Ep. 380: Josiah Royce on Community (Part One)

You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some folks who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 380 is something like, what is a community? And we read sections of Josiah Royce's The Problem of Christianity from 1913. For more information about the text and the podcast, please see partiallyexaminedlife.com. This is Mark Nitzenmeier sundered from the rest of you by chasms of mutual mystery in Madison, Wisconsin. This is Seth Paskin, breeding cooperation at the expense of a loss of interest in the community in Austin, Texas. This is Wes Alwin, the mere gesticulation of a self in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This is Kara Barnett, and I am speaking from Salt Lake City, Utah. Well, thanks for joining us, Kara. You had recommended Royce to us more than a year ago. It was, I think, seven years ago. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, okay. Well, that's still technically accurate. And we knew that Dylan was gonna be gone. I was combing through emails of recommendations, and I think I was intrigued when you had recommended this guy because we just don't cover a lot of the lesser known pragmatists, I guess, or the American slash British Hegelians. We haven't done much of that. And I think this guy falls into both camps. A little bit of Emerson, maybe, is the closest figure that people would be familiar with. The term that usually gets used with Royce is an absolute pragmatist, which is kind of two terms that seem a little contradictory. He separated himself from the Hegelians, and the pragmatists, the other pragmatists were made a little uncomfortable with his discussion of the absolute. So sometimes sort of distanced themselves from him, but absolute pragmatist is what we call him. The selections you had picked out for us in this problem of Christianity are really all about what is a community. And Yes. You know, so I was interested in that, just seeing that from the Hegel perspective. We're gonna actually start reading a little more of his phenomenology on the Geist and how you could sensibly talk about this sort of super mind, super sensible merging of people without being some sort of weird mystic because, you know, it's just not the case. Even if you think that as, Royce refers to in in Hindu mysticism or something, oh, I am you. You are me. We are all together. We are so this Emerson uber mind, there's very little apart from sort of a strictly religious context that I can make sense of out of that. You certainly can't, as a psychologist, say, well, let's talk about what this Ubermind produces. Like, you could get a little bit of a Jungian or something about it. But this guy is is more concerned with actual communities without trying to falsify any of the data. Right? That it it is just the case that my consciousness …