Chapter 3

Chapter 3

THE FREEDOM OF BELIEF

The previous chapter presented James's reasons for thinking that belief is an intentional action or inducible by intentional actions. The purpose of this chapter is to explore James's reasons for claiming that belief also is a free action in his Libertarian sense. The next chapter will lay bare his doctrine of the will to believe and how it justifies believing that the will and belief are free in this sense. This chapter will be subdivided into four parts. The first presents James's theory of freedom. The second gives his reasons why it cannot be decided on epistemic or evidential grounds through empirical inquiry that we are or that we are not free in this sense. The third expounds his reasons for thinking that it is desirable in terms of maximizing desire-satisfaction to believe that we are free. The fourth presents some objections to his theory of freedom and how James could respond to them; herein some of the finer points in his analysis will emerge. It will be found in Chapter 4 that among the several necessary conditions for having a will-to-believe option are that the proposition to be believed cannot have its truth or falsity determined on epistemic or evidential grounds and that believing it has desirable consequences. Thus, if one or more of the objections to James's theory should prove fatal, his theory would not qualify as a candidate for a will-to-believe option, since its falsity can be epistemically determined.

What Freedom Is

Throughout his adult life, James ardently believed in the Libertarian doctrine of free will, replete with its contra-causal spiritual acts of will. It was this belief that helped him make it through the night, for the most intense form that the blues took for James was the "I Aint Got No Contra-Casual Free Will Blues." His near life-ending emotional crisis of 1870 was occasioned by his doubt that he was free in this sense and therefore that he was able to function as a morally responsible agent. By a promethean act of will he self-induced this belief by following his formula of acting as if he believed, part of which involved publicly declaring that he was free, thus the point of his claim that "our first act of freedom, if we are free, ought in all inward propriety to be to affirm that we are free." (WB 115. see also PP 1177) Through this public avowal he commits himself in the eyes of his fellow persons to acting as if he is free and thereby assuming full moral responsibility for his actions. Because this belief in free will was foundational to his existence as a man he was unable to resist his own strictures in The Principles of Psychology against metaphysical digressions when he got to the subject of freedom in the chapters on "Attention" and "Will." He not only waxed metaphysical but did so in the manner of an itinerant New England preacher out to save our souls, which is what he really was. It is quite amazing in the midst of a psychology textbook suddenly to find oneself in a locker room at half-time being given a pep talk by the author.

James, for reasons that shortly will be considered, was a committed incompatibilist, believing that a free act must, among other things, not have a prior sufficient cause. A free act must be at least a chance occurrence in that it is not determined in any way by prior states of the universe. For James, no free acts are to found on the first tier in my reconstructed version of James's theory of will and belief at the end of the last chapter, since it is causally determined by the workings of the brain which ideas enter consciousness and thus get entertained in the neutral sense. It also is causally determined whether an effort is made on tier three to bring about a willing or believing on tier two of one of these ideas from tier one. The only place that free will can get into the act is in regard to the amount of effort that is made to will or believe one of these ideas via attending to certain ideas, such as in my Hollywood Ethics. It is only "the effort to attend, not to the mere attending, that we are seriously tempted to ascribe spontaneous power. We think we can make more of it if we will; and the amount which we make does not seem a fixed function of the ideas themselves, as it would necessarily have to be if our effort were an effect and not a spiritual force." (PP 426-7)

James characterizes this spiritual force as an "original force" and the "star performer." (PP 428) Its free efforts "originate ex nihilo, or come from a fourth dimension." (PP 1178) To be an original force, for James, it must be an irreducibly conscious event that is not causally determined. After giving a very fair and forceful exposition of the epiphenomenalistic "effect theory" of the amount of the effort to attend, according to which it is only a causally determined effect of physiological events, he expresses his personal preference for the "cause-theory." "The reader will please observe that I am saying all that can possibly be said in favor of the effect-theory, since, inclining as I do myself to the cause-theory, I do not want to undervalue the enemy." (PP 424-5)

This cause-theory gives James a way of dissolving the creating-discovering aporia. We do not "create" in his prime mover or ex nihilo first cause sense the fact that we are conscious of or attend to certain ideas nor that we make an effort to adopt a certain psychic attitude toward them: All of these facts are causally determined by our interests, which, in turn, are causally explained in terms of physiological facts pertaining to the activity of the brain. Thus we merely discover but do not create these facts. We are the free cause and sole creator only of the amount of effort that we make to adopt a certain psychic attitude toward one of these ideas. It will be seen that although the area within which our free will operates is very constricted, the long range effects of this radically limited use of free will can be very extensive.

The Epistemic Undecidability of Freedom

That the amount of these efforts to attend against the course of least resistance, such as in a case of moral temptation, do not have a prior sufficient cause in the physiological workings of the brain cannot be epistemically determined, since we cannot make sufficiently fine-grained measurements of brain events so as to discover whether the effect-theory is true.

