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

0:04 Mark: Hey folks, I'm trying to teach my big books in Continental philosophy class again for the spring. I need to know how many people are interested and when. Please see partiallyexaminelife.com class for details. Hey, this is the Partially Examined Life, episode 380. We've been discussing Josiah Royce. We had a wonderful guest for our first half. She has fled. So it's just Wes and Seth and I for the second half here. And Wes, you were about to read something. We're still in lecture four of the Realm of Grace, is that right? Or are we?

0:41 Wes: Well, I was jumping ahead to community and time process just to kind of underline some of the points you guys were making because you're referencing this. But we don't have to go there because it's jumping ahead.

0:52 Mark: I'm fine jumping ahead. I like getting. I mean, we've. We've already referred to this quite a lot because we were talking about what it is to be a member of a community. And I think he really doesn't get down to the brass tacks of what this is until these later lectures.

1:06 Wes: Yeah, so he makes the point that, you know, this is around 36, so

1:11 Mark: section nine of lecture nine, community and time Process.

1:15 Wes: He makes a point that if we look at any, you know, if we take a sort of time slice of a community, it won't look so organized. Right? So say that we're likely to see the, quote, predominantly pluralistic form of the various relatively independent doings of detached individuals, or else the social form of the confused activities of a crowd. And then he makes this distinction between crowds and communities. The crowd has no institutions, no organization, no coherent unity. And then he wants to make this particular point about the unity of a community involving a time process.

And the community is the product of a time process. And the analogy is the personal identity in which our own personal coherence is predicated on our relationship to our memories, which I compare to sort of Locke's idea and the one expanded upon by Parfit. So at this point we're at page 40, right? He'll say the self is in essence a being with the past. And we're inseparably bound up with our past, not to mention our future and our plans. So without that, the self is just. If we just take a time slice of the stream of consciousness, we're just a flash of consciousness.

He calls it the mere gesticulation of a self, not a coherent personality. And what makes me an actual self is memory that links me to the past. And. Right. Not just that, but it reveals these tendencies within me. There's a kind of coherence to it and it has this Forward looking trajectory. So 42. I am one more or less coherent plan expressed in life. And then Most succinctly, my idea of myself is an interpretation of my past. This is what Seth was getting at. Linked also with an interpretation of my hopes and intentions as to my future.

2:58 Mark: And he throws in the next way that a child is less of a self because they have fewer accomplishments, fewer antecedents, fewer deeds to reflect on. I mean less interesting in some ways are interesting for other reasons.

3:12 Wes: He's got a lot of great lines here. Like the mature person bears the credit and burden of his long life of deeds. Unlike a child. Right. He is in great part a record. I love that some of us have better records than others, unfortunately. So he'll say, right. An individual self is present datum, but a collection of. Collection of data based on. End quote. So quote based on and upon an interpretation of the sense of the tendency of the coherence and the value of a life to which belongs the memory of its own past. I just love these little pithy descriptions of what it means to be a self.

3:47 Seth: Yeah, that same sentence I had marked out, Wes. It's worded kind of weirdly and it's. If you try to just parse through it, it's a little strange. But I said I think I got the idea. So where do we want to go next?

4:00 Wes: So the thing now is in section 11 he's going to use this. He's going to say in a sense of community also has an identity analogous to. Based on memory and future hopes. That's analogous to the personal.

4:12 Mark: I guess just before we get to the expanded self here. And what enables the expanded self is do we. I guess this does strike me as a very forward looking, parfit esque take on the self that it's not about phenomenology. The phenomenology gives us this illusion of the continued. The stream of consciousness and that's what the self is. When in fact, you know, we just. We're very scattered. We don't have this continuous stream of consciousness. We're focused on one thing and then we sleep for a while and we're focused on something. And there's not necessarily this continuity of memory.

So it becomes. It's a social thing primarily. And even the way that we know ourselves is socially, as you know, per Hegel, that we've discussed ad nauseam is that I know myself because I am a record for other people. And I am acquainted with what is worth recording on the record by the way that other people treat me, by the way that I operate as a social self because there's so many tedious Trivial things that I do throughout my day. And if I just regarded every second of my day as co. Equally important with every other second, it would just be buzzing, blooming confusion.

And so it can't be just us as individuals with our desires that sort of pick out not just what comes to my attention at this moment, but what constitutes myself. It has to be a cooperative effort with. With others.

5:30 Wes: Yeah. The self is not. It's not an empirical object. Right. Famously, it's not a. Even a metaphysical object where I can say, oh, I have my sense of self because I can look inward and see this thing called the self. That's why the word interpretation is important. I have to take all these different data and look at their coherence. And he uses this word tendency as well. Right. What is their. That's where hopes and desires and things like that come in. What is the trajectory, all these different experiences, the ones in the moment and the ones in the past. And so my interpretation of myself, right, is. Is heavily based on making sense of all the. These different data of the past and also thinking in terms of, okay, what do I want to be, what do I want to do? Yeah, all of that stuff. So.

