[MD] Royce's Evolutionary Insight

[Ian Glendinning]

Hi John,

One observation on Royce and the (19th century) primitive Darwinian
view of evolution.
He's right to raise the subject above the mechanistic reductionism,
but of course there were / are plenty more creative mechanisms than
conflict involved in the long-run history - biographical narrative.
The combined result can be fitter, without there being a loser as
suggested by the archetypal tooth-and-claw reading.

And one question. As a Royce scholar, do you see his reading of Fichte
as useful / relevant ?
(I ask because there is a Royce connection to Mary Parker-Follett I'm
thinking about following-up, as well as to Jamesian radical
empiricism.)

Regards
Ian

On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 8:43 PM, John Carl <ridgecoyote at gmail.com> wrote:
> Royce in reconciling the mechanistic view of the 17th century with the
> evolutionary view of the 19th:
>
>
> "Should evolutionary doctrines be true, the real world will not be a place
> of mechanical laws and the flux of atoms; it will be a world of struggle and
> conflict, of the triumph of the good, or of the abolition of evil, of the
> moral importance of the world, of the transition form lower to higher
> conditions... it will be a world of ideals."
>
>
> Why does Royce see these implications in the truth of evolutionary
> doctrines?  An evolutionary process is historical, and to appreciate it, he
> claims, we must forsake that kind of temporality which confines mechanistic
> explanation.  An evolutionary sequence may be a series of events which qua
> series is physical -- a set of causally related conditions occurring in
> space and time; but to accept this series as an historical explanation is to
> emphasize unity, meaning, or significance in a way that a causal explanation
> will not.  When a temporal explanation functions this way as an explanation,
> when it affirms meaning or significance, our explanation takes on a moral
> dimension; it will be evaluative according to Royce.
>
>
>
> Evaluative.  Value.
>
>
> Royce compares the construction of a mental life to the construction of
> sound on a phonograph.  Reverse the motion of the phonograph and the same
> sounds become unintelligible.  All the same information is there, but the
> meaning is lost.
>
>
> Analogously, imagine a physical description of human consciousness.  If we
> should reverse the description, the equation differs only by the
> substitution of a minus for a plus.  Nonetheless, as a conscious mind, there
> will not merely be "inverted significance":
>
>
> The significance of mental life is not a function of the law-governed
> sequences of its states.  The world of our mental states has a history from
> moment to moment, and we cannot reduce this history to sequence.  If this
> dimension of mind is real, then the world has meaning; it is a place in
> which moral ideals and the goals of conscious striving play a part.
>
>
> "The doctrine of Evolution is the schoolmaster which teaches us to face at
> last the real question of the universe.  This question is the issue between
> causation and the ideals... "
>
>
>
> This passage in Kuklick's Intellectual Biography of Royce is philosophically
> similar to Pirsig's description of a chemistry professor made up of
> inorganic compounds.  A mechanistic explanation does not explain the
> professor.   Evolution is not thus, a mechanistic explanation.  It's a
> biographical explanation.  It's a valuistic explanation.
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