The feeling of effort certainly may be an inert accompaniment and not the active element which it seems. No measurement are as yet performed (it is safe to say none ever will be performed) which can show that it contributes energy to the result. (PP 428)

Thus, "The last word of psychology here is ignorance, for the 'forces' engaged are certainly too delicate and numerous to be followed in detail." (PP 429) This gets repeated in the later Chapter on "Will," when he says that such measurements "will surely be forever beyond human reach." (PP 1176)

This account of why it is not epistemically decidable whether or not we have free will is different from and far superior to the one he gave six years earlier in his 1884 "The Dilemma of Determinism." His strategy then was to argue that the issue gets down to the truth of certain counter-factual conditionals, but there is no truth of the matter with respect to them, a position that Peirce defended in his 1878 "How to Make Our Ideas Clear," which James first became aware of when it was presented to the Metaphysical Club in the early 1870s. The counter-factuals enter in because determinism entails that if the same state of the universe were to recur, though it doesn't, it would be followed by the very same state it formerly was, whereas indeterminism denies this entailment, allowing for history to take a different course the second time around than it in fact did the first time. But the universe or history happens only once, thus rendering the determinist's claim about what would happen if some state of the history of the universe were to recur counter-factual.

But why do counter-factuals lack a truth-value for James? The reason is that

Science professes to draw no conclusions but such as are based on matters of fact, things that have actually happened; but how can any amount of assurance that something actually happened give us the least grain of information as to whether another thing might or might not have happened in its place? Only facts can be proved by other facts. With things that are possibilities and not facts, facts have no concern. If we have no other evidence than the evidence of existing facts, the possibility-question must remain a mystery never to be clear up. (WB 119)

Something has gone radically wrong here. To be sure, scientific inductive arguments appeal only to matters of fact concerning what has "actually happened." But from this it does not follow that science cannot give good inductive arguments from such bagged facts to what would happen in a counter-factual situation. The very same inductive argument for the prediction that when I leap from the top of the Chrysler Building one hour from now I will fall to earth can be given for the counter-factual proposition that if I were to leap from this building one hour from now (though I will not) I would have fallen to earth. James, along with Peirce, gave up this misbegotten view that counter-factuals lack a truth-value, but for some reason that I cannot fathom he didn't both to tell the reader of The Principles of Psychology that he had given up his earlier account in "The Dilemma of Determinism" for the epistemic undecidability of determinism. It is well that he gave up his implausible view of counter-factuals; for, if they were to lack a truth-value, they could not be an object for a will to believe option, in which they are believed upon insufficient evidence. There would be no truth of the matter concerning indeterminism, since it entails counter-factuals, and thus indeterminism could not be believed, since we can only believe something that has a truth-value or wherein there is a fact of the matter.

The Desirability of Believing in Freedom

James makes clear that his reasons for belieiving that the amount of effort we make to attend is contra-causal are "ethical." His so believing has great benefits for him, enabling him to satisfy his most important desires, namely to function as a morally responsible agent.

The whole feeling of reality, the whole sting and excitement of our voluntary life, depends on our sense that in it things are really being decided from one moment to another, and that it is not the dull rattling off of a chain that was forged innumerable ages ago." (PP 429)

Our very sense of our own self-worth as persons depends on this belief, since "the effort seems to belong to an altogether different realm, as if it were the substantive thing which we are, and those ["our strength and our intelligence, our wealth and even our good luck"] were but externals which we carry." (PP 1181) James extols the stoical hero who, regardless of external deterrents, can still find life meaningful "by pure inward willingness to take the world with those deterrent objects there." (PP 1181)

The world thus finds in the heroic man its worthy match and mate; and the effort which he is able to put forth to hold himself erect and keep his heart unshaken is the direct measure of his worth and function in the game of human life. (PP 1181)

This sets the stage for the eloquent concluding paragraph of the section on free will.

Thus not only our morality but our religion, so far as the latter is deliberate, depend on the effort which we can make. "Will you or won't you have it so?" is the most probing question we are ever asked; we are asked it every hour of the day, and about the largest as well as the smallest, the most theoretical as well as the most practical, things. We answer by consents or non-consents and not by words. What wonder that these dumb responses should seem our deepest organ of communication with the nature of things! What wonder if the effort demanded by them be the measure of our worth as men! What wonder if the amount which we accord of it be the one strictly underived and original contribution which we make to the world! (PP 1182)

We are essentially a "spiritual force," for that is the "substantive thing which we are." (PP 1181) A lot more will be said in Chapters 8 and 9 about the nature of this immaterial, nonnatural self , which is not denizen of the natural spatio-temporal order that science describes and explains, but instead a transcendental being or force from James's "fourth dimension" that brings about effects in this order.

James sometimes found it convenient to overlook the nonnaturalistic commitments of his theory of free will, as for example when he made this disclaimer in his 1904 "The Experience of Activity:"

I have found myself more than once accused in print of being the assertor of a metaphysical principle of activity. Since literary misunderstandings retard the settlement of problems, I should like to say that such an interpretation of the pages I have published on effort and on will is absolutely foreign to what I meant to express....Single clauses in my writing, or sentences read out of their connexion, may possibly have been compatible with a transphenomenal principle of energy; but I defy anyone to show a single sentence which, taken with its context, should be naturally held to advocate such a view. (ERE 93)

The sentences that have just been quoted from The Principles of Psychology on effort as an "original spiritual force," as originating ex nihilo [as]...from a fourth dimension," more than meet James's challenge. James is not alone in overlooking his nonnaturalistic account of the will in this work. So eminent an historian of American philosophy as Herbert Schneider could write that "There is a coherent exposition in Chapters I-VI, XI-XIV, and XXII-XXVI [in PP] of his biological account of mental acts, culminating in his naturalistic treatment of the will." (AP 498) And to make matters even worse, Elizabeth Flower, another highly respected authority on American philosophy, echoed this: "Clearly, James is attempting to deal with voluntary behavior without resorting to a faculty of will and certainly not to a supernatural agency." (PA, Vol. II, 660) It is almost as if there is a conspiracy among naturalistically inclined historians of American philosophy to remake James in their own image, no matter how much of his writings they must overlook.

