Book Review: Unbelievable: Why We Believe and Why We Don't

Abstract

Unbelievable: Why We Believe and Why We Don't. By Graham Ward. London: I. B. Tauris Publishers, 2014. x + 246 pp. $32.00 (cloth).In 1787 the German philosopher Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi wrote one of the very first responses to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Jacobi argued that Kant, in his attempt to save the concept of reason, had only further condemned it. Through reason, the Enlightenment had sought a purer, objective way to understand reality, free from history or prejudice. The problem with such a program was that all knowledge, including reason, was fundamentally contextual. For Jacobi, the only way to be at peace with our knowledge was to realize that everything we know is essentially a matter of belief. According to Jacobi, no philosophy, not even Kant's, could escape this contextual nature, and it was, accordingly, time that we gave up wanting to invent spectacles that enable us to see without eyes.In his new book, Unbelievable: Why We Believe and Why We Don't, Graham Ward takes up a topic that is as germane to our own age as it was to Jacobi's. We, too, are presently questioning the way we structure concepts such as belief and reason, and wondering whether in our narrow search for certainty we have left too much out. How has our lack of faith in belief undermined our ability to believe in anything?One of Unbelievable's most important projects is to take up the dualism between fact and belief. Ward points out how we require a more complex approach to this problem. Facts do not simply manifest themselves; rather, they arise out of a process of abstraction guided by human interest. These processes by which we come to know the world are first emotional and relational before they are 'rational' (p. 55). The failure to recognize this has meant that belief has come to be associated with opinion and desire, establishing a narrow definition of knowing that ignores belief s fundamental role in human knowledge.Ward maintains that we all engage in belief. Belief is not, as many progress narratives would lead us to understand, something that can be outgrown. It is not a hangover from a simpler, more ignorant time. Rather, as Ward puts it, believing is an anthropological condition (p. 14). In order to demonstrate how we are believers to the core, Ward marshals a range of materials to offer an archeology of belief. From the emergence of the species, we have accommodated ourselves to the material world through belief. Through images, symbols, and rituals, humans have constructed the world which they inhabit through various imagined continuities and connections. …