Existence, Reality, and God in Peirce's Metaphysics: The Exquisite Aesthetics of the Real

We think by feeling. . .

—Theodore Roethke

In the 1906 essay entitled "Answers to Questions Concerning My Belief in God," Peirce makes some claims about God that are, I think, quite surprising. He says that God is real, but that God does not exist ("it would be fetichism to say that God 'exists'" (6:495, 1906)).¹ These two claims alone would seem to be as surprising to the atheist as to the theist. Peirce goes on to say another, rather surprising, two-part thing. "So, then, the question being whether I believe in the reality of God, I answer, Yes. I further opine that pretty nearly everybody more or less believes this, including many of the scientific men of my generation who are accustomed to think the belief is entirely unfounded" (6:496, 1906). This may strike one as a kind of inversion of the "hermeneutics of suspicion" (Ricouer 1970, 32). It is inverted because the hermeneutics of suspicion generally posits atheistic, materialistic, self-interested motives and beliefs behind a falsely claimed idealistic motive or belief. Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud are the masters of this kind of hermeneutics of suspicion. Peirce, on the other hand, seems to be going the other way, positing as real the idealistic belief in God, and as false the claimed atheistic, materialistic beliefs commonly associated with the modern scientific sensibility.

A natural response to these moves by Peirce, the response natural to a contemporary, postmodern reader of these claims, is to see them as fatally dating Peirce and to dismiss them. I want to suggest, however, that these claims are surprisingly coherent, and that, although they will demand some radical inversions with respect to how one sees and values things, these inversions are, in the best pragmatic, or pragmaticistic, spirit, potentially quite empowering and conducive to more effective action in the world.

My goal is to naturalize the way we talk about, and what we understand by, God; but also to naturalize metaphysics as well. That is, I want to continue Richard Rorty's project of de-divinizing what is putatively taken to be divine, but at the same time, contra Rorty, to divinize, or, at least, to personalize, what is putatively taken to be inanimate matter. I want to continue Cornel West's project, the project that he describes as the project of American philosophy generally, of evading metaphysics, that is, specifically, an ontological metaphysics based on a transcendental logic of analysis, and replace it with a Peircean logic of Thirding,² that will yield a metaphysical sort of realism that is nevertheless grounded in experience and experiment.

I see these goals, in part, as extensions of James's project in essays like "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings" and "The Will to Believe," which is to promote understanding between people of different beliefs and temperaments by demonstrating that there are, good rational grounds for apparently very disparate beliefs and values. That is, one very great value of Peirce's philosophy, it seems to me, is the use that can be made of it in overcoming hate in the spirit of love. Of course, there is no love without hate, or, in other words, there is no love without an Other,³ and so, via Peirce, we are led to identify even with the oppositional factions of obdurate resistance to Thirding.

So one great value of following Peirce's way of Thirding rationalism and empiricism, atheism and theology, religion and science is just the understanding it can promote between peoples in this deeply fractured world. Another, perhaps more individual, value is the way certain possibilities and certain methodologies for understanding the world are opened. A metaphor Peirce uses is that of finding the key to a locked door (6:460; 6:469, 1908). I will argue that both of the two dominant interpretations of nature, that of scientific materialism and religious supernaturalism, shut and lock doors on realms of our own experience, impoverishing our experience, hence our understanding, in ways that are wholly unnecessary.

A difficulty with which one is presented in discussing any...