From Enlightenment to the Anthropocene: Vico Behind or Ahead of His Time?

On all Saint’s Day—November 1, 1755—an earthquake (estimated at 8.5 to 9.0 on the Richter scale) hit the Portuguese capital of Lisbon. Estimates of mortality at the time varied widely from 10,000 to 100,000. Even in more recent projections, the death toll ranged from 15,000–40,000. A giant tsunami destroyed all the boats in the Lisbon harbor 40 minutes after the quake. With raging fires and aftershocks, 85% of the buildings in the city were destroyed. The quake wrecked a vibrant capital city with major ambitions for global empire (fig. 1).

The effects of the quake were not limited to Lisbon. Seismic activity was felt for weeks throughout Europe and beyond, making it an extended physically experienced event. High seas lashed coasts from Finland to North Africa and the Caribbean, and even Brazil, as has been recently documented.¹ Written corroboration arrived sometimes weeks later, also by sea. The Lisbon quake created the first major natural disaster media event around the Atlantic, with communications including printed journalism proliferating through oceanic networks, flattening the world at the very moment of its buckling. Thus, even as this ambitious colonial city was destroyed, its impact on global territories emerged in geological, oceanic, and climatic form, as well as in print form. What I have elsewhere described, through Vico, as anatopism was in play.² Along with a temporal displacement in news and seismic activity, the historical climatic event also created a spatial displacement that demonstrates that attention to neither the impact on Lisbon nor to its unidirectional effects on the rest of the world is adequate for the task of thinking about climate (fig. 2).

Figure 1.

Jacques Philippe Le Bas. Recueil des plus belles ruines de Lisbonne causées par le tremblement et par le feu du premier Novembre 1755. 1757. Etching and engraving on paper. British Museum, London.

Broad speculation as to the causes of this iconic earthquake ensued. While Voltaire responded with a poem accusing God of indifference, Immanuel Kant came up with a telluric theory of explanation that relied on physics and earth movements.³ His was a pressure cooker theory of hot gases that was later proven wrong. All the same, Catherine Malabou’s recent reading sees Kant as favoring the category of epigenesis.⁴ Rather than supporting either innateism or contextualism, Kant was interested in the novelty of the development of reason without any prior physical causality. Epigenesis is novelty without divine grace, but it is not physical determinism. It is unmotivated nonteleological development as Darwin would later theorize in the nineteenth century. While highly distinct in their understanding of this event, Voltaire and Kant both distanced themselves from the divine.

Figure 2.

Tsunami Travel Time Map for 1755 Lisbon earthquake. Produced by the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information. Tsunami Travel Times computed using TTT (P. Wessel, Geoware), 2009.

Even as the Lisbon earthquake provided this proliferation of thought, it is worth considering – anachronistically – how philosopher Giambattista Vico, who died at the age of 75, more than a decade before the earthquake, might have responded to it, had he lived to see it. Even more speculatively, we can consider how he might have understood the contemporary world we now identify as the Anthropocene? What would he have made of today’s story of climate change, with its language of scientific certitude and statistical confidence, its colonial ideology, and its sense of the catastrophic-sublime? In this address, I gesture toward a response to these questions by examining Vichian conceptions of time and history, and even of climatic rupture, for what they offer us at a time in which we can, as Fredric Jameson once put it, more easily “imagine the end of the world than…imagine the end of capitalism.”⁵ The history of the Enlightenment too might be told as a response to climate awareness, or to the differences and changes brought about by climate. Examples of the...