Voltaire info
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Candide - A Contrast to Optimism |
Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire was the French author of the
novella Candide, also known as "Optimism"(Durant and Durant 724). In
Candide, Voltaire sought to point out the fallacy of Gottfried William
von Leibniz's theory of optimism and the hardships brought on by the
resulting inaction toward the evils of the world. Voltaire's use of
satire, and its techniques of exaggeration and contrast highlight the
evil and brutality of war and the world in general when men are meekly
accepting of their fate. Leibniz, a German philosopher and
mathematician of Voltaire's time, developed the idea that the world
they were living in at that time was "the best of all possible
worlds." This systematic optimism shown by Leibniz is the
philosophical system that believed everything already was for the
best, no matter how terrible it seemed. In this satire, Voltaire
showed the world full of natural disasters and brutality. Voltaire
also used contrast in the personalities of the characters to convey
the message that Leibniz's philosophy should not be dealt with any
seriousness.
Leibniz, sometimes regarded as a Stoic or Fatalist because his
philosophies were based on the idea that everything in the world
was determined by fate, theorized that God, having the ability to pick
from an infinite number of worlds, chose this world, "the best of all
possible worlds." Although Voltaire chose that simple quality of
Leibniz's philosophy to satirize, Leibniz meant a little more than
just that. Even though his philosophy stated that God chose "the best
of all possible worlds," he also meant that God, being the perfection
he is, chose the best world available to him, unfortunately it was a
world containing evil. It seems as though Voltaire wanted to ridicule
Leibniz's philosophy so much that he chose to satirize only the
literal meaning and fatal acceptance of evil of Leibniz's philosophy.
To get his point across in Candide, Voltaire created the
character Dr. Pangloss, an unconditional follower of Leibniz's
philosophy. Voltaire shows this early in the novella by stating, "He
proved admirably that there is no effect without a cause and that, in
this best of all possible worlds....(16)" Pangloss goes on to say that
everything had its purpose and things were made for the best. For
example, the nose was created for the purpose of wearing spectacles
(Voltaire 16). Because of his "great knowledge," Candide, at this
point a very naive and impressionable youth, regards Pangloss as the
greatest philosopher in the world, a reverence that will soon be
contradicted by contact with reality (Frautschi 75). The name Pangloss
is translated as "all tongue" and "windbag." The colloquialism
"windbag" implies that a person is all talk, and he takes no action.
In this case, Leibniz's philosophy is Stoic acceptance of the evil of
the world. As the story progresses, though, Pangloss loses faith in
the Leibnizian philosophy. Although Pangloss suffered many hardships,
he still sticks to the philosophy to avoid contradicting himself
(Frautschi 69). Voltaire uses Pangloss and a contrasting character,
Martin, to point out the shortcomings in Leibniz's philosophy.
A contrast to the views of Pangloss is the character Martin.
Martin, a pessimist, is a friend and advisor to Candide whom he meets
on his journey. Martin continuously tries to prove to Candide that
there is little virtue, morality, and happiness in the world. When a
cheerful couple is seen walking and singing, Candide tells Martin, "At
least you must admit that these people are happy (80)." Martin answers
Candide's comment with the reply, "I wager they are not (80)." Martin
suggests that Candide invite the couple to dine at his hotel. As the
young girl, now found to be Paquette, tells her story, Martin takes
pleasure in knowing he has won the wager.
Another contrast to this "best of all possible worlds" is
Eldorado. Voltaire describes Eldorado as an extremely peaceful and
serene country. Eldorado, a place that is "impossible" to find, has no
laws, jails, war, or need for material goods. Voltaire uses Eldorado
as an epitome of the "best of all possible worlds." It contrasts the
real outside world in which war and suffering are everyday
occurrences.
Another example of how Voltaire ridicules Pangloss' optimistic
philosophy is the mention of the Lisbon earthquake and fire. Even
though the disastrous earthquake took over 30,000 lives, Pangloss
still upheld his philosophical optimism by stating, "For all this is
for the very best...For it is impossible that things should not be
where they are.(26)" The disaster in Lisbon affected Voltaire's life
so much that he wrote the Poem on the Lisbon Disaster, but Pangloss'
philosophy said that the Lisbon earthquake was necessary in the course
of nature, and there was definitely a rationale for the situation.
