On the wall, up the institution

Josiah Royce is not a household name.

His name recognition was once quite high, comparatively speaking, for an academic philosopher. That was a century ago. Lately, your average working philosopher in America toils in utter obscurity. The initial response to David Brooks's January shout-out for Royce suggests he/she likes it that way. "Josiah Royce deserves better readers than David Brooks," tweeted one scholar. Another called him out for interpreting Royce as saying scholars should "submit themselves to their institution, say to a university. They discover how good it is by serving it..."

Admittedly that last statement could use some trimming and qualifying. But committing (not "submitting," please)  to a university institution may just be, will-to-believe fashion, the best strategy for improving it.

Sometimes you first have to profess the loyalty you want to feel, if you want to really feel it. That's why it's not entirely cynical or ironical of my colleagues and me to proclaim ourselves true blue.  Saying it's easier than feeling it (not that we'd ever actually say it out loud, in public) but you've gotta start somewhere.



 In a 1900 letter to his Harvard colleague G.H. Palmer, William James extolled "the genuine philosophic universe" of his institution's department of philosophy, naming all the views of all his colleagues with whom he disagreed profoundly on points of philosophical commitment: Santayana's "pessimistic platonism," Royce's "voluntaristic-pluralistic monism," Palmer's "ethereal idealism," etc., alongside his own favored "crass pluralism." But they shared an institutional commitment, and their plurality continues to shine as the Platonic ideal of academic pluralism, diversity, openness, and civility across difference.

James and Royce famously sat on that wall in Chocorua in 1903, as James "damned" his friend's venerated Absolute. But his true colors were on display in another letter of 1900. To Royce he wrote, from across the ocean:

When I write, 'tis with one eye on the page, and one on you. When I compose my Gifford lectures mentally, 'tis with the design exclusively of overthrowing your system, and ruining your peace. I lead a parasitic life upon you, for my highest flight of ambitious ideality is to become your conqueror, and go down into history as such, you and I rolled in one another's arms and silent (or rather loquacious still) in one last death-grapple of an embrace... Different as our minds are, yours has nourished mine, as no other social influence ever has, and in converse with you I have always felt that my life was being lived importantly. Our minds, too, are not different in the Object which they envisage. It is the whole paradoxical physico-moral-spiritual Fatness, of which most people single out some skinny fragment, which we both cover with our eye. We "aim at him generally"—and most others don't. I don't believe that we shall dwell apart forever, though our formulas may.

That's marvelous! We don't engage our intellectual adversaries with such bonhomie anymore, and such respect. Or such frank (though Victorian) love, it's not too much to say. I can't emulate it myself, and I don't know anyone who can with any credibility. Alas.

But on the eve of another academic season at my university (Fall Faculty Meeting and department staff meeting Thursday, convocation Saturday, classes beginning Monday) I can perhaps muster just a bit more institutional commitment - and a bit more enthusiasm for the increasingly sluggish marketplace of ideas.

We're #385!

Postscript. If I'm being honest, the thing I'm most enthusiastic about at the moment is...