(Director’s note: Johannes Schmidt teaches German in the Clemson Languages Department, where he will offer a course on “Tolerance in the Eighteenth Century” (in German) in the fall of 2020 and on Hanna Arendt and Totalitarianism (in English) in the spring of 2021. This is Clemson Humanities Now.)
On November 1, 1755, an earthquake off the coast of Lisbon struck and destroyed a large portion of the city; aided by subsequent fires and massive tsunami wave, it claimed between 30,000 and 100,000 lives (of about 275,000 residents).
It disturbed all aspects of life. Economically, the destruction of one of the most important European port city was felt in all places of trade and commerce. The news of the earthquake reached London within a day; newspapers in Hamburg, my own hometown, reported only a few days later. Colonial politics became magnified; the outbreak of the Seven Years War (French and Indian War) may have been hastened due to the rising tensions caused by an increased desire for control of trade with the New World.
Art and literature took note, and so did the Enlightenment in general, reconsidering the Leibnizian philosophy of optimism. In his Candide, ou l’Optimisme, Voltaire famously makes fun of “the best of all worlds.” Johann Gottfried Herder—who together with Goethe coined the term zeitgeist (spirit of the age)—reprimanded the “philosophes” for hubris; they had falsely proclaimed a golden age that advanced beyond every other historical era and was above every other culture: “‘In Europe now, there is supposed to be more virtue than ever, [than] everywhere in the world has been?’ And why? because there is more enlightenment in the world – I believe that just for that reason it has to be less” (1774).
The faith in Enlightenment only made philosophy too proud of the knowledge gained than aware of that which we cannot control in nature. Unsurprisingly, neither knowledge nor reason predicted this catastrophe. To this day, earthquake predictions are plagued by their unpredictability—much to the vexation of the Italian government concerning the botched warning of the devastating earthquake in the Abruzzo region in 2009. The unpreparedness and our unenlightened–irrational, at times even heartless–response to the COVID-19 pandemic seem to be grounded in the same misgivings about nature and knowledge that many of the European thinkers had before 1755.
Goethe’s observation about the earthquake stands out to me today: “Perhaps, the daemon of terror had never before spread as speedily and powerfully over the world”. As a six-year old, he was terrified, despite being more than 1500 miles away. In Georg Philipp Telemann’s “Ode of Thunder” (TWV 6:3a-b, 1756 [link to the entire piece: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDW19YqDq64]), we can hear the horrific feeling the existence of an “angry God” must have evoked; we can perceive young Goethe’s fear of the Hebrew Bible’s “wrathful deity” that could not be conciliated: Listen today to the frantic fifth and sixth movement from the Donnerode, entitled “The voice of God shatters the cedars!” [https://youtu.be/7ZUUBmol_HE] and “[The voice of God] makes the proud mountains collapse!” [https://youtu.be/4D-u6VslLlg]. Our anxieties connect us to the desolation people felt in the aftermath of 1755; one might hear the aftershocks in the fifth movement or people fleeing from proud palaces collapsing in the sixth.
It was Kant who—having already studied the physics of the earth’s crust—reminded us of the need for rational-scientific investigation into disastrous occurrences:
“Great events that affect the fate of all mankind rightly arouse that commendable curiosity, which is stimulated by all that is extraordinary and typically looks into the causes of such events. In such cases, the natural philosopher’s obligation to the public is to give an account of the insights yielded by observation and investigation”, he writes in one of his three studies on earthquakes (1756).
Of much needed insight was his proclamation that the event dictated a clear distinction between moral evil and natural disasters. Since all natural occurrences are subject to physical laws, a supernatural cause (divine punishment) for natural disasters must be rejected.
Epidemiologically, the coronavirus does not discriminate. Neither did the earthquake spare the righteous more than the corrupt. Yet, both events show the drastic inequalities brought forth when calamity strikes. While the earthquake affected the rich and the poor alike, the pious and the heretic equally, the nobility and the outlawed in similar ways, the fate of those who survived is very different. The king of Portugal—who spent the holiday away from Lisbon—never set foot into the city ever again; the entire royal family relocated to palaces elsewhere. A king’s luxury mirrored today: the affluent fled the cities hit hard by the pandemic and retreated into their summer homes. In the end, viruses and earthquakes do discriminate.
One of the core ideas of Kant’s philosophy of ethics is the importance of human dignity: the incalculable worth of a human being’s life, which is beyond any form of measurement. Free human existence is fundamental. Kant makes perfectly clear that the categorical autonomy of all human beings is absolute and independent of any phenomenological or physiological distinction. This imperative is as valid today as tomorrow. (Kant’s Eurocentric thinking is certainly disturbing and his belief in Western civilization’s supremacy contradicts the inclusiveness that may be suggested in this kind of universal call for autonomy of all peoples and races.) Still, I read this today as an affirmation that there cannot be any material or any other justification for the loss of even a single life.
Protest against racism and inequality, as well as solidarity with all whose human dignity has been and continues to be violated, is not only legitimate but also necessary at all times, especially during natural and manmade disasters. Even more so, for us in privileged positions, it is our responsibility.
