[MD] still going?

Tue Feb 2 12:27:54 PST 2016

Adrie,

You don't have to read all of Royce, any more than I do.  We all rely
upon philosophology and authority to some extent or another.  Even
though, authority has been dominated by a SO metaphysical outlook!
It's a conundrum, indeed.

I think together we form a community of interpretation and each view
is an alternative "view of the elephant" that has value and shouldn't
be rejected.  Does this mean just any old thing?  No.  It's tricky, I
admit.  Time and communication are the only way it can be made clear,
who is an individual in the community, and who is not.    Before, I
felt like you were throwing out Royce's insight and contribution to
Pragmatism.  And if you don't believe me, search on Royce, in the
Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy.  It's online, you know.

Ok, on the absolute.  Royce definitely used the term, but he used it
within a purely intellectual framework - that is, whether or not any
absolutes exist, we use certain pre-suppositions for rational
discourse - his fundamental argument was for the unquestionable
existence of error.  What is error?  He asks, a whole lot of lights
dawn upon his thinking, akin to Pirsig's rhetorical query, What is
Quality?  If you think about those terms in relation to life, you see
that they are the same question.

Now, Royce "used" absolute, in a way that doesn't fly well today, but
Professor Auxier make a  very pertinent point for those that think the
term "absolute" in Royce means rigid, Victorian values.  And Pirsig
himself used the term synomously in his Coppleston Annotations,
disliking only the connotations.    So it's not such a far-fetched
idea that Royce was himself a pre-Pirsigian in his own way.   Auxier
brings a lot of support to his thesis, which I can supply and offer
footnotes and all that academic stuff.

" As I have said in Chapter1, and have shown by example, Royce's moral
temporalism developed partly as an answer, philosophically and
religiously, to moral problems posed by the annexation of  California
and Royce was working on that history of California and this argument
about error at the same time.  Royce's history of California was an
application of his dramatic or even romantic ontology to the problem
of historiography.  ... it was the collection of solutions to these
problems of self-deception, ignorance, and error that provided the
impetus, the direction, and the goal of Royce's hypothetical or
fictional ontology, in all of its particulars.

The cultivation of the inner life he called for as a remedy to the
mis-behavior of the Bear Flag "Heroes" is nothing other than the
cultivation of the norms of reflection, especially as the bear upon
practical life.  The development of external boldness, decisiveness,
cleverness, and the virtues praised by the "mock eloquent cant" of the
euphoric masses is meaningless without the firm association of these
virtues with excellent reflection upon our experience, and such
reflection begins with the idea that WE COULD ALWAYS BE IN ERROR.
This is Royce's  FALLIBILISM.

The fact that it has not been recognized in the literature on both
Royce and the other pragmatists that his argument from error is a
statement of Royce's commitment to fallibilism, simply boggles my
mind.  What could be more obvious?

And yet, supposedly intelligent people charge Royce with absolutism,
in the very sense contradicted by his argument from error?"

Auxier, TWL, 68

Man, Adrie, you can imagine what a relief it was for me to read those
words, because maybe all the academics with their reliance upon
authority might not have seen this, but I sure did, in the Grass
Valley Library, so long ago.  But I was prepped by Pirsig, so I knew
the full significance of Royce's argument for error.

But pardon me while I pat myself on the back.  Nobody else is going to.  heh.

> But , David , as i do not have the intention to piss off John further than
> neccesary i would happily agree with him to read and discuss everyting
> about Royce should John make the effort not to pursue the shortcut to
> paradise,but even then, i would make it obligatory for me to read all
> Royce's work wich would take me long.... and i do not know if i can spare
> the time or the effort.
>

I think a bigger and more important task than convincing Pirsigians
that Royce was a Pragmatist  but convincing Pragmatists that Pirsig
was one,

