British Journal for the History of Philosophy
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Reparative agency and commitment in William
James’ pragmatism
Bonnie Sheehey
To cite this article: Bonnie Sheehey (2022) Reparative agency and commitment in William
James’ pragmatism, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 30:5, 818-836, DOI:
10.1080/09608788.2022.2032589
To link to this article:  https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2022.2032589
Published online: 24 Feb 2022.
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BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY
2022, VOL. 30, NO. 5, 818–836
https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2022.2032589
ARTICLE
Reparative agency and commitment in William
James’ pragmatism
Bonnie Sheehey
Department of History and Philosophy, Montana State University, Bozeman, MT, USA
ABSTRACT
This paper highlights a central feature of William James’ pragmatism to
challenge the conflicting charges that his political and ethical thought
amounts to either a Hamlet-like impotence or a Promethean-like sovereignty.
I argue that James develops an account of reparative agency and
commitment which figures in his philosophy of hope as a response to the
problematics of action. Reparative agency concerns the possibility of acting
in the midst of constraints that frustrate or otherwise inhibit action.
Conceptualizing agency in this way entails a reevaluation of the status of
commitment in James’ thought and the possibility of a more collective
practice of hope.
ARTICLE HISTORY Received 18 June 2021; Revised 10 October 2021; Accepted 18 January 2022
KEYWORDS William James; agency; hope; commitment; pragmatism
1. Introduction
The status of agency and commitment in William James’ work offers a pro-
ductive, if contested, site for thinking through the limits and possibilities of
pragmatism’s political and ethical implications. Reflecting on these limits,
contemporary scholars like Cornel West have famously depicted James as a
deeply uncommitted thinker. Indeed, West goes so far as to argue that
James’ philosophical perspective is one of “political impotence” (West, Amer-
ican Evasion, 60). West follows a line of critics like Lewis Mumford who charac-
terize Jamesian pragmatism as a political “anesthetic” or form of
“acquiescence” that endorses a “desire for a comfortable resting place”
(Mumford, Golden Day, 182, 192).
This interpretation counters the strongly Promethean reading1 of James at
work in W.Y. Elliot’s 1928 book, The Pragmatic Revolt in Politics: Syndicalism,
Fascism, and the Constitutional State. Elliot links the Romantic pragmatism of
James with the revolutionary syndicalism of Georges Sorel, arguing that,
CONTACT Bonnie Sheehey bonnie.sheehey@montana.edu
1On the Promethean quality of James’ pragmatism, see Gale, The Divided Self.
© 2022 BSHP
BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 819
“Whatwemay call the ‘activism’which inspires James’ conception of themoral
life becomes, in the hands of his followers, an apologia for the appeal to force,
since it is only by force that the final test of survival can be applied” (Elliott,
Pragmatic Revolt, 56). Responding to this Promethean interpretation, James’s
student, Ralph Barton Perry, while admitting the presence of “militant self-
assertion” in James’s moral philosophy, contends that James’s “benign
traits” of humanity, compassion, and sympathy are “the more fundamental
in both theory and practice” (Perry, Thought and Character, 231, 370).
Shadowing Perry’s line of defense though disputing his political por-
trayal of James, literary critics like Frank Lentricchia and Jacques Barzun
mine James’s political activism and sympathetic sentiments for evidence
of his thought being neither reducible to political impotence nor to Pro-
methean strenuousness. A host of political theorists have likewise resusci-
tated the possibilities within James’s metaphysical and ethical pluralism to
make the case for his contributions to democratic theory and practice
(Miller, Democratic Temperament), a politics of inclusion without violence
(Connolly, Pluralism), and an ethics of alterity (Ferguson, William James).
Most recently, scholarship by Sarin Marchetti, Alexander Livingston, and
Stephen S. Bush has worked to frustrate the overdrawn Promethean and
impotent depictions of James’s political and ethical thought. Following
George Cotkin’s portrayal of James as a public philosopher (Cotkin, William
James), these scholars specify the complex quality of political and ethical con-
viction expressed in James’s writings. While these thinkers tend to approach
the problem of commitment in James through his revolution in moral
thought (Marchetti, Ethics and Philosophical Critique), his subversive critique
of American empire (Livingston, Damn Great Empires), or his democratic indi-
vidualism (Bush, Democratic Individuality), I argue that we can clarify this
problem by attending to the concept of agency at work in his psychological
and ethical writings.2
This paper highlights a central feature of James’s pragmatism to challenge
the conflicting charges that his political and ethical thought amounts to
either a Hamlet-like impotence or a Promethean-like sovereignty. I argue
that James develops an account of reparative agency which figures in his
meliorism or ethics of hope as a response to the problematics of action. Sub-
jects engaging in the work of reparation aim at salvaging possibilities in spite
of constraining limits; or, in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s words, they aim at
“extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture – even of a culture
2Here I follow Loren Goldman’s recent revaluation of James’s political and ethical thinking by attending
to his concept of agency. While Goldman complicates the strongly Promethean readings of James by
clarifying his ethics of energetic receptivity, I focus on what I call the ‘reparative’ within James’s rework-
ing of agency and commitment which emphasizes the simultaneous presence of uncertainty and faith
in a single agential position. See Goldman, “William James, Energy, and the Pluralist Ethic of
Receptivity”.
820 B. SHEEHEY
whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them” (Sedgwick, Touch-
ing Feeling, 150–1). I draw on the reparative to highlight that James was not
divided on the issue of agency,3 but attempted to repair an agency broken
by despair without relying on an inflated sense of confidence in our
capacity as agents. Reparative agency concerns the possibility of acting
in the midst of constraints that frustrate or otherwise inhibit action. Repara-
tive agency is marked by those risks, hazards, hopes, and surprises that
accompany any venture in possibility. This concept maps onto what Sedg-
wick calls the “middle ranges of agency” – the idea that one can be rela-
tively empowered or disempowered without thereby destroying or being
destroyed by another (Sedgwick, “Melanie Klein”, 632). Conceptualizing
agency in this way entails an account of power as relational, dealing in
negotiations and exchanges such that one neither wholly possesses
power nor lacks it absolutely.