It might be conjectured that the reason for James going back on his earlier "metaphysical" account of the will is that the 1904 paper was his presidential address to the American Psychological Association, and he wanted to impress the "brethren" that he was as tough-minded as they. James was not above playing to his audience like a barnstorming politician. He knew that they thought he was too tender-minded and gullible because of his interest in the paranormal and made a ritual throughout his career of allaying their suspicions by taking an outwardly hard-headed stance to the field.[1] A similar sort of misleading tough-minded posturing is found in his 1898 "Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine." He begins by saying that he cannot understand why the Ingersoll Committee chose him to give this lecture, since he is no friend of the doctrine of human immortality and has little personal concern for it. He then goes on to neutralize the two major objections to it, mount an inference to the best explanation argument in support of it, about which more will be said in Chapter 10, and end with a will-to-believe justification for believing in it! With opponents like this, a doctrine doesn't need any defenders.

His greatest fear was to wind up like his father, who was perceived as a genius, but a very eccentric one whose writings therefore could safely be neglected. There are poignant remarks in letters to brother Henry after the publication of The Literary Remains of the Late Henry James in 1884, of which William was the editor and contributor of a mammoth introduction. In a 1885 letter he writes: "Houghton's July semi annual account shows only six copies sold in six months, and me in their debt for bindings. Alas! poor Father. It is sad." (ERM 217) And in a letter of 1887 there is more of the same: "I got Ticknor's account last week--poor Father's literary remains has sold only one copy in the past six months! It is pitiful, but there's nothing to be done about it." (ERM 217) (I bet that sole buyer mistakenly thought it was by his son, Henry -- was he disappointed.) In his "Farewell" letter to his father he patronizes him by telling him about some prominent persons who praised his books, knowing that this would elate his father on his deathbed because he had agonized all his life over the total neglect of his publications: "At Paris I heard that Milsand, whose name you remember in the 'Revue des Deux Mondes" and elsewhere, was an admirer of the 'Secret of Swedenborg,' and Hodgson told me your last book had deeply impressed him." (ERM 214) This is almost like one of Willie Loman's sons trying to cheer him up by informing him that when he was Macy's last week the buyer asked after his father and said, "No one could sell women's underwear like Willie." James was going to avoid his father's fate no matter what it took, even if he had to play both sides of the street and tell each audience what they wanted to hear. He was determined that everyone was going to love him and read his publications assiduously, both of which they did in abundance.

It is in his famous article on "The Dilemma of Determinism" that James gives his fullest and most compelling reasons for thinking that it is desirable for most people to believe that they are one of these immaterial selves possessed of his sort of contra-causal free will. We have already seen that James assumes that most other people are like him in this respect, their whole sense of their own self-worth and the meaningfulness of life depends on their believing that they have such freedom, for without it they could not function as a morally responsible agent. He now develops an ingenious argument to show the disastrous consequences for the believer in determinism, consequences that are avoided by the believer in his contra-causal free will. This is the dilemma of determinism argument, from which the article gets its title.

The key assumption that underlies the argument is that determinism is incompatible with free will, because it entails fatalism, namely that whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened, that possibilities are not in excess of actualities, that nothing that happens could have been avoided or prevented. In order to show that determinism entails fatalism, an acceptable definition of determinism must first be given. James is well aware of the danger of begging the question at the outset by giving an emotively charged definition. Whereas the words freedom and chance have associations that are respectively eulogistic and approbrious, fortunately "no ambiguities hang about this word [determinism] or about its opposite, indeterminism. Both designate an outward way in which things may happen, and their cold and mathematical sound has no sentimental associations that can bribe our partiality either way in advance." (WB 117. my italics)

James, however, immediately forgets his admonition against using emotive and rhetorical language, for in the very next paragraph he gives about as question-begging a rhetorical definition of determinism as one could imagine. Determinism, we are told, "professes that those parts of the universe already laid down absolutely appoint and decree what the other parts shall be." (WB 117) This gets repeated in The Principles of Psychology when he writes that if determinism is true then whatever efforts of will we make were "required and exacted," that "whatever object at any time fills our consciousness was from eternity bound to fill it then and there, and compel from us the exact effort, neither more nor less, which we bestow upon it." (PP 1175. my italics) Plainly, James's use of legalistic language confounds positive with scientific laws because it makes the unnoticed slide from an event happening in accordance with a scientific law to its being coerced or compelled to occur by some positive law of the state or decree of a sovereign. It is as if the law of f=ma were to threaten all the material particles in the world that they sure as hell better obey it or else.

But this is not the end of James's question-begging rhetorical definition of determinism. He also avails himself of ball-and-chain type metaphors in his description of causation. Determinism holds that "The whole is in each and every part, and welds it with the rest into an absolute unity, an iron block, in which there can be no equivocation or shadow of turning." (WB 118. my italics) This is followed by talk about "one unbending unit of fact" if determinism is true. And, again, if determinism is true then the whole of our voluntary life is "the dull rattling off of a chain that was forged innumerable ages ago, " and "the world must be one unbroken fact." (PP 429 and 1177. my italics) Plainly, it is unfair to burden the determinist with accepting a view of causation that makes an effect a link in a chain or inexorably welded to its cause in one big iron bloc, for this makes the effect look like an unfortunate member of a chain gang, completely destitute of any freedom.

