[MD] Royce and Wittgenstein- does Rorty concur?

[Matt Kundert]

As I understand it, Rorty was till the end an admirer of Royce.  
Though he wrote very little about Royce, or never explicitly used 
Roycean tools, there is a late essay (either unpublished or hard to 
find) floating around that is about Royce.  There are also these 
comments in Rorty's Living Library collection in response to Jacquelyn 
Ann K. Kegley's contribution, which compares Rorty and Royce on 
communities:

"When I was at Princeton [from '61 to '82], I used to assign The 
World and the Individual in tandem with Ayer's Language, Truth, and 
Logic in order to contrast metaphysical system-building with the logical 
empiricist approach to philosophy. Later, at Virginia ['82 to '97], I gave 
a history of philosophy course in which I followed up on Hegel by 
assigning chapters from The Spirit of Modern Philosophy and from The 
Religious Aspect of Philosophy; my aim was to give the students a 
sense of how German idealism had, in the nineteenth century, 
revitalized natural theology.

"But though I greatly admire Royce's vigorous and sophisticated 
defense of absolute idealism, I have never gotten much out of The 
Philosophy of Loyalty.  I do not disagree with what he said in that book, 
but I find it neither original nor inspiring.  I have never been able to 
figure out what his notion of 'loyalty to loyalty' came to in practice.  In 
particular, I cannot see what use the principle of being loyal to loyalty 
could possibly be to people with divided loyalties."

Whatever about originality, I will say that Royce's notion of the 
"beloved community" I think is pretty much what Rorty has in mind 
when he talks about the utopia envisioned by liberals.

Matt