Reparative agency entails a conception of commitment that escapes the
totalizing dilemma of complete conviction or absolute impotence. If one
can be relatively empowered or disempowered (and thus neither wholly
omnipotent nor wholly powerless), then one can also be committed and
yet doubtful (and hence neither totally committed nor totally uncommitted).
This type of reparative commitment underscores the simultaneous presence
of uncertainty and faith in James’s meliorism.4 We thus ought to read James
as investing reparative agency with an affect of hesitant hope.
By turning to James’s psychological and ethical work from the 1880s and
1890s, I show how his meliorism functions as a response to certain crises of
agency and action. To address such crises, James advances an account of
reparative agency in texts like The Principles of Psychology and “The Will to
Believe”. I start with his description of two pathological types of will and
their reparative alternative in The Principles of Psychology. I then take up his
discussion of the ‘will to believe’ as a form of reparative commitment that
negotiates the tensions of paralysing doubt and excessive faith. Finally, I
draw out the implications of reparative agency and commitment to
suggest that James’s meliorism might be framed not only as an individualist
project, but also as a collective practice when hope is occasioned by the
saving power of others.
3For an example of this interpretation, see Gale, The Divided Self.
4This type of commitment bears affinities with what Paul J. Croce calls James’s “decisive ambivalence”
and with what Livingston calls “stuttering conviction”. Croce describes James as “refining the burdens
of his indecisions in his development of a decisive ambivalence, a decisiveness within his ambivalence”
(Croce, Young William, 26). Livingston draws on the Deleuzian notion of ‘stuttering’ to specify a type of
conviction which “highlight[s] the ways that faith always involves a dimension of hesitation and self-
doubt that is overlooked when conviction is figured as acting on command” (Livingston, Damn Great
Empires, 106). Building on and departing somewhat from these concepts, my account of reparative
commitment is attentive to the way hesitation and ambivalence inform the affect of hope and
notion of agency at work in James’s meliorism.
BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 821
2. Volition and reparative agency
In an 1895 letter to George H. Howison, James admits, “I am a victim of neur-
asthenia and of the sense of hollowness and unreality that goes with it”
(James, Letters Volume 2, 23). Identified by neurologist George Miller Beard
in 1869, neurasthenia, or ‘Americanitis,’ was a diagnosis for an assortment
of physical and psychical symptoms, including fatigue, depression, anxiety,
irritability, neuralgia, headaches, insomnia, and indecision (Beard, American
Nervousness, 9).5 Beard referred to neurasthenia as “nervous exhaustion”, a
disease emerging from the enervation of the nervous system which
drained subjects of their nervous energy. Describing this condition as the
“Hamletism” of James’s milieu, Cotkin argues that this paralysed form of
agency constituted not simply a personal crisis for James, but a cultural
crisis for those similarly positioned (Cotkin, William James, 39).6 Contra
West, the problem of inhibited agency was not simply “personal and existen-
tial” for James, but functioned as a socio-cultural problem with ethical and
political stakes.7
The primary problem with neurasthenia can be understood in terms of its
effects on what James calls “voluntary action”. In the “Will” chapter of The
Principles of Psychology, James concerns himself with the physiological and
psychological conditions of voluntary action as distinct from both wishes
and reflex actions.8 In the course of identifying its conditions and features,
he highlights two types of will that prevent the exercise of voluntary or
wilful action. These are the pathological extremes of the ‘explosive will’
and the ‘obstructed will’. Neurasthenia maps onto the obstructed will,
which paralyses the agent’s capacity for voluntary action. The opposite of
this, the explosive will, discharges energy so impulsively that the subject
becomes overconfident in her capacity as an agent. James contrasts the
5According to Beard, neurasthenia affected upper-class American intellectuals and professionals (or
‘brain-workers’) whose close proximity to the demands of modernization – competition, industry,
and urbanization – left them vulnerable to ‘nervous bankruptcy’. On this view, the conditions
giving rise to neurasthenia were not simply psychological, but were informed by rapid changes in
the technological, economic, social, and physical environment. As the disease drained a person’s
nervous energy, Beard proposed treating neurasthenia with rest and relaxation.
6Hence, contra West’s depiction of James as attending exclusively to the personal and existential, Cotkin
writes, “In much of his popular philosophy in this period of cultural crisis, James confronted the pro-
blems of inertia and tedium vitae, as a prelude to the full development of his own discourse of heroism,
individual autonomy, and pragmatism” (Cotkin, William James, 77). Similarly, Deborah Coon contends
that “James’s social and philosophical concerns were inextricably mixed; indeed, they can hardly be
thought of as separate categories”, citing the interconnections between James’s social concern with
‘bigness’ and imperialism and his philosophical concern with absolutism (Coon, “‘One Moment in
the World’s Salvation’”, 91).
7James can be witnessed addressing this as a social problem in his 1897 Preface to The Will to Believe and
Other Essays in Popular Philosophy and in his 1892 public lectures on psychology to teachers and stu-
dents, later published in 1899 as Talks to Teachers on Psychology: And to Students on Some of Life’s
Ideals.
8Voluntary or wilful actions are different from wishes insofar as they treat an end of desire as attainable
or within one’s power.
822 B. SHEEHEY
agency associated with these types of will with the agency corresponding to
wilful action. In this section, I develop an account of the volitional feature of
this reparative type of agency so as to distinguish it from the sovereign
agency of the explosive will and the paralysed agency of the obstructed will.