War is another evil which Voltaire satirizes in Candide.
Voltaire used the Bulgarians and their brutality as a basis for his
satire on war. Voltaire writes how Candide was captured by the
Bulgarians and is given a choice "to be beaten thirty-six times by the
whole regiment, or receive twelve lead bullets at once in his brain
(19)." Being the "hero" he is, Candide chooses to run the gauntlet.
Instead of the thirty-six times he was to run the gauntlet, our "hero"
made it only two until he pleaded to the Bulgarians to smash in his
head (19). Another satire of war included in Candide is the
Bulgarians' burning of the Abarian village "in accordance with the
rules of international law.(20)" Voltaire also shows his satire on war
in that the Bulgarian soldiers do not just kill other people, they
rape disembowel, and dismember innocent women and children. In fact,
Candide's training as a soldier involved being brutalized and beaten.
Voltaire uses this example to demonstrate the inhuman vulgarity of
many belligerent groups. He thought that this torture was cruel and
unjustified. If this were the "best of all possible worlds," innocent
people would not be harmed, and violent peoples such as the Bulgarians
would not exist.
Upon arrival in England, Candide witnesses another instance of
brutality, the execution of an admiral because of his failure to
win a battle(Voltaire 78). A reply to Candide's questioning of the act
is, "...it is a good thing to kill an admiral from time to time
to encourage the others (78-79)." This is an obvious allusion to an
incident Voltaire himself witnessed. Admiral Byng of England was
court-martialed for the same outrageous reason, and although Voltaire
tried to stop the execution, Byng was still killed (Durant and Durant
725).
Although the novella Candide was partially written for
entertainment purposes, it was written primarily to satirize the views
of Leibniz's philosophy. Voltaire looked at the world with the idea
that there could be something done about all of the evil in the world.
He achieved his goal of satirizing Leibniz by tearing apart Pangloss'
philosophy, using Martin as a contrast to Pangloss, showing the
destruction caused by natural disasters, and the brutality of war.
---
Works Cited
Durant, Will, Ariel Durant. The Story of Civilization: Part IX: The
Age of Voltaire. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965.
Frautschi, R.L. Barron's Simplified Approach to Voltaire: Candide. New
York: Barron's Educational Series, Inc., 1968.
Voltaire. Candide. In Candide, Zadig and Selected Stories. Trans.
Donald Frame, New York: Penguin Group, 1961.
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The Enlightenment, or Age of Reason, was a time of great intellectual and moral growth for humanity. In part because of the increasing effect of the Protestant Reformation, people were starting to turn to reason for the answers to life's questions, rather than to the dogmas of the Catholic Church. Scientific inquiry became widespread and accepted as the standard for inquiring into the nature of the universe. The scientific method was developed. For the first time in the history of art, perspective was used in paintings. (Now people who were farther away looked farther away). Great advances were made in medicine, in part because of pioneers like Leonardo da Vinci, who studied the human body inside and out and used reason to discover what secrets it kept hidden, rather than accepting (as was common at the time) the ancient Greek idea that sickness was caused by an imbalance of the four elements in the body. The Enlightenment also marked the advent of capitalism, an economic system which, in theory, is a meritocracy in which the skilled producers and traders rise to the top of the economic spectrum through their own effort. Capitalism stands as a stark contrast to the earlier, pre-Enlightenment economic situation, in which the rich tended to come from the aristocracy, the poor tended to be serfs bonded to a certain section of land, and opportunities for economic advancement for the majority comprised of non-aristocratic individuals was severely limited.
