Josiah Royce on Interpreting Other People

Introduction

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Close Reads Podcast

1:00This is Close Reads. A philosophy podcast with Mark and Wes. I'm Wes Alwyn. And I'm Mark Lentenmeier. Hey, let us follow up on the Partially Examined Life recent episode on Josiah Royce. That's episode 380. To read a little more from the book we covered in that episode, The Problem of Christianity, which is not really about Christianity, at least not the part that we're going to talk about. And you had recommended, Wes,

1:30you had looked ahead to lecture, this is in Volume 2, Lecture 9, Chapter 9,

The Will to Interpret

1:38which is talking about the will to interpret, and specifically how we, how community, as he's talked about in the rest of the book, works in how we relate to each other. We had said in the other episode that people share a common sense of history, for instance. They send a common purpose in what we're doing right now, but we still have to then understand each other. We have to be able to interpret each other. So I think that's what we're going to address here. Any preliminary words?

2:09No. Well, why, why, did you read the whole second volume? I didn't recommend this. Well, you had put on our, on our syllabus, oh, this part is also really good. No. No, it was just part of the original reading. Really? Yeah. No, I didn't recommend this. That the rest of us just ignored somehow. Okay. I would have to do some, some slack sleuthing that, uh. Why would I just like randomly pick out a.

Understanding Royce

2:41I, that's why I'm asking the question. So, no, I mean, I responded to one of, it was, it was originally within the recommendation. And then, you know, I think you, you asked people if they were going to get to it. Yeah. It was, it was part of the original. Okay. Well, there's, there's some mystery to this, but I guess it's probably within, uh, Kara, our, our partial guest for the episode, uh, within her recommended, uh, but to me, when we got to this, but I don't know the way that you sort of represented here are,

3:13you know, you had found new versions, the text for us, uh, from what she had provided.

Royce's Text

3:18And, uh, and created the slack entry that then we were leading off of the way that I read it was, okay, we're reading these parts. Oh, this part is also good. So I didn't, I, I thought it was just something you had found. Anyway, we're going to, uh, she was pretty spot on in terms of, uh, figuring out things that would elucidate this concept of community, even though we didn't really get a good idea, either of what his whole project was about Christianity. I mean, we know he said a lot of things about why the Christian community, the, the, the ideal community,

3:49the future community that doesn't exist yet of peace on earth

Interpretation Process

3:52and goodwill among all peoples, uh, why that doesn't exist yet. And we also didn't find out at all. And I would, wouldn't mind doing a future reading on this, what an absolute pragmatist means. We saw a few elements of pragmatism. Uh, you know, we know that he's like Hegel concerned with God in some sense, but I still have no, no indication. Anyway, when I, when I was reading this at the time and I did read through this and then actually looked at it again a couple of nights ago, very quickly, uh, seemed like a different topic.

4:26Um, but we can, and, and I didn't actually see what, what the big deal was about it. So I thought you had found some special value in this.

Understanding Others

4:34No. So what happened is, so I'm just looking back at Slack. It's in the original reading. And then you said, should I tell the guests that we're formally adding section nine to 12 of the will to interpret? Because it, she had said she had given us a set amount of reading. And then she said, and this is also good. Oh, she said that. Okay. So you were just pasting. Yeah. And then, yeah. And then she, uh, and then you said, is it part of the same narrative? If not, let's leave it out. And I don't think anyone, oh, I just responded. I read it. And then no one else responded.

5:04So that was my recommendation. I was like, of course you read it. You're the one who recommended it. I read it. So we had a hermeneutic. We had a problem. I think, yeah, you have me confused with Kara there. We had a problem of interpretation right on her own. She's the one. All right. All right. Well, let's, let's get going. Let's just, yeah.

5:24This is a page 204 or PDF 204.

