Voltaire and Candide
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Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, in his satirical masterwork Candide, critiques both society and humanity wit little mercy. The author obviously seeks to expose all of the human race's self-deceptions and weaknesses, but he does so with great humor. Voltaire gives delight with his humor while planting the deeper message about the fallibility and corruption of humanity. This contradiction holds the power of Voltaire's writing. Candide provides a horrific portrait of the human condition, but it does so with preposterous and outlandish humor. Voltaire especially intends to criticize the popular idea of his era that sees a rational order in the world: "Voltaire shows how the claim of a rational universal order avoids the hard problems of living in a world where human beings have become liars, traitors, and so on" (335). At the same time, Voltaire is not so much the pessimist that he holds no hope for any sort of improvement or salvation on the part of human beings. For example, after putting his protagonist through every sort of awful predicament, Voltaire allows Candide the positive goal of starting and cultivating a garden (402). Yes, Voltaire is saying, there is much corruption in humanity, but there is also at least a glimmer of hope that individual human beings can overcome that corruption, survive their suffering, and lead some sort of productive and responsible lives. Voltaire leaves it up to readers to decide for themselves just how much weight they might give this opt
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f paradise, which directly caused these torments of hell, from which I am now suffering" (342).
Perhaps the favorite target of Voltaire is the philosophy which holds that the world which exists is the best of all possible worlds and the accompanying view that everything is for the best. This philosophy is clearly nonsense to Voltaire, who uses Pangloss to express its absurdity in the wake of an exploding volcano which has wrought tremendous destruction: "For, said he, all this is for the best, since if there is a volcano in Lisbon, it cannot be somewhere else, since it is unthinkable that things should be where they are, since everything is well" (345).
Of course, Voltaire's message is precisely that everything is not well, that everything is far from well, and that only a fool would ever consider the preposterous argument that the world is a reasonable place or that humanity lives in the best of all possible worlds.
To Voltaire, the only starting point for a philosophy of truth is the acceptance that human life is for the most part a miserable set of circumstances. This excerpt from a diatribe from the old woman aboard ship illustrates the author's position:
Ask every passenger on this ship to tell you his story, and if
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Approximate Word count = 1361
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)
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