ISSN 1393-614X Minerva - An Internet Journal of
Philosophy Vol. 10 2006
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Positivism, Cerebralism and Voluntarism in William
James Wesley Cooper |
Abstract
James’s positivism is different
from Comte’s, Clifford’s, and the logical positivists’. Notably, it presupposes
a difference between natural–scientific inquiries and the metaphysical inquiry
he calls radical empiricism. Equally importantly, the positivism of James’s
great book, The Principles of Psychology, studies the cerebral
conditions of the will. This cerebralism is necessary background for
understanding James’s voluntarism, the will–to–believe doctrine that came
later. James’s positivism goes hand–in–hand with his value pluralism; they are
responsible for different domains of inquiry, natural-scientific and ethical,
respectively. It is a mistake to impose a “master moral syllogism” onto the
former, implying that all facts are constituted by the will as guided by a
utilitarian moral principle. Cerebral shaping of the will occurs not only
through the “front door” of experience, especially in the formation of habit,
but also through the “back stairs” of mutation and natural selection, which
creates brains suited to different pursuits. The brain is no tabula rasa.
William James declared his
“strictly positivistic point of view” in the Preface to The Principles of
Psychology:
I
have therefore treated our passing thoughts as integers, [p. vii] and regarded
the mere laws of their coexistence with brain-states as the ultimate laws for
our science. The reader will in vain seek for any closed system in the book. It
is mainly a mess of descriptive details, running out into queries which only a
metaphysics alive to the weight of her task can hope successfully to deal with.
That will perhaps be centuries hence; and meanwhile the best mark of health
that a science can show is this unfinished–seeming front. (James 1981b)
In the same place he distinguishes
various different contexts of inquiry including the various natural
sciences and, at a more general level, the context of natural-scientific
inquiry as opposed to metaphysics:
I
have kept close to the point of view of natural science throughout the book.
Every natural science assumes certain [p. vi] data uncritically, and declines
to challenge the elements between which its own ’laws’ obtain, and from which
its own deductions are carried on....This book, assuming that thoughts and
feelings exist and are vehicles of knowledge, thereupon contends that
psychology when she has ascertained the empirical correlation of the various
sorts of thought or feeling with definite conditions of the brain, can go no
farther — can go no farther, that is, as a natural science. If she goes farther
she becomes metaphysical. (James 1981b)
James might also have
said, as he said later in the Principles, that if she goes further she
may become ethical. At the end of the chapter “Attention” he observes that
there are “no facts definitely known to stand as arbiter between” the
mechanical conception of the will and a conception of the will as a spiritual
force.
Under
these circumstances, one can leave the question open whilst waiting for light,
or one can do what most speculative minds do, that is, look to one’s general
philosophy to incline the beam. The believers in mechanism do so without
hesitation, and they ought not to refuse a similar privilege to the believers
in a spiritual force. I count myself among the latter, but as my reasons are
ethical they are hardly suited for introduction into a psychological work.
(James 1981b, 429)
This division of labour
between psychology and ethics is starkly at odds with Richard Gale’s “master
syllogism” interpretation of James, which globalizes the activity of the will,
constrained only by a unitary conception of value, the “preference–satisfaction
utilitarianism” that Gale detects in James’s later essay “The Moral Philosopher
and the Moral Life”. More plausibly, James was a value pluralist who always
honoured the division of labour between the natural sciences and moral
philosophy.
Two points can be
extracted from these basic commitments. First, James’s positivism must be
separated out from a variety of “positivisms” hovering in the Zeitgeist of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
1. Auguste Comte’s
historicist positivism, in which history discloses progress from a theological
stage of mythical explanations, to a metaphysical stage of explanation by
reference to obscure forces postulated by abstract philosophy, and finally a
“positive” stage at which scientific explanation reigns.
2. Victorian positivism
such as Clifford’s, which insists that belief should be a strict function of
the evidence, forbidding the “over–beliefs” that figure prominently in James’s
philosophy of religion, as well as the tie–breaking role for life-enhancing
beliefs when the state of science is indifferent between such beliefs and
hypotheses that lack this feature.
