Reviews for Reason, community and religious tradition

The average rating for Reason, community and religious tradition based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-09-20 00:00:00 Emily I-ping Lo Taming Impossibility What is the appropriate name for a person who solves a problem several generations before anyone realises there is such a problem? Prophet? Genius? Failure? Possibly all three? Josiah Royce was one such person. He anticipated the discovery of a fundamental contradiction in virtually every element of social interaction which wouldn’t be precisely formulated for 60 years after he identified it, and which constitutes an intellectual challenge that no one else has successfully addressed. The first to articulate the problem was the Nobel economist Kenneth Arrow in 1950. The so-called Arrow Impossibility Theorem revealed a fundamental flaw in theories of business, economics, organisation and the democratic state. All of these involve collective decision-making, that is choice by some group of individuals. The presumption most of us make is that through discussion and compromise, it is generally possible to arrive at some sort of agreement that works for everyone, perhaps one that might even be superior to anything preferred by any of the individuals involved. What Arrow demonstrated with very precise logic is that such group decisions under almost all circumstances work out very differently than expected. Except with the rarest of luck, the standard result of group decisions will be that which all the members of the group can accept but which none of them actually wants. Since Arrow published his findings many other mathematicians, logicians, and social scientists have confirmed and expanded his work. It is now the elephant in the room of social theory. Few talk about the Arrow Theorem because no one knows what to do about it. Or rather, no one but Josiah Royce. [see ] The implications of Arrow are disconcerting. For a start, there is, and can be, no ‘social utility function,’ that is, a means of calculating an outcome in which everyone is better off. This is called Pareto Optimality by economists; but Pareto Optimality does not exist. Therefore every proposal approved by say, congress, or the cooperative apartment board, or the jury at a murder trial, will produce a situation that is unsatisfactory to everyone, even for those who voted in favour of the proposal. More generally from a political point of view, it means that talk of the national interest, or the good of the community, or the collective value is bunk, clap-trap, hot air. Arrow touches everything that is even vaguely political not just formal electoral politics. In any situation in which the participants have even slightly different views based on experience or personal preferences, the Arrow stalemate will prevail. In a business board meeting, for example, the differences in perspectives of, say, the Operations manager from the Marketing manager, from the Financial director will virtually guarantee that the choice among alternative courses of action will be inferior to any one of the individual views expressed. [see: ] The consequences of Arrow are hard to digest. Surely with good will and the exercise of some reason there must be a way through such an apparent impasse. But there isn’t. In fact empirical studies have shown that the problem often gets worse when the participants in a decision want to maintain civil relations with each other. In any case the proof of Arrow is all around us continuously, from the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, to the results of the Global War on Terror (or Drugs), to the latest business strategy fiasco by a BlackBerry or the introduction of a New Coke or the hyped arrival of the Microsoft Zune (don’t remember that one? Exactly). Group decisions aren’t occasionally bad; according to Arrow bad is the best that can be hoped for. The problems with group decision-making, especially in electoral politics, it that frequently promotes the feeling of acceptance for dictatorship, for a leader who can cut through waffle and debilitating compromise and do the right thing, even if he or she is a bit of a bully. The issue with dictators, of course, is that unless they possess draconian powers of coercion, no one is likely to cooperate with them. Government agencies are likely to stonewall, business subordinates can subtilely sabotage, rivals will pounce on the resultant bad press. Royce anticipated the dictatorial response: “... the will of an individual or a group that prefers itself can breed cooperation only by stifling interest in any true community.” In other words, dictatorship destroys the community it infects. So the fact that Arrow is of critical social import is unquestionable. But the fact that no modern social theorist or mathematician or philosopher has any suggestion at all about how to deal with it is also unquestionable. So, despite its importance, Arrow is generally ignored. The Arrow Theorem is the common cold of organisational disfunction, a pervasive, long-lived virus that makes HIV look tame. The symptoms can be masked but the pathogen seems untouchable. Josiah Royce addressed just this problem of the Arrow Impossibility Theorem in much of his work. Royce developed the idea he frequently referred to as the Beloved Community, a group of indeterminate size, composed of individuals with a very specific relationship to each other. The major portion of Oppenheim’s book is devoted to explicating this relationship and, without ever mentioning Arrow, suggesting how this relationship works to solve The Impossibility Theorem. For Royce, community is a “conscious spiritual whole of life” which is formed when “the interests of the self lead it to accept any part of an item of the same past or the same future which another self accepts as its own.” This may sound mystical but Royce disliked mystics. It is decidedly spiritual and implicitly points to Arrow as a spiritual problem which is necessarily solved only by the spirit. Spirit for Royce is not something otherworldly but a commonplace of the everyday world of life, work and survival. Emphasizing this routine nature of spirit, Oppenheim uses what Royce calls ‘membership’, or the epsilon-relation, as his focal point. The epsilon-relation is the locus of the spirit. Surprisingly, Oppenheim does not mention the likely inspiration for the epsilon-relation, namely the Christian doctrine of the trinitariam nature of