Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society: A Quarterly Journal in American Philosophy

William Gavin’s William James in Focus: Willing to Believe is a brief and creative introduction to James’s philosophy aimed at students and non-specialists. As the subtitle of the book suggests, Gavin uses James’s will to believe doctrine as the organizing theme for his interpretation of James’s philosophy. One might initially think that this implies reading the latter in the light of James’s views on religion, but Gavin downplays the religious aspects of James’s will to believe doctrine and focuses instead on its relevance for understanding what he terms the “latent image” of James’s personal life, which according to Gavin is primarily concerned with human mortality and the need to affirm philosophical positions (such as a belief in libertarian free will) which cannot be definitely solved (4). Interpreting James’s philosophy as largely an [End Page 271] expression of his personal life, in particular his struggles with nihilism, depression, and existential angst (which Gavin collectively terms the “manifest image” of James’s personal life), Gavin presents a Tillichian “courage-to- be” James who challenges us to recognize and heroically accept the facts of human finitude and mortality. As Gavin summarizes his interpretation in the Epilogue:

James’s texts are “prophetic,” in the sense that Cornel West speaks of prophetic pragmatism. They ask or invite us to rise to the occasion, to embrace reality “warts and all,” unfinished and wild and sometimes threatening as it is. His texts, in short, ask us to act heroically, that is, to exhibit courage. Courage is usually defined as having to do with how an individual faces death. And since James constantly asks us to be courageous or heroic, we might say that James’s texts are about how we deal with death.

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Gavin undertakes to support this argument over the course of eight short chapters and a conclusion. For reasons of space, I will restrict myself to offering brief summaries of the main lines of argument in each chapter and the conclusion, and will conclude by raising a few questions about Gavin’s interpretation of James.

Chapter 1, “James’s Life: Will to Believe as Affirmation,” presents a brief biographical sketch of James’s life and introduces the distinction between the “manifest” and “latent” images of his personal life that I mentioned above. James’s well known personal crisis of 1870 and his discovery of Charles Renouvier’s writings on free will and determinism figure prominently in this chapter, as does Gavin’s claim that the latent image of James’s life has three aspects: “the realization that this issue of freedom versus determinism cannot be solved as a seeming ‘problem’ or quadratic equation but is one rather of ‘affirming’ a position; second, the realization that this affirmation is not a once-and- for- all- time decision but must be reaffirmed continually; and, third, the realization that this task, because it will remain eternally unfinished, is a difficult one for James to carry out. Or differently stated, for James, writing the text throughout his life span is exercising the ‘will to believe’” (4).

Chapter 2, “The Will to Believe: Policing versus Free-Roaming,” represents the beginning of Gavin’s effort to support this interpretation, and focuses on two important essays in The Will to Believe (1897), “The Will to Believe” itself and “The Sentiment of Rationality.” Here, as in subsequent chapters, he employs his manifest image v. latent image distinction to contrast what the text in question is explicitly about with what he regards as its deeper underlying assumptions, which reflect the latent image of James’s life discussed in Ch. 1.

Chapter 3, “The Principles of Psychology: Consciousness as a Constitutive Stream,” focuses primarily on James’s notion of the stream of consciousness...