The Philosophy of Loyalty by Josiah Royce
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Loyalty to Loyalty

The postscript included below is from today’s New York Times. It reminded me that I had never made the comments I’d intended two years ago on Royce’s The Philosophy of Loyalty .

In The Philosophy of Loyalty Royce makes the case for what he believes in the central human virtue. Royce’s philosophy was substantially influenced by the Christian teaching of his mother who was also somewhat of a mystic. For him, loyalty is the general social aspect of the Christian idea of love, that is, the habitual raising of the interests of another above our own. The theological model from which he derived his concept of loyalty is that of the Divine Trinity in which each of the distinct Persons is defined in terms of their complete and eternal devotion to the Others. This devotion is not a property of each Person but rather the defining characteristic of the relationship among them. In a specific sense, therefore, the essence of each Person is a distinctive commitment to the mutual relationships within the Trinity. This is expressed in Royce’s philosophy as “Loyalty to Loyalty.”

Despite its religious inspiration, Royce’s philosophy is meant for a secular audience. His argument is that we are all improved as human beings through the demonstration of loyalty by any one of us. Loyalty is not a zero sum but a positive sum relationship. But his concept of loyalty, and especially loyalty to loyalty, is easy to misinterpret. In an era when someone like Trump extols the virtue of loyalty as a reason for omertà, silence about criminal activities, some further explanation is obviously necessary. For Trump, loyalty clearly means personal devotion at any cost to someone else. But this has nothing to do with the loyalty of Christianity or Royce’s philosophy. It is a parody, a purposeful distortion of the principle of love.

Loyalty is a two way street. Not in the sense that we can only be loyal to those who are loyal to us, but because loyalty demands that we accept the diverse loyalties of others. Ultimate loyalty is to the relationship which promotes the loyalty of others, not just to ourselves but much more generally. Loyalty demands that we respect what Royce calls the ‘Cause’ of the other. This is another way of saying that we are all pursuing some purpose, and that as an essential aspect of being human purpose must be respected. Valuing the Causes of others, he contends, will assist in the recognition as well as achievement of our own. We and others may not be even aware of the possibility of such a Cause, in which case the duty of loyalty is to assist in its articulation and bringing it to conscious awareness.

Of course not all Causes are equal. Some may be trivial; others provoked by neurotic impulses; some are evil. According to Royce there is a way to distinguish among Causes. A Cause is more important if it is ‘bigger’ than another, that is if it incorporates other Causes within itself. Thus the Cause of a marriage is more important than the Causes of the individuals who constitute the marriage. A Cause is better than another Cause to the extent it accepts the Causes of others and reformulates those diverse Causes successfully - for example the health and well-being of an entire family of parents and children certainly includes the well-being of each individual but redefines what that well-being means as a member of the family..

Loyalty to loyalty is the practical commitment to finding a joint, group or communal Cause. The default relationship - in marriage, in corporate business, in politics - is to presume that no such Cause exists unless the parties have interests in common. Loyalty to loyalty implies not the discovery of common interests but the invention of an entirely new set of interests in which individual interests are not obliterated but subsumed as special cases. Loyalty to loyalty also implies that no Cause, except that which restricts or invalidates other Causes, can be excluded. This is a profound re-interpretation of democracy, not as a political system of equality of opinion but as a process of discovering increasingly general purpose.

Royce’s sort of philosophical idealism was a response to the carnage and civil disintegration of the American Civil War. It was abruptly removed from the national scene as a consequence of the carnage and civil disintegration of the First World War. I think the NYT article is correct. There are strong reasons for promoting a revival of Royce’s philosophy of loyalty. It is a prescription for finding real unity out of divisive chaos. It is a philosophy as urgently relevant in Europe as it is in North America. It is simultaneously a morality and an organizational principle which applies as much to politics as it does to business. Finally, it is a personal attitude which promotes listening for the hidden intentions and unspoken purposes of not just others but also ourselves.

Postscript 1Feb19: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/24/op...

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