Theodicy across Scales: Hemsterhuis's Alexis and the Dawn of Romantic Cosmism

Symphilosophie: International Journal of Philosophical Romanticism 4:263-293 (2022)
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Abstract

This essay re-reads François Hemsterhuis's philosophical dialogue Alexis (1787) as a post-Copernican cosmic theodicy that prefigures a central nexus of concerns in Early German Romanticism. This theodicy is cross-scalar, in that it functions across three disparate scales: the history of global humanity, the geo-cosmic history of the Earth, and the broader processuality of the universe. From the perspective of this cross-scalar entanglement, I reconstruct Hemsterhuis's vision of the ages of the world and his theodical narrative of the golden age, the Fall, and the cosmic destiny of humanity. Additionally, I offer a counter-reading of this destiny through the story of the Moon in Alexis, and through the contingency, uselessness, and cosmic failure that the Moon embodies.

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Kirill Chepurin
Universität Hamburg

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