April Reading: "The Will to Believe" by William James

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This month we’re reading “The Will to Believe” by William James. It was first delivered as a lecture to the Philosophical Clubs at Yale and Brown universities in 1896, and was published the same year in the journal The New World, and then included in James’s 1897 book, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy.

The text is widely available. The most convenient is on Wikisource, which has an HTML version and also provides downloads in various file formats, including PDF:

Or if you’re a fan of Jonathan Bennett’s versions at the Early Modern Texts website, which are modified for readability (though still faithful to the originals), there’s a PDF available there:

Audiobook versions have been helpfully suggested by @Amity here.

Also, e-books of the full essay collection, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, are available for free from Project Gutenberg and wherever you get your e-books.

Overview

James argues, against W.K. Clifford’s evidentialism, that it can be rational to believe something in the absence of conclusive evidence. In particular, he defends the rationality of religious belief, although the essay’s scope is wider than that.

As mentioned above, the essay started out as a lecture delivered to university philosophical clubs. These were probably open to any students interested in philosophy, rather than professional philosophers or even just philosophy students. This is reflected in the style: James writes rhetorically (not a criticism—I’ll say more in a future post); deploys a warm and playful tone; uses many examples and analogies; and sometimes spells things out in a way that professional philosophers would not have required. (The essay drags for me in section VI, which feels like an unnecessary detour, but James may have thought it was useful background in the context of the clubs).

The Wikipedia page on the essay includes a somewhat useful outline.

What next?

You don’t have to wait till April. Go ahead and post your thoughts when you’re ready (or respond to those of others). I recommend the following approach.

  1. Read the essay in full:
    Outlines and AI summaries are useful to complement your reading, but please read the thing itself as well.

  2. Interpret the essay:
    Before evaluating it, try to work out what it’s saying.

  3. Focus on what interests you:
    You don’t have to evaluate the argument in its entirety. You can focus on parts of it, making connections with other philosophical works or with your own experience and observations.

When you refer to what James has written, do it directly by quoting the text, thus making explicit exactly what you’re referring to. This helps to keep the discussion anchored and prevent people talking past each other.

NOTE: Quoting will work best if you copy and paste from the HTML version, since it won’t end up with line-breaks in the wrong places.

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Thank you, Jamal, for a great beginning with resources, advice and insight.
It is unfortunate that you are correct re:

I enjoy Jonathan Bennett’s pdf version. Its ease of presentation, his notes and the Search function. However, I tested it out and the transition to TPF format is terrible. How can this travesty be allowed? :slightly_frowning_face:

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Could I suggest we take this issue up in one of the How To threads? I have some ideas and tools for easily converting between various formats (pdf, markdown, html etc) but this thread is not the place to discuss those technicalities.

@Jamal

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You may be able to convert to HTML using Calibre (freely downloadable open source app).

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I’d like to know what the issue is before trying to help. What’s wrong with copying quotes from the Wikisource version? If you’re on a desktop or laptop it’s easy to have TPF and the Wikisource page open in different tabs.

I read the essay on Kindle, but will be copying from the Wikisource version. You read Bennett’s version, but could also copy from Wikisource, no?

I don’t think converting between formats has any relevance.

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There is nothing wrong.

Yes, I could and probably will. But, for me, it is worth considering ease of use - even in general - of converting reading materials into TPF friendly formats.

I appreciate @Wayfarer’s suggestion and accept that this RG discussion should not weigh itself down in technicalities. It is a good idea to link to a ‘How to…’ thread. Make it so, I say :slight_smile:

I’d argue that it is the place to discuss any preliminary thoughts and challenges experienced by participants.
Of course, it is important not to derail the ‘real’ business but is it not good to share and learn different ways, as we go?

Some of us will have questions, perhaps deemed ‘irrelevant’, and some will provide useful answers or options. Useful to consider ‘relevance’ and practicalities.

