World and the Individual: Nature, Man, and the Moral Order by Josiah Royce
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Spirit Dwells Next Door

In the beginning of the 20th century the question of global significance was an ideological one: socialism (collectivism) or capitalism (individualism). At the beginning of the 21st century the question is one of sentiment rather than ideas: reactionary resentment (nostalgic, rural, religious collectivism) or meritocratic optimism (aspiring, urban, test-passing individualism). But the essential issue is the same: how can an individual lead a meaningful life in a world which he or she did not create and which appears simultaneously to overwhelm and nurture everything they try to accomplish? This is the point of departure for The World and the Individual, and it seems as relevant today as it was when it was written in 1901.

For Royce, all human experience is shared experience. Not in the sense that we all go through the same live-events but because “by ‘human experience’ we always mean more than the facts that are verifiable by individual men.” We all find it necessary to organise our experience; but how we do so is not the result of our own experience but of the experiences of others. We are taught what our experiences mean by the people with whom we come into contact - parents, teachers, friends, colleagues. Meaning is a distinct category from experience and is necessarily, like the language in which meaning must be expressed, social. It comes from elsewhere.

What we designate as our human freedom, our free will, presupposes meaning which is the foundation of our desires, aims, and ambitions. And meaning is not only the foundation for free will, it is also the environment in which its self-determining force works. This does not imply a reduction in freedom but it does imply a particular type of freedom: “Our rational purpose... is essentially the wanderer’s purpose... in the very search itself lies the partial embodiment of what we ourselves will.” What is common, therefore, for all human beings is this inevitable search for what it is we truly want.

This condition has several corollaries. First, being human implies living in a sort of Never Never Land of unavoidable doubt about what ‘the point’ is. That doubt is not a defect but the motivating force for the search in which we are engaged. When doubt ceases, so does real human life. Second, my free will cooperates in its own compulsion. I can’t avoid engaging in the search and remain part of the human community. This paradox has no logical resolution; it is the price we pay for our reflective ability.

It is this rather oddly formed thing called our will which expresses itself continuously by interpreting what it finds. Our will establishes ‘facts’, not because it causes these facts but because it determines what constitutes a fact in the first place. And the will does so on the basis of what it considers its purpose. If the will allows itself to do so, it may even learn about what constitutes a better or worse purpose. If not, it will likely become either frustrated and resentful about its inability to achieve its purpose, or it will become single-mindedly ruthless in pursuing its fixed purpose at any cost.

However, even at its most obstinate and self-promoting, the will is actually placing itself in a subservient position. Simply paying attention to those things which are relevant to pursuing the interests our will has chosen, “involves a typically objective self-surrendering, a submissive attitude of attention... [so that] the fact observed is the fulfilment of our intention to observe that kind of fact” and no other. In short, the more myopic we are about pursuing our interests, the less freedom we exercise and the less we are even aware of our reduced freedom. Yet another paradox, therefore, of the human condition.

Royce summarises what he calls the “fatal circle of our finitude”:

“We must submit in order to succeed and must be conscious of subordinating ourselves before we can hope to find ourselves expressed... We have to presuppose our facts in order to make concrete our purposes, while we can define our facts, if at all, only in terms of our purposes.”

With such an impossibly convoluted situation, is it any wonder that many of us find solace in either ideology or the comforts of shared mass sentimentality?

There is an implication of all this which may be difficult to bear psychologically. The ‘world’ is composed not of the autonomous self-expressions of other people, what Royce calls the World of Description, but the world of socially inter-related selves who are acting with aims and purposes of which they may be entirely unaware, or which are archaic and self-deadening simply because their expression has been ossified and has trapped the will which created them. This he calls the World of Values. It is this latter world with which we have to deal as reality. This world is neither orderly nor rational in any recognisable way. But it is not inimical.

This conclusion may appear trivial until one realises that it is quite contrary to our expectations of regularity, order, and predictability, not only in our daily lives but in formal scientific research which presumes that there is a formal comprehensible structure of the universe that is there to be found. The natural state of the World of Values is chaos, not merely because individuals have diverse interests, but because none of these interests are themselves inherently stable. The meaning of the world is quite literally changing constantly as our neighbours supply us with more or less continuous supplements to our own fragmentary meanings.

The world, as it were, blows where it will, as Royce might paraphrase the gospel of John:

“The wind blows wherever it will, and you hear the sound it makes, but do not know where it comes from and where it is going. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

The allusion is not inappropriate. What Royce is in fact suggesting is something philosophically and theologically radical, namely that what we casually call the world is in fact identical to what has been historically referred to as the Spirit. As he says explicitly:

“Our models and our inspirations, the mysterious grace that saves us, and the visible social order that moulds us - these lie at first without the Self...the free gift of the world... The ethical teaching of Plato and the gospels of the Christian Church, have agreed in insisting that the higher self is a resultant if influences which belong to the external world, and which the individual man is himself powerless to initiate. The Divine Spirit enters a man in a way that it’s own wisdom pre-determines.“

Our very dependence upon this spirit of the world is our condition of freedom. We experience and engage the spirit continually. The more we try to escape it, the more it exerts its irrepressible force. The world and the individual are one. The choices offered, ideological or emotional, between collectivism and individualism are patently absurd.

Postscript: It strikes me that Marcel Proust adopted a similar philosophy to Royce’s and made it the central theme of the first part of his In Search 0f Lost Time. See https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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