6

Three Speculative Dispositions After

William James: Towards a Concept
of Pre-cursive Faith
Carlota de La Herrán Iriarte

Introduction: Taking a ‘Terrible’ Leap

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. Have faith that you can successfully make it, and your feet are nerved
to its accomplishment. But mistrust yourself, and think of all the sweet
things that you have heard the scientists say of maybes, and you will hesi-
tate so long that, at last, all unstrung and trembling, and launching yourself
in a moment of despair, you roll into the abyss.
(James, 2009: 119)

Within the last decade, the notion of speculation has attracted wide-
spread attention within geography and the social sciences. Previously
confined to the conjectural and divinatory practices of scholastic philoso-
phers and ancient Greek seers, geographers and social scientists are

C. de La Herrán Iriarte (*)

School of Science, University of New South Wales Canberra,
Canberra, ACT, Australia
e-mail: e.delaherraniriarte@student.unsw.edu.au

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 103
N. Williams, T. Keating (eds.), Speculative Geographies,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-0691-6_6
104 C. de La Herrán Iriarte

developing innovative, conceptual and empirical approaches to specula-

tion in relation to a range of topics, including cinema (Woodward, 2016),
material design (Roberts, 2014), smart city urbanism (Tironi, 2018),
environmental sensing (Gabrys, 2017), post-crisis capitalism (Bear,
2020) and activist philosophy (Massumi, 2011), amongst others. Instead
of complacently reifying our pre-established, all too human habits, a
speculative mode of thought calls us to attend to that which cannot be
known, calculated or acted upon in advance (Duvernoy, 2016). As the
word’s etymological definition suggests, from the Latin verb speculari,
meaning ‘to look from above, to observe’ (Online Etymology Dictionary,
n.d.), this is about actively looking for, as opposed to passively looking at,
the “differences, relations, novelties and potentialities” that incessantly
impregnate a concrete empirical situation (Savransky, 2021: 155).
Following the hypothetical example that James describes in the quote
above from The Will to Believe, speculation, just like when you climb a
mountain, entails a risk, for which, as well as having to be physically and
mentally, or in this case, theoretically and methodologically prepared, we
must take a “terrible leap” of faith (2009: 119). In this example, however,
faith does not adhere to the doctrinal prescriptions traditionally upheld
by religion. Rather, in conceptualising it as the micro-subjective, spiritual
force that makes us think, believe and act, James reworks faith pragmati-
cally (Lapoujade, 2019). Coming before we have laden it with our sub-
jective expectations, this kind of faith serves as the essential, ‘pre-cursive’
and not pre-meditative condition, which induces us to speculatively
explore and experience new and unforeseen connections with the world,
yet without determining how or why (James, 2009: 69). If we decide then
to embrace such pragmatic perspective on faith as a starting point, how
might we understand speculation today? And what might this entail for
our geographic and social scientific engagements with the speculative? In
this chapter I address such questions.
Despite having undergone “something of a renaissance” in social the-
ory, the work of American pragmatist William James, together with that
of other American pragmatists such as John Dewey and Richard Rorty,
remains significantly under-examined within the research field of specu-
lation (Savransky, 2017: 26). Reversing this trend, Debaise and Stengers
(2018), as well as Savransky (2017), have examined the speculative
 6 Three Speculative Dispositions After William James… 105

potential inherent to James’ philosophical preoccupation with the ‘practi-

cal consequences’ that our thinking might have, beyond any prior repre-
sentational considerations. Particularly, in emphasising how our thoughts
are immediately felt and not dogmatically held, such endeavours have
further argued for the necessity of coming to terms with the processual
conception of experience that James articulates through his radical empir-
icism. Indeed, understanding experience as a constant flux, which is nei-
ther subjective nor objective, psychical or physical (Lapoujade, 2019),
James’ radical empiricism provides the means through which to sidestep
the fallacious, bifurcated vision of the world that an experimental form of
speculation stands against (Savransky, 2017). After James then, specula-
tion does not presuppose an isolated, thinking subject. Rather, by bind-
ing us to the present and heading us towards a future, without guarantees,
speculation testifies for a transformation in our ways of thinking, validat-
ing and acting (Stengers, 2008).
In taking this “apparent unnatural marriage” between the speculative
and the pragmatic further (Debaise & Stengers, 2018: 19), this chapter
seeks to explore how we might rethink speculation as having more to do
with an experimental, micro-subjective venture than with a specific
method or practico-theoretical tool. Combining James’ radical empiri-
cism 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, the chapter
will present three speculative dispositions through which to amplify our
openness towards an indeterminate, unfinished world: (1) an aesthetic
sensibility towards sensation; (2) a testable attitude towards genuine
problems; (3) a pre-cursive faith in the in-between. As highlighted by the
biographical details about James provided at the beginning of each of the
sections that follow, it is important to be clear that what is at stake here is
an alternative way of thinking, one which seeks less to instruct and more
to “learn with and from” the thinkers engaged (Stengers in Savransky &
Stengers, 2018: 131). 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.
106 C. de La Herrán Iriarte

