Josiah Royce - The Philosophy of Loyalty

The Philosophy of Loyalty

This social metaphysics lays the groundwork for Royce’s philosophy of loyalty. The book of this title published in 1908 derived from lectures given at the Lowell Institute, at Yale, Harvard and at the University of Illinois in 1906-07. The basic ideas were explicit in his writings as early as his history of California. Here Royce set out one of the most original and important moral philosophies in the recent history of philosophy. His notion of “loyalty” was essentially a universalized and ecumenical interpretation of Christian agapic love. Broadly speaking Royce’s is a virtue ethic in which our loyalty to increasingly less immediate ideals becomes the formative moral influence in our personal development. As persons become increasingly able to form loyalties, the practical and on-going devotion to a cause bigger than themselves, and as these loyalties become unifiable in the higher purposes of groups of persons over many generations, humanity is increasingly better able to recognize that the highest ideal is the creation of a perfected “beloved community” in which each and every person shares. The beloved community as an ideal experienced in our acts of loyal service integrates into Royce’s moral philosophy a Kingdom of Ends, but construed as immanent and operative instead of transcendental and regulative. While the philosophical status of this ideal remains hypothetical, the living of it in the fulfillment of our finite purposes concretizes it for each and every individual. Each of us, no matter how morally undeveloped we may be, has fulfilled experiences that point to the reality of experience beyond what is given to us personally. This wider reality is exemplified most commonly by when we fall in love. The “spiritual union also has a personal, a conscious existence, upon a higher than human level. An analogous unity of consciousness, an unity superhuman in grade, but intimately bound up with, and inclusive of, our separate personalities, must exist, if loyalty is well founded, wherever a real cause wins the true devotion of ourselves. Grant such an hypothesis, and then loyalty becomes no pathetic serving of a myth. The good which our causes possesses, then, also becomes a concrete fact for an experience of a higher than human level.” (The Philosophy of Loyalty, p. 311). This move illustrates what Royce calls his “absolute pragmatism,” which is the claim that ideals are thoroughly practical, and the more inclusive ideals are maximally practical. The concretization of ideals cannot therefore be empirically doubted except at the cost of rendering our conscious life utterly inexplicable. If we admit that the concretization of ideals genuinely occurs, Royce argues, then we are not only entitled but compelled to take seriously and regard as real the larger intelligible structures within which those ideals exist, which is the purposive character of the divine Will. The way in which persons sort out higher and lower causes is by examining whether one’s service destroys the loyalty of others, or what is best in them. Ultimately personal character reaches its acme in the recognition that service of lost causes, through which we may learn that our ultimate loyalty is to loyalty itself.