could anything have moral qualities, since no one could have done
otherwise? Yet, Spinoza writes, “There is no rational life, therefore
without intelligence, and things are good only in so far as they
assist men to enjoy that life of the mind which is determined by
intelligence. Those things alone, on the other hand, we call evil
which hinder man from perfecting his reason and enjoying a rational
life.”5 Isn’t Spinoza caught in the same paradox as the radical
behaviorist, such as B.F. Skinner, who believes human behavior (as a
dependent variable) is shaped by operant conditioning (stimuli or
independent variables)? How, then, can one tend one’s own soul, or,
as the behaviorist would phrase it, how can one achieve self-directed
behavior or a self-managed life-style?
4. Evaluate Immanuel Kant’s criticism in his Lectures on Philosophi-
cal Theology of Spinoza’s metaphysics: “Fundamentally Spinozism
could just as well be called a great fanaticism as a form of atheism.
For of God, the one substance, Spinoza affirms two predicates: ex-
tension and thought. Every soul, he says, is only a modification of
God’s thought, and every body is a modification of his extension. Thus
Spinoza assumed that everything existing could be found in God. But
by making this assumption he fell into crude contradictions. For if
only a single substance exists, then either I must be this substance, and
consequently I must be God (but this contradicts my dependency); or
else I am an accident (but this contradicts the concept of my ego, in
which I think myself as an ultimate subject which is not the predicate
5.
The Ethics, Appendix.
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of any other being).”
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209
Chapter 20
“The Will to Believe” by
William James
William James, Thoemmes
About the author. . .
William James (1842-1909), both a philosopher and a psychologist, was
an early advocate of pragmatism. He thought that a belief is true insofar
as it “works,” is useful, or satisfies a function. On this theory, truth is
thought to be found in experience, not in judgments about the world. James
had a most profound “arrest of life”— one quite similar to Tolstoy’s as
described in the first section of these readings. While Tolstoy’s solution
to his personal crisis was spiritual, James advocated the development of
the power of the individual self. In this effort, James exerted a greater
influence on twentieth century existential European thought than he did
on twentieth century American philosophy.
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About the work. . .
In his Will to Believe and Other Essays,1 James argues that it is not unrea-
sonable to believe hypotheses that cannot be known or established to be
true by scientific investigation. When some hypotheses of ultimate concern
arise, he argues that our faith can pragmatically shape future outcomes.
Much as in Pascal’s Wager, by not choosing, he thinks, we lose possibility
for meaningful encounters.
From the reading. . .
“He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as
certainly as surely as if he tried and failed.”
Ideas of Interest from The Will to Believe
1. Carefully explain James’ genuine option theory. In his characteriza-
tion of three types of options, does James commit the fallacy of false
dichotomy?
2. How can one be sure an option is momentous? Is is possible some
momentous options are not evident to us at the time they occur in
our lives? Is is possible for us to obtain a second chance to decide a
momentous option? Can you construct necessary and sufficient con-
ditions2 for an option to be a momentous one?
1.
William James. The Will to Believe and Other Essays. London: Longmans,
Green, and Co., 1897.
2.
A necessary condition is a factor in the absence of which a specific event cannot
take place. A necessary condition is indispensable or is essential for some other event to occur. For example, the presence of oxygen is a necessary condition for a fire to
occur. A condition x is necessary for condition y, if whenever x does not occur, then y does not occur. A sufficient condition is that factor in the presence of which an Reading For Philosophical Inquiry: A Brief Introduction
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Chapter 20. “The Will to Believe” by William James
3. James applies his theory to morals, social relations, and religion. Are
there any other dimensions of living which should be included? Why
cannot the genuine option theory be applied to the scientific method?
How is option theory applied to the problem of free will?
4. Discuss whether or not acceptance of the genuine option theory and
James’ thesis, itself, is a momentous option in a person’s life. Could
such a decision be related to the philosophy of existentialism?
5. Can you construct an example where James’ thesis is false? I.e. , is it
possible for our passional nature to decide an option which cannot be
decided on intellectual grounds and have a disastrous result?
