Reading Notes: August 4th, 2022

“The Religious Aspect of Philosophy features, among other positions, one of Royce’s governing insights: a transcendental proof of the Absolute from the possibility of error. First, that there is error is an experiential fact. Error is the failure of an idea to represent its object. But how is an error known to be an error? The mind must have an idea of the intended object along with the misrepresented object. Kelly Parker gives a concrete example: “If I think that my keys are on the hall table, but discover that my idea is erroneous, I do not conclude that my keys never existed as the object of my thought. Rather, I focus on an idea that I had all along—that my keys do definitely exist somewhere. They are the true object of an idea, and an object which is at the moment available to me only imperfectly.” This is a higher order idea, that for Royce eventually concatenates into an all-inclusive Absolute Thought.” (Brunson, Voluntarism: A Difference that Makes the Difference between German Idealism and American Pragmatism?, 84) 

“Royce fulfills this promise to see the Absolute as more than Thought in at least two ways in The World and the Individual. The first is his definition of ideas as essentially purposes: “Whatever else our ideas are, and however much or little they may be, at any moment, expressed in rich, sensuous imagery, it is certain that they are ideas not because they are masses of series of images, but because they embody present conscious purposes. Every idea is as much a volitional process as it is an intellectual process.” In other words, the correspondence to its object that makes an idea true or false is not similarity, as in a photograph looking like the person photographed, but rather in the fulfillment or frustration of the embodied purpose. “When I have an idea of the world, my idea is a will, and the world of my idea is simply my own will itself determinately embodied.” Second, Royce combines this reconceptualization of ideas with his argument from error to provide a non-Hegelian conception of the Absolute, one that Royce does not hesitate to call God: “In him, namely, and as sharing in his perfect Will, my will comes consciously to find wherein lies precisely what satisfies my will, and so makes my life, this unique life, distinct from all other lives.” In other words, now the final unity of the Absolute is a unity of Willing, not only Knowing.” (Brunson, Voluntarism: A Difference that Makes the Difference between German Idealism and American Pragmatism?, 85)