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

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An excellent, comprehensive and substantial article. It fits in with what I’ve read of James, so far and why he would enjoy talking to that particular cohort.
Didn’t he have the t-shirt of indecision and spirit of exploration? The need to feel free.

Choices re what to be or do? Art v Science v Psychology v Philosophy?

In the choice of study, is there any? Parents pay, don’t they? They have desires which may conflict with students’ personal wants or needs. They often look to what is acceptable or practical for pursuit of prestige or payment.
This tearing of the individual’s spirit can lead to unhappiness and even depression.

The angst but also the importance of questioning belief or faith. Even if it produces tension and conflict in some family and community lives to be ‘different’.

At one point we must wrestle with the evidence given and make a decision within our uncertainty. Philosopher and psychologist William James himself noted this problem, acknowledging that perhaps “[o]bjective evidence and certitude are doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and dream-visited planet are they found?” The Risk of Belief: William James, Experience, and Religious Practice | Epoché Magazine

The final paragraph in James’ The Will to Believe’ is powerful. Stephen’s quote reflecting religious and philosophical questions, not only of young students:

‘What do you think of yourself? What do you think of the world? …These are questions with which all must deal as it seems good to them. They are riddles of the Sphinx, and in some way or other we mustdeal with them…In all important transactions of life we have to take a leap in the dark…
[…]
What must we do? “Be strong and of a good courage.” Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what comes…If death ends all, we cannot meet death better.’ p16 The Will to Believe

The religious element remains but it is not an Either/Or. The options and decisions we take are multi-faceted. The implications of what we believe are shown or observed.

From the start, James:

This shows that deadness and aliveness are not intrinsic properties of an hypothesis but relations ·of the hypothesis· to the individual thinker. They are measured by his willingness to act. The maximum of aliveness in an hypothesis means willingnessto act irrevocably… But there is some believing tendency wherever there is any willingness to act. p2 The Will to Believe

The Will to Believe and the willingness to act - how are they measured?

By their actions shall we know them? Matthew 7:20 So then, by their fruit you will recognize them.

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Yes, given his life story and experiences, it is clear that James is not just one label. Like ‘Protestant’ or ‘agnostic’ or ‘radical empiricist’.

It interests me how he uses the word ‘hypothesis’:

I. Let us give the label ‘hypothesis’ to anything that may be proposed for us to believe; and—just as electricians speak of ‘live’ and ‘dead’ wires—let us classify hypotheses into live and dead. p2 The Will to Believe

James speaks of a hypothesis as ‘anything that may be proposed to our belief’. Is that the usual meaning?
I have the sense that this is deliberate use of scientific language - to appeal to the audience of students. Their main subjects would be Maths and Science. The electrical analogy is well chosen for James’s classification of ‘live’ and ‘dead’ hypotheses.
James sees ‘live’ as real possibility ( a positive wire is ‘hot’) with a real electric connection with a person’s nature. ( beware it could be dangerous - perhaps another option would be ‘neutral’ - ‘grounded’ or indifferent).
He contrasts the students’ ‘nature’ and belief in Christianity (live) with that of an Arab and the belief in Islam (live). Talks of the Madhi. ( I had to look it up - how much would this mean to the students)
Mahdi - Wikipedia

Probably enough to use the word ‘Arab’ - probably already dismissed as a ‘dead’ option to them. But I don’t like the term ‘dead’ - it seems not to give the ‘believer’ room to live and to be listened to.

Is this a useful way to look at options? It seems to narrow the field. A particular bias towards Christianity.
Also, the distinction between ‘trivial’ and ‘genuine’ - ‘momentous’. Who’s to say what is ‘unique’ or special? Re: the meaning or decision taken - isn’t it that the nature of options is wider and spread out over a spectrum? Does James admit to that…?

What might be proposed to our beliefs?
Would it be electrifying?

Think of how we don’t give the existence of ‘electricity’ a second thought (apart from the expense and eco footprint).
However, in 1894, domestic wiring was in its early stage. The science and students showing its practicality and implications. Testing hypotheses…

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If I ask myself what it means ‘to believe in God’ I’d suggest the answer is: ‘god’ explains ‘reality.’

