Too Rich to Accept the Rags this Shopkeeper Sells?
Terrible, aren’t they?
Doubts. They can destroy even the best work. Stellar stuff demolished by a single question. A thousand pages defeated by a few
words. “Why” as deadly as an
Assassin’s knife. The only things we think about if we think at all about the
book we have just read - the questions we ask ourselves about it. Doubts. Such terrible things! We shouldn’t have them, but we do. So human! Are they what
separate us from the animals?
We are what we are because we
doubt? Civilisation founded upon
our uncertainties. Can this really
be so? What an odd place on which
to build a home! Doubts, it seems,
can be such strange, such useful, such wonderful, things when we begin to
really think about them. Like
rabbit holes in a grassy bank they should riddle the books we read…
I know I know, intoxicated with a new idea, I’ve forgotten someone important. The
author! Can a hothouse plant, so
fragile that it wilts under the mere whiff of an autumn wind, welcome such cold
questioning? Open the doors! Break the glass! Now’s the time to see...
I’ve always had my doubts about Peter Gay’s great work on
the Enlightenment; its two big volumesi too schematically structured around a central argument to be altogether
convincing. Is life really so
simple as the old against the new; the 18th century merely a punch
up between the philosophes and St Thomas
Aquinas; Voltaire knocking out the elderly scholastic with a head butt? Did the modern world really emerge out of its mother’s womb fully formed and mature – did those arthritic theologians
have no influence at all? Was it
really conceived through parthenogenesis?
The professor’s argument implies that this was so: modernity can owe
very little to its medieval predecessors because they are two different species
of thought - the one irretrievably religious and mythic, the other analytical,
and heavily influenced by the classical heritage. The Enlightenment, in this view, represents a profound break
in the history of thought. It is
an ideological revolution; an intellectual coup d’état. The
old ideas sent to the guillotine.
There is an element of advocacy in these books; or at least
the suggestion of a pre-conceived theory that oversimplifies a complex and subtly
shifting reality that defies easy categorisationii – Roy Porter writes of separate nationalist enlightenments, a thesis which,
while not altogether convincing, captures something of the variety of this
intellectual movement.iii Too entranced by a simple binary
opposition there are moments when Gay’s work feels like a world devised by
newspaper columnists – the good guys on our side battling it out with the
illiberal barbarians - although the exposition is usually much more
sophisticated than this; Peter Gay is a fine scholar not a crude
controversialist. And these are
great books! They have taught me a
lot. I have some doubts. That is all.
My greatest debt is to the
writings of Ernst Cassirer both in philosophy and in intellectual history. His central distinction between
critical and mythical thinking lies at the heart of my interpretation. (The Enlightenment: An
Interpretation; The Rise of Modern Paganism)
Reality, even intellectual reality, is always more
complicated than a simple dialectic;iv the 18th century not just a boxing match between two opponents, a
religious mindset and a “critical philosophy”, even if this is what the
original protagonists themselves believed.v Of course we must listen to their
views, and take their words seriously; although we should never wholly trust
them – Voltaire and his friends burdened with large biases and a limited
perspective. Often it is we who
have the greater knowledge, and are able to situate them within a context of
which they were hardly if at all aware.
The arrogance of hindsight?
Think of yourself, and the limitations of your understanding of the
contemporary scene. The world is
too vast for us to fully comprehend even a part of what influences even our own
thoughts – do you remember everything
that you have read and heard? And
how little of what we remember we understand! We miss so much of its subterranean complexity; the culture
for the most part absorbed reflexively, percolating down unobserved into our
all too crafty and secretive subconscious; which then decides what it will do
with what it has received – one day using a defaced poster to create a
masterpiece; another day throwing Kirchner’s Marzella away as useless junk. Consciousness is like a bus station open 24/7: anyone can
enter! Dogs and cats; drunks with
their lager cans; preachers with their messages of universal salvation;
prostitutes with their money belts half full of condoms… Anybody can stroll in and out. Even Serenity Science has been seen to
lurk around by the dustbins, though few notice her. We know so little of what enters our minds, which are
usually too jealous to give up what they contain – it is their art
collection, and no one else is going to see it! There is so much we do not know. So much that is out of our control, even inside our own
heads.