At the backdrop of James’s discussion of volition is the theory of ideo-
motor action. This theory proposes that ideas always discharge themselves
immediately and unhesitatingly into movements or “motor effects” (James,
Principles, 522).9 In cases where a single idea occupies the mind, that idea
will easily pass over into motion “without express decision or effort”. These
cases map onto James’s concept of habit which has the function of simplify-
ing our actions by diminishing the “conscious attention with which our acts
are performed” (James, Principles, 114). Volition arises in response to more
complicated cases where multiple ideas with conflicting motor effects
possess the mind. That is, volition emerges when habit – the unhesitating dis-
charge of an idea into a motor effect – is interrupted.10 The functional role of
volition is to settle or decide the paralysing impasses between conflicting
ideas through a process of deliberation. These are circumstances character-
ized by “that peculiar feeling of inward unrest known as indecision” (James,
Principles, 528, italics in original).11
9James summarizes the theory as follows: “The fact is that there is no sort of consciousness whatever, be
it sensation, feeling, or idea, which does not directly and of itself tend to discharge into some motor
effect” (James, Talks to Teachers, 83).
10This speaks to the intimate relationship between habit and volition in James’s psychology and ethics.
Without fully fleshing out this relationship here, I might briefly state that James offers a physiological
concept of habit which refers to the relative ability of a material structure to change or alter when it
interacts with other material agents. Habits can be categorized as being either more or less mutable.
Despite their relative plasticity, habits also have the function of establishing consistency and stability in
living creatures such that James refers to them as society’s “most precious conservative agent[s]”.
Because humans are “bundles of habit”, James regards habit as simultaneously what makes transform-
ation so difficult and the very material through which such transformation must occur (James, Prin-
ciples, 104). Thus, James spends the last several pages of his “Habit” chapter from Principles
dedicated to the ethically relevant question of how to alter or transform our habits. In order for
such transformation to occur, habit must first be interrupted. This type of interruption can be wit-
nessed, for instance, in the chapter on “Volition” when two conflicting ideas (with conflicting
motor-effects) arise in cases of decision, or more concretely, in James’s encounter with North Carolina
mountain settlers in “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings”. The interruption of habit – whether
intentionally from within or unexpectedly from without – is a condition of possibility for self-transform-
ation. Volition is conditioned by the interruption of habit and functions as one possible way through
which habit can be transformed. As José Medina contends, James himself did not always cultivate an
interruption of habit as evidenced by his sexist assumptions and remarks and his relative silence on
issues of gendered and racial oppression. This ignorance on James’s part reflects his privilege in
having opportunities for exercising his will which were not similarly available for those of different
social standing. See Medina, “The Will Not to Believe”. For more on habit as an ethical category in
James, see Uffelman, “Forging the Self”; Colapietro, “Customary Reflection”; Koopman, “The Will, the
Will to Believe”; Craig, “Habit, Relaxation”; Welchman, “William James’s ‘The Will to Believe’”; and
Marchetti, Ethics and Philosophical Critique.
11James uses the language of indecision and hesitation interchangeably. In Talks to Teachers, he writes,
“Such acts [of will] are often characterized by hesitation, and accompanied by a feeling, altogether
peculiar, of resolve, a feeling which may or may not carry with it a further feeling of effort” (James,
Talks to Teachers, 83).
BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 823
James gives the example of hesitating to get out of bed on a frigid
morning and the conflict of ideas presenting two possibilities of action – to
stay in the warm bed or to get up and face the cold. The paralysing struggle
between these two courses of action is overcome by the decisive idea or
resolve that one “must lie here no longer” (James, Principles, 524). Volition
thus depends on a prior condition of conflict, hesitation, and indecision con-
cerning the habitual discharge of ideas in movement. Such circumstances are
overcome through a process of deliberation whereby one reaches a decision
about a course of action that will resolve the dilemma. While James outlines
five different types of decision, it is the fifth type that is most important for
the account of reparative agency developed here.12
The fifth type refers to decisions that settle a conflict of ideas through the
“creative contribution” of our “feeling of effort” (James, Principles, 534). These
kinds of decisions require an agent’s effort of attending to one of the clashing
ideas and holding it stably before the mind. To use an example from his own
life, when confronted with the vexing dilemma of suicide, James describes
attending to a Renouvierian belief in free will to decide his crisis. In his
famous diary entry from April 1870, James confesses:
I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the part of Renouvier’s
second ‘Essais’ and see no reason why his definition of Free Will – ‘the sustaining
of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts’ – need be
the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present – until next
year – that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.
(James, Letters Volume 1, 147, italics in original)
He exercises effortful attention in holding fast to the idea of free will so as to
settle, if only momentarily, an inner tension of conflicting tendencies for
action. James performs the will in his very effort of attending to the idea of
free will. In doing so, he exercises a type of agency that moves him from
immobilizing indecision to embrace a course of action without the promise
that this act will save him from his crisis.
The effort of attention names just what James means by the ‘will’. He
explains, “The essential achievement of the will, in short, when it is most ‘volun-
tary,’ is to ATTEND to a difficult object and hold it fast before the mind” (James,
Principles, 561, italics in original). The crucial function of the will is one of
attending. Attending requires an awareness and strenuousness whereby
one strives to steadfastly commit to a difficult idea (and action) in spite of
12The five types of decision can be summarized as follows: (1) the ‘reasonable type’, consisting in the
patient weighing of alternatives in the mind until one reaches a conclusion favoring one alternative
over the other; (2) the acquiescing type, whereby one passively and indifferently allows a resolution
to be determined accidentally ‘from without’; (3) the ‘reckless’ type which are accidentally determined
out of the impulsive discharge of nervous energy in one direction of the impasse; (4) the ‘changes of
heart’ type, consisting in sudden or abrupt shifts in temperament that involve a wholesale change in
one’s values, motives, impulses, and perspective; (5) the effortful type, which are settled by the ‘crea-
tive contribution’ of our strenuous effort. See James, Principles, 532–4.