Yet another rhetorical device that James employs to make determinism appear to have fatalistic consequences is the use of metaphors that spatialize the time of a deterministic universe so that future events are always there, our mind coming upon them one after the other in its journey up its world-line, to paraphrase the accounts given by Weyl and Eddington of the Minkowskian world of relativity theory. For determinism, "There is nothing inchoate...about this universe of ours, all that was or is or shall be actual in it having been from eternity virtually there," and "The future has no ambiguous possibilities hidden in its womb." (WB 118 and 117) Indeterminism, on the other hand, holds that "actualities...float in a wider sea of possibilities from out of which they are chosen; and, somewhere, indeterminism says, such possibilities exist, and form a part of truth." (WB 118) This spatialization of time in the deterministic universe, suggests that as our minds "travel" up their worlds lines into the future they come upon preexistent events and thereby play no active or creative role in bringing them about, and, furthermore, when they make a choice there is only one choosable object hanging from the rafters in the Hall of Future Possibilities. Time presents them with no branching tributaries that they might choose to journey along.[2]

While James's "arguments" for determinism entailing fatalism amount to nothing but a skein of question-begging rhetorical definitions, his incompatibilist intuitions still might be right. If determinism is true, then whatever we do is the only thing that it was causally possible for us to do. But if we causally couldn't have done otherwise, then could we have done otherwise? Could we have avoided or prevented doing what we did? My intuitions, along with those of many other philosophers, not to mention the vast majority of lay persons, require a negative answer to these questions. If James were alive today, he would look with favor on some recent arguments to prove that determinism entails fatalism, such as the unpreventability argument. If determinism is true, there is a deductive-nomological explanation for every event. Take any future event E that we think we are able to prevent. There is a deductive nomological explanation of E in terms of a conjunction of a set of causal laws and a description of the state of the universe before we were even born. Since we can prevent neither the universe from having been in this state nor these causal laws from holding true, we cannot prevent anything that is entailed by their conjunction, such as the future occurrence of E.

Having explored James's reasons, or lack thereof, for believing in incompatibilism, we are in a position to consider his dilemma of determinism argument, which, it must be emphasized, is directed against not the truth of determinism but only the desirability of believing it to be true. Since the determinism issue is not epistemically decidable, he thinks that we are justified in choosing what to believe in this matter on the basis of the consequences for good and ill of believing one way or the other

The argument begins with the fact that we express judgments of regret about some evil or ought not to be, of which the world abounds. Assuming both determinism and incompatibilism, it follows that these evils could not have been prevented or avoided. And this is pessimism. But "our deterministic pessimism may become a deterministic optimism at the price of extinguishing judgments of regret." (WB 127) This requires saying that our judgments of regret are false. A false judgment, however, is itself an evil or ought not to be, and thus we still face the same pessimistic consequence.[3] In fact, one can't believe falsely that there is evil; for if their belief is true there is evil, and if it is false there again is evil, namely, their own false belief.

The theoretic and the active life thus play a kind of see-saw with each other on the ground of evil. The rise of either sends the other down. Murder and treachery cannot be good without regret being bad; regret cannot be good without treachery and murder being bad. Both, however, are supposed to have been foredoomed; so something must be fatally unreasonable, absurd, and wrong in the world. It must be a place of which either sin or error forms a necessary part. From this dilemma there seems at first no escape. (WB 127)

For the purpose of critically evaluating this dilemma argument it is necessary that it be given an explicit mounting. The argument is formulated in the form of a conditional proof, in which pessimism is deduced from the assumption that determinism is true, along with certain other truths.

(1) Determinism is true. assumption for conditional proof

(2) If determinism is true, then whatever happens could not have been avoided or prevented. the incompatibilist premise

(3) There is a judgment of regret, J, that there are events that ought not to be. an empirical premise

(4) J is either true or false. an instance of the law of bivalence

(5) If J is true, then there are events that ought not to be but could not have been avoided or prevented. first horn of the dilemma and follows from (1), (2) and (3)

(6) That there are events that ought not to be but could not have been avoided or prevented is pessimism. true by definition

(7) If J is true, pessimism is true. from (5) and (6)

(8) A false judgment is an ought not to be. premise

(9) If J is false, there are events (namely, false judgments) that ought not to be but could not have been avoided or prevented. second horn of dilemma and follows from (1), (2), and (8)

(10) If J is false, then pessimism is true. from (6) and (9)

(11) Pessmism is true. from (4)-(10) by dilemma argument

(12) If determinism true, then pessimism is true. from (1)-(11) by conditional proof

Supposedly, it is quite undesirable to believe in pessimism, for then we would have no reason to take life seriously and try to make the world a better place (you know, by putting our shoulder to the wheel). But pessimism is a logical consequence of determinism. Does this argument show that anyone who believes in determinism will also believe in pessimism? Of course not: Belief is not closed under deduction, a person not having to believe everything that is entailed by what she believes. It only shows that someone who is rational enough to be aware of the deductive consequences of her belief in determinism, coupled with the controversial assumption of incompatibilism, will believe that pessimism is true. The irrational types are beyond redemption by this argument. Thus, James's argument must be restricted to those who are sufficiently rational as to be among the saving remnant. This is not much of a concession on James's part, since he supposes that his readers want to think logically and thus would welcome help in doing so. Nor does the argument even show that every sufficiently rational person who accepts determinism will take a seat on the sideline in life's struggles against evil; for the psychology of some persons would allow them both to accept pessimism and lead the morally strenuous life. James just happens not to be among them.

