The limits of loyalty

Rosenstock-Huessy cites Josiah Royce’s The Philosophy of Loyalty as an example of a reductive view of human life. Royce rightly emphasizes the importance of loyalty, but then “could not resist the temptation to explain everything in terms of this one power which essentially binds us to the past.” But the past is only one arm of the “cross of reality,” and if loyalty is the supreme good, then there is no room for a creative break with the past: “Loyalty is an expression of historical continuity; it can never justify a decisive break.” Royce goes so far as to suggest that love is a kind of loyalty, but Rosenstock-Huessy rightly points out that “to say that a man leaves father and mother and cleaves to the wife of his choice out of loyalty simply does not make sense.”