God. In this doctrine, God is conceived as three distinct persons, each with a definite personality; yet each of these persons completely contains the whole of the personalities of the other two. Thus the Trinity is the extreme ideal of community in which the independent interests of each member are never denied but which nevertheless are conceived as including the interests of the other members. Royce conceived of the epsilon-relation as potentially universal. It must remain, as it were, open-ended in its human form in order to exist at all. Its nature is inclusion. This is expressed in traditional religious terminology as ‘atonement’, that is the unification of those already in the epsilon-relation with those who are not yet. The epsilon-relation is called spiritual because it is a relation. It both is and is not a property of the human beings who are related through it. That is, it has an existence which is independent of its members; it transcends them and they are bound together through it, thus retaining their own independence within the community. The epsilon-relation is not transitive. That is, the fact that x has and epsilon-relation with y, and y has an epsilon-relation with z, does not imply that x has an epsilon-relation with z. All epsilon-relations are, at it were, mediated by the community not by any of its members individually. The community lives. It needs its members in order to live but its life is not theirs. Its interests includes theirs but they are not theirs. The community is the locus of the spirit and it is the spirit which unites the members to form the community. The spirit is in a position of the ‘ideal observer’ of the community. The members need to acknowledge the existence of this presence in order to be ‘opened’ by it to the other members. The reality may be difficult to conceive, but its logic is simple and straightforward. Each member of the community has what Royce calls their ‘cause’. This is the more or less articulate point of their life as they understand it. There are no wrong causes, although there may be many ineffectual, inappropriate, or obsessively destructive ways in which one’s cause is pursued. Usually these are the consequence of the stifling of causes either by self-censorship or social inhibition. Causes become stale and neurotic if they are not expressed and developed in concert with others. All causes of any consequence demand the cooperation and support of other people, who also have causes, if they are to be achieved to any significant degree. By sheer enlightened self-interest, it is clear that the causes of others are relevant to the achievement of one’s own. Causes are the result of interpretation - of individual history, of personal experience, of assimilated social norms, and of previous interpretations - by members of the community. That is, causes do not appear from some outer or inner space without reason. The complexity of their origins may defeat any analytic explanation, but the one thing we know for sure about causes is they are modified by further interpretation. And the interpretation that is possible within a community held together by the epsilon relation has a particular character: it seeks the bigger cause. That is, it searches for a cause which includes one’s own as well as that of other members, without diminishment of any of them. It is essential to keep in mind that a cause is an interpretation, not some unassailable fact of the universe. For Royce there are no unassailable facts in any case, just a series of progressive interpretations of an ideal called the truth. The end point of the process of truth-seeking is what is conveniently called God, but it could with equal accuracy be called the final universal community. The process of progressively inclusive interpretation can be seen clearly in science in which, for example, Newtonian physics is not proven wrong by Relativity physics, but included in it as a special case in which things are neither too big nor too fast. Interpretation of causes is therefore not a matter of compromise or bowlderisation but of imaginative expansion. The effect of community therefore is not the change of individual causes but their transformation. There is a fundamental philosophical difference between what has become known in management theory as ‘alignment’ and the synoptic vision created by a well-functioning community. The former tries a variety of mechanisms to fit round pegs into various oddly-shaped holes. The result is what Arrow predicts: universal dissatisfaction. The job of community is to ‘make everyone right’ that is to demonstrate how causes are linked, inter-related and dependent upon one another. In doing so new causes are discovered, invented really, which are manifestations of the spiritual unity already accomplished through the epsilon-relation. As Oppenheim points out, “For Royce a genuine community is not primarily an object of contemplation but a doer of deeds, a seeker and achiever of ends.” Quite apart from the achievements by the community as a whole, however, the most basic achievement is the discovery by individual members of his or her identity as a meaningful self. This is not some form of fixed tribal identity which has its existence in the denial of belonging somewhere else; it is an identity which is both positive and constantly shifting as the interests of the community and its members become more articulate and respond to new members and new conditions. Possible courses of action multiply as fast as the issues to which they are attached. Imagination inspired by hope is what the epsilon-relation provides. Royce’s concept of community doesn’t fit easily with any other sociological, managerial, or political theories. This doesn’t make it wrong, merely unpopular. Nonetheless there have been a string of rather brave academics and organisational practitioners who have done significant work to make his idea of spirit a reality. The philosopher C. West Churchman reflected the need for Roycean inclusion in his ‘sweeping in’ epistemology. Russell Ackoff spent a lifetime employing his Royce-derived idea of ‘idealization’ as a way to create effective epsilon-relations in business and government. The philosopher and political theorist Mary Parker Follett developed radically innovative organisational and political theories based on the concept of transformational leadership. Perhaps it is inevitable that the ideas of a prophetic genius like Royce should find their place only in the margins of modern life. Not failures exactly but neither promoting a sustained social revolution. And perhaps that is as it should be. Only as long as Royce’s community remains outside the mainstream of thinking does it have a chance to escape cooptation, distortion and diminishment. As things stand, his idea of community acts as a beacon of hope that Arrow is not an inevitable fate for us all.