DB 4b
lambtro10ENG 325 Week 4 Unit B: Optimism
1. Discussion board: Optimism (250 words)
Reading 1:
Finish the text I have posted before, I will post it again this time.
“Attached Files: File Candide, or Optimism.pdf”
Page 25-47
Reading 2: Liebnitz, the Philosopher
It is easy, after reading Candide, to follow Voltaire's lead and mock Liebnitz. But . . . (from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy*)
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) was one of the great thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and is known as the last “universal genius”. He made deep and important contributions to the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, logic, philosophy of religion, as well as mathematics, physics, geology, jurisprudence, and history. Even the eighteenth-century French atheist and materialist Denis Diderot, whose views were very often at odds with those of Leibniz, could not help being awed by his achievement, writing in his entry on Leibniz in the Encyclopedia, “Perhaps never has a man read as much, studied as much, meditated more, and written more than Leibniz… What he has composed on the world, God, nature, and the soul is of the most sublime eloquence. If his ideas had been expressed with the flair of Plato, the philosopher of Leipzig would cede nothing to the philosopher of Athens.” (Oeuvres complètes, vol. 7, p. 709) Indeed, Diderot was almost moved to despair in this piece: “When one compares the talents one has with those of a Leibniz, one is tempted to throw away one's books and go die quietly in the dark of some forgotten corner.”
So what is this "optimism"?
In philosophic terms, Liebniz was working with the "problem of evil": in a Christian world-view, where God is both all-loving and all powerful, why does He allow evil to happen? If He is all-loving, why would He subject us to evil? If He is all-powerful, why doesn't He stop it?
Voltaire's satire of Liebniz's response to the problem of evil is very simplified: We must be living in the best of all possible worlds, says Dr. Pangloss, because otherwise the perfect goodness of God is suspect.
For a more nuanced discussion of both the question in general, and how Liebniz actually responded, see: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz-evil/
DB question:
In Candide you can see what Daniel Gordon has described as “Voltaire’s double identity”: an engaged Enlightened opponent of injustice and intolerance, but also a skeptic about the limits of reason or theory in confronting the problems of human life. Discuss these positive and negative aspects of Voltaire’s message in the story.
2. Write responses for another student’s work. (75 words)
El Dorado is a mythical South American kingdom filled with riches. Voltaire portrays it as a remote community ensconced by mountains. Voltaire’s El Dorado is an idyllic place where the natives are attractive and friendly and the roads are littered with “gemstones”. The inns are government funded, established for trade within the kingdom. The one possible drawback is that its citizens are required to promise never to leave the kingdom.