extending West's analogy royce, mead, and american philosophy

Extendiendo la analogía de West Royce, Mead y la filosofía norteamericana

Claudio Marcelo Viale *

Erfurt Universität *claudio.viale@uni-erfurt.de

Abstract

In The American Evasion of Philosophy Cornell West makes a comparison between the developments of European and classical American philosophies. Within West's analogy, however, two important American figures are missing: Josiah Royce and George H. Mead. In the context of this framework, this article attempts to extend West's analogy, speculating on the possible roles of Royce and Mead within it. The argumentation is developed in two parts: on the one hand, I show how secondary literature that considers Royce-Mead ties reproduces Meadean statements on Royce -mainly presented in "The Philosophies of Royce, James and Dewey in their American Setting" (1930); on the other hand, I show a schematic analysis of Meadean statements on Royce from a historic as well as a systematic pragmatist perspective.

Keywords: West's analogy, Royce, Mead, Mead on Royce and American philosophy, classical pragmatism, contemporary pragmatism on Royce.

Resumen

En The American Evasion of Philosophy Cornell West traza una comparación entre los desarrollos de las filosofías europea y norteamericana. Dos importantes autores norteamericanos, sin embargo, están ausentes en la analogía de West: Josiah Royce and George H. Mead. En este contexto, me propongo en este artículo extender la analogía de West especulando sobre los posibles roles de Royce y Mead. La argumentación es desarrollada en dos partes: por un lado, muestro cómo la literatura secundaria -cuando analiza la vinculación entre Royce y Mead- tiende a reproducir la interpretación meadeana de Royce (presentada principalmente en "The Philosophies of Royce, James and Dewey in their American Setting" (1930)); por otro lado, realizo un análisis esquemático de la interpretación meadeana de Royce desde un punto de vista histórico y sistemático.

Palabras clave: la analogía de West, Royce, Mead, Mead sobre Royce y la filosofía norteamericana, pragmatismo clásico, pragmatismo contemporáneo sobre Royce.

Introduction

The purpose of this article is twofold. On the one hand, I intend to show how secondary literature that considers Royce-Mead ties reproduces Meadean statements on Royce; on the other hand, I will present a schematic analysis of its impact from both a historic and systematic pragmatist perspective. In my view, Mead's interpretation of Royce's philosophy is essential not only for the American setting of the latter -paraphrasing his article "The Philosophies of Royce, James and Dewey in their American Setting" (Mead 1930)- but also for a genuine understanding of his own pragmatism and its inherent tension. Thus Mead's psycho-social pragmatist theorizing would differ from his interpretation of the meaning of pragmatism. Regarding Royce, my basic thesis revolves around the hypothesis that Mead's examination of Royce's philosophy, rather than presenting an accurate description of the latter, discloses the inherent tension of his own general pragmatist perspective.

If Mead's statements on the development of Royce's philosophy inside American and pragmatist thought are inadequate, the situation of secondary literature is not much better even within the current resurgence of interest in classical pragmatism. Two striking issues deserve to be highlighted in connection with this idea. First, that the connection between Royce's and Mead's philosophies is virtually unnoticed in secondary literature despite an extraordinary increase in the number of studies on classical American tradition and pragmatism, where prominent exponents are re-examined and related to one another, as well as contrasted and related to philosophers belonging to different traditions -a matter that will be referred to in the second section. Secondly, that in the scarce mentions found in the literature discussing the relation between Mead's and Royce's philosophies, there seems to exist a generalized tendency to repeat Mead's mistakes concerning the interpretation of Royce's philosophy. In the first place, it is held that Royce's and Mead's philosophies radically oppose each other; secondly, the link between Royce and Hegel is excessively highlighted; thirdly, Royce's philosophy is not recognized as a pragmatist one, and it is thus not linked with Mead in particular and not with the classical pragmatist tradition in general. However, some aspects of Miller's and Joas's interpretations do contain valuable clues on Royce-Mead connections, as I will try to show.

