Three Rising Metaphysical Systems c. 1730
François-Marie Arouet (pronounce) aka "Voltaire" (in the Sanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) Quotes of Voltaire
Voltaire was one of the most famous French writers in 18th century Europe. He is most famous for his attacks on Christianity, especially the established Catholic Church and its role in France, and his advocacy of freedom of religion, freedom of speech and separation of church and state. He attacked the state for its "corrupt" judicial system and use of torture.
Voltaire was a versatile and prolific writer, producing works in almost every literary form, including plays, poems, novels, essays and historical and scientific works. He wrote more than 20,000 letters and more than 2,000 books and pamphlets. Voltaire was less a philosopher than a satirical, social polemicist. He was especially well known for his biting wit. He used it to decry "despotism," "superstition," and "fanaticism."
Voltaire was a Deist. His ideas philosophical stance was driven primarily by the British empiricists Isaac Newton and John Locke, whose philosophies he popularized in France.
Biography
Voltaire was born in Paris in 1694. His father was a lawyer and the family was fairly well off. He attended a Jesuit school from age 10 to 17 (1704 - 1711), learning Latin, theology, and rhetoric. He wanted to be a writer, but in 1713 his father tried to force him into law by getting him a position in The Hague. There Voltaire got involved in a scandalous affair with a French Protestant girl and then returned to Paris.
From early on, Voltaire had trouble with the authorities for critiques of the government. As a result, he was twice sentenced to prison and once to temporary exile to England. One satirical verse, in which Voltaire accused the French Régent of incest with his daughter, resulted in an eleven-month imprisonment in the Bastille. The Comédie-Française had agreed in January 1717 to stage his debut play, Œdipe, (Oedipus) and it opened in mid-November 1718, seven months after his release. Its immediate critical and financial success established his reputation. It was then he chose the pen name Voltaire ("the young Arouet?").
The Bastille, Paris
In 1722, Voltaire traveled to The Hague to publish his epic poem of King Henry IV of France, which had been forbidden in Paris. He met Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the way. In Holland, Voltaire was impressed with the openness and tolerance of Dutch society.
In 1726, a young French nobleman paid thugs to beat up Voltaire for insulting him. When Voltaire sued for damages, the aristocrats got him sent to the Bastille without a trial. Voltaire then convinced the authorities to let him leave France, and he went to England. There he met some of Britain's greatest writers and got his interest in both British philosophy, government, and Shakespeare, who was still relatively unknown in France.
After two years in exile, Voltaire was allowed to return to Paris. In 1733, Voltaire met Émilie du Châtelet, a wife of a Marquis and mother of three who was 12 years his junior and with whom he was to have an affair for 16 years. The relationship had a significant intellectual element. Voltaire and the Marquise collected over 21,000 books and conducted scientific experiments together. Émilie's translation of Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica was the definitive French translation for over 150 years. At this time Voltaire published his views on British attitudes toward government, literature, religion and science in a collection of essays in letter form entitled Letters Concerning the English Nation (London, 1733).
In 1734, Voltaire wanted to publish Letters in France. Before it appeared, Voltaire attempted to get official permission for the book from the royal censors, a requirement in France at the time. His publisher, however, ultimately released the book without these approvals and without Voltaire's permission. This made the first edition, now called Lettres philosophiques, illicit, a fact that contributed to the scandal but does not explain the rapid and overwhelming response on the part of the French authorities. The book was publicly burned by the royal hangman several months after its release, and this act turned Voltaire into a widely known intellectual outlaw. Had it been executed, a royal lettre de cachet would have sent Voltaire to the royal prison of the Bastille, instead he was able to flee with Du Châtelet to Cirey where the couple used the sovereignty granted by her aristocratic title to create a safe haven and base for Voltaire's new position as a philosophical rebel and writer in exile.
25 Years Away from Paris
Émilie died in childbirth in 1749, and in 1750 Voltaire went to Prussia where he served as Councillor to Frederick the Great for four years. They eventually had a falling out, and having since been banned from Paris, Voltaire went to Geneva in 1754 and then to Ferney (western France) in 1758. It was here he wrote his most famous work, Candide.
Voltaire's Chateau de Ferney
In 1754, at Jean de Rond d'Alembert, Voltaire began writing for the Encyclopédie, now in its 4th edition. Eventually, this would lead to a falling out between Voltaire, and d'Alembert and Denis Diderot, and Voltaire would also fallout with Jean-Jacques Rousseau (more on this in a later class).
From 1762, he began to champion unjustly persecuted people, the case of Huguenot merchant Jean Calas being the most celebrated. Calas had been tortured to death in 1763, supposedly because he had murdered his eldest son for wanting to convert to Catholicism. His possessions were confiscated and his two daughters were taken from his widow and were forced into Catholic convents. Voltaire, seeing this as a clear case of religious persecution and a brutal French judiciary, managed to overturn the conviction in 1765. Voltaire later also became involved in the cases of François-Jean de la Barre and Pierre-Paul Sirven.
Voltaire showed little interest in peasants until he was in his 60s when he suddenly started a campaign at Ferney to protect them from nobles who used the courts to extort massive tithes from them. He continued his activities on their behalf into his 80s.
Death and burial
In February 1778, Voltaire finally returned to Paris but the travel made him ill. He died in May, two months before Rousseau died. During the French Revolution, the National Assembly of France enshrined Voltaire in the Panthéon on 11 July 1791. It is estimated that a million people attended the procession, which stretched throughout Paris. In October 1794, Rousseau's remains were moved to the Panthéon, where they were placed near the remains of Voltaire.
Important ideas:
Deism - "What is faith? Is it to believe that which is evident? No. It is perfectly evident to my mind that there exists a necessary, eternal, supreme, and intelligent being. This is no matter of faith, but of reason."