3. William James’ instrumentalist
positivism, which recommends pursuit of psycho-physical correlation laws in
psychology, in order that it might achieve predictive and practical value. “The
kind of psychology which could cure a case of melancholy, or charm a chronic
insane delusion away,” as opposed to one that promises “the most seraphic
insight into the nature of the soul” (James 1983, 277). This instrumentalism
about the natural sciences goes hand–in–hand with James’s non-instrumentalism
or realism about his radical-empiricist metaphysics, the world of pure
experience.
4. The Vienna Circle’s
logical positivism, a marriage of logic as descended from Frege, Russell, etc.,
and empiricism as descended from Hume, Mach, etc. The marriage is characterized
by a Verification Principle that distinguishes scientific sense from nonsense —
in particular, from metaphysics.
These differences must be
kept in mind in order to avoid such false dilemmas as David Hollinger’s, that
James was either a positivist or a precursor to postmodernism. (Hollinger 1997,
69, 81). Hollinger writes that “However diverse our opinions of William James
today, we generally agree that the great pragmatist was right about one thing:
the pretensions of the Victorian “positivists,” opposing them “as a founder of
truly ‘modernist’ or even ‘postmodernist’ thought” (Hollinger 1997, 69).
The second point to be
drawn from the Preface is that evidence for beliefs is context–specific rather
than context–neutral. Each natural science has its postulates or unchallenged assumptions,
for instance, defining distinct contexts of inquiry.
Context–specific evidence: What counts as evidence
for a hypothesis depends on the context of belief that the hypothesis
addresses. Evidence is not generic but rather specific to the assumptions or
postulates of particular contexts of inquiry.
Context–neutral evidence: What counts as evidence
is context free: hypotheses are generic empirical hypotheses for which generic
empirical evidence is relevant.
Hollinger advocates a
context–neutral reading of James: empirical evidence was what decided the
merits of religion in the long run, “and it was up to people who believed in
religion to go out and get that evidence, thereby putting their cherished ideas
at empirical risk” (Hollinger 1997, 81). He takes this as reason to reject the
“spheres of belief” reading of James, or what is being called here the
context–specific conception of evidence. However, the evidence for belief in
God (quality of life considerations) is of a very different kind from
the evidence that there are butterflies in the backyard (observation reports),
the former having to do with whether a faith venture does indeed enhance life,
the latter with seeing butterflies. Hollinger appreciates that “the various
over–beliefs of men, their several faith ventures,” (James 1981a, 144)
are needed to bring the evidence in, but he doesn’t appreciate the
context–specificity of evidence that is central to James’s positivism.
Another distinction is
needed to get James’s voluntarism in focus. If there is a role for the will in
formation of belief, what is the character of the mind/brain on which the will
is to have its influence?
• The will may act on a
blank-slate brain, a constant from individual to individual, from culture to
culture, etc.
• The will may act on a
structured brain that is predisposed to this or that pattern of beliefs by its
phylogenetic and ontogenetic etiology, a variable from individual to individual
via evolutionary spontaneity, from culture to culture via habit formation, etc.
This pair corresponds to
two different approaches to interpreting James’s 1897 essay “The Will to
Believe.” The latter, the structured-brain conception, stresses the unity of
James’s thought and orients his voluntarism towards brain science, emphasizing
cerebral constraints on voluntarism implied by discussion of brain and habit in
the 1892 magnum opus, The Principles of Psychology. The former,
the blank-slate conception, sees James’s thought as disconnected and orients
his voluntarism towards prudential or ethical reasons willing belief in this
direction or that, such as the prudential idea that it is rational to accept
any belief that promises significant benefits to the believer even if the
belief is known to be false, (Nathanson 1985) or the ethical idea that James
was a utilitarian whose “master syllogism” required believing whatever
maximizes desire satisfaction. (Gale 1999). (See Jackman (1999) for a critique
of the prudential idea, which he calls crude pragmatism, and Cooper (2002) for
critique of the ethical idea, which overlooks the value pluralism that is
present in the crucial essay, “The moral philosopher and the moral life.”)
James’s value pluralism is
expressed in the following passage by the phrase “the more imperative ideals”.
