§19 The Optimum

The present chapter describes some of the ways in which Hemsterhuis attempts to make time perceptible in his writing, and it proceeds by setting up a contrast between the function of the present in the early and the late Hemsterhuis’ practices of philosophical communication. Before 1775, Hemsterhuis’ writing is structured according to a model of optimal form – a model which privileges intuitive over discursive reasoning, which is hostile to temporal and historical succession, and which calls, instead, for simultaneity in thinking, i.e., the coexistence of as many ideas as possible. It is a model of the all-at-once. After 1775, Hemsterhuis begins to write in a way that is open to history and succession as well as optimal form. The dialogues stage a conflict between the present and the past – not just a quarrel between the ancient perihelion and the modern perihelion, but between historicity and presentism, between the virtual and the actual.

In the last of his published dialogues, Alexis, Hemsterhuis returns to a principle that had served as ‘a leitmotif across his work … a genuine guiding thread’ (Boulan 1924: 66) – the ideal of the optimum. He writes,

Hemsterhuis describes an epistemic ideal that consists in making coexist as many ideas as possible so as to intuit their rapports.