There is a way out of the dilemma that consists in challenging its second horn,

(9) If J is false, there are events (namely, false judgments) that ought not to be but could not have been avoided or prevented.

by denying premise

(8) A false judgment is an ought not to be.

The gnostic or subjectivist denies that false judgment is an evil, and is prepared to give a theodicy of sorts for false beliefs based on their promoting the outweighing good of deepening our awareness and understanding of evil. James gives a most eloquent and convincing presentation of this view that is due not only to his passion for fairness but also, I suspect, his philosophical nymphomania; however, he soon thereafter pulls the plug on it. To find our highest good in our subjective appreciation of the world's evils belittles the morally strenuous life, sapping our incentive to take seriously our moral duties to perform certain overt actions. James tells us that it "violates my sense of moral reality through and through." (WB 136) Subjectivism, at least in those whose psychology resembles James's, thereby engenders an undesirable passivism and ethical indifference.

Once consecrate the...notion that our performances and our violations of duty are for a common purpose, the attainment of subjective knowledge and feeling, and that the deepening of these is the chief end of our lives--and at what point on the downward slope are we to stop?...And in practical life it is either a nerveless sentimentality or a sensualism without bounds. Everywhere it fosters the fatalistic mood of mind. It makes those who are already too inert more passive still; it renders wholly reckless those whose energy is already in excess. All through history we find how subjectivism, as soon as it has a free career, exhausts itself in every sort of spiritual, moral, and practical license. (WB 132)

Indeterminism alone makes of the world a suitable arena for our deepest moral concerns and aspirations. "It says conduct, and not sensibility, is the ultimate fact for our recognition. With the vision of certain works to be done, of certain outward changes to be wrought or resisted, it says our intellectual horizon terminates." (WB 134) One senses James's promethean proclivities lurking in the background, for what matters is changing the world through our overt actions. James admits that not every one shares his sentiment of rationality in this matter, and he attempts to win them over through his impassioned prose in his half-time pep talks.

James fails to note that subjectivism or gnosticism is not the only basis for justifying or constructing a theodicy for false belief. There is, for example, the free will theodicy for false belief, such as was given by Descartes in his Fourth Meditation, according to which false belief results from our misuse of our free will, but that is no reason for indicting the Deity since there is in general such great value to our having free will. This theodicy is not available to the determinist if free will is incompatible with determinism, as James was convinced it was.

The worry is that James's dilemma of determinism argument proves too much, precluding any theodicy for any type of evil. James made a careless remark that had the effect of ruling out the possibility of any theodicy succeeding: "The ideally perfect whole is certainly that whole of which the parts also are perfect--if we can depend on logic for anything, we can depend on it for that definition." (PU 60) Far from logic requiring this, James's reasoning commits the fallacy of division by assuming that the parts must have the same properties as does the whole. But this is not James's considered opinion, for when he was in a healthy mood he extolled the value of the traditional soul-building theodicy, favored by all the great medieval theists. But take any evil, E, and any theodicy that attempts to show that E has overall beneficial consequence in that E is necessary for either the realization of an outweighing good or the prevention of an even greater evil. E, being an evil, is an ought not to be, but, James would go on to argue, if the theodicy works, then E is not after all an ought not to be, and thus E both is and is not an ought not to be. Because our initial intuition is to take E to be an ought not to be we feel a moral duty to try and prevent and eliminate E type events. But when we accept the theodicy for God's allowing E, we no longer view E as an ought not to be and thereby do not feel morally obligated to try and prevent and eliminate E type events.[4]

There is a failure in this argument against the viability of any theodicy to relativize an ought-not-to-be, either to us finite creatures or to God. Thus, when a theodicy shows that some evil, E, is justified, it means that God is morally justified in bringing about or permitting E, not that we are. E, therefore, is not an ought-not-to-be relative to God, the planner and creator of the entire universe, with the possible exception of our free acts and their consequences. This does not entail that E is not an ought-not-to-be relative to us finite creatures, for our position and role in the scheme of things is quite different from God's. We are thrown into the world at a later time with the moral duty to prevent and eliminate every evil we can. God, as the planner and creator of the universe has a different role to play and thereby is not subject to the same duty that we are. Thus, it would be unfair to challenge the soul-building theodicy's attempt to morally exonerate God for creating natural evils, such as physical impediments, as a means for our developing higher character traits, by an analogy with a finite father who purposely breaks his son's legs so that the boy will have an opportunity to engage in soul-building, certainly a wicked thing to do. For this overlooks the radical difference in the perspective and role of God and finite creatures. A broken limb is an ought-not-to-be relative to us but not God.

Some Objections

If there is a telling objection to James's theory of free will, it will stand epistemically discredited and thus not be a suitable target for a will-to-believe option. The standard objections to Libertarian theories will be considered. First, there is the perennial objection that a Libertarian type freedom, in virtue of postulating a nonphysical cause, be it a Cartesian soul substance or some type of spiritual act of effort or will, of some change in the physical world, violates the law of the conservation of angular momentum. Herein some spiritual event that is not itself possessed of any physical energy, and thus cannot get plugged in for the f in the f=ma law, causes an acceleration of a physical object, thereby violating the law of the conservation of angular momentum.