There is not a single ideal that the strenuous mood harkens to:
When,
however, we believe that a God is there, and that he is one of the claimants,
the infinite perspective opens out. The scale of the symphony is incalculably prolonged.
The more imperative ideals now begin to speak with an altogether new
objectivity and significance, and to utter the infinitely penetrating,
shattering, tragically challenging note of appeal. They ring out like the call
of Victor Hugo’s Alpine eagle, “qui parle au précipice et que le gouffre
entend,” and the strenuous mood awakens at the sound. It saith among the
trumpets, ha, ha! It smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains
and the shouting. Its blood is up; and cruelty to the lesser claims, so far
from a deterrent element, does but add to the stern joy with which it leaps to
answer to the greater. All through history, in the periodical conflicts of
puritanism with the don’t-care temper, we see the antagonism of the strenuous
and genial moods, and the contrast between the ethics of infinite and
mysterious obligation from on high, and those of prudence and the satisfaction
of merely finite need. (James 1891, 352)
James acknowledges the
possibility of “a divine thinker with all-enveloping demands,” whose way of
subordinating demands to each other would be the finally valid casuist scale.
But his way is “hidden from us even were we sure of his existence,” so James’s
religion of humanity preaches the need for the various imperative ideals to
adjust themselves to each other with what wisdom we can muster in the long
course of the history of the race. (James 1891, 353) This is why he begins his
essay by writing, “The main purpose of this paper is to show that there is no
such thing possible as an ethical philosophy dogmatically made up in advance.
We all help to determine the content of ethical philosophy so far as we
contribute to the race’s moral life.” (James 1891, 330) In particular, a
principle of desire-satisfaction utilitarianism cannot spare us the challenge
of moral life, which puts “our character and total personal genius on trial;
and if we invoke any so-called philosophy, our choice and use of that are but
revelations of our individual aptitude or incapacity for moral life.” (James
1891, 354) We must muddle through with the strenuous spirit harking to the more
imperative ideals, which ring out like the call of Victor Hugo’s Alpine eagle.
The need for this muddling is why James concludes his essay with these stirring
words: “The solving word for the learned and the unlearned man alike lies, in
the last resort, in the dumb willingnesses and unwillingnesses of their
interiors, and nowhere else. It is not in heaven, neither is it beyond the sea.
But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart that thou
mayest do it.” (James 1891, 354)
In the first chapter of
the Principles, “The Scope of Psychology,” James argues that the soul
and its faculties, the bread and butter of spiritualist psychology, are
parasitic on brain science for any explanatory power they may have. Similarly,
an associationist psychology that replaces souls and faculties by
recombinant ideas is shallow without brain science to explain “the effects of
fever, exhaustion, hypnotism, old age, and the like” on mental life. (James
1981b, 17) He writes,
The spiritualist and the associationist must both
be ’cerebralists’ to the extent at least of admitting that
certain peculiarities in the way of working of their own favorite principles
are explicable only by the fact that the brain laws are a codeterminant of the
result. (James 1981b, 18)
The chapter that follows,
“The Functions of the Brain,” sharpens his cerebralism by arguing that the
higher brain is different in different human beings, in such a way as to affect
the beliefs or ’considerations’ they act on. This occurs before the chapter on
habit, so the cerebral influence should be understood, not as caused by the
influence of habituation in the course of experience, but rather as due to
brain facts caused by evolutionary and developmental processes, phylogeny and
ontogeny.
Within
the psychic life due to the cerebrum itself the same general distinction
obtains, between considerations of the more immediate and considerations of the
more remote.... The tramp who lives from hour to hour; the bohemian whose
engagements are from day to day; the bachelor who builds but for a single life;
the father who acts for another generation; the patriot who thinks of a whole community
and many generations; and, finally, the philosopher and saint whose cares are
for humanity and for eternity,– these range themselves in an unbroken
hierarchy, wherein each successive grade results from an increased
manifestation of the special form of action by which the cerebral centres are distinguished from all
below them. (James 1981b, 35)
The next chapter, “Habit,”
presses even further this cerebral shaping of considerations, in this case by
reference to the acquisition of habits.
