Footnotes is a series of essays that build on each other. This one is the third installment in a chapter on the The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James’ book.
⩩ 26
Our relation to the world seems to be encapsulated in the concept of interest. We have an interest in the world, we take interest or are interested in it.
Our relation to the world is not best or ultimately characterized by action: the result of our activity is always something unintended, unexpected. Nor by knowledge. Imagine yourself, if you can, suddenly stripped of all the emotion your world now inspires in you, and try to think of it as it exists, purely by itself, without your favorable or unfavorable, hopeful or apprehensive comment. It will be almost impossible for you to realize such a condition of negativity and deadness. No one portion of the universe would then have importance beyond another; and the whole collection of its things and series of its events would be without significance, character, expression, or perspective. The conclusion is that our minds do not passively read the world but actively select through attention. The whole of our knowledge is an extension of us, reflects us and our concerns and has its use in our lives.
Our fundamental relation is given by interest. To be alive is to take interest. Our stance is that of an interested party. The world is a concern to us, we are attached to it, invested in it, dependent on it. We need, we “want,” we desire, we love. Our interest is ourselves, and so the ultimate formal object of our interest is our fate. It is the root and sum of our concern: how things will stand with us at last. Somewhere in you you have an unshakable, unsharable feeling of the pinch of your individual destiny as you feel it rolling out on fortune's wheel.
Interest is a modality of care, or tending. Attention is just another word for the activity of taking interest. We attend to what interests us. In the image I like, a person’s awareness is pictured as a stage. What most interests her stands front and center. It is in the spotlight. It shines. It draws her eyes. It awakens and excites her. It absorbs her. Other things move in the peripheries and still others are offstage completely. Dark.
Interest wraps the world in enchantment, spreads a zest over life and brings joy to the living being, if not the fulfillment itself then the promise of fulfillment, and there is joy already in that promise. There is no life without joy. Interest, the ability to find oneself out there, in the other, in the world, implies or supplies this joy, and thus lends the living being strength to endure suffering. In this way the living thing feeds off the interest, drawing life and nourishment from it.
The ability to take interest is connected with what William James calls faith and the problem it is the solution to. The problem is this: in the face of its grievous troubles, what makes life worth living? Not “objectively,” in general, from no point of view, but for a subject, in a particular person’s eyes, or rather in their gut, since this deliberation and reckoning is not verbal but affective. What makes a thing willing to live? How, by what means does anyone overcome grief and suffering?
The answer is faith and in explaining it James refers to Leo Tolstoy again and again. “Faith, says Tolstoy, is that by which men live,” James writes, and again, “Tolstoy does well to talk of it as that by which men live; for that is exactly what it is, a stimulus, an excitement, a faith, a force that re-infuses the positive willingness to live, even in full presence of the evil perceptions that erewhile made life seem unbearable.” Whether it’s called an excitement, an interest, a joy, what he is getting at is at bottom the willingness to live. Faith issues the willingness to live, though living brings pain.
In this sense of the word, all those who are willing to live have faith, which is plainly not to say that all have faith. James considers Tolstoy correct in classing it among our biological necessities, the forces we live or die by. The collapse of faith is equivalent to the collapse of the ability to take interest, which is the collapse of life itself. There is a loss of appetite for all life's excitements, experiments and adventures, as the spirit withdraws, leaving the world emptied and still. Already dead.
While all living people have some willingness to live and therefore have faith in this sense, some have it fully and robustly and paradigmatically. If faith as such is a joy that makes life worth living despite the pain, then full-grown faith is that same joy full grown. It is a state of confidence, trust, union with all things. It is the assurance that all is well with one. James calls it the joyous conviction and it is expressed perfectly in the lines by Walt Whitman from Leaves of Grass,
What will be will be well — for what is is well,
To take interest is well, and not to take interest shall be well.
To live is well, and not to live will be well. This is faith perfected.
A second example is given by Thoreau, who expresses the joyous conviction and its accompanying sense of victory in his characteristically defiant and blunt way. “There is a certain class of unbelievers who sometimes ask me such questions as, if I think that I can live on vegetable food alone; and to strike at the root of the matter at once, — for the root is faith, — I am accustomed to answer such, that I can live on board nails.” His point is not dietary. He reports his world and mood. He is assured of his fate.
You are reading Footnotes, by Garrett Allen, a series of philosophical-ish short essays. You just read ⩩ 26, the third installment in a chapter on William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience. Here are some highlights from what came before.
Retreat
⩩ 21 Review
⩩ 19 Storytelling
⩩ 17 Retreat
Firsthand
⩩ 16 Revelation
⩩ 14 Yourself
⩩ 12 Learning
⩩10 Habit
⩩ 9 Firsthand
Stagestranger
⩩ 7 Mistake
⩩ 6 Whim
⩩ 3 Speechless
⩩ 1 Headsup
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A shoutout as usual to Danny at breakfastswerved for his ink. See his drawings for the series here.
If you’ve come this far: thank you for reading my work and spending time with me. I would love to hear from you.