Editor’s Note: The article we publish below originally appeared in the Spanish edition of Letras Libres in March 2025. We wish to thank Daniel Gascón, editor of Letras Libres in Spain, for allowing us to share this text with LALT’s readers.
Opportunism, gratuitous statements about the future and ridiculous interpretations of the past. Much of Western philosophy has gone missing, lost among appeals to a supposed critique that is often merely intellectual laziness.
The earthquake that struck Lisbon happened on November 1, 1755; by the end of the year Voltaire had already composed a philosophical ode: Poem on the Lisbon Disaster. It was published in March of the following year. Kant, who was then working on his Physical Monadology, wrote three treatises: On the Causes of the Earthquakes, the History and Natural Description of the Most Noteworthy Occurrences of the Earthquake, and Continued Observations of the Terrestrial Convulsions. All in 1756. They are outstanding examples of the immediate philosophical legacy from that catastrophe. Much was written, and about everything, including also a lot of religious and obscurantist literature.
Žižek took even less time than Voltaire to write his Pandemic! COVID-19 Shakes the World (published in March 2020), but he wasn’t even the first. By then it had been possible to publish a compilation (Sopa de Wuhan, the name is fantastic) with texts by Agamben (the first to publicly plant a philosophical pine, so to speak, on the subject), Han, Butler, Badiou, Žižek himself, and other enlightened authors. Almost all had appeared in the great Western press.
This could seem improvised, but there were already literature and debates on the causes of earthquakes and their philosophical implications. In particular, the terrible earthquake in Lima in 1746, to which Voltaire refers in the prologue to his poem, had already created an intense moral, political, religious, and philosophical debate. In reality, attention to earthquakes in a world that was beginning to be what we now call global was inevitable, at least since the end of the previous century, when extremely tragic earthquakes took place in Peru in 1687, Jamaica in 1692, and Catania in 1693. The difference, for popular culture but not for the most attentive, was that all the previous earthquakes had happened in places considered remote, exotic, or poor, not in a major capital on a seismically stable continent.
There is also a parallel to this with the pandemic, but only in reference to Western public opinion, not to the minimally attentive philosophers. Among all the authors of Sopa de Wuhan, only two (Agamben and Badiou) refer to SARS-CoV-2. This could have added perspective or depth to their reflections, but their observations on the past are just as embarrassing as the ones they make about the future.
Science has the answer
The debate about Lisbon was a debate on two fundamental levels as far as philosophy is concerned. For Kant and many others, it was primarily about eliminating superstition, offering a secular explanation, about convincing people that tremors had nothing to do with God’s will. The answer was in science. For Voltaire, who understood science (he popularized Newton in France) but had respect for God, the question was situated in the drama of the believer who had trusted in a benevolent God. This broke with a kind of truce that science and religion had reached in the eighteenth century. It was based on an optimism now unsustainable. The world was not right.
The poem’s subtitle was Examination of the Axiom “Whatever is, is right,” which was a maxim of Pope’s (An Essay on Man, Epistle 1, 1734). Dictionaries say that optimisme was a term invented by a Jesuit abbé in 1737 to refer to Leibniz’s Theodicy (1710), which was popularized by Pope. In 1759, the echo brought back le pessimisme in a magazine (L’Observateur littéraire). That same year, Voltaire published his Candide, or Optimism. The poem about Lisbon had been an intermediate, bitter, and painful stop in his move away from what now had a name. His novel was a masterpiece of philosophical satire, directed against theodicy, although it did not offer a very hopeful intellectual conclusion to the maxim “everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” The disillusioned Dr. Pangloss could only give Candide this piece of advice: “Cultivate your own garden.”
A discussion with Rousseau, to whom Voltaire sent his poem before publishing it, is intriguing. Rousseau responded in summer with a letter in which he refused to stop believing in divine providence. He ended with some inconclusive rhetorical twists: the goodness of the world could be known by faith and not reason. But he launched a broadside: nature did not gather 20,000 people in buildings up to seven floors tall. Under more natural living conditions, the disaster would have been minimal. This could be seen as a fledgling ethic of sustainability, but also as a black seed. The end of theodicy brought, in some people’s heads, the replacement of God’s plan with secular plans to remake a corrupting society. Even without God, evil would remain moral and unnatural. Let’s not blame the good Rousseau for the populism of Robespierre, who admired him, but authoritarian and “virtuous” solutions for collective happiness were always lurking.
In 1758, the Marquis of Pombal, prime minister of the kingdom, commissioned from someone who signed with an assumed name a “Memory of the main provisions that were given in the Lisbon earthquake.” It recorded 233 measures classified by purpose: 8 to avoid the plague, 24 for hunger, 8 for the sick and wounded, 18 to prevent theft, 1 to avoid panic, 9 to accelerate justice, 7 to secure the coasts and overseas trade, 10 to involve the army in reconstruction, 23 to fix prices and regulate businesses, 29 to clear rubble and for demolitions, 11 for rebuilding, 76 to reestablish worship and life in the convents, and 9 to give thanks to God. Its unknown author is known in Portugal as the Portuguese Candide.
