William James on Religion

H. Rydenfelt, S. Pihlström, H. Rydenfelt, S. Pihlström

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137317353
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

A team of international experts present a collection of articles on William James's philosophy of religion and its current relevance. A new look at his philosophy of religion is crucially important for the development of this field of inquiry today.

Part I

1

Religion and Pragmatism from ‘The Will to Believe’ to Pragmatism

Wayne Proudfoot

1 The Will to Believe

William James’ essay, ‘The Will to Believe’, has been read in many different ways. James describes the article as a ‘defense of our right to adopt a believing attitude in religious matters, in spite of the fact that our merely logical intellect may not have been coerced’.¹ His criticism seems to be directed chiefly at William Clifford’s claim that ‘It is wrong, always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.’² But this is not so clear. We might expect that in cases in which the evidence is insufficient, or in James’ terms ‘our logical intellect has not been coerced’, Clifford’s principle would call for withholding assent. But James tries to set up the issue in such a way as to preclude this possibility.

He begins by writing not of whether to adopt a particular hypothesis, but of options, that is to say, choices between two hypotheses, and restricts his focus to what he calls genuine options. A genuine option, for James, is one in which both hypotheses are live ones, the opportunity at stake is momentous, and the choice is forced. The fact that the choice is forced means that there is no place on which to stand that is outside the two alternatives. So the difference with Clifford cannot be over whether or not one should withhold assent, or remain agnostic, when the evidence is insufficient. James has already built into the description of the cases that he will consider a stipulation that the choice is forced. To withhold assent is actually to choose. He thinks that there is a practical and momentous difference between a life informed by religious belief and one without it, that therefore the choice is forced, and that the evidence is insufficient to settle the matter one way or another. For Clifford, of course, the burden of proof is on the person who adopts the religious hypothesis, and the default condition is to reject it in the absence of convincing evidence. James has replaced Clifford’s asymmetric description with one in which both logic and evidence are insufficient to determine a choice between two live hypotheses.

After stipulating what he means by a genuine option, James turns to look at what he calls the ‘actual psychology of human opinion’. He notes that it seems impossible to decide to believe something. If I am engaged in inquiry about a particular topic, it seems both impossible and illegitimate to try to settle the question by just deciding. Charles Peirce had addressed this question in his essay ‘The Fixation of Belief’, in which the first and least effective way of resolving a problem and eliminating doubt that he considers is what he calls the method of tenacity, to just will to hold on to a particular belief come what may.³ As Peirce points out, this is very difficult to achieve and usually does not satisfy the inquirer.

James is not concerned with this kind of willing, but with something much broader. What has made certain hypotheses dead for us, he says, and unavailable for belief, is for the most part a previous action of our willing nature. By ‘willing nature’, he writes,

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 factors of belief as fear and hope, 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.⁴

James’ topic in the article is not solely, and not chiefly, explicit acts of volition, but the ways in which believing and change of belief are shaped, in part, by interests, by something other than logic and evidence. As he writes after introducing Clifford’s jeremiad against believing on insufficient evidence: ‘if anyone should … assume that intellectual insight is what remains when wish and will and sentiment have taken wing, or that pure reason is what settles our opinions, he would fly … directly in the teeth of the facts’.⁵

An important point in James’ essay is his identification of empiricism with fallibilism, or what we might call anti-foundationalism. We can know something, but we can never know with certainty that we know it. No concrete test of what is really true has ever been agreed upon. Different philosophers have proposed different criteria, but none of these criteria is infallible. As empiricists, he says, we give up the doctrine of objective certitude, but we don’t give up the quest or hope of truth itself. Pragmatists, James writes, represent the empiricist attitude in a more radical and less objectionable form.⁶

James’ thesis then reads:

Our passional nature not only lawfully may but must decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds; for to say, under such circumstances, ‘Do not decide but leave the question open,’ is itself a passional decision—just like deciding yes or no—and is attended with the same risk of losing the truth.⁷

The main point of this thesis is a descriptive one: not that our willing nature may tip the balance in such instances, but that it must; that is to say, it always does. So the essay is not so much a proposal that we decide these matters as it is a claim that our interests are always at work in fixing belief. Given that our interests, or willing nature, play this role, James wants his readers to acknowledge that, to make those interests explicit, and in some cases to self-consciously endorse one or another of them. Later in the essay he adopts the rhetoric of persuasion to encourage the reader to ask what she can do with a particular belief and then to actively side with that interest, when the issue is one that cannot be decided on intellectual grounds.