As such, my interpretation is that the essay is about the ability to believe qua core feature of the nature of what it means to be a thinking being. Belief in god is a limiting case. ‘God’ explains ‘reality’, our understanding of which is qualified as belief. Beliefs do not exist in isolation and neither does evidence. There is not evidence for ‘a thing’ so much as there is evidence of ‘a thing that is in my way’ or ‘a thing I can eat’ etc. That is why, crucially, belief is measured by a ‘willingness to act.’

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The style of the whole essay is rather old-fashioned, and it’s a rather informal use of the word ‘hypothesis’. (I regret to say, I’ve found it hard to maintain an interest in this essay, despite my initial enthusiasm.)

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I think that is a good and useful approach. For me, reading it for the first time, I forgot to jot down my immediate impressions and questions. So easy to forget!

I remedied that by use of symbols and abbrevs (abbrs?). Now, wish I’d expanded a little so that I can better respond:

Good questions to think about and discuss.

Right now, I changed your quote to reflect the pdf, I’m using. Hope you don’t mind.
It is easier for me to see any differences.

Here, James corrects himself, not only the (ironic?) word ‘sermon’ to ‘essay’ but also from ‘by’ to ‘of’ faith.

For me, he may well be standing at the academic equivalent of a pulpit, but he is not preaching or ‘doing a reading’ from their ‘bible’. His unique voice is very much ‘alive’ to the audience.
He talks to or with them, rather than at them.

Does the reference to his essay, mean the final 3 Sections?
Section VIII (pp10-11), there is talk of truth and evidence; the judging mind v that of discovery.

You have indeed had to admit as necessary two first steps dictated by what we want (passional): we must think so as to avoid being deceived, and we must think so as to gain truth;

James takes aim at science who:

has organised the nervousness [of deception] into a regular technique, it’s so-called method of verification.

He suggests in a strange and questionable fashion that:

she has fallen so deeply in love with this method that she may even be said to have stopped caring for truth by itself. It is only truth as technically verified that interests her.
The truth of truths might come in merely affirmative form and she would decline to touch it.

The questions I have concern James’ use of hyperbole; the rhetorical ‘passion’ of a ‘she’ and her apparent carelessness for the truth.

What narrative is he playing? The lovers?
The ‘truth’ of what? Is it scientific, social, personal, religious? Objective v Subjective. Both?

What does he mean by ‘the truth of truths’?
I sense that it is the religious or the theological kind. God?
However, there are different perspectives including the moral, the philosophical, the scientific.
To be discussed…

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The paper, or transcript, was published in 1894. Old, yes. But James’ writing or lecturing contains different styles. Some more formal than others. He switches things up. For me, it is challenging and engaging.

The issues are eternally relevant and inter-disciplinary. Exploring the interplay between empirical evidence and personal belief. The distinctions and examples given are of his time and place.

I think he used the word ‘hypothesis’ deliberately, not as an informal throw-away. Interesting that James, apparently, did not enjoy the experimental, scientific side of psychology.

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James is known for the term ‘radical empiricism’:

Radical Empiricism is a philosophical doctrine proposed by William James (1842–1910) that treats experience as the only source of knowledge and the fundamental “stuff” of reality. Unlike traditional empiricism, which focuses on discrete sensory data, James’s version is “radical” because it insists that the relations between things are just as directly experienced and real as the things themselves …James’ factual statement is that our experience is not just a stream of data, but a complex process that’s full of meaning. We see objects in terms of what they mean to us and we see causal connections between phenomena. Experience is “double-barreled”; it has both a content (“sense data”) and a reference, and empiricists unjustly try to reduce experience to bare sensations, according to James ~ wikipedia.

Which is vastly different to what empiricism is usually taken to mean. But then, James was part of the ‘Golden Age of American Philosophy’, alongside Borden Parker Bowne, Josiah Royce and C. S. Peirce. Recall this was before the ‘revolt against idealism’ in the early 20th c which was antagonistic to any form of philosophical idealism, which James’ radical empiricism clearly has affinities with.

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I don’t think I was even aware of radical empiricism. Maybe that’s what James J. Gibson’s theory of affordances grew from.

It’s also quite Husserlian.

EDIT:

E. B. Holt, who was taught by William James, inspired Gibson to be a radical empiricist

—Wikipedia

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Thank you. I had previously noted the mention of ‘radical empiricist’ but your chosen quote captured its meaning. Your post gives it the necessary context.

James’ factual statement is that our experience is not just a stream of data, but a complex process that’s full of meaning.