6:19 Seth: Yeah, well, and it's the importance, the move he needs to make here is that. So he's got the idea of two different types of being, two different types of entities, the individual and the community. And we've talked about community being made up of individuals, but how do they share things? Having a shared existence in this community. And we know it's not going to be mystical or transcendent in some way. So in a very practical sense, by saying individuals get their sense of self and become who they are by virtue of having a past and interpreting that past.

And he says, okay, well then if we say that communities have a past and there are events in the past of a community that are shared by two individuals, that's how they've come together and that's basically how they merge. And in fact, it becomes kind of the defining characteristic in some sense of the community itself. Like being in a community means sharing experiences, the same experience with others. That's kind of the foundational element. And so it's constitutive not just of the community by bringing individuals together, but also becomes constitutive of the identity of the individuals themselves as they tell that story.

Very, very nice move.

7:40 Wes: Yeah. And it's. And the weird thing about it is it's just. It's not even our own actual experiences necessarily. Right. So he'll say Two different. Two people can reg. The distant past is the same part of their own personal life. The distant past as in things that happened before I was born. King Arthur did such and such. I don't know why that suddenly occurred to me. That's not a great one. But anyway, let the stuff of legend the stuff of history.

8:04 Mark: I'm really into Arthurian legend.

8:05 Wes: Are you really?

8:06 Mark: No,

8:08 Wes: I would not. That would be consistent with what I know about your coherent self. But anyway, so for instance, the having of common ancestors, all these things that are part of what a culture might revere and point to. So I had mentioned the founding fathers because that's a very typical move that we make in this country to talk about, well, what. What does it mean to be an American? What does it mean to be part of this community? But yeah, we don't have need to have actually experienced it ourselves. We just need to have been told about it. So he uses this word, deeds, glory, spiritual powers of past men.

These things we can see as part of our own self and part of our own quote unquote experience, even though we haven't experienced it. And he gives this great example of the Maori with you ask them what clan they're in and they say clan or tribe. And they think of it in terms of, well, what canoe did I come over in? I came over in the canoe Tainui, for instance. And that's a way of defining, okay, what community am I part of? In terms of this past event that they never actually experienced? They never literally came over in the canoe.

9:14 Mark: Yeah. I mean, what do we think about this? I know this is just a step in the argument that he wants to ultimately talk about Christians being united by this common occurrence of the death of Jesus as being something in their personal history. This is when my salvation was established. But it just. Ultimately we want to have the. You love the community and the community loves you. The community is a mind so it can love you. Which of course takes the form of, you know, just like the community produces literature. Well, it's individuals writing the literature.

It's not. There's some super mind that is operating according to Searle's Chinese Room manual and producing things that the individuals don't understand. It's just that the individuals as a group taking collectively understand more than the one individual does. But there's so much potential. Should I be worried about just the potential error here? He says it doesn't even matter if some of these things are legendary.

10:08 Seth: Right.

10:08 Mark: If we all see ourselves. This is when the great Turtle Gave birth to. To us, to the first man. So I regard that, you know, and it's a pure myth. And maybe even the Jesus thing, you could say, maybe that didn't happen. But the fact that, like, this is identified as a real historical event is enough to motivate the community. It just seems like depending on who you talk to now, they might be like, oh, yeah, they might identify with coming over on the Mayflower. Basically, like, it was my ancestors that came over on the Mayflower. I'm so much more American than you.

10:39 Wes: I did, by the way.

10:41 Mark: It was the later Mayflower.

10:43 Wes: No, the real Mayflower. And his parents died immediately, but he survived. He was a kid. It says a lot about my. My life. But, yeah. No, I think what you're saying is important, Mark, because it. Because he does want to make the point. It's not just an allegory or a metaphor. And you can't believe it that way. Like, a Christian has to believe that Christ actually died on the cross. It has to be like a real concrete historical event to play its role in the same way. In my personal memory, I wouldn't look back on something, oh, that didn't really happen to me, but that's kind of an allegory, and that's the basis for my personal identity. That's not the way it works. So I think this is important. Yeah. What do we do with legendary stuff which is either not true or quasi true?

11:22 Seth: Well, I'm not sure I agree. I don't know. This is a tough one for me because I think. I'm not sure. You have to believe that it's literally true or not, simply because what's important is that you share it with somebody else. And that you share it. You have an interpretation of it as a shared experience or as a shared memory. And memories we know are inherently questionable. So I should say this in Royce's ideal world, maybe just in the same way that he's. Ideally, the community is founded on love, and ideally, the community, individuals are participating through loyalty and love and all this.