A writer’s words must be taken seriously. Yet they cannot be left to proselytize
alone on a street corner. Always
we must bring in other writers, other ideas, and ourselves as well. We must muscle in between Voltaire’s
sentences and Rousseau’s paragraphs, and break a few noses and bruise a few
ankles with our questions and our doubts.
Ah! Here they are again. “Calm down Jean Jacques, calm
down.” Now is the time to find out
just how critical is your Critical Philosophy!
When summing up a slightly longer period three historians
inform us that although the scientists and philosophers of the early modern era
may have rejected the content of the old scholasticism they nonetheless
inherited the most significant part of its mindset.
In the Eighteenth Century a
small group of determined reformers established science as the new foundation
for truth, a granite-like platform upon which all knowledge could rest. The absolute character of their truth
mimicked the older Christian truth upon which Westerners since late Roman times
had come to rely. They transferred
a habit of mind associated with religiosity – the conviction that transcendent
and absolute truth could be known – to the new mechanical understanding of the
natural world. Eventually they
grafted this conviction onto all other inquiries…(Telling the Truth About History, by Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt
& Margaret Jacob)
The classic statement of this view is the once famous
Carl L. Becker.
Obviously the disciples
of the Newtonian philosophy had not ceased to worship. They had only given another form and a
new name to the object of worship: having denatured God, they deified
nature. They could, therefore,
without self-consciousness, and with only a slight emendation in the sacred
text, repeat the cry of the psalmist: “I will lift up mine eyes to Nature from
whence cometh my help!” With eyes
uplifted, contemplating and admiring so excellent a system, they were excited
and animated to correspond with the general harmony. (The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers)
Candide could be
a test case for Peter Gay’s work;
his interpretation of Voltaire’s masterpiece an indication of the soundness of
his theoretical scheme. Does the
book accord with his thesis? Or
must he squeeze it into the corset of his premises? Is he able, after all the pushing and pulling, and the
laboured breathing, to actually lace up Candide’s well-fed body inside the narrow stays of his
arguments? Luckily the first
volume contains an essay on the novel, which allows us to test both the professor’s ideas and his analytical
skill. “Lucky for us or for him”,
you say. Oh! I see! It seems, my friend, you know me just a little too well!
…young Candide, innocent
and naïve, is expelled from a miserable chateau in Westphalia by the baron who
owns it…
It hasn’t begun well. Compare this gloss with title of
the first chapter…
How Candide was
brought up in a beautiful country house, and how he was driven away
And contrast it with the first two sentences of the
second:
After being turned out
of this earthly paradise, Candide wandered off without thinking which way he
was going. As he plodded along he
wept, glancing sometimes towards heaven, but more often in the direction of the
most beautiful of houses, which contained the loveliest of barons’ daughters.
By misreading the first section professor Gay misses
something essential in this book: its fall into pessimism. On the threshold of acquiring “modern”
knowledge – the satisfaction of Cunégonde’s sexual craving is the metaphor -
Candide is thrown out of the Garden of Eden. Reared in a paradise he can remain there only for as long as
he retains his innocence; when desire awakens a combination of sex, social
class and prejudice will destroy this contented life and he will be expelled
from his earthly happiness.
Candide, by going beyond the limits of his status, has broken the rules,
and is kicked out of the Baron’s estate because of his presumptive
behaviour. His knowledge is not
commensurate with his experience, once sex enters into his environment. And how he bemoans this newfound desire
– it lays waste to all of his comforts and creates a yearning that can never be
fulfilled. Love the great
devastator! It is why Candide is
miserable after he leaves Westphalia; while it is only much later, when he
realises he can never regain his childhood idyll, that he reconciles himself to
his expulsion. An extremely
important nuance that Gay misses entirely, although he is not the only one.vi
The Baron’s chateau wasn’t miserable it was
lovely. However, our hero wasn’t
civilised enough to remain there.