The Reading Selection from The Will to
Believe
[Hypotheses and Options]
. . . Let us give the name of hypothesis to anything that may be proposed
to our belief; and just as the electricians speak of live and dead wires,
let us speak of any hypothesis as either live or dead. A live hypothesis is
one which appeals as a real possibility to him to whom it is proposed. If
I ask you to believe in the Mahdi, the notion makes no electric connec-
tion with your nature—it refuses to scintillate with any credibility at all.
As an hypothesis it is completely dead. To an Arab, however (even if he
be not one of the Mahdi’s followers), the hypothesis is among the mind’s
possibilities: It is alive. This shows that deadness and liveness in an hy-
pothesis are not intrinsic properties, but relations to the individual thinker.
They are measured by his willingness to act. The maximum of liveness in
an hypothesis means willingness to act irrevocably. Practically, that means
belief; but there is some believing tendency wherever there is willingness
to act at all.
event always occurs. A sufficient condition is always enough for some other event to occur. For example, in the U.S., having ten dimes is sufficient for having a dollar, but
having ten dimes is not necessary to have a dollar because one could also have a dollar
by having four quarters. Subjunctively, a sufficient condition can be expressed in the
formula, “If factor p should occur, then factor q would also occur.” This subjunctive conditional statement also expresses q as a dispositional property of p.
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Chapter 20. “The Will to Believe” by William James
Next, let us call the decision between two hypotheses an option. Options
may be of several kinds. They may be (1) living or dead, (2) forced or
avoidable, (3) momentous or trivial; and for our purposes we may call an
option a genuine option when it is of the forced, living, and momentous
kind.
1. A living option is one in which both hypotheses are live ones. If I say
to you, “Be a theosophist, or be a Mohammedan,” it is probably a dead
option, because for you neither hypothesis is likely to be alive. But if I
say, “Be an agnostic or be a Christian,” it is otherwise: Trained as you are,
each hypothesis makes some appeal, however small, to your belief.
Fridtjof Nansen and the Fram in the North Atlantic, from Fridtjof Nansen, Farthest North, Harper & Bros., 1897—Nansen’s account of the polar expedition of 1893-1896.
2. Next, if I say to you, “Choose between going out with your umbrella or
without it,” I do not offer you a genuine option, for it is not forced. You
can easily avoid it by not going out at all. Similarly, if I say, “Either love
me or hate me,” “Either call my theory true or call it false,” your option
is avoidable. You may remain indifferent to me, neither loving nor hating,
and you may decline to offer any judgment as to my theory. But if I say,
“Either accept this truth or go without it,” I put on you a forced option, for
there is no standing place outside of the alternative. Every dilemma based
on a complete logical disjunction, with no possibility of not choosing, is
an option of this forced kind.
3. Finally, if I were Dr. Nansen and proposed to you to join my North
Pole expedition, your option would be momentous; for this would prob-
ably be your only similar opportunity, and your choice now would either
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Chapter 20. “The Will to Believe” by William James
exclude you from the North Pole sort of immortality altogether or put at
least the chance of it into your hands. He who refuses to embrace a unique
opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he tried and failed. Per contra
the option is trivial when the opportunity is not unique, when the stake is
insignificant, or when the decision is reversible if it later prove unwise.
Such trivial options abound in the scientific life. A chemist finds an hy-
pothesis live enough to spend a year in its verification: He believes in it
to that extent. But if his experiments prove inconclusive either way, he is
quit for his loss of time, no vital harm being done.
It will facilitate our discussion if we keep all these distinctions well in
mind. . .
[James’ Thesis]
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 an 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. . .
