Teaching James's "The Will to Believe"

Teaching Philosophy

Volumn 24, Issue 4, 2001, Pages 325-345

  Axtell, Guy ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA   (United States)

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EID: 79958261927     PISSN: 01455788     EISSN: 21536619     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/teachphil200124448     Document Type: Article

References (29)

1. William James, The Will to Believe, and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 13. Hereinafter referred to as WB.
2. For a sympathetic treatment of Clifford, see especially David Hollinger, "James, Clifford and the Scientific Conscience," in The Cambridge Companion to William James, Ruth Anna Putnam (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 69-83.
3. W. K. Clifford, "The Ethics of Belief," (original 1877) reprinted in The Ethics of Belief and Other Essays (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1999), 76. Hereinafter referred to as EOB.
4. "By 'lawfully may' and have 'the freedom to believe' James means 'is morally permitted.'" Richard M. Gale, "William James and the Ethics of Belief," American Philosophical Quarterly 17, 1 (1980), 1-24, footnote 3.
5. James characterized the "religious hypothesis" (RH) as (1) that "the best things are the more eternal things" and (2) that "we are better off even now if we believe." Inclusion of claim (2) is rather notorious, because as a statement about the effect of belief in the religious hypothesis, it cannot without circularity be used to define that hypothesis. Gale suggests that claim (1) essentially means that the universe has a moral order or driving force, so that good will win out over evil in the course of time.
6. Table 1 for the genuine option borrows both from Richard Gale and from Doug Browning. As the characterization of the evidentialist in James's terms as a "faith vetoer" should suggest, this table presents James's own characterizations in "The Will to Believe" of his dispute with Clifford, and aims only to be descriptive of James's approach. Gale says James and Clifford could agree if 1) Clifford took a wider view of evidence, to include personal experience; or 2) James settled for "hope" rather than "belief," since, as is often pointed out, James, like many fideists, seems to equivocate. For a view that develops upon the second point, see Pojman, 1986.
7. "Faith and Belief," in William James's Essays in Religion and Morality (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982).
8. Fideism may become an extreme doctrine denying that religious-belief systems are subject to any kind of rational evaluation. "Balanced fideists" like Pascal and James, however, do not despise reason, nor do they neglect considerations of rationality and intellectual duty.
9. "Faith-tendencies are extremely active psycho-logical forces, constantly outstripping evidence." "Faith and the Right to Believe," in William James's Some Problems of Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979 [1911]), 112.
10. Some contemporary pragmatists think that James conceded too much by looking only for exceptions-cases to Clifford's principle. Henry Jackman, for example, has argued that it is a mistake for the pragmatist to "leav[e] epistemic rationality entirely to his evidentialist opponents and merely argu[e] that believing what is in our interests can occasionally be prudentially rational." Henry Jackman, "Prudential Arguments, Naturalized Epistemology, and the Will to Believe," in Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, forthcoming.
11. Jack Meiland, "What Ought We To Believe?" American Philosophical Quarterly 17, 1 (1980), 15-24. Meiland challenges the notion of "purely epistemic warrant" on which he sees evidentialism resting.
12. The correct response for a pragmatist may be that he is not interested, as Locke was, in "truth for truth's sake." Compare, for example, John Dewey's sharp critique of this notion in The Quest for Certainty (1929). Clifford's stance is perhaps more objectionable than Locke's, since Clifford abandons the idea of the proportionality of the strength of beliefs in favor a vague "threshold" notion where an agent either has or fails to have "sufficient" evidence. This in turn leaves little space for the notion of "intellectually undecided" options, where James hopes to locate a robust realm of privacy rights.
13. Critics of James would not easily concede that a faith in "truths" answering to metaphysical questions has any rational basis; it therefore makes little sense to them that they "risk loss" of a potential momentous truth. Logical positivists and others argued that many or all metaphysical questions are ill-formed, and simply "senseless."
14. On the naturalistic hypothesis as the competitor to the religious hypothesis, see James's important footnote 4 to WB.
15. The Essential James, Bruce Wilshire (ed.) (Albany: SUNY Press, 1984), 252.
16. For useful discussions of the generic character of the religious hypothesis, see Ellen Suckiel's Heaven's Champion: William James's Philosophy of Religion (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), 115-116.
17. Michael Martin, Atheism: A Philosophical Justification (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 245.
18. "Attempts to prove the universality [of religion] prove too much or too little. It is probable that religions have been universal in the sense that all the peoples we know anything about have had a religion. But the differences among them are so great and so shocking that any common element that can be extracted is meaningless." The Essential Dewey, Vol. I, Larry Hickman and Thomas Alexander (eds.) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 403.
