The Will to Believe and Pragmatist Conception of Truth

The Will to Believe and Pragmatist Conception of Truth

The Will to Believe: And Other Essays

In “The Will to Believe, and Other Essays,” Mr. James vigorously preaches the liberty of believing,” “the lawfulness of voluntarily adopted faith,” “the right to adopt a believing attitude in religious matters in spite of the fact that our merely logical intellect may not have been coerced.” “I wish to make you feel,” he says,—I take a form of his favorite declaration pitched upon almost at random,—“that we have a right to believe the physical order to be only a partial order; that we have a right to supplement it by an unseen spiritual order which we assume on trust, if only thereby life may seem worth living again (Allen, 1967).” “ “Faith based on desire, ” “believing by volition,”—thus he characterizes a mood of mind which he goes on to defend with inexhaustible resources of ingenuity and illustration, and with that well-known diction, straight from the hot-springs of an intense imagination, with which already, in his “Psychology,” he made alive whatever he touched.

The question arises whether the author means that we are to bring ourselves by use of will into a believing state of mind, an internal assent, or only that we are to act as if we believed.... In truth, much vigorous writing could be cited to either effect. We hear of our “right to believe” and also of our “right to adopt a believing attitude”; of “the right of the individual to indulge his personal faith at his personal risk,” and again, of merely “acting on the assumption” of a certain tenet (Barzun, 1983).

The author speaks of “those questions that belong to the province of personal faith to decide.” If faith “decides,” as in the case here referred to, a question of truth or falsehood, faith would appear to be the mental state of belief. Indeed, it is roundly said, “Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is still theoretically possible; and,” the writer goes directly on, “as the test of belief is willingness to act, one may say that faith is the readiness to act in a cause the prosperous issue of which is not certified to us in advance. ” Thus (though one does not gather why the thing should be identified with its test) it would seem that it is no mere outward scheme of living, without an ex animo [“sincere”] assent, that is recommended, but action flowing from and expressing a state of mind which is none the less belief because it rises superior to the evidence (Rescher, 2000). However, there is much about risk boldly faced. “I have discussed the kinds of risk; ... and I have pleaded that it is better to face them openly than to act as if we did not know them to be there.” Faith “is in fact the same moral quality which we call courage in practical affairs.” But the risk in question is ...