Time, Will, and Purpose by Randall;

Author:Randall; [Auxier, Randall E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Court

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Community and Purpose

In Chapter 7 it became clear that one of the most pointed differences between Royce and James concerns whether there are “superhuman” persons. I do not care for this term, but since it is the one Royce uses, it is appropriate to alert the reader to it. A more careful and appropriate label for the idea is that of “wider or more generalized personal existence beyond the level of individual biological humans.” This is, however, too clumsy, and so I will occasionally use Royce’s term, with this caveat: it need not refer to anything supernatural for Royce, and does not for me. The category of the supernatural has no serious relevance for personalists.1 If person is not a natural kind, nothing is, and the idea that there is an utterly impersonal nature somewhere “out there” beyond our experience of it, as I have said earlier, is at least as superstitious as supernaturalism. Nature, like God, is a concept. It ceases being useful when it constricts our thinking and imagining, and I suggest that those who are in the habit of bludgeoning one another with these allegedly opposed concepts of God and nature need to grow up and recognize that this is a child’s dispute unfit for mature people. People like that are more alike than they could ever stand to admit.

The point of difference between Royce and James, where James clearly expressed his own problem as the opposite of Royce’s (in the previous chapter), is a version of the venerable problem of the One and the Many, a problem every philosopher confronts sooner or later, and not childish at all. In James’s formulation, Royce had to explain how not to absorb the many in the one, while he had to find some unity in the many. It is a metaphysical problem, of course, but its most important ethical dimension—indeed, the very reason philosophers must deal with the question at all—is due to its implications for the relations between individuals and their communities. Where ethics is first philosophy, the metaphysical consideration of the relation of parts and wholes serves, first and foremost, the clarification of our thinking about the relation of the individual and the community. I will move to the issue of superhuman personal existence in this chapter, but first, a taking-stock of what has been learned, and a contextualizing of it, is needed.

The so-called battle between James and Royce is characteristic of the sorts of arguments that have gone on within the personalist fold for as long as there have been personalists—essentially since the end of the eighteenth century. The general problem is really a very simple one, and quite familiar to all students of philosophy. To over-stress unity, or the One, or Monism, is to render precarious or illusory the ontological status of the Many or the individuals. That is the line Royce is trying to negotiate. To over-stress plurality is to move toward atomism and to be left with no good explanation of

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