Teaching James’s “The Will to Believe”
Guy Axtell
University of Nevada, Reno
In his lecture “The Will to Believe,” William James (1842-1910) announces to his audience that his purpose will be to present “a justification of faith, a defence 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] Many readers have taken this as James’s most distinctive and influential lecture, one that resonates with central themes of his pragmatist philosophy. Yet for all the scholarly attention it has received, the complexities of the pragmatist “defense,” and especially his views concerning the relationship between evidential and pragmatic reasoning, are still often misunderstood. In this paper I present a number of classroom tools and techniques that I have found effective for teaching James’s lecture, and the broader debate that has ensued over “the ethics of belief.” My classroom approach is somewhat reconstructive of James’s argument, which is well-noted for its ambiguities and lack of effective organization. But I have found that the Tables and syllogism that I provide below aid student comprehension, and allow teachers to utilize limited classroom time in a more focussed and productive manner.
James does not set out to convince non-believers, as did Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) whose famous “Wager” argument also relies upon pragmatic rather than evidential reason. James instead first sets up his “defense” of religious belief as a rebuttal of W. K. Clifford’s famous evidentialist principle, the principle that “It is wrong, always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence.”[2] The exceptionless way in which Clifford states his principle implies that evidential reasoning provides the singularly valid standard for assessing the epistemic rationality of agents. The specifically ethical sense of “wrongness” (or “ought”) that Clifford’s principle employs[3] is tied closely to the willful resistance of agents to a standard that he thought dictated by epistemic rationality. So James’s subsequent attempt to develop counter-example or exception-cases is intended to defend the religious believer—or more qualifiedly, the Jamesian kind of believer who shuns “the absolutist way of believing in truth” (Section V)—against the charge that they commit any such an ethical wrong.[4] The identification of exception-cases to Clifford’s principle revolves around decisions he called “genuine options,” of which the decision over the “religious hypothesis”[5] was one instance. After discussing the conditions by which genuine options are identified, the general thesis of James’s pragmatist defense is articulated: “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.”
One key to having a rewarding classroom experience in teaching “The
Will to Believe” is to make James’s thesis statement an early and sustained
critical focus for your discussions. It is often neglected in the classroom
when teachers begin by trying to explicate the religious hypothesis, or
by introducing James by way of Pascal. In order to facilitate a sharpened
focus on James’s thesis, I recommend reproducing the ensuing three pages
of this paper for classroom use. I first present Table
I, that explains genuine options and their intended role as exception-cases.
The syllogism I next present reconstructs an argument that is directly
linked to James’s thesis statement, and so extends this focus. Based on
the Ought-Implies-Can principle, this argument is especially useful for
highlighting philosophic differences between James’s “pragmatist” and Clifford’s
“evidentialist” perspective. Thirdly, I provide Table II, intended
to make James’s “Ought-Implies-Can” argument readily accessible for closer
classroom examination.[6]
References on these reproducible pages (and in the subsequent sections of
this paper that elaborate on them), are by Section rather than page number,
in order to make them amenable for use with any philosophy reader that
contains James’s lecture.
| a. Living |
A living option is one in which both
hypotheses are lives ones, i.e., ones that make some appeal to S, and which
S considers it a real possibility to accept. |
By contrast, it is possible that
S has a predilection to take only one of the two hypotheses seriously,
in which case the other, and by extension the option itself, is “dead.”
|
| b. Momentous |
A momentous option presents a unique
opportunity, an irrever-sible decision, or a decision with a highly significant
stake. |
By contrast,
a “trivial” option presents no such unique oppor-tunity, irreversible decision,
or significant stake. |
| And c. Forced |
A forced option is one where the two alternatives
form a ‘complete logical disjunction’ (they are contradictories
repre-sentable by A and not-A). In such a case there is ‘no standing place
outside the alternatives’ (by the law of excluded-middle),
so that not to accept A is to accept not-A, even if only by default.
Example for action: “Choose between buying an umbrella, or not buying one.” The general form for options between propositions (truth-claims) is: “Either accept this proposition, or go without it.” |
By contrast, many options are unforced in the
sense that there exists third options beyond the proposed hypotheses. Compare
the forced “Will you buy an umbrella, or not buy one?” and the unforced
“Will you go out with your umbrella or without it?”
In the latter case, a hidden third option exists: I might decide not to
go out at all.
Similarly for propositions, “Accept A or do not accept A” is forced, while “Accept A or accept non-A” (where non-A, is a contrary of A, such as B, etc.) is unforced. With contraries, a person always has the third option ‘outside the alternatives’: accept neither one. |
An ‘Ought-Implies-Can’ Argument Against
Clifford’s Principle
In Section IV of “The Will
to Believe,” James writes,
“The Thesis I defend is, briefly stated, this: 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. ”
‘Ought-Implies-Can’ is the idea
that if I am told that I ought to do something (that I am obligated in
some sense), then it must be the case that I can do that
thing; and if I cannot, then the claim that an obligation exists must be
mistaken.
An ‘Ought-Implies-Can’ argument
suggested by James’s thesis statement might be formulated in modus tollens form as follows:
1. If, as Clifford’s Principle assumes, epistemic rationality is a demand for the negation of passional influence in all cases of deliberation over options between propositions, then it must be possible for human agents to negate passional influence over their deliberations in all such cases.
2. But the negation of passional influence in all cases of deliberation over options between propositions is not possible, as the necessary passional favoring of either the council of courage or the council of caution in the case of “genuine options” shows.