The complex process concerns consciousness and its ‘stream of thought’.

I’ll quote a little from this beautifully informative article:

Invoking Heraclitus by name, James repurposes his idea — that a person can never wade into the same river twice: “no state once gone can recur and be identical with what it was before. . . . In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life .” Beneath this stream, to continue his fluvial metaphor, sits the silt and pebbled bed of the unconscious, voluntary and involuntary memories, and even alternative persona. […]

If consciousness is a stream, what are the banks and channels that guide its course? James alighted on a concern that would preoccupy spelunkers of cognition in the decades to follow: the deadening effects of habit, the diminishing returns of repetitive pleasures, whether gustatorial, aesthetic, or spiritual. As if trying to refresh the perception of his reader’s glazed eyes, James lapses literary when addressing the topic, assuming the voice of a world-weary male:

From one year to another we see things in new lights. What was unreal has grown real, and what was exciting is insipid. The friends we used to care the world for are shrunken to shadows. . . once so divine, the stars, the wood, and the waters, how now so dull and common! the young girls that brought an aura of infinity, at present hardly distinguishable existences; the pictures so empty; and as for the books, what was there to find so mysteriously significant in Goethe, or in John Mill so full of weight? — William James on the Stream of Consciousness (1890) — The Public Domain Review

Beware! At the start, there is an excerpt from the Internet Archive of James’ ‘The Principles of Psychology’. It scrolls down, from p224/712. Chapter IX, ‘The Stream of Thought’.
…
I never thought I would enjoy reading and discussing James’ article. My eyes have been opened. The staleness I had expected is alive and sparkling. :dizzy: :slight_smile: :sparkling_heart:

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There are so many influences. What I’ve become aware of is how James’ essay has made a bit of a splosh in my own meandering.

His language and style integrating with literature, he can’t help but be poetic!

We’ve talked about ‘stream of consciousness’ before in the TPF short story, event. Remember?

An extract from the article:

In Ulysses, the “stream of consciousness” technique not only faithfully represents the mind by violating the supposed objectivity of nineteenth-century realism, as May Sinclair described, but leaves its reader, perhaps, with an enhanced consciousness of their own cognition.

Take, for instance, a scene in the “Lestrygonians” episode that occurs along the waters, when the adman Leopold Bloom crosses Dublin’s O’Connell Bridge over the River Liffey. We begin in the third person, as a narrator describes how Bloom scans the river, finding a clever advertisement — for a London clothier, selling trousers in its Dublin outlet at eleven shillings a pair — mounted on a docked and rocking rowboat:

His eyes sought answer from the river and saw a rowboat rock at anchor on the treacly swells lazily its plastered board.

Kino’s
11/-
Trousers

Good idea that. Wonder if he pays rent to the corporation. How can you own water really? It’s always flowing in a stream, never the same, which in the stream of life we trace. Because life is a stream.

The ad is not summarized or offset by quotation marks: we see it as Bloom does. And suddenly, without marked transition, we are inside his mind, surfing the stream of consciousness as Bloom reflects, like Heraclitus and James before him, on the everchanging fluidity of inner and outer life. It’s a brilliant passage, for — as aqueous advertising seeps into free-flowing thought — Bloom himself becomes an advertisement for Joyce’s style, how the author approximates the treacly swells of cognition, plunging us deep into the thick river of reality. — William James on the Stream of Consciousness (1890) — The Public Domain Review

Reading and writing in TPF, trying to express understanding — well, that’s one of my reasons for coming here. It can be a welcome release of our inner thought and images, as well as the more serious consideration of concepts.

Here, I find my voice as it listens and responds to others.

The electricity of life?
Never forget, we have the power! :flexed_biceps: :wink:

I enjoy this too. But, as a balance, is his poetry too much?
Romantic, indeed, but we are not only visited by dreams. And the moon…well, humans are back in the race! Not only 3 Americans but a Canadian and all the rest of the team…

Could James imagine that in his ‘dream world’? Perhaps. He took drugs, didn’t he?

In his mature years (50’s), he must have been smiling at the students in memory.
How much was he trying to influence them? Towards religion? Or simply to ask questions of the orthodox, including academic philosophy?

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I found an amusing photo of James and Josiah Royce. Friends despite differences of opinion.

