[MD] Royce's Absolute

[John Carl]

dmb quotes wiki:

Wiki says that Royce, "conceived the Absolute as a unitary Knower
Whose experience constitutes what we know as the 'external' world",

John said:
There's no "transcendance" in Royces definition.  His Absolute IS
Experience itself!  You say that's not "much different" than a reality
that's beyond experience, and I don't know what's wrong with your
reading and reasoning powers...

dmb says:
Oh, I see. Well, if you've ever said that before I missed it. Do you
have any source to cite on that? I can't just take your word for it,
especially since my sources say otherwise. That's a reasonable
request, no?

and John reasonably points to his "source":

Your own wiki-thinking Dave.  A unitary knower whose experience
constitutes the "external" world.  The "unitary knower" is the
absolute, the experience of the knower is the world, and our
experience of the world is the experience of the Absolute's Experience
and since Being and Being's Experience are ultimately the same, our
experience is Royce's Absolute.

It's all in the definitions.

But more careful exposition is called for and thus, I oblige:


The most important feature of Royce's Absolute, to him anyway, is that
is not religiously derived.

"We do not believe in the world of the absolute Self because we merely
long for something spiritual: the doctrine is the outcome of a rigid
logical analysis."

His purpose, as stated in the The Spirit of Modern Philosophy, is "to
remove from idealism... this reproach of being a mere poem of moral
enthusiasm."  When he becomes a devotee of symbolic logic at the end
of the century, this formulation is explicit.  Religious - perhaps
more broadly social and ethical - concerns remain predominant, but
they are conceptually subordinate to logic.  In a wider sense, the
thorny, stony and arid way, but the only way to lead to the Absolute
is the way of logic.

It is in this way that Royce's Absolute cannot be understood unless
his logic is understood.

A second prelimanary point which Kuklick mentions to clarify his own
confusions (and ours) is that like many who followed them (Royce and
James) at Harvard, Royce was committed to a version of phenomenalism.
The finite knower is directly aware not of a physical object but of
what is momentarily present.  We can best speak about this "given" by
statements like "This appears white to me".   From this slender basis
Royce proposes to demonstrate that we can have knowledge of a more
extensive realm - the external world.

Often he expresses his theses by saying that this external world
consists of contents of consciousness, or equivalently, of actual and
possible experience.  But his cardinal principle sis that in
experience we are given ideas and it is of these ideas that the
external world is made.  We must account for this external world in
ideal terms, that is, in terms which rule out an independently
existing externality.

Royce traces aspects of his heritage to Berkeley and sets up the
argument for his absolutism by formulating the Berkeleyan claims for
idealism.

There are two aspects of idealism, the first, which Berkeley made
famous, has no "absolute character" about it, but attempts only to
show that our world is an ideal one.

Royce restates this argument, as I will upon request, but more
interesting is what he does with the results.

to be continued....