Habit
is thus the enormous fly–wheel of society, its most precious conservative
agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves
the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone
prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by
those brought up to tread therein.... It dooms us all to fight out the battle
of life upon the lines of our nurture or our early choice, and to make the best
of a pursuit that disagrees, because there is no other for which we are fitted,
and it is too late to begin again. It keeps different social strata from
mixing. Already at the age of twenty-five you see the professional mannerism
settling down on the young commercial traveller, on the young doctor, on the young
minister, on the young counsellor-at-law. You see the little lines of cleavage
running through the character, the tricks of thought, the prejudices, the ways
of the ’shop,’ in a word, from which the man can by-and-large by no more escape
than his coat-sleeve can suddenly fall into a new set of folds. On the whole,
it is best he should not escape. It is well for the world that in most of us,
by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften
again. (James 1981b, 125)
This sampling of the
cerebralism of the Principles is enough to pose a problem for
understanding the voluntarism of James’s well-known doctrine of the will to
believe. Written only five years after the Principles, his essay “The
Will to Believe” makes no mention of the cerebral structuring of
considerations that produces a bohemian or a patriot, a doctor or a minister.
It mentions only the structuring that is due to authority, by which he
means the intellectual climate. The brain does not belong to a person’s intellectual
climate, but rather to the person. So the puzzle is: How to integrate James’s
cerebralism with the voluntarism of his will–to–believe doctrine. Is that
doctrine constrained only by ’authority’, or is it constrained too by facts
about the brain? An overview of the
essay will be followed by an attempt to solve the puzzle.
James announces in the
opening paragraph of “The Will to Believe” that his aim is “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.” (James 1979, 13)
The exercise of this right is what he calls voluntarily adopted faith. A
candidate for belief is a hypothesis, which can be live or dead,
the former if the prospective believer considers it a real possibility. A
decision between two hypotheses is an option. Options may be living or
dead, but they may also be forced or avoidable, and momentous
or trivial. An option is genuine when it is living, forced, and
momentous. He takes it as evident that there must be some pre-existing tendency
to believe a hypothesis if it is to be a living option.
“It is evident,” James
writes, “that unless there be some pre-existing tendency to believe in masses
and holy water, the option offered to the will by Pascal is not a living
option.” The general point applies just as forcefully to evidentialist critics
such as Clifford, showing how their own preference for adhering to an
atheistic, materialist worldview is rooted in their desires and will. “As a
rule,” according to James, “we disbelieve all facts and theories for which we
have no use.” (James 1979, 19) Everyone’s beliefs are affected by the passions,
then, and consequently by their origins in cerebral facts, so if this is
James’s pragmatism at work, it is not a crude form of pragmatism that simply
sanctions adding prudential considerations to epistemic values when we reason:
”While crude pragmatism introduces prudential considerations as an alternative
to epistemic ones,” Henry Jackman writes, “[James’s] more sophisticated type of
pragmatism allows prudential considerations to shape the epistemic norms
themselves.” (Jackman 1999, 18) There is a connection between epistemic
justification and the passions, but it is the role of the passions in the
brain’s belief-forming processes, the role reserved for the higher brain in
grounding our emotional and instinctive lives, and not the utility of actual
beliefs that is important. This role is what Ellen Kappy Suckiel is concerned
with when she attends to the link between passional beliefs in James’s sense
and an individual’s serious commitments. (Suckiel 1982, 87) This link will
become important when interpreting the relevance of James’s chapter “The
Functions of the Brain” in the Principles to an individual’s higher
aesthetic, moral, and intellectual life.
That there are
pre-existing tendencies to belief is not a reason to follow Clifford in holding
that belief should be a strict function of the available evidence, but rather a
reason to acknowledge that a voluntarily adopted hypothesis cannot be dead.
James adds that dead hypotheses “for the most part” are rendered thus by our
“willing nature.” (James 1979, 18) This latter phrase denotes not only “such
deliberate volitions as may have set up habits of belief that we cannot now
escape from,” but also “such factors of belief as fear and hope, prejudice and
passion, imitation and partisanship, the circumpressure of our caste and set.”