Maybe, ideally, the event actually happened. But practically, I think we can see that if you take this mechanism to be the way things actually work in some senses. And I think it's as good an explanation as any that people have shared myths. There are founding myths. I mean, I've been listening to revisiting Greek myths. Like, I just listened to. What is it, Edith Hamilton's mythology and the myths. When you hear the fully articulated myths and you get it, from earth and sky to titans to Olympian Gods and so on and so forth. The purposes and the meanings of the mythical stories and the moral lessons they're meant to impart in the way they're supposed to describe.

Like, like the founding of Athens, right. Or the existence of why there's a temple to so and so in this particular place and what it means, it serves that purpose. Now, whether did the Greeks believe that it was literally true? I don't know.

13:04 Wes: Well, I mean, yeah, by, by the time of Plato, I don't think so much. Yeah, maybe, maybe at some point. But what I'm thinking of is page 71. Because Paul, right, resisted this effort to treat things as allegory. That's part of the importance of Paul. So he says, since the early church was aware of this dependence of its community upon its memory, it instinctively resisted every effort to deprive that memory of definiteness, to explain it away as the Gnostic heresies did, or to transform it from a memory into any sort of conscious allegory. The idealized memory, the backward looking faith of an individual believer must relate to events that seemed to him living and concrete.

Hence the early church insisted upon the words suffered under Pontius Pilate. The religious instinct which thus insisted was true to its. Which thus insisted was true to its own needs. A very definite event must be viewed by each believer as a part of the history of his own personal salvation. Otherwise the community would lose its coherence. So I'm not sure that it needs to be true, actually true. But it seems like the believer must believe it's literally true, even if it's not. So we, right, the basis of our community might be something that really is on some level allegorical, but we can't think it's just allegorical like because at that point where, right, for Socrates, yeah, okay, the gods.

But obviously it's more of he's not taking the gods literally. And then he got right, he got killed for it. Although the people who killed him probably didn't take the gods literally either. They were just pretending, being hypocrites and pretending that they still had the faith that was actually passing out of existence at that point.

14:47 Mark: Throughout this I was thinking when I was reading about just how we identify ourselves as a member of a generation or something, you know, and a lot of it has to do with media.

14:58 Wes: Right.

14:58 Mark: Did we do. We are a community because we have read the same books, because we were subjected to the same commercials when we were growing up. And of course in that way it's just very gradational and we don't pretend it's an actual community. There's no community of Gen X. We're all working together to do the Gen X stuff. But we could still talk about when 911 happened or if you were alive when Kennedy was shot, these things, Mark, in the way that he's talking about things in our personal history. So I guess he's using this to. For the very definite purpose of defining a particular kind of community.

But clearly they have resonance and application beyond. Like they're not sufficient to give you a community. Maybe that's just to say that we all regard the 911 as part of our personal history. At one point he says we are community with regard to that event. But that just makes it sound like community is not a real thing. There's. There's an infinite number of communities, just as there's a sort of an infinite number of groups that we identify with or causes that we identify with. Just things that we have sentiment towards.

16:01 Wes: Yeah, it does seem like there are. So the ideal community in a way is like the eidos. It's the standard. And that would be the Christian community or something like it, which is genuinely lovable and which we love in the right way. And for the ideal, there's this very strict set of criteria. And time process is included, but a lot of other things are included as well. And so what do we want to say about these other more ordinary forms of community, including the tribal ones that he begins with? Right. Is that a community in the fullest sense? It seems?

No, but in a looser sense, he does seem to be using the word community there. He does of course, want to say, okay, these certain groupings of human beings are definitely not communities like crowds, but even cooperate people who are cooperating. Right. Or a bunch of people in the factory are not necessarily a community. He uses the marketplace as an example. So independent buyers at a market. This is on page 37. These are not communities. And they may even have some sort of things that bind them together, like gossip. But that gossip doesn't establish the life of a community.

He says a true community is a product of the time process. And gossip has too short a short a memory. So time process does some of the role of safe distinguishing Right. Buyers at a market and some other crowd. What is it in chemistry? It's like a colloid instead of being something that's actually chemically bonded. Right. When you mix something together, where does the chemical bonding happen?

17:30 Seth: There's the time element. And also he talks about like, I think I had a quote here. About the drudgery of modern mechanical existence, that even if you're together a long time, if you're just not invested in what you're doing.

17:44 Wes: That's page 80 84. Mechanically cooperative social life versus true community. Yeah, this is a great section for talking about true versus whatever.

17:53 Seth: The other thing he says, even if you are in a cooperative group, cooperation doesn't equal community, because A, you need time and B, you need a kind of investment by each of the individuals in the activity of the group. And if you're just working in a factory, showing up every day, doing your thing, and you have no connection to the output or the product, and you have no shared experience. He says, so there's the quote. On the contrary, and for the most obvious reasons, there's a strong mutual opposition between the social tendencies which secure cooperation on a vast scale and the very conditions which so interest the individual in the common life of his community that it forms part of his own, ideally extended life.

