Professor Yang Jing of the School of Foreign Chinese of Nanjing Normal University
Kant like
As Russell put it in His History of Western Philosophy, "Kant's early writings deal more with science and less with philosophy." In 1755, Kant (1724-1804) published what became his most important scientific work, The General History of Nature and the Theory of Celestial Bodies— although the "nebula hypothesis" proposed in it predates Laplace (1749-1827), but because the author is unknown, this work has long been almost unpopular in the scientific community. At the same time, even fewer people noticed that the book was published in exactly the same year as the Lisbon earthquake — after which Kant's academic research shifted more from the natural sciences to broad philosophy (including ethics and political science). Kant's turn had a profound impact on the history of Enlightenment thought in Germany and Europe. The reason for this is worth exploring.
The Lisbon earthquake is highly related to the historical process of the European Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, and this assertion has become the consensus of contemporary Western historians. The most direct consequence of the earthquake was that the Portuguese Maritime Empire, which was originally trapped in internal and external difficulties, was hit hard by this and eventually disintegrated. At the same time, with the outlawing of the Catholic Jesuits (and their inquisitions), which impeded the spread of free thought, the country's ideological Enlightenment gradually came into line with countries such as Britain and France, and theocracy (or clerical power) was gradually replaced by secular power held by the emerging bourgeoisie. The Reformers, led by the Marquis de Pombal (1699-1782), after purging the papacist political opponents, set out to promote all-encompassing changes in the political, economic, cultural and social life of Portugal. It was these changes that led the backward Portugal to the path of early modernization. Looking at Europe as a whole, the controversy this event sparked within the "literati republic" marked the end of the optimism that pervaded the Enlightenment.
As we all know, the center of gravity of Western civilization began to shift from the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean in the late Middle Ages, while Portugal was located at the junction of the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, and the capital Port of Lisbon was the throat of the Mediterranean Sea. According to the Portuguese historian J. H. Saraiva's view that the Mediterranean Sea in the late Middle Ages was the dividing line between Christian civilization and Islamic civilization confrontation, struggle and mutual penetration, and Portugal's superior geographical location and advanced navigation and shipbuilding technology also provided a strong guarantee for its expansion abroad before other European countries. By the mid-eighteenth century, although the momentum of overseas colonization had slowed, Portugal still had a pivotal position in Europe until the great earthquake.
Earthquakes are natural disasters, but they are not without trace. Nearly half a century before the earthquake, the German thinker Leibniz (1646-1716) prophesied in his philosophical masterpiece Theism (1710): "A Caligula, or a Nero, is far more evil than an earthquake." He satirized João V (1689-1750), the first absolutely despotic king in Portuguese history. In August 1754, the year before the earthquake, the English novelist Henry Fielding called it "the dirtiest city in the world" after visiting Lisbon— although the latter was at the time the european capital after Paris and London, and was known for its prosperity. The "father of the English novel" was impressed by the extravagance of the local aristocracy and clergy class – the word "dirty" does not refer to the streets of Lisbon alone.
The Lisbon earthquake occurred on November 1, 1755, the epicenter of the earthquake is about 100 kilometers west of Lisbon at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, the earthquake has a sensing radius of 200 kilometers, the tsunami wave caused by the earthquake is 30 meters high, Britain, Germany, France are all affected by it (Kant, who is far away in Prussia, also noticed a "strange" change in the water of the nearby Templin Lake), and the death toll is as high as more than 200,000. The earthquake was the largest in European history and one of the most devastating and deadly in human history.
The Great Lisbon Earthquake
Confusingly, the earthquake (and the subsequent fire) destroyed hundreds of churches, monasteries and other public buildings across the city, but the city's brothels were intact, a phenomenon that drove the Jesuit clergy and theologians known for their "piety" madness. The Protestant theologian John Georg Zimmerman (1714-1795) believed that the Catholic way of worshiping saints and the "heretical" judgment were the root causes of the earthquake: the day of the earthquake coincided with The Catholic Church's Halloween, which marked the obvious sign; and the inquisition's first collapse in the earthquake was the inevitable result of "the common indignation of man and God". Catholics do not dare to agree with this. In the autumn of 1756, Gabriel Maragrida (1689-1761), portugal's most influential Jesuit, published a book, "A View: The True Cause of the Great Earthquake," which severely refuted the above "fallacies." In the book, Maragherida exhorts the entire population, including protestants, to reflect deeply: "Don't forget, Lisbon! Destroy our houses, palaces, churches and convents, ignite fires that devour countless treasures, and cause the lives of all beings... It is the wickedness of your sins! The cleric was adamantly opposed to attributing the Lisbon earthquake to a natural phenomenon, insisting, instead, that this was the consequence of the sinful lifestyle of the country's Protestants (whom he called the "neo-Christians") such as watching opera, listening to music, and enjoying bullfighting.