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-12-15 00:00:00 Martin Gonzalez Studying Royce's Religious Philosophy With Frank Oppenheim Josiah Royce (1855 -- 1916) was an American idealist philosopher who taught at Harvard for over thirty years together with his friend, William James. With his idealistic commitments, Royce has been an obscure figure since his death (unknown even to many professional philosophers). There has been a revival of interest in his work in recent years as part of a revival of interest in American philosophy. In a career spanning 40 years, Frank Oppenheim, S.J. (1925 -- April 3, 2020) was a tireless interpreter and champion of the thought of Royce. As a Professor of Philosophy at Xavier University, Oppenheim wrote four detailed book-length studies of Royce together with many papers and introductions to books. He also worked indefatigably in organizing the Royce papers at Harvard. With the exception of the small group of scholars interested in Royce, Oppenheim's work has mostly been unrecognized. His work has great value in understanding Royce and in making a case for Royce's continued importance. Oppenheim's studies focus on what he describes as the "mature" Royce -- the works Royce wrote in the last few years of his career beginning about 1911. In these works, Oppenheim argues, Royce developed and deepened his philosophical and personal arsenal beyond its scope in his earlier and middle-period writings. Most but not all Royce scholars agree that Royce's most lasting work came in his late period. The late works differ from Royce's earlier studies in downplaying his commitments to absolute idealism , in their greater attention to formal logic, and in their tendency to avoid allegedly knock-down deductive argument. Oppenheim's book "Royce's Mature Philosophy of Religion" (1987) shows how Royce's thinking about religion developed in his late works. Oppenheim devotes attention to two of Royce's books. The first is "Sources of Religious Insight" (1912) in which Royce developed seven ways in experience that individuals came to understand their religion, both for themselves and communally . This book was written in part as an answer to William James' famous book, "The Varieties of Religious Experience" which, Royce believed, unduly emphasized individualism and private feelings in its approach to religious experience. Royce's "Sources" is one of the most accessible of his works and he said that "it contains the whole sense of me in a brief compass." The second book Oppenheim studies, and in much more detail than the "Sources" is the 1913 work "The Problem of Christianity" which he views, together with most contemporary Royce scholars, as Royce's masterpiece. The "Problem", I have found, is a difficult book and Oppenheim approaches it from a variety of perspectives. Oppenheim stresses throughout Royce's engagement with the thought of the brilliant, if eccentric, American thinker Charles S. Peirce. Peirce wrote an article called "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God" in which Peirce coined the term "musement" for wide-ranging, non-deductive thinking about religion. Royce, for Oppenheim, practiced and developed "musement" in the problem. More importantly, Peirce attacked the standard philosophical distinction between subject and object by arguing that there was a third factor in knowledge -- interpretation. In his late religious philosophy, Royce took Peirce's insight and ran with it. He saw religious knowledge as triadic rather than as dyadic and as always involving interpretation rather than a subject somehow coming in direct contact with an object. This adoption and broadening of Peirce became the critical factor in Royce's late thinking about religion. It gave his thought a hermeneutical, communal focus. It was non-relativistic, for both Royce and Peirce, in that interpretation always was directed towards truth and, in Royce's case towards an interpreter-spirit that appears a descendant, at least, of the Absolute of his earlier writings. Royce's book, and more so Oppenheim's study, is unclear about the nature of the Christianity it studies. Oppenheim is far more committed as a practicing Christian than Royce ever was or became. Oppenheim's analysis sometimes straddles between the Christian Church and an ideal form of religion not limited to Christianity. Both Royce and Oppenheim recognize the difference, but Oppenheim's interpretations for me sometimes slide too close to Christianity and to the Catholic understanding of Christianity. Oppenheim describes well how Royce worked at developing a system of formal logic that was less purely extensional than the logics beginning to be developed in his day and how he tried to state his religious philosophy in terms of the logic. The result is basically a communal approach in which individuals function on a dual level: by themselves but more importantly as a member of a community, which for both Royce and Oppenheim is ontologically real. Oppenheim understands Royce as adopting an experiential, historical approach, to find the basic teachings of Christianity in the doctrine of community, sin, and atonement which both Royce and Oppenheim suggest are important in different ways to all forms of religious life, not merely Christian. The ultimate goal is to love and trust life and community as opposed to seeing oneself as an isolated, "lost" or "alienated" individual as was common in Royce's time and remains so today. I have learned a great deal from Royce over the years, and I learned a great deal from thinking about Royce with Oppenheim. Oppenheim sees Royce as a pilgrim of sorts, similar to John the Baptist or John Bunyan, pointing the way to a fuller conception of religious spirit and of possibility than was common among his peers. Oppenheim's care, patience, and devotion to his subject, together with his own philosophical and religious commitments, make him a valuable guide even for those readers who may not fully share either Royce's or Oppenheim's own religious or philosophical understandings. Robin Friedman