Baron Thunder-ten-tronckh’s estate is thus transformed from a permanent
residence into a temporary abode; a place where Candide lives until his childhood
ends. He is too innocent and too
naïve to stay forever in this Elysium.
If he had been crafty, a good actor, or much wiser, if he had been
Odysseus for example, he would have found a way to live with his Eve in this
particular Eden. But he was too
simple for that; Candide lacking the sophistication to stay long in the Baron’s
home. It is the reason why they
threw him out – he betrayed his civilisation by succumbing to his desires which
if satisfied would have destroyed the established order. Of course he wasn’t to blame. But if he had been wiser he would have
been more careful when Cunégonde persuaded him to repeat Pangloss’ lesson. It was both his naivety and his
ignorance that defeated him; and so he was banished into the wilderness of
unfulfilled love.
Notice how I have reversed the polarity. Candide is about its hero’s fall from grace not his rise into critical
enlightenment. Candide has lost
something vital and beautiful, something that is very important to him; the
reason why later he rejects Eldorado – it may be an intellectual’s paradise but
it cannot satisfy a man in love.
The Baron’s estate was not some horrible place that he is happy to
leave. On the contrary! The hero is thrown into an ugly and
uncaring world, from which he barely escapes sane. Candide, ostensibly a comedy, also has tragic elements; the
novel a sad reflection on the narrow horizons of modern man – think of how much
Candide must lose in order to gain his worldly wisdom. After the marvellously rich estate of
his youth he must live the rest of his life on a small farm in a country
outside Europe; the then intellectual centre of the world. What a miserable existence! Surely not something we should
celebrate; although we accept it as the best Candide can do, in the circumstances. He has made too many mistakes to
recover the lost happiness of his childhood, and must now accept the few scraps
of comfort left to his adult years.
Now let us look at the metaphors. By itself reason isn’t enough to
understand the universe – this was the failure of the scholastics.vii Reality is too various and too
complicated to be contained within simple syllogisms and naïve theories; it
needs a level of intellectual sophistication that can apply itself to each case
at hand. Where there are general
laws they tend to apply only to simple phenomena, and must be vigorously tested
with evidence to ensure their validity; the reason why the hard sciences are
limited to such small areas of knowledge.
The social sciences are not so careful, and the less sophisticated
amongst them have been known to confuse trends with laws. Yet in daily living these laws rarely
apply – they have a tendency to break down under the pressure of individual
circumstance. If Cunégonde had
thought about the difference in status between herself and her mother’s maid
she would have foreseen the consequences of applying Pangloss’ “sufficient
reason” to her childhood friend; and thus aware of the dangers she may not have
risked their happiness.
Alternatively, if she had considered her lesson more closely Cunégonde,
like her teacher, would have practiced the “new science” in the woods - far
from the sensitive ears of her parents the lovers may not have been caught so
easily; Candide safe until it was too late to chuck him out. Pangloss’ lesson
isn’t so much wrong, after all, it does give the participants great pleasure,
as that Cunégonde hasn’t learnt it well enough; and thus makes a mistake in its
application. The perennial problem
of master and pupil! It is also
the fatal error of a metaphysical system that pays little attention to the
facts on the ground, which can, if properly considered, limit our natural
generalising tendencies with their bias towards error and exaggeration.viii It is one reason why intelligence alone
is useless for comprehending the world – clever minds tend to prefer their own
ideas to the recalcitrant facts that contradict them. It is a special kind of stupidity; and if you want success, particularly in academia or the newspapers, you should cultivate it vigorously.ix
Any kind of knowledge has to be applied with
sophistication; and this is especially so in human affairs, which relies so
much on the fluid moment and the uniquely particular. No laws here please!
A good education should encourage children to think for themselves,
questioning old maxims not copying them, thus making them alert to the
peculiarities of the individual situation; always different, always alive with
the potential for new possibilities.
If only the two lovers had been properly educated, if doubt and
uncertainty had been instilled into their self-consciousness, Candide may not
have been expelled from this paradise.