19. Had it been available to him, one way that James might have consistently clarified and developed the two levels while still maintaining the analogies he sought between scientific and religious reasoning would have been to borrow from Imre Lakatos's model of competing "research programmes." Such a model has been usefully applied to religion, for instance, in Gary Gutting's Religious Belief and Religious Skepticism (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), 175-177. Using this model, the Jamesian Religious Hypothesis (without details of the nature of the religious absolute) would be represented as the "hard core" of the religionists' programme, while the "outer" or "protective" belt of the programme, to which a more interim assent is appropriate, would "include almost all the content of the creeds and theologies that express the distinctive commitments of specific religions."
20. "Belief, that sacred faculty which prompts the decisions of our will, and knits into harmonious working all the compacted energies of our being, is ours not for ourselves, but for humanity" Clifford, EOB 74. "If I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief: it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward actions. But I cannot help doing this wrong towards Man, that I make myself credulous." Clifford, EOB 76.
21. Louis Pojman suggests not so much a contrast between public duty and private right in James's thought, but a contrast between different kinds of perceived duty. Clifford's duties are "deontological," while James's are "teleological," in the sense that they derive from ends deemed worth pursuing, perhaps as prerequisite to a meaningful and moral life. In "Faith and the Right to Believe," for instance, James says that "These faith tendencies in turn are but expressions of our good-will towards certain forms of result" (112).
22. See also Louis Pojman, Religious Belief and the Will (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), chapter 9.
23. Since on my reading, "liveness" already implies intellectually undecided for the agent, James's sudden inclusion of this extra condition must be construed objectively-he means intellectually-undecidable by currently available evidence, not just by evidence that a particular agent may have. Otherwise this condition would be redundant. The evidentialist nevertheless finds this condition suspect, because, they hold, if there are not sufficient objective grounds for assent to a statement, then there are, for that self-same reason, sufficient grounds for determining that the agent should suspend judgment. Pursuing James's thought concerning this condition would lead one to examine his important but ambiguous notion of "overbeliefs."
24. "If we accept that 'ought' implies 'can,' then Clifford has no business telling us that we ought to believe only on the basis of sufficient evidence unless he too thinks that belief is in these cases a voluntary matter." Meiland, 17. James is ambiguous as to whether by the phrase "voluntarily accepted faith" he supports direct voluntarism or only a far less controversial indirect voluntarism. He is often interpreted both ways, and while I believe he equivocates, it seems to me that a greater part of the problem derives from Clifford's voluntaristic language and the notion of an "ethics of belief" that James inherits from him.
25. For an interesting perspective on the social and psychological aspects of risktaking, see The Culture of Adolescent Risk-Taking, by Cynthia Lightfoot (New York: Guilford Press, 1997): "Risks are actively sought for their capacity to challenge, excite, and transform oneself and one's relationships with others. In this regard, risks are speculative, experimental, and oriented toward some uncertain and wished-for future" (2).
26. R. B. Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, Vol. 2, 245.
27. See also the Preface to The Will to Believe, p. 8: "I quite agree that what mankind at large most lacks is criticism and caution, not faith. ... What should be preached is courage weighted with responsibility. ... I do not think that anyone can accuse me of preaching reckless faith. I have preached the right of the individual to indulge his personal faith at his personal risk. I have discussed the kinds of risk; I have contended that none of us escape all of them; and I have only pleaded that it is better to face them open-eyed than to act as if we did not know them to be there."
28. See Richard J. Hall and Charles R. Johnson, "The Epistemic Duty to Seek More Evidence" (American Philosophical Quarterly 35, 2, 129-140). The authors argue that epistemology continues to overemphasize the synchronic character or aspect of epistemic duties/obligations, in contrast to future-looking diachronic duties. This emphasis leads in James's terms to the demand he chides as "waiting for the bell" to toll, the bell of sufficient or coercive evidence. James would point out that logic alone doesn't tell us when to stop waiting or when to stop looking for more evidence; like all "threshold of belief" issues, these are largely prudential issues and involve the will more than the intellect.
29. "Faith thus remains as one of the inalienable birthrights of our mind. Of course it must remain a practical, and not a dogmatical attitude. It must go with toleration of other faiths, with the search for the most probable, and with the full consciousness of responsibilities and risks." "Faith and the Right to Believe," 113.