James never explicitly addressed this objection, but the manner in which he developed and defended his theory indicates that he was concerned with finding a way around this objection. James's version of Libertarianism is far superior to that of others, from Aristotle down through Sartre and Chisholm, in giving hope of escaping this objection. For in his version a free act of effort operates directly on consciousness, having as its immediate effect the sustaining of attention to some idea or the adoption of a psychic attitude, rather than a bodily movement, as is the case with other versions of Libertarians. For example, in Aristotle's famous example of the stick moves the stone, the hand moves the stick, and the man moves his hand, something that is not an event in the physical world, the man, directly causes an acceleration. By making the immediate effect of an effort of will the strengthening of an idea in consciousness, rather than the acceleration of a physical object, James's theory does not seem to violate the conservation law.

James gives some hints that he was worried about his theory violating a conservation law, for he wrote that "The world...is just as continuous with itself for the believers in free will as for the rigorous determinists, only the latter are unable to believe in points of bifurcation as spots of really indifferent equilibrium or as containing shunts which there...direct existing motions without altering their amount." (MT 303. my italics. See also PP 144 and ERM 87) This is a variant on Descartes's pineal gland theory, and, unfortunately, involves the same violation of the conservation of angular momentum. The shunts -- acts of free will -- do alter, pace James, the amount of existing motions, not by changing the speed of any object but instead its direction and thereby its velocity, resulting in a change in the angular momentum of the entire system. Obviously, A lot more work would have to be done to rework James theory so that it does not violate this conservation law, but James would not be in agony if it did since he believed that this law was only an empirical generalization that permitted occasional exceptions. Moreover, as will be seen in Chapter 7, he thought that we are free to adopt the perspective of the moral agent rather than that of the scientist and thus reject the law of the conservation of angular momentum in its universal form. "Science...must be constantly reminded that her purposes are not the only purposes, and that the uniform causation which she has use for, and is therefore right in postulating, may be enveloped in a wider order, on which she has no claims at all." (PP 1179) "When we make theories about the world and discuss them with one another, we do so in order to attain a conception of things which shall give us subjective satisfactions." (WB 115) This involves an application of his casuistic rule from Chapter 1 to the formation of theoretical beliefs.

Another objection to Libertarianism of the Aristotelian variety that is escaped by James's version is that there is a commitment to a troublesome sort of backward causation, for when Aristotle's man freely moves his hand, he brings about earlier events along the efferent nerves linking his brain with his hand. (By clenching my fist I ripple my forearm muscles.) James's theory, in virtue of making the immediate effect of a free act of will the strengthening or sustaining of an idea in consciousness avoids this problem.

An even more prevalent objection than the conservation law one is the charge that the Libertarian's concept of a causally undetermined free act is conceptually absurd. There are two versions of this objection. The first, and less formidable, version is that an undetermined action is a purely random or chance occurrence and therefore not attributable to a person in a way that makes her morally responsible for it. The second version holds that the absurdity is due to the fact that the undetermined free acts are without reason or motive and therefore not intentional actions at all.

James opens himself up to the first version of the objection by his popularizing penchant for giving nutshell definitions of complex ideas, not realizing that the only thing that should be put in a nutshell is a nut. He falsely makes it appear as if a free act is action is merely a causally undetermined one when he says that "'free will'...is the character of novelty in fresh activity-situations." (ERE 93. See also SPP 72 and ML 412) The same message is sent by his other nutshell definition of freedom as "meaning a better promise as to this world's outcome." (P 63. See also MT 6) There could be promise of a better future independently of what we might freely do. A novel action could be a purely capricious or chance occurrence, such as a causally undetermined twitch of a person's nostrils that never occurred before. Furthermore, qualitatively novel states can occur in a deterministic system, such as a collection of billiard balls moving according to Newton's laws, and an action can be free even though it is qualitatively identical to earlier actions. Yet another one of James's nutshell definitions is ""Freedom' means 'no feeling of sensible restraint'." (SPP 38) This certainly does not give a sufficient condition, since I could act without feeling any sensible restraint yet be doing so under a post-hypnotic suggestion and thereby not be doing so freely.

Fortunately, James has a much more to say about freedom than is supplied by these misbegotten nutshell definitions. He has an extended response to the objection of reducing freedom to mere capriciousness in "The Dilemma of Determinism" (WB 121-4), the chapters on "Attention" and "Will" (PP 428-30 and 1175-82), and "Abstractionism and "Relativismus.'" (MT 136-8) He charges this objection with vicious abstractionism that consists in taking just one part of what a word means to the exclusion of everything else. Because the indeterminist's past is causally disconnected from the future when a free act occurs, it is assumed that the past is totally disconnected from the future, thereby overlooking all the other ways in which the past and future are connected in this case. "If any spot of indifference is found upon the broad highway between the past and the future, then no connexion of any sort whatever" is to be found. (MT 137)

To understand what these other connexions are, in virtue of which a free act can rightly be attributed to an agent as something for which she is morally responsible, it is necessary to take the insiders approach by introspecting what goes on when one makes a free choice. Recall that for James there are two ways to investigate a phenomenon, either by an introspective (phenomenological) or causal analysis. A free act, being undetermined, eludes a causal analysis, since it can't be subsumed under a covering law, as it must be in a deductive-nomological explanation. But it would be for James a scientisitic prejudice of the worst sort to infer from this that such an act is unintelligible, for there still is the phenomenological way of understanding it through a description of what it is like from the inside to live through the exerting of an effort to attend to an idea in a case of conflict, such as in a case of moral temptation.