I feel the need to tell the story of Father Malagrida, a Lombard Jesuit at the court of Lisbon who had been a missionary in Brazil. Pombal’s enemy—like all Jesuits, he opposed Pombal’s colonial policy, which earned them expulsion—wrote a treaty stating that the earthquake had been divine punishment (Juízo da verdadeira causa do terremoto, 1756), one of many that circulated around Europe. (In what we would today call popular conversation, they discussed things like the anecdote that said that the earthquake had buried all the temples and saved the street with the brothels.) But the famous Marquis had published a pamphlet arguing otherwise. As he considered that the friar put a brake on his efforts, he had him banished. Later he succeeded in implicating him in the proceedings against the Távora family (they were all executed on charges of trying to kill the king) and had him locked up indefinitely. The civil authorities could not kill him, but they could indeed drive him crazy. In prison, under the tower of Belém, the place with the famous cakes, Malagrida heard voices from heaven. His enemy’s agents convinced him to transcribe and publish them. He was obsessed with Saint Anne’s uterus. In 1761, he was tried for heresy by a court of the Inquisition presided over by Pombal’s brother. They strangled him, burned him, and threw him into the Tagus river. He was the last victim of the Portuguese Inquisition, and of the Lisbon earthquake.
Pombal, as you can clearly see, did not retire to cultivate his garden.
In the sixth chapter of Candide, Voltaire imagines that, as his characters passed through Portugal, a “magnificent auto-de-fé” was organized to drive away future dangers, “the University of Coimbra having decided that the spectacle of a few people being burned solemnly over a low flame is an infallible secret to prevent earthquakes.” Pangloss and Candide found themselves involved and narrowly escaped the sacrifice, in which a Vizcayan and two suspect Portuguese were burned.
Voltaire could also be an ass who let himself be carried away by prejudices and clichés. But, most notably, his sarcasm ends up being quite inferior to the irony of history. If there was an auto-de-fé, it was so that one of those doctors who saw the hand of God in the earthquake could burn. Not even Voltaire was good at guessing the future.
Intellectual affectation
Pandemic is a spectacularly vulgar book whose only entertainment is that it predicted the imminent coming of communism. In one chapter, Žižek was an international security analyst, in another a sociologist of panic, in another an expert in markets for medicines and commodities, in another a psychologist, in another a philosopher who dealt with severe ontological problems (capital is a spectral entity that ceases to exist if we stop acting as if we believe in it, but the virus—he concluded—does not). In several chapters he got entangled in debates with other ufologists. Nothing we haven’t seen many times before. In general, he went leaping from puddle to puddle like a frog, without completely diving into any of them, to defend the position that only a type of communism (alas, definitions) could save us from the crisis. Moreover, that it was inevitable it would happen. There was conclusive evidence, such as that Trump was planning to take political control of the economy, although he had sensed this before. In some places it was a communism that obeyed “a pure rational and selfish motivation” and in others it had an “ethical inspiration”; in some places, Westerners faced the challenge of doing “democratically” what the Chinese did in the face of the virus, while in others it was described as an inevitable war-like communism just like the standard of the Soviet era. By one reason or another, communism. But it’s better when he talks about this, because if not, everyone dies of boredom. The good thing is that, as you can imagine, if we didn’t like his ideas, he had others. With what might be a good sense of humor, in 2021 he wrote Pandemic 2, in view of the fact that communism did not emerge and changing his predictions in the opposite direction.
But note that Byung-Chul Han had already tidied things up in an earlier text: “Žižek claims that the virus deals a deadly blow to capitalism […] He is wrong.” Han’s argument was one of the most infantile versions of the cultural differences between Asia and the West that can be read in a short format. What is someone going to do with a hammer except fix things by hammering them. Masks: cultural difference. The use of big data: cultural difference. Barriers between people: object of cultural change. Platitudes said solemnly. Not one interesting idea, not one contrasting fact. Some nonsensical ideas, yes, such as that “panic is inherent in markets.” His vagueness is inherent: In one paragraph Asians and their culture are more effective in the fight against the virus because they are more collectivist and prone to certain forms of authority; in another, the virus individualizes and isolates us, weakens us in the face of authority, and we risk evolving toward a Chinese-type state. How? Well, somehow, collectivism, individualism, don’t ask me about nonsense when what is coming is so serious.
This was in 2020, but in 2022 Han was still the same. When I say the same, he saw us as even “more alone” than before, as he said in a summer course in Santander. I have read the report, which read like this: The professor believes we will “take a long time to come back” to situations prior to the coronavirus, such as shaking hands, a gesture that he has equated to a “poem” and even a “gift.” He finds it dramatic that we are not able to touch each other when “it transmits incredible energy.” “We no longer touch each other or tell each other stories,” he lamented. “We are more alone than ever,” he proclaimed.
As there was extra time, you can see they still asked him about Netflix, thank you very much: “We are addicted to series because we don’t read poems.” One of the amazing things about the current intellectual environment is that this version of Coelho, the worst of the Frankfurt School, can captivate as many intelligent people as it does.