During the Age of Reason, several important philosophical ideas were also developed. Some of the most important, which still influence the lives of Westerners on a daily basis, were the political doctrines developed in Europe in the eighteenth century. For the first time, people began to believe that they had individual rights. Prior to the Enlightenment, the commonly accepted political belief in Europe was the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings, which told the people that their monarch had been appointed by God and was responsible only to God for his actions, not to the people. (World 11-33) The implication was that the king could perform any action that he wanted to perform, that this action would be sanctioned by God, and that the people had no recourse in the event of injustice. During the Enlightenment, the Social Contract theory of government became popular, in part due to abuse of power by European monarchs. This doctrine was popularized by the political and philosophical writings of Locke, Hobbes, Kant, and Rousseau, among others. It held that humanity had originally existed in a "state of nature," without any sort of government or law, and that people entered a compact with other individuals. The people, in entering into the contract, gave up some personal liberty to gain security and the other benefits of government intended to secure law and order. (Government 7-22; Philosophy 19-22)
The social contract justification for the existence of government led to the establishment of the idea of government by the consent of the governed, a view which now forms the basis for the governments of the United States and other democratic countries. (Government 7-22)
Another philosophical idea which arose and was popular during the Enlightenment was the religious philosophy of deism. The deistic idea stands in opposition to the doctrine of theism, which holds that God is present to the world, yet separate from it, and pantheism, in which god is manifest in nature and, in fact, identical to nature. Deists believe that God exists, and that his glory is manifest in the heavens and the earth, but that he does not participate in any way in the events which happen in that universe. A common deistic conception of God is that he is a great clock maker, who created the cosmos and stands outside watching the events that unfold within it. Implicit in the notion of God as a great clock maker is the conviction that they predetermine the events in the universe. If a perfect clock existed, and its initial state was known, it would be possible to predict what the clock would read at any time in the future, as well as what the clock's internal state would be. The tenets of deism have influenced our country in many ways; in fact, most of the founding fathers of our country were deists. (Not all deists believed in a deterministic universe).
It is my personal contention that the near-universal demise of deism toward the beginning of the twentieth century is due, in large part, to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle in physics and to Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem in mathematics. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle places an absolute limit on how much we can know about events in the subatomic world and, in fact, shows that the very act of observing a subatomic event affects its outcome. Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem states that any formal system, such as Euclidian geometry, which is sufficiently powerful to express all of the truths in its chosen realm is essentially incomplete, meaning that there are and always will be propositions that are true which cannot be proven to be true, and propositions that are false which cannot be proven to be false. It seems to me that these two ideas destroyed the mechanistic, predetermined view of the universe created by the great clock maker by telling humanity that there are things which are, and always will be, uncertain. (However, deism is not completely gone from the world. I have a friend at the University of Oregon, for example, who considers himself a deist).
Arguably the most important development of the Enlightenment was the emphasis on the rights of individuals. The social contract theory is one example of evidence of this: rather than espousing the idea that a monarch could commit any act that he chose, political science began to teach that the function of a ruler is to safeguard the well-being of the people. The philosophies of the time also reflect this idea. For example, in contrast to the philosophy of Plato, in which individuals exist (in large part, if not entirely) for the "good of the state," philosophers such as Descartes put a large emphasis on questions of individuality. How do I know I exist? asks Descartes, and solves this problem with his famous phrase cogito, ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am"). This is a question which Plato probably never would have considered; Plato believed that individual good was subsumed under the good of the state, or people as a whole (this is exemplified by the manner of the death of Socrates).
Leibniz's philosophy is based upon the idea of a monad, which is an "immaterial, simple, mind-like entity." (Leibniz did not originate the term "monad"; it was used a century before by Giordano Bruno). The monads are the basic units of which everything is comprised; matter is only a composition of monads. To borrow Kant's terminology, matter is phenomenal, not noumenal; matter itself is not a basic building block of reality. Monads, according to Leibniz, cannot fundamentally be affected by anything else in the universe (Leibniz describes them as "without windows"). Therefore, monads cannot really interact with each other. To explain how entities apparently interact with each other, Leibniz says that each monad has a system of internal programming, which creates the impression in each of a pair of monads that they are interacting with, affecting, or communicating with each other. This system is set up by God. The system under which God set up the monads so that they will perceive the supposed influence upon each other is called the pre-established harmony by Leibniz. ("Leibniz" 599-600; Hawton 204)
All monads encompass the reality of the entire universe from that particular monad's point of view. The monads contain impressions of what has happened, is happening, and will happen. One of the few fundamental ways in which monads differ from each other is in the point of view from which they reflect the rest of the universe. ("Leibniz" 600) This reflection, which is due to the pre-established harmony, explains how our body knows what our mind, or soul (the central monad of our existence, dominant in a way over the monads which comprise our physical bodies) what the mind or soul wants it to do: the soul is not telling the body what to do, but the pre-established harmony lets the body know when the mind or soul wants it to do something. This basic tenet of Leibnizian philosophy also explains how our souls can feel pain stemming from something that happens to our physical bodies. (Abernathy 205).