Thank you for your welcome suggestion. :slight_smile:

Markdown Editing Apps
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No, you’ve misunderstood me. I meant that I didn’t think converting between file formats had any relevance to the issue you have with quoting, because Wikisource already provides a perfectly compatible format. I may be wrong about that of course. Anyway, I’m not saying this is not the place for reading group meta chat.

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Thank you for correcting my misinterpretation. Always good to talk :upside_down_face:

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Quick Summary

Clifford argued that it’s always wrong to believe something without sufficient evidence. James concedes this for many beliefs, but he argues that it fails for a specific set of cases: options that are…

  • live (genuinely open to the believer);
  • forced (not deciding is itself a decision);
  • momentous (high stakes, no second chance).

James’s claim is that in such cases, believing on the basis of inconclusive evidence is not just permissible but rational. With such “genuine options,” withholding belief is itself a positive choice, one that may block the way to truths accessible only through our prior passional investment.

Others may wish to analyze the argument. For now, I’m going to focus on a few different things that I thought about when reading.

Religion & Relevance

The main problem I have with the essay (am I breaking my own rule by criticizing before I’ve even interpreted it?) is that the religious hypothesis is not for me a live option. And he says himself…

If for any of you religion be a hypothesis that cannot, by any living possibility be true, then you need go no further.

— Section X

So what more is there to say? The tempting conclusion is that, if it’s the case that for a very large number of people, the religious hypothesis is no longer a live option, James’s essay says nothing generalizable or interesting about epistemology, because it applies only to a certain milieu in a certain era, when the religious hypothesis was a big deal.

But this is probably too hasty a judgement. If we focus on the religion, then yes, but the argument surely works—if it works at all—for other kinds of beliefs.

He mentions some of those himself: moral beliefs in section IX, where he argues that the question of whether to have moral beliefs at all cannot be settled by evidence; and interpersonal trust, where a faith that someone likes you is the condition for their liking you.

The structure of the argument applies wherever you have a genuine option: political commitment, intellectual risk-taking, basically any domain of life in which an indefinite suspension of judgement forecloses the very evidence that could have vindicated belief.

For example, “The evil dictator will be overthrown” is something you make true by believing it.

Is this enough to establish the essay’s relevance and importance?

Rhetoric

James’s use of rhetoric is interesting because, viewed charitably, it’s not merely the stylistic vehicle for a formal argument. It’s not just packaging for content that could have been presented neutrally. Rather, in speaking rhetorically, James wants to make his claim as live, forced, and momentous as the religious hypothesis itself. So the rhetoric is doing philosophical work.

So the lecture performs or enacts the argument, demonstrating that whatever persuasion it manages to achieve is legitimate even if it’s achieved by rhetoric, i.e., in appealing to the audience’s emotions.

Of course, a critic would turn this against him. Rhetoric can conceal weak reasoning: the emotional pull of his speech does some of the work that argument should be doing.

Specifically, James’s argument only gets going if the religious hypothesis is live for the audience; but the rhetoric may be doing the work of making it feel live, smuggling in the precondition the argument relies on. And this makes it much worse than the restricted applicability that I mentioned before: in fact, he can’t assume that the religious hypothesis is a live option for his audience, and has to compensate for this by manufacturing it with rhetoric.

But I’m not going to abandon the good side of rhetoric so easily. In another post I may look deeper at how James’s rhetoric, and maybe the argument itself, ties in with Adorno’s conception of the role of expression and risk-taking in philosophy. Basically the idea echoes James’s final quotation, which includes this:

In all important transactions of life we have to take a leap in the dark

— Fitz-James Stephen, quoted in Section X

Affective cognition

James advances a descriptive claim that fits with later work in philosophy, cognitive science, and neuroscience: a “pure” rationality, uncontaminated by emotion and desire, is a myth. Even the attempt to remain pure, to resist the pull of belief, may be a motivated passional choice—in section VII he’s explicit about this:

We must remember that these feelings of our duty about either truth or error are in any case only expressions of our passional life. Biologically considered, our minds are as ready to grind out falsehood as veracity, and he who says, “Better go without belief forever than believe a lie!” merely shows his own preponderant private horror of becoming a dupe.