3. Therefore, it is not the case that as
Clifford’s Principle assumes, epistemic rationality is a demand for the negation
of passional influence in all cases of deliberation over
options between propositions.
Table II: James’s “The Will to Believe”
The Evidentialist as ‘Faith Vetoer’ The Jamesian Believer
|
A. Goal |
Avoid believing what is false! |
Believe what is true! |
|
B. Risk of Losing the Truth |
Remaining in ignorance; never coming
to believe something that is true. |
Falling into error; coming to believe
something that is false. |
|
C. Guiding Rule or Prescription |
Evidential reasoning should always prevail in our
deliberations: “The rightness
or wrongness of belief in a doctrine (proposition) depends only upon the
nature of the evidence for it, and not upon what the doctrine is” (Clifford,
EOB 102). Stated negatively, “It is wrong, always,
everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence”
(EOB 77). |
In specific instances, pragmatic reasoning should
be treated as a normal element in making up our minds: “The thesis
I defend is, briefly stated, this: 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” (James WB, Sec. IV). |
|
D. Applied to Religious Hypothesis (RH) |
Withhold assent until sufficient evidence is
present. The agnostic perspective as uniquely rational. |
“The lawfulness of voluntarily adopted faith,”
since the option between the alternatives of accepting or doing without
the RH meets the above conditions. |
|
E. Justifying Moral Argument |
There is a public duty to withhold assent, based
on harm done by irresponsible and dishonest habits of belief-acquisition. |
There is a private right defended by the desirability
of an “inner tolerance,” a tolerance for diversity among beliefs (specifically,
those James terms “overbeliefs”). |
|
F. Primary Intellectual Virtue |
Intellectual Caution: Since “we must avoid error,” we should maintain
the “skeptical balance,” and remain uncommitted until sufficient evidence
is presented either for or against a belief. |
Intellectual Courage: Since “we must know
the truth,” we may have to dare to be wrong. Under
the conditions of the genuine option, we may commit to belief “in advance”
of sufficient evidence. |
|
G. Motivating Passion |
Fear: “Better risk loss of truth than
chance of error,—that is your faith-vetoer’s exact position” (WB Sec. X). |
Hope: “If religion be true and the
evidence for it still be insufficient, I do not wish...to forfeit my sole
chance in life of getting upon the winning side” (WB Sec.
X). |
How
shall we locate the argument we are calling the pragmatic defense of religious
belief, in contrast to better-known approaches? A pragmatic argument is
one that justifies religious belief through the benefits or practical consequences
of holding a belief, even when that belief lacks convincing rational support.
The reasons offered for accepting a statement are pragmatic or prudential
reasons, in contrast to strictly evidential ones. This approach contrasts
with all forms of rationalism (of which Clifford’s evidentialism is one
sort), the view that belief of any kind can is only justified or judged
rational on the basis of the logic and evidence that supports it.
Religious rationalism, the clearest
example of which is traditional “natural theology,” claims that theological
argumentation is sufficient to prove the basic tenets of theism. The burden
of rationality is met. On the other hand, skeptical rationalism,
the standard ground of agnosticism and atheism, contradicts religious rationalism
by denying that arguments for God’s existence prove or make probable their
purported conclusions. In a short essay, “Reason and Faith,” James points
out the irony that the traditional theist and the atheist agree in the
necessity of such an appeal to reason, yet sharply disagree as to “Reason’s
all-sufficiency to reach religious conclusions without the aid of faith.”[7] Neither view well-represents what James calls the ‘faith-ladder’
that he sees religious consciousness relying upon. He thus proposes an
alternative, non-rationalistic relationship between faith and reason. The
religious consciousness requires not rational proof but merely a kind of
“possibility and permission”; so long as reason and modern science do not
foreclose possibilities of religious meaning and truth, live options exist
where “faith jumps in” through the active intervention of the will. By taking such a non-rationalist stance, James’s views
are associated with a well-known alternative to rationalism, namely, fideism
(literally, faithism). Since they are anti-rationalistic
in approach, the pragmatic defenses of religious belief offered both by Pascal
and by James overlap with and are sometimes classified as fideistic.[8] For a fideist, faith is understood as something very different
than an item of proven knowledge. Having religious faith
involves having belief, James wants to insist, but also involves an active commitment and a special kind of risk-taking.
For James this means that the dynamics of religious faith integrally
involve the will or passional nature of human agents, and these factors,
reflected in pragmatic reasoning, must be given proper place in any discussion
of the rationality of belief.[9]
Among the few things that religious and skeptical
rationalists have in common is their shared claim of the inadequacy
of the kinds of prudential considerations that James based his defense of
religious belief upon. But the criticism works both ways. To the extent
that faith has the active, passional dimension James alludes to, his pragmatic
approach calls attention to enduring features of religious consciousness
that have been ignored or misunderstood on rationalist assumptions. This,
it seems to me, is chief among the many reasons why scholars return again
and again to reconsider James’s astute psychological insights, and his
pragmatic defense of religious belief.
The exception cases
James develops in order to refute Clifford’s principle are decisions between
two “hypotheses,” decisions of a sort that James termed “genuine options”:
“We may call an option a genuine option when it is of the
forced, living, and momentous kind” (Sec. I). The
latter two conditions on the genuine option are similar in nature, so Table
I takes the liberty of mentioning these first. A live hypothesis is
any proposition not thought to be false, and is such that one could believe
it without extensive and far-reaching revisions in one’s web of beliefs.
