Three Speculative Dispositions After William James: Towards a Concept of Pre-cursive Faith

Abstract

In The Will to Believe, William James puts us in the following risky, hypothetical situation: “Suppose, for instance, that you are climbing a mountain, and you have worked yourself into a position from which the only escape is by a terrible leap” (2009: 119). No matter how psychically and physically well prepared you are, whether you take such a terrible leap or not will depend upon you having faith that you can successfully make it. In this example, however, faith does not correspond to its doctrinal definition. Rather, by conceptualising it as the micro-subjective, spiritual force that makes us think, believe and act, James reworks faith pragmatically. Inducing us to explore new and unforeseen connections, yet without determining how or why, faith after James comes to constitute the essential pre-cursive and not pre-meditative condition that geographers and social scientists might need in order to speculatively venture into an indeterminate, unfinished world. Thus, if embracing such pragmatic notion of faith as a starting point, how might we understand speculation today? Rethinking speculation as having more to do with an experimental, micro-subjective venture than with a specific method or practico-theoretical tool, in this chapter I address this question. To do this, I combine James’ radical empiricism with some aspects of Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism, which similarly advances an immanent approach that prioritises those intensive moments, which erase any prior subject-object distinction. Mobilising a way of thinking, which learns with and from the thinkers engaged, the chapter presents three speculative dispositions: (1) an aesthetic sensibility towards sensation; (2) a testable attitude towards genuine problems; (3) a pre-cursive feeling of faith in the in-between. In doing so, my aim is to examine the ethico-political implications that moving towards a concept of pre-cursive faith might have for geography, the social sciences and beyond.KeywordsPre-cursive faithSpeculative pragmatismJamesDeleuze