In fact, this is the next page. It is the original sin of any highly developed civilization that it breeds cooperation at an expense of a loss of interest in the community. And I thought that was. You know, we've seen this many, many times on the podcast when we've talked about other things, talking about social media, the idea that somehow what that is is community, that social media forms community. But, you know, when you read it through the Roycean lens, if you will, you can see how it's in no way, shape or form anything even like community.

19:09 Mark: Well, yeah, it's like the common thing that I was referring to of, you know, we've seen some of the same movies or whatever, that these are bastardized pseudo communities that do not provide the spiritual nourishment that he thinks a community. They do not solve the problem of personal life. They might make you, in some sense feel less alone because you are witnessing some of the same things or have some of the same thoughts or whatever. But it is not enough.

19:34 Wes: I mean, I do think, just speaking of personal experience, I feel most a part of a community of a sort when I am involved in some cooperative activity with others. Even in a corporate job setting where I'm like on a team. And as pathetic as it sounds, right, there is something about cooperating with others towards a unified goal which is powerful. Right. But in section nine, he's going to say people don't form a community merely by cooperating. That has to be accompanied by what he calls an ideal extension. So what does he mean by that? This is like page 85. The into cooperation enters into his own life. Into his own life is the life of my own self writ large. So it can arise. Cooperation can arise from all these selfish motives like imitation, rivalry, greed, ingenuity, all this stuff. But it can rise to a different. It can ultimately do something else than serve base interests.

20:38 Mark: And I think love ends up being the thing that he puts in here. I mean, we've talked about many different thinkers. I feel like Harry Frankfurt most recently, who talked about an extended sense of self so that you could have. You could be selfish. But if you include in yourself that you're being selfish about all your interests, your family, your community, then you actually end up not looking what an ordinary person would look like by selfish. You're just. You value the things that you value is what it comes down to. And so yes, we can be participating, we can be cooperating, even unwittingly.

We could be in the economy. You've been assigned this, you know, to, to operate your particular widget. And you're part of this machine that is the factory. And you could think of this factory as a mind that produces these particular things. But are you really a member of that community if you don't care about or like what's going on? It's only if it's the people's factory and you're saying, this is me. So I think of a, you know, he uses the example of a musical ensemble. Like in that case, unless it's a really bad musical ensemble and everybody's only singing or you know, playing for themselves, then like, we're doing this together.

We know we're doing this together. I see that you're singing the alto part. I know that I couldn't sing the alto part. And you know, without you we would not have this, this wonderful thing. And I love, I'm an artist. I love what we are doing. I love playing this role. So that's the full, full on community.

22:02 Wes: Yeah, this is page 88 to 89. And he gives these different criteria to say when, when does cooperation rise to the level of a community? And he'll say that individuals must be able to direct their own deeds and deeds of cooperation. That's 1. Observe those by their fellow workers. That's 2. Which can happen to some extent in an orchestra, but not right in a larger factory or something like that, where we were just cogs. And then three, know that without this cooperation, the deed could not be accomplished by the community. And that's where he brings up a chorus or an orchestra.

So there's an element of conscious art to it. And then he'll say, all right, so if you add to cooperation three things you'll get. You'll get a genuine community. And the three things are deeds that are seen as linked through an extended history with the past and future deeds of the community. And then we identify our own life with this common life of the community and those that extended history. And then all the members agree in this identification. So it's a bit abstract there in those criteria. I'm not sure I fully understand it, but that seems to be the differential.

23:07 Mark: All the members agree is something that I have the hardest time with, is that I feel like there could be, in some sense we are all Americans or I don't know, even in a band you could be like, I don't care about the lyrics, you know, I just want this. Like this is the thing that I'm focusing on what you guys are doing over there with the production and your background vocals or whatever, like I'm not identifying with that. I don't really give a about that. And so we're both. It's so common, right? We on this podcast, we are being a community, we're working for a common thing.

But do we have the same understanding of our project? This is why we have endless nightcaps and things where we sort of try to express to each other what we think we're doing. And I feel like there's always still going to be separation like that. You're not going to have. Unless you have somebody telling you, as in the case, oh Jesus. And then Paul, he told you this is what the community is about. If you're really in this community, you're actually adopting somebody else's interpretation.

24:10 Seth: I think it's too much to ask that, that everybody would have the same shared interpretation of the participation in the community. And I think that's what he gets at later when he starts talking specifically about the problem of Christianity and the Christian community and how it's unified. There is something that at least shapes the interpretation of participation of each individual, namely the resurrection. Right. So I do think that you could buy off and say that a non unified or any individual could have. As long as an individual has a belief that they're invested in, they're sharing in this community, they have that kind of commitment to it, the loyalty part of it, as he says, as long as everybody else in there has that too.

