William James in Focus: Willing to Believe by William J. Gavin (review)

William J. Gavin is a leading authority on the philosophy of William James. For over forty-five years, his work embodies Jamesian virtues of openness, interdisciplinarity, and novelty. His latest book is Jamesian in the best sense.

Gavin investigates the “indissoluble marriage” between “radical empiricism” and “the will to believe”—perennial themes in the Jamesian corpus. Starting with an important heuristic distinction between “manifest” and “latent” meanings, Gavin guides the reader through a landscape where objectivity and subjectivity often collide, resulting in powerful experiential implications. Questions concerning belief, will, mortality, and God reflexively fold upon themselves in ways leading to the realization of creative possibilities experienced de facto rather than de jure. In A Pluralistic Universe, James pays tribute to the reflexive nature of the philosophical inquiry:

Either what the philosopher tells us is extraneous to the universe he is accounting for … or the fact of his philosophizing is itself one of the things that is taken account of in the philosophy, and self-included in the description. In the former case the philosopher means by the universe everything except what his own presence brings; in the latter case his philosophy is itself an intimate part of the universe, and may be a part momentous enough to give a different turn to what the other parts signify.¹

William James in Focus: Willing to Believe consists of eight tightly woven chapters considering James’s vital contribution to philosophy. Philosophy, for James, consists of a simultaneous activity of “doings and undergoings” as Dewey liked to say. The universe, for James, is open and in-the-making. We are no longer mere spectators or “readers only of the cosmic novel … but the very personages of the world drama. The tale which the absolute reader finds so perfect, we spoil for one another through our several vital identifications with the destinies of the particular personages involved.”² Gavin’s use of a “manifest/latent” distinction is remarkably suited for navigating the Jamesian landscape—a landscape consisting of relational series forming web-like configurations, where human beings occupy an anchor-like position at the center. Much like a series of concentric circles, when one of these relations is impacted, a ripple-like, directional effect occurs: “[I]ts members interdigitate with their next neighbors in manifold directions and there are no clean cuts between them anywhere. [I]t now follows a zigzag. … [N]ot only do the terms themselves and their associates and environments change, but we change and their meaning for us changes.”³ Experience remains a prescriptive, molding activity, and philosophy must be forever aware that “change is an ongoing process. As an unfinished continuum, [philosophy] is the experience in and through which the molding tak[ing] place presents itself as a continuum” (22).

Chapter 1 is largely biographical, emphasizing the importance of crisis in the life of James. The plethora of biographies of James attests to the richness of his life story. While few would downplay the significance of the existential crisis he underwent between 1868 and 1870, there are other fault lines running through James’s psyche. For Gavin, James’s appreciation of the efficacious power of “willing to believe” was continuous, recursively gaining its strength through empirical reappearance and experiential affirmation. In chapter 2, Gavin delineates how the constitutive power of belief—once viewed as a sort of coping mechanism—burgeons into an important philosophical principle. What began as an insight gleaned from individual psychology grows in epistemological and metaphysical proportions. At this point, the “manifest-latent” distinction begins to take hold. Any degree of constitutive efficacy discerned at the psychological level must be re-grafted upon the larger epistemological and metaphysical edifice. “Manifest” insights gleaned at the level of prima facie evidence “latently” rebound in ways that call into question the very distinction between knowledge and belief: “The latent content consists of the realization that consciousness, because it is constitutive in the very act of being aware, cannot be neutral in character but rather molds and...