— Section VII

Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis, for example, has confirmed James’s descriptive claim that emotion and affect, rather than obscuring or thwarting reason, partly constitute it.

So, the question is no longer whether passional influence plays a role, but exactly when it’s legitimate and nothing to worry about, and when it’s worth minimizing.

Questions:

  1. What does James actually mean by belief?

    To me, he seems to always mean faith, what we would call today something like belief in the absence of evidence. The more recent notion of belief as a proposition held to be true (“There is a God”, “I have never been to the moon”, “The cup is in the cupboard”) is not exactly what he’s talking about. Is this an aspect of his pragmatism?

  2. Is James arguing for doxastic voluntarism?

    This is the idea that we can choose what to believe. James would probably rather say that in the case of genuine options, our passional nature already decides for us. But at other times he seems to conflate the passional and the voluntary. And he says explicitly in the preface:

    I have long defended to my own students the lawfulness of voluntarily adopted faith

    Maybe it’s something like a restricted voluntarism?

  3. Is James arguing along the lines of Pascal’s wager even while claiming he’s not?

    He dismisses Pascal’s wager in section II, but later on in section X he seems to deploy a very similar kind of argument in favour of faith. Assuming consistency, he must be relying on a distinction between what he’s doing and what Pascal was doing. What is it? Is it a convincing distinction?

  4. Why was this essay so popular on TPF?

    I’m genuinely curious. It was by far my least favourite out of the candidate essays. Americans voting for one of their own? The religious angle?

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I haven’t finished reading it, about half-way through. But I think it is very much a kind of secular religious apologetic, if there is such a thing. James after all wrote Varieties of Religious Experience, which is still on University curricula to my knowledge and is still well-regarded in comparative religion. He writes from a rather psychologistic and anthropological attitude, which canvasses a huge range of religious and spiritual experiences, not only Christian.

Varieties of Religious Experience

His primary goal was to document the “feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude.”

  • Experience Over Dogma: He famously distinguishes between “institutional” religion (theology, ritual, organization) and “personal” religion (the inner life). He focuses almost exclusively on the latter.
  • The “Sick Soul” vs. “Healthy-Mindedness”: James categorizes religious temperaments. The “healthy-minded” see the world as essentially good, while the “sick soul” is acutely aware of evil and suffering, requiring a “second birth” or conversion to find peace.
  • The Reality of the Unseen: He argues that if a religious experience produces “fruits for life”—meaning it makes a person more functional, moral, or joyful—then it is “true” in a pragmatic sense.
  • Mysticism: James outlines four marks of the mystical state: Ineffability (cannot be put into words), Noetic Quality (states of knowledge/insight), Transiency (short duration), and Passivity (feeling held by a superior power).

I will add that the part I’ve read so far is also very much a psychological analysis - of motivations, character, why people believe or don’t believe.

A snippet from one of James’ contemporaries and lifelong associate, Josiah Royce, an American idealist philosopher. This is part of Royce’s description of what motivates religious belief:

..The need for salvation, for those who feel it, is paramount among human needs. The need for salvation depends on two simpler ideas:

a) There is a paramount end or aim of human life relative to which other aims are vain.

b) Man as he now is, or naturally is, is in danger of missing his highest aim, his highest good.

To hold that man needs salvation is to hold both of (a) and (b). I would put it like this. The religious person perceives our present life, or our natural life, as radically deficient, deficient from the root (radix) up, as fundamentally unsatisfactory; he feels it to be, not a mere condition, but a predicament; it strikes him as vain or empty if taken as an end in itself; he sees himself as homo viator, as a wayfarer or pilgrim treading a via dolorosa (path of sorrows) through a vale that cannot possibly be a final and fitting resting place; he senses or glimpses from time to time the possibility of a Higher Life; he feels himself in danger of missing out on this Higher Life of true happiness. If this doesn’t strike a chord in you, then I suggest you do not have a religious disposition. Some people don’t, and it cannot be helped. One cannot discuss religion with them, for it cannot be real to them. It is not, for them, what William James in “The Will to Believe” calls a “living option,” let alone a “forced” or “momentous” one.

