Happy the man

Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He who can call today his own:
He who, secure within, can say,
Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.
Be fair or foul or rain or shine
The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.
Not Heaven itself upon the past has power,
But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.

“Happy the Man” by John Dryden.

WA

Josiah Royce on happiness and loyalty

Josiah Royce offered a shift in perspective. When evaluating your life, don’t ask, “How happy am I?” Ask, “How loyal am I, and to what?”

His brief moment of fame seems finally to have arrived. David Brooks's column on him is at the top of the charts this morning.

In 1900, there were two great philosophers working side by side at Harvard, William James and Josiah Royce. James was from an eminent Boston family and had all the grace, brilliance and sophistication that his class aspired to. Royce, as the historian Allen Guelzo points out, was the first major American philosopher born west of the Mississippi. His parents were Forty-Niners who moved to California but failed to find gold. He grew up in squalor, was stocky, lonely and probably knew more about despair and the brooding shadows that can come in life.

James and Royce admired and learned from each other, but their philosophies were different, too. James was pragmatic and tough-minded, looking for empirical truth. Royce was more idealistic and tender-minded, more spiritual and abstract.

They differed on the individual’s role in society. As David Lamberth of Harvard notes, James’s emphasis was on tolerance. We live in a pluralistic society and we each know only a fragment of the truth. People should give one another enough social space so they can be themselves. For Royce the good life meant tightly binding yourself to others — giving yourself away with others for the sake of a noble cause. Tolerance is not enough... (continues)

If my loyalty to America does not allow your community’s story to be told, or does not allow your community’s story to be part of the larger American story, then my loyalty is a domineering, predatory loyalty. It is making it harder for you to be loyal. We should instead be encouraging of other loyalties. We should, Royce argued, be loyal to loyalty.

Before Martin Luther King Jr. used it, Royce popularized the phrase “the beloved community.” In the beloved community, political opponents honor the loyalty the rival has for a cause, and learn from it

....evil exists [insert comma here, right David?] so we can struggle to overcome it.

Royce took his philosophy one more crucial step: Though we have our different communities, underneath there is an absolute unity to life. He believed that all separate individuals and all separate loyalties are mere fragments of a spiritual unity — an Absolute Knower, a moral truth. [Or better, compare Carl Sagan: "Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.”]

That sense of an ultimate unity at the end things, shines back on us, because it means all our diverse loyalties are actually parts of the same loyalty. We all, he wrote, “seek a city out of sight.” This sense of ultimate unity, of human brotherhood and sisterhood, is what is missing in a lot of the current pessimism and divisiveness.

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DISSENTER FOR THE ABSOLUTE
COMMENDING JOSIAH ROYCE AS AMERICA'S PHILOSOPHER by Allen C. Guelzo

No American philosophy has as yet been produced,” complained Charles Sanders Peirce in 1866. “Since our country has become independent, Germany has produced the whole development of the Transcendental Philosophy, Scotland the whole philosophy of Common Sense, France the Eclectic Philosophy and Positive Philosophy, England the Association Philosophy. And what has America produced?” Whereupon Peirce took it upon himself to answer his own question, and in 1878 laid out the lineaments of what his friend and patron William James would call pragmatism. James would do more than name the new philosophy; he would popularize it so successfully that Peirce faded into the background of his own eccentricity.

James had no time for any sort of dualism of thinking and doing, believing and acting. “Beliefs, in short, are really rules for action,” he insisted, “and the whole function of thinking is but one step in the production of habits of action.” An idea isn’t good because it’s true. It is good because the consequences of believing it make life better: “‘The true,’ to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking.”

That instrumental conception of truth changed everything. It turned philosophy into the determination of “what works best.” Pragmatism was the new method. It aimed to answer questions, not to speculate on first things. Pragmatists don’t wait for absolute truths to arrive and give us full contact with hard reality; that will never happen. Mind is an instrument, not a slate, and truth is provisional and ever corrigible. Even if eternal verities exist, we’ll never know them, so we should stop arguing over conceptual differences that have no practical consequence. Apply the pragmatic method to metaphysical disputes and most of them will quickly disappear and productive inquiry may proceed.

At least, that’s what James believed, and his persuasion was strong enough to become the main current of American thought. Translated into social theory by John Dewey and Horace Kallen (James’s student), poetry by Wallace Stevens (another James student), social science by George Herbert Mead, semiotics by Charles Morris (a Mead student), and jurisprudence by Oliver Wendell Holmes—not to mention the philosophy of F. C. S. Schiller, Sidney Hook (a Dewey student), C. I. Lewis, W. V. O. Quine (a student of Lewis), and many others up to and beyond Richard Rorty—pragmatism swept through the universities. It has become the national outlook, “one that,” in the judgment of William Goetzmann, “governs much of our behavior and certainly the politics and courts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in America.”

But as the pragmatists were transforming higher thought at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Chicago, and in the culture at large, another thinker was extending pragmatism well beyond the instrumentalist conception. He shared some pragmatist principles, but he aimed them toward the Absolute. Like James, he began with concrete individual experience, but built up from it to a vision of a “Blessed Community” aligned with God. He has disappeared from popular memory, but he is worth remembering today as a moral contrast to the utilitarian viewpoint, a reminder that the good must always be subordinated to the Good.

Josiah Royce is the first important American thinker born west of the Mississippi. This was interpreted by him as a disadvantage. His ­parents were Forty-Niners who had journeyed to California expecting to find gold and wealth, only to find neither. Royce was born on ­November 20, 1855, amid the squalor of a mining camp in Grass Valley, California, and he never lost in his later years at Harvard the intimidating sense of being a rube among the roses. “I never was, in my youth, a person ‘cultivated’ in any aesthetic sense,” Royce recalled in 1912, “and I remain more barbarous as to such matters than you can easily suspect.” One of his earliest memories was of the enormous mountains that rimmed his home along the Sacramento River, but the impression they made was of imprisonment and isolation. Even at the beginning, Royce looked for something beyond the limitations of immediate experience... (continues) ==
Royce @dawn

What do I desire?

Students come to me and say, well, "we’re getting out of college and we have the faintest idea what we want to do". So I always ask the question, "what would you like to do if money were no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life?" Well, it’s so amazing as a result of our kind of educational system, crowds of students say well, we’d like to be painters, we’d like to be poets, we’d like to be writers, but as everybody knows you can’t earn any money that way...

When we finally got down to something, which the individual says he really wants to do, I will say to him, you do that and forget the money, because, if you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you will spend your life completely wasting your time. You’ll be doing things you don’t like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing things you don’t like doing, which is stupid. Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way... And so, therefore, it’s so important to consider this question: What do I desire? -AW

Try to Keep Up With Australia’s Fastest 92-Year-Old Woman

A "role-model" indeed: "Would she, I asked, like to die while walking? She didn’t skip a beat. “Wouldn’t that be lovely?”

nyt