(James 1979, 18) He accepts the term authority to encompass “all those
influences, born of the intellectual climate, that make hypotheses possible or
impossible for us, alive or dead.” (James 1979, 18) Hypotheses that are
authoritatively dead are “as a rule” those for which we have “no use,” an
aspect of our “non-intellectual nature” that, though “far from simple,” is not
simply a matter of “pure insight and logic.” (James 1979, 20) He is led to
announce his thesis:
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. (James 1979, 20)
That no hypothesis is
“indefectibly certain,” except that the present phenomenon of consciousness
exists, is the empiricist position, as opposed to the absolutist
view and the claim to objective certitude. He endorses empiricism and the
associated idea that there is no “concrete test” for truth, denying the
doctrine of objective certitude although pursuing truth with the expectation of
corrigibility. (James 1979, 22)
Belief formation is
subject to two different duties, we must know the truth and we must
avoid error. He accepts both duties as expressions of our passional nature,
but blames evidentialists like Clifford for over-emphasizing the latter step of
passion, the duty to shun error. He recommends instead on behalf of the
empiricist philosopher, that “[O]
One short way with the
puzzle integrates it with the cerebralism of the Principles by
acknowledging the two tracks that that book follows, the physical track
featuring the brain’s contribution to mental life, and the mental track
featuring the stream of thought. It studies the mind ’from without’ by
reference to brain science, and ’from within’ by reference to introspective
awareness of the stream of thought. Then the “Will to Believe” essay is about
belief as something in the stream of thought, particularly about the conditions
under which one is justified in exercising the right to believe. The cerebral
track is simply irrelevant, or at most taken for granted. Beyond the truism
that the mental is dependent on the physical, there is nothing more to say
about the will to believe at the cerebral level.
That this way is too short
is proven by reflection that the theory of habit in Principles explains
how the intellectual climate constrains the will to believe. This climate
shapes habits that shape belief: it affects the educational system, which
affects what we believe about molecules, etc. More generally, as James writes,
Here
in this room, we all of us believe in molecules and the conservation of energy,
in democracy and necessary progress, in Protestant Christianity and the duty of
fighting for the doctrine of the immortal Monroe, all for no reasons worthy of
the name. We see into these matters with no more inner clearness, and probably
with much less, than any disbeliever in them might possess. (James 1979, 18)
The original puzzle
depends on a duality of organism (including brain), on one hand, and the
intellectual climate, on the other hand. A partial solution notes that the
climate influences brain by inculcating habits, and so the duality is false.
The mechanism of climate’s influence on the individual is given by the
cerebralist theory of habit, whereby, as James approvingly quotes Dr. Carpenter
in the Principles, “our nervous system grows to the modes in which it
has been exercised.” (James 1981b, 117) In this case it is exercised
under the guidance of intellectual climate, producing a believer in the
But the puzzle isn’t
entirely solved, since the solution so far presumes that the brain, apart from
its acquisition of habits, is a tabula rasa in respect of its
constraining the will to believe. James certainly rejected the theory that the
brain was in general a blank tablet, emphatically rejecting the then–favoured
Meynert scheme of the brain on this particular among others. (James draws on
the writings of the Austrian anatomist Theodor Meynert to present the way
Modern Science conceives of the relationship between mind and brain. It holds
that brain and mind alike consist of simple elements, according to James, who
proposes that on the mental side there is no such granular “mind dust” but
rather a continuous stream of thought, which is correlated not with simple
elements of the brain but rather with states of the brain as a whole.)
The
plain truth is that neither in man nor beast are the hemispheres the virgin
organs which our scheme called them. So far from being unorganized at birth,
they must have native tendencies to reaction of a determinate sort. These are
the tendencies which we know as emotions and instincts. (James 1981b,
83)
More specifically, some
nativism about belief formation is implied by the passage from the Principles
about tramp, bohemian, bachelor, father, patriot, philosopher and saint.
