Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet)

Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) (1694–1778)

Voltaire remains the most celebrated representative of the reformers and free-thinkers whose writings define the movement of ideas in eighteenth-century France known as the Enlightenment. He was not, however, a systematic philosopher with an original, coherently argued world-view, but a philosophe who translated, interpreted and vulgarized the work of other philosophers. His own writings on philosophical matters were deeply influenced by English empiricism and deism. His thought is marked by a pragmatic rationalism that led him, even in his early years, to view the world of speculative theorizing with a scepticism that was often expressed most effectively in his short stories. As a young man, Voltaire was particularly interested in Locke and Newton, and it was largely through his publications in the 1730s and 1740s that knowledge of Lockean epistemology and Newtonian cosmology entered France and eventually ensured the eclipse of Cartesianism.

After his stay in England Voltaire became interested in philosophical optimism, and his thinking reflected closely Newton’s view of a divinely ordered human condition, to which Alexander Pope gave powerful poetic expression in the Essay on Man (1733–4). This was reinforced for the young Voltaire by Leibnizian optimism, which offered the view that the material world, being necessarily the perfect creation of an omnipotent and beneficent God, was the ‘best of all possible worlds’, that is to say the form of creation chosen by God as being that in which the optimum amount of good could be enjoyed at the cost of the least amount of evil.

Voltaire’s later dissatisfaction with optimistic theory brought with it a similar loss of faith in the notion of a meaningful order of nature, and his earlier acceptance of the reality of human freedom of decision-taking and action was replaced after 1748 with a growing conviction that such freedom was illusory. The 1750s witness Voltaire’s final abandonment of optimism and providentialism in favour of a more deterministically orientated position in which a much bleaker view of human life and destiny predominates. Pessimistic fatalism was a temporary phase in his thinking, however, and was replaced in turn by a melioristic view in which he asserted the possibilities of limited human action in the face of a hostile and godless condition.

1 Life

Voltaire (born François-Marie Arouet) was one of the most prolific and controversial writers of ancien régime France, and his works encapsulate the spirit and ideology of the French Enlightenment. His writings, which span a broad spectrum of genres, do not readily provide the reader with a single, coherent philosophical system or even a systematically argued world-view. In fact, Voltaire deeply mistrusted systems and system-builders, and he frequently satirized, particularly in his later years, the terminology and theories of metaphysicians such as Spinoza, Descartes, Leibniz and Wolff (see LEIBNIZ, G.W.). He wrote mostly, though not exclusively, as a philosophe rather than as a philosopher, that is to say, as a dissident polemicist concerned more with persuasive forms of discourse, and the effective advancement of a programme of moral and political reform, than with the pursuit of abstract speculation and analysis per se. Some aspects of his philosophical thinking are conducted at an arguably superficial level in the form of short, satirical tales. The term ‘philosopher’, in its post-nineteenth-century sense, thus sits uneasily with Voltaire. Had he known about the modern meaning of the term, he would have dissociated himself from it. He remained deeply sceptical about the mission of philosophy, and the absurdity of metaphysics is a striking leitmotif of his writings.

In 1726, as the result of a scandal, Voltaire was exiled from Paris, and decided to go to London where he stayed until 1728. His stay in England enabled him to engage with the Baconian tradition of English empiricism and to familiarize himself with the work of Locke, Hobbes, Newton, Clarke, Berkeley, Collins and others. The impact of England on his thinking resulted in 1734 in the publication of the Lettres philosophiques, composed originally in English as the Letters concerning the English Nation. In 1734 he also started work on another important fruit of the English experience, the Traité de métaphysique. This is one of the few Voltairean treatises to contain sustained, relatively sophisticated, philosophical argument and analysis.

The controversy following the publication of the Lettres philosophiques forced Voltaire to flee Paris for the chateau of Mme Du Châtelet-Lomont at Cirey, where he stayed for the rest of the decade working on his most ambitious scientific achievement, the Éléments de la philosophie de Newton (1738). After a brief stay at Frederick the Great’s court at Potsdam, Voltaire settled in Geneva in 1754–5, and the following decade saw the publication of major historical, polemical and satirical works, including the anti-Leibnizian Candide (1759), the Philosophie de l’histoire (1759), the Dictionnaire philosophique (1764–9) and Le Philosophe ignorant (1766). The 1755 Lisbon earthquake proved to be a catalyst in his long debate with others and with himself on the problem of evil and predetermination, culminating in Candide, his most brilliant and enduring philosophical narrative.