James debating with his friend and fellow Harvard philosopher, Josiah Royce. Apparently James was snapped just as he exclaimed ‘damn the Absolute!’
[…]
What did James finally believe? He had no final beliefs. Life is a process, a journey, a search, and he never closed his accounts or settled on one answer for long. He was always open to new influences and ideas, and wary of ossification into old-fogeyism (which he thought often began around the age of 25).

He was open, for example, to the extraordinary ideas of his friend Benjamin Blood, who wrote a book on nitrous oxide called The Anaesthetic Revelation, claiming he’d had genuine religious experiences through laughing gas. James tried the gas himself, and subsequently wrote his famous passage:

Our normal waking consciousness . . . is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different

These other states of consciousness — trance, reverie, dreams, ecstasy — have their adaptive functions too. James declared this while most psychologists and psychiatrists were insisting mystical experiences were proof you were mentally ill.

— William James on living life as if it mattered — Philosophy for Life

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Yes, but to me it’s less like poetry and more like charismatic preaching.

I think so. And William’s brother was Henry James, the novelist, so it all ties up (not that HJ used stream-of-consciousness in his own work mind).

I’m interested in this part of the SoC article (good find btw):

Samuel Beckett would concede in a 1930 essay on Marcel Proust that the stream of consciousness only appears consistent due to the regulatory effects of habitual action: “Habit then is the generic term for the countless treaties between the countless subjects that constitute the individual and their countless correlative objects.” Though influenced by Henri Bergson, Beckett’s idea may not have been possible without the work of William James, who dedicated a 1914 essay to the topic, and meditated on habit and the continuity of selfhood at length in “The Stream of Thought”.

— William James on the Stream of Consciousness (1890), The Public Domain Review

One of the most fascinating works of fiction I’ve ever read is Beckett’s Molloy, which uses a kind of past tense stream-of-consciousness. I wouldn’t have imagined any connection with William James (though it wasn’t consciuous on Beckett’s part).

Generally, one thing this reading demonstrates is how important it can be to read things in context to form a good interpretation. The essay seems to need a lot of external support from his other work to make it make proper sense, or to make it interesting—and I’m not saying that’s a bad thing.

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The “stream of consciousness” approach is in direct opposition to what I would call Hume’s mistake. Hume represented sense experience as distinct static perceptions. From here he proposed that the mind creates the continuity which connects one perception to the next, as activity.

I call it Hume’s mistake because I believe he had things backward. In reality we perceive and experience a continuity of activity, a stream of consciousness, and the mind produces distinct states from this.

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Perhaps so.

In ‘The Will to Believe’, is James more of a philosophical ‘preacher’ than a religious one?

The art of persuasion is important in both.

For me, the ‘sermon’ is given by a ‘charismatic’ James (engaging but not related to that Christian group).

His essay is an interaction, a well-practised dialogue with student audiences. In this case, capturing and holding attention by verbal and physical expression (or so I imagine).

In today’s TPF Reading Group, the perception is different with varied and colourful interactions.

I don’t know how many follow and imagine the scene, how it might play out. We don’t know the effect on James’ students. I don’t think that the author is ‘dead’.

Arguably, it is a spiritual endeavour using intricate terminology including the technical, the polemical; creative expression, including the poetic.

I’m reminded of the part dialogue plays in philosophy. Plato and the ‘old quarrel’— the relations between literature and philosophy.
From: Plato on Rhetoric and Poetry (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

At this point we might want to ask about the audience ; after all, the rhetorician is trying to persuade someone of something. Might not the speaker know the truth of the matter, and know how to embody it artfully in a composition, but fail to persuade anyone of it? Would not a failure to persuade indicate that the speaker lacks the complete art of rhetoric?
Socrates in effect responds to this question by postulating that the successful speaker must also know the nature of the human soul, else his skill is just “empeiria” (the term from the Gorgias again) rather than “techne” (270b6).

Hasn’t there always been this play, this rhetoric. The appreciation of poetic elements. Even if literature appears to be somewhat maligned by Plato, he uses it!

Plato’s remarkable philosophical rhetoric incorporates elements of poetry. Most obviously, his dialogues are dramas with several formal features in common with much tragedy and comedy […] No character called “Plato” ever says a word in his texts. His works also narrate a number of myths, and sparkle with imagery, simile, allegory, and snatches of meter and rhyme. Indeed, as he sets out the city in speech in the Republic , Socrates calls himself a myth teller (376d9–10, 501e4–5).