What makes the “living” and “momentous” conditions on the genuine option
similar is that both are relative to an individual. James says specifically
“that deadness and liveness in an hypothesis are not intrinsic properties,
but relations to the individual thinker.”
While James does not directly say so, a good case might
be made that that unique opportunities, high “stakes,” and even reversibility
of decisions, are best understood as similarly relative to an individual
thinker.
In the forced option, “There is no standing point outside of
the alternative.” Not to choose A is to choose its contradictory, not-A.
This condition is strictly logical in nature, in contrast to the other
two, since it revolves around the difference between contradictories and
contraries. When two competing hypotheses are both “live” for an agent,
the option itself is characterized as live. But a live option
still does not itself constitute a genuine option. That only occurs when
we reframe the choice as a forced one between “having” one of these hypotheses
or “doing without it”; and when, in addition, this having or doing without
is seen by the agent as having a potentially momentous impact on his or
her life. After the preliminary of discussing with your class the genuine
option and its intended role in James’s lecture, you can turn attention
directly to James’ thesis statement, and to the Ought-Implies-Can argument
against Clifford’s Principle.
4. Introducing the Ought-Implies-Can Argument
On one construal of the pragmatist defense of religious belief, the pragmatist is someone who argues that it may be justified
to accept or reject a proposition because of the beneficial or bad pragmatic
consequences of holding it, regardless of how much or little “epistemic”
justification it enjoys. Extra-evidential or “pragmatic” reasons occasionally
trump “epistemic” ones, on this understanding of the pragmatist defense.
The background of Pascal’s Wager, as well as aspects of James’s own argument,
make it easy to construe James in this way. We may also be led this direction
by James’s condition of momentousness on the genuine option, by his general
strategy of framing exception-cases to Clifford’s principle, and especially
by his concession that aside from these special cases the “dispassionately
judicial intellect with no pet hypothesis…ought to be our ideal” (Sec.
VIII).
But
another and stronger version of the pragmatic argument has sometimes been
raised, associated with James’s view of pragmatic reasoning
not as an intruder from outside, but rather as both an “unavoidable” and
a “normal” constituent of epistemic rationality.[10]
James’s lecture probably contains aspects of both these weaker and stronger
pragmatic arguments against evidentialism. Though he never elaborates, the difference is acknowledged in his claim that “There are passional
tendencies and volitions which run before belief and others which come
after belief, and it is only the latter that are too late for the fair”
(Sec. III). The latter kinds of volition, James concedes, “do seem, in the
matter of our credences, to be only fifth wheels to the coach.” James appears
to concede, in other words, that if they enter only in defending beliefs
that a person already holds, then one’s willing or sympathetic nature does
indeed raise the warning flags of ad hocness and dogmatic rationalization—aspects
of intellectual irresponsibility that deeply worried Clifford. But Clifford,
for his part, makes no apparent allowance for the
consideration that many beliefs come to us through childhood enculturation,
long before we are developed critical thinkers. What is interesting about
reconstructing James’s Ought-Implies-Can argument is that it throws emphasis
on his stronger pragmatic stance vis-à-vis evidentialism,
that stance which takes its start from volitions or aspects of our willing
nature claimed “unavoidably” and “normally” to run before
belief. It is to highlight this aspect of James’s thought that I have made
the notion of competing “councils” (of courage and of caution) more central
than James himself does in his lecture.
If premise (1) of our modus tollens accurately
reflects a claim that Clifford would accept, then Premise (2) becomes the
crucial ground over which Clifford and James disagree. James “give(s)
the name of logicians to those who would rule out our willing nature” (Sec.
IV) in the acquisition of beliefs. That belief about factual matters ought
to be based solely on factual evidence, and that for passion and sentiment
to enter the deliberative process serves only to introduces irrationality,
are assumptions that trace back to the very roots of philosophic modernism.
A ‘right’ to believe, on these assumptions, arises solely from a relationship
between the evidence and the conclusion. Jack Meiland and others have thus
argued that we find Descartes’s universal, non-situated subject imbedded
in Clifford’s principle, framed as applying “always, anywhere and for anyone.”[11]
More straightforwardly, this principle reflects Hume’s dictum that “A wise
man…proportions his belief to the evidence,” as well as John Locke’s “one
unerring mark by which a man may know whether he is a lover of truth for truth’s sake: the not entertaining any proposition
with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant."
In Premise (2) Clifford’s universally-stated principle is denied
because the negation of passional influence on deliberations over our cognitive
options is not possible in all cases, “as the necessary
passional favoring of either the council of courage or the
council of caution in the case of ‘genuine options’ shows.”
Table II attempts to reconstruct James’s argument
in support of the crucial second premise of the Ought-Implies-Can argument.
In using this Table in the classroom, it is important to point out to students
that it is only intended to reflect James’s own way of
looking at things. Whenever the schedule allows, I try to assign at least
part of Clifford’s “The Ethics of Belief” in addition to James, in order
to get both writers represented by their own work. My purpose with
this Table is primarily to explicate this argument in a ‘bare-bones’ fashion
for classroom study. The subsequent sections of this paper are intended
simply to clarify each of its successive steps for teachers who would like
to utilize Table II in their classroom.
5. Explaining the Steps in Table II
A. The Goal. To be successful, James must
convince his readers of a substantial connection between their passions
or willing nature, and their favoring of one or another of the prescriptions
that we are calling, respectively, the council of courage and
the council of caution. On the order that our Table
provides, the first step would be to point out differences between epistemic
goals (or if one prefers, between sub-aspects of the epistemic
goal). James writes “We must know the truth; and we must avoid error,—these are our first and great commandments
as would-be knowers; but they are not two ways of stating an identical commandment,
they are two separable laws” (WB, Sec. VII). The evidentialist
would likely challenge this initial distinction, but James can acknowledge
that the epistemic goal remains unified for agents in most situations.