Royce's Philosophy

5:27Maybe I'll make a special PDF of just this chunk that we cover to post for people as I often do. Please proceed. Wes. Our lengthy study of comparison and interpretation as they are present in the inner life of the individual man has prepared us for a new view, the social meaning of the will to interpret here. I must once more take a temporary leave of Pierce's guidance, purse's guidance and trust to my own resources.

5:55One who compares a pair of his own ideas may attain if he is successful, that vision of unity, that rate of self-possession, which we have now illustrated, but one who understands to interpret his neighbor's idea. I'm sorry. One who undertakes to interpret his neighbor's ideas is in a different position. So of course we didn't read. Keep going before this makes sense. Well, we, yeah, we didn't read the previous chapters within or the sections within this lecture. So we don't really know what he has in mind, but he'd already started in the parts we had read talking about how we

6:28interpret ourselves through our own past. And I thought that the social was also built into that, you know, in a very Hegelian sense that I don't, you know, to, to determine what are the significant events in my life. I don't just take my word for it. I, you know, how do people describe me? How do my parents describe me? How do my, my having my siblings still living and able to talk with them about, you know, a part of yourself is retained. So it's, it seemed like our notion of ourselves as a continuous being,

7:02and, you know, not just the momentary Humean Sartrean instant point that is unconnected to a past. That's not really the self. This, the self is invariably social. So why do we need this additional section? I'm interested.

7:18In general, as we've seen an interpreter and his social relations with other men deals with two different minds, neither of which he identifies with his own. His interpretation is a third or mediating idea. This third is aroused in the interpreter's mind through signs, which come to him from the mind that he interprets. He addresses this third to the mind to which he interprets the first. This is interesting because we might think of interpretation primarily as a

7:50relationship between a reader and a text, for instance, or a relationship between me and some other person if I'm interpreting them. But here the interpretation is to another. I'm interpreting, right? So if I do interpret a text, I'm doing that for another prospective reader of my interpretation or hearer of my interpretation. It's a little less clear when I'm doing that with another person's mind, if I'm interpreting what's going on in their head. But at least in fantasy, right?

8:21If I'm having an inner monologue, I'm interpreting to a third in fantasy, perhaps. Well, and it's interesting that this is sort of missing in what we read in Hegel in that part of the formation of yourself is I am observing you and I'm saying what I'm seeing and I'm providing that interpretation to you. But of course, we know how this can be pretty warped that, you know, the gaslighting, that if it's really just a couple with no third party

8:56therapist or anything like that getting involved, then they can inflict very strange roles upon each other that would not stand up to the light of day. And but, you know, as we were just discussing in our previous close reads here, when you appeal to reason, you are appealing to something that certainly needs at least three. It can't just be the fucked up thing that you and I have agreed that we're doing here. It has to be to to refer to something that is

9:27an indefinite number of additional people could run through the same chain of reasoning and say, yep, yep, that's right. So that's just the way science works. It seems to be the way reason works in general. And so interpretation, even just saying, what did you mean by that? Well, let me let me let me ask. Let me post on the Internet. Am I the asshole? Like, here's here's what the person, you know, the gesture, what they said to me. Here's how I interpret it. Is that is that right? Yeah, I like your example of the couple, though, or the dyad where we are always interpreting

10:00people's minds back to them. You know, normally we think of that as, you know, reflection or something or the mirroring involved in recognition and a la Hegel, people to come to know their own minds through our interpretations of them. And as you pointed out, that could be a kind of gaslighting ultimately. And even if it doesn't rise to that level, we are we are trying to put people into roles often. Or we have a narrative.

10:30We have a I think people often they have a very strong narrative about the world that they're not aware of. And it's almost like they're constantly proselytizing, like they're preachers. They're always asserting their thesis. And in that thesis, we always have a role. So they're trying to tell us who we are often. They're trying to interpret us back to ourselves in a not just in a way that tells us what's there, but in a way that influences us to fill that role. Psychoanalysts call this projective identification.