From my perspective, the integration of these relevant clues with an extension of West's analogy can be the way to overcome the shortcomings present in both Mead's interpretation and in the literature on Royce-Mead ties. In other words, such integration could allow development of a coherent relation between Royce's and Mead's philosophies as well as a more comprehensive view of classical American pragmatism. Three steps should be taken for a critical full-scale comparison between Royce and Mead: first, to examine Mead's references to Royce's oeuvre in its own context; second, to analyze statements from the secondary literature; and finally, to highlight problematical cores of both conceptions and attempt to show how they could correct each other.

I have already taken the first step in two articles which mainly examine Mead's own references to Royce's philosophy.¹ The present work, meanwhile, must be understood as a second philosophicalhistorical step concerned with examining the role of secondary literature. Finally, I will complete my approach by fully developing in a systematic sense my own hypothesis -the Hypothesis of Corrective Complementarity- in a coming paper.

1. Extending West's Analogy

Cornell West schematizes his view on the development of classical American pragmatism with a deeply ironic analogy:

American pragmatism reaches its highest level of sophisticated articulation and engaged elaboration in the works and life of John Dewey. To put it crudely, if Emerson is the American Vico, and James and Peirce our John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant, then Dewey is the American Hegel and Marx! On the surface, these farfetched comparisons reveal the poverty of the American philosophical tradition, the paucity of intellectual world-historical figures in the American grain. But on a deeper level, these comparisons disclose a distinctive feature of American pragmatism: its diversity circumscribed by the Emersonian evasion of epistemology-centered philosophy and the Emersonian theodicy of the self and America. (West 69)

One could continue this analogy asking about the role of the secondary actors of the play. What philosopher would the English pragmatist F. S. Schiller have been? Would Chauncey Wright have played the role of the American Bentham? Would Santayana have repeated the bitter wisdom of Schopenhauer? Without doubt all these roles would have been reasonably assigned. However, following the logic of the analogy, two classical pragmatists seem to have roles made to measure: Josiah Royce and George Herbert Mead.

Within this extended analogy it is possible to think that Royce, Peirce's American Plato, would be the American Fichte. The parallelism between Royce and Fichte could be established if one thinks the former professes or imitates the philosophical futility of the latter as has been maliciously and elliptically suggested by A. O. Lovejoy in his critic of "[…] the imposture in the pseudo-voluntarism of the neo-Fichteans" (cited in Clendenning 342). At first sight this association may seem strange due to the perennial link between Royce and Hegel. However, with the interpretative license granted by West's analogy, Hegel's thought seems to prefigure Dewey's practical philosophy rather than Royce's metaphysical one. Then, for the sake of the argument, let's momentarily suppose Royce's philosophy reflects in a Fichtean mirror instead of in a Hegelian one.

In connection with Mead, meanwhile, the analogy leads us straight to Dewey, i.e., as Dewey is the great American Marx, Mead becomes the American Engels. In other words: Engels's philosophical developments being both secondary in relation to and dependent on Marx's, Mead's pragmatism seems to have played a similar role in the history of American philosophy in relation with Dewey. Although this statement would need a more detailed analysis, again for the sake of argument let's accept the canonical image of Mead, i.e. the image that represents him as Dewey's closest colleague and friend at Chicago University but philosophically secondary inside the American pragmatic tradition.

