ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 discusses the incorporation of perfect truth-as-openness into a temperate theodicean ideal. Here the focus is on Hegel’s theodicy; as a systematic model of balance, between cool ‘rationality’ and warm, impassioned response to moral ‘reality’. So Hegel’s doctrine is presented as a via media, between two opposing extremes; one represented by Schopenhauer, the other by Lev Shestov. Schopenhauer and Shestov are both, albeit in quite opposite ways, militantly anti-theodicean thinkers. When Hegel speaks of his own philosophy of history as a ‘theodicy’, this is sometimes misunderstood, as if he were merely adapting the older theodicy of Leibniz by historicising it. In fact however – it is argued – he really is attempting something quite radically alien to Leibniz, and much more interesting: a systematic bid for temperate balance in the moral interpretation of history.
