Z Quanbeck (Princeton University), “Resolving to Believe: Kierkegaard’s Direct Doxastic Voluntarism”
Forthcoming, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
By Z Quanbeck
You can raise your hand at will, just by deciding to do so. But intuitively you can’t just decide to believe at will in the same way that you can decide to raise your hand. While you can exercise indirect voluntary control over your beliefs in a variety of ways—such as selectively exposing yourself to evidence, or taking drugs that induce belief—according to philosophical orthodoxy, you cannot directly exercise voluntary control over your beliefs. That is, most philosophers today affirm “indirect doxastic voluntarism” while denying “direct doxastic voluntarism.”
One of the most notorious purported direct doxastic voluntarists in the history of Western philosophy is the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard seems to assert that the will is involved in forming any belief about a contingent proposition about the external world. And he indicates that the will plays a central role in believing the “improbable,” “absurd,” “paradoxical” Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. Accordingly, on a traditional interpretation of Kierkegaard he holds that we can, by brute force of will, make a “leap of faith” to believe propositions that we ourselves take to be improbable, absurd, and paradoxical.[1]
Understandably, most Kierkegaard scholars now resist this traditional interpretation and instead argue that Kierkegaard should be interpreted as an indirect doxastic voluntarist. Since direct doxastic voluntarism is widely regarded as an implausible view, these commentators appeal to a strong version of the principle of interpretive charity—according to which we ought to interpret other philosophers as holding views that are not merely internally coherent but philosophically plausible in their own right—to motivate interpreting the apparently voluntarist passages in Kierkegaard’s writings in non-voluntarist terms.[2]
In “Resolving to Believe: Kierkegaard’s Direct Doxastic Voluntarism,” I argue that the now-dominant indirect doxastic voluntarist interpretation is mistaken. I make the case that Kierkegaard endorses a principled, cogent, and moderate version of direct doxastic voluntarism which is much more philosophically plausible than the simplistic, extreme view traditionally attributed to Kierkegaard. So, there is no reason to refrain from attributing this view to Kierkegaard on grounds of interpretive charity.
As background for my interpretation, I show that Kierkegaard’s direct doxastic voluntarism is embedded within a sophisticated account of the nature of belief and the norms governing belief.[3] Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Climacus writes, “The conclusion of belief is no conclusion but a resolution, and thus doubt is excluded” (PF: 84). That is, Kierkegaard conceives of belief as a resolution that excludes doubt. As long as we are still trying to figure out whether some proposition p is true, we doubt its truth and suspend judgment about it. But by terminating our reflection or deliberation about whether p is true—by settling the question of whether p is true by closing inquiry and at least provisionally foreclosing future inquiry—we make a “leap” to believe.
But crucially, Kierkegaard claims, we aren’t forced to make this leap. Not only is it psychologically possible to doubt any contingent proposition about the external world, but it can be rationally permissible to do so. In the terminology of contemporary epistemology, Kierkegaard endorses a strong version of “epistemic permissivism” about outright belief: the view that there are cases in which a given body of evidence epistemically permits either believing or suspending judgment about a proposition. He holds this view for two reasons. First, Kierkegaard thinks that epistemic rationality alone cannot determine when we ought to open or close inquiry. Second, Kierkegaard takes there to be multiple epistemically permissible ways to weigh the aim of forming a true belief against the aim of avoiding a false belief. In the terminology of contemporary analytic epistemology, Kierkegaard thinks there can be multiple epistemically permissible attitudes towards epistemic risk (i.e., the risk of forming a false belief).
This makes space for the will to directly affect what we believe in both religious and non-religious contexts. Corresponding to the two motivations for Kierkegaard’s epistemic permissivism, Kierkegaard thinks we can exercise direct voluntary control over our beliefs in two ways (especially when we take ourselves to be in a situation where our evidence permits us to either believe or suspend judgment).