I understand why it is not a live option for some, but that it remains so for many others.

He does say, page 14

In all of this I am supposing that. . . . even for us who are discussing the matter, religion is a live hypothesis which may be true.

And on the next page:

When I look at the religious question as actual men really confront it, and when I think of all the possibilities it involves, both practically and theoretically, then this command that we put a stopper on our heart, instincts, and courage, and wait—while acting pretty much as if religion were not true —until doomsday, or until such time as our intellect and senses working together may have raked in evidence enough, seems to me the queerest idol ever manufactured in the philosophic cave.

So it seems to me the whole essay is concerned with religious belief in particular.

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Yes, but my claim is that the essay might be relevant over and above that. This is an intentionally charitable reading, trying to get as much as I can out of an essay which is quite alien to me owing to its focus on religion.

And though religion is the focus, he does explicitly indicate alternative avenues, like morality, interpersonal experience, and politics.

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I’m on a roll right now so I’ll reply to my own question.

I have long defended the lawfulness of voluntary faith to my own students

— Preface

I think the evidence of the text is that when James uses “voluntary” and “volitional,” he means to include (and even emphasize) non-discursive, i.e., affective willing. It’s clear that he is associating—sometimes to the point of indistinguishability—volition with emotional, unconscious motivation. The most significant clue is here:

When I say “willing nature,” I do not mean only such deliberate volitions as may have set up habits of belief that we cannot now escape from, I mean all such principles as prejudice and passion, imitation and partisanship, the circumpressure of our caste and set. As a matter of fact we find ourselves believing, we hardly know how or why.

— Section III

So perhaps after all he does not primarily mean voluntary conscious choice, but something more like choice on the basis of unconscious conditioning or hidden motivations (and here we can bring in later thinkers on the topics of the unconscious or ideology—James even mentions the significance of class). Or maybe better put, he does not even think it’s important to strictly distinguish these, since for him they lie on a spectrum.

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What an absolute intellectual punishment to wade through this gibberish : it literally reads like a Presbyterian youth-fellowship seminar for prepubescent teens!

Right up until the penultimate page, the guy desperately tries to ape philosophical logos, only to finally admit that he is strictly addressing believers—people who already have faith. A faith he cowardly disguises under the inept jargon of a “living option.”: he actually discusses absolutely nothing, real philosophers were out from the beginning ! It is nothing but a pseudo-scholarly soothing salve, dispensed solely to make his little audience of anxious teens feel good about themselves and like their pastor. Pathetic. I could easily waste two more pages dismantling his ridiculous naming conventions, childish metaphors, and delusional pseudo-logic.

This only cements my conviction that there is simply no such thing as Anglo-Saxon philosophy : it’s only an endless Old Testament verbiage, where propositional ratiocination has merely replaced inept Kabbalistic numerology.

I fully intend to exact my revenge for the time stolen by this reading : sometime I’ll push a post titled something along the lines of: “The Paradox of Analytic ‘Philosophy’ as Yahwist Terror.”

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I feel like you’re holding back. If you don’t like the essay, just say so. :wink:

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I personally only read the short description and I didn’t think it was about religion but I find the non-religious question of “should we believe on insufficient evidence” interesting so I voted for it. I am however not disappointed.

I don’t know if he is claiming that he isn’t making a similar argument. I don’t think he dismisses Pascal’s Wager; he simply says that the wager is powerless for someone for whom the religious hypothesis is dead. Which is also true for his argument in section X.

But it’s not really the same. The wager is more like “whether or not it’s true that God exists, the simple fact that there is the possibility of infinite reward means the rational choice is to believe”. Here, he is saying that he could actually be right by believing, and not believing could cut him off from the truth. The non-believer could say the same thing, and I think he would agree, saying that his target is more the idea that there is a correct or non passional answer in this situation.