It just wouldn't be ideal. Perfect community that's going to accomplish universality, perhaps that you're going to get when you factor in the shared future goal. Because he doesn't mention that as a. So apparently you can have community without having that shared future goal.

25:14 Mark: And certainly Kara was trying to say, you know, don't forget these are. This community is a special thing. This is a technical term. And you can't associate with any given community. So I was asking about Madison versus Wisconsin versus the United States. Do we just have to say that all those things that we call communities that we value for community's sake are never by necessity communities? Because no city is going to have even. Right. Seth is saying we don't all have to have the same interpretations, but we can't have such widely divergent interpretations that any given city is like a market, as he says, at least the market people are there to buy stuff.

They have a shared goal. They want to buy and sell stuff. They have a recognition of the role that others are playing there. So you could say that it is sort of like we're being in a band. If you went to the market by yourself, well, there's nothing to buy. You can't. You can't have a market by yourself. So it's a cooperative effort, still with a shared understanding, but yet that's still not a community. So much less is the entire city of Madison a community.

26:19 Seth: Right.

26:20 Wes: Yeah.

26:20 Seth: No, no, I think Mark's exactly right. According to this criteria, right? There's what we call communities aren't really communities. And I was thinking about this. He says on page 92, I think, talking about great national festivities that engender a positive feeling of participation in community. Just so tomorrow's drudgeries will be bearable. That there used to be much more of rituals and events and things that were built into the national consciousness of the United States and the fabric of the. Of life in the United States that connected individuals to the nation and to the community, and that those things have seemed to have disappeared or degenerated or maybe I just got old and I don't feel the same way anymore. But do you guys remember going to elementary school and saying the Pledge of Allegiance? And, like.

27:13 Wes: I sure do, because I came here from Ireland at the age of nine, and I'm like, what in the hell? I thought it was so freaky. And I refused to do it. But I also, in Ireland, you know, with public schools or Catholic schools, I refuse to do confession. But mainly because I felt too guilty to do confession. Like, I just felt guilty about everything. So, like, there's no way.

27:35 Mark: I was also influenced by the episode of Good Times where the Son is like, I don't want to say the pledge of Allegiance, especially that under God part. And it turned out that there was some sort of evil liberal teacher that was influencing this. And then there was a confrontation between the parents and the liberal. The evil liberal teacher, the boy was, you know, back on the straight and narrow. I think by the end of the episode, as as happens.

27:58 Wes: Oh, who's the producer of Norman Lear, All in the Family?

28:02 Mark: Norman Lear.

28:03 Wes: Super liberal. Yeah, that's interesting. But I just looking back here at. There are various places where he's like, okay, I'm going to give you the criteria of community now. So here's yet another one starting on page 60 where he's going to go first, second, third. Right. First condition of community is this temporal extension part to what's not personally remembered. So to these shared past of the community. And then that's actually quite a long section before he gets to the second stuff. So he talks there, for instance, about common objects, has this great line about it's the ideally extended self that is worth living, not just the right, the momentary self.

So the community sense has to live in the past and the future. And then second condition, communication. Not mystical melding into one another, but discrete individuals who actually communicate. And then the third condition, it can't

28:59 Mark: be that everybody that watched the same TV show or whatever is part of a community. You'd have to talk about it at the very least. We are not communities just by being dictated to which. So I sort of think of that as like, well, we all are undergoing this Trump bullshit and we'll all think about the day in which Trump will not be in front of us and how we thought that that would. And there are lots of people that identify in this community. But are we really a community unless we're, you know, engaging in. I don't know how much communication is necessary.

It seems lots of people feel this way without feeling the need to themselves kvetch about it. Do you have to be. Is communicating two way or is my just hearing other people through podcasts again a top down medium kvetching about it? Is that enough for me to be. Can you be a listener community of the pel. Just because you, you listen or do you. For to be a community, do you. Do you have to communicate back to us?

29:53 Wes: Yeah, he doesn't really. He just. This is on 67, the communication part and it just, he. It's just sort of a throwaway and he's. I think he's trying to just make the point that he doesn't like the mystical melding of cells thing, because then there would be no communication. But maybe there is more about that. And, you know, all this stuff on interpretation, but yeah. And then the third condition, some identical shared events in ideally extended past and future selves, which does sound a lot like the first condition we got.

30:20 Mark: Right. You mentioned the swords or something in here. Instruments of my will. So they're along with these events. There can't be just objects. The object has to be tied to events. But interestingly, we have to. For to consider it the. The past event or the future hope. Part of my personal timeline, I think it has to be connected to my will. And so the coat of arms or whatever that identify with. Oh, yeah, this is when we came over from Germany and my grandfather brought this coat of arms, this rock, whatever the thing is somehow, you know, so we can have talismans, we can have objects, a flag that we regard as part of our personal identity, but they're definitely tied to stuff that has happened.