Instead he has to learn about the real nature of knowledge through his
own gruesome experiences. It is
not a pleasant task. Empiricism,
he is to find, is hard work; and its rewards are not that wonderful. Its adherents poorly paid labourers far
from the City of Reason; the truth neither rich nor glamorous, “just average on
the iniquity scale”.x
Do the wealthy need this kind of education? Not really. It is only for those, like Cunégonde, who transgress the
social conventions; for it is only then that they must think for themselves.xi Although…
Although these characters need practical reason in
order to survive they acquire it only when their desire has gone; the sad irony
at the end of Voltaire’s book.
Romantically (sexually?) worn out, Candide is now ready to cultivate his
garden, having resigned himself to his uninspiring middle age. He has nothing better to do. He has no fire left! That last chapter a stoic acceptance of
the inevitable disappointments of mature adulthood. Make the best of the little you have got, is the final
message. Candide has reconciled himself
to his limitations. He is a
farmer, not a thinker; a simple bourgeois not a rich aristocrat, an ordinary
man not Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz.
Here is The Fall if ever there was one. For a thinker, for a scholar, even for the pedant, this,
surely, is a tragic collapse of the human spirit: potatoes preferred to
Spinoza.
Gay will have none of it.
The end of the tale,
which portrays stability after long wandering, is happy – or at least not
intolerably unhappy… Candide is… a morality tale in the most concrete sense
possible: it teaches, by example, the supremacy of realistic moral thinking…
…Candide [suggests] moral action, action which is the only
cure for the sense of impotence and the only justification for happiness. That is why Candide is so unsparing in
its criticism - more than almost any other production of the Enlightenment, Candide
embodies the philosophes’ equation of
criticism with philosophy.
Is “[m]oral action… the only cure for the sense of
impotence and the only justification for happiness”? If working in order to survive is moral action then Gay is (partially) correct (happiness is its own reward); but anyone with a refined intellectual taste will not accept such a
crude formulation, which if taken seriously would include the work of just
about everybody - clerks, hairdressers, butchers, even journalists and
politicians, could call themselves moral actors if they listened to this
paragraph. Indeed some, I am
thinking of particularly the latter, believe they are such agents; although
they justify themselves not by reference to their wage packets but to their role
as representatives of the People - work thus gains moral value by serving some
higher purpose. It is a view of
morality that is surely closer to the truth than Gay’s: politicians are
endorsing some transcendental idea (almost certainly the source of moral law)xii even if they do not practice it; the very belief then creating a moral
restraint on their behaviour however slight. Candide has no such aspiration. He decides to work in his garden because it is the most
profitable thing he can do for himself and his tribe. Disillusioned with the world of adventure and power, a world
that Pangloss’ idealism has failed to explain, he gives up the cosmopolitan
life for a little plot of land that his family alone can cultivate. The public realm and its affairs
will no longer be part of his mental landscape. He has forsaken them. Hard work is all that is left to
him. His Turkish mentor is very
explicit about the moral.
‘I have no idea,’ he
replied. ‘I could not tell you the
name of any judge or any minister.
I am utterly ignorant of what you have been talking about. I suppose it’s true that those who
enter politics sometimes come to a miserable end, and deserve it; but I never
bother myself about what happens in Constantinople. I send my garden stuff to be sold there, and that’s enough
for me.’
Constantinople represents Paris. To live a happy life we are not
expected to bother ourselves with the metropolis, the centre of the French
Enlightenment. Ignorance is bliss! Concentrating on mundane concerns will
help us to survive tolerably well; sound advice, but only for the worn out and
uninspired. It is a philistine’s
philosophy. Justifiable on its own
terms, but a sad and rather limited perspective for the rest of us: could any
artist of note live long in such an intellectually impoverished atmosphere? We are thus shocked (but not surprised)
by Candide’s reaction to the Turk’s folksy wisdom.
‘That old fellow,’ said
he, turning to Pangloss and Martin, ‘seemed to me to have done much better for
himself than those six kings we had the honour of supping with.’