824 B. SHEEHEY
the doubt that accompanies one’s decision. James poignantly captures the
pain and struggle that pervade situations requiring effortful attention,
describing them as “desolate and acrid” excursions into “a lonesome moral
wilderness” (James, Principles, 534).13 Such decisions are desolate and lone-
some because they ensnare us in the tragically painful act of consciously
and deliberately destroying a possibility we desire to enact. Whereas the
prior types of decision drop one of the alternatives from sight, “here both
alternatives are steadily held in view, and in the very act of murdering the
vanquished possibility the chooser realizes how much in that instant he is
making himself lose. It is deliberately driving a thorn into one’s flesh”
(James, Principles, 534). Notice here the complicated tension between recov-
ery and loss at work in the agency achieved through this process of decision.
On the one hand, agency is recovered by deciding on one possibility for
action, while on the other, agency is punctured by the loss of another agential
possibility, and the agent must negotiate this painful tension.
James contrasts volition through effortful attention with two pathological
types of will: the explosive will and the obstructed will. With the explosive
will, impulsive energy is discharged so quickly into action that “inhibitions
get no time to arise” (James, Principles, 537). This type of will has the advan-
tage of executing actions promptly and with ease. James explains, “It is the
absence of scruples, of consequences, of considerations, the extraordinary
simplification of each moment’s mental outlook, that gives to the explosive
individual such motor energy and ease” (James, Principles, 538). However,
with the surplus of impulsive power over inhibition, the explosive will can
result in reckless and precipitous actions. The explosive will is troubling pre-
cisely because of its sovereign and Promethean relation to agency, producing
a sense of mastery over the world that neglects the obstacles and limits hin-
dering action and bypasses the tension arising with inhibition.
The obstructed will, however, faces the contrary problem of resigning to
act with the disproportionate presence of inhibition over impulsive power.
The obstructed will entails an impotent form of agency which cannot trans-
late its ideas into action. James associates this type of will with melancholic
and reflective types who display “a condition of perfect ‘abulia,’ or inability
to will or act” (James, Talks to Teachers, 87). Unlike the sovereign agency of
the explosive will, the obstructed will paralyses the agent’s capacity for
action. Incapable of realizing the motor-effects of their volitional ideas, the
obstructed will leaves agents in a perpetual state of hesitation, apathy, and
resignation.
In contrast to this, the agency that accompanies effortful attention is one
that energizes an agent’s capacity to will and act in the face of obstruction.
13See also James’s description of Robert Gould Shaw’s ‘lonely courage’ in his oration at the unveiling of
Shaw’s memorial and Livingston’s discussion of this speech in Livingston, Damn Great Empires.
BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 825
This is a type of reparative agency that involves a realistic avowal of both the
limits and inhibitions that hinder action as well as the possibilities and
impulses that empower it. In the face of indecision, the wilful agent neither
impulsively acts nor shirks from action, but attends to both the inhibitions
that constrain action and the impulses that stimulate it. Keeping these in
view, the agent affirms her ability to act “under an array of inhibitions”
(James, Talks to Teachers, 88). This does not mean that the wilful agent
ignores the hesitations that impede action as the impulsive agent does.
Nor does she waver perpetually in inaction as does the agent with an
obstructed will. Rather, she attends to such hesitations and finds her
energy precisely in willing to act in the face of obstruction. As James explains
in Talks to Teachers,
The highest form of character… abstractly considered, must be full of scru-
ples and inhibitions. But action, in such a character, far from being paral-
yzed, will succeed in energetically keeping on its way, sometimes
overpowering the resistances, sometimes steering along the line where
they lie thinnest.
(James, Talks to Teachers, 87–8)
While the explosive will and the obstructed will hinge on an all-or-nothing
conception of agency such that one is either completely powerful or power-
less, volition through effortful attention involves a more complicated under-
standing of agency. This is a type of reparative agency that negotiates the
tensions of inhibition and conflicting impulses. It is the only type of agency
that is marked by both loss and recovery, consisting in the painful recognition
that a recovered agency is conditioned by loss – the loss of other possibilities
for action which amounts to a loss of alternative futures competing for actua-
lization.14 James takes an interest in mapping the “limits of human power in
every conceivable direction” as well as the “various ways of unlocking the
reserves of power” (James, “Energies of Men”, 145). Reparative agency nego-
tiates these limits and reserves, countenancing obstructions to and losses of
action with the energy that arrives with affirming other agential possibilities.
One does not start out with this type of agency so much as one arrives at it
through the struggle of work, effort, and attention. Agency, on this view, is
taken as a fragile achievement rather than as a thing one possesses. Hence,
it is only through the exercise of the will in the face of hesitation that one
becomes a volitional agent energized by what James calls “a new range of
power” (James, “Energies of Men”, 136).
14James voices this consequence of a loss of future possibility upon the loss of an agential possibility in
his 1882 essay, “On Some Hegelisms”. There is even, he suggests, a loss of possible self involved in this
process insofar as “mutually exclusive possibilities… strive to possess themselves of the same parts of
time, space, and ego”. The simultaneous presence of loss and recovery arises because there is “an
excess of possibility over actuality” (James, “On Some Hegelisms”, 294). Hence, some possibilities
will be saved while others are lost.
826 B. SHEEHEY
This type of agency is reparative insofar as it transforms the debilitating
reality of indecision into the effort of voluntary attention. The reparative
agent recognizes the reality of her action being limited by a variety of hin-
drances and losses without arriving at the fatalistic conclusion that she is
therefore impotent. She attends, rather, to the possibilities that remain
open for action. This form of agency consists in an affirmation of agents’
ability to act and their venture to actually act when the occasion arises
without the guarantee that their action will stave off all uncertainty or
doubt. That is, reparative agency is less about the certain execution of
action and more about the possibility of acting in the midst of constraints.