Similar to the above is the English Christian theologian John Wesley (1703-1791). He wrote in his diary in 1755: "Earthquakes are an expression of divine judgment. Before the earthquake, the founder of Wesleyan had observed Halley's Comet more than once, which led him to believe that God's punishment for "disobedient" people was imminent. In fact, the most popular view among pastors and theologians after the great earthquake is that the earthquake was God's warning to his people and a harbinger of the coming of the end—that the world could only be saved by repenting of its sins and changing its way of life.
Not only among religious people, the great earthquake caused widespread controversy within the Enlightenment "Literati Republic", of which the Voltaire-Rousseau dispute was the most famous. After Learning of the details of the earthquake, The European cultural figure Voltaire wrote the famous poem "The Disaster of Lisbon". In the poem, he first questions the "theory of divine condemnation": if the earthquake is God's punishment, what sin does the infant have to be punished? Second, there are more corrupt societies in Paris and London, but why is Lisbon, which is less evil, severely punished? In addition, Voltaire took advantage of this natural disaster to severely ridicule and criticize the "optimistic" philosophy that prevailed in European intellectual circles at that time. The first to bear the brunt of Leibniz's (and his disciple Christian Wolff's) rational interpretation of natural evil and its "predetermined harmony theory" is, in Voltaire's view, a ridiculous nonsense concocted by scholars living in ivory towers and detached from social reality. Later, Voltaire criticized the great English poet Pope (1688-1744) by name in the poem's Preface to the Author, especially the maxim "Reality is reasonable" (or translated as "everything is good")," in his long philosophical poem "On Man" (1734)—according to Pope' view: Individual misfortunes are meaningful because they promote universal well-being. In contrast to Leibniz's stupidity and "naivety," Voltaire considered Pope's claims to be both absurd and "cruel"—a philosophy that talks about the necessity of human suffering is too callous.
Voltaire statue
Voltaire's mockery of the former sages greatly displeased Rousseau. In 1756, Rousseau presented Voltaire with his Book of Divine Intentions. In his letter, Rousseau claimed that in another previous book (On the Origin and Foundations of Human Inequality, 1755), he had pointed out that the natural disasters that human beings suffered were often man-made disasters—such as the Great Lisbon Earthquake, which caused such heavy casualties because the people who "fled to prosperity and vanity" abandoned the countryside and poured into the dense cities. In contrast to Voltaire's questioning of "divine retribution", Rousseau insisted that man-made disasters are more important than natural disasters (as in his later opening statement in Emile, "Everything that comes from the hand of the Creator is good, and when it reaches the hands of man, it is all bad"). In other words, Voltaire was complaining, rousseau thought it was better to complain; civilized people must conduct self-reflection and review. Voltaire's response to Rousseau's letters was a satirical philosophical novel, The Honest Man or Optimism (1759). Voltaire chooses the Lisbon earthquake as the background in his book, the main purpose of which is to attack the "theodicy", in his writings, the Lisbon earthquake destroyed nearly three-quarters of the city, while the Inquisition burned the church "heretics" alive in solemn religious ceremonies, and declared that this was to prevent the destruction of the whole city as the "secret recipe for all souls"—a bitter irony.
