[MD] CA 2 - an aside

[John Carl]

>
>
> Absolue Idealism comes in a few flavors.  Which flavor are your rooting
> for?
>
> Why you know the answer to that one, Marsha.  The Roycean flavor.  In fact,
the Roycean flavor at it's fullest development which he termed "Absolute
Pragmatism".






> Absolute idealism as defined by Hegel:
>
> "But in contrast to both forms of idealism, Hegel, according to this
> reading, postulated a form of absolute idealism by including both subjective
> life and the objective cultural practices on which subjective life depended
> within the dynamics of the development of the self-consciousness and
> self-actualisation of God"  (plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel/)
>
> There's that 'god' word.  I don't find much value in that pattern.  Is
> there a direct link between absolute idealism and god?


Nope.  I think the Copleston I quoted mentions a few atheists of that
stripe.

Here's my best shot at this time to answer the question you ask:

In his last period Royce embraced what may be called a hermeneutic
epistemology. While he still maintained the central notion that a true idea
correctly represents its object, he arrived at a new understanding of the
nature of representation. Earlier, he had rather uncritically taken
"representation" to be a straightforward correspondence relation in which
the idea merely copied its object. Under the influence of Peirce's theory of
signs, however, Royce came to appreciate the creative, synthetic, and
selective aspects of representation. The new semiotic conception is detailed
in the chapter of *The Problem of Christianity* entitled "Perception,
Conception and Interpretation." Knowledge is not at bottom merely the
accurate and complete perception of an object, as empiricism would have it.
Nor is it the accurate and complete conception of an idea, as rationalism
maintains. Knowledge is instead a process of interpretation: the true idea
selects, emphasizes, and re-presents those aspects of the object that will
be meaningfully fulfilled in subsequent experience. Royce's "absolute
pragmatism," like other versions of pragmatism, thus offers an alternative
to rationalism and empiricism.

This revised understanding of knowledge as interpretation prompted, if it
did not exactly require, a corresponding change in Royce's notion of the
Infinite Mind whose reality was established in the argument from error. As
long as knowledge is regarded as possessing perceptions or conceptions that
correspond to objects, the Infinite Mind is naturally envisioned as
something that "contains" the totality of all perceptions or conceptions. If
knowledge is instead regarded as a process of interpretation, though, the
Infinite Mind may be regarded as the mind that carries this process forward.
Royce had long sought an explicitly non-Hegelian account of Absolute Mind.
In *The Problem of Christianity* he was finally able to replace the old
terminology of the Absolute with a description of an infinite Community of
Interpretation. This community is the totality of all those minds capable of
representing aspects of Being to one another or to their future selves.
Royce summarized the metaphysical implications of this new view by saying
"the real world is the Community of Interpretation… If the interpretation is
a reality, and if it truly interprets the whole of reality, then the
community reaches its goal [i.e., a complete representation of Being], and
the real world includes its own interpreter" (Royce 2001 [1913], 339). In
this late period Royce remained firmly committed to idealism. He renounced
the notion that the Absolute is complete at any actual time, thogh, and
instead preferred to think of the possible totality of all truth simply as
the eternal.