The Logic and the Absurd

The Logic and the Absurd

In his essay, Will to Believe, William James essentially asserts that there is great value in what he calls our passional tendencies, which may flavor the choices we make.  He contends that where there is willingness to act, there is a will to believe.  Pure logic can’t dictate our beliefs and faith is sensible. Science should not discredit these in a knee jerk reaction by yelling, “There is no Evidence,” for everything cannot be explained by science. Au contraire, if we look for absolute answers, we will close our minds to furthering our inquiry of the truth. Religion is a therefore very much a live hypothesis for James; a live hypothesis being measured by an individual’s willingness to act. Faith or belief becomes an extension, in the sense that it is a “willingness to act irrevocably.” James’ essay is an attempt, "to defendour right to adopt a believing attitude in religious matters, in spite of the fact that our logical intellect may not be coerced."

Consider the logic of Psychiatry for instance. Psychiatry is a field that is firmly entrenched in the purview of modern medicine and scientific evidence. Yet psychiatric medicines are oft prescribed based on external observations of behavior rather than blood work and other tests that form the basis for medication in most other medical fields.There are to date no specific tests that measure the working or the stresses of the mind. External observations of behavior of course are very subjective, so much of what is prescribed is based on trial and error, as the physiology and mind of no two individuals are identical.  Ironically, the patient himself has to first believe that the med will work, before it can begin to have its desired effect. As James puts it “There is some believing tendency wherever there is willingness to act at all.” So it starts with a belief. This brings us back to the point that science is not able to explain everything. In the meantime, do we let our lives come to a standstill as we wait for evidence in every single area? It is inevitable that passional tendencies will come before and after belief. For James, when a genuine option can’t be decided by intellectual reason, it is perfectly acceptable to let our decisions be governed by passional tendencies.

What does James mean by this genuine option? An option is genuine if it’s live (has internal and subjective appeal, is a real possibility and is not absurd to the thinker), is forced (either do this or don’t do this) and is momentous. But how do we believe what we believe? When the cave man walked, he believed that he would not suddenly float off into space and that his feet would stay on the ground. (The modern man investigated and came up with gravity.) But the cave man had those beliefs, though he knew not why. It’s like knowing when you are sick. You just know it or you accept what you been told by authority figures around you. Before Galileo, people genuinely believed in the geocentric model. It was a living option for them. Moral opinions themselves are often based on what you want to believe and cannot be willed into existence.

Yesterday,Spirituality

..  risky, yes

.. a will to believe

.. simply a matter of faith

Tomorrow, Science\

… unexplainable becomes understood

… knowledge cognized

..   New questions wait to be resolved

Spirituality and Science

… 2 sides of the same coin!

Permutations & Combinations

… attitude shifts and understanding

In the meantime,

The quest for truth carries on

I too have found this need for outright rejection of so called unevidenced subject matter, rather puzzling. It seems to me that spirituality and science are simply 2 sides of the same coin.  Is not what was spirituality yesterday, simply science tomorrow. When explanations are found, it gets moved to the realm of science, But in the today, it can very much be a live hypothesis, much like what  James says. One must keep in mind that science is currently restricted to what is measurable in nature, but that does not mean that the scope of science will change in the future.  While, James says that passional tendencies can be allowed when logic does not provide for, I in fact, go further in asking why does it have to be a choice between science and spirituality. It could be a combination of both. In fact in the tomorrow, there may yet be a third component, outside of science, which we discover enroute our search for the truth.

In the meantime, the science camp are those who are know when they have found the truth, while the empiricists are those who constantly keep seeking the truth. Towards the beginning of his essay, James points to the irony he finds in his own students - as soon as they get “imbued with the logical spirit,” they refuse to admit to the possibility of passional tendencies “though personally they are chock-full of faith.” James states that the downside of our inherent absolutist nature is that it would lead us to stop seeking solutions.  Therefore James urges us to overcome this weakness by adopting an empiricist attitude of continually seeking wisdom.  There are however 2 approaches when it comes to our actions in the matter of opinion. We can either believe truth or shun error. James advocates the former, ie: believe truth, as he feels you have more to lose in shunning error than you have to gain, when it comes to a genuine option. He gives Pascal’s wager as an example-  if you believe in the existence of god, you have everything to gain and nothing to lose on the day of judgment.

When it comes to the question of religious hypothesis, James rejects the attitudes of both skepticism and agnosticism, and in its place he advocates a concrete and abstract manner of thinking. On a concrete level. the freedom to believe can only cover living options which the intellectual cannot resolve for living options, since living options can never be  absurd to the thinker. In the abstract sense, the risk is all ours, for any live hypothesis. At the end of the day, James says that whether we choose to believe, not believe, or wait to believe, we do so at our peril.

Sources:

James, William. "Will To Believe." N.p., n.d. Web.