The Will to Realize

Abstract Chapter 8 reconstructs Vivekananda’s nuanced cosmopolitan account of the dynamics of religious faith. Vivekananda made a unique intervention in late nineteenth-century debates about faith and reason by steering a middle course between the stringent evidentialism of W. K. Clifford and T. H. Huxley and the anti-evidentialist fideism of William James. Vivekananda justifies religious faith on the basis of an “expanded evidentialism,” arguing that supersensuous perception and mystical testimony are valid sources of evidence that support the rationality of religious belief. Vivekananda’s various remarks about faith hint at a dynamic conception of religious faith, according to which one’s faith evolves in the following three stages: (1) faith as sub-doxastic intellectual assent, (2) faith as belief, and (3) faith as self-authenticating realization. The chapter concludes by bringing Vivekananda into critical dialogue with William Alston, who was one of the first Western philosophers to distinguish doxastic and non-doxastic forms of religious faith.