How many myths are told by James in ‘The Will to Believe’?

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I agree. It has always been necessary for me to explore further so that I can better appreciate a written work. I like to meet the author.

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I remember it as meaningful to me. As part of some fascinating and helpful comments to my crazy and confused first short story, ‘Red, White and Blue’ (July/Aug 2023).

The importance of TPF’s Literature Event should not be underestimated. Not only for writers but readers with interesting interpretations. :wink:

Hope you are listening @Baden and other participants?

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It is on the radar. :saluting_face:

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James and the influence of habit on beliefs.

What does that (consciousness) mean? Does it concern subjective experience of multiplicity with mutual others, similar values/rights ? The growing sense of being and becoming self? Our actions or interactions making us who we are? (a wide or narrow ‘reading’ of the world?)

According to James in Section III:

It is only our already dead hypotheses that our willing nature can’t bring to life again. But what has made them dead for us is mostly a previous antagonistic action of our willing nature. When I say ’willing nature’, I don’t mean only deliberate volitions that may have set up habits of belief that we cannot now escape from. I mean all such contributors to belief as fear and hope, prejudice and passion, imitation and partisanship, the circumpressure of our caste and set. — The Will to Believe

I question James’ suggestion that there is no escape from habits of belief.

Is it true that a ‘dead hypothesis’ cannot be changed?
This ‘deadness’ to possibility only means that there has been no opportunity, or a refusal, to ‘sparkle’ with an apparent lack of ‘electric connection with your nature’.
James seems to deny our vitality, or flexibility, of thought.
In the world, our life and philosophy, don’t we need to be alert, attending to, and with others?

James in Section X:

Science says things are; morality says some things are better than other things; and religion says essentially two things:
(i) 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.
Charles Secrétan’s statement ‘Perfection is eternal’ seems to be a good way of putting this first affirmation of religion, an affirmation which obviously cannot yet be at all verified scientifically.
(ii) We are better off even now·—when we are far from finality or perfection—·if we believe religion’s first affirmation to be true.

How many of his students would know of Charles Secretan? A Swiss academic philosopher, author of works about society and politics, and a lawyer. (wiki)
It doesn’t matter, James has now planted this soundbite, almost an earworm, of a ‘perfect’ affirmation.
…
Habit can be restrictive or expansive. Harmful or helpful. Depending. A regular routine or practice. For some, repeated ritual, stultifying in religion. In philosophy, what is a good habit? And from the psychological perspective… of adherence, learned behaviour?

James’ ideas influenced the growth of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA).

Life can be a fight. Whatever gets you through the night, right?

The AA makes the Serenity Prayer a habit. A daily reflection or practice.

It is known world-wide. But you don’t need to address ‘God’:

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”

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Indeed, I was trying to get at something similar here:

That post may have been unfair, but maybe only slightly so. The trouble is, he doesn’t explicitly make a distinction between bad influences and good ones. He just describes different aspects of our willing nature, and doesn’t give us any way of discriminating. He says that under certain conditions, we have to let our passional nature decide, but if “Our faith is faith in some one else’s faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case,” and if “fear and hope, prejudice and passion, imitation and partisanship, the circumpressure of our caste and set” are contributors to belief—then surely it’s important to try breaking free of these circumpressures. (quotes from §III)

So, while he doesn’t positively recommend that we follow those potentially bad influences—I misrepresented him somewhat—he nevertheless does describe these things as being part of the passional nature that we can legitimately follow in the relevant cases. And this, to me, is a recommendation by default.

In other words, I totally agree that we can escape from habits of thought, and that James doesn’t pay enough attention to the need to do so.

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Except by giving this lecture at all. Maybe glance back at the preface, which I quoted above. It’s the habits of this sophisticated, modern, science-minded group that James is challenging.

James has a strong pluralist streak. He doesn’t tell his audience what to think. But he asks, have you considered this? And then he points out that sometimes considering isn’t enough, you have to actually try it.

Not everyone, not everything, not always, but if the inclination is there and you hold yourself back out of intellectual scrupulousness, you might be blocking access to the very experience that would fulfill your inclination.

It’s a pragmatist intuition, I think, that life is an adventure. If staying home is your adventure, do that; but if you’re inclined to venture out, don’t talk yourself out of it.

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