Consequently, rethinking and extending West's analogy it is possible to speculate that Royce's and Mead's philosophical profiles could have had, in the philosophies of Fichte and Engels, their respective European counterparts. In relation to the purpose of this article, it must be highlighted that the analogy can be extended not only due to the philosophical similarities that can be found between Fichte and Royce (the practical character of truth)² and Engels and Mead (philosophical commitments with revolutionary or reformist praxis) or to the secondary character of their philosophies. Even more important is the fact that Engels and Mead as well have also had a close relation with the philosophies of Fichte and Royce. To a certain extent both Engels and Mead think of themselves as followers of Fichte and Royce respectively. Engels, for example, argues that "we German socialists are proud to descend from not only Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen, but also from Kant, Fichte, and Hegel" (7-8). While Mead recognizes Royce's efforts to develop a genuine American philosophy:

[I]t was the passionate struggle of Royce's great mind to fashion, in his philosophy of Loyalty, an expression of this idealism which would fit the problem of American thought […]. (Mead 1930 221)

Then, Mead can be conceived of as the great American Engels because, paraphrasing Engels's quotation, he is not only a successor of James, Wundt and Darwin but should also be proud to share philosophical features with Royce's speculative pragmatism. However, as I have tried to show in another paper,³ Mead's pragmatism is a forked one, divided between his own pragmatist developments and his interpretation of the meaning of pragmatism, and while the former has similarities with Roycean philosophy, the latter is explicitly conceived against Royce's philosophy. Mead has always designated Royce's philosophy as a Hegelian, Idealist or Romantic one without real or authentic connection with attitudes and habits of the American mind. This statement, where he clearly converges with Deweyan philosophy, partly helps to configure the canonical image of Royce, image that is still being shaped by current literature, as I shall try to show in the next section.

2. Looking for Lost Ties

Let's accept that both classical and contemporary pragmatism are, in Bernstein's words, "a set of narratives in conflict" (55). Let's also agree that not only is Emersonian diversity alive nowadays -as I have said- but that the battles are being fought appealing to the names of the classics. Then, what was the role of Royce's and Mead's narratives in conflict? At first sight, four positions on Royce-Mead ties can be found in the secondary literature: first, a sharp differentiation between them; in the second place, a relation based almost exclusively on Hegelian inheritance; thirdly, a lack of relation; in the fourth place, relevant statements proposed by Joas and Miller.

A clear example of the first position appears in Herbert Schneider's A History of American Philosophy, where he points out an unequivocal opposition between both conceptions on the basis of the category of "community":

Another "seminal mind" among the metaphysicians of radical empiricism was G. H. Mead. Mead was first of all a social psychologist; he had learned to conceive mind, not in terms of individual consciousness, but in terms of social acts. He might easily have been tempted to follow the idealists like Royce (his teacher) in what he called "the great experience of bringing the whole of reality to experience" and to construct a theory of reality based on the structure of absolute community. But he did the opposite and interpreted the emergence of communities and consciences as a more general process of "natural emergence". (Schneider 550)

I do not agree with this interpretation for three reasons. First, because Roycean philosophy is presented in an extremely metaphysical way, his practical philosophy being conceived of as inevitably permeated by the absolute community. In my view, Schneider makes the common mistake of conceiving Royce's philosophy as an idealist one, being unaware of the determined attempt at pragmatization in Royce's intermediate and mature work, where a distinction between metaphysics and practical philosophy is drawn.⁴ In the second place, because Mead's naturalist features -unlike his ideal-normative conception- are exclusively and excessively highlighted. Although it is true that from a sociological point of view Mead's position is clearly "naturalist" - explaining the genesis of the self, starting from the "unconscious conversation of gestures" and the conception of the concrete "generalized other"- it is also the case that, from a philosophical and ethical point of view, he attempts to connect these natural features or elements with ideal conceptions of community and the universal "generalized other". In the third place, due to the inexistent opposition between Royce and Mead derived from these unilateral conceptions of them, i.e. Royce attempting at an impossible transformation of the real community on the basis of the absolute community, and Mead's philosophy grounded only on a naturalistic approach. Only by dismembering Royce's and Mead's philosophies, radicalizing and distorting an aspect of them, is it possible to postulate such an opposition. That is why Royce's philosophy is shown as an idealist one, while Mead's philosophy is presented as empiricist-naturalist. As a result, no connection can be conceivable between them.