Pangloss’ reply is accurate:
‘High estate… is always
dangerous, as every philosopher knows…’
Candide has made up his mind. He will prefer the safety of cabbages to the dangerous
doubts of David Hume. This is the
comfort of middle age, where the stress and strain of adventure, whether mental
or physical, is given up for the easily calibrated pleasures of
domesticity. Life outside the
garden gate is too hard to think about; and to change; so best leave it
alone. And he does! Candide is a common man who accepts
this all too common advice. No
wonder the book has remained popular!
Its conclusion is the folk philosophy of the ordinary and the tedious:
only money matters. How often do
we hear these sentiments? More to
the point, how rare is the occasion when we don’t – only when we talk to an
intellectual, that rare breed, do we perceive that it is possible to live a
life inside ideas. I listen to
Candide’s final words, and I see and hear… what? The flushed faces and pitiful clichés of the successfully
dull; whose wit rarely rises above the conventional and banal. For success is like quicksand. It is a world made up of the ambitious
and the mediocre who first trap then suck down the original intellect, now
unable to escape the endless demands on their person: “come to Carlotta’s”,
“see you at Jake’s”; “don’t forget Arsenal on Saturday....” Surrounded by fashionable opinion that
it cannot overcome the original mind is left with no time to think for itself;
and thus sinks down into oblivion.xiii Can a serious thinker accept Candide’s
conclusion? Did even Voltaire?
How does Gay deal with this tribute to limited
horizons? By slight of hand. Watch
him as he does it…
His fable enjoins men to
cultivate their private selves, but the question remains: how large is our
gardens? Voltaire’s specific
answer to this question, as I have suggested, changed after he published Candide: if we
take the last twenty-five years of Voltaire’s life, busy, even frantic, with
good causes, as a commentary on this question, the answer become that our
garden is the world – or more realistically, whatever in the world is in our
power.
If you read too fast you miss the trick; which is to
conflate the book with Voltaire’s public life, which negates it.xiv That Gay thinks he can reconcile
this contradiction suggests something of the power of his ideological urge: he
wants everything to fit together into one harmonious whole; a characteristic of
the mythic mind. A more subtle
reading is to divorce Voltaire’s public life from his most notorious work; his
social and political activism, when we consider it properly, casting doubt on
the moral of that last chapter; implying that Candide’s famous conclusion is
just as bone-headed as Pangloss’ premises. They are extremes none of us should follow; that is, if we
want to become enlightened and act morally. Candide is not a philosophe – at least as portrayed in the myth of the critical thinker. He is far closer to Pangloss: a
caricature of a position the author does not actually hold; or at least refuses
to embody – Voltaire was too active a person to remain quietly at home poking
his nose in amongst his chrysanthemums.
He wanted to influence people too much to do that.
The cynicism of Voltaire
was not bred in the bone… It was
all on the surface, signifying nothing but the play of a supple and
irrepressible mind, or the sharp impatience of an exasperated idealist. In spite of Candide and all the rest of it, Voltaire was an optimist,
although not a naïve one. He was
the defender of causes, and not of lost causes either – a crusader pledged to
recover the holy places of the true faith, the religion of humanity. Voltaire, skeptic – strange
misconception! On the contrary, a
man of faith, an apostle who fought the good fight, tireless to the end,
writing seventy volumes to convey the truth that was to make us free. (Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City
of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers)
“In spite of Candide….” How true!
So keen to prove his theory Gay has forgotten that Candide
is a novel, preferring to read it as a
philosophical tract and contemporary critique of the “great compromiser”
Leibniz; thus his emphasis on its factual basis; although as he himself admits
the presentation of so many facts in so a dense cluster transforms them into
fable. Again and again he reads
into the book an empiricism that the narrative seems to subtly undermine: the
idealised fantasy of Cunégonde that engenders Candide’s adventures replaced by
the prematurely aged and ugly woman whom he eventually marries. Voltaire’s very advocacy of the new
wisdom contains its own criticism – that last garden is not a new utopia but a
dull and rather poor place.