Cerebral influences due to phylogeny and ontogeny, or what James calls psychogenesis,
constitute what for him is the “back stairs” (or sometimes the “back
door”) to our mental life, in contrast to the “front door” provided by
experience and experience-driven processes like habituation. This is where
James locates the influence of necessary truths, as he writes in the final
chapter of the Principles, “Necessary Truths and the Effects of
Experience,” where he defines his own view of such truths by triangulation with
the views of “apriorists” and “evolutionary empiricists,” agreeing with the
apriorists that “taking the word experience as it is universally understood,
the experience of the race can no more account for our necessary or a priori
judgments than the experience of the individual can,” and siding furthermore
with the apriorists in denying that our instinctive reactions are fruits of our
ancestors’ education in the midst of the same environment, transmitted to us at
birth.” (James 1981b, 1216) However, he parts ways with the apriorists’
view that necessary truths have a “transcendental origin,” contending rather
for “a naturalistic view of their cause.” (James 1981b, 1215-6)
More specifically, he favours the view that the relevant features of our
“organic mental structure” must rather “be understood as congenital variations,
’accidental’ in the first instance, but then transmitted as fixed features of
the race.” (James 1981b, 1216)
James distinguishes between
direct and indirect ways in which an animal can become adapted to its
environment by modification of brain structures. “The direct influences are the
animal’s experiences, in the widest sense of the term,” he writes. (James 1981b,
1224) When such influences affect the “mental organism,” in his phrase, “they
are conscious experiences, and become the objects as well as the causes of
their effects.” (James 1981b, 1224) Indirect influences on the other
hand are causal factors influencing behaviour without becoming experiences that
conceptualize the behaviour as a mental object. They are “causes of which we
are not immediately conscious as such, and which are not the direct objects of
the effects they produce.” (James 1981b, 1224) So necessary truths like
those of arithmetic are causes of arithmetical thought and behaviour, but they
are not the “direct objects” of experience, as they would be if arithmetical
truths were high-level empirical generalizations, as in John Stuart Mill’s
view.
James’s account of a
necessary truth’s “transmission to the race” emphasizes individual spontaneity
in evolution and cultural development. The trail of the human serpent is not a
monolithic path, but rather an aggregation of different paths, giving rise to
different predispositions of the bohemian, the bachelor, etc. James’s regard
for variety between individuals freed him from a kind of species determinism,
where a shared physiology leads to a common psychology. He appealed to the
interplay of individual variation and the selective forces of the group to
build a model of human thought evolving over time. But it is not a simple case
of logical habits and scientific concepts entering the mind through the front
door of experience. The sources of our modes of thought are fundamentally
back-stairs phenomena. The use of Darwin to counter the environmental
determinism of those James called evolutionary empiricists makes his work stand
out from his contemporaries both for his refusal to oversimplify the theory and
his boldness in employing it for purposes supporting individuality.
This many-paths account is
how James appropriates Darwinian evolutionary doctrine, specifically the
influence of mutation (“accidental” variations) on natural selection. Such
back-stairs influence extends beyond necessary truths to the basic tendencies
of one’s instinctive and emotional life, and particularly to the tendencies
that predispose to their different ways of life the types of people James
refers to in “The Functions of the Brain”: bohemian, bachelor, patriot,
philosopher, saint. James makes the point more broadly in “Necessary Truths and
the Effects of Experience.”
