What role do sublime destructive events play in history? History is not a vertical accumulation of facts. Rather, it is an almost infinite field of echoes, reflections and influences. It is the creative historian’s purpose to investigate history to find undiscovered relationships. To think of things in new ways, rather than simply adding to the already-long chronology of the world. In a supra-historical sense then, events and individuals separated by cultures and centuries can have direct interaction. In this essay I would like to investigate two disasters, their long-range cultural impact and will argue that these events form epoch-changing historical axes.

In 1755 Lisbon, Portugal was destroyed in a cataclysmic earthquake. In an age before electric light-pollution, the fire could be seen from Paris. Approximately 100,000 people were killed. Wood cuts and prints circulated images of the event around the world. Today, this disaster is distant from our consciousness, but the Lisbon earthquake caused cultural changes which would have planetary consequences. Before the earthquake, Portugal was one of the most backward countries of the counter-reformation. Heretics were burned regularly in Lisbon’s central square. In Europe, Enlightenment thinking had been evolving for several centuries, especially in the work of Newton and Spinoza, but the experience of the earthquake solidified the triumph of the Enlightenment in Europe.

Immortalized in Candide, thinkers after the earthquake adopted an anti-leibnizian model of the universe which sought not to passively accept “God’s perfect nature” as Leibniz had done, but rather to understand the chaos of nature and employ human agency to improve it. The earthquake was understood as a natural phenomena, not an act of God, and immobility and causality were put further into doubt as Copernican and Newtonian models were increasingly proved. Philosophical Optimism argues that the universe is perfect because it is God's benign will. In the wake of Lisbon's destruction, Optimism was rejected. Instead Skepticism and Rationalism were adopted. Adorno, in Negative Dialectics, identifies the earthquake as one of the key events to 'cure' philosophers of Theism. Efforts to understand what had occurred were early explorations of what we now know as plate tectonics and geology. Kant, for example, wrote pamphlets attempting to explain the dynamics of the earthquake and its destructiveness was instrumental in Kant's development of the concept of the Sublime. The Sublime is the apperception of the annihilation of the sensible self in face of vastness which is too mighty to comprehend. Sublime events are simply beyond the limits of human imagination and comprehension. A catastrophic earthquake, an atomic bomb or an unimaginable terrorist attack qualify as sublime events.

Now, the triumph of the Enlightenment in Europe did not have entirely happy outcomes. It resulted in Revolutionary and Napoleonic excess in France and in the case of Portugal, led to brutal colonial war in Africa. Adorno argues in Dialectic of Enlightenment that Enlightenment rationalization and systemization resulted in Totalitarian Ideology and the Holocaust. So, while the Enlightenment has given us Democracy, human rights and rational science, it has also provided the rationale for total war, slavery and genocide.

While Portugal suffered a natural disaster, the United States recently suffered an ideological disaster. The September 11, 2001 attacks are the formative event of our time whose aftershocks continue to circle the planet. If the Lisbon Earthquake is a sublime destructive event that opens the triumph of the Enlightenment, is 9/11 the sublime destructive event that dialectically closes it? Are these disasters Dialectical Images? If the Enlightenment gave us Democracy, human rights and rationality, what has been the result of the 9/11 attacks? We have witnessed a new paradigm of ideologically-driven illegal aggressive war, the imperial occupation of key strategic zones, torture, the failure of democracy and religious fanaticism in various sectarian conflicts and ersatz Christianity in this country. Is this the post-Enlightenment? Our democracies have failed, universal human rights are no longer respected and our rational science and technologies are actively engaged in melting the ice caps.

The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 solidified the Enlightenment for all its good and bad. While today we reject Enlightenment concepts such as moral universality, perhaps we should not abandon the Eighteenth Century and its ideas entirely in the face of what the Twenty First has shown us so far.