William James’s Ethics of Faith

William James’s writings on philosophical ethics are a vexed collection.  Though James’s moral contributions are quite wide in their range, there can be little doubt that most of the attention he has received in these respects has been focused on his work on the ethics of belief, including the infamous essay “The Will to Believe”. (A quick and nonscientific survey of The Philosopher’s Index on April 23, 2010 revealed 91 hits for “Will to Believe” versus 6 hits for “Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life”, even though most commentators would regard as James’s most sustained contribution to philosophical ethics.)  For the most part, the interpretations and criticisms commonly put forward concerning the ethics of beliefs has tended to treat these writings in an isolated fashion that fails to make connections to James’s other contributions to philosophical ethics.

The standard treatment is unfortunate because what is needed is exactly what we lose by failing to take James seriously on these matters.  Faith, thought James, is much-needed in our world today.  But it something that many of us, myself included, know precious little about.  The causes of this would be difficult to discern.  But the story would probably have something to do with the late-nineteenth century culture wars between voluntaristic religious outlooks and evidentialist scientific outlooks.  The history of the twentieth century shows that science won that war.  Perhaps this was for the better.  But religion (or at least morality in a capacious sense, such that religion would be one species of the wider genus) provided something that science can never muster of its own accord, namely faith in uncertifiable possibility.  If there is no longer a place for traditional religion in our scientific culture, then it would behoove us to make a place for something else by which we might find our way to faith.  For faith is needful now more than ever, as James himself well understood over one hundred years ago.  We live, now more than ever, in a world of immense fragility, threadbare possibility, and thoroughgoing chance.  Finding oneself at home in such a world would be greatly assisted by founding faith within oneself.  Hence the importance of James’s contributions to ethics for us today.

So how can we come to recognize the importance of faith in James’s sense?  By putting WJ’s writings on the philosophical ethics of faith in conversation with his writings on the psychology of ethical self-transformation.  This means reading “The Will to Believe” alongside the “Will” chapter of the Principles.  Doing so enables us to see that James’s ethical defense of faith just is a defense of our capacities to make a difference in our own life where making a difference can never be guaranteed in advance of action but can only be acted upon as a mere possibility.

The full justification of this is something I’m not going to spell out here (but I’m working on an article on it).  But if you can buy what I’m saying without the full justification, then the result goes something like this.

James’s faith in freedom is best seen not as a defense of wishful thinking, as critics from Russell to Santayana have worried, it is rather better seen as a defense of hope within a universe of chance.  (And if you don’t believe that we late moderns live in such a universe today, see Ian Hacking’s The Taming of Chance.)  Hope is an eminently appropriate attitude to take for someone who finds themselves living in a reality awash in contingency.  James affirms with the critics of wishful thinking that we cannot fully control the lives in which find ourselves, but he also goes beyond those critics in insisting upon the possibility that we can yet transform our lives and often quite possibly for the better.  This reading of James borrows from a more general interpretation of his ethics in all of its various instantiations under the sign of meliorism (which is an -ism I make alot of heavy weather about in my book Pragmatism as Transition).  My claim is that meliorism has everything to do with both a proper understanding of James’s defense of faith and a solid appreciation of why such faith should be important for us today.

(The above taken for some draft notes for an article provisionally entitled ‘The Ethics of Faith & Self-Transformation in William James.’)

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