Between his earliest writings on philosophical matters in 1734 and those works that appeared after 1755, his position changed from one of qualified deistic providentialism and belief in a logically ordered creation, whose harmony had been convincingly demonstrated by Newton’s mathematical principles, to one of uncompromising rejection of providentialism and philosophical optimism. Voltaire has few claims to originality as an abstract thinker. As his commentaries in the Lettres philosophiques on the work of Francis Bacon, Locke and above all Newton show, he excels in the art of exposition and vulgarization. As a result, he occupies a uniquely influential position as a mediator and disseminator of English and German seventeenth-century philosophy in a France that was to remain dominated by Cartesianism until well into the 1740s. Newton and Locke, in particular, enter the French consciousness through Voltaire’s pen.

2 Metaphysics and ethics: the Traité de métaphysique

Voltaire’s early adherence to rational deism was reinforced in England, although the problems of theodicy and free will had started to preoccupy him well before his exile (see Deism). The first version of the Traité de métaphysique (1734) grew out of Voltaire’s reactions to Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding (1689), and its composition was shaped by the controversy aroused in France by the Lettres philosophiques. By 1736 the text had evolved to take in the implications of Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man (1733–4), and included chapters dealing with ethics and with man as a social being, reflecting also the influence of Shaftesbury, Mandeville and Clarke. The philosophical balance of the Traité moved between 1734 and 1736 from metaphysics to ethics. The Traité consists of a brief introduction dealing with doubts about the nature of man, written in the sceptical tradition as transmitted to the eighteenth century through the writings of Montaigne and Le Mothe Le Vayer, followed by nine chapters. Voltaire’s philosophy at this stage owes much to the theodicy of English deism and the optimism of Pope and Shaftesbury. The Traité also contains traces of the influence of ancient scepticism and epicureanism, the French Pyrrhonian tradition, and late seventeenth-century libertinism (see Libertins).

Much of the Traité is anchored to Lockean problems, the second, third, fifth, sixth, seventh and ninth chapters correlating closely to Locke’s programme of epistemological investigation. Voltaire follows Locke in the rejection of innate ideas (attributed to Descartes), and in the location of the source of ideas in the senses and the reflective processes. He does not deal with reflection per se except to note that thought is not, pace Descartes, necessarily a spiritual attribute. Voltaire fully shared Locke’s view of the limitations of human understanding, and epistemological modesty was to be the organizing theme of a later wide-ranging essay, Le Philosophe ignorant.

Voltaire’s starting-point is an awareness of the relative combined with an insistence on the practical aspects of ethics and the lessons of natural morality. Establishing a significant order of priorities, his argument moves from man to God, bypassing Christian notions of creation and original sin. God’s existence is deduced empirically in the second, and longest, chapter in the treatise, although knowledge of God’s existence is not seen as being either universal or necessary to man’s happiness. God’s existence is argued from final causes and the Locke–Clarke propositions concerning necessity. The counter-arguments denying certainty in God’s existence, and affirming the reality of evil as a negation of the possibility of belief in divine benevolence and omnipotence, are also expounded, but at this stage in Voltaire’s thinking they are not allowed to undermine what was essentially a deistic position.

On the question of the soul, Voltaire’s view in the Traité was that man was composed of thinking matter. He rejected the notion of thought itself as a material compound, but in 1734 he was not prepared to discount entirely the notion of the spirituality and immortality of the soul. He was to advance that argument even more positively in the article ‘Ame’ in the Dictionnaire philosophique. In spite of a tenacious belief in the existence of the soul, often identified with thought itself as a ‘principle’ invested in inert matter by God, Voltaire did not allow man to occupy a special, privileged place in nature. Man was just a ‘reasonable animal’. Unlike the rest of creation, however, man had a measure of free will, although freedom and the power to act freely in accordance with the dictates of reason, always remained for Voltaire severely limited features of man’s condition. But on freedom depended morality, and morality provided the focus for the last two chapters of the Traité.