30:59 Wes: Have you guys ever looked into genealogy?

31:02 Mark: Yeah, I mean, I've had relatives that have. So that you've. I've gotten a book. Here's the booklet of as far back as we can go. On my mother's side, for instance.

31:11 Wes: Yeah, I just. Like in my family, you know how the. The Mormon Church actually tries to do genealogies for everyone, even if you don't know about it and you can get on a certain site. So on my father's side, it's a complete genealogy, although. And part of it's like a faux genealogy all the way back to the Bible. It connects me to genealogies that continue through the Bible, but. Yeah, right. So Charlemagne is, of course, in there, but Charlemagne is the ancestor of every living Western European. And so is Muhammad, by the way. We are all direct descendants of Muhammad.

Every Westerner is. So you can read. There's an Atlantic Monthly article, and it's just the way the genetics works. And I'm like, oh, yeah, if you go back farther enough, basically you don't have to go that back that far before every person living in, say, 900 A.D. either they're the direct ancestor of everyone in the world, or they have no descendants in the world. It's either. Or. And it's like something like 60, 40. So it leads you to think, okay, well, first of all, I just get disillusioned with genealogy. Like, who cares? Who cares if I'm the descendant of some king?

Everyone is the descendant of that king. And then you ask yourself the question, okay, what Was I trying to do with this? Why was I interested in this? What did I want to know by saying, oh, look, there's a famous person that I'm descended from. Before I find out everyone is descended from that famous person, is it about thinking that I belong in some way to a community founded on this ancestry? Maybe I'm going too far on the limb here.

32:38 Mark: I mean, that seems like part of why we do this. I mean, we want to feel more important. I was in a past life. I think this is a similar phenomenon that I was somebody important in a past life. It allows us to be connected with. Yeah, I mean, that's the cynical way that I analyze a lot of this community stuff. It's not that it's the. It's the solution to my life. That it is a bullshitty way of identifying myself with something that I think is greater than me to ground meaning because I'm too wussy to find it in my own life?

33:13 Wes: Well, Orwell would say, right, we feel powerless and humiliated. Well, think of the Fukuyama episode on identity, where a lot of it is about status anxiety, right? And people we belong to, all these various different hierarchies, dimensions of status, whether it's everything from beauty and brains to what type of job we have and blah, blah, blah. We do better or worse in those things. But usually there's lots and lots of people who are way ahead of us. And so we naturally gravitate towards these different forms of transcendence. One is the stoic form, by the way, universalization.

It's also there in liberal, the idea of rights and Christianity, where we just get recognition by virtue of being human. You're important just by virtue of being human, but it doesn't really do enough for us because we continue to live in a competitive society. So the appeal of nationalism is that we can identify. We can say, okay, well, maybe I'm not better than anyone at anything at guitar this or that, but my country is better. I belong to the greatest country in the world. It's better than all the other countries. And I can get a feeling of power out of that.

That, to me is the more. The darker side of all this. You know, what is meaning? Is meaning just really about this fantasy of power that I can get by identifying with a larger group? Or is there a more benign sense of this, you know, Orwell's patriotism? Is there a way in which I can embrace the community and get something out of it that isn't?

34:38 Seth: Well, I think no. And that's The I should say sorry, I was answering a different question in my head already when you were finishing up your thought there, Wes. So if we get to the end of the second volume, the part that we read in the second volume, the redemptive what redeems participation in a community? Let's say you meet those first three criteria, right? The individual, the shared experience, the belief that the others are doing it is love. That essentially kind of an emotional attachment or emotional relationship that changes loyalty to a kind of form of devotion.

And that he kind of circles back to some of the stuff he says in volume one earlier about the individual being too small, too weak and needing to quote, unquote, merge or participate in the community. Love is the layered on top of participation in the community is the form of self sacrifice that's necessary to achieve a true deeper union. Something above and beyond just simple shared participation, if you will. And of course he thinks that that's what's unique to the Christian form of community because he says that it's only achieved through grace.

It's on page one, over two. Knowledge of the community is not love of the community. Love, when it comes, comes as from above. And he talks about grace. So, you know, I think what it comes down to is, you know, in his perspective at least, the Pauline conception of Christianity structured with the resurrection of Jesus on the one hand and one end, right? The perpetuation through time, the future resurrection of the believers and then the participation. And then, you know, you have to kind of like hope for the grace of God that welcomes you, in essence welcomes you into the community.

But you have to work to participate in the same way. And I don't think that possibility exists for any other kind of community for him. So whatever work, nationalism and nationalist identity might be doing for you, it's not going to do that.

