This revolting absurdity made passable Voltaire

Haiti earthquake shows all components of our world that usually remain in the shade. The fragility of human beings human - made first, essential and banal, that current life eventually be forgotten. The persistence of compassion and solidarity, often drowned under daily indifference. The strong existence of the international community, with its good will its bad organization and its relative powerlessness. The immediate return of the raw violence of the war of all against all, as soon as no force no longer provides public order. The ubiquity of images, often hiding the absence of real words and precise information.

It seems that with trembling Earth is packed the thin film of normal time. It lays bare the bones and tendons of the present, by unveiling is brutally, haphazard phenomena without age (terror, despair, cruelty, mutual assistance) and recent situations (instant communications, the power of cameras, powerlessness of the logistics). Because it is sudden, unpredictable and devastating, the earthquake is a special disaster: it collapsed, literally and figuratively, everything that humans have built - buildings or families, fortunes or hopes. Without apparent motive.

This revolting absurdity made passable Voltaire. Her screams are turned in to - they are not less explicit: "what crime, what fault have committed these children/on the womb crushed and bloody." These bodies of children are those of Lisbon, fire, 1 November 1755 by an earthquake followed by a tsunami. 50,000 To 100,000 dead. And, in their suite, the first debate philosophical modern on major natural disasters. How believe in providence, on the agenda of the world, the divine goodness and goodness of nature, in contemplating the massacred innocent, absolute arbitrariness of the thinnest and the remnants What Voltaire begins to discover his "poem on the Lisbon disaster" (1756), it is, well before Camus and the 20th century, the theme of the absurd: "that can, therefore, the most extensive spirit extended." No, the book of fate closes to our view.

Rousseau replicates it, always about Lisbon, that nature is less responsible for the disaster that the company. Who has therefore built buildings collapsed Without this vast urban concentration, which only humans bear responsibility, "the damage would have been much lower, and possibly zero." This "letter on Providence" (1756) is not the only evidence of the profound impact of this earthquake on European thought. Kant, fascinated by this drama help based seismology in drafting several memoirs on the possible causes of earthquakes.

Contemporary thought reflects less to Providence to our evidence, but it can nevertheless inform the specificity of the drama in his own way. Thus, written late mathematician and philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), include a course of 1931 entitled "earth does moves not." The philosopher explains how our perceptive world is any integer on a soil immutable, fixed, devoid of movement. We know, of course, that the planet is moving at any speed, but the anchor of our reality and our thoughts, it remains stationary. This is why so many metaphors - among philosophers, but men of Science - also revolve around the "foundations", "foundations", "Rock" the certainties or "soil" of the evidence.

There is, ultimately, point of terror to the earthquake. The earthquake just defeat, unthinkable way, the foundation of the world, the immemorial basement where relies, without knowing it, our existence. Before even all the consequences as you know, the seismic tremor causes first tear, a primordial catastrophe: from stability of Earth breaks, breaks of the inside. When the Aspen, the most archaic basis of our certainties reeling.