Here Voltaire addressed the question of whether man was a social being, together with the related issue of vice and virtue. Concepts of good and evil were determined by what was useful or harmful to society. Parting company with Locke, Voltaire postulated, reflecting again a measure of inconsistency in his thinking, that man possessed innate moral sentiment and an instinct for justice. The assumption of universal morality followed logically from that, and supported the notion of legality, although Voltaire accepted at the same time that specific, contingent laws could well be diverse and contradictory in different parts of the world. Vice and virtue were seen to be relative to social contexts, as was man’s understanding of what was useful. However, like Bayle, Voltaire accepted the proposition that all men concurred in the general notions of what was good or evil inherent in those natural laws on which all men in all societies ultimately agreed. Reflecting Shaftesbury’s influence, Voltaire’s view of human nature was determined by the premise that man possessed latent moral qualities derived from God, and he was never able to reconcile this successfully with his Lockean rejection of innate ideas in other contexts.

Much as God had given the bees a powerful instinct to organize the communal life of the hive, so he had given man, not moral instructions on how to behave, but certain instincts conducive to social and moral life. These were in addition to the instincts of sexuality and self-preservation common to all animals, and included benevolence, compassion, honour, love of truth, pride and the passions, of which even the unattractive, such as pride and envy, had teleological purpose, and served to promote the public good. In all this, God’s role in human affairs remained remote and non-interventionist. Voltaire’s moral philosophy was essentially a naturalist code in which his concern was less with logical argument than with a passionate determination to define man as an ethical being whose moral conduct and decisions owed nothing to theology or faith, but a great deal to the will to action.

3 Cosmology: La Métaphysique de Newton

When it first appeared in 1738, the Éléments de la philosophie de Newton was exclusively concerned with optics and gravitational theory, that is with ‘natural philosophy’, rather than with philosophy as such, and there is little reference to the ‘Scholium generale’ with which Newton had concluded his Principia (1687). However, the 1741 edition of the Éléments contained a nine-chapter essay prefacing the commentary on Newtonian physics. This had been printed separately in 1740 as La Métaphysique de Newton, ou Parallèle des sentiments de Newton et de Leibniz.

Much of this work is concerned with an exposition of the problems of free will, morality and the mind-body relationship, many of which had been raised earlier in the Traité de métaphysique. The new ground that Voltaire now broke concerned Leibniz, and the treatise represents Voltaire’s most sustained analysis of Leibnizian science and cosmology. Voltaire’s long engagement with Leibnizianism was to drive much of his thinking on questions relating to theodicy and philosophical optimism between 1740 and 1755, culminating in 1756 in his first major attack on optimistic theory in the Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne, reinforced three years later in his satirical demolition of Leibnizian cosmology in Candide. Voltaire’s attention had been drawn to Leibniz through the work of Christian von Wolff, who had systemized some of Leibniz’s thoughts on logic and metaphysics, and whose merits had been commended to Voltaire by Mme Du Châtelet-Lomont and Frederick the Great. Voltaire’s knowledge of Leibniz was also based on a Latin translation of the Monadology (1714), and he was familiar with the Leibniz–Clarke correspondence concerning space and time.

In La Métaphysique de Newton he resumed Newton’s arguments from design as a proof of God’s existence as a First Cause, outside time and space, of the contingent phenomena of the universe. Whereas in the Traité de métaphysique Voltaire’s God had been an absent Prime Mover, in La Métaphysique he was more sympathetic to the providentialism that marked Newtonian assumptions of divine paternalism. Voltaire still managed to deflect the paradoxes presented by the spectacle of man’s suffering and experience of evil, although in La Métaphysique the problem of theodicy was raised again in the context of man’s freedom to act within the parameters inherent in a providentially ordered human condition. It was here that Leibniz entered the discussion with reference to sufficient reason, necessity and contingency, matters upon which Voltaire had already exchanged views with Clarke. Like Clarke, he argued that divine omnipotence would be compromised if God’s will was made subject to the principle of sufficient reason. Voltaire preferred the Newtonian position in which God is seen to have made many things, the reason for whose existence is God’s will alone.

