| This dissertation presents an interdisciplinary study of literary, scientific, religious, and philosophical texts from the German-speaking realm in the eighteenth century that treat the violent forces of nature. The perception of natural disasters sheds light on continuities and shifts in the social-cultural attitudes towards nature from the pre-modern to the modern period in European intellectual history a closer look at eighteenth-century texts shows that times of acute crisis evoked a multitude of responses from a wide range of disciplines.As I discuss in the first part of my dissertation, the optimistic outlook in the sciences and philosophy of the German Enlightenment was put to the test following major disasters such as the Lisbon earthquake on November 1, 1755. Contrary to the view held in current scholarship, the German intelligentsia did not question the validity of philosophical optimism in their immediate reactions to Lisbon's destruction. A more pragmatic response to natural disasters can be ascertained in the travel accounts of German scholars who traveled to Calabria and Sicily after earthquakes ravaged both regions in the spring of 1783. The catastrophe is not interpreted as God's punishment but showcased as a stupendous act of nature that effected incredible changes to the landscape along with the threat of social anarchy.In the second part of my dissertation I investigate the sublime as an aesthetic response to natural disasters. Originating with post-Copernican cosmologies, the feeling of the sublime is a reaction to those elements of nature that elude our faculties of reason and challenge our will to assert ourselves. The loss of orientation that cannot be compensated by the natural sciences is momentarily overcome in the sublime experience. A major paradigmatic shift occurs with Immanuel Kant's critical philosophy when he refutes any efforts to establish objective judgments on whether nature as a whole operates according to teleological laws. At the end of the eighteenth century, the central question was no longer whether nature's destruction could be justified within the conceptual framework of a perfect universal whole, but rather whether we are able to act in a morally justified manner when catastrophic events occur. |