An Aesthetic Sensibility Towards Sensation

Son of American theologian Henry James Sr and brother to the renowned
American novelist Henry James, William James was born into a family of
intellectual privilege. As a result of this, since an early age, James received
a complete and varied education in continental languages, religious stud-
ies, the sciences, and the humanities (Kaag, 2021). Particularly, amongst
the diverse intellectual interests that he developed, James had a strong
passion for painting, which, even if he did not pursue professionally, pro-
vided him with an aesthetic sensibility towards the world that would later
become the cornerstone of his “pluralistic philosophy of experience”
(Savransky, 2021: 146).
Challenging the absolutist assumptions that pervaded nineteenth-
century psychology and science, James articulates a pluralistic philosophy
of experience, which no longer reduces it to a static set of observable
facts. Rather, by resisting any absolutist reference to the one or the many,
James conceptualises experience as a patchwork of conjunctive and dis-
junctive relations, which grows by its edges (Lapoujade, 2019). As he sets
out in his essay Does Consciousness Exist? such conceptualisation of experi-
ence constitutes the basis of his renewed, radical version of empiricism.
Defined as that which “neither admits into its constructions any element
that is not directly experienced, nor excludes from them any element that
is directly experienced”, radical empiricism asserts the primacy of those
immediately felt events, processes and series that precede our conven-
tional conceptual representations (James, 2010: 44). Specifically, in
unsettling the classical empiricist separation between the psychical realm
of the knowing subject and the physical realm of the known object, this
corresponds to the immanent view of the world that Deleuze advances
through his transcendental empiricism (Duvernoy, 2016). As Bignall
et al. (2014) argue, it is precisely here, where we can see the strong influ-
ence that James, via the studies on Anglo-American philosophy of his
university teacher Jean Wahl and the works of Henri Bergson, had upon
Deleuze’s thinking. Whereas James focuses on articulating a processual
interpretation of consciousness, which exceeds all received psychological
forms, Deleuze (1997) theorises a plane of immanence that is immanent
 6 Three Speculative Dispositions After William James… 107

in itself and not to an already constituted, transcendent subject. Ultimately

though, both empiricists enact the same operation, which is to extract the
pre-individual and impersonal zone that lies at the “genesis of sensibility
and thought as such” (Heaney, 2018: 376).
Given the pre-individual and impersonal zones that James and Deleuze
move us towards, how might we frame the relation between speculation,
as a mode of thought, and the material drops and connections that con-
tinuously stretch the tissue of experience? Clearly, such relation cannot
remain subordinated to the authority of an all-knowing, “man [sic] in
isolation”, who merely worships “the thoughts of another man [sic] in
isolation” (Koopman, 2014: xi). Responding to this challenge, James
introduces the notion of ‘ambulatory cognition’, whose nature, as opposed
to the ‘saltatory cognition’ that he associates with transcendental philoso-
phies, is inherently speculative. Rather than being governed by a “com-
mon superior form”, an ambulatory cognition generates itself transversally,
as it de-ambulates across those intensive moments of ‘pure experience’ in
which the thought-of-an-object and the object-thought-of double up
(Lapoujade, 2019: 44). Likewise, for Deleuze, in being neither subjective
nor objective, neither mental nor physical, but also “both at once, simul-
taneously, albeit still virtually”, such moments emphasise the central role
that sensation plays in the emergence of thought (Lapoujade, 2019: 17).
Indeed, in his study of Francis Bacon’s paintings, Deleuze (2003) tells us
that sensation has the capacity to ‘violently’ stimulate our neural path-
ways, spiritual energies and bodily movements before we have time to
register such effects. As James further adds when describing a reader’s
immanently ‘pure’, as opposed to phenomenologically intentional, expe-
rience of a room, sensation captures:

the that in short (for until we have decided what it is it must be a mere that)
is the last term of a train of sensations, emotions, decisions, movements,
classifications, expectations, etc., ending in the present, and the first term
of a series of similar ‘inner’ operations extending into the future, on the
reader’s part. On the other hand, the very same that is the terminus ad
quem of a lot of previous physical operations, carpentering, papering, fur-
nishing, warming, etc., and the terminus a quo of a lot of future ones, in
108 C. de La Herrán Iriarte

which it will be concerned when undergoing the destiny of a physical

room. (2010: 34)