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“As a rule we disbelieve all facts and theories for which we have no use. Clifford’s cosmic emotions find no use for Christian feelings. Huxley belabors the bishops because there is no use for sacerdotalism in his scheme of life. Newman, on the contrary, goes over to Roman Catholicism, and finds all sorts of reasons to be good for staying there, because for him a priestly system is an organic need and delight” ~ p 5

’Clifford’ refers to William Kingdon Clifford, a 19th-century English mathematician and philosopher. He is well known for his essay “The Ethics of Belief” (1877) in which he argued that it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. Clifford was a prominent advocate of scientific rationalism and skepticism, and his views are frequently contrasted with those of religious or faith-based approaches to belief. Similar in outlook to a Richard Dawkins.

John Henry Newman’s ‘Grammar of Assent’ (1870) presented the opposing case. It emphasized the legitimacy of religious belief even in the absence of strict logical or scientific proof.

  • Argued that assent (believing) is a natural and rational human act, often based on cumulative probabilities, conscience, and personal experience rather than only demonstrative evidence.
  • Maintained that certainty in belief can be justified by the convergence of many factors, not just by formal, objective proof.

This is all given (p4-5) in the context of a discussion of the influence of society and culture on the formation of belief. He is making the point that many factors influence our beliefs, only a few of them fully conscious or articulated.

I very much like the remark he makes a little later (p7) ‘Objective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where are they to be found on this moonlit and dream-visited planet?’

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I first read this paper many years ago, and am familiar with the thrust of it. I’ve only just started reading this again. I thought, given limited time, that the best approach for me would be to deal with questions as they arise.

I have brought with me to-night something very like a sermon on justification by faith to read to you—I mean an essay in justification of faith, a defense of our right willfully to adopt a believing attitude in religious matters, in spite of the fact that our merely logical intellect may not have been coerced.

This passage immediately raises questions as to how the things being investigated are being conceived, and whether the way it seems they are being thought about is the most apt:
• is the idea that our beliefs are voluntarily chosen plausible?
• What is meant by “religious matters”?
• What is meant by “logical intellect”?
• Under what authority could a purported right or lack of right to hold any belief be legislated?

I will come back to these questions as they seem relevant to the passages as I encounter and react to them.

A live hypothesis is one that appeals as a real possibility to him to whom it is proposed. If I ask you to believe in the Mahdi, the notion makes no electric connection with your nature, it refuses to scintillate with any credibility at all. As an hypothesis it is completely dead. To an Arab, however (even if he be not one of the Mahdi’s followers), the hypothesis is among the mind’s possibilities; it is alive.

This passage addresses one aspect of the question of volition in relation to the holding of beliefs. We cannot hold a belief about something which means nothing at all to us. In the example given it is a matter of cultural “luck”―depending on your familiarity with a cultural tradition some beliefs would be either meaningful to you or not. A related thought would be to try to imagine holding a belief expressed in a language you did not understand when no translation is available to you. Or further, even if you had the thing explained to you, you could lack the cultural background that would enable you to feel any affinity for it.

This shows that deadness and liveness in an hypothesis are not intrinsic properties, but relations to the individual thinker. They are measured by his willingness to act. The maximum of liveness in an hypothesis means willingness to act irrevocably. Practically that means belief; but there is some believing tendency wherever there is willingness to act at all.

This seems right but it raises the question as to whether the aliveness or deadness of any hypothesis to a particular individual is always culturally determined, and the degree to which one or other is culturally predetermined in any case. In some traditional cultures the people may have no culturally available access to hypothesises that do not form part of the culture. Are some people able to question the cultural imperatives in such societies just on the basis of reasoning, of logical negation? Is it possible within a rigidly traditional to imagine alternatives to its imperatives just on the basis of “native” logic and imagination?

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