This month, we publish a fantastic new hardback edition of Voltaire's Candide, translated by Theo Cuffe and with an afterword by Michael Wood. Here, A. C. Grayling asks whether the book is essentially optimistic or pessimistic.
Anyone asked to describe Voltaire’s miniature masterpiece Candide would say that it is a satire on optimism, and they would be right – but for the wrong reasons. Yes, Candide wittily, entertainingly, even sometimes bleakly satirises optimism, which gave Voltaire a chance to attack many of mankind’s follies in the process. But does that mean he was a pessimist, convinced that the cause of humanity is hopeless? No, and understanding why not is the same as seeing why most people would be right for the wrong reasons about Candide.
There are four ‘-isms’ at issue in Candide: optimism, meliorism, quietism and pessimism. In eighteenth century terms, optimism is the view that the world is the best world there can be, which is guaranteed by the fact that it was created by God, and God is both all-good and all-powerful. Meliorism is the view that the world is not perfect – it is indeed very far from being so – but it can be made better; ‘ameliorated’ literally means ‘sweetened’. Pessimism means that almost everything, if not indeed everything, is bad, and will never get better.
Quietism belongs to this family of ‘-isms’ in an indirect way. It means accepting things as they are, keeping out of the line of fire, and getting on with life quietly. It therefore combines a bit of pessimism with a relieving garnish of meliorism.
In Candide Dr Pangloss is the high representative of optimism. Actually, he is a high caricature of optimism, for Voltaire deliberately – for artistic and polemical reasons – distorts the views of Dr Pangloss’s hero, the philosopher Leibniz, in a rather interesting way. More on this in a moment. The melancholy Martin is Candide’s pessimist, and he has an easy time stating his case, because whereas all the accidents and misfortunes which occur to Pangloss and Candide are repeated refutations of Panglossian optimism, nothing – not even episodes of great good fortune – can refute Martin, for he need only gloomily say, ‘Wait and see; this could all go wrong.’
Candide himself finishes by being a quietist. When the group of friends end their tumultuous adventures in Constantinople, and acquire a little garden there, Candide is the one who encourages them to tend it in quietness, no longer fretting over questions (still less endeavours) concerning the best and the worst of things.
And Voltaire himself is the meliorist in Candide, where a kind of success, a kind of happiness, a kind of ‘best’, is at last wrested from the grip of a multiply contrary fate for all the parties. And not only there but in his overall philosophy in life and work beyond Candide he is a meliorist. Had he not been so, he would not have written so much, and argued so long, in hopes of making the world a better place.
This is the respect in which Voltaire is a true Enlightenment figure, despite having savaged optimism so thoroughly in Candide. The Enlightenment is above all a meliorist project, and in Candide Voltaire singles out many of the things – superstition, greed, disloyalty, ignorance, selfishness, illiberalism – which conspire to make the world a bad place. For note one shining fact about Candide: the principal characters in it are all good people: the cheerful, hopeful Dr Pangloss, the delightful, ingenuous Candide, the excellent, faithful Cacambo, the honest Martin, the charming ever-innocent Paquette, even the much victimised and abused Cunegunde, are examples of what would gladden a meliorist’s heart – and even the heart of an optimist, in the proper sense of this term: which must now be explained.
For the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the conclusion that our world is the best of all possible worlds follows, as already mentioned, from the perfections of God’s nature. It follows indeed with logical necessity, for it would not be consistent with the beneficence and omnipotence of the deity that he should create anything less than the best possible world. But the best possible world need not be, and perhaps had better not be, a perfect world. On the contrary, said Leibniz, the bestpossible world might well be one in which the creatures it contains are subjected to the test of miseries and struggles – earthquake, plague, bereavement, injustice, struggle, and the like – in the interests of whatever ultimate plan the deity has for them. A perfect world would contain nothing that would test or stretch God’s creatures; so a perfect world would not necessarily be the best one for the deity’s purposes, and therefore our own ultimate good. By this logic Leibniz was able to make the existence of an all-good and all-powerful God consistent with the fact of the world’s profound imperfections and the moral and natural evils that everywhere infect it.
Voltaire did not like this casuistical way out of a problem that challenged the faith of all reflective people. Europe had seen the terrifying earthquake and tsunami that devastated Lisbon in 1755, an event that gave added force to the rejection of traditional religion shared by most of the Age of Reason’s greatest thinkers, he among them. That was his reason for caricaturing optimism by misinterpreting the phrase ‘best of all possible worlds’ as ‘perfect world’. This is why Dr Pangloss, for all that he was a votary of the rigorously logical Leibniz, used an array of such illogical arguments as that we have noses so that we can wear spectacles, putatively thereby proving that in this best of all possible worlds, everything is for the best.
In any case, a book that was genuinely pessimistic could not have El Dorado in it. Voltaire’s version of Utopia – a place without religious strife and without greed, a place of amity between people because there is no cause for them to betray, cheat, fight and murder each other – is a place in fact of quietism. Candide manages to recreate, imperfectly of course, a miniature El Dorado at the end of the saga, showing where Voltaire’s own best hopes lay.
A. C. Grayling is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London.