[Options in Science]
Wherever the option between losing truth and gaining it is not momen-
tous, we can throw the chance of gaining truth away, and at any rate save
ourselves from any chance of believing falsehood, by not making up our
minds at all till objective evidence has come. In scientific questions, this
is almost always the case; and even in human affairs in general, the need
of acting is seldom so urgent that a false belief to act on is better than
no belief at all. Law courts, indeed, have to decide on the best evidence
attainable for the moment, because a judge’s duty is to make law as well
as to ascertain it, and (as a learned judge once said to me) few cases are
worth spending much time over: The great thing is to have them decided
on any acceptable principle and gotten out of the way. But in our dealings
with objective nature we obviously are recorders, not makers, of the truth;
and decisions for the mere sake of deciding promptly and getting on to
the next business would be wholly out of place. Throughout the breadth
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of physical nature facts are what they are quite independently of us, and
seldom is there any such hurry about them that the risks of being duped by
believing a premature theory need be faced. The questions here are always
trivial options; the hypotheses are hardly living (at any rate not living for
us spectators); the choice between believing truth or falsehood is seldom
forced. The attitude of skeptical balance is therefore the absolutely wise
one if we would escape mistakes. What difference, indeed, does it make
to most of us whether we have or have not a theory of the Roentgen rays,
whether we believe or not in mind-stuff, or have a conviction about the
causality of conscious states? It makes no difference. Such options are not
forced on us. On every account it is better not to make them, but still keep
weighing reasons pro et contra with an indifferent hand.
From the reading. . .
“Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an op-
tion between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot
by its nature be decided on intellectual ground. . . ”
[Discovery in Science]
I speak, of course, here of the purely judging mind. For purposes of dis-
covery such indifference is to be less highly recommended, and science
would be far less advanced than she is if the passionate desires of indi-
viduals to get their own faiths confirmed had been kept out of the game. . .
On the other hand, if you want an absolute duffer in an investigation, you
must, after all, take the man who has no interest whatever in its results: He
is the warranted incapable, the positive fool. The most useful investigator,
because the most sensitive observer, is always he whose eager interest in
one side of the question is balanced by an equally keen nervousness lest
he become deceived. Science has organized this nervousness into a regu-
lar technique, her so-called method of verification; and she has fallen so
deeply in love with the method that one may even say she has ceased to
care for truth by itself at all. 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. Such truth as that, she might repeat with
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Chapter 20. “The Will to Believe” by William James
Clifford, would be stolen in defiance of her duty to mankind. Human pas-
sions, however, are stronger than technical rules. “Le coeur a ses raisons, ”
as Pascal says, “que la raison ne connait pas: ”3 and however indifferent to
all but the bare rules of the game the umpire, the abstract intellect, may be,
the concrete players who furnish him the materials to judge of are usually,
each one of them, in love with some pet “live hypothesis” of his own. Let
us agree, however, that wherever there is no forced option, the dispassion-
ately judicial intellect with no pet hypothesis, saving us, as it does, from
dupery at any rate, ought to be our ideal.
The question next arises, Are there not somewhere forced options in our
speculative questions, and can we (as men who may be interested at least
as much in positively gaining truth as in merely escaping dupery) always
wait with impunity till the coercive evidence shall have arrived? It seems a
priori improbable that the truth should be so nicely adjusted to our needs
and powers as that. In the great boarding-house of nature, the cakes and
the butter and the syrup seldom come out so even and leave the plates so
clean. Indeed, we should view them with scientific suspicion if they did.
[Moral Beliefs]
Moral questions immediately present themselves as questions whose solu-
tion cannot wait for sensible proof. A moral question is a question not of
what sensibly exists, but of what is good, or would be good if it did exist.
Science can tell us what exists; but to compare the worths, both of what
exists and of what does not exist, we must consult, not science, but what
Pascal calls our heart. Science herself consults her heart when she lays it
down that the infinite ascertainment of fact and correction of false belief
are the supreme goods for man. Challenge the statement, and science can
only repeat it oracularly, or else prove it by showing that such ascertain-
ment and correction bring man all sorts of other goods which man’s heart
in turn declares. The question of having moral beliefs at all or not having
them is decided by our will. Are our moral preferences true or false, or
are they only odd biological phenomena, making things good or bad for
us, but in themselves indifferent? How can your pure intellect decide? If
your heart does not want a world of moral reality, your head will assuredly
never make you believe in one. . .
3.
“The heart has its reasons that reason does not know.” Ed.