11:02But yeah, to kind of mold people in the image that and according to the thesis that we have about the world and about other people. So I think even, I mean, the larger point is that this idea of three, right? The mind of the interpreter, the mind of the interpreted, and then the mind of the one who's being interpreted, you know, the one we're interpreting for, this third person, they can be collapsed, I think, in practice into two people who are interacting.

11:33So the wording, though, that he uses here is not about three people. It is the interpretation. So what is this? The interpretation, a string of symbols, a thought is a third or mediating idea. This third is aroused in the interpreter's mind through signs which come to him from that mind that he interprets. So you're making some motions and I process them

12:03and I create, let's say, a document that I think, you know, he's saying, I'm drowning. And so he addresses the third to the mind which he interprets first. So I show, is that right? Are you drowning? Interprets the first, so. Yeah, to which he interprets the first. Is that different? Is there a three? Because it doesn't seem like there are three ideas. I think I'm relying on what happens later since I've read this. But here, yeah, it is a little bit unclear.

12:35So we have two different minds. There's an interpreter with an interpretation. And this interpretation is a third or mediating idea. And then presumably he's interpreting something else. And I think the something else will be another person, whether, you know, has embodied in a text or, you know, their speech. But the third, you know, in this particular paragraph, the third is just the idea, right, that comes into the interpreter's mind.

13:09So, but there is this, you know, so they come to him through the mind that he interprets. So here we are getting, I think we're already getting the idea of a third person whose mind we are interpreting. So we're going to take another person's mind and then interpret that to a third person. Who is actually the second person? The third person is the one we're interpreting. Anyway, who's on first? All right, let's keep going. The psychology of the process of social interpretation, so far as that process goes on

13:40in the interpreter's individual mind, is identical with that psychology of comparison, which we have now outlined. Nobody can interpret unless the idea which he interprets has become more or less clearly and explicitly one of his own ideas. And unless he compares it with another idea, which is in some sense his own. So we are, again, referring to something that happened earlier in the lecture, which we can easily imagine as being kind of,

14:10what is the process of explicit thinking? It's like you're putting a list of pros and cons. You're setting one idea and you're placing another idea next to it and you're making a comparison. And even though it seems like, well, that's all just going on in my mind, if I'm going to do it involving another person, well, it still has to be reduced to that. Like whatever interpretation I have of you, I don't compare my inner idea with you directly. I compare it with the third, with the interpretation.

14:39Yeah, I think the simplest case is someone is saying something to me and I already have to have my own ideas for whatever he's transmitting to make sense. I have to have a receiver. And so that's the point of comparison. If he's using the word dog, I have to be able to compare it to what's going on in my own mind in a sense. I think that's what he's talking about, but we'll see. Yes, and we can already see, given that, how we could fail to understand each other. If the thing that you are saying

15:10resembles something that's in my lexicon, but actually isn't what you meant, then I'm going to make a mistake there. If it is just baffling to me, if I have nothing in my lexicon to compare it to, then I can't, it's just nonsense. You know, I'm going to interpret it as a string of nonsense. Well, I have that in my lexicon. These two strings of nonsense both look like nonsense. And then there's plenty of them in between cases where, for instance, you take Hegel and it's a string of nonsense, but if you do, if you try to find enough points of comparison,

15:40you might be able to decipher it. So there's coded stuff that can be deciphered, but it takes work. So the interpretation can be work in that sense, yeah. And I don't know, maybe we should do this in the public nightcap a little bit, and I don't want to get us on a tangent here, but I think it's obviously really important, the thing that you were talking about, why a pure idealism doesn't make any sense, why you need to bring the data in from something objective.