We can go on and on. But, to be more ecumenical, let’s at least take a look at the texts of John Gray, who was not in Sopa de Wuhan, I suppose because he had written interesting things on other occasions. “Liberal capitalism is over,” wrote this philosopher on April 1, 2020. And he kept talking about it in the past from that phrase on, like about an ex-partner. It was an experiment whose time had come. “When everything is over,” he said, the government would take control of the economy. What the hell did he know? Nothing. Possibly as little as the vast majority of us at the time. But we did have the right to expect some common sense, because only the philosophers said this kind of nonsense with so much intellectual affectation. Everything could be, it was all a matter of playing with the emphasis and never saying anything clearly false. But to use the tricks of a sneaky talk-show guest (and speak about exports, agriculture, airlines…) these meanderings weren’t necessary. “The disintegration of European institutions is not unrealistic.” Come on now.
The denaturalization of criticism
When did a part of Western philosophy lose the oremus? That question is too big. But we have a clue. Regarding these philosophers, we are repeatedly told they are necessary because they are “critical.” The subversion and denaturalization of criticism, from its original meaning to the present, is one of the regrettable developments in philosophy.
“The sailor for whom a correct measurement of longitude saves him from a shipwreck owes his life, through a chain of truths, to discoveries that were made in Plato’s academy.” Thus wrote a magnificent Marquis de Condorcet in 1793. It makes me think of that defensive boutade by Richard Dawkins two centuries later: Nobody is a social constructionist at 30,000 feet. Between the two, what happens is nihilistic skepticism disguised as social criticism, the appropriation of criticism—a philosophical, juridical, and scientific concept characteristic of research—on the part of social parascience, with the necessary assistance of certain generations of philosophers (mostly of the variety known as continental).
For Kant, and even for Marx, to criticize was to explore the conditions of possibility of what we know and affirm. In a broad sense, critical thinking is learning to recognize ambiguities in concepts, unfounded generalizations, only seeming equivalences, incomplete demonstrations, statements for which data is needed, the probabilistic nature of facts, and to recognize reliable data. This is more or less what scientists do in their specialties. Nobody says to do “critical science,” as far as I know (besides the enlightened and constructionists), although anyone understands that scientific criticism is as much a part of science as experiments or manuals. We are far from knowing how we went from the philosophical criticism that makes knowledge possible to the “criticism” understood as (supposed) unmasking of any affirmation with a pretension of truth with (supposedly) liberating results. But there were philosophers among the culprits.
One difference between social science and natural science is that while natural science is fairly immune to “criticism” but very sensitive to criticism, social science is much less protected from “criticism” (as it is considered a plan in itself) and is not very sensitive to criticism.
The problem of optimism in the seventeenth century was set out poorly. The answer to Candide’s question—“If this is the best of all possible worlds, what are the others like?”—could have been simple. The past worlds. The right question is not whether evil can be justified as a necessity for good, or whether suffering is a punishment humans deserve. The question is whether we are reducing it, if there is progress. The foundation of optimism is not that everything that is is good, but that almost everything is better.
Optimism is statistical
But, to get to the question of progress, it was necessary to stop thinking about the world, as they did then, like a clock moved mechanically, with or without a benevolent watchmaker. It had to be thought that things happen with probability, that in any tendency there is dispersion. The basis for optimism is, ultimately, statistical.
One thinks that progress exists because of things such as the fact that life expectancy in the world in 2025 is twenty-seven years longer than in 1950. I grew up cleaning my plate on behalf of children in Africa. Life expectancy in the worst African countries is today around that of Spain at that time or shortly before; the worst is tied with Poland, and the best have life expectancies like those of the Scandinavian countries at that time. The problem with a certain philosophy is that it needs to close this window in order to be able to think about its “critical” things. And I think it’s fine if they decide, let’s say, that the only philosophical problem is suicide, as Camus once thought, and stop getting entangled in public affairs; but if they want to intervene, they should do something useful. Poke about in what they say: that life is a disease, that the end of the world is near, that longevity is at the service of this or some other interest, that it has a “biopolitical” explanation, which exacerbates the contradictions of capitalism… The same things they would say if we had gotten worse.
The last pages of Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1793) are devoted to scientific progress and the need to introduce the social sciences (“moral and political”) onto the safe path of true knowledge. How? Through statistics, calculation, and conceptual clarification. Something very beautiful. A better understanding of human societies will bring, the author thinks, new progress. Condorcet hazards that these will come along these paths: equal rights between the sexes (which will benefit men), the end of colonialism (people will understand that being dominant leads to being dominated), the generalization of trade and the expansion of education. The work was written in prison, where he died. Condorcet is a philosophical martyr of radical liberalism and reformist socialism.
And, if you would allow me another laurel, of analytical methods. A transparent and understandable science, in a shared language, is, along with democracy, everything that points the way. There are no enlightened people, there is no rational reconstruction of society, there are only individuals who discover their interests and decide their future. Their enemies did not see it that way.
In the last lines of the book, Condorcet evokes contemplation of the picture he has drawn on the history of human evolution and finds in it “refuge in which the memory of my persecutors cannot reach me.” He died a few months later, confident that “slavery and prejudice” had suffered a permanent defeat, that this was only a temporary setback, a disturbance in progress.
