Royce

Sometimes your reading instincts fail you, and this was one of those times. Too bad Shakespeare and Origen weren’t available for the trip, because Royce was a definite misfire, on this occasion at least, and I was reminded of why I can never make it all the way through his books.

Don’t get me wrong, he’s a serious author with a bit of a philosophical spark. But he really meanders around the point for many sections at a time. He seems to offer nuclei of good ideas rather than full-blown ideas. For instance, his point about the central importance of loyalty to all forms of maturity is interesting, but now after many pages it still keeps slipping away from me. It’s hard to put my finger on why, but I suspect it goes back to the following sorts of points.

Ortega has a gripe against Balzac. (I don’t have strong feelings about Balzac one way or the other.) But Ortega calls Balzac a “dauber,” meaning that the more pages of his you read, the more you feel that his characters and situations aren’t really there. That’s sort of what I think about Royce. His books are like the ghosts of philosophical systems. Your eyes aren’t tricking you — there’s something in the room, but you can’t grasp it, and when you turn on the lights you don’t see it anymore.

Another way of putting it is this… The really great philosophers evoke something that is deeper than their own sentences. With Royce I am always somehow stuck on the level of his exact words.

This may seem somewhat paradoxical, given that we think that a great stylist is one who adds something over and above the mere piling up of ideas. But I think it’s the opposite– the great stylist (of ideas, and not just of language) obliquely awakens something that language can never touch, yet is still very much there, and very much palpable. But Royce’s ideas are too often exhausted in the stating of them.

Again, he’s not that bad. And in many ways you feel like he’s ahead of his time a bit, given that his Gifford Lectures are from around 1899-1900 (early success for someone from such a humble background). But even though I feel more sympathy for Royce’s speculative temperament than for the temperament of his friend William James, I think there’s a good reason that the reputation of James is immeasurably higher today. It’s not just because pragmatism is more fashionable than absolute idealism. Even if the fashions flip all of a sudden (as they invariably do at some point), James’s will still be a voice we want to hear.

And of course, that’s always a good test for depth– “will the book I am reading still be of interest once its claims are completely out of fashion?”