What he needs to insist upon is only that it comes apart under
conditions of the genuine option. (Most relevant here may be the “live”
character of genuine options, since the notion of liveness carries with it
the idea of decision-making-under-conditions-of-uncertainty). The evidentialist’s
challenge, then, cannot be made a priori but must await consideration
of the purported exception cases.[12]
B. Associated “Risk of Losing the Truth.” According to James, “…When as empiricists we give up the doctrine of objective certitude, we do not thereby give up the quest or hope of truth itself. We still pin our faith on its existence…” (WB Sec. VI). Here James distinguishes certitude, an elusive epistemic state, from truth itself. The distinction is important if he is to argue that the skeptics, too, place themselves at risk through their suspension of belief: they risk the possible loss of truth and whatever effects, potentially “momentous,” such truth might have upon their lives. James concedes that he is on “dogmatic ground” here—that the very existence of such truth is a “faith.” But at the least he wants to insist that the possibility of such truths are not denied when, as empiricists, we reject human certitude (Sec. VI).[13]
James was not successful in framing what he terms the “religious hypothesis” (see endnote 5, below); his definition in Section X famously involves circularity, and relies on metaphor when its point is precisely to establish a minimal yet clear proposition that all religious believers assent to. But the naturalistic hypothesis, the competitor to the religious hypothesis (see James’s own footnote 4) can certainly be given cognitive sense; and if we concede that, despite the shortcomings of his definition, the religious hypothesis can in principle also be stated as a cognitive claim, then we have taken another step in his pragmatist defense. Everyone presented with the forced option, the option of either “having” or “doing without” this hypothesis, stands a chance of losing the truth by their decision, whether that loss is due to falling into error, or to missing an opportunity. By the nature of a forced option, they have become cognitive risk-takers, whether or not they acknowledge the risk. James intimates that Clifford and the “logicians” are already committed to a kind of scientistic faith. James held that committed as they are to the naturalistic hypothesis or “a purely naturalistic scheme of belief, the religious hypothesis is already “dead” for them; this leads them to confuse their council of caution with a universal law of rationality, and to “act as if we did not know them [these cognitive risks] to be there.”[14]
C. Guiding Rule or Prescription. The second step sets up James’s next inferences, that the evidentialist principle is a prescription for how to manage risk, and that it is in this sense an expression of the passional life. There may be different strategies for managing risk, but the way that we prioritize our goals and manage the inevitable trade-offs between risks and potential rewards are decisions that reflect judgments of value. “We may regard the chase for truth as paramount, and the avoidance of error as secondary; or we may, on the other hand, treat the avoidance of error as more imperative, and let truth take its chance” (Sec. VII). Indeed James says that by prioritizing among the two epistemic goals, “we may end by coloring differently our whole intellectual life.” Of course, everyone acknowledges the need to affect a balance between the goals of believing what is true and not believing what is false. Ask your students what an agent would do who was interested exclusively in the former. Might he cover his bets by assenting to all hypotheses presented to him without regard for logical consistency between them? For instance, if presented with the religious hypothesis and its own contrary, the naturalistic hypothesis, would he not give himself a foot-up on truth by assenting to both? And what of the agent interested exclusively in avoiding believing falsehoods? Would she, much like the Cartesian methodological doubter, identify the threshold for acceptance of a proposition with a state of certitude, and attempt to “do without” all beliefs that failed this measure? Both strategies are obviously absurd in our world, and students are led to see that for both logical and pragmatic reasons, human agents must affect a balance between believing what is true and not believing what is false.
D. Applied to the Religious Hypothesis. James uses the notion of a forced option to show that while atheism and agnosticism may be theoretically distinct positions, they have nearly indistinguishable practical consequences: They both prescribe “doing without” any belief for which an agent does not presently have “sufficient” evidence. That both theoretical positions are commonly referred to by the term “skeptic” underlines this point. James tries to drive home that the agnostic is not above the battle—that there is no standing outside the choice and the risk of losing the truth that it entails. “Scepticism, then, is not avoidance of option; it is option of a certain particular kind of risk” (Sec. X).
There are well-known problems surrounding James’s notion of the religious hypothesis that we should comment on here. “Religions,” James writes, “differ so much in their accidents that in discussing the religious question we must make it very generic and broad. What then do we now mean by the religious hypothesis?” (Sec. X). James sought a proposition representing a minimal shared essence of the world’s religions. As in his earlier Varieties of Religious Experience, James sees philosophy’s role in a critical science of religion as one of “discriminat[ing] the common and essential from the individual and local elements of the religious beliefs she compares.”[15] But this strategy of eliminating the local and accidental from his definition leads to the problem that the religious hypothesis, as formulated by James, may not in fact be a living option for most people. As Michael Martin has put the objection in Atheism: A Philosophical Justification (1990),
“James…seems to suppose that believing that the religious hypothesis is true involves accepting some undifferentiated theism. But as many religious scholars have noted, one does not have religious belief in the abstract; it is always relative to a certain religious tradition…Oddly enough, when James discusses live and dead religious options he seems to be aware of the nature of religious belief, but he forgets this when he specifies the content of the religious hypothesis.”[16]
This objection is strong because James does not consistently distinguish believing the broad, generic religious hypothesis and commitment to a particular religious tradition which includes specific teachings. Indeed he nowhere satisfactorily explains the relationship between them. For instance, even in the Preface to The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, where he tries to avert the problem, he speaks of “active faiths” as the expression of separate, competing “religious hypotheses”; hence he continues to equivocate between the singular “religious hypothesis” and plural “religious hypotheses.”
