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

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Why do we not have a geniune option?

James’ description of the religious hypothesis seems ‘timeless’ (not dependent on the period you are in) to me, so maybe you are talking about some different religious hypothesis

Well, there is this idea that, in some sense, atheism is just one less superstition, and the appeal is that, as there is no sufficient evidence, you can simply be rational and discard Christianity. But if we accept that it’s a forced option, then you can’t say, “I am just ignoring what doesn’t have sufficient evidence,” as you would always be taking a belief with insufficient evidence. You are believing in a superstition just like the Christian. You could say, “Yes, but you cannot not believe in a superstition,” and that’s true, but you still wouldn’t be able to appeal to some skepticism.

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Because the option we’re facing is not alive, not forced, and not momentuos.

No. James gives the examples with the Mahdi and the Turk, ie. how the aliveness of an option for a particular person is culturally, temporally, geographically dependent.

This is what is so revolutionary about James’ approach: he casts religious choice as being a matter of a particular person, living in a particular time and place.

In contrast, the typical way to present religious choice (both by religious apologists as well as their opponents) has always been as if it is something that transcends individual people and their circumstances.

Just like you do below:

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Right and that’s because? Remember, we simply have a forced option with insufficient evidence on each side

Yes, only the liveliness, not the two others and I only need the forced option for my argument. Here’s the religion hypothesis:

What then do we now mean by the religious hypothesis? […] religion says essentially two things:—

First, she says that the best things are the more eternal things, the overlapping things, the things in the universe that throw the last stone, so to speak, and say the final word. “Perfection is eternal”—this phrase of Charles Secrétan seems a good way of putting this first affirmation of religion, an affirmation that obviously cannot yet be verified scientifically at all.

And the second affirmation of religion is that we are better off even now if we believe that first religious truth.

– Section X

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The reading group discussion of ‘The Will to Believe’ is proving to be a fantastic interaction. Sometimes a bit overwhelming for a beginner, like me. I am taking it slow.

I’d like to start with the title and the questions of what, who, why and who James is addressing.

Title: ‘The Will to Believe’.

What is meant by ‘Will’ and ‘Belief’? Or the verb ‘to believe’.
Perhaps, the power of the individual to accept a given belief in religion, politics, depending on their intellect, logic or senses. Context and circumstance.
How their own - perhaps volatile - feelings might be working on how they see the world, or v.v. - is it about fear or desire.
Wanting or needing to be ‘right’?

Could it just as easily have been ‘The Reason to Believe’ (as suggested somewhere)? Or, more fancifully, ‘The Desire for Faith’?

Certainty v Doubt.

Next, the audience.
The Introduction, includes a school story of James Fitz-James Stephen.
The Will to Believe - Wikisource, the free online library

The teacher, a certain Mr. Guest, used to converse with his pupils in this wise: “Gurney, what is the difference between justification and sanctification?—Stephen, prove the omnipotence of God!” etc., etc. In the midst of our Harvard Unitarianism and indifference we are prone to imagine that here at good old orthodox Yale your conversation continues to be somewhat of this order.

According to Jonathan Bennet’s note: ‘This work began as a lecture to a philosophy club whose members were students at Yale and Brown Universities: James was at Harvard.’

The work was then published elsewhere, so the audience even wider.

I made an assumption about the make-up, mentality and psychology of the philosophy groups. That they would be mostly white, male Christians, conservative.

Yes, a photograph of the time shows majority white, males - spot the African-American.
Yale Undergraduates, 1896 by Granger

There’s more info on the fascinating history of both. See wiki. One thing - at Brown Uni, it seems that it was open to religious diversity. So, not all ‘Protestant’.

Religion is a ‘live hypothesis’, very much on the students’ minds. James is there, by request, to speak to them. ‘Perhaps your minds will be more clear…’

James talks honestly and directly to them. To make himself and his position more clear.

From VII:

We must know the truth, and we must avoid error; these are our first and great commandments as would-be knowers;

Is this true?

I agree with @Jamal that there is relevance here for ‘other aspects of life and other contexts.’

Although, not voting for this, I am intrigued by the reading, my assumptions and the group’s interaction. :slight_smile:

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A fair and accurate assumption I’d say. And yes, it’s important to bring it up for this essay in particular, because (a) when it comes to lectures I find it necessary to know the context to begin to understand the text—text that was once upon a time spoken in a room to a group of people; but also (b) James makes a point of conceding that his argument is specifcally directed to the kind of people in the audience—at the same time admitting that his speech wouldn’t convince other kinds of people.