When James arrives at the point in the essay where he identifies what he takes to be the religious hypothesis, it seems frustratingly vague and empty. He writes:

Science says things are; morality says some things are better than other things; and 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 … is the first affirmation of religion … The second affirmation of religion is that we are better off now if we believe her first affirmation to be true.⁸

To unpack the meaning of this cryptic summary we need to look briefly at the development of James’ conception of religion.

The volume The Will to Believe was published in 1897 and dedicated ‘To my old friend Charles Sanders Peirce, to whose philosophic comradeship in old times and to whose writings in more recent years I owe more incitement and help than I can express or repay.’ The first six essays in that volume, those most relevant for the philosophy of religion, are the product of twenty years of reflection on the fact that interests shape belief and on the extent to which that might be epistemically acceptable. In ‘The Fixation of Belief’, published in 1877, Peirce had argued that genuine inquiry is elicited by doubt, had described several ways of satisfying that doubt, and had concluded that ‘it is necessary that a method should be found by which our beliefs may be caused by nothing human, but by some external permanency—by something upon which our thinking has no effect’.⁹ In articles beginning with ‘The sentiment of rationality’ in 1879, James argues that it is neither possible nor desirable to find a method by which our beliefs are caused by something on which our thinking has no effect. Our non-intellectual nature does influence our convictions, and that is a normal factor in our making up our minds.

In three articles published in the early 1880s James sets out what he takes to be the religious question. ‘The radical question of life’, he says, is ‘whether, at bottom, this be a moral or unmoral universe’.¹⁰ It is the question of materialism. Despite the comments of some of his critics to the contrary, James was interested, both as a philosopher and as a person, in the truth of the matter. Clearly it is underdetermined by the evidence and his interests motivate the inquiry. In these articles James considers how we might fix belief on such an issue. He reflects on the criteria by which we decide that one belief is more rational than another.

In ‘Rationality, Activity, and Faith’ (1882), James writes that ‘of two conceptions equally fit to satisfy the logical demand, one may awaken the active impulses or satisfy other aesthetic demands far better than the other. This one will be accounted the more rational conception and it will deservedly prevail.’¹¹ This statement, like its analogues in ‘The Will to Believe’, is first descriptive (‘It will prevail’) and then normative (‘It deserves to prevail’). What are those demands? James proposes two: (1) it must define expectancy in a way that fits with future consequences, and (2) it must define the future congruously with our spontaneous powers. The first means that it must not be refuted by future experience. The second is more elusive, but is central to James’ conception of religion. The future, and in fact the universe of which we are a part, must be characterized in a way that is congruous with, or continuous with, our moral life, where ‘moral’ is not narrowly defined but means our interests and our powers. Idealism is to be preferred over materialism, James says, because it makes the universe more intimate, more continuous with us and with our values. When he tries to set out the lineaments of his metaphysics in his final book, A Pluralistic Universe, he proposes that intimacy be used as a criterion for an adequate metaphysics. Here, in this early essay, he writes: ‘A nameless Unheimlichkeit comes over us at the thought of there being nothing eternal in our final purposes, in the objects of those loves and aspirations which are our deepest energies … We demand in (the universe) a character for which our emotions and active propensities shall be a match.’¹²

Approaching the same topic in a different way in ‘The Dilemma of Determinism’, James writes, descriptively, that we work to cast the world into a more rational shape than we have found it, and, prescriptively, that he is ‘as willing to try conceptions of moral, as of mechanical or logical necessity’.¹³ We employ logical and scientific concepts to make sense of the world and there is no reason to think that we don’t, or shouldn’t, try to make moral sense of it as well. His argument in this article is that determinism, which he takes to be a ‘block universe’ devoid of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Index