[MD] Julian Baggini: This is what the clash of civilisations is really about

[John Carl]

Ron,

This sounds exactly right and in line with what I've read of Royce:

This rendering of wholes out of the many bits of experience is an artistic
> act so that it is a will toward greater
> Meaning not so much a truth in terms
> Of absolutes.
>


Royce emphasizes the absolute nature of the artistic will, but I agree he
could have used a better term:

"For one finds what it is that one must construct even if one denies that,
in the ideal world of free construction which one is seeking to define,
that construction has a place. In brief, all such researches illustrate the
fact that while the truth which we acknowledge is indeed relative to the
will  which acknowledges that truth, still what one may call the pure form
of willing is an absolute form, a form which sustains itself in the very
effort to violate its own laws. We thus find out absolute truth, but it is
absolute truth about the nature of the creative will in terms of which we
conceive all truths.  Now it is perfectly true that such absolute truth is
not accessible to the empirical world, in so far as we deal with individual
phenomena. But it is also true that we all of us conceive the unity of the
world of experience — the meaning, the sense, the connection of its facts —
in terms of those categories which express precisely this very form of our
creative activity.

Hence, although every empirical truth is relative, all relative truth is
inevitably defined by us as subject to conditions which themselves are
absolute. This, which Kant long ago maintained, gets a very new meaning in
the light of recent logic, — a far deeper meaning, I think, than Kant could
conceive."

The Problem of Truth in the Light of Recent Discussion

This is his later work where his thought has evolved towards what he termed
Absolute Pragmatism - and I'd say to THIS group, what could be more
pragmatic than the reality of ideals?

John