Today is the 251st anniversary of romanticism...

[KansDem]

The earthquake shook much more than cities and buildings. Lisbon was the capital of a devout Catholic country, with a history of investments in the church and evangelism in the colonies. Moreover, the catastrophe struck on a Catholic holiday and destroyed almost every important church. For eighteenth-century theology and philosophy, this manifestation of the anger of God was difficult to explain.

The earthquake strongly influenced many thinkers of the European Enlightenment. Many contemporary philosophers mentioned or alluded to the earthquake in their writings, notably Voltaire in Candide and in his Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne ("Poem on the Lisbon disaster"). The arbitrariness of survival motivated Voltaire's Candide and its satire of the idea that this was "the best of all possible worlds"; as Theodor Adorno wrote, "he earthquake of Lisbon sufficed to cure Voltaire of the theodicy of Leibniz" (Negative Dialectics 361). In the later twentieth century, following Adorno, the 1755 earthquake has sometimes been compared to the Holocaust as a catastrophe so tremendous as to have a transformative impact on European culture and philosophy.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was also influenced by the devastation following the earthquake, the severity of which he believed that was due to too many people living within the close quarters of the city. Rousseau used the earthquake as an argument against cities as part of his desire for a more naturalistic way of life.

Immanuel Kant.The concept of the sublime, though it existed before 1755, was developed in philosophy and elevated to greater importance by Immanuel Kant, in part as a result of his attempts to comprehend the enormity of the Lisbon quake and tsunami. Kant published three separate texts on the Lisbon earthquake. The young Kant, fascinated with the earthquake, collected all the information available to him in news pamphlets, and used it to formulate a theory of the causes of earthquakes. Kant's theory, which involved the shifting of huge subterranean caverns filled with hot gases, was (though ultimately shown to be false) one of the first systematic modern attempts to explain earthquakes by positing natural, rather than supernatural, causes. According to Walter Benjamin, Kant's slim early book on the earthquake "probably represents the beginnings of scientific geography in Germany. And certainly the beginnings of seismology."
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from Wikipedia.

Tuesday should bear witness to another "earthquake" that will usher in another Enlightenment...

[bobbieinok]

1. why 'romanticism'???

[KansDem]

2. Glad you asked that!

Philosophical thought changed following the quake of 1755. When the walls fall in on hundreds of thousands of “good Christians” doing what they’re suppose to be doing, a seed of doubt is planted. As the article says, For eighteenth century theology and philosophy, this manifestation of the anger of God was difficult to explain... So philosophers turned elsewhere.

Eventually, the arts were influenced. Writers, poets, artists, and musicians turned to other subjects for expression. For example, in the decades following the Lisbon earthquake:

Interest in the macabre and supernatural
Literature: “Frankenstein” (1818 ) Mary Shelley—imagine how a book about piecing a human together from cadaver body parts and bringing it to life would have been received in a society tightly controlled by Christianity. I doubt it would ever have been published, let alone conceived.

Music: “Der Freischutz” (opera, 1821) Carl Maria von Weber—plot deals with an essentially-good guy who makes a pact with the devil in return for some worldly pleasure. Kinda like the Faust legend.
Symphonie Fantastique (symphony, 1830) Hector Berlioz--programmatic symphony (in 5 movements) is which the protagonist kills his beloved and is sent to the gallows in the fourth movement, and then experiences the "witches sabbath" in the fifth

Unrequited love (always big with romanticists!)
Literature: “Sorrows of Young Werther” (1774) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe—about a young man who commits suicide due to unrequited love.

Music: "Wintereise" (1824) Franz Schubert; and "Dicterliebe" (1840) Robert Schumann,--unrequited love, again.

Nature
Check out the painters of the late 19th/early 20th century. Subjects will include sweeping panoramas of nature. If man is included in the painting, many times he is depicted as small or insignificant. Also, ruins or shipwrecks may also be seen as examples of man’s endeavors eroded or destroyed by time and nature.

Shipwreck on the Coast of Norway 1832—Johan Christian Dahl

These are only a few examples taken off the top of my head. It may be an oversimplification that this all began on November 1, 1755, but certainly the Lisbon earthquake was a defining moment that prompted man to look elsewhere other than the church or religion for answers...