16:10So, you know, all the alleged subjectivisms, if it's a good philosopher, they're actually still are using some objectivity. So Barclian idealism is not scary. Kantian idealism is not scary. They're not, in fact, you know, some solipsistic pure subjectivism at all. But we sort of left that, and I might have to just re-listen to that episode as I post it this week with my thinking, oh, this was, we received some very ambiguous input from Hegel,

16:42and this just clicked on the subroutine of this point that you find very important, and is at least in the neighborhood of what he was talking about. And we left that episode with me saying, I don't actually see how you got that out. I can see why you were reminded of it, but I don't actually see Hegel saying that. So I think this might be one way in which, you know, in fact, I had another guy, the PVI episode that I just released, this is a guy who's like, I'm very into deep listening,

17:15you know, expressive listening. And whenever you say something, then I'll pounce on it. And I noticed then when I sort of objected to something that he said, that he interpreted it as just affirming what he said, and he continued saying what he was saying. So he actually wasn't deep listening at all in terms of actually responding. He was interpreting everything through the framework of the idea, the pre-existing idea. I think we're all guilty of that. Yeah, I think with someone like Hegel, we're dealing with a text which is so difficult that we're making guesses.

17:48For sure. And then it is pretty clear he's talking about the history of philosophy, right? So it's not crazy to try and to speculate, okay, he's talking about Kant or he's talking about Barclay or he's talking about so-and-so. And sometimes, you know, I think we are jumping back and forth. Who the fuck is he talking about, right? And then interpreting him as if he were talking to that person. And in any case, so that's what I did with the, you know, my critique about objectivity is based in, or my interpretation in terms of objectivity is based in what I know about Kant

18:19and Hegel's relation to Kant. And then once I decided, you know, I decided kind of Hegel was jumping onto a critique that had been made by others after Kant and that had been picked up by the tradition of German idealism. Now, is that what he was doing in that paragraph? Who knows? Does anyone know? I'm sure someone somewhere knows. And I would love to read that interpretation. And I think at the beginning of that episode or the previous episode, I made some sort of lofty cosmological thing that you were like,

18:50okay, yeah, I think that's going to be relevant to his project, but that's not what this paragraph is about. And so we're definitely, Hegel especially invites that in that he has microcosms that echo the macrocosm. Like that's just the way his system is built is that the overall, you know, logic that he's using in a particular section is going to be the logic that, you know, is what he calls logic is going to be his whole metaphysical picture. So, you know, it invites that. Yeah. And I think, you know, the Bible,

19:21which is, I think, part of what Royce is thinking about, right, is going to be one of these texts where exegesis, you're going to have to work hard to get the meaning out of the dietary restrictions and the stoning and the mass murder, at least in the Old Testament. Well, it's not as hard with the Jesus who's just, who's pretty clear in many ways, but although he has the parables, but yeah, you have to, you have to work really hard to make sense of a text like that for religious ethical purposes.

19:52And when I was writing the description for the Royce episode on the website, I ran into this issue of, so who is the leader of the church? That on his own account of community, you need a leader to provide sort of the primary interpretation to say Jesus died for your sins. And the way he's outlining it is actually Paul. Paul was the guy historically that created this doctrine or at least, you know, infused it into, I don't know, maybe he didn't invent it, but he infused it into the believers

20:25of Jesus died for your sins and this is, so Paul was the spiritual leader, but according to all the believers, it is Jesus who is the leader. Paul was like, oh, this is not me. This is Jesus himself. And what, and Jesus is the, you know, people don't pray to Paul now. And in the Freud that we're reading, he brings up this idea of the church as a group with Jesus as the nominal leader. Of course, he's not telling us anything right now,

20:57right? You know, we only have the Bible. We only have the interpretations of the people who wrote the Bible, of the people, of the clergy, you know, of the Catholic church or whatever who are giving us this, but Freud tells this from this, I guess, novel of his time that of somebody discovering evidence that Joseph of Arimathea moved Jesus's body. And so there was no, you know, from the tomb. So there was no, oh, the Jesus must have risen. Like, no, no, it's actually documented

21:27that he just, he just moved the body and he buried it somewhere else for, for various reasons. And, and this causes a giant rupture, a breakdown in this group cohesion because they're leaderless. Yeah. This was a novel. This, this whole, yeah, this story was a popular novel at the time, but for its time. So, so I think, yeah, you, what you're getting at is very important because some interpretations are commandments basically, right?

