Josiah Royce Biography
Royce was born November 20, 1855, in the remote mining town of Grass Valley, California, to Josiah and Sarah Eleanor Bayliss Royce. Sarah Royce was a devout Christian who headed a primary school in Grass Valley. Royce's mother and older sisters directed his early education. At age 11 he entered school in San Francisco. He graduated from the newly established University of California in Oakland with a B. A. degree in Classics in 1875. Royce then traveled to Germany to study philosophy for one year, mastering the language and attending lectures in Heidelberg, Leipzig, and Göttingen. On his return, he entered the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, where he earned a Ph. D. in 1878.
He taught composition and literature at the University of California, Berkeley from 1878-1882. During this time he published numerous philosophical articles, as well as his Primer of Logical Analysis. He married Katherine Head in 1880. The couple had three children (Christopher 1882; Edward 1886; Stephen 1889) and remained married until Josiah's death. Not content in California, so far from the intellectual life of the East Coast, Royce sought help in attaining a new post from his acquaintances there. In his later ethical writings Royce would stress the centrality of action intended to realize a sound ideal that one has freely embraced. When offered the opportunity to replace William James during a one year sabbatical at Harvard University, Royce acted: he accepted the offer of half of James's salary, resigned his California appointment altogether, and moved his wife and newborn son across the continent in the summer of 1882.
In Cambridge, Royce commenced to work doggedly and in diverse areas. In January 1883 he arrived at an insight that proved fundamental to his philosophy: in order for our ordinary concepts of truth and error to be meaningful, there must be an Absolute Knower, an actual infinite mind that encompasses the totality of all actual truths and possible errors. This insight formed the core of his first major philosophical publication, The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, which appeared in 1885. Royce received a permanent appointment as assistant professor at Harvard in that same year. (During his three decades at Harvard Royce would teach such notable students as T. S. Eliot, George Santayana, and W. E. B. Du Bois.) He taught full time, gave many public lectures, published his History of California in 1886, and a novel in 1887. In 1888 he experienced a nervous breakdown, from which he recovered after a sea voyage of some months' duration.
Royce was appointed Professor of the History of Philosophy at Harvard in 1892 and served as Chair of the Department of Philosophy from 1894-98. During these years Royce established himself as a leading figure in American academic philosophy with his many reviews, lectures and books, including The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892) and The Conception of God (1895). In 1898 Royce attended a series of lectures by Charles S. Peirce, "Reasoning and the Logic of Things," which significantly influenced his understanding of the relation between logic and metaphysics.
Royce delivered the prestigious Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen in two series, the first in 1899 and the second the following year. He regarded this as the opportunity to consolidate his years of hard thought and study, so as to produce a definitive and original statement of his metaphysics. The result was his two volume opus The World and the Individual (1899-1901).
The Gifford Lectures marked a turning point in Royce's life and thought. He had worked out his philosophical theories in minute detail. His public reputation as a philosopher was sealed (Royce was elected president of the American Psychological Association in 1902 and of the American Philosophical Association in 1903). The year 1900 apparently represented the culmination of his life's work. Royce was only 45 years old, though, and this culmination proved also to be a starting point for significant growth.
Reviews of The World and the Individual praised Royce's philosophical acumen but raised significant objections to his conclusions. Peirce, in particular, pointedly criticized Royce's use of logic. Royce set out to reconsider his central arguments and, at the same time, undertook an ambitious program of study in mathematical logic. In his teaching and publications after 1900, two philosophical strains came to the forefront. One was a growing reliance on formal logical and mathematical concepts as the basis for his metaphysical speculation (the first hint of this appears in the "Supplementary Essay" to the first volume of The World and the Individual). The second was an emphasis on philosophy as a means to understand the concrete phenomena of life: the nature of human society, of religious experience, of ethical action, of suffering and the problem of evil.
After 1907 Royce's emphasis on the relevance of philosophy for living took on a clear personal dimension. In that year Christopher, who had come with Josiah and Katherine across the continent as a newborn 25 years earlier, and who had graduated from Harvard at age 18, showed symptoms of severe depression and psychotic delusions. In 1908 his parents committed him to a state mental hospital with little hope that he would recover. In August of 1910 William James died, leaving Royce without his closest friend, neighbor and colleague. In September of the same year Christopher Royce died of typhoid fever, leaving Josiah and Katherine without their firstborn child. Royce had earlier stated his philosophy in a somewhat abstract and formal way, so that it might help him discover metaphysical truth. Perhaps under the weight of these later sorrows, Royce returned to his system seeking wisdom and understanding in addition to truth.
However that may be, and though he by no means abandoned systematic and theoretical philosophy, Royce began to write more about what today would be called "practical" or "applied" philosophy. His major work on ethics, The Philosophy of Loyalty, appeared in 1908. Later he would address ethics in even more practical terms, not as a philosophy but as an "art" of loyalty. He published a collection of essays under the title Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems in 1908; another collection, entitled William James and Other Essays on the Philosophy of Life, appeared in 1911. Four of the six essays in The Hope of the Great Community, written in the last year of his life and published posthumously in 1916, directly concerned global politics and the Great War.
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. Royce did not attempt to work out his religious philosophy until after James's death, however. In 1911 Royce finally composed the lectures that responded to James. These were published in 1912 as The Sources of Religious Insight. It is here that the theoretical and practical threads of his late thought began to come together. Royce himself said of the Sources: "It contains the whole of me in a brief compass".
In early 1912, Royce suffered a stroke. During his recovery, he continued to explore the philosophy of religion outlined in the Sources, with an eye toward adapting these ideas specifically to Christianity. He also returned to Peirce's writings, seeking the solution to certain nagging problems in his own metaphysics. He found in Peirce's semeiotic, or theory of signs, the technical tools he needed to address both issues at once. The Problem of Christianity presents, in place of the earlier Absolute Knower, the concept of an infinite community of interpretation guided by a shared spirit of truth-seeking. This Universal Community, which constitutes reality, develops greater understanding over time through its members' continual development of the meaning of signs. Within this framework Royce endeavored to reconcile and explain many key Christian doctrines and experiences.
Though Royce lived only a few years beyond this late philosophical breakthrough, his last period brought the true culmination and flowering of his life's work. Besides The Sources of Religious Insight and The Problem of Christianity, notable available works include The Hope of the Great Community, his last Harvard seminar on Metaphysics (1915-16) and a series of lectures given at the University of California at Berkeley. These lectures at his alma mater were to have ended with a talk entitled "The Spirit of the Community." When the Great War broke out, Royce set this manuscript aside and sketched a practical proposal to use the economic power of insurance to mediate hostilities among nations and hence reduce the attraction of war in the future. War and Insurance (1914) was a daring political and economic proposal on behalf of the Universal Community.
Royce died on September 14, 1916. Though scholars now recognize the originality and strength of his last works, he was unable to respond to critics or to press his case for the last crucial innovations to his philosophy. His reputation was eclipsed as other philosophers used Royce's earlier writings as a foil in developing their own doctrines of pragmatism, realism, empiricism, and logical analysis. While scholars of American intellectual life have always acknowledged the historical importance of Royce's influence, recent years have brought a revival of interest in Royce's thought on its own terms. Royce's work is proving especially fruitful for theologians and philosophers interested in speculative philosophy and metaphysics, practical and theoretical ethics, philosophy of religion, and the philosophy of community.