Pally also says about Peirce, "He called 'pragmatism' the method of understanding what beliefs mean through the actions one takes on account of believing them" (p. 163).
Pally says, "So completely was Peirce convinced of this social process that 'individuals' [e.g., Dr. King], he held, are not separate selves. The continuity among phenomena and beliefs is what Peirce called synechism (in a triptych with tychism and agapism). All beliefs and phenomena, including persons, are along a continuity of the same nature, differing in degree of physicality and spirituality. What is seen as interacting with other things is termed matter; what is experienced internally as the movement of feeling or energy is termed mind. Each person is differently embodied, but we understand self and world through interaction with matter and the minds of others, from whom we are 'distinct' but not 'separate' [she is here quoting Peirce]. Our distinct but not separate selves inform each other, and so the human effort to know continues dialogically to grasp more of the structure (or harmony) of the world" (p. 164).
"As the continuity of existence is not determined but tychistic, open to change, what makes banal change into productive growth is agape, the moral commitment to other persons and to work done toward increasing 'reasonableness' - hypothesizing, testing, and integration of knowledge into patterns that account for the world" (p. 164).
Subsequently, Pally says, "The application of logic/reason to concrete moral conduct is 'concrete reasonableness,' and agape is the moral commitment to such reasonableness. Both advance dialogically, and thus persons develop in distinction but not separation from this larger dialogic effort, indeed, in interaction with it" (p. 165).
Eig discusses Dr. King's account of agape love (pp. 84 and 287).
Now, in Pally's subsection "Josiah Royce," she begins with a sketch of Royce's epistemology, as she did with Peirce.
Pally says, "While Peirce's and Royce's epistemologies differ, it is worth noting two parallels: [1] between Peirce's goal-directed hypotheses and Royce's internal purposes, and [2] between Peirce's testing against external outcomes and Royce's external meanings. These [two] parallels can be understood in light of what Royce called his 'Peircean insight' that thought is triadic: [1] experience-fed hypotheses, [2] their elaboration by deduction, and [3] testing, all informed by the thoughts of others" (p. 167).
"Triadic models of thought allow us to exchange (tested) ideas and so allow for their combination, modification, and reciprocal correction. In the process, ideas move from vagueness to clarity, bringing their meaning into fuller existence" (p. 167).
Pally also says, "Roycean idea testing - including ideas about the Absolute - is 'the power to see widely, steadily, and connectedly.' As Peirce's dialogic belief integration enables us to grasp more than the cosmos' harmony, Royce's dialogic idea testing brings the structure of our thinking closer to the structure of reality" (p. 169).
Now, in Pally's subsection "Theological Pragmatism as a Resource for [Boston] Personalism and King," she highlights George Davis (1902-1960) of Crozer Theological Seminary, Edgar Brightman (1884-1953) of Boston University, and L. Harold DeWolf (1905-1986) of Boston University.
Eig mentions each of them (for specific page references to each of them, see the appropriate entry in the "Index"). He also discusses Dr. King's philosophical and theological personalism (pp. 79, 89, 110, and 253).
Pally says that Dr. King emphasized "the interconnectedness of persons" (p. 171). "'in a real sense,' he wrote [in "Letter from Birmingham Jail" in his 1964 book Why We Can't Wait (Harper & Row, pp. 77-100)] 'all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one [person] directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. . . . This is the inter-related structure of reality'" (quoted by Pally on p. 171; the ellipsis here is in her text).
Now, Pally also says, "In [Dr. King's 1958 book] Stride Toward Freedom [Harper & Row], King positioned himself in the Personalist tradition of Brightman and DeWolf, from which he developed his fundamental principles: the nature of human reason, the imago and value of each person, the sin of violating any person and thus of racism, his ontology of interrelatedness, and agape" (p. 172).
"King built on these ideas in rejecting the platonic view of the transcendent as actus purus, preferring instead a Roycean, DeWolfian God, 'a creative personal power in this universe who is the ground and essence of all reality.' With Pearce and Royce (and Aquinas), King held that persons are varied in experience, ideas, and purposes and limited in their grasp of the transcendent, which is a unity and unlimited. Thus, humanity need submit its varied, fallible ideas and social mores such as segregation to reality's 'ground and essence,' a god that 'placed certain immutable moral principles' like love and reciprocity, 'within the very structure of the universe'" (pp. 173-174; the last quoted words here are quoted from John Ansbro's 2000 book Martin Luther King, Jr..: Nonviolent Strategies and Tactics for Social Change (Rowman & Littlefield, p. 50); but the italicization here is hers).
Now, in Pally's subsection "Some Effects in [King's] Activism," she says, "This agape underpinned King's specific collective, nonviolent form of protest grounded in reason and imago-in-community - his understanding that, as interconnected, we can solve problems only interconnectedly" (p. 178).
Pally then quotes the following passage from pp. 94-95 of the 1986 Beacon Press edition of his 1958 book Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story:
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