3. Belief and reparative commitment
James’s preoccupation with the debilitating effects of indecision would
inform some of his most important work in moral philosophy, including his
1896 essay on “The Will to Believe”. This infamous essay illuminates the
type of conviction entailed by a notion of reparative agency developed in
the previous section. In his Preface to the volume in which this essay is pub-
lished, James employs the vocabulary of paralysis and recklessness, which
map onto the obstructed and explosive wills respectively, to describe the
dual dangers that agents seek to evade in willing to believe. In “The Will to
Believe”, he translates the agential dangers of paralysis and recklessness
into two extreme hazards of belief, which can be understood in terms of
either debilitating doubt (i.e. “believing too little”) or excessive faith (i.e.
“believing too much”).15 He offers wilful belief as an alternative to these
extreme forms of doubt and faith. Reparative commitment names the type
of conviction that accompanies wilful belief. It constitutes a form of commit-
ment that is simultaneously hesitant and hopeful, cautious and courageous,
thus underscoring the dual presence of uncertainty and faith in James’s
meliorism.
In “The Will to Believe,” James proposes:
Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between
propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided
on intellectual grounds; for to say, under such circumstances, ‘Do not decide, but
leave the question open’ is itself a passional decision – and is attended with the
same risk of losing the truth.
(James, “Will to Believe”, 11, italics in original)
This thesis defends our right to believe in cases that cannot be decided by
intellectual proof or evidence. These restricted cases are decided by our
15Belief is intimately linked to agency for James insofar as he follows Charles S. Peirce who follows Alex-
ander Bain in defining belief in terms of action or habit. See Peirce, “Fixation of Belief” and Bain,
Emotions and the Will.
BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 827
passional nature which hazards the risk of being wrong. The term ‘passional
nature’ refers to what James calls ‘the will’ in The Principles of Psychology. It
includes both our more private volitions and affective motivations like fear
and hope, as well as social influences that predispose us to certain beliefs.
That is, our wilfulness is conditioned not only by such idiosyncratic features
as our emotions, dispositions, and drives, but also by features of our social,
political, and historical contexts – what James categorizes under ‘habit’ in
The Principles.16 Habit both positively conditions and negatively limits wilful
belief such that it often stands in need of interruption for belief to spark
the attention and effort of the will.
The will energizes belief only under specific conditions that comprise what
James calls a ‘genuine option’. A genuine option is one that fulfils the follow-
ing three criteria – it must be “live” rather than “dead”; it must be “forced”
rather than “avoidable”; and it must be “momentous” rather than “trivial”
(James, “Will to Believe”, 3). A live, as opposed to a dead, option is one that
appeals to the belief of the person to whom it is proposed. An option is
forced rather than avoidable when there is no possibility of not choosing
one option or the other. If I said to you, ‘Either come to dinner with me or
don’t’, this would be a forced option because there is no alternative that
allows you to escape the choice. Finally, a decision is momentous rather
than trivial when it is potentially life changing. These are unique opportu-
nities with high stakes insofar as they can impact one’s life irreversibly.
Together, these three criteria – live, forced, and momentous – constitute a
genuine option and supply the necessary and sufficient conditions for
wilful belief. This means, moreover, that the contrasting criteria – dead, avoid-
able, and trivial – function as the boundaries or limits circumscribing wilful
belief.
In spite of his careful specification of the conditions under which we are
justified to believe, many critics accuse James of defending a version of
wishful thinking. One can witness such an interpretation in Dickinson
Miller’s mocking suggestion that the essay ought to be titled “The Will to
Make-Believe” (Miller, “Will to Believe”), or in Cheryl Misak’s recent critique
that the will to believe includes a subjectivist standard of evidence in the
form of “the satisfaction of the believer” (Misak, American Pragmatists,
63).17 On this view, James’s account of wilful belief steers too closely to the
16Hence James’s recognition that the afflictions of abulia and neurasthenia that debilitate the will are not
simply determined by one’s physiological and psychical makeup, but are conditioned by certain tech-
nological, political, economic, and social aspects of a specific historical milieu. The economic and tech-
nological factors contributing to neurasthenia were especially emphasized by Beard. In American
Nervousness, Beard attributes the emergence of neurasthenia to the technical and social developments
of “steam power, the periodical press, the telegraph, the sciences, and the mental activity of women”
(Beard, American Nervousness, 18).
17On Misak’s reading, James does not so much seek to refute evidentialism in “The Will to Believe” as he
tries to expand what counts as evidence for the truth of a belief. While I agree with Misak that James
828 B. SHEEHEY
danger of reckless faith or the hazard of “believing too much” (James, Will to
Believe, xi). Like the explosive will’s sovereign relation to agency outlined
above, a reckless form of faith risks placing an overconfidence in its own
willing capacity. This is a form of faith that is uncritical just insofar as it is
unaware of its own limits.
James, however, is not defending the omnipotence of belief as an exercise
in wishful thinking. As he lays out in the “Will” chapter from The Principles of
Psychology, wishing is something distinct from willing in that where the
former sets aims one cannot attain, the latter desires only what is within
one’s power (James, Principles, 486). Thus, the will to believe realistically
targets attainable desires while the wish to believe idealistically strives for
what it cannot possibly realize.18 Recognizing the bind between the
dangers of paralysis and recklessness in questions of faith, James proposes
a type of belief that “hits the right channel between them” (James, Will to
Believe, xi). This is a critical form of belief that countenances the limits of its
efficacy while hazarding to act in circumstances where decisive proof is
absent.
For James, the will to believe comes up against limits that obstruct its
willing capacity. These limits appear in the form of dead hypotheses, avoid-
able choices, trivial options, as well as idiosyncratic and social influences
that habituate the will toward specific beliefs. If the hypothesis is dead, the
will has nothing to decide because no appeal is made to its energizing
effort. This situation is much like the one James describes in The Principles
in connection with the obstructed will. In the lethargic state of the will,
“ideas, objects, considerations, which… fail to get to the will, fail to draw
blood, seem, in so far forth, distant and unreal” (James, Principles, 546–7).