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Chapter 20. “The Will to Believe” by William James
[Social Relations]
Turn now from these wide questions of good to a certain class of questions
of fact, questions concerning social relations, states of mind between one
man and another. Do you like me or not?—for example. Whether you
do or not depends, in countless instances, on whether I meet you half-
way, am willing to assume that you must like me, and show you trust
and expectation. The previous faith on my part in your liking’s existence
is in such cases what makes your liking come. But if I stand aloof, and
refuse to budge an inch until I have objective evidence, until you shall have
done something apt, as the absolutists say, ad extorquendum assensum
meum, ten to one your liking never comes. How many women’s hearts are
vanquished by the mere sanguine insistence of some man that they must
love him! He will not consent to the hypothesis that they cannot. The desire
for a certain kind of truth here brings about that special truth’s existence;
and so it is in innumerable cases of other sorts. Who gains promotions,
boons, appointments but the man in whose life they are seen to play the
part of live hypotheses, who discounts them, sacrifices other things for
their sake before they have come, and takes risks for them in advance?
His faith acts on the powers above him as a claim, and creates its own
verification.
A social organism of any sort whatever, large or small, is what it is because
each member proceeds to his own duty with a trust that the other members
will simultaneously do theirs. Wherever a desired result is achieved by the
cooperation of many independent persons, its existence as a fact is a pure
consequence of the precursive faith in one another of those immediately
concerned. A government, an army, a commercial system, a ship, a col-
lege, an athletic team, all exist on this condition, without which not only
is nothing achieved, but nothing is even attempted. A whole train of pas-
sengers (individually brave enough) will be looted by a few highwaymen,
simply because the latter can count on one another, while each passenger
fears that if he makes a movement of resistance, he will be shot before any-
one else backs him up. If we believed that the whole car-full would rise
at once with us, we should each severally rise, and train-robbing would
never even be attempted. There are, then, cases where a fact cannot come
at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming. And where faith in a
fact can help create the fact, that would be an insane logic which should
say that faith running ahead of scientific evidence is the “lowest kind of
immorality” into which a thinking being can fall. Yet such is the logic by
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Chapter 20. “The Will to Believe” by William James
which our scientific absolutists pretend to regulate our lives!
In truths dependent on our personal action, then, faith based on desire is
certainly a lawful and possibly an indispensable thing.
[Religious Questions]
But now, it will be said, these are all childish human cases, and have noth-
ing to do with great cosmic matters, like the question of religious faith.
Let us then pass on to that. Religions 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? 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 overlap-
ping things, the things in the universe that throw the last stone, so to speak,
and say the final word. . .
The second affirmation of religion is that we are better off even now if we
believe her first affirmation to be true.
From the reading. . .
“Whenever the option between losing truth and gaining it is not mo-
mentous. . . The attitude of skeptical balance is therefore the absolutely
wise one if we would escape mistakes.”
Now, let us consider what the logical elements of this situation are in case
the religious hypothesis in both its branches be really true. . . So proceed-
ing, we see, first, that religion offers itself as a momentous option. We are
supposed to gain, even now, by our belief, and to lose by our nonbelief, a
certain vital good. Secondly, religion is a forced option, so far as that good
goes. We cannot escape the issue by remaining skeptical and waiting for
more light, because, although we do avoid error in that way if religion be
untrue, we lose the good, if it be true, just as certainly as if we positively
chose to disbelieve. . . Skepticism, then, is not avoidance of option; it is
option of a certain particular kind of risk. Better risk loss of truth than
chance of error—that is your faith-vetoer’s exact position. He is actively
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Chapter 20. “The Will to Believe” by William James
playing his stake as much as the believer is; he is backing the field against
the religious hypothesis, just as the believer is backing the religious hy-
pothesis against the field. To preach skepticism to us as a duty until “suf-
ficient evidence” for religion be found is tantamount therefore to telling
us, when in presence of the religious hypothesis, that to yield to our fear
of its being error is wiser and better than to yield to our hope that it may
be true. It is not intellect against all passions, then; it is only intellect with
one passion laying down its law. And by what, forsooth, is the supreme
wisdom of this passion warranted? Dupery for dupery, what proof is there
that dupery through hope is so much worse than dupery through fear? I,
for one, can see no proof; and 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. If
religion be true and the evidence for it be still insufficient, I do not wish,
by putting your extinguisher upon my nature (which feels to me as if it
had after all some business in this matter), to forfeit my sole chance in life
of getting upon the winning side that chance depending, of course, on my
willingn