21:57If I'm the Pope or the clergy, I'm, I'm engaged in an act of interpretation, which is ultimately the, the results of that interpretation yield ethical imperatives and, and I'm telling people what to do basically. And when I tell them what to do, I'm saying, oh, it's not me. I'm just interpreting the word of God. I am a conduit for that. I'm, I'm, so I'm, as interpreter, right? I'm in this weird position of, of being a leader, but just channeling

22:27some other authority. Well, it's also, also just interesting the ways in which people try to transcend their time in terms of, to fix their leadership, to say, here's the covenant. I, I'm your leader right now and can boss you around, but I'm not going to be around, you know, 40 years from now. So, uh, we're going to set up this constitution. We're going to set up this covenant. We're going to say, I was never the leader all along. It's actually this thing in this book. It's your direct conduit to God. Uh, so, you know, keep following the rules that I set out

22:58for you. Look, these stone tablets. in our constitutional republic, right? The constitution in a sense is supposed to be the leader and we want the leader not just to be a person, but we want it to be this document and also we want it to be the role, right? It's the role of the presidency, which is in a way the leader and then particular people fill that role, but ultimately the constitution and then one of the most important activities becomes interpretation of that text, which is what the Supreme Court does. So we don't know

23:28what we're allowed to do and, or what our rights are exactly until the Supreme Court tells us, interprets this document back to us, which we can change, but it takes a lot of work to do that. But from the point of view of the interpreter, the essential difference between the case where he's interpreting the mind of one of his neighbors to the mind of another neighbor and the case where he, wherein he's comparing two ideas of his own is a difference in the clearness of vision, which is under human conditions attainable. When I compare two ideas

23:58of my own, the luminous self-possession, which then for a time may come to be mine, forms for me an ideal of success in interpretation. This ideal I can attain only at moments, but these moments set a model for all my interpretations to follow. So this sounds like Cartesian clearness and distinctness. Yeah. So he does give us the kind of model he's operating on, interpreting the mind of one of his neighbors to the mind of another neighbor. But I might be interpreting the mind of my neighbor

24:29back to myself, in which case I'm playing two roles in this situation. Or I might be interpreting, I'm not sure here, might be interpreting my own mind to someone else when I communicate. Right? So if I'm interpreting my own mind to someone else, then there's certainly some kind of luminousness that might be incorrigibility, right? You know, although in the 20th and 21st century, we've come to, right, we have a hermeneutics of suspicion now and we doubt incorrigibility

25:00and we say, oh, actually people are bad interpreters of themselves to others. But I think for Royce, we might, we're at least better interpreters of ourselves to others than we are of one person to, you know, another person to a third person. Yeah, without knowing what examples that he uses in the earlier sections of this chapter, I, I couldn't really say. Yeah. It's, it just sounds to me like, I think it becomes clear. I'm not necessarily interpreting my own mind, which you're right, might in, in, you know, involve all sorts of psychoanalytic

25:31pitfalls, but that I've gotten two ideas in my head somehow and I can interpret them that I can, I can definitely say this dog is like this other dog. They're both dogs. I'm, you know, absolutely sure of that, you know, so I'm just sort of thinking on these naturalistic or, or, you know, how, how Descartes would, obviously it's clear that two plus two and four, oh, what luminosity I have about those once you get to the natural world, well, is that really a dog or is that a fox?

26:01Is that, you know, we're, we're not considering essences so directly. Yeah. So for, for instance, when I, we might be talking about judgment a year. So he's, he's talking about comparison, which sounds very Lockean. But if I say, if I have a perception or a series of perceptions and I bring that under a concept, dog, right? I mean, that sounds according, you know, you can give a Lockean associationist psychology of that, which sounds very much related to what he's talking about when he talks about

26:32comparison. So, so I think you might, if this is what you were saying, I think, yeah, you might be right. So it might be as simple as someone bringing some particular under a concept. That's an act of interpretation. Is it a dog or is it not a dog? But I do think he's going to keep up this three mind model, but, but we'll see. Yeah. 206. When I endeavor to interpret my neighbor's mind, my interpretation has to remain remote from its goal.