To illustrate the pre-established harmony, Leibniz gives the examples of the two choirs and the two clocks. If two choirs are singing the same piece of music at the same time, then we can know what exact notes the second choir is singing if we can hear the first, even if the second choir is on the other side of the earth. And if two clocks tell the exact same time, and both clocks keep perfect time, we can tell what time the second clock tells by looking at the first, even if we are nowhere near the second. (Abernathy 205)
Leibniz established a hierarchy of monads, starting with the simple monads of the inorganic world (which have a confused perception of all other monads, but no memory or reason) to the monads of animals (which have simple reason, understanding, and memory) to human monads (which have a developed sense of reflection, self-consciousness, memory, and reason) to God, who is the ultimate monad.
The existence of God is central and crucial to the philosophy of Leibniz, and he gives at least four arguments for the existence of God. One that seems to best fit into the rest of his philosophy is his second argument for the existence of God, which is a version of the cosmological argument. Everything in the world, Leibniz tells us in this argument, is contingent, not necessary. And because everything is contingent, there must be a reason for its existence. This reason must be good enough to ensure that everything exists with no shadow of a doubt; and this sufficient reason, Leibniz tells us, is God. (Abernathy 207)
One of the most remarkable parts of Leibnizian philosophy (at least, one of the parts that has been the most remarked upon) is his argument that we live in the best of all possible worlds. God is infinitely good, Leibniz tells us; therefore, his creation is good in that it represents the greatest excess of good over evil in all of the possible worlds that God could have created. (Abernathy 207)
One of the parts of Leibnizian philosophy that seems to be the most unusual is his belief that God, although omnipotent, is limited. God is limited in that he can only cause possibilities to exist if they are compossible (if there is no logical contradiction to their coexistence). (Abernathy 207)
Although Leibniz distinguishes between several types of evil, his basic argument is that evil for individual monads stems, for the most part, from the individual monad not being God (that is, monads experience evil because they are created, imperfect, and are contingent, rather than being the eternal, perfect, and necessary monad which is God). (Abernathy 207) Leibniz also asserts that every evil which occurs is part of a greater good and that all actions get their just rewards at some time, if not right away. In the Monadology, Leibniz states that
sins must carry their penalty with them by the order of nature, and even in virtue or the mechanical structure of things. Similarly, noble actions will receive their rewards with regard to bodies, even though this cannot, and must not, always happen immediately. (Leibniz 640)
Dr. Johnson, a somewhat famous empiricist, was once quoted as saying "I refute it thus!" while kicking a large rock. (Johnson was discussing rationalism at the time). Voltaire's response to Leibniz is similar to Johnson's: Go out and look at the world, Voltaire tells us over and over in Candide. Candide, often considered to be Voltaire's masterpiece, tells the story of a naïve (or candid, from which he gets his name) young man who grows up in the German province of Westphalia. Candide grows to be, in his own opinion, wise under the tutelage of the learned and traveled Doctor Pangloss. Pangloss may be intended as a caricature of Leibniz, or he may not. At any rate, he most certainly espouses the philosophy of Leibniz throughout the work. Voltaire constantly pokes fun at Leibniz's philosophy by making Pangloss look foolish and arrogant; near the beginning of the book, for instance, Voltaire has Pangloss saying that
the nose was formed to bear spectacles--and thus we have spectacles. Legs are visibly designed for stockings--and we have stockings. [...] Pigs were made to be eaten--therefore we eat pork all the year round. (Voltaire 2)
Voltaire also pokes fun at Leibniz's doctrine of sufficient reason at the beginning of the book by putting Pangloss in a compromising position with the baron's wife's chamber-maid; he describes the force of repeated experiments, the causes, the reasons, and the effects. Cunegonde, the baron's daughter, who happened to observe this "lesson in experimental natural philosophy," leaves blushing and hoping that she might be "sufficient reason" for Candide.