The second position found in secondary literature, which I exemplify from M. Aboulafia, highlights that, to a certain extent, the relationship between Royce's and Mead's philosophies allow for a connection between the latter and the most acceptable features of Hegelian philosophy:

But there is another Hegel; viz., the unrivaled dialectician who gave us the dialectic of recognition. Hegel the organic thinker, like Hegel the theoretician of the development of the self through the other, left an indelible imprint on Mead. To what degree this was a direct imprint and to what degree it came through Josiah Royce is a question worthy of further investigation. (xiv-v)

Although this interpretation clearly diverges from the previous one by rightly stating that Royce's philosophy is not necessarily opposed to the Meadian conception, I find that the perennial association between Hegel and Royce obscures more than clarifies Royce's thought, hiding its pragmatist features. Besides, Royce himself explicitly rejects this link:

It is time, I think, that the long customary, but unjust and loose usage of the adjective 'Hegelian' should be dropped… my own interpretation of Christianity, in these volumes, despite certain agreements with the classical Hegelian thesis, differs from that of Hegel, and of the classical Hegelian school, in important ways which I can, with clear conscience, all the more vigorously emphasize. (Royce 2001 39)

Also some paragraphs of H. Joas's book (1997) can be interpreted under this perspective:

The most important thesis of this discussion is that Mead's approach to a theory of intersubjectivity is incomprehensible without an understanding of his relationship to German idealism, and that on the other hand some problems of the German philosophical tradition can be solved precisely with the help of Mead's approach. (11)

This man was the Christian neo-Hegelian Josiah Royce, who became important particularly for Mead's view of German Idealism, and who transmitted to him the basic model of a philosophy of history that interpreted the kingdom of God as the historical realization of a community of all human beings brought about by universal communication. (id. 17)

However, although these statements seem only to insist on the association between Royce's and Hegel's philosophy, they contain a deep insight, i.e. that the philosophies of Royce and Mead far from being radically different -as held by Schneider- are complementary. In other words, analogously to Joas's interpretation about the relation between Mead and German idealism, it can be held that Royce's and Mead's works are connected by being mutually corrective. I will briefly refer to this topic in the third section.

The third standpoint present in secondary literature is the absence of connection, which in my judgment results from the error of failing to conceive Royce within the pragmatist tradition, as it can be seen in Cook's conception: "If we want to understand Mead's view of the pragmatic tradition, then, we must turn to his remarks about James and Dewey" (1993 162).⁵ This author holds, on the one hand, that virtually no connection can be established between Peirce and Mead, and on the other hand, he does not include Royce's philosophy inside the pragmatist tradition, so that Mead's pragmatist connections should be looked for in James's and Dewey's works. Although the latter idea is right, so is the fact that Mead's philosophy could have an indirect connection with Peirce's philosophy through Royce's late works. An example of this conception is exposed in Joas's book:

However, from the standpoint of the history of social theory, it is most interesting to see that the frequently noted intrinsic kinship between Mead's linguistic theory and Peirce's 'semiotic transformation of transcendental philosophy' (Apel) does not appear to be due a direct influence, but came about through Josiah's Royce intermediation. (99)

The influence unquestionably exercised by Peirce's theory of signs on Mead's conception of the significant symbol was indirect and came to Mead via Royce's late writings. (id. 37)

However, leaving aside this possibility, if one considers Royce's philosophy as a pragmatist one, there exist direct connections between Royce's and Mead's philosophies, as it can be seen in various of the latter's articles.⁶ Even more important, if -as Cook does- one does not consider Royce as a genuine pragmatist, his link with Meadian philosophy is essential to Mead's characterization of pragmatism as different from Idealism and as a typically American product, as it can be inferred from "The Philosophies of James, Royce and Dewey in their American Setting".