In fact, the whole of Europe, including theologians and Enlightenment thinkers, was reflecting on the lisbon catastrophe. The explanation of God's punishment is widely questioned – it has been found that god's wrath (continuous aftershocks) has not been quelled despite the adoption of the most devout religious rites to pray all day long after the great earthquake. On the one hand, this phenomenon has prompted many scientists to think and explore the causes of earthquakes in the modern scientific sense, such as the British astronomer John Mitchell (1724-1793), who was later regarded as the "father of seismology" in modern times, who found that earthquakes are the fluctuations eventually caused by the displacement of rock masses below the surface; on the other hand, Enlightenment thinkers realized that breaking through the theological inhibitions, popularizing knowledge, and educating the people are the only way for European society to transform and enter modernization. In this process, the philosopher Kant thought the most deeply about the great earthquake and had the most far-reaching impact.
Kant, who had almost never left Königsberg, learned of the Lisbon earthquake through newspaper news. This event greatly touched Kant and directly affected his future scientific and philosophical research. According to historical records, Kant was one of the first scholars to conduct in-depth research on the causes and consequences of earthquakes. As early as late January 1756, he published an article in the Königsberg Weekly Newspaper Inquiry and Advertising News, entitled "Historical and Natural Descriptions of Strange Events of earthquakes that shook a large part of the Earth at the end of 1755." He concluded that the moon triggers tidal waves, and the fluctuations of the tide trigger the burning of minerals in the center of the earth, which in turn causes a chain reaction of volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunamis — according to Newton's theory, Halloween (November 1) is the day and earth with the least gravitational force between the day and the earth due to the change in the angle of the celestial orbit. Therefore, Kant proposed that in the future, new houses should avoid river valleys and fault zones as much as possible. At the end of the article, Kant borrows the theme to argue that "it is necessary to have earthquakes on the surface from time to time, but we do not have to build luxurious buildings on them" - the reason is that "we are not born to build permanent places of residence ... He has a higher pursuit of life."
After that, Kant published three consecutive earthquake science papers, taking the Lisbon earthquake as a case, trying to explain the conditions, processes and causes of natural phenomena including earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes and other natural phenomena in a broader sense, and trying to provide solutions for reducing earthquake disasters. One of the papers specifically addresses the positive factors of volcanic eruptions: geothermal heat is conducive to plant growth, can emit abundant salts from the ground, and dust containing sulfur can purify the air; in addition, the impact of the volcano can prevent the earth's crust from rigidifying, and asserts that people can even enhance their physique by soaking in volcanic hot springs (hot spring therapy became popular in Europe in the future, not unrelated to Kant's advocacy).
For Kant, the lisbon earthquake was important not only in the fact that it promoted scientific research, but also in the fact that it had become a metaphor, inspiring the Königsberg "hermit" to turn his gaze from the starry sky overhead to the earth beneath his feet. As the German historian Ulrich Roffler points out, the earthquake was considered a "key breakthrough point in general optimism" in the Enlightenment, and often also seen as a turning point in the Enlightenment, when Enlightenment thinkers began to see natural violence such as earthquakes (volcanoes, tsunamis, and plagues) as revolutionary metaphors for overthrowing the established order that existed— and as Engels later put it, "There is no great historical catastrophe that is not compensated for by historical progress." Not only that, but Kant (and later Goethe) saw from the French Revolution a "terrifying side of the transformation of modernity": abuse of power and violence.
