This article explores Leibniz's philosophical concept of the 'best of all possible worlds' and Voltaire's satirical response to it in his novel 'Candide'.
Leibniz was too logical about God. Like some ancient Stoics, he reasoned that, if God is omnipotent and good, ours has to be the best of all possible worlds, because if a better world had been feasible God would have made that one instead. All our sufferings must therefore be lesser evils that somehow serve to bring about a greater good. This solves the age-old puzzle of why God lets bad things happen.
I cannot show you this in detail,” Leibniz conceded, because no finite mind can see all the connections between events. But God had surely done all the relevant sums. So, Leibniz insisted, we may rest assured that any imagined world that might seem happier than our own would actually have been worse over all. This cheery train of thought gave Voltaire plenty to work with. In his tale, the young Candide is expelled from a baronial castle in Westphalia and subjected to a procession of colorful and violent disasters around the globe, often in the company of an equally battered tutor, Dr. Pangloss. Pangloss remains upbeat and contented throughout, convinced that all is for the best, because “Leibniz cannot have been wrong.” The good doctor is adept at spinning any setback into a hidden blessing. Even the syphilis that afflicts him is ultimately a good thing, because, from the New World, Columbus brought not only that disease but also chocolate. Pangloss triumphantly infers that without syphilis there would have been no chocolate. Voltaire took an excusable liberty in “Candide.” The real Leibniz almost always refrained from spelling out Panglossian excuses for particular evils. He kept his theory safely abstract; Voltaire brought it comically down to earth. And the best-of-all-possible-worlds thesis had another self-protective feature that Voltaire’s satire ignores. It referred not to our planet at some specific stage in its history but to the whole universe considered throughout eternity. The claim wasn’t that everything was fine and dandy in the here and now
LEIBNIZ VOLTAIRE CANDIDE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS PHILOSOPHY SATIRE
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