The dead hypothesis would thus need to be transformed into a live one to
activate the energy of the will.19 As James maintains, “In concreto, the
does not aim to refute evidentialism (precisely because he does not think that the ethics of belief is a
matter of proof or disproof), I worry that an overemphasis on the epistemology of belief in James’s
essay potentially undercuts the ethical significance of willing to believe. That is, I agree with scholars
like Marchetti, Alexis Dianda, and Colin Koopman who emphasize the import of “The Will to Believe” as
an essay in ethics. See Marchetti, Ethics and Philosophical Critique, Dianda, “Moral Life”, and Koopman,
“The Will”.
18James’s critique of idealism here extends to his insistence that optimism or the “healthy-minded”
cannot face or admit the evils, damages, losses, and sufferings that mark reality and is thus too “sac-
charine” (James, Pragmatism, 142). His position can be understood in terms of non-ideal (as opposed to
ideal) theory. For more on this debate in the context of political philosophy, see Valentini, “Ideal vs.
Non-Ideal”.
19James highlights such transformations in his discussion of conversion experiences in Varieties of Reli-
gious Experience. There he articulates how subjects can undergo redemptive conversions from a prior
state of melancholy and morbidity which correlate with his description of certain hypotheses being
‘dead’ for agents in “The Will to Believe”. See James, Varieties, 196–7. Yet, in Varieties, James also
states that “Some persons, for instance, never are, and possibly never under any circumstances
could be, converted. Religious ideas cannot become the centre of their spiritual energy… To the
end of their days they refuse to believe, their personal energy never gets to its religious centre, and
the latter remains inactive in perpetuity” (James, Varieties, 204). Hence, while it certainly is the case
that James hoped (in addition to providing evidence and reasons) for the transformation of belief –
BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 829
freedom to believe can only cover living options which the intellect of the
individual cannot by itself resolve; and living options never seem absurdities
to him who has them to consider” (James, “Will to Believe”, 29). Likewise,
avoidable choices do not demand wilful belief to decide their outcome.
And while wilful belief can decide trivial options, these do not quiver with
the moral and existential weight of uncertainty at stake in momentous
options. Other obstructions like social habits and physical or psychical ail-
ments mark the resistances that the will must face if it is to overcome
them. Yet, James leaves open the possibility that there are some resistances
facing the will that may not be ultimately overcome.20
Just as effortful volition steers between the agential extremes of the explo-
sive will and the obstructed will, James’s concept of wilful belief navigates
between the dual dangers of recklessness and paralysis facing belief. Wilful
belief constitutes a critical form of faith that humbly avows the limits con-
straining its exercise without thereby yielding to the paralysing impotence
of the skeptic disavowal of decisive action. James is especially concerned
with the paralysing doubt advocated by intellectuals like William Kingdon
Clifford who demand abstention in questions of faith out of a fear of error
(Clifford, Ethics of Belief).21 This fear functions as one possible affective
response to situations of uncertainty that James contrasts with the hope of
wilful belief. He writes:
To preach scepticism [sic] to us as a duty until ‘sufficient evidence’ for religion
be found, is tantamount therefore to telling us, when in presence of the reli-
gious hypothesis, that to yield to our fear of its being error is wiser and
better than to yield to our hope that it may be true.
(James, “Will to Believe”, 26–7)
James worries that the skeptical avoidance of reckless belief comes at the
price of giving up faith altogether. That is, the skeptic champions doubt at
the expense of belief. In doing so, she not only sets up a problematic dichot-
omy between doubt and belief that clashes with the conception of faith
defended by James, but her position also has debilitating agential effects
insofar as she opts for a state of perpetual hesitation in waiting for
sufficient evidence to arrive. This is to be in the agential position of the
and action – for his readers and audience, he nonetheless admits that such transformations, whether
religious, ethical, or existential, may not always take place. This admission productively underscores
the limits of the will and strenuousness so championed by his Promethean readers.
20Though James does not explicitly detail such cases, we might consider an example supplied by his
sister, Alice, in her diary entry from 26 October 1890. After reading her brother’s paper on “The
Hidden Self”, Alice describes the endless battle between her “body” and her “will” following violent
bouts of hysteria and the torment of having to abandon the latter to her bodily inclinations: “As I
lay prostrate after the storm with my mind luminous and active and susceptible of the clearest, stron-
gest impressions, I saw so distinctly that it was a fight between my body and my will, a battle in which
the former was to be triumphant to the end” (James, Diary of Alice James, 149).
21For commentary on the debate between Clifford and James, see Aiken, Evidentialism.
830 B. SHEEHEY
obstructed will, where agents are incapable of affirming their wilful
capacities. In terms of commitment, the skeptic essentially commits herself
to being uncommitted.
In contrast to the debilitating doubt of the skeptic, James outlines a form
of faith that is simultaneously cautious and courageous. To understand the
type of commitment that the will to believe entails, consider his suggestion
from the Preface to The Will to Believe: “It does not follow, because reckless-
ness may be a vice in soldiers, that courage ought never to be preached to
them. What should be preached is courage weighted with responsibility”
(James, Will to Believe, xi). Recognizing the capacity of agents for reckless
action, James encourages a kind of cautious courage rather than a complete
divestment from action. This courage is cautious in the sense that it is
checked by inhibitions and requires agents to take responsibility for risking
to believe in conditions of uncertainty. The type of commitment that
follows from such courage is one that maintains a relationship to doubt
without thereby being overcome by it. Hence, faith for James does not so
much extinguish doubt as it keeps it open as a possibility. He clarifies in
“The Sentiment of Rationality”, “Faith means belief in something concerning
which doubt is still theoretically possible” (James, “Sentiment”, 90). Whereas
the contrary position maintains that one ought not to believe in anything that
can possibly be doubted, James argues that one is justified under specific
conditions to believe in something even if it can be doubted. Belief responds
to conditions of doubt without fully overcoming or being overcome by it. The
believing subject does not express the full confidence in her faith as does
someone for whom faith is the negation of doubt. Rather, the believing
subject expresses a trembling confidence, or a “stuttering conviction” in
Livingston’s words, as she avows the elements of uncertainty and risk that
condition and accompany her will to believe (Livingston, Damn Great
Empires, 106).