And this makes me wonder about how relativist James is being.

It is evident that unless there be some pre-existing tendency to believe in masses and holy water, the option offered to the will by Pascal is not a living option. Certainly no Turk ever took to masses and holy water on its account; and even to us Protestants these means of salvation seem such foregone impossibilities that Pascal’s logic

— Section II

Belief is relative to one’s milieu. But does this imply an overarching relativism?

It’s a bit of a puzzle. James is open about the fact that his argument will only work for a narrow slice of humanity—the educated New England Protestant elite. And yet he counts himself as having the same living option, inescapably, while others (Turks and Arabs) may have their own very different genuine options.

I’m not sure how to take it. Does he hold an underlying opinion—or heartfelt volitional feeling or whatever he wants to call it—that he as a Protestant Christian is right, whereas all other religionists are wrong? I mean, that’s probably a normal viewpoint for a thinking believer, but it doesn’t really sit right with his awareness of the relativity of belief.

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Did you ever consider, that what he is saying is that if you cannot accept that religion is a real option, then you are so closed minded in your assumptions of absolute certainty, that you will not even be able related to what he is going to talk about.

For James, “belief” does not involve absolute certainty. So he is going to talk about how it is the case, that we move around in the world, and act, without absolute certainty about what we are doing.

So he may be saying, that if you are so closed minded on this issue of religion, then you have an attitude of absolute certainty. And if this is the case you will not be able to relate to the ideas he is discussing, the mind which is always open to the possibility of being wrong, at every step of the way.

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@Meta_U: I am a metaphysician. I establish strict logic. I deal in 1=1 equations; that is what I do.

James explicitly states that his writing addresses only those who already harbor the “living” idea of God inside themselves. To me, this “living” idea possesses the exact vital force of a sparrow’s wingbeat in the middle of a hurricane.

James is a human primate—a meta-monkey—just like you and me. I can perfectly simulate his mental state and understand exactly why he says what he says. Simulating the internal states of other biological entities is the very essence of the “Thought” category. Therefore, I relate 100% to James’s writing about God, but not in the way you wish. I have perfectly diagnosed it for what it is: religious anti-thought. It is the submission to the alpha-dominant idea of “God,” desperately trying to survive under the even more alpha-dominant constraint of having to produce something that resembles the Greek philosophical Logos.

Because this posture is inherently contradictory and makes no sense, he is forced to emit inept jargon and oxymoronic concepts like “living option” (which is merely a cowardly synonym for “belief”). James’s prose and logic are intellectually painful to read, but they are fully transparent to me.

Now, I have a very important question for you, Meta_U: are you a Raëlian or an a-Raëlian?

This is utterly important. We should be having very long, serious discussions about the journey Raël undertook when he was abducted by the Elohim and taken to the Planet of the Eternals. This is of the utmost importance, Meta_U; it could save you, me, and the entirety of humanity.

So, are you a Raëlian or not?

What?! You are not “open-minded” to Raël? You refuse to entertain this immense possibility that will save humanity? Even worse, you pretend to objectively understand why Raël said what he said without actually believing him?! You are so closed-minded Meta_U, it’s unbelievable!

I am neither a believer nor an atheist. I am a metaphysician.

48

James, Adorno, and the Leap in the Dark

William James and Theodor W. Adorno are very different philosophers, but I’ll compare them under the assumption that it will be productive, or informative, or at the very least enjoyable for me.

They agree that the demand for certainty before commitment is not the epistemic virtue it’s presented as by people like Clifford (Adorno would have shared James’s antipathy to Clifford). Genuine thought, thought that gets somewhere interesting or substantively true, requires a willingness to think boldly without the guarantee of solid ground.

First, some quotations from James’s essay:

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

— Fitz-James Stephen, quoted in Section X

We may talk of the empiricist way and of the absolutist way of believing in truth. The absolutists in this matter say that we not only can attain to knowing truth, but we can know when we have attained to knowing it; whilst the empiricists think that, although we may attain it, we cannot infallibly know when. To know is one thing, and to know for certain that we know is another.

— Section V

And after showing that everyone is instinctively and practically an absolutist—holding to beliefs with unshakable certainty—he asks whether we should espouse this absolutism, or regard it as a weakness that we should seek to free ourselves from. He answers:

I sincerely believe that the latter course is the only one we can follow as reflective men.

— Section VI

He makes the point with some biting polemic:

When, indeed, one remembers that the most striking practical application to life of the doctrine of objective certitude has been the conscientious labors of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, one feels less tempted than ever to lend the doctrine a respectful ear.

