Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 24 Fall 2006

              Royce, Santayana, and
"The Relational Form of the
Ontologicai Argument"
We don't substitute for [essences and existents] private or romantic views of what it is to
Be. We first accept [Santayana's] view of what it is to Be, if only he can make clear to us
what that view means. This difficulty was to comprehend the sense in which the essences
are, apart from the existents; the sense in which essence is different from existence; the
sense in which you cannot determine from the essence of a thing whether it exists or no.
Josiah Royce, "The Fourth Conception of Being"
Is there anything whatever in the sort of reasoning which is represented by the ontologicai
proof? I suppose this question to be of very critical importance for your whole view of the
method of metaphysics. The fact that Anselm was using that proof in reference to the God of
Christianity is a historical accident.
Josiah Royce, "The Relational Form of the Ontologicai Argument"
I
During his final years, Josiah Royce (1865-1916) shifted from defending an absolute
idealism that features a universal consciousness to working out a social metaphysic that
adapts for its own ends some elements of C. S. Peirce's social hermeneutic theory.1
This is how Royce summarized his still-developing metaphysical doctrine in 1913—-
the passage clearly sets the stage for his ultimate effort logically to ground his "social
approach to metaphysics" upon a hermeneutically cast "relational" form of the
Ontologicai Argument:
The universe, if my thesis is right, is a realm which is through and through dominated by
social categories. Time, for instance, expresses a system of essentially social relations. The
present interprets the past to the future. At each moment of time the results of the whole
world's history up to that moment are, so to speak, summed up [in what Thoreau called the
"nick of time"] and passed over to the future for its new deeds of creation and of
interpretation. I state this principle here ... as an example of what I have in mind when I say
that the system of metaphysics which is needed to define the constitution of this world of
interpretation must be the generalized theory of an ideal society. Not the Self, not the Logos,
not the One, and not the Many, but the Community will be the ruling category of such a
philosophy,"
To miss this trajectory of Royce1 s thinking is to miss his move to construe
"interpretation"3—specifically a metaphysically generalizable notion of triadic
"communities of interpretation"4—as a third of three ways (or "forms and sorts") of
1 This paper was presented to the George Santayana Society at its annual meeting in New York
on December 29, 2005,
2 The Problem of Christianity (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press, 2001), p. 344,
emphasis added. To be abbreviated as PC.
3 Which fails to get so much as a separate entry in the detailed index of his published Gifford
Lectures, The World and the Individual (1899, 1901 rpt. New York: Dover, 1959).
4 Royce terms "triadic communities" those whereby some B interprets an A to a C. Examples
that he adduces range from the temporal community, in which the present (B) "interprets" the
past (A) to the future (C), to the "banker's community," where the lender or depositor (B)
"interprets" the borrower (A) to the banker (C), to Peirce's scientific community, where the