Gerard Passannante's fascinating book Catastrophizing explores the recurring descriptions of imaginary disasters in early modern Europe and the role they play at the junction between empirical and speculative forms of knowledge. Imaginary disasters, the book argues, illustrate a conceptual crisis, an experience of the limits of sense perception. Each chapter offers multiple examples of the mind's inclination to catastrophize in ways that echo or challenge the writings of Democritus, Epicurus, or Lucretius.
The first chapter is centered on Leonardo's paradoxical representations of disaster as a figure of the insensible world. The argument focuses first on his prophecies, a series of riddles mocking astrologists’ obscure predictions and to which Leonardo supplies absurdly simple solutions. Leonardo's preoccupation with scale, movement, and making movement visible in painting also led him to describe and draw dramatic scenes of deluge and storms, a way to experience the ruthless quality of nature's necessary laws, the author notes, and to confront the uncertainties of perception. Catastrophic thought occurs repeatedly at “the threshold of the visible” (59).
The nova of 1572, the comet that appeared in 1577, and the 1580 Dover Straits earthquake all contributed to a reevaluation of Aristotelian cosmology and materialist assumptions. Philip Melanchthon, who was the first to use catastrophe in the broad sense of the word, argued that the Epicureans had been oblivious to the signs of God that confirm the order of the universe. As new theories such as Copernicus's or Kepler's radically expanded knowledge of the cosmic world, there was an undeniable attack upon the idea of a chaotic universe as it was posited by the materialists. In this context, the author offers a new and distinctive evaluation of John Donne's poetry as a fusion between personal torment and a feeling of universal chaos not entirely relieved by what Pascal or Kierkegaard would call a leap of faith.
In the following chapter, the concept of quidlibet ex quolibet, the tragic misinterpretation of anything, no matter how small or inconsequent, leads the reader from Montaigne's skepticism to Shakespeare's descriptions of the catastrophic thoughts that can take possession of the mind, from the madness of King Lear to Othello's insane suspicions. The question of scale, which recurs in all the parts of the book, is also addressed in a chapter dedicated to the invention of the microscope, which, along with positive knowledge of the infinitely small, led to more fundamental questions about earth's early history. Richard Hooke's geological speculations, for example, turned to earthquakes and disasters to illustrate the convulsive phenomena that might have contributed to the extinction of species and redrawn the physical map of the world. Hooke, like many other natural philosophers of the time, was anxious to found his reasoning on solid evidence, such as microscopic examinations of fossils; yet, when speculating about the history of the earth, his cataclysmic imagination, Passannante observes, became an integral part of his thought process.
A complex section entitled “Disaster before the Sublime” examines Kant's Universal Natural History, An Attempt to Account for the Constitutional and Mechanical Origin of the Universe upon Newtonian Principles, published before the Lisbon earthquake. Kant's reasoning gives priority to physical certainties, though the argument also relies on images of disaster; the most extraordinary is Kant's apocalyptic vision of the surface of the sun: a stunning passage that, in my view, no account of the Lisbon earthquake or any natural disaster would ever rival. Passannante also argues that Kant's later theory of the sublime, that feeling of astonishment bordering on terror induced by the spectacle of an awe-inspiring nature, throws light on Kant's post-Lisbon vision of the dangers threatening the mind. The concluding pages turn to the crisis brought upon the natural world by global warming and serves as a reminder of both the power and pitfalls of imaginative thought.
Passannante's work offers new and captivating insights on a particularly tumultuous period in the history of philosophical and scientific thought. The overall argument moves seamlessly from natural history to philosophy and art. Although the book is focused on early modern European thought, it includes comments on a multiplicity of authors ranging from Augustine to Beckett, drawing an intellectual map of catastrophizing quite relevant to contemporary concerns.