For some critics, including John Dewey, James’s attempt to eliminate the local in order to identify a universal cognitive core in religious consciousness is a doomed strategy.[17] I believe, however, that James could have circumvented the problem by a more careful delineation of the differences between assent to the generic religious hypothesis and commitment to a particular tradition. Raising this issue may lead to interesting class discussion, though many of our students will find it difficult. James meant for the religious hypothesis to be neutral with respect to specific conceptions of Godhead, for instance, theism, deism, and pantheism. For students raised in a Western culture, however, their understanding of the religious hypothesis will likely already take on aspects specific to monotheism, just as the question of “religion” in popular parlance is narrowed and equated with the question of whether or not there exists a personal creator-God. Study of Western history lays bare other alternatives besides monotheism, and study of non-Western culture leads the student to consider conceptions of the absolute in which a personal creator-god has no role.
It need not hinder class discussion that students interpret the religious hypothesis in terms of concepts that are “live” to them—indeed as a matter of practice James would find this entirely normal if not to some extent unavoidable. But teachers should be aware of thisdifference, and depending on your purposes, there may yet be worthwhile theoretical and pedagogical purposes served by having your class spend additional time considering James’ primary sense of the religious hypothesis as a universal shared minimum of the world’s religions—one that does not presuppose particular traits of Godhead. Theoretically, the religious hypothesis understood in this ‘thin’ way serves as a cognitive anchor for religious consciousness, as an object of strong belief, however anti-realist one may be about the extant teachings—such as historical teachings—of a particular religious tradition. Pedagogically, I have also found it can be a culturally-awakening experience for students to attempt to separate the “universal” from the “local” in James’s way, even if we sense that his proposed ‘science of religion’ (based upon the identification of such a common core and the propositional expression of it in the form of a hypothesis), may be Quixotic.[18]
E. Justifying Moral Argument. Clifford’s principle is supported by a practical argument concerning the need for a public ethics of belief. Few if any of our beliefs, he tells us, are so detached from life as to be harmless to others; because of this our acquired intellectual habits and dispositions carry communal ethical import.[19] The primary risk as Clifford sees it is the ethical risk that by “stifling doubts” and basing belief elsewhere than in present evidence, we will engender within ourselves standing habits of credulity and wishful thinking. James rejects this need for a public “ethics of belief,” and in the closing paragraphs of his lecture counters Clifford’s argument with a plea for “an inner tolerance.” Mere “outer” (or political) tolerance is “soulless,” he interestingly argues, unless it is founded on a “spirit of inner tolerance,” a spirit which leads us not to “bandy words of abuse” but “profoundly to respect another’s mental freedom.”[20] James thus tries to shift the locus of risk from the ethical into the cognitive realm. When I digress to ask my students what the basis for James’s respect is, our discussions often lead us to consider the possibility and limits of reasonable disagreement in various areas of discourse.
F. Primary Intellectual Virtue. Although the main intellectual virtue that Clifford saw himself promoting was intellectual honesty, he did speak about caution (not extending beyond what is proven) as a hallmark of science. The contrast James draws between courage and caution therefore appears to be fair to both sides. The councils of courage and of caution are prescriptions for managing risk when faced with decision-making under conditions of uncertainty. Options that are both live and forced necessarily involve agents in risk-taking; in such circumstances, the cognitive goal can come apart for agents, leading them to deliberate between two very different strategies or “councils” for managing risk and reward. Many of our options between propositions are “trivial” in the sense that nothing great will be lost should continued suspension of judgment lead us to miss out on holding a true belief. But where a potentially momentous option is presented, “maintaining the skeptical balance” may no longer be the most reasonable strategy of risk management.
It is always worthwhile to discuss the moral and personal cases of Section IX with your students. Here James discusses two kinds of “truths based upon our personal action” where “faith in a fact can help create the fact,” and reaches the preliminary conclusion that in such cases “faith based upon desire is certainly a lawful and possibly an indispensable thing.” Commentators sometimes distinguish these Making-True types of cases from the Finding-True types of cases that James also discusses. In these terms, Section X details how the religious hypothesis fills the conditions of the genuine option and is a kind of Finding-True case. Clearly for James, intellectual courage is exemplified in the personal action such cases turn on; more specifically, he thinks “making willing advances,” or a “participation of our willing nature” is prerequisite for the recognition of evidence supporting a hypothesis, a hypothesis first recommended to an individual on the basis of their passional wants and needs.
G. Motivating Passion. James
clearly indicates in “The Will to Believe” that sentiments such as hope
and fear constitute part of our “willing nature,” and play a causal role in an agent’s choice between the councils of courage
and of caution. When an option, besides being genuine, is also “intellectually
undecidable,”[21]
then the need for risk-management is implied, and James argues that a person’s
passional nature must be involved in the determination of the strategy towards
risk that he or she ultimately prefers. The preference to keep a ‘skeptical
balance,’ he argues, is “itself a passional decision—just like deciding
yes or no,—and is attended with the same risk of losing the truth” (Sec. III). The skeptic, whether an atheist or an agnostic, “is
actively playing his stake as much as the believer is” (Sec. X).