Religious toleration - "It does not require great art, or magnificently trained eloquence, to prove that Christians should tolerate each other. I, however, am going further: I say that we should regard all men as our brothers. What? The Turk my brother? The Chinaman my brother? The Jew? The Siam? Yes, without doubt; are we not all children of the same father and creatures of the same God?"
Voltaire was unwavering in his hostility to church authority and the power of the clergy. For similar reasons, he also grew as he matured ever more hostile toward the sacred mysteries upon which monarchs and Old Regime aristocratic society based their authority.
The Problem of Good and Evil
Although Voltaire was not a big believer in sin and eternal salvation or damnation, the problem of Good and Evil in the world was a theme of his work throughout his life. His first successful writing venture, the 1718 play, Œdipe (Oedipus), had made him famous. In it he questioned whether Oedipus had free will when he killed his father and married his father, or was he fated by the Gods? If he was fated, could he be held accountable? Oedipus mother criticizes the priests: "Our priests are not what the foolish people imagine; their wisdom is solely based on credulity."
Human freedom (free will)
Voltaire explored the question of human freedom in philosophical terms. The question was particularly central to European philosophical discussions at the time, and Voltaire's work explicitly referenced thinkers like Hobbes and Leibniz while wrestling with the questions of materialism, determinism, and providential purpose that were then central to the writings of the so-called radical deists, figures such as John Toland and Anthony Collins. Voltaire struggled to understand the nature of human existence and ethics within a cosmos governed by rational principles and impersonal laws.
Voltaire adopted a stance in this text somewhere between the strict determinism of rationalist materialists and the transcendent spiritualism and voluntarism of contemporary Christian natural theologians.
For Voltaire, humans are not deterministic machines of matter and motion, and free will thus exists. But humans are also natural beings governed by inexorable natural laws, and his ethics anchored right action in a self that possessed the natural light of reason immanently. This stance distanced him from more radical deists like Toland, and he reinforced this position by also adopting an elitist understanding of the role of religion in society.
For Voltaire, those equipped to understand their own reason could find the proper course of free action themselves. But since many were incapable of such self-knowledge and self-control, religion, he claimed, was a necessary guarantor of social order. This stance distanced Voltaire from the republican politics of Toland and other materialists, and Voltaire echoed these ideas in his political musings, where he remained throughout his life a liberal, reform-minded monarchist and a skeptic with respect to republican and democratic ideas.
The 1755 Lisbon Earthquake and Candide
The 1755 Lisbon earthquake occurred on the morning of Saturday, 1 November, the holy day of All Saints' Day, at around 09:40 local time. In combination with subsequent fires and a tsunami, the earthquake almost totally destroyed Lisbon and adjoining areas. Seismologists today estimate the Lisbon earthquake had a magnitude in the range 8.5–9.0 on the moment magnitude scale. Estimates place the death toll in Lisbon alone between 10,000 and 100,000 people, making it one of the deadliest earthquakes in history.
Numerous philosophers since the 17th century, particularly Pierre Bayle, argued that natural events were not 'signs from God'. However, Catholic religious leaders like the Archbishop of Peru claimed that the Lisbon quake was a sign of God's displeasure with man's sins, albeit administered with 'great merciful loving kindness' (he had claimed the same of quakes in Peru, which he blamed partly on the lack of modesty in Peruvian women's dress). The Protestant John Wesley claimed that the Lisbon quake was God's retribution for Portugal's persecution of Protestants.
Candide: All for the Best is the story of a young man who was taught Gottfried Leibniz's theory that this world is the best of all possible worlds by his teacher, Dr. Pangloss. Since God created the world and God is good, everything that happens must be for a good reason, even if we cannot see it. Voltaire lampoons Leibniz's optimism throughout the book as Candide embarks on travels and encounters one tragedy after another.
Voltaire mocks Leibniz's logic...
" It is demonstrable that things cannot be otherwise than as they are; for as all things have been created for some end, they must necessarily be created for the best end. Observe, for instance, the nose is formed for spectacles, therefore we wear spectacles."
"it was a thing unavoidable, a necessary ingredient in the best of worlds; for if Columbus had not caught in an island in America this disease [syphilis], which contaminates the source of generation, and frequently impedes propagation itself, and is evidently opposed to the great end of nature, we should have had neither chocolate nor cochineal."
Voltaire also mocks many other attitudes of his age regarding religion, authority, sex, and more.
In the end, Candide rejects Pangloss' claim that "all turned out for the best: saying "we must cultivate our own garden."
Political ideas - Voltaire had a low opinion of the masses. He did not believe in widespread education and was not a believer in mass democracy. He believed that enlightening the upper classes would evoke gradual social and political changes. He was not a revolutionary.
Voltaire's influence on history writing
Voltaire's best-known histories are History of Charles XII (1731), The Age of Louis XIV (1751), and his Essay on the Customs and the Spirit of the Nations (1756). He broke from the tradition of narrating diplomatic and military events, and emphasized customs, social history and achievements in the arts and sciences. The Essay on the Customs traced the progress of world civilization in a universal context, thereby rejecting both nationalism and the traditional Christian frame of reference. (more)
Article on Voltaire and Newtonian Empirical Science
Important philosophical works
Letters on England (1733) (online text)
Le Mondain (1736)
Elements of the Philosophy of Newton (1745)
Zadig (1747)
Micromégas (1752)
Traité sur la tolérance (1763)
Candide: or All for the Best (1759)
Dictionnaire philosophique (Philosophical Dictionary) (1764)
Idées républicaines (1765)
Questions sur les Miracles (1765)
L'Ingénu (1767)
Des singularités de la nature (1768)
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