Voltaire avoided determinism at this stage in his thought by preserving, by means of extended implication, the capacity for unmotivated choice arising from ‘liberty of indifference’. His position on ‘liberty of indifference’ was not consistent or rigorously applied, however, and elsewhere – in the Discours en vers sur l’homme (1738–42), for example – this received less emphasis than the Lockean view that man’s freedom consisted in the power to act and put conscious choices into effect, the question of motivation or absence of motivation being irrelevant. On the question of freedom, and free will in general, Voltaire’s views were to change radically, and by the 1750s his position was much more deterministic.

Despite his acceptance of Newtonian arguments from design as proof of an ordered universe in La Métaphysique, signs of contradiction and traces of scepticism, to be more strongly articulated at a later stage, were already surfacing in Voltaire’s discussion of Leibniz’s arguments relating to sufficient reason and to the existence of simple substances, or monads. Leibnizian monadology underpinned the elaboration of the Great Chain of Being theory and the postulation of a cosmos of active metaphysical atoms, or monads, each following a programme of dynamic evolution established by the Creator, and each in harmony with other monads, one of their more controversial characteristics being perceptivity. This infinite multitude of monads constituted a metaphysical substratum of the world of material reality and conscious experience. Voltaire measured Leibniz’s theory of monads by simplistically empirical criteria that he associated with Lockean epistemology and Newtonian mathematics. His approach reflected only a partial understanding of the Theodicy (1710) and the Monadology, and incoporated a great deal of caricatural commentary.

Voltaire objected that Leibniz’s postulation of a cosmos of infinitely divisible, nonmaterial and nonspatial matter as an integral component of the material cosmos was self-contradictory. Any explanation of matter that involved the nonmaterial was fanciful, and the notion of perceptivity in all monads, including those constituting inanimate matter, was against common sense. He countered with arguments not entirely free of speculation themselves, drawn from Newtonian science, and advanced a view of matter whose atomic structure was diverse but immutable. Change was accounted for in terms of the effects of gravitational attraction, the ‘active force which sets everything in the universe in motion’. Newtonian physics and cosmology did solve for Voltaire some of the philosophical problems arising from his study of Leibnizian monadology and harmony. After 1741, however, notwithstanding his deep admiration for Newton’s empirical rigour, he was to have little more to say about Newton. His preoccupation with Leibnizianism, and with its broader philosophical implications, would continue, on the other hand, for many decades.

4 Optimism and freedom

Voltaire’s engagement with the problem of evil arose as part of a general broadening of his philosophical interests during his stay in England. Prior to that, he might have already gained some awareness of the issues through the well-publicized debate on theodicy that had taken place between 1697 and 1716 between Archbishop King, Bayle and Leibniz. It was, however, Pope’s Essay on Man that fired his interest initially in the philosophical issues generated by optimistic theory.

The first serious discussion of the implications of optimism had occurred in the Traité de métaphysique where Voltaire had been concerned almost exclusively, as was Pope, with mounting an effective defence of deism against the objections of the atheists. The central argument in this defence related to the question of human ignorance. Voltaire sought to account for evil in terms of a contingent, rather than transcendental, phenomenon, whose nature and effects were falsely determined by the partial, imperfect nature of human understanding. Evil was relative, and to ascribe to God injustice and cruelty was as meaningless as to call him blue or square. The human mind could not conceive of perfection on a cosmic scale, and thus assertions of imperfection were necessarily flawed. Any moral judgment on God’s creation must therefore be suspended for lack of evidence.

While Voltaire never quite shared Pope’s confidence in providence as an unambiguously benevolent force in human affairs, his early views can be aligned with Pope’s ‘Whatever is, is right’ formulation, and this was fully reflected in his own Discours en vers sur l’homme (see especially Part 6). However, the problem of theodicy had been deflected rather than resolved, and after 1740 it re-emerged in Voltaire’s thought as a major issue. By 1740 he was aware of Leibniz’s arguments on the Theodicy as these related to evil, not as a contingent but as an absolute, universal phenomenon that sought to leave intact the providentialist thesis of creation as the work of a beneficent and omnipotent God. Dogmatic promulgation of Leibnizian optimism by German commentators such as Wolff and Kahle became increasingly a subject for ridicule and caustic satire in Voltaire’s letters and works. Leibnizian optimism, immortalized in the figure of Candide’s tutor, Dr Pangloss, soon came to exemplify for him the irrelevance of speculative metaphysics to the real world of human suffering and everyday experience.