James places faith on quivering, unsettled ground. This quivering quality
specifies how faith is held by an agent. Less a steady resolve to execute
actions swiftly and without question, quivering faith maintains contact with
the doubt and hesitation to which it is initially responsive. Recall James’s
description of the willing function as one that responds to the indecision
wrought by conflicting impulses that interrupt habit. If conviction is not to
become the excessive form of faith that accompanies a reckless will, then it
must remain open to doubt, hesitation, and uncertainty. This does not
mean that one wallows perpetually in doubt, for to do so is precisely to be
without faith and the action it makes possible. Rather, quivering faith is
about the movement from doubt to belief and the type of uncertainty that
attends such movement. Depending only on a maybe, faith trembles in the
movement from doubt to belief. It trembles because it bears the traces of
doubt that condition its prior movement. Without uncertainty, there would
BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 831
be no faith and no accompanying risk, for as James contends, faith only
decides matters that lack evidence or certainty.22 Hence, faith is “the readi-
ness to act in a cause the prosperous issue of which is not certified to us in
advance” (James, “Sentiment”, 90, italics added). Without faith, however, sub-
jects would remain indefinitely in the torpor of indecision and hesitation, and
could not affirm their capacities as wilful agents – as agents capable of willing
and acting without the guarantee that they are right in doing so.
The agent who risks believing even when doubtful is one who is cautiously
poised. In being cautious, she does not thereby give up being committed, but
rather her commitment reflects the caution she maintains in leaving doubt
open as a possibility and the responsibility she assumes for venturing to
act despite this uncertainty. She places a quivering confidence in her capacity
as a believing, and hence, wilful agent.
James’s account of wilful belief entails a form of reparative commitment.
This type of commitment is reparative insofar as it posits (and affirms) the
possibility to believe within specific limits. To be reparatively committed
means to at once countenance doubt as that which limits belief and the
action it entails and to extract confidence from willing to believe. This is
the type of commitment that accompanies reparative agency. In being
reparatively committed, the agent places trust in her capacity to act
despite the uncertainties that attend her action.23 I am reminded, for
instance, of the quavering in my voice once I get the nerve to speak about
an experience of sexual trauma. The quavering refers to the uncertainty I
have about speaking, reflects a vulnerability I assume in speaking, modifies
how I speak as a subject, and is informed by a legacy of gendered power
dynamics concerning speech around sexual violence. This trembling quality
bespeaks the kind of conviction I take on as a speaking subject. I am not
quite steady, not quite sure, and yet I venture to speak, my words touched
with the tremble of hesitation, a hesitation that at once bears the trace of
a power differential, but on which I redemptively draw for its different agen-
tial power. This is an example of what Sedgwick means by the work of repara-
tion whereby one extracts sustaining possibilities from limits that do not
sustain us (Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 150). The caution qualifying my
speech does not altogether prevent me from speaking, which would be a
22These are cases that cannot be “decided on intellectual grounds” (James, “Will to Believe”, 11).
23While one might say this placing of trust in one’s agential capacities in spite of uncertainties is an indel-
ible feature of any action, I see James as delimiting this feature to the constraints of wilful belief which
he specifies in “The Will to Believe”. As discussed above, reparative commitment applies to those
delimited cases in which we are justified to believe without evidential proof where the options for
belief posed to our wills are forced, live, and momentous. The decision over suicide posed to
James’s will fits this kind of case insofar as it involves an option that is forced, live, and momentous.
In my own example, the decision to speak about sexual trauma and the reparative commitment
involved in such a decision also concerns an option that is live (it appeals to my will), forced
(because there is no way to avoid not choosing), and momentous (because what I speak about is
of significant consequence for others and myself).
832 B. SHEEHEY
capitulation to the power differential, but it permeates my voice insofar as I
speak from doubt rather than certainty. This type of agency, while experi-
enced by a gendered subjectivity quite different from the one James writes
of or from, nonetheless bears affinities with the one he affirms in his risk to
believe in the face of suicidal depression. Like my hesitant venture to
speak, James’s decision in that context rested only on a ‘may be’, reflecting
an agential position that affirms the hopeful yet vulnerable feature of
action under conditions of doubt.24
Such agency is not the over-confidence of a Promethean will nor is it the
timidity of Hamlet-like indecision. Reparative commitment is located along
the middle-ranges of conviction and doubt. It realizes the extent to which
one can be simultaneously cautious and courageous, hesitant and hopeful
without conviction and possible action being thereby undermined. This cau-
tious courage is indexical of the vulnerability agents assume in risking to
believe and act in a world without security or guarantee. The cautiousness
does not lead to a position of impotence insofar as the subject places faith
in her agential capacities. Without faith, an agent cannot move from the con-
dition of doubt that incapacitates her ability to act. Yet, without being open
to doubt, an agent potentially commits herself to a form of excessive faith
and a boundless sense of agency. To be reparatively committed, agents
must therefore maintain a relation to doubt by remaining cautious and uncer-
tain without giving up their affirmation to hope and act on this hope. What
results is a position from which it becomes possible to hope so long as one
is also open to doubt.25 Hope thus carries the vestige of hesitation as it ener-
gizes reparative agency and commitment.