According to historians, both the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789 have made ordinary people see the rationality of revolutionary violence. Natural violence brings about the "revolution of the earth", which is the inevitable movement of nature, so political turmoil cannot be avoided. The violence of the French Revolution was "propaganda in the name of nature, execution in the name of nature, criticism in the name of nature", thereby destroying the old system and bringing freedom, equality and fraternity to human society. In order to strengthen the sanctity of the revolution, the image of the volcanic eruption is also consciously or unconsciously associated with the violent revolution – the sanctity of the mountain is fused with the destructiveness of the fire to form a politicized "volcanic impression": which is both turbulent and energetic, and naturally becomes the symbol of the Great Revolution. Proponents of the French Revolution generally had sympathy and romantic imaginations of violence—believing that violence was enough to destroy and transform the old institutions, as the German thinker Ernst Arndt (1769-1860) put it: "Tyrants and kings like dust, pyramids and colossus will collapse, and earthquakes and volcanic eruptions will put them in a difficult situation." Only truth is eternal. In this regard, even Kant was no exception—according to Russell, "He had always been sympathetic to the Revolution before the Age of Terror." ”
Kant's greatness, however, is that his reflections on history and reality did not stop there. In the face of nature's mighty destructive forces and the resulting religious strife, Kant first advocated the demarcation of knowledge, acknowledging that man is a "limited rational being." He dismissed the Leibniz-Wolff system and the doctrine of the Jewish philosopher Mendelssohn as "the last testament of monastic metaphysics", because this type of optimistic philosophical doctrine infinitely exaggerates the rational power of human beings, believing that "all failures, all evils, are caused by insufficient knowledge" - as long as human beings continue to learn new knowledge and constantly improve themselves, they can achieve the "eternal progress" of human society. Kant, however, believed that reason itself is infinite, but it needs to go through a vast process of acquisition, so theoretically, unless human beings are immortal, they can attain infinite reason. According to Kant, the word value (Latin for "berm" and Old German for "shelter") was meant to be nihilistic in dissolving the meaning of human existence, but if human beings take reason (instrumental reason or scientific reason) as the standard of value, it is very likely that they will eventually lose value, because scientific reason is limited and insufficient to serve as the basis of value for human existence. In this way, Kant had to limit his knowledge, thus leaving a place for faith—this is what Kant called the "Copernican revolution" in the field of philosophy in the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1787).
After completing his inquiry and critique in the field of ethics, Kant turned his attention to the field of political science, which explored the meaning and necessity of enlightenment. In 1794, he published Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment? In the article, Kant defines "enlightenment as coming out of his own created juvenile state." Ordinary people are willing to remain in juvenile status for life, not only because of their own laziness and timidity, but also because of the foolishness and incitement of the rulers and the cultivation of prejudice with ulterior motives. Citing the French Revolution as an example, Kant argues that "a revolution may lead to the downfall of individual dictatorships and oppressive systems, but it will never bring about a real change in the way of thinking, but will make new prejudices the guide of thoughtless gangsters." According to his view, a change of thinking or a revolution of thought is the whole meaning of "enlightenment".
Thus, in his essay "The Controversy of the Faculties" (1798), published four years later, Kant advocated that "lower" philosophy should be separated from the "imperial" higher disciplines such as theology and law. The state established the imperial discipline to intimidate its subjects in order to facilitate its rule, and the individual's pursuit of independence and autonomy will be shackled to authoritarianism and tradition, to the point of being afraid and stagnant; on the contrary, philosophy only obeys reason, is neither a "handmaiden of theology" nor bound by secular power—philosophers should freely and deeply engage in rational thinking and criticism. Kant argues that politics and religion are the two most sensitive areas of criticism—and therefore the most need to be criticized—and his famous phrase is that "if the critic cannot criticize everything, he cannot criticize anything."
This is also Kant's "freedom of enlightenment", that is, the freedom to use one's reason openly in all affairs. Yet in his lifetime, as far as the eye can see, there are restrictions on freedom everywhere—" said the officer: "Don't talk about it, just train!" The treasurer said, don't talk about it, just pay taxes! The clergy said, don't talk about it, just believe! In Kant's view, restrictions on civil liberties can only make them increasingly numb and cowardly, while greater civil liberties benefit the spiritual freedom of the nation. In his words, "if nature makes the seed which it cares for sprouts and grows under this hard shell, it will gradually in turn affect the character of the nation and, ultimately, the basic principles of government, which will consider it very beneficial to treat man in accordance with human dignity." But sadly – "And now, man is more of a machine."
In 1933, Hitler came to power. In an unprecedented catastrophe (which Theodore Adorno regarded as a "twentieth-century replica of the Lisbon earthquake"), the writings of Kant (along with Marx himself), whom Marx called the "political philosopher of the French Revolution," were banned in Germany, with the same charge of spreading "heresy" as the inquisition was customary.
bibliography:
Thomas Kendrick,The Lisbon Earthquake, London: Methuen, 1956
Garrett Thomson, Kant, Zhao Chengwen et al., Zhonghua Bookstore, 2002
Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (Part 2), translated by Ma Yuande, The Commercial Press, 1996
Editor-in-Charge: Huang Xiaofeng
Proofreader: Shi Gong
The Surging News shall not be reproduced without authorization. News Report: 4009-20-4009