Josiah Royce: A Guide to Josiah Royce’s Life and Philosophy

Josiah Royce (1855–1916) was an American philosopher and historian who is known for his conception of absolute idealism, or the idea that all of reality exists within a single consciousness. Royce also wrote significant works of history, including the history of California, where he was born and raised.

At different times in his long career as a scholar, historian, and philosopher, Josiah Royce could be called an idealist and a pragmatist.

• Early life and education: Josiah Royce was born in 1855 in Grass Valley, California. He studied at the University of California, Berkeley, where he received a BA, and later taught English composition, rhetoric, and literature. In 1878, he received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. His early interests were wide-ranging and included literary criticism and fiction.
• Early teachings: Royce taught for four years at UC Berkeley, and then in 1882 went to teach at Harvard University near Boston, Massachusetts, where his friend, the philosopher William James, had taken a sabbatical. James’ work and writing, such as the essay “The Will to Believe,” made deep impressions on Royce. As a Harvard professor, he taught and influenced students who would become famous in their own right, including T.S. Eliot, George Santayana, and W.E B. Du Bois. The post would become permanent in 1884, and Royce spent the remainder of his life there.
• The “Absolute Knower”: In 1883, Royce first conceptualized the idea that would be a major component of his subsequent philosophical work. It was the idea of the “Absolute Knower,” an infinite mind and all-encompassing source of true knowledge.
• The Gifford lectures: In 1899 and 1900, Royce delivered lectures at Aberdeen in the UK, which presented a summation of his philosophical thought up until that point. The lectures helped to solidify his reputation in the American philosophical scene and abroad, but his thought continued to develop and change over time.
• Loyalty and pragmatism: The Philosophy of Loyalty, published in 1908, was Royce’s major contribution to the field of ethics. This was a turn away from a more abstract pursuit of philosophy and towards an integrated search for wisdom as well as truth. He was influenced by Pragmatism, a school of American philosophical thought associated with his friend William James, as well as the American philosopher John Dewey.
• Philosophy of religion and final years: Despite having a stroke in 1912, Royce continued to elaborate and develop his philosophical views. These became increasingly connected to his thoughts on religion and the religious experience. Some of these ideas were discussed in The Sources of Religious Insight (1912), where he approached the topic of religion through a Roycean lens. He died in 1916, unable to complete a final summation of his ideas, but he left behind a body of work that has informed successive generations of philosophers.

Although Royce’s ideas changed over the course of his life, much of his philosophical work is a gradual refinement of his main theses.

1. 1. Absolute idealism: Part of Royce’s scholarly work was to distinguish his ideas from previous versions of idealism, such as those of Emmanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Royce’s interpretation of idealism differed in that human beings could experience absolute truth as part of a collective being.
2. 2. Loyalty: Royce’s reverence for loyalty as human beings’ greatest virtue underpinned many of his philosophical theories. He believed that finding a cause centered on shared affection (rather than shared animosity) and committing to it could be a solution to many social ills and human misery. It is within this framework that he popularized the idea of a “beloved community” undergirded by loyalty to one another and life itself.
3. 3. Pragmatic religion: While Royce’s early works were largely concerned with the metaphysical, his later writings more directly addressed the notion of God and ethics. He generally took a pragmatic approach by criticizing the individualistic teachings of organized religion, instead advocating for communal participation as a way of connecting with the divine.
   

Explore some of the basic writings of Josiah Royce.

1. 1. The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885): Royce’s first major work, this book was an extended defense of idealism that was based upon the idea of an “argument from error.” In Royce’s view, although we often err in our search for the truth, even these errors are themselves indicative of an absolute truth, which was, for Royce, synonymous with the conception of God. This was a shift from Kantian idealism and showed Royce’s unusual understanding of God. He later elaborated on these ideas in The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).
2. 2. The World and the Individual (1899–1901): In this two-volume work, Royce developed critiques of three competing philosophical orientations, which he called realism, mysticism, and critical rationalism. The lectures asserted that errors undermined each of these ideas and his “Fourth Conception of Being” avoided these errors. This conception included the idea that humans can’t know the whole truth individually, but the cosmos as a whole entity can represent the totality of truth.
3. 3. The Philosophy of Loyalty (1908): In this work, Royce took ideas from Christianity and expanded them into a secular spiritual philosophy. In Royce’s ethics, being loyal to something higher or larger than oneself allows one to grow both as an individual and collectively. Through a “loyalty to loyalty,” Royce believed people can constitute a great community and shape a better world.
4. 4. The Problem of Christianity (1913): His last major work, The Problem of Christianity addressed the challenge of ethical living in a world that had, by his estimation, outgrown earlier versions of Christianity. As Royce saw it, Christianity offered certain key ideas and insights as well as ethical guidelines to live by, but it was less relevant to the lives of modern people and societies—especially after the rise of individualism. Here, he attempted to reconcile what he found valuable in Christianity with what he felt was also philosophically rigorous and true.

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