The evolution of Voltaire’s position with regard to Pope and Leibniz, and the related problems of evil, optimism and freedom, is best illustrated not in treatises but in Voltaire’s short philosophical stories, and in particular in Zadig, ou la destinée (1748) and Candide, ou l’optimisme. In Zadig he approached the problem of evil from the standpoint of human destiny. Using dialogic format he distilled philosophical optimism into three main propositions that were not argued, or even endorsed, but asserted arbitrarily by an angelic persona as articles of faith: chance does not exist; man’s destiny is organized in a beneficent way, immutably determined by providence; every apparent evil is part of a larger good and is impenetrable to limited human logic and understanding. While ‘Whatever is, is right’ still obtained in theory, by 1748 Voltaire no longer adhered fully to his earlier view that evil had no absolute reality. In Zadig the focus of attention is clearly on the realities of human suffering and the illogicality of the human predicament rather than on the metaphysical rationale for its existence. Man’s place in the Great Chain of Being might have been alloted to him by God for an unknowable purpose, but Voltaire was now firmly of the view that while transcendental perspectives may help to explain the human condition, they contributed nothing to the alleviation of that condition, or to the resolution of the problems that it posed for individual freedom and action.

In the 1750s Voltaire’s thinking was dominated by an awareness of the immediacy of evil in day-to-day human experience, and this gradually undermined his earlier sympathy for the optimistic-providentialist position. Events such as the 1755 Lisbon earthquake and the Seven Years War offered further brutal proof of the sterility of optimistic theory, and the darker tones of Voltaire’s world-view emerged clearly in the Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne. It was in this didactic poem that he first gave explicit expression to what had by now become his principal objection to the providentialist axiom that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Such a philosophy was now nothing less than a doctrine of despair and a denial of human freedom and of human capacity for action. Philosophical optimism had nothing to offer the stricken citizens of Lisbon.

On the question of free will, Voltaire’s earliest discussion of the problem is to be found in the seventh chapter of the Traité de métaphysique, where he had accepted that to will and to act accordingly was to be free. Freedom, however, was relative and, even at this ‘optimistic’ stage in his thinking, it was almost without constraints. He developed his thoughts on freedom further in 1737 in De La Liberté. Here he made use of the Lockean definition of freedom as being the choice of whether to act or to refrain from acting, but he now preferred to concentrate on ‘power of self-motion’ (Clarke’s phrase) as being the only true source of freedom. By the mid-1750s Voltaire’s views on freedom had evolved considerably, and in ways that mirrored his change of direction with regard to providentialism and philosophical optimism. His denial of free will, and his scepticism with regard to the notion of freedom in human decision-taking and action, was now complete, and it is set out in the fifty-six ‘doubts’ that constitute the Doutes sur la liberté (1752) (see also the articles ‘Destin’, ‘Franc arbitre’ and ‘Liberté’ in the Dictionnaire philosophique). Little trace remained of the arguments against determinism that had characterized the Traité de métaphysique and De La Liberté some two decades earlier, in which a high value had been placed on man’s power of judgment and his power to act on that judgment. Men, like animals, are determined by ‘instinct’ and by ‘ideas’ that they receive but over whose reception they have no control, and man is subject to the same laws of necessity that govern the whole of nature. The deep sense of futility that was to permeate Candide permeates also his list of doubts (see particularly the fourteenth).

Voltaire’s loss of faith in philosophical activity reached its climax in Candide, in which he finally turned his back on the ‘métaphysico-théologo-cosmolonigologie’ of Dr Pangloss. Candide inhabits a bleak, arbitrary and possibly godless universe in which evil is an omnipresent, crushing reality. Man might be the victim of forces beyond his control, but experience (not philosophy) taught Candide that the potential for limited, but effective, action still lay within man’s grasp: ‘Il faut cultiver le jardin’ (We must cultivate the garden). The point of thought was action, not the construction of inconclusive speculative systems.