Gay misses the melancholy that pervades the novel’s
last pages. He believes life on
this farm is happy (or “not intolerably unhappy”), and so implies it is
preferable to that “miserable chateau in Westphalia.” It is why he thinks Candide is such a positive book.
He has missed completely the hero’s sense of loss - of paradise; of a
theory that validates this perfect existence; of a beautiful lover that
inhabits it. Whatever benefits
Candide has acquired through recognising reality, and they are important - we
should never be insouciant about stability -, he has lost a great deal: the
entire universe has been reduced to a little plot of land outside of European
civilisation. And even if all his
previous life was an illusion, which it was not, it was nevertheless a
beautiful illusion for all that.
It gave him happiness and love; it gave him hope. All is gone. Only realism is left.
Candide is no
simple-minded paean to critical reason.
It is a disillusioned diatribe against the ugliness of the world and the
utopian blindness of the philosophers who escape from it into abstract ideas. We have to give up our aristocratic
airs if we want to survive amongst this amoral mess is the book’s final
defeated message. Those last
paragraphs have been forced to their knees by the weight of their terrible
experiences. Live only within
narrow limits! This is a half-truth
at most, and a grim one indeed if we follow it to its logical conclusion – the
farmer who criticises
Boris Pasternak for the lack of agricultural produce in his verses.
If Voltaire were a disciple of professor Gay he should
reject the mythic paradise of his childhood home not praise it. Joy should be found in the discovery of
practical reason not in the fantasies of prelapsarian youth; Candide glad he
was expelled from the Elysium of the Baron’s estate and separated from the
lovely Cunégonde because it enables him to discover life’s true meaning. He does none of these things. Instead
he recognises a simple truth: hard work in his own garden is the only way he
can survive in exile. This is
downbeat realism. It is a
submission to the hard facts of fate.
It is the second best option.
Gay, a writer on the side of the “Critical
Philosophers”, has the mindset of their opponents: he turns the Enlightenment
into a myth - the “critical” light of British empiricism, by penetrating the
dark of false rationalism, has revealed a wonderful new truth.xv Voltaire’s feelings were far more
ambiguous: for him the 18th century was the setting of the sun on a
late autumn afternoon. Beautiful:
yes! Joyous: yes! Exhilarating: yes! But also melancholic… so much is being
lost to the enveloping shade, even if most of it was meretricious. The 17th and 18th centuries are not simply a record of progress; they represent a change in the
very nature of knowledge and human understanding; a process that inevitably
destroys as well as creates, so that ideas enormously important in one
worldview become inexplicable to another; their fate to be forgotten or
dismissed as nonsense.xvi Such intellectual revolutions leave a
vacuum in the culture, which takes more than a few generations to fill. The period between the early 1700s and
the late 20th century is one of ideological transition from out of
an essentially Christian society into one where lots of little faiths cohere
into a conflicting but coherent whole – capitalism and nationalism somehow combine with science and
fundamentalist religion to form the modern
worldview. Values become
complicated and feelings are confused during transitions such as these. This is especially the case for a
writer like Voltaire living at the beginning of this historical change.
The simple optimism of a Pangloss ignores these
tensions, preferring to celebrate the latest invention as the panacea for all
contemporary ills. Fashionable
thinkers like Pangloss, and we see them all in the time in the establishment
culture - the evolutionary psychology of today’s Dawkins has replaced the
metaphysics of Leibniz -, tend to have short memories: they are as long as the
latest enthusiasm. This is
wonderfully captured in that last Panglossian speech which proves that a poor
farm is the best of all possible worlds.
The present is always perfect for people like these. It is why the powerful love them so
much. And why the author of Candide hated them with a vengeance!