Our
higher aesthetic, moral, and intellectual life seems made up of affections of
[a] collateral and incidental sort, which have entered the mind by the back
stairs, as it were, or rather have not entered the mind at all, but got
surreptitiously born in the house.... The way of experience proper is the front
door, the door of the five senses.... It would be simply silly to say of two men
with perhaps equal effective skill in drawing, one an untaught natural genius,
the other a mere obstinate plodder in the studio, that both alike owe their
skill to their ’experience.’ The reasons of their several skills lie in wholly
disparate natural cycles of causation. (James 1981b, 1225)
The points that James is
making in the Principles under the rubric of “the back stairs” are an
early expression of what he later called his humanistic principle, as in this
passage from Pragmatism:
You
can’t weed out the human contribution. Our nouns and adjectives are all
humanized heirlooms, and in the theories we build them into, the inner order
and arrangement is wholly dictated by human considerations, intellectual consistency
being one of them. Mathematics and logic themselves are fermenting with human
rearrangements; physics, astronomy and biology follow massive cues of
preference. We plunge forward into the field of fresh experience with the
beliefs our ancestors and we have made already; these determine what we notice;
what we notice determines what we do; what we do again determines what we
experience; so from one thing to another, altho the stubborn fact remains that
there is a sensible flux, what is true of it seems from first to last to be
largely a matter of our own creation. (James 1981a, 114-5)
The particular aspect of
the humanistic principle that James called the will to believe is also an
expression of back–stairs phenomena. Our “willing nature” is conditioned not
only by culture but also by what James called “psychogenesis,” or the factors
of mental evolution. These factors must be understood to belong to the authority
that James refers to in the “
The persistence of
innovative thoughts beyond an individual’s momentary awareness is largely
determined in a cultural setting. In the essay “Great Men and Their
Environment” James argues for the crucial role of individuals in cultural
evolution. He cites a scientific revolutionary’s conceiving a new law. This is
“a spontaneous variation in the strictest sense of the term. It flashes out of
one brain, and no other, because the instability of that brain is such as to
tip and upset itself in just that particular direction.” (James 1979, 185)
James goes on to note that good flashes and bad ones have the same origin. It
is the cultural environment that selects, preserves one over the other.
[T]o
the thought, when it is once engendered, the consecration of agreement with
outward relations may come.... The scientific hypothesis arouses in me a fever
of desire for verification. I read, I write, experiment, consult experts.
Everything corroborates my notion, which being then published in a book spreads
from review to review and from mouth to mouth....The environment preserves the
conception which it was unable to produce in any brain less idiosyncratic than
my own. (James 1979, 186)
So the authority of the
intellectual climate is not exclusive of back-stairs influence, such as the effect
of James’s idiosyncratic brain on his readers, even though its effect is
enhanced or inhibited by cultural selection. The following passage from “Great
Men” underscores this point about brain-to-environment causation:
[T]he spontaneous
upsettings of brains this way and that at particular moments into particular
ideas and combinations are matched by their equally spontaneous permanent
tiltings or saggings toward determinate directions.... [T]he personal tone of
each mind, which makes it more alive to certain classes of experience than
others, more attentive to certain impressions, more open to certain reasons, is
equally the result of that invisible and unimaginable play of the forces of
growth within the nervous system which, irresponsibly to the environment, makes
the brain peculiarly apt to function in a certain way. (James 1979, 186-7)
It was the interplay of
‘accidental variation’ in individuals and the selective forces within a group
and environment that gave
Darwinian ideas are
present in many different discussions in Principles, where the notion of
selection plays a prominent role in explaining how various psychological
systems function. As Philip Wiener suggested in his detailed examination of
James’s Darwinism in the Principles:
What
James as a metaphysician finally retained of evolution, namely, the ideas of
temporalism and spontaneous variation, served him persistently in his defense
of the primary importance of individual experience and personal freedom. That
is the Ariadne’s thread to James’s philosophy of evolution. The elusive but
genuine character of individual spontaneity in both the external world and in
man is in James’s view of evolution epitomized by “saltatory” mutations,
original, spontaneous, irreducible phases of experience. (Wiener 1965, 101)
The idea that individuals
contain traits not found in their ancestors allowed James to reject the
environmental determinism of his day. James found other uses for Darwinism, as
many writers have noted. He defended the adaptive role played by consciousness
against epiphenomenalism, argued for the selective function of attention (where
competing instincts and perceptions are selected according to an inner
environment of needs and desires), and of course pragmatism can be considered a
form of evolutionary epistemology. As indicated earlier, James applies
Darwinian thinking at several levels, distinguishes between mental selection,
cultural selection and the more familiar biological selection, and then goes on
to portray these processes as interrelated with the products of one level
serving as environmental constraints for another. In short, James’s thinking
across his oeuvre evinces a theory of modes of mental organization whose causes
are native to the brain, and the relevance of his cerebralism to his
voluntarism is a case in point.
