voltaire and earthquakes

"When you were hanged, dissected, stunned with blows and made to row in the galleys, did you always think that everything was for the best in this world?"
- Voltaire, Candide

Like a favorite landscape, Candide is a book that I seem to return to again and again. And, maybe like a lot of people right now, I've been thinking about the book's opening chapters when Candide-- along with the syphilitic Pangloss and the sailor from the boat-- were shipwrecked and washed up on Lisbon's shores just moments before the city is struck by the infamous mega-earthquake of 1755.

As if the earthquake wasn't enough, it is followed by fires and a great tsunami that caused the complete destruction of one of the world's greatest cities of the time. Indeed, the human suffering was so great that the disaster sparked philosophical and religious debates on the nature of Evil that continued across Europe for a long time after. Voltaire's Candide being perhaps among the most famous.

In one of the vivid scenes of the novel, as Candide is lying there trapped under the rubble, he begs for wine and light. The sailor has gone off to pillage but what of Candide's companion Pangloss? Well, our man Pangloss is too busy philosophisizing to be of any real help. Though thousands have perished, he tells his friend lying under the rubble, still everything is just as it should have been for "How could Leibnitz have been wrong?"

How indeed?

 Providence Lost-- I am finally making my way through Genevieve Lloyd's book, Providence Lost, which is very interesting in reminding us that there were once alternatives to Descrates’ idea that autonomous will (and choice) is the locus of freedom. And Lloyd argues that the formation of the "controlling, autonomous self of modernity--which we now take so readily for granted-- was conceptually dependent on changing ideas of providence." Indeed, so overwhemingly dominant has the cartesian conception of human agency as the locus of freedom become that we could almost forget that there is another equally compelling tradition (seen, in Spinoza & Hegel's transfiguration of Stoic views on freedom, for example) which posits freedom and the Good Life as being taken up with the capacity of –shaping- one’s life around the recognition of necessity and the adapting of self to others and to the cosmos (for the Stoics, "following nature" has an ethical force that de-emphasizes personal choice and posits agency as an attunement with nature and the rationality of the cosmos--ie, Providence, Fate and the Divine and conflated).

There was an old philosophy paper on Free Will written a long time ago—maybe 50 years ago?-- by a British philosopher Peter f.Strawson, which suggested that because it seems to be a fact that phenomenologically people tend to react to events in terms of feeings of moral responsibility and that these feelings are somehow more fundamental than any concepts we might have concerning free will-- that it is these feelings that ought to remain the focus of inquiry. That is to say that even if it were possible to prove perfect determinism or causality of all events, still human beings would tend to view things in terms of reactive attitudes which are based on inter-personal relationships. Such reactive attitudes could be feelings of “gratefulness” or “resentfulness” whereby even if everything was causally determined (something not provable in any case) --still within that determination, human beings do tend to have internalized culturall- determined 1) concepts of what appropriate and fitting and 2) a belief that being true to oneself in terms of moral sentiments is the foundation for how we hold people morally responsible.

In a sense, Voltaire is not doing anything all that different when he tackles the problem of evil in the aftermath of the Lisbon Earthquake. At the time the Lisbon earthquake had a profound affect on the collective imagination, but Voltaire--rather than focus on the philosophical and religious debates on the role of providence insisted that people must remain focused on human folly and compassion--for it is only in our human actions that we can own moral responsibility. More pain and suffering is caused by human beings unto other human beings than is caused by natural disasters and so it is there that we must direct our attention. We must seek to control or improve those things that are truly in our ability to control and leave what is out of our control to ideas of Providence. Or, as Lloyd says, "In place of philosophical speculation, Voltaire urged a response of simple compassion or pity" based on taking responsibility for what human beings can control.  

To take responsibility for what one can control: "Voltaire's characters are carried along in the flow of life--joyeous, even against their will; always ready for a celebratory feast, for a lively conversation. And they do, in the end, reach some measure of self-reflective contentment in taking responsibility for what they can control: they agree to cultivate their garden."

With this in mind, I think it may be safe to say that the more a culture emphasizes necessity or contingency (as well as inter-dependence and a field of obligations) the more that culture will prioritize ideas of "appropriateness" or fittingness. The stoics called this going with the flow, "cosmic sympathy," and while it seems that there is less room for human agency, the negotiating of appropriate behavior via shared sensibility or human reason would demand a self-reflection in just the way Voltaire seems to be suggesting.  

And, I think, then, it probably follows that where freedom and the Good Life are grounded in a recognition of necessity (not in a Cartesian vision of Will), --like earthquakes rumbling from afar-- we would be faced with the fact that we quite simply cannot control everything; indeed, human responsibility-as well as the will to control nature-- becomes less an issue in a world that is neither the best of all possible worlds nor a world where everything is under our control either. All we can do is ride things out with compassion and grace, I suppose--like the people of Japan. (Anne Thomas' first letter from Sendai here and Voltaire's famous Poem on the Lisbon Disaster here)

 

Comments

[Sam]

Your essays are always so thought-provoking; and this time, what an amazing parallel to current times. I really appreciated the links to more material - especially the article on the survivor spirit. I learned so much just from that article alone, from the origins of the divine wind to the idea of the atom bomb as atonement.

[John Emerson]

%0 years ago is "recently".