27/10/2023
At exactly 9:40 am on the first day of November 1755, a strong earthquake struck the city of Lisbon, the capital of the Portuguese Empire at the time, destroying it completely. It was followed by several aftershocks, all of which caused severe damage. Public buildings and homes were destroyed, as a result of which fires broke out, killing more than 100,000 people.
The earthquake toppled the city from its throne, and sparked a strong debate between European philosophers and thinkers, including the Frenchman Voltaire, his compatriot Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the German Gottfried Leibniz, and others. It was the reason for the development of what is known today as seismology, and it formed a dividing line between randomness and organization, and contributed to the world’s transition to what was later called the “Era of Enlightenment.”
Europe was at that time on the verge of a new intellectual era, following a revolutionary intellectual and philosophical movement at that time. At a time when the entire continent was subject to the absolute authority of kings and the church; Enlightenment intellectuals questioned the role of the church, the state, and the aristocracy and their control over the lives of citizens. Calls began to separate the authority of the church from the state.
A cultural revolution shook Europe
The Lisbon earthquake was not just an ordinary local disaster; In addition to the cultural wealth contained in the libraries that were destroyed by the earthquake, fire, and water, it left a profound impact on European thought, because it baffled philosophers and theologians and pushed them to rethink a number of metaphysical dilemmas (metaphysics), most important of which is the dilemma of evil and the justice and goodness of God. To develop their view of natural phenomena and their relationship to human actions.
The Lisbon earthquake shook all educated minds in Europe at that time, and due to the lack of rapid means of communication at that time, Voltaire, for example, who was residing in Geneva at the time, did not hear about it until November 24; That is, more than 20 days after it happened. There was no telephone, radio, television, or Internet.
Voltaire always said: “We sow and future generations reap. We will not see with our own eyes the fruits of our efforts, our toil, and the sweat of our brow. We will die under the shadow of religious obscurantism, superstition, and sorcery, and we will not see the first threads of dawn. But it does not matter! What is important is that enlightenment triumphs, and that you enjoy it.” “For future generations, progress will inevitably occur, and it will shine its light on all of Europe, and perhaps on all of humanity.” This is what actually happened after his death and the death of his entire enlightenment generation.
The French philosopher Voltaire (1694-1778) is considered one of the most prominent people who contemplated the disaster of the Lisbon earthquake, and this contemplation bore fruit. A long poem He also called “An Examination of the Postulate That All Is Well” (1756) and a famous philosophical novel with a satirical and satirical tone called “Candide, or Optimism” (1759).
In these works, Voltaire attacked the optimistic tendency represented by the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) and the English Leibnizian poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744), rejecting what was known as the “everything is fine” philosophy.
“World Charity”
The basis of Leibniz’s philosophy was the statement of the goodness of this world and its superiority over everything that could exist: “Because all things were settled once and for all in the greatest possible order and harmony, since supreme wisdom and mercy cannot act except according to complete harmony.”
On the other hand, Voltaire ridiculed the perspective of the goodness of the world, in the words of “Candide” in his famous novel: “If this is the best of the worlds possible, what are the other worlds?” According to Voltaire, it is difficult for common sense to accept the evils of this world and justify the torments and distress of the sufferers. Voltaire’s works seemed to be a comprehensive, and sometimes proactive, response to all philosophies of hope, from Leibniz, through Rousseau, and all the way to Hegel, who was still a young child on the day of Voltaire’s death.
As for Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), he took a position different from that of his counterpart, Voltaire, and wrote him a long letter dated August 18, 1756, in response to his poem. Rousseau did not attack existence and did not see any radical evil in it, but rather took an “environmental” position. He was hostile to life inside cities crowded with people and full of tall buildings, and called for simple, harmonious living that does not lead to the destruction or depletion of the land.
Rousseau criticized Voltaire for his gloomy vision and excessive pessimism, and he saw that his thought increased human misery and suffering instead of giving him solace and alleviating his pain.
But Rousseau fell into a different kind of pessimism, because he exonerated nature and divine providence and placed all responsibility on the shoulders of man and his civilization to the extent that he considered the Portuguese’s arrogance in architecture to be the main reason for the high number of deaths in the Lisbon earthquake.
It is known that Rousseau is hostile to civilizational and technical progress and calls for a more harmonious lifestyle that is less harmful to nature. In his opinion: “Evil does not stem from the nature of the world, because God created it best and perfected it. Evil stems from human interference and misconduct.”
As for the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), he went beyond the metaphysical debate and came to a more mature and rational vision. He tried to approach earthquakes from a scientific perspective. He wrote about the Lisbon earthquake in 3 separate texts. He did not deal with the earthquake as a tragedy, but rather as a scientific problem that he tried to describe and understand. He presented a theory of earthquakes and volcanoes that led to the birth of a new science.
The Lisbon earthquake, then, led to the establishment of a scientific discipline, which is seismology, and the lesson that we should draw is the necessity of contemplating disasters or “natural evils,” not from a negative theological perspective based on indignation, anger, and protest against divine providence, and blaming God for cruelty and impotence. It only leads to more metaphysical debates that do not lead to the benefit of the human species, but rather from an examining scientific perspective based on contemplating phenomena, studying them, and trying to anticipate them and limit their harms, and in that lies the interest of man who embarks on his adventure boldly without relying on heaven’s intervention.
From the perspective of those influenced by the philosophy of the European Enlightenment, the Lisbon earthquake was a message that natural disasters are not a punishment imposed on people, and that reason and nature are not identical, and any meeting between them is only an accidental meeting, and then the Lisbon earthquake created a rift between the human species and its planet, as the ontological difference became clear ( Existentialism) between man as a being possessing mental and moral effectiveness, and nature as a system that does not operate according to human will and actions, but rather has its own laws and methods of operation. Therefore, it is foolish to project our moral judgments onto the natural system.
American author in the field of philosophy, Susan Neiman, believes that the Lisbon earthquake: “was a witness to the birth of modernity, as the world began to mature and move away from theology (the study of theology and belief) and metaphysics (beyond nature) towards scientific consideration and human responsibility.”
Another lesson of the earthquake, as described by later historians, was the fragility of human existence and its terrifying accidentality. A human being’s life is like a worn-out straw that any wind can scatter and tamper with its fate. Let us imagine for a moment the amount of dreams, ambitions, projects, plans and hopes that are dashed in a few minutes.
Thus, the mid-18th century witnessed the height of the Enlightenment. At a time when the public tended to think that the destruction of the city of Lisbon was divine revenge on Portugal, which had invaded many of the safe lands of South America in order to form its empire; The thinkers of this era took it upon themselves to refute this idea by eliminating the control of church thinking, and the beginning of an era that supports free thinking and relies more on science.
