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Section IV: The Age of Reason
Voltaire’s Candide: Being Enlightened in the Face of Disaster
Dr. Neil Robertson, Director, Foundation Year Program; Associate Professor of Humanities
“Candide drew near and saw his benefactor, who rose above the water one moment and was then swallowed up for ever. He was just going to jump after him, but was prevented by the philosopher Pangloss, who demonstrated to him that the Bay of Lisbon had been made on purpose for the Anabaptist to be drowned. While he was proving this à priori, the ship foundered; all perished except Pangloss, Candide, and that brutal sailor who had drowned the good Anabaptist. The villain swam safely to the shore, while Pangloss and Candide were borne thither upon a plank.
As soon as they recovered themselves a little they walked toward Lisbon. They had some money left, with which they hoped to save themselves from starving, after they had escaped drowning. Scarcely had they reached the city, lamenting the death of their benefactor, when they felt the earth tremble under their feet. The sea swelled and foamed in the harbour, and beat to pieces the vessels riding at anchor. Whirlwinds of fire and ashes covered the streets and public places; houses fell, roofs were flung upon the pavements, and
Neither Leibniz nor Pope denied that there was evil or “discord” in the world, but that it needed to be seen as necessary part of the greater good attained in and through that very evil or discord. As Pope suggests, in a piece of music there may be moments of disharmony, but it is through them that a more complete harmony and completeness is attained.
the pavements were scattered. Thirty thousand inhabitants of all ages and sexes were crushed under the ruins.[4] The sailor, whistling and swearing, said there was booty to be gained here.
"What can be the sufficient reason of this phenomenon?" said Pangloss.” - Voltaire Candide, Chapter 5 On Saturday November 1, 1755, the feast of All Saints in the Catholic Church calendar, at around 9:40 am, while many in Lisbon, Portugal were at church, a terrible earthquake brought devastating chaos and death. In combination with the subsequent fires and a tsunami, most of Lisbon was destroyed, including the Cathedral. The death toll estimates range between 10,000 and 100,000. This would be a terrible natural catastrophe at any time. It was actually third major earthquake, that we have records of, to hit the city of Lisbon. But it was an especially significant event for eighteenth century Europe, the Europe of what we call in FYP, the Age of Reason or the Era of the Enlightenment. In this period in Europe, at least among the
literate classes, there was a growing sense that the world was knowable and that human life was, at least in principle, becoming more rational and civilized. The seventeenth century had undergone a “scientific revolution” through such figures as Galileo, Descartes and above all Isaac Newton. The human mind seemed capable of knowing the world outside it, nature, in all of its causal order and structure. Equally the modern state began to make human life more orderly and rational. Commerce grew; technology started to develop and human life seemed to have been liberated by scientific insight from being at the mercy of powers or accidents that it could not understand or control. The great contemporary of Newton (a fellow discoverer of calculus), Gottfried Leibniz famously argued in his book Theodicy, that this is “the best of all possible worlds”. Alexander Pope, also writing at the turn of the eighteenth century put a similar sentiment into poetry:
All nature is but art, unknown to thee; All chance, direction, which thou canst not see; All discord, harmony, not understood; All partial evil, universal good: And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite,
One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right. Neither Leibniz nor Pope denied that there was evil or “discord” in the world, but that it needed to be seen as necessary part of the greater good attained in and through that very evil or discord. As Pope suggests, in a piece of music there may be moments of disharmony, but it is through them that a more complete harmony and completeness is attained.
Such a philosophy and more than philosophy, a frame of mind or way of experiencing the world was both elevating and reconciling. The experience that all is fundamentally well. Science far from being the enemy of religion was rather the means by which God’s creation and governance of the world was confirmed. But of course such a frame of mind is also deeply conservative: it is arguing that there is a deep rational design in the world as determined by a rational benevolent God and so whatever sense of wrong or injustice one may have about the current disposition needs to recognize its limited perspective in the context of the divinely caused rational whole.
To such a reconciling frame of mind the earthquake at Lisbon on the morning of a deeply holy day, when all who gathered to worship God were exposed, by that very worship, to catastrophic harm, came as an intellectual and moral earthquake. A number of important figures responded to this event, but the most famous was Voltaire (1694 -1778) in his most memorable work, Candide. Voltaire had been one of those who found the standpoint of Leibniz and Pope fundamentally persuasive. He was not an orthodox Christian, but found in the science of the age a powerful indication of a rational deity that governed the cosmos, including the lives of the humans who inhabited it. While Voltaire was never simply complacent about the status quo - he was always a bit of a thorn in the side of French society - Candide marks an important shift and one that was evidently informed by the experience of the Lisbon earthquake.
Candide is a wonderful, if sometimes cartoonish, satire. It tells the story of the aptly named Candide who begins our novel as a follower of a caricature of Leibniz, called Pangloss, who argues that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Candide is then subject to a ridiculous number of incidents any one of which might reasonably have dislodged from Candide his confidence in Pangloss’s philosophy: he is subject to war, coercion, deception, any number of incidents of violence; those he knows and loves also undergo horrific events, often at the hands of apparently venerable institutions of state and church. There is a disquisition by Pangloss himself, who nearly dies from syphilis, about how the spread of syphilis to Europe - a slow pandemic that arose from that form of globalization known as colonialism - was all part
of this best of all possible worlds, sine without it “we should not have chocolate”. Quite early in the novel is Candide experiences the earthquake in Lisbon. One might expect this incident to be the turning point of the novel, the point that would break Candide’s happy confidence in Pangloss’s “optimism” (a word that literally refers to the belief that this is the best of worlds). But in fact that point of breaking occurs much later in the novel and reveals a deep insight by Voltaire.
What finally breaks Candide’s optimism is his encounter with an enslaved African who has suffered terribly at the hands not of this or that cruel individual or accidental or natural wrong, but as the victim of a system that makes slavery and cruelty the “cost” for the sugar that Europeans put in their tea:
“O Pangloss!” cried out Candide, “such horrid doings never entered your imagination. Here is an end of the matter; I find myself, after all, obliged to renounce your optimism.” “Optimism,” said Cacambo, “what is that?” “Alas!” replied Candide, “it is the obstinacy of maintaining that everything is the best when it is the worst.”
However, the final outcome of this recognition that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds is not, for Voltaire, or the European enlightenment generally, despair or cynicism. Strangely, it is what I like to call the “internalization” by humanity of the very principle of “the best of all possible worlds”. However, now this principle is no longer something divinely given and accomplished for us, but it has become instead the object of human moral work and aspiration. We will now strive and feel morally called to make this “the best of all possible worlds”: justice, equity, human happiness and well-being become human accomplishments or their deficiency human failures. Or, as Candide states it at the end of this novel:” We must cultivate our garden!”