36:54 Mark: We should just focus on probably for the remainder of this. Like what? This ultimate Pauline. So yeah, Paul the apostle from the Bible, Saul of Tarsus, AKA I've never thought about him as a philosopher. He refers to the genius of Paul, that he has this Rousseau like analysis of the social order. This is page 177, 178. That yes, society, you know, it puts us in relation with each other and you think that would make us into a community, but actually it just makes us realize that these impositions by society are foreign to us. I don't want to have to play this, be this cog in the machine.

And so it is sort of anti community. I mean we realize like I'm dependent on the community, but I certainly don't like the community, or at least I don't necessarily like the community. So he thinks that this is our fundamental fallenness is that we are by the very method of training to be social. We become less social, we become less apt to be able to join in real communities. And the only way out of that is some sort of grace that allows us to. It's loyalty really, but allows us to put aside. It's made us too selfish, this training, because we're defining ourselves in opposition to the community.

But through loyalty that we can merge back. We can throw aside this fundamental irascibility and impetuousness and shallowness that is the individual self's desires and channel them to this stable thing.

38:26 Wes: This is 175 to 76. We can train. Man can train his conscience only by awakening his self will, the active assertion of his own individual desires, worth and undertakings over against the will of his fellow and over and against the social will. So the training I think is in part about, you know, civilization and culture and everything that makes us self conscious. And so the, you know, the irony is that the greater that that's a collective process, that's an accomplishment of the collective of the community, that it can advance civilization to that level.

But the result of that is alienation. Right. The result of that is individualism is a sense of separate from another, from others. And the more he uses this phrase, the disease of self consciousness, which I love because Dostoevsky says something very similar in Notes from the Underground. And it's also evocative of Hegel, of course. Right. Self consciousness inherently alienates us from each other. So then what do we do about that?

39:22 Mark: Yeah, I had just been teaching Rousseau recently and it's a very similar picture of the very things that make us self conscious, that make us interesting, turn us against each other, that we have these, these values and we use them. Values sound like a good thing, but we use them to judge others, some of which we judge to be wanting. And so it creates competition, it creates where we have to put up a front for each other to meet other people's expectations. And so we become self alienated, we become deceptive. I think we could sort of use that Rousseauian idea to fill out what he's saying here. Since this is, given how long this text is, I think a very fragmented, quick account of this Pauline theory.

40:06 Wes: Yeah, he sets up this. Right. So training, part of training is to get us to respect the law, which is an expression of the Collective will. But then we. Right. The more aware we are of the law, the more aware we are of our own personal law, which is our individual will.

40:22 Mark: And I mentioned Ricoeur before, he has also this notion of the, the second innocence, if you recall, like that there's something you don't want to go back and be sort of childish and accept, join into. Right. He says the people most likely to join in communities. Royce says those who are not very well developed.

40:41 Seth: Right.

40:41 Mark: They have not developed the self will that you're talking about. They're not very sophisticated. So they're going to be the subman. They're going to be drawn into the mobs and the crowds. And what he wants, what he thinks is a real community is. No, no. For the enlightened people, the people that have developed self will, can they nonetheless sign on to something? Because it is a truly lovable community. Not that I'm just saying my team, rah, rah, rah, whatever it does, right or wrong, but I'm gonna posit that there is a community that is actually worth putting my entire developed individuality behind to channel and root that stuff without blunting my individuality at all.

41:22 Wes: Yeah. And he sees Paul as an exemplar of this kind of self, this willful person, this person who. Not just a naive person looking for a cult or something, but already very skeptical. Right. And I think Paul persecuted the Christians before he converted. He was a Pharisee. And it's not that he gives up that willfulness. It lives alongside the great, you know, the love that he's been converted into. Let me just find this section. Paul kept a marvelous union of unconquerable and even willful self consciousness with an absolute loyalty to the cause of his life. He combined those two things anyway. So it's the lovability. The lovability, as Mark pointed out, it's the lovability of the community has to overcome that acute self consciousness. We can't just lose it, right? We just talk. Oh, we're going to merge. We're going to lose our self consciousness. And that's the solution.

42:14 Seth: But I just saw, I went back to my notes. I just found something that seems to contradict what I just said before and what you just said. Maybe not contradict, but listen to this from page 98. But the Pauline charity is not merely an emotion, it is an interpretation. The ideal extension of the self gets a full and concrete meaning only by being actively expressed in the new deeds of each individual life. Unless each man knows how distinct he is from the whole community and every member of it. He cannot render to the community that what love demands, namely the devoted work.

Maybe by using the term, using love as a. And talking about merging or becoming a member. I guess since the individual conception of self is rooted in interpretation, there has to be some kind of agency, choice. Maybe you can't just believe that you're part of this whole thing and that you have no active will. You have to maintain the integrity of the difference between the two of you, meaning the community and the individual, but at the same time overcome that by, you know, through devotion and love of the community, to make that kind of commitment without losing a sense of self.

