[MD] still going?

[david]

 Adrie Kintziger said to dmb:

Yes, one of my biggest concerns is exactly the blending in of fallibilism as a key argument to maintain god's presence in the house of philosophy. ...It did not take me much time to find that Royce, indeed is using fallibilism to maintain the theistic stance. It took me less then 10 minutes to keep Auxier against the light to find out he gives bible classes in his free time. But using this as an argument against John's apparent will to devote him would make this case moot.

My personal perspective on fallibilism in general is derived from logic, if fallibilism is true, then fallibilism itself is probably wrong. However this does not mean that fallibilism is not a genuine and solid analytical knife, if handled in skilled hands. 
...But regardless of these moot-events, David, in your opinion, should i take the effort to read and study some work of Royce, just for the sake of my knowledge of philosophy, or lack of it? Is there value to discover, new insights or things that were left behind too easy?



dmb says:


It looks like there are three questions here, one about the religious motives of Royce and his followers, one about the value and nature of fallibilism, and one about the value of studying Royce. The first and third questions are related to each other and can be treated as a single issue but the question of fallibilism can be treated by itself.


I don't think the idea of fallibilism can be defeated with simple logic, by simply pointing out that fallibilism is itself fallible. Behind the idea is an entire critique of philosophy's quest for certainty, for eternal truths, for ultimate truths, for objective truths, etc.. Fallibilism doesn't simply say "we could be wrong" but rather insists that our truths are always provisional, man-made tools that must remain open to revision. It says truth evolves along with our needs and practices, that it does not remain fixed by it's correspondence to an objective reality. This is very different from the fallibilism Royce as Auxier describes it:

"All errors are judged to be erroneous in comparison to some total truth, Royce argued, and we must either hold ourselves infallible or accept that even our errors are evidence of a world of truth. Having made it clear that idealism depends upon postulates and proceeds hypothetically, Royce defends the necessity of objective reference of our ideas to a universal whole within which they belong,.."


Royce's fallibilism entails another version of subject-object metaphysics. The reality to which our truths must correspond is not the physical universe of scientific materialism but rather the idealist's conception of "some total truth" or "world of truth" or "universal whole," as Auxier puts it. That's the absolute, the God of the idealists. But the pragmatic arguments against the scientific version SOM also apply to the idealist version and so both are rejected for the same reasons. Pragmatism is an alternative theory of truth, the kind of truth that doesn't correspond with any ultimate reality but rather functions successfully as a tool or instrument within particular practices for particular purposes. 


Should you make the effort to study Royce? 



It's partly a matter of taste, I suppose, and depends on your aims in studying philosophy in general. As my friend Dorothy Parker might have said, Royce's books should not be tossed aside lightly. They should be thrown with great force.


As I understand it, Hegelian philosophies were quite popular and widely taught in England and the United States in the 19th century when James, Dewey and Royce were working and writing. Roughly speaking, Pragmatism in America and Analytic philosophy in England were both invented, so speak, as a reaction against the Hegelians, particularly British Idealism. These days Hegel is most likely to be named and used by neo-Marxist philosophers, who work largely in the Continental tradition but in the English speaking world, where Analytic philosophy dominates, Hegel is mostly ignored and his name is considered to be obsolete. Again, like Pragmatism, it was founded as a reaction against Hegel's quasi-theological Idealism.


It's no accident that those interested in re-animating that kind of idealism are motivated by some kind of theism because a revival of this idealism sort of entails a revival of the possibility of faith. It's easy to imagine the desire to rescue one's faith, the desire to make it intellectually respectable once again and even to sympathize with that desire. But I really don't think it can be done, which is probably why it always seems a little desperate or disingenuous. I think it's a dead end, at least for the foreseeable future. And Pragmatism, which I subscribe to of course, entails a rejection of any foundational claims and any metaphysical claims, which include the claims of physicalists and theists alike. This rejection is also consistent with philosophical mysticism, which says the fundamental nature of reality is outside of language, which means it cannot be defined by any philosophy or science. But, importantly, this mystical reality is not some other realm beyond reality as it appears to us. It is the reality we know directly and immediately in experience before we have a chance to think about it. In the MOQ, DQ is this mystic reality, this primary empirical reality. Believing in that reality requires no faith, there is nothing supernatural about it, and it doesn't have a logical structure. 


 
Thanks for asking.

Dave

 


> From the Stanford Encyclopedia:
>
> "Royce and James had always disagreed deeply concerning the proper
> understanding of religious phenomena in human life. When James delivered
> the Gifford Lectures in 1901 and 1902, he directed many arguments against
> Royce's idealism, though he did not there target his friend by name.
> James's lectures, published as The Varieties of Religious Experience, were
> a popular and academic success . Royce believed that James, who had never
> been regularly affiliated with an established church or religious
> community, had in that work placed too much emphasis on the extraordinary
> religious experiences of extraordinary individuals. Royce's first education
> was into a strongly Protestant world view, he always retained a respect for
> the conventions of organized Christianity, and his writings exhibit a
> consistent and deep familiarity with Scripture. He sought a philosophy of
> religion that could help one understand and explain the phenomena of
> ordinary religious faith as experienced by communities of ordinary people.
> There was a deeper difference between them, as well, and it centered on a
> metaphysical point. Royce's 1883 insight concerning the Absolute was at
> bottom a religious insight. Contrary to the open-ended pluralism and
> pragmatism of James, Royce was convinced that the object and source of
> religious experience was an actual, infinite, and superhuman being."
>