This causal role played by the passions does not necessarily
compel one to prioritize goals in a certain way or to accept
one council over the other when faced with genuine options. Indeed if this
were the case, then it would appear that both alternatives would not for
them be “live” in the first place, and the elements of cognitive risk would
go unrecognized. But the motivating nature of the passions is such that,
in the absence of compelling or “coercive” evidence to the contrary, they
will incline an individual in one direction or another.
It is worth pointing out to your students here that our
passions or “willing natures” include, according to James, cognitive habits
that may be schooled into us, “imitation and partisanship, the circumpressure
of our caste and set” (Sec. III). An individual can certainly be schooled
to suppress their natural dispositions, and to follow the evidentialist
or some other philosophical advice in spite of its inconsistency with their
own passional needs. This
may be one reason why James accepts the burden of refuting Clifford on the
latter’s own ethical ground, even though terms such as ‘right to believe’ and ‘will to believe,’ leaves discerning
readers with the impression that James is a voluntarist about belief.[22]
James is intent on showing that no such ethical obligation exists, and that
it is part of wisdom to allow one’s passional needs to shape one’s choices,
where deliberation and choice are indeed present. There are legitimate concerns
over the assumption of voluntarism about belief in the “ethics of belief”
debate, but I have tried to mitigate it in our Tables, by framing the relevant
kind of deliberation in question as that over strategies of
risk-management, rather than as whether or not one should come to believe
the religious hypothesis by an act of direct volition. The latter seems
misconstrued, for again we should not ask whether we “should,” if it is
impossible that we “can.”
James
says that the evidentialist principle is motivated by “fear,” or by the
evidentialist’s “private horror of becoming a dupe” (Sec. VII), and I have
had students who not-unreasonably interpret James’s as committing a kind
of ad hominem fallacy against Clifford. But a focus on James’s Ought-Implies-Can argument
provides a strong counter-point to such a reading of James. The claims
that the passions underlie all strategies of risk management,
and that consulting them is “a normal element in making up our minds,” are
central to James’s argument, and for him such considerations are part of
“the formal logic of the situation” (X). On the other hand, James may well
be faulted for his characterization of the relevant motivating
passion. James’s characterization of the motivationally-active passions
as those of “hope” and “fear” is highly contentious, and he has no mandate
to declare, as he does, that for the evidentialist fear is more important
than hope in every instance of our cognitive lives. The positive and negative
connotation of these two terms “hope” and “fear” may indicate that he is
giving us only persuasive definitions, and that would be a most serious problem
for the cogency of the Ought-Implies-Can argument. Perhaps your students
can suggest some alternative, more neutral way in way James might have sought
to identify the passions that he saw underlying the competing councils of
courage and caution.
James’s Conclusions.
James does not argue that it is a duty to accept the Religious Hypothesis,
but only that the strategy a person takes to their management of cognitive
risks and rewards is, to a far greater extent than Clifford allows, a matter
of personal choice. James’s pragmatist defense of religious belief functions
to privatize the option to “have” or to “do without” the
religious hypothesis. The individual himself is the only rightful chooser
of his risk:
“I simply refuse obedience to the scientist’s command to
imitate his kind of option, in a case where my own stake is important enough
to give me the right to choose my own form of risk” (Sec. X).
There may be other and less objectionable routes to make
this private right apparent if it indeed is one, but what I find fascinating
is that James chose to approach it by a headlong assault upon evidentialism,
and with it, upon certain basic assumptions of philosophic modernism. Point
out to your class that one strand of James’s argument is negative: Rationality
cannot require that every agent act as risk-aversely as
do the evidentialists, and ethics therefore cannot obligate the evidentialists’
“agnostic rules for truth-seeking.” Another strand of the argument is positive:
The role of the passions in determining individual responses to the exception-cases
is “normal” and “necessary,” and it is the part of wisdom for a person
to respond to these options in accordance with their own pre-reflective
psychological needs.
Exercising the right James defends depends on the individual’s
“willingness to run the risk” of falling into error (Sec. X).[23]
But is this as subjective an issue as it is made out to be? One of the
hard questions for James that we have so far side-stepped concerns the
gap between the possibility that the religious hypothesis
is true, and the plausibility of that hypothesis. For however
agreeable or psychologically satisfying a hypothesis is for a person, it
would seem silly for them to appeal to the sheer logical possibility of
its being true, where available evidence does not show it also as plausible.
James seems extreme in the many passages where he indicates that mere possibility
is sufficient to sustain a private intellectual right to belief. But I try
to point out to my class that James’s concern with defending the legitimacy
of religious faith is balanced in his thought by a sense of ongoing intellectual
duties or responsibilities. In his correspondence from 1904, he insists that
he had “hedged the license to indulge in private over-beliefs with so many
restrictions and signboards of danger that the outlet was narrow enough.”[24]
James’s language of a right to a “precursive faith,”
or a faith running in advance or “ahead of the evidence,” implies that the
Jamesian believer remains under obligations to confront objections to their
beliefs. This important consideration is often overlooked because James’s
conception of these obligations is primarily forward-looking, whereas Clifford’s
principle bases obligation entirely on supporting evidence presently possessed
by an agent.[25]
If this interests your students, you might pursue it by distinguishing
between questions of belief acquisition and of belief maintenance. A favorite ploy of mine to animate class debate
over issues of intellectual responsibility is to quote Clifford’s harsh
descriptions of religious beliefs as ‘stolen’ in defiance of a public ethical
obligation, and then to suggest that the Jamesian believer would claim he
does not steal, but only ‘borrows’ the belief. Readers of James know that
he was highly sensitive to the hazardous effects of dogmatism and fanaticism;
but neither does James supply us with the account of the forward-looking
obligations that his language suggests he owes us.[26]
So is his wording mere rhetoric? What intellectual traits would a Jamesian
believer demonstrate when confronted with objections to his faith-commitments?