During Voltaire’s lifetime modern thought was leaving
the wide-open spaces illuminated by the summer sun to enter into a myriad of dark
little rooms, each lit up by a single and extraordinarily powerful light. And what power these lights have! It is because of them that we know much
more than even the greatest of the Greeks – that concentrated gaze on a hundred
thousand individual subjects has uncovered so many of their hidden secrets.xvii But there has been a cost. The splendid unity, the fabulous
harmony, the balminess, of pre-modern thought has been left behind in the
process. Man is no longer the
centre of the universe. We know
that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds; so complex now we can
hardly understand it. This is a
terrible loss; and a religious man like Voltaire would have felt it
acutely. Only doubts and practical
philosophy remain; a poor compensation for our former wisdom. No wonder the Turk doesn’t want to live
in Constantinople. The world
outside his farm is too big to be safely comprehended. But even practical philosophy becomes too much for Candide. To survive he must even get rid of this burden: hard work
on his own land is the only thing left to him at the end. This is poor stuff compared to the
promises of the Universal Church, where everything was explained, the good
would always be redeemed; and the best of all possible worlds was proven to
exist – the Baron’s estate was no illusion. Nothing is certain now. Indeed, everything is so uncertain, there is such a mismatch
between knowledge and reality, life and our ideas about it, that it is best to
give up thought altogether, and work like a bourgeois farmer. Candide represents the spiritual
poverty of the post-Christian world; which has its own kind of riches, for
sure.
Cunégonde… soon made
excellent pastry, Pacquette was clever at embroidery, and the old woman took
care of the linen. No one refused
to work, not even Brother Giroflée, who was a good carpenter, and thus became
an honest man.
Weird is Gay’s refusal to engage with the religious
references in the work, which seem to bear out (and how!) Appleby’s, Hunt’s and
Jacob’s argument about the intellectual overlap between the medieval and the
modern mind. Instead the professor
prefers to attribute its inspiration to the Greeks and Romans (a major theme of
his two volumes – the Enlightenment went back into the classical past to
acquire the critical methods to attack the Catholic present). His conclusion follows inevitably.
As a classic of the
Enlightenment at once extraordinary and representative, Candide epitomizes the appeal to antiquity. (My
emphasis)
It is an odd kind of antiquity, and I fail to see how
it applies to this novel. Gay happy to simply state his case for the classical
authors, assuming the book proves his thesis. Too fast!
Before he can dive into the safety of a narrative summary he must first
argue his point with a close reading of the text. This he fails to do, preferring to follow the above comment,
which for him is a truism, with a brief summary of the plot. The barest details, it seems, are
enough to establish his argument.
Yet to take his own example: does the expulsion of
…young Candide…from a
miserable chateau in Westphalia by the baron who owns it…
… prove that the hero is
wearing a toga? Surely, the
later reference to an “earthly paradise” suggests another kind of ancient
wisdom, which although influenced by the Greeks is separate from them – The
Old Testament. Gay needs to tell us why the Baron’s estate is the Island of
Hesperides and not the Garden of Eden.
He doesn’t feel this necessity, preferring to make somewhat empty
comparisons to the Stoics and the Epicureans.
It is the task of
philosophy to discover, as the Stoics said long ago, what is within our power
and what is beyond it. Candide is
thus a morality tale in the most concrete sense possible: it teaches, by
example, the supremacy of realistic moral thinking.
This is the classicism
of Candide: its wit is Voltaire’s own, its message places it in the tradition
of antique speculation.
This gloss is not necessary wrong; it is simply too
abstract and general. Using a
little ingenuity you could make it work for any writer; especially if they
lived in the 18th century.
Doubts are beginning to shuffle in through the back door… Would a Stoic
wish to emulate a poor farmer with no intellectual pretensions? Did classical writers argue that manual
work must replace philosophy? And…
what exactly is antique speculation: a brilliant satire to prove a point that
is already known? Voltaire was
more a journalist than a philosopher.
A proselytizer not an original thinker. He didn’t write Candide
to find things out but to prove a point; a lot like Peter Gay himself, in
fact.
Although there may be some classical influence on
Voltaire’s writing style these are minor elements in this particular book;
which is a masterpiece precisely because it is so modern and so
individual. That is, Candide must be read on its own terms before it can be
fitted into some wider (Enlightenment) pattern. Carl L. Becker knew better: this book is an exception in this author’s oeuvre. Gay cannot accept this obvious truth; being a mythic thinker
himself he reads the totality of his vision into all phenomena, so that Candide
is “at once extraordinary and representative”. It is
not enough that Voltaire is influenced by the classics. No! For the religious mind God has to appear in each line of the
Holy Book he inspired. The
professor therefore interprets each sentence in Candide as a sign of the deity’s presence: the pagan one of
Critical Philosophy. And so we end
in absurdity: the very fact we can’t see any Greeks or Romans in the book
proves that they are everywhere in it.
