exactly as the best possible of all created worlds must be).įurther, a perfect being would create everything that could be created, therefore everything that could exist does exist.įurther still, everything is connected to everything else because that's how God created it, from the angels above to the worms below, therefore every creature and event is connected to every other creature and event.Ĭonsequently, this is the best of all possible worlds AND everything must be for the best (because God created it that way, natch).Ĭandide sums up the optimism's basic insanity when he encounters the mutilated negro in Surinam and declares that he is renouncing his optimism. God is perfect God created the world a perfect being would create a perfect world, therefore the world is perfect (e.g. The eighteenth century optimist was a philosopher whose notion of the universe went something like this: Pangloss's optimism is not the same as that of the cheerful optimist today who sees the glass half full while the gloomy pessimist sees it as half empty.

Voltaire hated optimism and parodied it brilliantly in the character of Pangloss, the philosophical optimist.

His name continues to stand for the homage to reason which is thought to have been distinctive of the intellectual outlook of the eighteenth century, especially in France.' (Ayer, 171)

Ayer points out that 'Voltaire is a great symbol. Voltaire was one of the chief thinkers of the Enlightenment and he lived his long life through most of it. 'The potentially explosive idea of happiness as a right, something to which all men were entitled and which only ignorance and external nied them, was now for the first time in history gaining wide acceptance.' (Anderson, 367) Happiness was the greatest goal of enlightenment thinking this was happiness in this life, not happiness in heaven beyond. Some were still Christian while others explored atheism and materialism a few supported monarchies while others preferred the radical new ideas of democracy.

The philosophes were not unanimous in their ideas. Freedom.of moral man to make his own way in the world.' (Gay, 3)

Philosophical optimism in candide