Thus, by prioritising the demonstrative that over the interrogative

what, James’ (2010) radical empiricism points us towards a mode of
thought which thinks less in terms of the cognitive capacities of an indi-
vidual, human subject and more according to the felt, “physical-mental
material” virtualities and relations that render it indistinct from a con-
crete empirical object (Lapoujade, 2019: 3). After James then, specula-
tion can be reconfigured as a ‘virtualised’ kind of experimental endeavour,
which, in order to carry out without falling back on any given divide
between the dogmatic and the experiential, requires us, both geographers
and social scientists, to cultivate an aesthetic sensibility towards
sensation.

A Testable Attitude Towards Genuine Problems

The late 1860s marked a turning point for James. Having struggled with
some physical and psychological impairments throughout his youth, in
1869, James fell into a deep depression, which eventually drove him to
the edge of suicide. Overwhelmed by the terror that struck American
society during the civil war (1861–1865), James had for a long time been
carrying within him a profound despair towards life. Brought up as a
Christian, such despair was further aggravated by the fact that he was not
finding comfort within his own religion that “had little to offer beyond
the usual negative, ‘Thou shall not’” (2009: 85). As Kaag suggests, this
awoke within James an insatiable thirst for “modest, testable beliefs and
truths” (2021: 6) upon which he would later base his pragmatic critique
of determinism:

It professes that those parts of the universe already laid down absolutely
appoint and decree what the other parts shall be. The future has no ambig-
uous possibilities hidden in its womb; the part we call the present is com-
patible with only one totality. Any other future complement than the one
fixed from eternity is impossible. The whole is in each and every part, and
 6 Three Speculative Dispositions After William James… 109

welds it with the rest into an absolute unity, an iron block, in which there
can be no equivocation or shadow of turning. (2009: 67)

Understanding reality to be continuously in-the-making, James puts

forward a pragmatics of thought, which seeks to depart from the rigid
deterministic position described above. Particularly, in evaluating ideas at
the level of their practical consequences and not of their abstract codifica-
tions, James’ pragmatics reconsiders the question of truth. Throughout
much of the history of Western scientific thought, the search for truth has
acted as the universal standard upon which scientists and other determin-
istic thinkers have relied to validate their claims, beyond all doubt. Yet, as
opposed to conceptualising it according to what it is in opposition to
falsehood, James focuses on how truth “happens to an idea” as it verifies
itself virtually within experience (in Lapoujade, 2019: 33). Thus, if tak-
ing forward such pragmatic account of truth: what kind of alternative
criteria might we apply to validate our own geographic and social scien-
tific speculative efforts?
Through his discussion of Pascal’s Wager in The Will to Believe, James
(2009) gives us some hints. Formulated by seventeenth-century French
mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal in his Pensées, Pascal’s Wager
offers us a pragmatic argument for the existence of God. Even though
having reservations about the transcendental assumptions, specifically
those of Catholicism upon which the argument is framed, James and
likewise Deleuze in his cinema books re-appropriate the wager imma-
nently. Conceiving it as more than a mere debate around “belief, non-
belief or abstention” (Cullen, 2020: 216), this responds to the immanent
privileging of choice over causation that both thinkers pursue. On the
one hand, in James’ case, via his critique of Clifford’s evidentialist theory
of belief, and on the other, in Deleuze’s, via his adoption of Nietzsche’s
concept of the dice throw (Bogue, 2006). Instead of reasserting the rigid
principle of cause and effect, typically associated with the deterministic
view which states that “the dice are already cast, that one is unable to
change anything, to make a difference”, choice makes chance an inherent
pragmatic criterion for the production of knowledge (Stengers, 2009: 3).
In this way, what matters is not whether we can predict with certainty
why a situation will unfold in a particular way, but rather how we can
110 C. de La Herrán Iriarte

