The Will to Not Believe

I do not believe. That is a complete sentence. I am not a nihilist. In fact, no one is a nihilist because nihilism doesn’t make sense—to attack, or defend, a viewpoint, you have to have standards of truth (what is), morality (what ought to be), or both—the very things nihilism is defined by rejecting. What I mean is that as soon as I discover a new idea inspires or fascinates me, I set to work trying to figure out how it might be incomplete or wrong. This has caused me no shortage of problems, embarrassing or alienating friends and family, getting in minor trouble more than once, and so on. Believing creates social order; challenging the basis of belief interrupts that order. I “get” philosophy, using logic and argument to dissect arguments and map the universe of ideas; I think I became a sociologist because I struggle with society and social norms and want to understand them better. Perhaps I have outgrown a hard-headed “no gods, no masters” approach to life, but today, and this new year, is shaped by all those yesterdays.

Just a few months ago, I blogged about William James’ “The Will to Believe” lecture, which I have read several times, usually when troubled or struggling with difficult decisions. William James criticizes the view (expressed by many philosophers, scientists, and self-styled skeptics) that “it is wrong always, everywhere to believe anything on insufficient evidence” because that’s not actually how our brains work, and it’s also not how and why we believe. We are “feeling critters that think,” not the other way around, a view that forms the basis of major developments in social psychology today. Also, and maybe more importantly, what we believe actually changes us and how we interact with the world, and vice versa (the basis of many currents in social psychology). James argued that it took strength of will to believe, and that doing so made us stronger willed in ways that would be beneficial in a lot of other ways too.

Today I’m revisiting another thinker I’ve often read when troubled or struggling with difficult decisions, one who is very different from James: Friedrich Nietzsche. He seemed to argue, throughout most of his work, almost for a “will to not believe,” shattering cherished illusions and challenging every conviction—especially our own. He disagreed with himself in various places in trying to gain more than one perspective at the same time; instead of James’ solemn lectures aimed toward preserving faith and hope, Nietzsche seemed to bask in creating conflict and chaos in his writing.

My issue here is not with James’ approach to making difficult decisions—pragmatist thought makes for good decision-making “software.” Sometimes you must choose, and you must choose based on the currently available information, however incomplete; every day you do not choose, you choose the negative, and must live with the consequences to yourself and others in any case. It is not the sort of software you need to make “should I have the salad or the soup for lunch?” decisions, but it helps with making up your mind about the most difficult and scary sorts of decisions.  It is not with James’ penchant for finding hope in difficult times, either (some of his work influenced not only modern psychological traditions, but also the field of social work and the 12-step approach to treating addiction).

My issue is this: doesn’t it take just as much character and strength of will (if not more) to question our convictions as to embrace them? Nietzsche had a reputation for being a nihilist, but he was animated first and foremost by a search for the truth, and participated in the destruction of all cherished illusions in that search—he was more anti-nihilist than most of us. If James offers a toolkit for making up your mind, then Nietzsche offers a way to make sure all those tools are in good working order, sharp and clean and merciless. Nietzsche cares more about the reasoning process that leads to our decisions about what is true or false, what is right or wrong, how they unfold in both people and civilizations, what assumptions go unquestioned. He is not interested in telling us what is true or false, right or wrong, and lived this view by rejecting any and all would-be “disciples” in his lifetime.

From this question comes another: is the process more important than the result, in the end? This fundamental debate influences so many other sets of ideas: I think of Thomas Sowell’s work “A Conflict of Visions” and how he, a conservative intellectual, argued (among other things) that how different views of things like (in)equality and justice tended to be defined in terms of process (by conservatives) and results (by progressives) in ways that caused folks to talk past each other.

Even if everyone has equal opportunities, won’t that always lead to unequal outcomes because every society is going to value different things, well, differently? If results should be made equal, who is tasked with making those results equal, and how do you avoid unequal power falling into the hands of those who are doing the equalizing? On the other hand, who gets to decide that processes and opportunities are in fact equal, and who makes sure those who dispense justice are themselves behaving justly?

To be clear: I’m not calling James a progressive and Nietzsche a conservative; I think of partisan politics as a shallow exercise of deeper commitments. That’s something else I question about the pragmatists, who imply that you must play the game to see what happens, and that what’s closer to true is the result that works best. Some games have tilted tables and loaded dice, and in playing at all we lose the critical distance to sharpen our reasoning processes. If I get most of my information through a social media or search engine filter that shows me what I want to see based on what I’ve looked at before, and based on whether it has sorted me into a Blue bucket or a Red bucket, then I am playing a game that will always lead to a useless (from a Nietzschean vantage point) result because I can’t even examine the processes by which I am making up my mind (I am, in effect, obeying authority, which I wrote on here).

You might say I got the COVID vaccine for Jamesian reasons (which I explained here), and I left social media over a month ago, letting some of my accounts lapse into permanent deletion, for Nietzschean reasons (some of the other reasons here). Pragmatists like James embraced the promise of democracy; Nietzsche was harshly critical of “the last men,” who, in their equality, were no longer capable of doing anything inspiring or worthwhile. Pragmatists were parents, teachers, social activists; Nietzsche was a solitary hermit, retreating to the frigid mountains to live without creature comforts for long periods. I should like to be a bit more Nietzschean for a while. It takes will, but believing has nothing to do with it.

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Sources:

James, William. “The Will to Believe.”

Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ.” And “The Genealogy of Morals.”

Sowell, Thomas. “A Conflict of Visions.”

Image Credit: Gustav-Adolf Schultze (d. 1897), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nietzsche1882.jpg