— Section VI

Then, despite having abandoned absolutism, he reasserts his “dogmatism,” by which he means the belief that we can attain truth:

But please observe, now, that when, as empiricists, we give up the doctrine of objective certitude, we do not thereby give up the quest or hope of truth itself.

— Section VI

Now Adorno:

There has been an about-face in the function of the concept of certainty in philosophy. What was once to surpass dogmas and the tutelage of self-certainty has become the social insurance of a cognition that is to be proof against any untoward happening. And indeed, to the unobjectionable nothing happens.

— Adorno, Negative Dialectics Introduction: Fragility of The Truth

Adorno is saying that the concept of certainty began as a weapon of Enlightenment, how reason was supposed to free itself from dogma and intellectual dependency, i.e, sapere aude. But later, the concept turned into its opposite, a way of making thought safe, risk-free and unobjectionable. And thought that is unobjectionable, Adorno is saying, is inert: nothing happens to it—meaning it doesn’t productively react with anything—and thus nothing comes of it.

I see James and Adorno as criticizing the same thing, in the same way, though for rather different reasons.

First, what they have in common: they both criticize the over-dependence on certainty, recommending instead a bold thrust into the unknown. Only such courageous thinking will attain truth. This is because thought which demands certainty before committing has already, in a sense, decided against truth: it has foreclosed on the possibility of grasping something for fear of setting a foot wrong.

The major difference is that even though James accurately identifies “prejudice and passion, imitation and partisanship, the circumpressure of our caste and set” as forming the passional, willing nature that determines which hypotheses are live for us, he still recommends that we listen to and follow these pressures and motivations.

But for Adorno, these are precisely the ideological forces that we have to break through, critically analyzing the very “prejudice and passion, imitation and partisanship, the circumpressure of our caste and set” that James seems to find unobjectionable. This is exactly where we need to be, in Adorno’s own words, “blasting open individual phenomena through the insistent power of thought.”

So from Adorno’s point of view, James’s essay is ideology. It presents contingent conditions—what happens to be a live option for a particular class in a particular historical moment—as universal epistemological ones, since despite the essay’s obvious awareness of the relativity of belief, he assumes the correctness of Protestant Christianity.

Generalizing, the leap in the dark turns out to be a leap into whatever your passional nature happens to be, as shaped by your social position. The way Adorno sees it, that’s not courage so much as a capitulation to the most dreary conventions dressed up as authenticity.

Thus we see James’s rhetoric as being deployed in the service of mere ideological apologetics, whereas for Adorno, rhetoric has a liberating potential when used in the service of philosophical speculation:

It is the element of freedom because it is the point at which the expressive need of the subject breaks through the conventional and canalized ideas in which he moves, and asserts himself.

— Lectures on Negative Dialectics, p. 108

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It’s a wonderful lecture, quite a bit better than I remembered.

I’ll just note a few points here, and then see what develops.

A little bit of context. By 1896 James had been teaching psychology at Harvard for twenty years; The Principles of Psychology was published six years before this lecture. Even more than twenty years earlier was the year of the Metaphysical Club, and the volume of essays in which this appears is dedicated to Peirce “to whose philosophic comradeship in old times [some 23 years prior] and to whose writings in more recent years I owe more incitement and help than I can express or repay.” He had become professor of philosophy as well some fifteen years before this lecture. The Varieties of Religious Experience was five years away, and the various well-known books on pragmatism more than ten.

In my edition, the lecture is about 30 pages, and the first 20, sections I through VII, he calls introduction. There are then two more sections and he only comes to religion proper in the very last section, the last five pages of the lecture, more or less. If you make it to “If for any of you religion be a hypothesis that cannot, by any living possibility be true, then you need go no further,” you’ve already heard 80% of the lecture.

There is a lot of material, but I believe the key passage comes in about the middle, the end of section VI:

Our great difference from the scholastic lies in the way we face. The strength of his system lies in the principles, the origin, the terminus a quo of his thought. For us the strength is in the outcome, the upshot, the terminus ad quem. Not where it comes from but what it leads to is to decide.

There are things throughout somewhat like arguments, maybe some of them are arguments, but fundamentally I think it is an invitation to a certain way of comporting yourself toward the world, an orientation, what he calls “empiricism” but we would call “pragmatism”.