come to know what it might demand from us, when affirming an “unsta-
ble, indeterminate world” (Lapoujade, 2019: 62). As Savransky (2021)
highlights through his re-reading of the Jamesian notion of the genuine
option, this entails attending to those genuine, or empirically significant,
problems that force us to think and believe, without knowing before
whether they are true or not. However, instead of providing a totalising
solution, which merely imposes a pre-defined pathway for action, James
urges us to experimentally test ourselves through the multiple, unfore-
seen possibilities generated by such problems. Following Cullen (2020)
then, the emphasis is not placed upon the individual terms that consti-
tute problems, but rather upon the concrete interrelations between the
“laid down” and the ongoing and unfinished that reconfigure both
options as equally genuine (James, 2009: 67).
Thus, by reworking the production of knowledge itself as a wager on
the hypothetical, indeterminate, or virtual, James’ pragmatics of thought
foregrounds an alternative method of validation, one which validates
experience less according to an abstract form of truth, and more accord-
ing to the chance of the conceptual-empirical moment in which we throw
the dice and the dice falls back, specifying a new mode of existence
(Bogue, 2006). Consequently, if we wish to more effectively appreciate
the “differences, relations, novelties and potentialities” that problematis-
ing the speculative might lead to, it is important for us, both geographers
and social scientists, to cultivate a testable attitude towards genuine
problems (Savransky, 2021: 155).

A Pre-cursive Feeling of Faith

in the In-Between
In August 1870, James went through a psychologically and spiritually
transformative experience while coming across French philosopher and
mystic Charles Renouvier’s second Essais (Kaag, 2021). Indeed, insisting
upon the importance of acting upon one’s free will, Renouvier gave James
the courage he needed to regain the “healthy love of life” that he had
previously lost (James, 2009: 298). As Lamarre remarks, this evolved into
 6 Three Speculative Dispositions After William James… 111

a continued reference to “the inner”, “inwardness”, “personal religion and

individual experience” (in Lapoujade, 2019: 99), which would become
key in fostering the pre-cursive “feeling of faith” that saved him
(Lapoujade, 2019: 35).
Interested in exploring that something ‘more’ and besides ourselves
that relates us to the world, James develops an individualised approach
towards religion. As he announces at the start of The Varieties of Religious
Experience, such approach is not concerned with “religious institutions”
(James, 2002: 40). Instead, by complimenting it with his long-time fas-
cination for altered states of consciousness and psychic phenomena,
James, who would become the father of American psychology, focuses on
those often invisible spiritual feelings, impulses and passions, which
shape our religious and psychological experiences at a micro-level.
Comparatively, in corresponding to “the order of dreams, of pathological
processes, of esoteric experiences, of drunkenness, and excess” character-
istic of Deleuze’s plane of immanence, this speaks to the simultaneous
folding of the inside and the outside that underpins a micro-subjective
sense of self (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994: 41). While for James, such sense
of self involves a persistent reliance upon the individual as his preferred
method of access, Deleuze associates it to a non-psychoanalytic, and
thereby non-individuated, conception of the unconscious (Smith, 2007).
Despite their conceptual and methodological differences, both thinkers
seek to liberate us from the “stable, established dogmas” that prevent us
from establishing and experiencing novel connections with the world
(Lapoujade, 2019: 62). Therefore, the question for geographers and social
scientists is: what role do such micro-subjective, spiritual aspects play
within our speculative endeavours?
For James, the answer to this question lies within his pragmatic notion
of faith. Defining it as “a lawful and possibly indispensable thing”, James
provides an understanding of faith which does not respond to doctrinal
readings of it (2009: 63). Indeed, even if embracing a “limited (Christian)
God”, James takes faith beyond the religious sphere (Connolly, 2011:
75). Linking it to a general architecture of belief, which encompasses the
spiritual powers inherent not only to religion, but also to the arts, to
nature and to love, faith can be seen as the micro-subjective, spiritual
force that binds us to the world. Similarly to Deleuze’s conception of
112 C. de La Herrán Iriarte

desire (Smith, 2007), faith has the capacity to reconcile our innermost
needs with their empirical context, making us think, believe and act
without enforcing a pre-determined goal or purpose (Lapoujade, 2019).
As Stengers argues through her examination of the mountaineering
example quoted at the beginning of the chapter, faith is then “what is
required” when no assurances are offered (2009: 16). This is not to say
however, that faith is “some abstract notion” to which we can hold on
blindly (Halewood, 2018: 5). Rather, in emerging in-between the psychi-
cal and the physical, faith after James serves as the “pre-cursive” and not
pre-meditative condition (2009: 62), which speculatively induces us to
take the terrible leap into the unknown and indeterminate that will save
us from rolling “into the abyss” (James, 2009: 119).
Ultimately though, as James (2009) realised when asking himself again
the question, ‘Is life worth living?’ in 1895, whether you succeed or not
and thereby have faith or not in your own abilities and those of the world
in which you apply them depends upon your power to choose. Responding
to what Bogue conceptualises as an “immanent ethics of ‘choosing to
choose’” (2006: 33), such power addresses the risk that you, both as a
liver and as a gambler in your own life, are willing to take when choosing
to invest in the possibility of a transformed future:

he who makes the leap, or Pascal’s gambler, he who throws the dice, are
men of a transcendence or a faith. But they constantly recharge imma-
nence: they are philosophers or, rather, intercessors, conceptual personae
who stand in for two philosophers and who are concerned no longer with
the transcendent existence of God but only with the infinite immanent
possibilities brought by the one who believes that God exists. (Deleuze &
Guattari, 1994: 74)

Thus, by placing us in-between the conjunctions of the psychical and the

physical that arise within a concrete empirical moment (Halewood,
2018), James’ concept of pre-cursive faith bespeaks of an alternative
model of action, one which acts less upon our pre-meditated, rationalistic
calculations, and more upon the micro-subjective, spiritual forces that
implicate us in a mental/physical world. As such, if we wish to enhance
our speculative capacity to act, which involves us ‘choosing to choose’
 6 Three Speculative Dispositions After William James… 113

between one mode of life over the other (Bogue, 2006), there is a need
for us, both geographers and social scientists, to cultivate a pre-cursive
feeling of faith in the in-between.

Conclusion: Faith as a Veritable Aesthetic

Of course, we continue to act as we always do, and undoubtedly even with
a considerable ‘return’, but do we still believe in our actions? With what
intensity? Do we still believe in the world that makes us act? How can we
feel faith in others have faith in ourselves, and even have faith in the world?
Which philosophy, which doctrine, will restore our faith?
(Lapoujade, 2019: 6)

Taking James’ pragmatic notion of faith as a starting point, this chap-

ter has sought to rethink how geographers and social scientists might
approach speculation today. Even if writing at a time when the thought
of American transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau, who preached
on the faith of the individual in the “power of Nature”, was on the rise,
James does not stand by such transcendentalist project (Lapoujade, 2019:
4). Rather, as I have highlighted through the risky mountaineering exam-
ple that James describes at the beginning of The Will to Believe, faith can
be reworked as the essential “pre-cursive” and not pre-meditative condi-
tion, which speculatively induces us to take the ‘terrible’ leap into the
unknown and indeterminate yet without determining how or why (2009:
62). Thus, if we understand speculation as having less to do with a spe-
cific method or practico-theoretical tool to apply within concrete empiri-
cal settings such as: smart city urbanism (Tironi, 2018), environmental
sensing (Gabrys, 2017) or post-crisis capitalism (Bear, 2020), and more
with an experimental, micro-subjective venture within an unstable,
unfinished world, what kind of ethico-political implications might mov-
ing towards a concept of pre-cursive faith have for geography, the social
sciences and beyond?
In his recent book Sick Souls, Healthy Minds How William James Can
Save Your Life, Kaag (2021) helps us to think through such question.
Although criticised by some for being yet another attempt at “peddling
114 C. de La Herrán Iriarte

philosophy to the masses” as “spiritual therapy” (Eagleton, 2020: n.p.),

Kaag (2021) shows us that James provides the ethico-political means
through which to restore our faith in this world and not in another. As
Stengers further suggests when stating that his pragmatics favours “the
refusal of certain effects, accepted as perfectly legitimate by many ‘ethical’
philosophers”, James develops a way of thinking which is not merely
intellectual (2009: 9). Indeed, by demanding we, both as researchers and
as livers, attend to those “moments of energetic living” in which the spiri-
tual force of a particular artwork, natural landscape or romantic feeling
revitalises you both psychically and physically, such way of thinking pro-
poses an alternative ethos of life (James, 2009: 144). Likewise Deleuze, in
endorsing faith as a “veritable aesthetic”, such ethos is one which strives
to give us the courage to not be afraid of choosing how we want to live
(1994: 57). The point then is not to think, validate and act according to
our “stable, established dogmas” (Lapoujade, 2019: 62). Instead, as I
have argued in this chapter, it is about cultivating the speculative disposi-
tions which amplify our openness towards the novel and unforeseen con-
nections that can radically transform, at the micro-level, our research
experiences and more importantly, our daily lives.

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