Ask your students what kinds of intellectual traits they
think are most relevant, and most admirable.
6. Overview
By
focussing upon James’s Ought-Implies-Can argument, and utilizing the Tables
and other techniques discussed here, I have been able to lead my students
to more readily understand how James can claim 1) that the influence of
the passions is normal and unavoidable in respect to genuine options that
we face, and 2) that the influence of the passions is already apparent in
Clifford’s own principle, which prescribes a singular (or universal) strategy
for balancing the goals of seeking truth and avoiding error. Of course these
techniques do not demonstrate the validity of James’s argument,
but understanding is a prerequisite for proper evaluation. The classroom
techniques we have elaborated will make constructive use of your limited
class time, and place your students in a better position to assess for themselves
the strengths and weaknesses of James’s classic “pragmatic” defense of religious
belief.
[1] William James, The Will to Believe, and Other Essays. (Hereafter referred to as WB). Harvard University Press, 1979, p. 13.
[2]
For a sympathetic treatment of Clifford, see especially David Hollinger, “James, Clifford and the Scientific Conscience,” in The Cambridge Companion to William James, Ruth Anna Putnam
(ed.), Cambridge University Press, 1997: 69-83.
[3]
W. K. Clifford, “The Ethics of Belief,” (original
1877) reprinted in The Ethics of Belief and Other Essays. Amherst,
N.y.: Prometheus Books, 1999, p. 76. Hereafter referred to as EOB.
[4] “By ‘lawfully may’ and have ‘the freedom to believe James means ‘is morally permitted.’” Richard M. Gale, “William James and the Ethics of Belief,” American Philosophical Quarterly Vol. 17 No. 1 (1980): 1-24, footnote 3.
[5] James characterized the “religious hypothesis” (RH) as (1) that “the best things are the more eternal things…” and (2) that “we are better off even now if we believe.” Inclusion of claim (2) is rather notorious, because as a statement about the effect of belief in the religious hypothesis, it cannot without circularity be used to define that hypothesis. Gale suggests that claim (1) essentially means that the universe has a moral order or driving force, so that good will win out over evil in the course of time.
[6] Table I for the genuine option borrows both from Richard Gale and from Doug Browning. As the characterization of the evidentialist in James’s terms as a ‘faith vetoer’ should suggest, this Table presents James’s own characterizations in “The Will to Believe” of his dispute with Clifford, and aims only to be descriptive or James’s approach. Gale says James and Clifford could agree if 1) Clifford took a wider view of evidence, to include personal experience, or 2) James settled for “hope” rather than “belief,” since, as is often pointed out, James like many fideists seems to equivocate. For a view that develops upon the second point, see Pojman 1986.
[7] “Faith and Belief,” in William James’s Essays in Religion and Morality. Harvard University Press, 1982.
[8] Fideism may become an extreme doctrine denying that religious-belief systems are subject to any kind of rational evaluation. ‘Balanced fideists’ like Pascal and James, however, do not despise reason, nor do they neglect considerations of rationality and intellectual duty.
[9] “Faith-tendencies are extremely active psycho-logical forces, constantly outstripping evidence.” “Faith and the Right to Believe,” in William James’s Some Problems of Philosophy. Harvard University Press, 1979 (1911), p. 112.
[10]
Some contemporary pragmatists think that James conceded too much by looking
only for exceptions-cases to Clifford’s principle. Henry Jackman, for example,
has argued that it is a mistake for the pragmatist to “leav[e] epistemic
rationality entirely to his evidentialist opponents and merely argu[e] that
believing what is in our interests can occasionally be prudentially
rational.” Henry Jackman, “Prudential Arguments, Naturalized Epistemology,
and the Will to Believe,” in Transactions of the Charles S.
Peirce Society, forthcoming. Michael Williams, in Problems of Knowledge
(Oxford University Press, 2001) argues that philosophers have underestimated
the importance of the distinction between responsibility (or personal justification)
and grounding, because they have accepted what he calls the "Prior Grounding
Requirement." This assumption is intellectualist, and committed to internalism.
Williams' critique of it is akin to what I am here calling a "strong" response
to evidentialism.
[11] Jack Meiland, “What Ought We To Believe?” American Philosophical Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 1: 15-24. Meiland challenges the notion of “purely epistemic warrant” on which he sees evidentialism resting. The correct response to evidentialism for a pragmatist may be that he is not interested, as Locke was, in “truth for truth’s sake.” Compare, for example, John Dewey’s sharp critique of this notion in The Quest for Certainty (1929). Clifford’s stance is perhaps more objectionable than Locke’s, since Clifford abandons the idea of the proportionality of the strength of beliefs in favor a vague “threshold” notion where an agent either has or fails to have “sufficient” evidence. This in turn leaves little space for the notion of ‘intellectually undecided’ options, where James hopes to locate a robust realm of privacy rights.
[12] "Foundationalism," according to Michael Williams (2001, 88) "amounts to a counsel of extreme caution." It is "dramatically tilted towards error-avoidance." Wayne Riggs concurs by arguing that "Every theory of justification takes an implicit stance regarding the relative importance of these two cognitive goals, though few are explicit about it." Traditional (foundationalist and internalist) theories set high standards, and a theory that has such high standards demands cognitive security and prefers ignorance to error. "Balancing Our Epistemic Goals," forthcoming (2003) in Noûs.
