Voltaires Candide - Book Report/Review Example

dear client, this is still incomplete. i will upload the completed, finalized paper asap. Please forgive me for this delay. We had experienced long blackouts due to maintenance problems. But I assure you that the paper will be completed this morning, no more further delays. Kindly ignore the completed status of your order. Thank you =) Voltaire’s Candide The most normal and effective way to shed light on the open-minded skepticism of Voltaire is to thoroughly examine one of his works which remains popular far and wide—Candide. This work reveals that Voltaire’s skepticism is most correctly understood through a comparison with Leibnitz’s optimism—the idea that the existing, real world is the ‘greatest’ of all rationally possible things, that God had an adequate justification for creating it, and that it is reasonable as the greatest decision of a ‘wisely charitable’ and ‘universally benevolent’ of God or the ‘Infinitely Perfect Being’. After revealing that the profound distrust of Voltaire of rationalist theology and metaphysics gave him an image of being inescapably ‘anti-Leibnitzien’, it reveals that, oddly, Voltaire, just like Leibniz, was committed to enlightened, open-minded, and liberal political rule which could mitigate suffering and poverty, create educational and scientific traditions, scorn religious discrimination and fallacy, and choose happiness and fortune over violence and war. The concrete aspirations of Voltaire and Leibniz are not very different, although their beliefs about ‘finding’ ideals of common justice which are binding for human beings and God alike differ profoundly and totally. Leibniz’s and Voltaire’s ‘first philosophies’ are very distinct from each other—Leibniz was against skepticism, a neo-Augustinian, Christian-Platonic rationalist who believe that ‘English’ empiricism was misleading and erroneous in many ways, whereas Voltaire embodies the skepticism of Pascal and Bayle, Charron, and Montaigne, and the empiricism of Newton and Locke which he established. Even so, Leibniz and Voltaire deeply shared a belief in social development, liberalism, and enlightenment. Both of them may embrace the popular saying, ‘crush the infamous’, although they disagree over what qualifies as ‘infamous’ and deserves being crushed. A concluding opening statement Voltaire links the idea that ‘all is well’ to Leibniz’s Theodicee and Plato’s Timaeus: “Leibniz… took Plato’s part… But after having read both more than once, we avow our ignorance, according to our custom; and since the Gospel has revealed nothing to us on this point, we shall remain without remorse in the shadows”—specifically, in Plato’s allegory of the cave without a climb toward the light. However, Leibniz not once said that ‘all is well’; he said that the world is ideal or ‘best’. Yet, ‘best’ is not tantamount to ‘good’; only God is flawlessly good, plain and simple. Being ‘best’ is, and ought to be, in harmony with the actual presence of Dr. Goebbels and Caligula; the world, according to Leibniz, is best in spite of being fraught with ‘moral’, ‘metaphysical’, and ‘physical’ sin. And hence Voltaire’s unbearably hilarious account of earthly calamities and tragedies in Candide—common injustice, Spanish Inquisition, Lisbon earthquake, drowning, mutilation, incest, sodomy, syphilis, bestiality, cannibalism, slavery, vivisection, hanging, beating, rape, and murder—could not harm sheer ‘bestness’ in the manner that it would be lethal to direct ‘goodness’. When Candide is brought back together with the allegedly deceased Dr. Pangloss—who by this time suffers from acute syphilis—the below dialogue results: --Well, my dear Pangloss, Candide said to him, now that you have been hanged, dissected, beaten to a pulp, and sentenced to the galleys, do you still think that everything is for the best in this world? --I am still of my first opinion, replied Pangloss; for after all I am a philosopher, and it would not be right for me to recant since Leibniz could not possibly be wrong. However, Leibniz did not claim that all things—taken separately—are “for the best in this world”; Leibniz argues that the world, in general, is best. However, what Voltaire opposes is any attempt to justify evil or immorality, to make it understandable, justifiable, and tolerable within an allegedly ‘universal jurisprudence’. Certainly, for Voltaire, human beings should experience and withstand evil—because it is unavoidable for predetermined, conscious beings; but we should not—and in fact cannot—find a ‘rationality’ for it. Voltaire argues, “One must at least grant that this puny animal [man] has the right to cry out humbly, and to seek to understand, while crying out, why these eternal laws [of the ‘best’ world] are not made for the well-being of each individual.” On this final argument, virtually without recognizing it, Voltaire underlines the serious problem in Leibnizian optimism. Hence if Leibniz did not assert that ‘all is good’, he did certainly argue that the world is and ought to be best. However, Voltaire not once mentions the most inexcusable problem in Leibniz’s argument: ‘why would a wisely charitable and universally benevolent etre infiniment parfait create in time (when he need not) any ‘world at all—a world which is (at best) ‘best’, but not good?’ Leibniz raises the fundamental question in the Principles of Nature and Grace—‘why is there something rather than nothing?’ Voltaire, basically, does not understand what is ‘worst’ in the ‘best’ of the Leibnizian world; how to shift from God’s omnipotence to the sheer ‘bestness’ of a real, formed world. Candide is regarded as the most hilarious and lengthiest of Voltaire’s narratives. It is obviously a satire on ‘optimism’. It is also a parody on systems; a discourse on the issue of evil; a quest for the secret of happiness; an analysis of reality and Utopia; and, primarily, a humor. Candide is a defining moment in Voltaire’s vocation. In this work an entire array of previously applied components are combined in a single effective formula. The worldwide journey of reason; the naïve spectator; the mixture of actual occurrences with the unbelievable stories; the account of evil; the bizarre combination of the irreligious and religious; the institute of experience; the acceptance of an unclear doctrine of realism over metaphysics; the manuscript of a translation. Voltaire discloses the silliness of human self-importance and deception and the truth of human desires, the foolishness of metaphysics and the central value of facts or realities. Candide is the ultimate allegory of reason. The primary role of the earthquake in Candide is not really to question an all-powerful and generous God, but to mock the systems by which people try to understand and rule their lives. With regard to the anguish and damages brought about by the earthquake, the Leibnizian faith of Pangloss appears simply as absurd as the idea of the Coimbra intellectuals that an Inquisition will certainly thwart another. Obviously, Leibnizian optimism is harshly parodied in Candide. Instability, political violence, prostitution, cannibalism, disease, earthquake, shipwreck, hanging, torture, discrimination, religious persecution, carnage, pillage, and rape—all is well! Through the power of satire, the practices and traditions of both Leibniz and Pope are mocked. Neither Pope nor Leibniz claimed that all is well. They recognized the existence of evil and, whereas Pope believed that it belongs to a ‘good’ plan, Leibniz did not think that every evil automatically resulted in ‘good’. Without a doubt neither of them thought, as Pangloss does, that “private misfortunes are public benefits; so that the more private misfortunes there are, the greater is the general good.” Voltaire keenly opposes the pragmatic and intellectual idleness to which faith in this system can encourage. To some extent this is because he views Leibnizian optimism as a kind of fatalism, even though Leibniz clearly advices against this notion of ‘fate’. Voltaire argues, “We need a God who speaks to mankind. Optimism is hopeless. It is a cruel philosophy under a consoling name.” Hence he tries to dishonor optimism not merely by illustrating its principles in incompatible juxtaposition with evidence which disproves such principles, but also by reiterating them as slogans to indicate moral and intellectual spontaneity. ‘Sufficient reason’, ‘effects and causes’, ‘best of all possible worlds’, ‘all is well’—each reappears with the regularity of a ‘Hail Mary’ unconsciously mumbled. The fact that optimism is criticized ‘as being’ a system instead of simply ‘as being’ optimism is manifested from the parody of other systems in Candide. Candide is submerged in misery because of the inability of Cacambo to go back but, in a way suggestive of the merciless Pangloss. The entire subplot of Cacambo’s message to return Cunegonde is intended to give proof of Cacambo’s faithfulness and goodness in which to disprove Martin’s negative prediction that Cacambo will do nothing; thus, Voltaire concludes the part portraying this message with a definite sign: “Cacambo set the same day: it was a very good man that Cacambo.” Martin has correctly envisioned that the goodness of Candide in offering cash to Paquette and Giroflee would have a negative outcome, but the strength this endows the Manichean philosophy is much more undesirable than their misery because it indicates that such systems can be a trustworthy guide. Read More