This is what makes Candide strikingly relevant.

Voltaire here demonstrates that not only is optimism flawed because it is also severely fatalistic, but that it also requires an a priori framework that employs a premise-conclusion inversion of reality justified by philosophy. Pangloss reasons that there was nothing to worry about, as the Bay of Lisbon was expressly made for Jacques to drown in, since everything was for the best. We see one of the more absurd optimist formulations in the novella spewed by Pangloss after witnessing a man thrown overboard and drown off the coast of Lisbon.

As Alexander Pope, a staunch Leibnizian optimist, put it: “All partial evil, universal good.” This implies that personal misfortune is always contextualized by a greater, but often unknowable, universal good. His philosophy is perfectly summarized by the much used “best of all possible worlds”, which describes that having considered all infinitely possible worlds, God in all His goodness has chosen the best one. Leibniz’s optimism was his proposed solution to the problem of evil: how evil can persist despite the existence of a benevolent, omnipotent and omniscient God. The work is a critical and satirical response to the absurd logical extremities of the once-prominent philosophy of optimism that Gottfried Leibniz (who had a hand in inventing calculus) had propounded. You’d be fully forgiven into thinking this was the script for a Monty Python special. The stylistic familiarity and slapstick, deadpan way it handles rapes, disembowelments and religious persecutions make it easy to lose the way to its true meaning. Eventually, Candide and his band of misfits end up on a Turkish farm only to realize that moving forward requires them to “cultivate their gardens'.Ĭandide falls prey to its own satirical prowess. Candide’s adventure begins after his tryst with the Baron’s daughter Cunegonde is exposed and he is exiled from the municipality.Ĭandide experiences the lows of atrocities such as the Inquisition, slavery and the Great Lisbon Earthquake, as well as the highs of discovering the unparalleled wealth of El Dorado in the New World and that his beloved Cunegonde and Pangloss are very much alive, despite their present mutilated state. There, his tutor Pangloss instills in him a doctrine of Leibnizian optimism. The novella starts with the young nobleman Candide, who lives in the castle of the fictional Baron of Thunder-ten-tronckh in Westphalian Germany. Voltaire’s 17 th century Candide ou l’Optimisme (Candide: Optimism) is not merely a hallmark of the Enlightenment Age and holds as much relevance today as it did then, as it serves as a guide to more inclusive and thoughtful political discourse. Tue, J 13:17 1772 a7124a1e87885b91d244660f9ed2aaaf 3 Books philosophy,Voltaire,Candide,liberalism,inequality,politics,#books,Book Free

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