Our single-text class on James' Varieties started today... with another text. We only get seven sessions, and I wasn't about to give one up just because nobody could be expected to have prepared! So I gave students James' famous 1896 essay "The Will to Believe" to read and discuss.
It's a dusey! This is where James provides a "justification of faith." Faith has a role in the quest for knowledge, and in particular is a proper way of engaging particular kinds of "hypotheses," more appropriate in moral and especially religious questions (where sometimes "faith in a fact can help create the fact") than the detached waiting for "objective certitude" of science. It's quite dramatic and existential, as the lines from Fitz James Stephen with which James ends show:
We stand on a mountain pass in the midst of
whirling snow and blinding mist through which we get glimpses now and then of
paths which may be deceptive. If we stand still we shall be frozen to death. If
we take the wrong road we shall be dashed to pieces. We do not certainly know
whether there is any right one. What must we do?
It's a dusey! This is where James provides a "justification of faith." Faith has a role in the quest for knowledge, and in particular is a proper way of engaging particular kinds of "hypotheses," more appropriate in moral and especially religious questions (where sometimes "faith in a fact can help create the fact") than the detached waiting for "objective certitude" of science. It's quite dramatic and existential, as the lines from Fitz James Stephen with which James ends show:
James starts by suggesting that in matters of belief there are different kinds of "options" for any given person at a given time, and for those which are "living, momentous and forced" it is licit to go beyond incomplete evidence or even risk error... It's a little hard to make sense of, since it's presented as an objective category of irreducibly subjective apprehension. Our discussion struggled to determine whether I can change what is a 'living option" to me (and if so, how), if a decision could be "momentous" even if the subject wasn't aware of it, if an option is "forced" only because a person thinks it is.
James' thought always confounds in this way: too crisp-seeming contrasts are pressed into the service of articulating a humble, experimental, growing consciousness, of an experience where everything overlaps. The contrasts can start to crumble under this pressure but it doesn't matter (Jamesians aver), as they've done their work helping us move and change.
This slipperiness isn't just a feature of experience. James' universe isn't a fixed one, where our categories might come to rest if, per impossibile, they stopped revising and resolving. It's not just that our apprehension of it is incomplete and ever evolving: James' universe, too, is on the make. And it is in some way changed by our apprehension of it. This thought show up in one of this essay's famous lines:
This feeling, forced on us we know not whence, that by obstinately believing that there are gods (although not to do so would be so easy both for our logic or our life) we are doing the universe the deepest service we can, seems part of the living essence of the religious hypothesis.
...which is no longer talking about those situations in which believing the life has meaning keeps us from "freezing to death." In this line, I noticed today for the first time, it is the universe which is reassured. It would be "easy" for us not to give it that encouragement, not "obstinately" to persist in "believing there are gods." Ultimately is is better for us to believe this, too, but James' suggestion here is that this isn't just good for the individual believer. There is a deep "service" we do the universe by believing it meaningful.
Perhaps this stuck out to me today because the question if the universe has meaning, if our existence within it does, came up in "Religion & Ecology" yesterday, and we encountered three kinds of answer. One, dismissed rather quickly out of hand by the class: it's all an accident. Second, that, au contraire, life and even consciousness were destined to emerge (the argument of "Journey of the Universe"). Finally (in Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass) that it is all a gift, and so the start of a relationship of reciprocity. Perhaps crisp contrasts like accidental/necessary distract us from the contingent - but for that only more miraculous gift of a relationship with all that is.
