is
"of an essentially human character or else of no world-wide objectivity.  It
may have truth about it, but this truth will in part be due to our own
limited point of view, to our particular station in the universe.  This
notion will be, so to speak, a mortal conception of things, not a conception
of a really eternal truth."

Royce is too thorough a thinker to allow his criticism of the World of
Description to rest on a a fault of contemporary science.  The implicit
premise of our talk about objectivity is the belief that we do "truly
communicate" with our neighbors.  The objectivity of the World of
Description consists in its sharability, in the fact that others experience
it.  Description presupposes that we attribute an appreciative reality to
others.  If appreciation is real, however, it cannot in actuality be
private, momentary , and fleeting, although it is from our perspective.

We can make this state of affairs intelligible only if we assume that the
World of Description does not characterize the real; and we must also
suppose that our seemingly isolated and momentary appreciative
consciousnesses do share in the organic life of one self in which everyone
experiences the consciousness of everyone else.  Appreciation is the reality
of the infinite whereas description is the reality of what is finite and
could not exist without it's higher corollary.

Real objects are not the cause of my thoughts.  A thinker assumes that his
thoughts first agree with their object, where "agree" means something like
"intend".  As we have seen, causation presuppposes this agreement and cannot
explain it.  That is, we can never formulate our theory of knowledge by
means of the categories of the World of Description (here causality).  We
must understand the connection between thought and object in terms of
purpose, a teleological notion which Royce says is "logically appreciable."
The relation of causation exists among certain objects of thought but is not
adequate to express the intentional relation of idea and referent; once
again description presupposes appreciation.

It seems plain to me that Royce is showing DQ (Appreciation) and sq
(Description) in logical relationship and harmonizes perfectly with Pirsig.

Comments?