I’ll add here a longish quote from the preface to the collection of essays in which this appeared, as a summary:

I admit, then, that were I addressing the Salvation Army or a miscellaneous popular crowd it would be a misuse of opportunity to preach the liberty of believing as I have in these pages preached it. What such audiences most need is that their faiths should be broken up and ventilated, that the northwest wind of science should get into them and blow their sickliness and barbarism away. But academic audiences, fed already on science, have a very different need. Paralysis of their native capacity for faith and timorous abulia in the religious field are their special forms of mental weakness, brought about by the notion, carefully instilled, that there is something called scientific evidence by waiting upon which they shall escape all danger of shipwreck in regard to truth. But there is really no scientific or other method by which men can steer safely between the opposite dangers of believing too little or of believing too much. To face such dangers is apparently our duty, and to hit the right channel between them is the measure of our wisdom as men.

I largely share his view of the world, so I think he gets a lot right in the lecture. Science is an extraordinary achievement, and there’s no question for us, as there was not for James, of rejecting science. But is it the One True Way of forming beliefs? No. There are other ways, and we can look at them, try to understand how they work, and in gaining such understanding take a step toward coming to some kind of an arrangement with science that respects it without mistakenly generalizing it as a model for all legitimate cognition.

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The quote, as you printed it was:

Do you see the difference between what the quote says, and what you say “James explicitly states”?

He says that those who cannot accept the hypotheses of religion as a possibility need not listen further. He does not say that those who harbour the idea of God inside themselves are the only ones he addresses.

Do you not recognize the difference between an option and a belief?

No comment.

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Thanks Pat, it’s good to have someone on board who is familiar with James. This is the first thing of his I’ve read.

I think I’m about 50/50. I agree with what he says about science, and I see nothing very wrong with the thesis that…

Our passional nature must, and lawfully may, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds

— Section IV

But even so, his style and interests do not really gel with me so far. I’d be interested to see what else you think about it.

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Here’s a bit from section IX that is not in the original magazine version reprinted on Wikisource, but is in the book version:

Wherever a desired result is achieved by the co-operation of many independent persons, its existence as a fact is a pure consequence of the precursive faith in one another of those immediately concerned. A government, an army, a commercial system, a ship, a college, an athletic team, all exist on this condition, without which not only is nothing achieved, but nothing is even attempted. A whole train of passengers (individually brave enough) will be looted by a few highwaymen, simply because the latter can count on one another, while each passenger fears that if he makes a movement of resistance, he will be shot before any one else backs him up. If we believed that the whole car-full would rise at once with us, we should each severally rise, and train-robbing would never even be attempted. There are, then, cases where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming.

This is a terrific analysis. He spots the great value of cooperation, grounds it in something much like shared intentionality (in the Tomasello vein), and notes the challenges of managing it, which will later receive extensive game-theoretic analysis.

And you can see how the forward-looking worldview he is commending to us connects quite naturally to what sustains our social practices, and thus our culture, and the achievements of that culture like science.

His remarks on the practice of science in the previous section are also nicely balanced—and he had firsthand experience here. On the one hand, you can and should withhold judgement; on the other, the best science is done by people with an investment, who have let their thoughts and their hopes run ahead of the evidence.

The distinction between seeking truth and avoiding error I thought was very sharp, and note that these are both actions or plans for action, still forward-looking. James always observes man in motion. The questions he is raising are about what to do, where to go next; it’s a dynamic view, not the static view of a system of ideas and an inert world to which they might correspond or apply.

There are lots of sharp observations and really compressed analyses scattered throughout. I thought of putting together a sort of outline to show how the various chunks fit together, because if you read him sentence by sentence as if you were reading an argument, it seems just to wander from idea to idea without any structure. There is some structure here, but in the main, as I said, it’s a matter of building up a picture, a view of life.

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That interpretation I think too simplistic. Firstly, if we can only follow what our dispositions, whether genetically or culturally determined, allow, then that does not seem to necessarily count as “following our hearts”.

Secondly, I think that when it comes to beliefs that are not either self-evident or based on empirical observations, no one simply follows their hearts (or even their predetermined dispositions) but rationalises such following with some logic (whether good, that is valid, or poor, that is invalid) based on those dispositions.

And then, relating to what you say in a later post, and to expand on the first point:

I don’t think it is plausible to equate following one’s heart with listening “to and following these motivations”. One may, in one’s heart, wish to go against such conventions, and yet be afraid to do so.

It turns on the question of whether it is possible to intuit any truth independently of the forces (genetic and cultural) determining one’s nature.

Not at all. Why would you think that?