I am...entirely willing to call it, so far as your choices go, a world of chance for me. To yourselves, it is true, those very acts of choice, which to me are so blind, opaque, and external, are the opposites of this, for you are within them and effect them. To you they appear as decisions; and decisions, for him who makes them, are altogether peculiar psychic facts. Self-luminous and self-justifying at the living moment at which they occur, they appeal to no outside moment to put its stamp upon them or make them continuous with the rest of nature. Themselves it is rather who seem to make nature continuous; and in their strange and intense function of granting consent to one possibility and withholding it from another, to transform an equivocal and double future into an inalterable and simple past. (WB 123)

James produces brilliant introspectively-based descriptions in the mentioned sources of a free choice. A central theme of Chapters 8, 9, and 10 is that reality in general, in particular change, causation, and the self, can be properly understood for James only through introspective analysis. He makes a far stronger claim than that the insider and outsider approaches are equally valid, each having its own special advantage relative to some human interest and purpose. Rather, he will argue that the externalized approach of the scientist that breaks reality up into a succession of numerically discrete states and coexistent objects renders reality unintelligble, a breeding ground for all of the a priori paradoxes from those of Zeno against change down through those of Bradley against relations.

According to the second version of the objection the Libertarian's free choice is without any motive or reason. The deep objection in the Euthyphro to saying that something is good because God chose it to be, rather than vice-versa, is that it renders God choice reasonless. But a choice must have a reason consisting in some good that the chooser thereby hopes to realize. If the choice creates what is good, there is nothing that is good when the choice is being made that could be appealed to as a reason for the choice. And thus God's choice is reasonless and thereby absurd.

The same objection applies to James's free choice. Consider his beloved case of moral conflict or temptation in which two conflicting ideas are racing around in a person's mind, one being the idea of the action in the course of least resistance, the other being of the action that is dictated by conscience or duty. Finally, the chooser makes an effort to attend to one of the ideas to the exclusion of the other so that it will dominate her consciousness and, as a result, lead her to perform the envisioned action. It is causally determined for James that the two ideas are entertained by her, and even that she makes an effort to attend to one of them, but what isn't determined is that she makes the AMOUNT of effort she does, and it is the amount of the effort that ultimately determines whether the idea in question wins out over its competitor. She can give no reason for exerting the amount of effort that she does other than the unhelpful one of "Because that's the sort of person I want to become, namely someone who chooses from the moral point of view rather than that of self-interest. But she has no reason for that, for wanting to become that sort of person. She is a naked self, devoid of any character that could supply her with reasons for her choice. What she does is to choose her character ab initio, as if they were like cold cuts layed out in a delicatessen's glass case. But this is absurd, because it requires her to make a reasonless choice.

Although James never explicitly considered this objection, I am quite certain that he would challenge the charge of absurdity, since his truly promethean person must be a causa sui with respect to her own character, and thus she must perform some acts, such as exerting just the amount of effort she does in resolving a moral conflict, that will create her character ex nihilo. Through this ultimate promethean act she makes one of the two competing reasons or motives out to be the dominant one, but she has no reason for doing this. My own intuitions are not clear in this matter, and since I do not know what to do in resolving the issue I will leave the dispute between James and the objector hanging.

Another objection to Libertarianism is that it give us no basis for determining forensic responsibility. A legal system is not pragmatically viable unless there are fairly straight-forward ways of empirically determining when a person is responsible for violating one of its laws and thereby fit to be punished in the prescribed manner. James's account of freedom is useless in this regard, since, admittedly, it is not epistemically determinable when the amount of a person's effort to attend is causally undetermined. The great advantage of Soft Determinism over Libertarianism is that it supplies us with empirically workable criteria for a person acting freely, namely that the action was not externally or internally coerced.

James must grant that for pragmatic or utilitarian reasons our forensic criteria for responsibility cannot be based on his criteria for a free act but instead on the verifiable criteria supplied by Soft Determinism. But it is clear from the overall tenor of James's discussion that he is not concerned with the forensic use of "free" and "responsible" but rather with how we should think about our freedom in personal contexts in which we take stock of ourselves, our worth as persons, as well as that of our intimates -- our friends and lovers, even our enemies. I advisedly use the word "should" because his analysis, as is typical of his analyses, is in part revisionary, being concerned with how we should conceive of things so as to promote the good life consisting in our full self-realization. It is not an ordinary language analysis that purports to describe how we actually use language. In these personal contexts we are not concerned with the way in which blame, shame, responsibility, and punishment are affixed in the public arena, but how to judge ourselves and thereby our intimates in our heart. James's contention really is that it is in these moments of solitude we should think of ourselves as an original spiritual force that can mold our own character ex nihilo. And, James would add, by so thinking of ourselves we get ourselves to make greater efforts to mold our own characters, thereby satisfying the desirable-consequences-for-the-believer necessary condition for having a will-to-believe option to believe.

A closely related objection to the preceding one is that James's Libertarianism radically restricts the range of our free actions, confining them to the rather infrequent cases in which we exert a certain amount of effort to attend to a difficult idea in a case of moral conflict, and thereby trivializes our free will. For example, we do say, pace James, that people act freely, even in non-conflicted cases, provided there is no coercion. Thus, it is correct to say of the person of charitable character who donates to charity without coercion or conflict that she did it freely, of her own free will.

Again, James's response must be that he is not giving an ordinary language type analysis of such public uses of "free," but rather a partially revisionary and normative analysis of the private cases in which we are alone with ourselves and ask who we are, what worth we have, and decide how we want to be judged and in turn to judge our intimates. It is this existential dimension of freedom that James wants to capture.

