In this essay I take up Schelling’s efforts to establish a new strategy for proving the existence of God on the basis of what he calls “metaphysical empiricism.” The conception of metaphysical empiricism involves a unique kind of reflective experience grounded in the establishment of living relationships between and among spiritual beings. The endeavor to interpret experience via metaphysical empiricism becomes especially challenging when the object of interpretation is God. If the essence of the deity has already been determined in the negative, a priori philosophy, and if the necessary sequence of stages in God’s progressive revelation has already been worked out as well, then what can the observed actuality of the world add to the evidence? Is this not a case, as Habermas and others have charged, of superfluous recapitulation? Worse, could Schelling be guilty of the logical fallacy known as “affirming the consequent” (i.e., a fallacy of the form: “If A, then B. B. Therefore A”). These are difficult hermeneutical puzzles, still hotly debated among Schelling scholars.
My proposed solution to the problem is this: To Schelling, whether or not God has in fact willed to exist, in any case His absolute supremacy and perfection as He is in Himself, beyond existence (als Überexistierendes), would remain untouched. The positive philosophy, accordingly, is not so much concerned with determining the predicative being of God’s nature as it is with determining whether the instantiation of the divine fiat, considered as a whole, reinforces or undermines the gradually awakening sense of religious awe, of standing in a direct and personal relationship to the author of the universe.
I conclude by raising some critical questions concerning the inner coherence and plausibility of metaphysical empiricism as a method for the human sciences.
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