4. Conclusion
Unlike fellow pragmatists Jane Addams and John Dewey, James’s meliorism
has been positioned as indelibly individualistic.26 This individualism concerns
both the source and medium of hope as emanating from and exercised
through an individual will. This individualism contrasts with those entailed
in the explosive and obstructed wills insofar as it realistically attends to limit-
ations and possibilities emerging from within and without. That is, while the
individualisms of sovereignty and melancholy threaten to slip into solipsism,
inflated or deflated by one’s sense of power or powerlessness, the individu-
alism of James’s meliorism is relational, conditioned as it is by the embodied
24For James’s response to suicide as resting on the ‘may be’ of belief, see James, “Is Life Worth Living”, 58.
25I take this to be the meaning behind Benjamin Paul Blood’s declaration that “doubt and hope are
sisters,” which James quotes in the Preface to The Will to Believe. See James, Will to Believe, ix.
26James’s vocabulary of individualism – the ‘strenuous,’ the ‘manly mood’ – is rife with misogynist insin-
uations and contributes to the idea that James celebrated a Promethean idea of agency. For a discus-
sion of the sexist underpinnings of James’s philosophy, see Haddock Seigfried, Pragmatism and
Feminism and “The Feminine-Mystical Threat”.
BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 833
and social nature of subjectivity.27 Reparative agency underscores the vulner-
ability of action in a world where we are given over to others. This feature of
vulnerability contests the fantasy of mastery at the heart of sovereign indivi-
dualism and the acquiescence of defeat central to melancholic individualism.
While my discussion of reparative agency and commitment in this essay
has been consistent with the individualistic orientation of James’s meliorism,
I now highlight, by way of conclusion, how these concepts are compatible
with a more outward positioning of hope, one attentive to the collective
capacities and practices of plural agents. In highlighting this compatibility,
my point is not to suggest that James conceptualized or practiced this kind
of hope in any robust manner, but rather that his meliorism bears possibilities
whose redemptive realization depends upon the conceptualization and prac-
tice of others. That is, the inchoate possibilities of a more collective practice of
hope expressed haphazardly in James’s writings stand in need of supplemen-
tation by other practitioners and theorists of hope if they are to be realized.
In a letter to his friend Thomas Ward from January of 1868, amid the throes
of a suicidal depression, James confesses:
All I can tell you is the thought that with me outlasts all others, and onto which,
like a rock, I find myself washed up when the waves of doubt are weltering over
all the rest of the world; and that is the thought of my having a will, and of my
belonging to a brotherhood of men possessed of a capacity for pleasure and
pain of different kinds… Every thought you now have and every act and inten-
tion owes its complexion to the acts of your dead and living brothers. Everything
we know and are is through men. We have no revelation but through man.
(James, Letters Volume 1, 130–1)
In addition to the thought of the will, James testifies clinging to his commu-
nion with his fellow humans for hope amid neurasthenic doubt. Indeed, even
the thought of the will, he admits, owes its appearance to the acts of his dead
and living kin. Elsewhere he describes borrowing the saving thought of free
will from Charles Renouvier after reading his second Essais (James, Letters
Volume 1, 147).28 The hope expressed by James in this letter reflects some-
thing more communal than the volitional decision of a lone individual who
places faith in their own agential capacities. What James appears to
confess is that even his hope in the will is a hope borrowed from (and com-
municated to) others.29 This is an example of what I call ‘hope fromwithout’, a
hope that further frustrates the Promethean subjectivity of a will longing for
mastery and control.
27For James’s account of the embodied and social conditions subjectivity, see Chapter 10, “The Con-
sciousness of Self” from The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1.
28On the connection between James and Renouvier, see Viney, “William James on Free Will”.
29In addition to the social nature of this letter, as Paul Stob has recently observed, James delivered most
of his essays as lectures or ‘popular statements’ which he carefully crafted with his particular audiences
in mind. This social dimension of James’s writings underscores the idea that his individualism is rela-
tional rather than atomistic or solipsistic. See Stob, William James.
834 B. SHEEHEY
To concretize this type of hope which James only obliquely intimates, we
might look to James Baldwin, who like James, describes a hope born of an
encounter with suicidal depression. Confronting a decision over suicide at
four o’clock in the morning, Baldwin derives a hope from the saving power of
other human beings which he calls the “miracle of love” (Baldwin, “Nothing Per-
sonal”, 700–1). This hope, he writes, is an ancestral heritage, one he learned
through “descending, as it were, into the eyes of my father and my mother”
(Baldwin, “Nothing Personal”, 705). Baldwin’s response to the question of
suicide does not so much reflect James’s contention that one can make life sig-
nificant if one wills it but insists on the connection of human life. He asserts:
What one must be enabled to recognize, at four o’clock in the morning, is that
one has no right, at least not for reasons of private anguish, to take one’s life. All
lives are connected to other lives and when one man goes, much more than the
man goes with him.
(Baldwin, “Nothing Personal”, 701)
More than just the loss of a life, suicide, as Baldwin notes, amounts to the loss
of connection and the lives tethered by that connection. The agency con-
ditioned by this connection bespeaks a vulnerability that recognizes not
only the fragility of my hope, but of our hope for there is much that under-
mines our saving of one another.
Hope from without is a hope borrowed or realized from others, reflecting
the relational quality of a reparative agency achieved with the help of others
and responsive to the agential possibilities and limits of others.30 If we take
seriously Baldwin’s and James’s attention to the social conditions of hope,
then we must admit that hope may not only be energized by the exercise
of an individual will but assumes a more collective complexion when it is bor-
rowed from or occasioned by the saving power of others. Simultaneously cau-
tious and courageous, this hope draws its sustenance from our collective
capacities and practices as reparative agents.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Shannon Hayes, Colin Koopman, Anna Cook, Justina Tor-
rance, Vincent Colapietro, Ben Davis, Scott Ritner, Jason Walsh, Miguel Gualdrón,
and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and feedback on
this piece.
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