The fourth position found in secondary literature on Royce- Mead relation is given by some valuable aspects of D. Miller's and H. Joas's interpretations. In contrast to other approaches that I have examined, they contain statements which are fundamental to a more comprehensive understanding of Royce's philosophy inside classical pragmatist tradition as well as a better explanation of the possible conceptual relationships between Royce's and Mead's philosophies.

In the first place, David Miller's article (1975) "Royce and Mead on the Nature of the Self" intended a detailed comparison between Royce's and Mead's philosophies, from which I infer four relevant assertions for my work. First, a connection is established between Royce and pragmatism: "Royce had several problems in common with the American pragmatist" (Miller 87 n3). In the second place, similarity is acknowledged between Royce's and Mead's concepts:

"Royce's 'Community of Interpretation' is similar to Mead's generalized other" (Id. 68). Thirdly, Royce's influence over Mead is justified:

The fact that Royce was one of Mead's teachers (1877-1888) is evidence enough to suspect that he had a direct influence on Mead. Further evidence is that several of the topics in Mead's Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century Movements are identical with Royce's The Spirit of Modern Philosophy. (Miller 67)

Finally, some important literature on Royce is analyzed and criticized for failing to establish connections with Meadian philosophy: In Cotton's Royce on the Human Self, the author compares and contrasts Royce's theory with that of Peirce, James and Dewey. But, I believe, he might well have considered Mead's theory also. Fuss, in his book, The Moral Philosophy of Royce, has an excellent exposition of Royce's theory of the self but he does not pretend to compare Royce and Mead. (Miller 67)

These four assertions are relevant to the present work for two reasons. The first one is that the plausibility of a connection between Royce's and Mead's philosophies is clearly shown by the first three assertions, and also that Miller's proposal of a systematic clarification is really valuable, though it must be noticed that his article lacks an explanation of Mead's interpretation of Royce and its consequences from a pragmatist viewpoint. The second reason is that Miller's claim about the failure of important secondary literature on Royce to consider possible connections with Mead's work -to which I could add "and vice versa"-is still valid nowadays. I could extend the list made by Miller -Cotton's and Fuss's books- to include the outstanding Royce scholars John Smith, John Clendenning, and Frank Oppenheim. The first practically does not include Mead in his conception of the spirit of American philosophy. In John Stuhr's words:

For Smith, Royce occupies a central position in American philosophy and Royce receives more attention than any other thinker. By contrast, Smith excludes Santayana from the American philosophical tradition, referring to him only twice in passing (once more than to Mead!) (42)

Clendennig's magnificent book The Life and Thought of Josiah Royce mentions Mead only once and so does Oppenheim's impressive Reverence to Relations for Life.

Meanwhile, the analysis of the Royce-Mead connection is not any better among prominent Mead scholars. For instance, in his book (1993) Mead the Making of a Social Pragmatist, Cook does not recognize Royce's philosophy as a pragmatist one, and thus he practically restricts the connection between Royce and Mead to the latter's student period. Meanwhile, Joas's book contains few references to Royce's philosophy, but his suggestions -as I have said before- are interesting despite his excessive insistence on the linkage between Royce and Hegel. Two issues deserve to be highlighted in Joas's approach. First, from a systematic point of view, that a relation of complementarity between Royce's and Mead's philosophies can be inferred similarly to his idea of complementarity between Mead's conception and German Idealism. Secondly, from a historical point of view it is important to stress that this book contains a very detailed description of the diverse lines of research on both Mead's own philosophy and his philosophical relation with other theoretical schools of thought and that no mention to Royce is made.⁷

Several authors make the same mistake as Mead regarding Royce-Mead ties. In the first place, Schneider -whose statements I have previously analyzed- wrongly holds that Royce's and Mead's philosophies radically oppose each other. Concerning Mead, he explicitly follows Dewey's pragmatism conceived as opposed to Royce's Hegelian idealism. In his words:

It has been a term of opprobrium that has been cast upon Dewey's doctrine that it is the philosophy of American practicality. But now that the world has become somewhat more respectful of us and more curious about us it may not, perhaps, be opprobrious to recognize the relation of Dewey's habitat to his philosophic output. In the first place it was beyond the Alleghanies, that he formulated his problem and worked out the essentials of his doctrine. Though Hegelianism flourished in a small and somewhat Teutonic group in St. Louis, which was not without its repercussions in America, as witness both Royce and Dewey, it was Royce who established the absolute idealisms in American thought by making them a part of culture. There was no sublimation of the individual in the structure of society in America which could make absolute idealism an outgrowth of America consciousness; but as a part of culture it took its place, and the center of gravity of this culture was in New England… It is hardly necessary to point out that John Dewey's philosophy, with its insistence upon the statement of the end in the terms of the means, is the developed method of that implicit intelligence in the mind of the American community. And for such an implicit intelligence there is no other test of moral and intellectual hypotheses except that they work. In the profoundest sense John Dewey is the philosopher of America. (Mead 1930 230-1)

In the second place, Aboulafia and Joas highlight with different nuances and almost exclusively the linkage between Royce's and Hegel's philosophies -as Mead did. I have already referred to Aboulafia's and Joas's analyses. The following is an example of Mead's interpretation:

The possessors of this culture did not through its possession become any of the technicians of American society […] The neo-Hegelianism which Royce presented so brilliantly, and with an originality of his own, was a part of this culture. The Hegelian formulation of Romantic Idealism had grown out of just phases of European history and civilization which had not been brought over the "Mayflower" or on its fellows and followers. (1936 66-7)

In the third place, following Mead in a non critical way, Cook fails to recognize Royce's philosophy as a pragmatist and genuinely American one. Thus he neither links it with Mead in particular nor with classical pragmatist tradition in general. In Mead's words: And no American, in his philosophical moments, regarding the sectarian meeting-houses of a western community would have felt himself at home in spiritual landscape of Royce's Blessed Community. Notwithstanding Royce's intense moral sense and his passionate love of the community from which he came and to which he continued to belong, his philosophy belonged, in spite of himself, to culture and to a culture which did not spring from the controlling habits and attitudes of American society (1930 222).

I have contextualized and analyzed the scope of these paragraphs in a previously cited article.⁸ Within the frame of this work I only intend to show the continuities between Mead's positions that have helped to mold Royce's idealist image and the conceptions of the secondary literature. For a re-examination of this image I judge it essential to regard aspects of Joas's and Miller's interpretations and to extend West's analogy. This is, in my view, the best way to reach a better understanding of the ties between Royce and Mead and a more comprehensive view of classical pragmatism.

3. Royce-Mead Ties. From a Historical to a Systematic Point of View

Royce's oeuvre has always been besieged by the ghost of the Absolute and metaphysical idealism. Although his philosophy, especially in his first period, gives room to such association, the firm intent of pragmatization in Royce's intermediate and mature periods -with his distinction between practical philosophy and metaphysics- discloses a pragmatist face of Roycean philosophy which remains virtually unnoticed, except for a handful of scholars. A direct consequence of this pragmatization may be that practical philosophy instead of metaphysics is the very core of Royce's mature thought. However, the figure of the metaphysical idealist Royce -molded by classic pragmatists, especially by Dewey and Mead- is the one that appears again and again even in the current secondary literature. Therefore, in order to take to pieces this image is necessary to recover relevant clues mentioned in the literature and to integrate them with a coherent proposal.