First, Kierkegaard repeatedly insists that inquiry and doubt do not stop themselves. Instead, Kierkegaard asserts, we must voluntarily resolve to close inquiry about whether p is true by deciding to judge that p is either true or false. For example, suppose that it appears to you likely, but not completely certain, that your friend is guilty of plagiarism in one of their papers. You thus take yourself to have sufficient evidence to permit believing but not sufficient evidence to compel believing that your friend is guilty. Kierkegaard thinks that you can decide either to continue inquiring (and thus suspending judgment) about whether your friend is guilty, or conclude your inquiry and resolve to believe that your friend is guilty. Similarly, the will can play a role in deciding whether to reopen inquiry into (and thus suspend judgment about) the propositions we already believe. Since beliefs involve resolutions not only to close inquiry but to foreclose future inquiry, maintaining this resolution sometimes requires the will, especially when we encounter counterevidence to our beliefs.
A second way that Kierkegaard thinks we can exercise direct voluntary control over our beliefs is by choosing which attitudes towards epistemic risk to adopt. Suppose again that you have pretty strong but not completely dispositive evidence that your friend is guilty of plagiarism. Kierkegaard thinks that you can deliberate about whether it would be morally worse to form a false belief about your friend’s guilt or fail to have a true belief about your friend’s guilt in this context. If you conclude that it would be worse to form a false belief, you can choose to be epistemically risk-averse and thus suspend judgment about your friend’s guilt. But if you conclude that it would be worse to fail to form a true belief, you can choose to be epistemically risk-tolerant and thus believe that your friend is guilty.
In both these ways, then, Kierkegaard thinks we can exercise direct voluntary control over our beliefs. And because the account of direct doxastic voluntarism I attribute to Kierkegaard does not say that we can arbitrarily decide to believe whatever we want regardless of our evidence—albeit with some significant complications in the case of Christian faith—reading Kierkegaard as a direct doxastic voluntarist does not conflict with the principle of interpretive charity. To the contrary, I suggest that Kierkegaard provides a plausible and distinctive account of doxastic voluntarism that merits serious philosophical consideration in its own right.
Let me conclude by highlighting two further upshots of my interpretation of Kierkegaard’s direct doxastic voluntarism. First, since Kierkegaard holds that we have distinctively practical agency over our beliefs in virtue of our ability to believe at will, Kierkegaard offers an alternative both to an influential view in contemporary analytic philosophy on which our agency over our beliefs is restricted to non-voluntarily responding to epistemic (or evidential) reasons, and to the views of many of Kierkegaard’s predecessors (such as Kant and Hegel) who anticipate this contemporary conception of our agency over our beliefs. Second, this interpretation has notable implications for understanding Kierkegaard’s ethics of belief.[4] Kierkegaard’s account of direct doxastic voluntarism explains both how we have the sort of control over our beliefs necessary for us to be morally responsible for our beliefs, and explains how we can be responsive to non-evidential, moral considerations that affect what we should believe. So, I hope that the interpretation of Kierkegaard I develop here is not merely of historical interest but also indicates that Kierkegaard offers a promising account of our agency over our beliefs which contemporary analytic philosophers could profit from engaging with. Check it out here!
References
Evans, C. S. (1989). “Does Kierkegaard Think Beliefs can be Directly Willed?” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 26: 173-184.
Ferreira, M. J. (1991). Transforming Vision: Imagination and Will in Kierkegaardian Faith. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Kierkegaard, Søren (1844/1985). Philosophical Fragments [PF], trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Pojman, Louis (1984). The Logic of Subjectivity: Kierkegaard’s Philosophy of Religion. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
______ (1986). Religious Belief and the Will. London: Routledge.
Quanbeck, Z (2024a). “Kierkegaard on Belief and Credence.” European Journal of Philosophy 32: 394-412.
______ (2024b). “Kierkegaard on the Relationship Between Practical and Epistemic Reasons for Belief.” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 105: 233-266.
[1] The most influential proponent of a version of this traditional interpretation is Louis Pojman (1984, 1986).
[2] C. Stephen Evans (1989) and M. Jamie Ferreira (1991) played the most significant role in establishing the indirect doxastic voluntarist interpretation as the dominant reading of Kierkegaard.
[3] I discuss Kierkegaard’s views about the nature of belief and the norms governing belief in more detail in Quanbeck (2024a) and Quanbeck (2024b).
[4] My broader research project on Kierkegaard—of which this paper is one component—addresses Kierkegaard’s ethics of belief.