After the baron of the castle expels Candide for conducting similar, although not quite so thorough, experiments in philosophy with his daughter Cunegonde, he embarks on a marvelous series of adventures, all of which satirize Leibniz's belief that all is for the best. Candide is impressed into an army, where he is forced to fight a battle having nothing to do with him, beaten, insulted, and made to learn to do drills; he lives through a shipwreck caused by a horrible storm and the historical 1755 earthquake in Lisbon, in which an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 people perished (Lowers 64); he is reunited with Cunegonde and separated from her multiple times; he is forced to kill two priests and a Jew, even though he considers himself to be a peaceful man (one priest manages to survive); he is nearly boiled alive and eaten; his beloved is stolen from him by an aristocrat in Paraguay; and he is finally reunited with Cunegonde, but by this time she has become ugly and shrewish. Because of his sense of dignity, however, and her brother's refusal to let him marry her, he marries her anyway and becomes very unhappy. Candide, however, always maintains his belief (taught to him by Pangloss) that we live in the best of all possible worlds, right up until nearly the end of the novel.
Pangloss fares no better; he nearly dies from a venereal disease before being cured by a philanthropist's money and is condemned to be hanged after the Lisbon earthquake because of his heresy. Like Candide, however, he continues to assert his belief in the Leibnizian philosophy that we live in the best of all possible worlds right up until the end, "though he no longer believed it." (Voltaire 85).
Cunegonde makes out no better than the rest: she is raped multiple times, nearly disemboweled, and is constantly staving off the affections of an amorous suitor or being sold into slavery. At the end, as a slave, she grows so ugly and shrewish that Candide no longer wished to marry her (although he does anyway, mostly because of his sense of honor).
One of Voltaire's main points is made through the character of an old woman who accompanies Cunegonde. She has only one buttock, because she was trapped inside a castle during a siege when the castle's occupants ran out of food. In order to survive, the defenders cut one buttock off of each of the women and ate that. On a voyage across the sea, while telling her story to Cunegonde and the rest of the party, she says
therefore I advise you to divert yourself, and prevail upon each passenger to tell his story; and if there be one of them all, that has not cursed his life many a time, that has not frequently looked upon himself as the unhappiest of mortals, I give you leave to throw me headforemost into the sea. (Voltaire 29)
Cunegonde takes the old woman's advice and discovers that, indeed, there is no one on board who does not conform to the old woman's description. This passage is a very important part of the essence of Voltaire's message. Life, Voltaire is telling us, is a vale of tears. All is not for the best, we have merely to look around us and see suffering in every person that we meet.
If suffering is everywhere, as Voltaire is saying, and is the common currency of human existence, then it is not possible that God has arranged things so that all is for the best. Leibniz's "all is well," which Voltaire puts into the mouth of Pangloss, becomes an ironic mockery which is possible only for those who willfully refuse to consider the evidence of their senses.
Voltaire did not come to this viewpoint easily. He had praise for Leibniz as early as early as 1733 and as late as 1756. (Lowers 61) And several of Voltaire's early works had very optimistic viewpoints; one, Zadig, is very similar to Candide in plot and structure, but expresses a highly optimistic view of life. (Lowers 13) According to Dr. Lowers, it was the Lisbon earthquake of November 1755 which finally destroyed his optimism. (He had been wavering back and forth for quite some time, but Lowers asserts that this was the straw that broke the camel's back). (Lowers 64)
Voltaire was also a deist. Since he believed in a God who was absent from the day-to-day functioning of the universe, it is easy to understand that he would have a difficult time accepting the idea that his God would set up a system where he interferes to make sure that all is for the best. Voltaire shows that his God is not overly concerned with the individual lives of individual humans by writing a conversation between Pangloss and the most famous Turkish philosopher in the realm into one of the last few chapters of Candide: when Pangloss asks why such a ridiculous animal as man was ever made, the dervish (or philosopher). The dervish replies that it is none of Pangloss' business, but Pangloss persists in asking questions; he protests that there is much evil in the world. The dervish replies,
"What signifies it," said the Dervish, "whether there be evil or good? When his highness sends a ship to Egypt, does he trouble his head whether the mice on board are at their ease or not?" (Voltaire 86)
To Voltaire and his deistic God, we are but the mice on the ship that the earth is, and God is the captain. The captain is not overly concerned with the mice; they are left to fend for themselves as best they can.
