I mean for those of us who point out the ways in which the world is not the best that it could be, at least in doing so we seem to be acknowledging the plight and the suffering of others, right? Not so it seems for those who can’t imagine anything being better than it is. It made them less sympathetic, more indifferent, to the tragedies of others. The contrast between light and shadow and life and death are two very different ones!Īnyway, all this said, I think what really bothered Voltaire about Pangloss’ optimism or theory that everything’s for the best, despite all the personal atrocities, was not that it was completely unreasonable maybe, but that it cultivated a heartlessness in people.

But ultimately the problem with this is that at the level of real life, it’s not shadows we’re talking about, is it? No, it’s blood soaked stains! Life just isn’t an artwork, despite the many comparisons we might draw between them.

In a painting the light and dark require each other and they play off one another to form an overall beautiful image. Now what are we to make of this, this analogy with shadows? I mean in a way, at least when it comes to a work of art, this makes some sense. And actually Voltaire himself is basically getting this from the great optimist Leibniz I mentioned, who claimed that “shadows bring out the colours”. He says this, he says, the ills of the world are but the shadows in a beautiful painting. Pangloss about just this sort of idea, and it takes the form of an aesthetic analogy. As the English poet Alexander Pope said in his The Essay on Man, “All discord is harmony not understood, all partial evil is universal good.”Īctually, Candide quotes Dr. So I could be living in a vale of tears but really what I don’t see is that ultimately everything is for the best.

So the idea here would be that what is bad for me is actually in the big picture good for the general arrangement of things. So Pangloss’ philosophical position in the novel is basically something like this: What he’s saying is that the world doesn’t have to be a terrible place even if it happens to be really bad for me. That’s to say, he disagreed with his view that our existing world is the best world that God could have created.īut back to the novel. The bottom line is that Voltaire disagreed with Leibniz’s, let’s call it, optimistic theodicy. Now, here’s the thing, the main target of Voltaire’s satire is actually the philosopher Leibniz, whose view is the one Pangloss is made to express. Pangloss fervently believes is that this world of ours, created and designed by God, is the best of all possible worlds, and so that whatever happens (however terrible it might seem), is really for the best. So what Voltaire is doing in the novel Candide is he’s satirizing the sort of happy optimistic rationalism of one of the main characters there, Dr.

Leibniz optimism candide