[13] Critics of James would not easily concede that a faith in “truths” answering to metaphysical questions has any rational basis; it therefore makes little sense to them that they ‘risk loss’ of a potential momentous truth. Logical positivists and others argued that many or all metaphysical questions are ill-formed, and simply “senseless.”
[14] On the naturalistic hypothesis as the competitor to the religious hypothesis, see James’s important footnote 4.
[15]
The Essential James, Bruce Wilshire (ed.), SUNY Press,
1984, p. 252. For useful discussions of the generic character of the religious
hypothesis, see Ellen Suckiel’s Heaven’s Champion: William James’s
Philosophy of Religion, University of Notre Dame Press, 1996, pg. 115-116.
[16] Michael Martin, Atheism: A Philosophical Justification. Temple University Press, 1990, p.245.
[17] “Attempts to prove the universality [of religion] prove too much or too little. It is probable that religions have been universal in the sense that all the peoples we know anything about have had a religion. But the differences among them are so great and so shocking that any common element that can be extracted is meaningless…. The Essential Dewey, Vol I, Larry Hickman and Thomas Alexander (eds.), Indiana University Press, 1998, p. 403.
[18] Had it been available to him, one way that James might have consistently clarified and developed the two levels while and still maintaining the analogies he sought between scientific and religious reasoning would have been to borrow from Imre Lakatos’s model of competing “research programmes.” Such a model has been usefully applied to religion, for instance, in Gary Gutting’s Religious Belief and Religious Skepticism (University of Notre Dame Press, 1982, p. 175-177. Using this model, the Jamesian Religious Hypothesis (without details of the nature of the religious absolute) would be represented as the ‘hard core’ of the religionists’ programme, while the “outer” or “protective” belt of the programme, to which a more interim assent is appropriate, would “include almost all the content of the creeds and theologies that express the distinctive commitments of specific religions.” Such a model, I believe, helps explain why religionists may sometimes disassociate with one extant religion and turn to another, while still maintaining a broad commitment to a religious worldview. But an individual may, of course, when disappointed in their religion or its communal life, also decide to reject the “core” of religious consciousness altogether and accept the competing naturalistic hypothesis, the core of the naturalist’s programme. So this Lakatosian model also makes sense of James’s insistence that the evidentialist is also living according to an unproven “hypothesis.”
[19] “Belief, that sacred faculty which prompts the decisions of our will, and knits into harmonious working all the compacted energies of our being, is ours not for ourselves, but for humanity” Clifford, EOB 74. “…If I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief: it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward actions. But I cannot help doing this wrong towards Man, that I make myself credulous.” Clifford, EOB 76.
[20] Louis Pojman suggests not so much a contrast between public duty and private right in James’ thought, but a contrast between different kinds of perceived duty. Clifford’s duties are “deontological,” while James’ are “teleological,” in the sense that they derive from ends deemed worth pursuing, perhaps as prerequisite to a meaningful and moral life. In “Faith and the Right to Believe,” for instance, James says that “These faith tendencies in turn are but expressions of our good-will towards certain forms of result” (112). See also Louis Pojman, Religious Belief and the Will. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986, Chapter IX.
[21] Since on my reading, “liveness” already implies intellectually undecided for the agent, James’s sudden inclusion of this extra condition must be construed objectively—he means intellectually-undecidable by currently available evidence, not just by evidence that a particular agent may have. Otherwise this condition would be redundant. The evidentialist nevertheless finds this condition suspect, because, they hold, if there are not sufficient objective grounds for assent to a statement, then there are, for that self-same reason, sufficient grounds for determining that the agent should suspend judgment. Pursuing James’s thought concerning this condition would lead one to examine his important but ambiguous notion of “overbeliefs.”
[22] “If we accept that ‘ought’ implies ‘can,’ then Clifford has no business telling us that we ought to believe only on the basis of sufficient evidence unless he too thinks that belief is in these cases a voluntary matter.” Meiland, 17. James is ambiguous as to whether by the phrase “voluntarily accepted faith” he supports direct voluntarism or only a far less controversial indirect voluntarism. He is often interpreted both ways, and while I believe he equivocates, it seems to me that a greater part of the problem derives from Clifford’s voluntaristic language and the notion of an “ethics of belief” that James inherits from him.
[23] For an interesting
perspective on the social and psychological aspects of risk-taking, see
The Culture of Adolescent Risk-Taking,
by Cynthia Lightfoot (Guilford Press, 1997): “Risks
are actively sought for their capacity to challenge, excite, and transform
oneself and one’s relationships with others. In this regard, risks are
speculative, experimental, and oriented toward some uncertain and wished-for
future” (2).
[24] R. B. Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, Vol. 2, 245. See also the Preface to The Will to Believe, p. 8: “I quite agree that what mankind at large most lacks is criticism and caution, not faith…What should be preached is courage weighted with responsibility… I do not think that anyone can accuse me of preaching reckless faith. I have preached the right of the individual to indulge his personal faith at his personal risk. I have discussed the kinds of risk; I have contended that none of us escape all of them; and I have only pleaded that it is better to face them open-eyed than to act as if we did not know them to be there.”
[26] “Faith thus remains as one of the inalienable birthrights of our mind. Of course it must remain a practical, and not a dogmatical attitude. It must go with toleration of other faiths, with the search for the most probable, and with the full consciousness of responsibilities and risks.” “Faith and the Right to Believe,” 113.