For thousands of years, humankind has struggled with the extraordinary task of understanding the purpose of suffering. People who believe God created the natural realm commonly struggle to understand why a gracious Creator would allow His creation to experience tragedy. Meanwhile, atheists often frame the existence of suffering as proof that a caring god could not have organized the universe. If the creator of the universe truly loves his creation, then why allow them to suffer at all? The doctrine of philosophical optimism seeks to explain the purpose of suffering by teaching that every physical event, including tragedy, is supernaturally aimed at achieving the best outcome. In his Candide, Voltaire satirizes philosophical optimism using the characters of Pangloss and Candide to show that his readers should abandon optimism and search for other ways to rationalize tragedy.
Voltaire uses satire to demonstrate that philosophical optimism encourages faulty reasoning. At the beginning of Candide, Pangloss summarizes philosophical optimism and affirms his belief in it, saying, “It is demonstrated… that everything being made for an end, everything is necessarily for the best end” (2). Pangloss’s philosophy leads him to several comically foolish conclusions about everyday objects, and Voltaire writes so that the flaws in Pangloss’s thinking are readily apparent. For example, Pangloss asserts that “noses were made to wear spectacles,” although spectacles are designed to fit noses, and that “legs were visibly instituted to be breeched,” though breeches are designed to cover legs (2). The human body has featured both the nose and the legs for thousands of years – they are not new developments – while spectacles and breeches are relatively recent inventions. Since humans existed long before spectacles and breeches, the human body could not have been designed for them. Instead, spectacles and breeches are human inventions intended for the body. To state that the purposes of the noses and legs are not to perform the essential functions of sense and ambulation but to carry glasses or fabric is to trivialize their worth. Voltaire satirizes philosophical optimism, using the impossible notion that the human body was designed for human creations to demonstrate that optimism encourages faulty reasoning. If optimism encourages defective rationale, it should be abandoned in favor of a better philosophy.
Voltaire also demonstrates that philosophical optimism undermines good judgment of character. Candide, hungry and tired, accepts money and food from two strange men dressed in blue (4). Voltaire highlights the men’s impure motives, writing that they flatter Candide by complimenting his stature, though he measures to a less-than-average five-foot-five, and claim that they will “never allow a man like you [Candide] to lack money” (4). Common sense encourages people to be highly skeptical of unsolicited gifts from strangers as they are usually given with impure motives, and people with good judgment tend to question the motives of flatterers. Accordingly, Candide initially rejects the strange men’s gifts but later remembers Pangloss’s teaching that “all is for the best” and accepts the presents, allowing his optimistic view of life to override his common sense and good judgment (4). He suffers physically for his unwise choice to trust the strange men, as they kidnap him and force him into the Bulgarian military, where the soldiers beat him so severely that his body requires three weeks of care under an expert physician to heal (6). Candide’s decision to depend on philosophical optimism rather than good judgment ends in his being taken advantage of by strange men and suffering at the hands of the Bulgarians. By demonstrating that optimism damages the perception of human character, Voltaire provides a compelling reason to abandon it in favor of a more pragmatic philosophy.
Furthermore, Voltaire highlights how philosophical optimism devalues human life. Pangloss contracts a terrible sexually transmitted disease from Paquette that rots his nose away, causes him to grow sores, dulls his eyes, twists his mouth, blackens his teeth, causes a violent cough, and will eventually kill him (8). Paquette’s disease is widespread. Given any army of thirty thousand men, Pangloss estimates that at least twenty thousand have the disease (10). Speaking of the illness, he says, “It was an indispensable thing in the best of worlds,” for Columbus’s discovery of chocolate and cochineal, what Pangloss calls the “best end,” necessitated Columbus contracting the disease and bringing it to Europe (10). If the discovery of chocolate and cochineal justifies the loss of human life, as Pangloss believes, then chocolate and cochineal are worth more than human life. The idea that any piece of candy or dyed garment is worth more than human life is unnatural and false since human life is priceless. Voltaire intentionally uses Pangloss’s character to demonstrate that optimism encourages an unnatural devaluing of human life.
Voltaire satirizes various flaws in philosophical optimism to encourage his readers to seek other methods of understanding tragedy. Optimism offers an attractive answer to suffering, that humanity must experience tragedy now to achieve an undefined “best end” later (2), but Voltaire believes that optimism’s drawbacks outweigh its advantages. He believes that optimism is a dangerous philosophy that severely harms human life by causing people to trust indiscriminately, reason improperly, and underappreciate life, and that people would be better off without it. Voltaire believes one can avoid the damage that philosophical optimism causes by abandoning it and seeking other methods to understand the world. He uses Candide and Pangloss to exhibit the flaws he sees in optimistic thinking, encouraging his readers to abandon it and seek to understand tragedy in other ways.