Because if you lose your sense of self, you're no longer doing interpretation, you're no longer actively constructing community or yourself. Right. Yeah.

43:28 Mark: Let's do our best to give a little more of the solution here, which does where you know. And he's going to continue this book further than we read to get into the more overall Christian part of this. But saying why this is such a exciting, unique community that is sort of natural outgrowth, the dialectical next step given other ideas of universal communities. And I don't think we've even said, like, what. Why he had this whole chapter called Grace. Whether we think this is just a cheat, right? That he says, I think, Wes, you had given this before that, right?

We want to be part of this universal, lovable community. I want to not just sign on to whatever bullshit community is here. I want to us to create the community that is worthy of our respect and worthy of my total admiration. And he sort of gives a phenomenological account of, like how Paul could sort of switch to that. It just as if it comes like a thunderbolt out of the sky, that that's what it feels like to receive grace to that. And he says, just psychology. Reason can never explain radical self transformation. And I just thought this was bullshitty.

I thought that this is. That unless you are already a Christian and had these notions, you would. Because otherwise he tries to be so in line with the psychology of his day. He refers to Wilhelm Wundt, you know, as somebody. Oh, they treated a community. He, Wundt, treated a community as a mind that can be. Let's talk about the psychological laws of the mind. In other words, sociology being a legitimate thing, which was just kicking off, right. Durkheim is about the same year, the same time period as what we're talking here, that there is a level of explanation available.

But then just to chicken out on that and say, well, there's some things that science just can't explain. And this one is really important for my theory.

45:19 Wes: Yeah. So the problem is, right, so we need great loyalty to be awakened, even in someone like Paul, who's obstinately critical and has a very independent attitude of spirit. So the community must be lovable. But to be lovable it must be a union of members who love it. Its lovability is predicated on its being loved by its own members. But they can't come to love it genuinely until it's lovable. So that's the whole chicken and the egg thing. And the way out is. This is page 184. And this is where he says, it seems to resemble the problem of the origin of life.

Right. Life as we understand it always comes from other lives. So how did it get started? Out of inanimate matter. But highly conscious loyalty presupposes some previous loyalty at a higher level. And we get out of that sort of, not actually entirely by getting an inspiring leader who teaches by his example or teaches by the example of his spirit, which is a very loyal spirit. So Jesus Christ, in other words. But Jesus himself, I mean, I think it helps to be the son of God. But Jesus, you know, why does he love the community? He can only love the community because it's not lovable yet, right?

It's got to become lovable through him. He can only love the community because he can see the future in a way, because. And see that in some sense it's predestined. But for the individual, as Mark was pointing out, there's no normal psychological explanation for this leap of faith, I guess is what you would call it. You can only get it through grace. So this like thing that converts Paul from being a cynic to being someone who believes despite all this stuff, he's done this work he's done with the lovability of the community. In the end, it can only be facilitated by grace.

It only has to be given to us by God, I guess.

47:08 Mark: Seth closing based on that. Was this the whole part where your brain just turned off and you're like, this is just scary and weird and I don't care about this.

47:16 Seth: It was the idea that there's a, you know, Jesus said, you know, you have to deny your mother and father and follow me, that kind of thing? Maybe I'm not quoting it exactly, but I don't speak Aramaic or Greek.

47:28 Mark: James Jones said, you had to deny anyway.

47:31 Seth: But my point is, is that there's this idea that you're nothing unless you have a commitment to. To a community, and specifically this particular community which is going to ask you to become. Which needs to become more important to you than any other community that you have. And anytime that you, you know, say, like, oh, well, it's based on love and, you know, it's all these. These sorts of things, but, you know, you just see the foundations. I've always thought of the violent and autocratic and tyrannical and genocidal roots of Christianity as being metaphysically based in the theology.

But here I see a way to construct those a different way. I've rarely read somebody who, as a thinker, I was just delighted, shocked, really enjoyed reading, and really impressed with Royce as a thinker and a writer. But, you know, like you said, is he preaching to the choir or is this just him trying to explain to the converted this is how you should think about, you know, get rid of your Episcopalianism and your various other flavors, and let's all go back to this Ur form of Christianity. As he's speaking to a broader audience. But what he seems to think of as being very positive, I just see as having a great potential for terrible outcomes.

48:51 Mark: Well, we're going to get to talk more about groups. We're going to do Freud on groups. We're going to do some Hegel on Geist pretty soon. So I think we'll get to wax more philosophical in this area next time. We're actually going to turn back to Thomas Aquinas and just read some more of his selected philosophical writings, this time on ethics. With Dylan back with us, you should let us know what you want us to read. Pel partiallyexaminedlife.com you can comment on the blog post associated with this episode, get in touch with us through Twitter, through Facebook, many other ways. Thanks, everybody. Good night.

49:26 Seth: Good night.

49:27 Wes: Good night.