27:02The luminous vision of the results of comparison comes to me at best only partially and with uncertainty. My neighbor's ideas I indeed in a measure grasp and compare with other ideas and interpret. But as I do this, I see through a glass darkly. Only those ideas whose comparisons with other ideas and whose resulting triadic interpretations I can view face to face can appear to me to have become

27:33in a more intimate and complete sense my own individual ideas.

27:38That's a little bit confusing, but I'm going to just read on a little bit. Sure. When I possess certain ideas sufficiently to enable me to seek for their interpretation, but so that, try as I will, I can never clearly survey as from above the success of any of these, any of my attempted interpretations, then these ideas remain from my own point of view, ideas that can never become wholly my own. Therefore, these relatively alien ideas can be interpreted at all only by using the familiar hypothesis that they belong to the self of someone else.

28:10Under the ordinary social conditions, this other mind is viewed as the mind of my neighbor. Neither of my neighbor nor of myself have I any direct intuition, but of my own ideas I can hope to win the knowledge which the most successful comparisons exemplify. Of my neighbor's ideas I could never win under human conditions any interpretation, but one which remains hypothetical and which is never observed under those human conditions as face-to-face with its own object or with the idea of the other neighbors to whom the interpretation is addressed.

28:41So I can't get directly into people's minds and have their thoughts, right? But to interpret them, I have to assume that they have a mind like my own. We do this all the time with motivation and behavior, right? We're always predicting that roughly speaking other people are motivated like myself, right? If they're putting a cheeseburger under their mouth and it's because they're hungry and I know what hunger feels like so I can interpret their hunger back to myself.

29:11But if they were a being nothing like me, if their minds were nothing like my own, that whole project would fail.

29:18I'm not sure. So obviously with simple things, so somebody is gesturing in a way that I interpret as help. Once I make that interpretation, that's as clear as can be. Like the concept of help, I can compare with other, well, so how does this, how, what does this mean I should do? How does it, how does it look like they really need help? Does it look like they just would like a little help? You know, how desperate do they look? There's a lot that I can compare.

29:49The only glass darkly part is, am I actually sure that that was a sign for help or are they just having fun in the water? When I possess certain ideas sufficiently to enable me to seek for their interpretation, but so that try as I will, I can never clearly survey as from above the success of my attempted interpretations. I mean, generally, you know the success of your social interpretations, especially if he's a pragmatist. When I exhibit my interpretation back to the person,

30:19do they say, yeah, that's what I meant? Of course, they could be misinterpreting what I say or they could be saying yes just to be amenable or something like that and in fact, you know, they don't want to just, oh, they've just explained some complicated thing, some problem and then I deliver some oversimplified soup back to them and they're just sort of out of disgust agreeing with me. But generally, it seems like for pragmatic purposes, we do get to survey the success

30:50of interpretation. Yeah, and that's what he's saying. He's giving a hypothetical here where, right, we have these alien ideas that there's alien ideas in another person and if it were the case that he couldn't survey the success of his interpretations, then these ideas would never become wholly his own. But they can become his own. The relatively alien ideas can be interpreted by using the more familiar hypothesis that they belong to the self of someone else

31:20and that self, my interpretation of this is that he means that that self is someone like me. So, the ideas are not alien, right, and I can survey their success in this way that you're talking about pragmatically if I make this assumption that the other has a mind like mine. So, under ordinary social conditions, the other mind is viewed as the mind of my neighbor. So, you're interpreting neighbor as being like yours.

31:51Well, as the paragraph goes on, you know, I don't have any direct intuition