Thanks for your patience with my obsessions,

John

> Probably were clean about that one..
>
>
> Feel free to talk about oter thing anyway, i did hurt my knee very badly
> about a month ago and i need some rest.
>
> Adrie
>
> 2016-01-31 17:39 GMT+01:00 david <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com>:
>
>>
>> Adrie Kintziger said to john carl:
>>
>>
>> ...It is true that i defended the case that James and Royce were in fact
>> enemy's but irl de facto friends. My point of view was partially derived
>> from the stanford entry about Royce (
>> http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/royce/) and after some investigation on
>> this page, the Gifford lectures given by Royce as "the world and the
>> individual", and subsequently thereafter William James "the variaties of
>> religious experience" - as the lead on the stanford page suggested i took
>> the effort to compare the two views, and i had to agree with the remarks
>> on
>> the stanford page under the header "life", if you want/like to find them.
>> I
>> did not invent my point. I honestly found that the narrator was very
>> correct in his analysis.
>>
>>
>>
>> dmb says:
>>
>> The Stanford Encyclopedia is considered to be among the most credible
>> academic sources, right up there with philosophy Journals and University
>> books. And there are many good reasons to draw the conclusion that James
>> and Royce had very different views. It's utterly contemptible to dismiss
>> SEP as if it were just some guy's opinion or to dismiss the basic facts
>> for
>> being the result of "a wrong-headed academic bias".  This is just the
>> commonly heard anti-intellectual attitude that says "my ignorance is just
>> as good as your knowledge". "For some reason," John says, "I didn't fit
>> in
>> with the Stanford Encyclopedia of Dogmatic Authority, and so not worthy
>> of
>> further discussion or interest" and, he says, "I was ignored and vilified
>> as a troll".
>>
>>
>> William James said that he and Royce loved each other like "Siamese
>> twins," but it's also true that they were opposed philosophically and
>> that
>> James said he wanted to destroy the absolute, wanted its "scalp". Royce
>> was
>> an advocate of Idealism and Monism while James was a Pluralist and a
>> Radical Empiricist. James spells out the difference is one of his essays
>> on
>> Radical Empiricism, a piece called "Absolutism and Empiricism," and the
>> life-long debate between the two men is somewhat famously known as "the
>> battle of the Absolute".
>>
>>
>> "James abused Hegel merrily," his biography says. 'Of all mental
>> turpitude
>> and rottennesses,' he thought, Hegelianism takes the cake. 'The worst of
>> it
>> is,' James told Hall, it makes an absolute sterility where it comes.'
>> James
>> wrote Royce in February 1880, groaning that 'my ignorant prejudice
>> against
>> all Hegelians except Hegel himself grows wusser and wusser. Their
>> Sacerdotal airs! And their sterility!' ...He told Xenos Clark in December
>> 1880, 'The Hegelian wave which seems to me only another desperate attempt
>> to make a short cut to paradise, is deluging the College this year and
>> will, if I am not mistake, completely sterilize its votaries'. ...He
>> added
>> his by now reflexist reaction to Hegel ('fundamentally rotten and
>> charlatanish'), but went on to concede that 'as a reaction against
>> materialistic evolutionism it has a use, only this evolution is is
>> fertile
>> while Hegelism is absolutely sterile'." -- Robert Richardson, William
>> James
>> in the Maelstrom of American Modernism, page
>>   214.
>>
>>
>> There are some points in common, of course, but these are very different
>> visions, from different schools of philosophy, held by people with very
>> different temperaments. I see no good reason to pretend they are similar
>> or
>> compatible and l see lots of good reasons for being clear about the
>> distinctions between them. Otherwise it's just the philosophical version
>> of
>> pounding a square peg into a round hole. You're only going to damage one
>> or
>> both of them in the effort. It's wreckless vandalism and if John feels
>> persecuted by this obvious criticism, then he has a problem that cannot
>> be
>> solved by anyone but him.
>>
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> dmb
>>
>>
>>
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-- 
"finite players
play within boundaries.
Infinite players
play *with* boundaries."