Voltaire also implicitly criticizes Leibniz's belief that if evil happens to one individual, it must mean that through that evil comes good for the majority. I was left with a pair of lasting impressions after reading Candide for the first time: my primary impression was that no good for the majority could possibly explain or justify that which Candide, Pangloss, Cunegonde, and the rest of the company had to go through; my secondary impression was that everyone goes through similar trials and tribulations, with no reward for their troubles except for a hope which is betrayed over and over. I believe that this is the impression that Voltaire wishes us to take from the book: "I refute it thus!" he says, and rather than discussing rationalism in general, he points specifically at Leibniz's form of it (Leibniz is the only philosopher to be explicitly mentioned by name in Candide); and rather than kicking a rock, he sweeps his arm around the room, letting the reader look at life as he sees it.
The fact that Voltaire has concentrated on Leibniz's philosophy should not be understood to mean that Leibniz is the only philosopher that Voltaire wished to criticize with the publication of Candide. (Nor should the fact that I have concentrated on Leibniz in this paper be taken to imply that I thought he was the only philosopher that Voltaire wished to criticize). Besides attacking organized religion, the military, and the stupidity of people in general, Voltaire had an attack for a group of philosophers in general, of which Leibniz was simply one of the chief exponents. Another of the exponents of the "All is well" philosophy was the English poet Alexander Pope, whose Essay on Man expressed many of the same ideas that Voltaire was criticizing. As Lowers said, it was "a rationalistic effort to defend the ways of God to man philosophically." (Lowers 63). Most of these ideas were expressed by Pope in the first epistle of that poem, where he asserts that chance is "Direction which thou canst not see"; that discord is "Harmony, not understood"; and that partial evil is "universal good." In line 294 of the first epistle, Pope claims that "One truth is clear, WHATEVER IS, IS RIGHT." (Lowers 64)
Nor do I believe that Voltaire would agree with the ideas of Kant, with his synthetic a priori concepts; Like Locke and Hume, Voltaire believed that the mind was tabula rasa, a blank slate, when born, and that the senses are the pens, pencils, and typewriters which write on the paper of the mind. I also think that, as a champion of individualism, Voltaire would reject Hegel, with his doctrine that individuals embody the "spirit of the people." Finally, I believe that Voltaire would emphatically reject the ideology of Marx, with his doctrine of "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." I believe that Voltaire would reject any idea (such as those both implicit and explicit in Hegel and his most famous follower, Marx) which bound any man to live for his fellow men.
Leibniz was likely one of the last of the philosophers of his era to advocate that some men should give up their well-being for the general good of humanity. The rising tide of the various schools of thought promoting the rights of individuals assured that this idea did not resurface in a substantial way until the mid-nineteenth century, when socialism and communism began to become "a specter haunting Europe," in the words of Marx and Engels.
Also contributing to the lack of popular adherents which Leibniz has in the modern day was his belief (which he shared with other rationalists) that the senses are not to be trusted. Although many modern-day people believe that there is a higher reality than that which the senses can perceive, most of these people will at least admit that their senses tell them the truth about the world that the senses do perceive. Leibniz did not, I think, accept even this, and I think that the acceptance of Leibnizian philosophy has suffered as a result of this. Modern people have at least subconsciously, and at least partially, accepted the empiricism of the scientific method.
Finally, Leibniz's assertation that "all is well" seems even more of a cruel farce in the era of AIDS, atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, rising rates of crime, falling wages, and Nietzsche's death of God than it must have in Leibniz's own time. Voltaire kicked the rock that was Candide toward the philosophy of Leibniz, and history has shown that that rock, rolling ever faster and faster, becomes more and more appropriate with each passing year.
Click on a title to purchase that work at amazon.com.
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