But I'll not be busy watching my team in postseason baseball. What a funny game. The Cards scored ten runs in the first inning of their division series winner against the Braves, but could barely muster a hit against the Nats. Good pitching stops good hitting, and embarrasses bad.
More importantly, it was great to see my old best man and his wife on their trip through town back from Indiana to Carolina yesterday. We met at our old greasy spoon on Elliston Place, enjoyed the classic cheeseburger on french bread, and wondered where the time went. We used to dine there just about every Friday night after "Sherry Hour" across the way, back in the day. Good times.
In those bygone days I was just discovering William James's pragmatism, learning to "damn the Absolute" as defended by James's friend Royce.
As an undergrad at Mizzou I'd been encouraged to think well of post-Kantian metaphysical idealism, and to think not at all of classic American philosophy. I didn't know there was any such thing. I wrote a sympathetic paper on Schelling (mostly) for the undergrad philosophy contest, c. 1979. Improbably, it won. Professor von Schoenborn told me I wrote like T.S. Eliot. I didn't know what he meant, but I guessed it was a good thing. The next year I came to Vandy.
James's name was in the air, spoken frequently by my new teachers Lachs, Hodges, and Compton. His pragmatic approach to thinking came as a revelation, and Royce became a convenient stand-in for Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Through this new lens the "Absolute," the Idealists' sacred ground of Being and source of universal unification and rational order, flipped in my mind from great to awful.
And flipped it's been, pretty much ever since. I've been quite sure that James was right to wag his finger in Royce's face and say "damn the Absolute!" I accepted James's confident conviction that metaphysical idealists must renounce the ameliorative fight for right that James said life felt like to him. “If this life is not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight.”
At some point in my grad school years, now considering myself a committed Jamesian, I decided one day on a whim to purge my old files. I threw out that winning essay, sure it no longer contained anything I'd care to claim. I forgot it.
And now, with the Royce conference impending, I'm recalling it. I recall specifically that whatever I thought I understood of Schelling and the idealists was largely due to Royce's 1892 book The Spirit of Modern Philosophy. Royce's name then meant nothing to me, I'd not yet found James or encountered the James-Royce friendly feud.
So I kinda wish I could lay hands on that old essay again. I don't suppose it's sitting in a dusty file in the philosophy department in Columbia, Mo. Maybe I'll ask.
Or maybe I'd rather not. It's been fun, trying to reconstruct without a map the long intellectual journey that's brought me back around to the place I began. Royce's book is the more elaborate map I've been trying to navigate by. Perhaps I will, as the poet said, finally come full circle - he also started in Missouri, and measured out his life with coffee spoons - and know the place for the first time.
“We shall not cease from explorationPerhaps, at least, I'll come to know the wisdom of Royce's statement that alternative positions in philosophy need not be mutually exclusive or mutually destructive. Just as he says there's a place for both the metaphysical optimism of a Hegel and the cosmic pessimism of a Schopenhauer, so is there not just room in philosophy for the insights of both James and Royce, there's an urgent need for them. Both. Together. Thesis-antithesis, point-counterpoint, ying-yang... I thought I knew it. I'm beginning to really feel it too.
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."
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