Such attitudes certainly exist. Personally I think they are based on misunderstandings and/ or prejudices.

There is a difference between believing things which cannot be determined with certainty (such as metaphysical beliefs) and believing things which go against what has been empirically detremined to be the case (that the Earth is not roughly spherical). One is free to believe whatever one’s dispositions prompt when it comes to metaphysical matters (within the range of what would count as plausible, or not simply arbitrary and absurd), whereas if one believes things which have been demonstrated to be false, then one is simply uneducated, or a fool.

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I’ll throw in one more connection to recent work that made rereading this particularly exciting for me.

I’ve recently discovered the work of a German psychologist named Gerd Gigerenzer. He picks up Herb Simon’s critique of Bayesian decision theory as an extension of a theory beyond the area in which it actually applies. Gigerenzer revives a distinction of the economist Frank Knight between risk and uncertainty: risk is where all the possible outcomes and their probabilities are known, and you can calculate; uncertainty is where there is constitutive ignorance, you simply do not know what the right answer is, what might happen, and so on.

Gigerenzer claims that mathematical models of the Bayesian sort are perfectly fine when talking about risk, but a failure when dealing with uncertainty. For that, you need what he calls heuristics: simple algorithms for decision-making that can be made explicit, can be studied, can be refined and improved, but do not require godlike access to information or compute.

Now if you look at “The Will to Believe” in that light, and taking Bayesianism as something like the science of evidence, you can see why religious faith in particular might show up as decidedly in the uncertainty bucket, rather than the risk bucket, and require a non-scientific (again, non-Bayesian, non-evidentiary) treatment. And similarly for morality, cooperation, and friendship, the three examples of non-scientific decision-making he treats in the build-up to dealing with religious faith.

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You have read me uncharitably. It’s been a while, so maybe you forgot the context. I was pointing out that most of the time when James refers to our “willing nature” and so on, he is not talking about conscious voluntary choice. Obviously “following our hearts” is shorthand.

The exchange was prompted by this comment:

So, I don’t really know why you are questioning whether “following our hearts” can be equated with listening to and following our prejudices or unconscious and socially-grounded motivations.

I think that’s often true, yes.

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I liked that section quite a lot, yes. But I’m annoyed that I didn’t know until now that the Wikisource version is different. I’ve been reading the one in the essay collection. Luckily, every time I’ve wanted to quote, I’ve found the passage in the Wikisource version, so maybe the differences are few and small.

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Exactly—I went to copy and paste that, and it wasn’t there! I don’t know how extensive the changes are, but you’d figure it was trimmed down a bit for magazine publication and restored for the book. I wouldn’t worry much about the differences. He’s not that sort of writer.

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My apologies if it came across uncharitably. James doesn’t use the phrase “follow the heart” but he does speak about following our “passional natures”. “Passion” has an older etymological relation to “passive”, and given that relation and that James says we should “follow our prejudices or unconscious and socially-grounded motivations”, I think in that context that connection seems apt enough.

However, under the more modern meaning of ‘passion’ and perhaps less restrictive notion of ‘following the heart’, as I already pointed out, I don’t think the two are (necessarily) equated.

So, if James equates the two ideas, in accordance with an older notion of passion, I am, from a modern perspective, disagreeing with him, and not necessarily with you. That was why I was questioning the equation of the two ideas.

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I’d definitely enjoy reading that.

I was somewhat confused by his terminology. He’s very comfortable with the scholastic terms, but avoids a Kantian distinction where it seems obviously applicable:

Apart from abstract propositions of comparison (such as two and two are the same as four), propositions which tell us nothing by themselves about concrete reality, we find no proposition ever regarded by any one as evidently certain that has not either been called a falsehood, or at least had its truth sincerely questioned by some one else.

Avoiding the term analytic here might be a concession to his non-professional audience, but I somehow doubt it—from what I can gather, the members of these clubs were educated and knowledgeable in philosophy even if it was not the focus of their studies or work.

Instead, the avoidance might be a reflection of the dynamic or action-oriented view that you mention, or a principled refusal to fall back on those concepts of the philosophical tradition which are associated with fixed a priori categories.

I get the sense that his thinking genuinely resists, or wants to resist, hypostatization. His concept of belief is more like a willlingness to act than a mental state.

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I’m reading the passage quoted by @Pat with interest. I wondered about the book version or source.
Glad to say, it exists in the other sources included in your OP:
Jonathan Bennett’s pdf The Will to Believe
and Gutenberg: The Project Gutenberg E-text of The Will to Believe, by William James

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