Here is the railway track logic of the religious mind, which operates as
if there are no station stops between the original assumption and the final
conclusion. Believe our lord is
omniscient and the proof is simple tautology – the first railway station is
also the last. There is no need
for facts. And even if they did
exist these facts would always be interpreted in line with the pre-conceived
idea; never would they be used as an independent means of verification; thus
the Baron’s lovely estate becomes a “miserable chateau” – the professor’s
religion requires it.
More likely is Gay’s assertion that the book is
designed to be topical; thus, or so he argues, all the incidents described in
the novel actually took place during Voltaire’s lifetime; the book not simply a
fable but an attack on the inhumanities of the day. Whatever the antique influence on Voltaire’s thought
professor Gay is surely correct that it is the author’s ire against the then
current inhumanity, and the sloppy thinking that accompanied it, that inspired
this story.
Gay does have insights: all the characters are
caricatures, so as to create a distance between the book and its readers,
giving us some critical detachment to read the moral, is one of them. But then he goes too far:
Thus the reality of the
detail is an essential quality of the fable: only the land of Eldorado, where
men live in peace, despise riches, have no jails or priests, and are all
deists, is obviously, ironically – alas, inevitably – a fiction.
How I’d love that insight to be true! Indeed, at first I thought it was; so
right did it feel. Unfortunately,
Gay’s assertion, which ignores the real paradise from which Candide has been
expelled, xviii is pure
wish fulfilment. I mean, how
realistic is this…
‘We had a Mohammedan
priest in our fortress, a most pious and compassionate man. He preached a beautiful sermon to the
soldiers persuading them not to kill us outright. “Cut one buttock off each of these ladies,” he said, “and
that will provide you with a delicious meal; if you find you need more, you can
have as much again in a few day’s time.
Allah will be pleased at such a charitable action…” [The meal finished she was rescued by
the attacking troops].xix
Gay so wants Candide to be on the side of the
facts. There is a sharp divide, he
argues, between those who believe in fictions and those that look at reality;
the one thinks in myths the other critically; Voltaire a prototype of modern
Analytic Man.xx If only
life was so simple! As Anita
Brookner writes, the philosophes were
incorrigible idealists; it is only the content of their thought that
distinguishes them from their Catholic antagonists.
The Enlightenment is
also about a new kind of priesthood, a brotherhood of enthusiasts who are
demonstrating, through the new gospel of the Encyclopédie, that the world is vast and variable, teeming with
skills and radical alternatives, a world in which the most important
preoccupation is not salvation but a different kind of morality.
The most beguiling
conversation of the day is devoted to the question of improvement, or, as it
was then called, perfectibility, and it developed around the fashioning of
systems – of law, education, government, and in the case of the fine arts,
appearance. There was no doubt in
the minds of the philosophes that
mankind would evolve naturally towards these ideal systems, and there was no
suspicion that they would or could come about as a result of either revolution
or autocracy. Theses systems had
the power of words, not of economics; they were harmless and beautiful and self-justifying
constructions, and they did not even aspire to the status of propaganda,
because if men were sensible as they were seen to be in 1760xxi their natural good judgement would concede that these ideal systems were
desirable. The matter could be left
there, and evolution would take care of the rest. (Soundings)
These paragraphs suggest that Voltaire isn’t so much
arguing with the old scholastics as against the new secular thinkers – he is
attacking his own side! Abusing
the philosophes for their own overly
rational fantasies. Critical
Philosophy prone to the same temptations as the Christianity it wanted to
replace – progress, not God, now the great redeemer in a new kind of
metaphysics, where the glorious future stands in for the once majestic past. This could be the reason why the book
is so brutal. It is a civil
war! