After the Machine of the World
Allegorical Scarcity as an Epistemic Condition in the Expanding Universe
Danilo de Athayde
Ratio Ethica: Toward Epistemic Justice, international conference of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts with the University of São Paulo · 27 August 2026
Paper presented at a conference. The text has not been published.
Abstract
The Western tradition of the “Machine of the World”, from Dante to Camões, organized a desire for intelligible totality, operating simultaneously as a cosmological structure and a poetic allegory. In this model, the cosmos presented itself as a legible artifact, ordered for human comprehension, a dimension that, in Camões, serves as a compass for imperial and historical expansion. However, modernity imposes a radical rupture of scale and nature, a transition that finds its critical witness in Carlos Drummond de Andrade, who, by rejecting cosmic revelation as a “trifling gift” [dom despiciendo] and facing the mining “pit” in his hometown of Itabira, denounces the collapse of ancient mechanical metaphors. We no longer inhabit a concentric “World” in the classical sense of mundus (a closed, ordered cosmos designed for habitation), but an accelerating, expanding universe, governed by a mathematical efficacy that escapes sensible imagination. This paper investigates how this ontological turn generates an “allegorical scarcity”: a diminished capacity of language to render a physical reality defined by events and relations rather than stable substances. I argue that this scarcity entails an epistemic-justice cost, widening the gap between technically valid knowledge and socially shareable intelligibility. Instead of restoring a lost symbolic cosmology, theory should embrace an asymptotic horizon as a new ethical figure. Under this lens, the “Machine of the Universe” emerges as a fugitive edge of representation, superseding the old image of visible gears and demanding an epistemic stance that recognizes structural incompleteness as the condition of knowledge.
Keywords Allegorical Scarcity · Machine of the World · Carlos Drummond de Andrade · Modern Cosmology · Epistemic Justice · Legibility
In plain terms
For centuries poetry could show the whole universe in a single scene, that of the machine of the world opening before a man, from Dante to Camões. Today’s cosmology describes an expanding universe with a mathematical precision that imagination no longer keeps up with. The paper follows that passage to Drummond’s refusal beside the mine at Itabira and asks what is lost when technically valid knowledge drifts away from what a community can figure and share. In place of the old cosmology, it proposes the asymptotic horizon as a new ethical figure.
Excerpt
The whole is gone as a picture and remains as a question, and between the pit at Itabira and a horizon that recedes as we approach it, the dispute over the figuration of the real remains, fortunately, open, waiting for the poems that will show our universe as Dante showed his world, there where language falters, where the desire for the whole, having outlived every machine built to satisfy it, goes on up the road.