One might ask, as the extent
of constraint on the will to believe is increasingly exposed as being
determined by cultural and psychogenetic selection and interplay between them,
whether there is any scope left for exercise of our willing nature. Two points
should assuage this concern. First, the culturally and genetically defined live
options for belief foreclose no options within this large category for the
individual’s willing nature. Scope is preserved in particular for the religious
hypothesis that James addresses directly in “The Will to Believe,” as well as
for other manifestations of the voluntarism he defends, such as willing to
believe that one can jump over a chasm, inducing a raised ability to do so.
Second, the live options are liable to be reshaped by “flashes out of the
brain” of the revolutionary scientist and others whose cerebral idiosyncrasies
challenge the status quo.
The first point is
important because it addresses a bogus motivation for the blank-tablet
interpretation of the brain’s relationship to the will. Referring to James’s
essay “The Will to Believe,” Gale declares “a curious anomaly in James’s text
that has escaped all of his commentators.” (Gale 1999, 68) He begins by quoting
the following passage from the essay, in which, as Gale phrases it, “James raises
the objection that we cannot believe at will.” (Gale 1999, 68)
Does
it not seem preposterous on the very face of it to talk of our opinions being
modifiable at will? Can our will either
help or hinder our intellect in its perceptions of truth? Can we, by just willing it, believe that
Abraham Lincoln’s existence is a myth, and that the portraits of him in McClure’s
Magazine are all of someone else?
... We can say any of these things, but we are absolutely
impotent to believe them. (James 1979, 15-6)
Gale characterizes James’s
response as the assertion that all of our beliefs are “passionally or
emotionally caused,” quoting James:
Our
non-intellectual nature does influence our convictions. There are passional
tendencies and volitions which run before and others which come after belief,
and it is only the latter that are too late for the fair; and they are not too
late when the previous passional work has been already in their own direction.
(James 1979, 19-20)
Gale turns to the alleged
anomaly, remarkably putting his version of the blank-tablet theory at odds with
the classical statement of the doctrine that it purports to present: “This is a
disastrous response that leads right into the creating-discovering aporia. We
are supposed to be able to create some of our beliefs by making the effort to
attend, but now we are told that the cause of all beliefs is passional, and
since we cannot control our passions at will neither can we control at will our
beliefs. This makes us into passive registerers or discoverers of our beliefs.”
(Gale 1999, 68)
But before James’s essay
is declared a disaster zone, consider that the passage about
Gale continues: “Why, for
heaven’s sake, did James not avail himself of his earlier causal recipe for
indirectly inducing belief by acting as if we believe?” (Gale 1999, 68)
Jackman’s distinction between crude pragmatism and James’s more sophisticated
pragmatism affords a reply. James’s voluntarism is meant to contribute to a
pragmatic account of epistemic norms. It would be trivial if it merely insisted
on the possibility of indirectly inducing belief that
REFERENCES
Cooper, W. (2002), The
Unity of William James’s Thought,
Gale, R. (1999), The
Divided Self of William James,
Hollinger, D. (1997),
James Clifford, and the scientific conscience, in ‘The
Jackman, H. (1999),
‘Prudential arguments, naturalized epistemology, and the will to believe’, Transactions
of the Charles S. Peirce Society 35(1), pp.
1–20.
James, W. (1891), ‘The
moral philosopher and the moral life’, International Journal of Ethics 1, pp. 330–354.
James, W. (1979), The
Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy,
James, W. (1981a), Pragmatism,
James, W. (1981b), The
Principles of Psychology,
James, W. (1983), Essays
in Psychology,
Nathanson, S. (1985), The
Ideal of Rationality, Humanities Press,
Russell, B. (1945), A
History of Western Philosophy, Simon and Schuster,
Suckiel, E. K.
(1982), The Pragmatic Philosophy of William James,
Wiener, P. P. (1965),
Evolution and the Founders of Pragmatism, Harper & Row,
NOTES
[1] I am indebted to Matthew
Stephens and Charles Rodger for help with earlier drafts of this paper.
Copyright © 2006 Minerva
All rights are reserved, but fair and good
faith use with full attribution may be made of this work for educational or
scholarly purposes.
Wesley Cooper teaches Philosophy at the University of
Alberta, Edmonton,
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