In my view, the interpretations of Joas's and Miller's on the ties between Royce's and Mead's philosophies, in contrast to other analyzed approaches of the literature, contain valuable clues from a historical as well as a systematic point of view. From a historical standpoint, they show, on one hand, the existence of connections between Royce's and Mead's oeuvres. On the other hand, their analyses of the literature reveal lack of a single full-scale work devoted to this topic. From a systematic point of view, as I have previously said, the central issue that can be inferred from Joas's and Miller's clues revolves around the possibility to develop a Corrective Complementarity between Royce's and Mead's philosophies, analogous to the one proposed by Joas for Mead and German Idealism. Such corrective complementarity between Royce's and Mead's practical philosophies depends on the following conditions:

First, from a sociological perspective a criticism based on Mead's thought can be drawn about Royce's way to establish a distinction between natural community and Beloved Community in The Problem of Christianity. Second, from a metaphilosophical point of view and in favor of Royce, it is possible to support the need for some kind of coherent distinction between a natural and ideal community, being lack of a coherent and systematic conception of ideal community the Achilles heel in Mead's thought. Concerning this interpretative strategy, I have presented a more detailed argumentation in other works.⁹ Besides, a systematic presentation and defense of my hypothesis is beyond the scope of the present article and it would require an independent argumentation. However, I do intend to highlight that the possibility of such a systematic hypothesis completely depends on regarding as conceivable the linkage between Royce's and Mead's practical philosophies. Consequently, my strategy rests on a kind of "deconstruction" of Royce's idealist image, shaped by Mead -among others- and kept by secondary literature. In other words, the historic- philosophical steps I have mentioned -Mead's references to Royce in my previous article -and expounded on- the analysis of secondary literature that I am presenting- are prerequisites of intelligibility of my systematic approach.

I should make it clear that I am not following Royce's philosophy religiously, disguising its theoretical problems and shortcomings as pragmatism. Royce's conception of natural community, for example, is sociologically weak. However, I think that it is necessary to establish Royce's setting inside classical pragmatism and American thought before considering typical Roycean issues. If it can coherently be supported -taking seriously Royce strong attempt of pragmatization in his intermediate and mature periods- that Royce's philosophy is a pragmatist one that clearly distinguishes between concrete (or natural) and ideal (or Beloved) community, it could begin to lose its metaphysical halo and to leave its perennial place as the American idealist opponent of classical pragmatists. Royce's philosophy, then, would not be the necessary reverse of classical pragmatism imagined by Mead but a pragmatist practical philosophy attempting to establish a connection between natural and ideal community in a Peircean way. The central issue at hand would therefore be how these relevant clues -and the interpretation I infer from them- could fit with the extension of West's analogy that I am proposing herein. Although West's analogy is a perceptive way to understand classical American philosophy from Emerson to Dewey, Royce's and Mead's philosophies do not play a significant role in it. What would be, then, the best way to incorporate them inside West's perspective? It must be stressed that West's analogy attempts to point out in the American grain a philosophical process similar to the European one. In this sense, American counterparts of European philosophers do not necessarily share their doctrines and philosophical tendencies entirely, but a similar position inside an internal development. Therefore, as much as Dewey is the great American Marx, if one follows West's analogy, it is clear that Mead would play the role of the American Engels.

Turning to Royce, why would Fichte be his European counterpart? Royce would not be the American Fichte either because he repeated his pseudo-imposture -in Lovejoy's words- or only because they shared similar philosophical commitments on some issues. More important is the role that he could play if conceived of as the American Fichte. For my purposes, the main point to highlight is that, had Royce been regarded as the American Fichte, Mead -the American Engels- would have thought of himself, to a certain extent, not as an antagonist but a follower of Royce's philosophy. As a result, Mead's pragmatism would not have bifurcated -as I maintain- into his own pragmatism and his interpretation of pragmatism. Consequently, extending West's analogy so as to incorporate Royce and Mead into it as the American Fichte and Engels respectively, allows to conceive, on the one hand, a more comprehensive view of classical pragmatism and, on the other, a better linkage between Royce's and Mead's practical philosophies. "Deconstructing" Royce's idealist image from a historical point of view would therefore allow to find the ties between the Roycean conceptions of natural and Beloved Community and the concrete and universal senses of the generalized other that, to my judgment, exist in Mead's philosophy. This systematic approach, however, is a task for a following article.

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