Studying Royce With Frank Oppenheim
During his long career as Professor of Philosophy at Xavier University, Frank Oppenheim, S.J. ( b. 1925 --- ) was a tireless student of the American idealist philosopher Josiah Royce. Royce (1855 -- 1916) had long been out of fashion in American philosophy but Oppenheim's lifelong work in writing, teaching, and in organizing Royce's papers has encouraged other readers to explore his work.
Oppenheim wrote four books about Royce, including this work, "Royce's Mature Ethics" (1993). Although the title refers to Royce's "mature" work and to his "ethics", the book is broader in scope on both counts. Almost from the beginning of his study of Royce, Oppenheim classified his work into four stages: the "pre-formed" period (1855 -- 1882), the "early" Royce (1883 -- 1896), the "middle" Royce (1897 -- 1911) and the "mature" Royce (1912 -- 1916), based on what Oppenheim sees as a deepening series of philosophical insights. While Oppenheim's work focuses on the "mature" Royce, this book is valuable for the overview in provides of Royce's life and thought beginning with his earliest years. A major theme of this book is the continuity through development of Royce's thought over the course of his life.
Similarly, while the book's title refers to "ethics", Oppenheim's study includes much more. Oppenheim stresses throughout the interconnected character of Royce's thinking and how it tended to weave together issues of ethics with metaphysical and epistemological questions. Oppenheim's book suggests that it would be futile to prioritize any of these three broad philosophical areas as more basic than the others to Royce's thought. Oppenheim's approach also suggests that questions of ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology become increasingly intertwined in Royce's "mature" period as did Royce's receptivity to empirical and historical studies.
As an ethical philosopher, Royce probably still is best-known for his 1908 book, "The Philosophy of Loyalty" in which he argued for the importance of the virtue of loyalty as the basis for ethical life and for the centrality of the virtue of loyalty to other virtues. Oppenheim argues that Royce came to qualify in his mature work the importance he placed on loyalty in favor of a more subtle, non-foundational situational approach which emphasized the three-fold values of autonomy, goodness, and duty as well as the concept of "fittingness" -- responding well to the needs of a particular situation rather than by reliance on abstract rules. For Royce, the three-fold ideals became ways of answering the fundamental ethical question "who am I?" and in developing the implications of this question individually, communally, and religiously. Oppenheim develops his understanding of Royce's "mature" ethics through a close reading of Royce's lectures and outlines for lectures between 1914 --1916, which were unpublished and sometimes sketchy, and through some late published essays.
Royce's late ethics gets described in detail only in the latter chapters of Oppenheim's book. Most of the book consists of Oppenheim's efforts to contextualize Royce's late thought by showing the development of ethical themes from his earliest works through "The Philosophy of Loyalty" through the late lectures and essays. At least as importantly, Oppenheim shows the development of Royce's metaphysics and epistemology from the Absolute Idealism of the earlier years. Oppenheim finds that late in his life, Royce became increasingly influenced by the thought of his friend, Charles Peirce. Royce learned from Peirce the importance of signs and interpretation and used this insight to replace the common subject-object dichotomy of philosophy with a triadic system consisting of an interpreter, the object or concept to be interpreted, and the person to whom the interpretation was given. Royce's development of Peirce's insight became the basis for Royce's religious philosophy in his 1913 book, "The Problem of Christianity", and Oppenheim argues, it carried over into Royce's ethical thinking as well. Peirce's thought also influenced Royce in other ways. Peirce spoke of "interpretive musement" as a way of exploring in a free-flowing kind of way the implications of philosophical concepts, and Royce adopted this approach, rather than the approach of rigorous, deductive, rationalistic argument in his late philosophizing on ethics.
The single most important part of this book is Oppenheim's discussion of Royce's "ethical-religious" insight of 1893 in which Royce argued from the existence of error and fallibility to an all-knowing, all-encompassing Absolute. This move to Absolute Idealism has a great deal to do with Royce's subsequent obscurity. Oppenheim tries to show how Royce worked at restating his argument through the end of his life and how it contributed to his "mature" philosophy, including his ethics. The Royce shown through Oppenheim's book remains a highly spiritual, religious thinker devoted as well to human community and deeply skeptical of modern forms of nominalism and extreme individualism. The last sections of Oppenheim's book offer comparisons of Royce's thought to that of others including Nietzsche, John Stuart Mill, and Richard Niebuhr together with Oppenheim's own assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of Royce's thought.
"Royce's Mature Ethics" is a multi-layered, difficult study that offers a challenging, sympathetic view of Royce and of philosophical thinking. The book shows, as Oppenheim wanted it to do, that Royce is a thinker worth knowing. Readers with a serious interest in Royce and with some familiarity with his writings will benefit from studying Oppenheim.
Robin Friedman