James also has a good response to the charge of triviality. Although the number of our free acts is far less than it ordinarily is taken to be, the importance of these acts is anything but trivial, since in them we define our characters and thus how we will behave in the most important matters of life, which, in turn, can have the most important, far-ranging impact on the future history of the world. "Our acts of voluntary attention, brief and fitful as they are, are nevertheless momentous and critical, determining us, as they do, to higher or lower destinies." (TT 111) Their remote effects "are too incalculable to be recorded; however, "the practical and theoretical life of whole species, as well as of individual beings, results from" them. (PP 401) The acts they occasion "may seal our doom." Think of James's example of the reformed alcoholic and the "fatal glass of beer." Thus, these sporadic efforts to attend are anything but trivial in their importance.

James is making use of a primitive type of Chaos Theory, similar to the parable of the war that was lost for the want of a nail that kept one horse from being shod and thus unavailable for the battle that was lost but would have been won had it participated, with this loss eventuating in the loss of the war. The nail part of the story begins with whether or not we freely make enough of an effort to attend to the right idea in a case of moral conflict. The amount of effort we make will determine what action we perform, for good or ill. The impulse to do the ideal or right thing, I, might alone be insufficient to overcome the propensity, P, to do what is in the course of least resistance. It might be, in other terms, that "I per se < P"; but when sufficient effort to attend to I, E, is added to the equation, it could result in "I + E > P." (PP 1155) The next part of James's parable concerns how acting in accordance with I factors into the big equation of history, this being the counterpart to the outcome of the battle and eventually the war. Let M represent the entire world minus the reaction of the thinker upon it, and x be what we contribute by way of action, which result in crucial, character-defining cases, from the amount of effort we freely make to attend. M alone could make for a quite dismal future, whereas M + x makes for a radically different future in which we realize the good life. "Let it not be said that x is too infinitesimal a component to change of the immense whole in which it lies embedded....The moral definition of the world may depend on" our contributed x factor, miniscule though it is in terms of quantity: Many a long phrase may have its sense reversed by the addition of three letters, n-o-t; many a monstrous mass have its unstable equilibrium discharge one way or the other by a feather weight that falls." (WB 81. See also EPH 333-4)

This is as promethean as it can get. As a result of our relatively few acts of free will, the entire future of the world can be sealed for good or ill. This is anything but a trivializing of free will. In fact, it makes our free will so momentous that some will crack under the strain, wanting assurance that forces beyond our control, will assure that the ultimate outcome or denouement of history is a good one, that eventually good wins out over evil. James was among them when in his sick, morbid-minded moods in which he was racked with existential angst at the thought of the hideous epileptic youth, who represented in general the evils that might befall us. James could turn in an instant from the healthy promethean mood, in which every fibre and cell in his body tingles at the thought of engaging in an all out struggle with evil without any assurance of success, to the morbid one of existential angst.

"The Dilemma of Determinsim" is an all out expression of his prometheanism up until the final section, wherein he trivializes our freedom by invoking a God who will assure an ultimately good denouement of history, no matter what we do with our free will. He draws an analogy between God's relation to us and that of a chess master to a journeyman opponent. It is assumed that both we and the journeyman have free will and that our actions thereby are not predictable by God or the chess master. No matter what unforeseen move the journeyman might freely make, the chess master can make use of it to bring about the ultimate checkmate of the journeyman. Similarly, no matter what unforeseen acts we freely perform, God will have the power and knowledge to bring it about that history ultimately has a good denouement in which good wins out over evil.

The belief in free-will is not in the least incompatible with the belief in Providence, provided you do not restrict Providence to fulminating nothing but fatal decrees. If you allow him to provide possibilities as well as actualities to the universe, and to carry on his own thinking in those two categories just as we do ours, chances may be there, uncontrolled even by him, and the course of the universe be really ambiguous; and yet the end of all things may be just what he intended it to be from all eternity. (WB 138)

We can be assured that our "world was safe, and that no matter how much it might zigzag he [God] could surely bring it home at last." (WB 140)

This 180 degree turnaround on the status of evil and the importance of our free acts in combating it is an example of the sort of thing Santayana, no doubt, had in mind when he wrote that James "was really far from free, held back by old instincts, subject to old delusions, restless, spasmodic, self-interrupted: as if some impetuous bird kept flying aloft but always stopped in mid-air, pulled back with a jerk by an invisible wire tethering him to a peg in the ground." (PP 401) And he adds, in his characteristic over inflated and unkind manner, that James, as a result, "got nowhere." This is quite unfair. That James, in certain moods, took back his promethean philosophy, does not show that he got nowhere, for the manner in which he developed and defended this philosophy is one of the great contributions to the history of philosophy, in spite of his occasional loss of nerve, as in the final section of "The Dilemma Determinsim." And the same can be said about James's anti-promethean mystical philosophy, which is to be the topic of the second part of this book. It too is great in its own way.[5] I believe that James was led to use his anxiety-allaying chess analogy because he wanted to please the theists in audience by showing how his view of free will could be reconciled with their creedal doctrine of providence. We have freedom but not significant freedom, because the free contribution we make to the cosmic equation can't affect its outcome. It's as if our freedom were limited to ordering the chocolate or strawberry sundae. It's just another case of working the audience, making sure that he would get every one's vote when he ran for the presidency. As the book progresses other examples of James's philosophical politicking will be unearthed, especially his attempts to placate the realist, which is to be a topic of Chapter 5.