[MD] Royce and Wittgenstein- does Rorty concur?

[Ian Glendinning]

Hi Matt, John,

Talking of "loyalty" I don't know Royce on this in any detail, but it
reminded me of Al MacIntyre, and the debate about virtues vs virtue vs
.... after virtue ....

Clearly loyalty is "a" virtue .... one of the "virtues".

Rorty's quip about divided loyalties is telling. The whole point is
the virtue is still "loyalty", and all the stronger for being divided.
Easy to be loyal when you have one consistent target of your loyalty.
Much harder when you have multiple inconsistent targets, to still be
loyal.

They are part of a whole .... after virtue ? .... Quality I like to think.
Ian

On Fri, Nov 26, 2010 at 6:14 AM, Matt Kundert
<pirsigaffliction at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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 Roycean tools, there is a late essay (either unpublished or hard to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
>
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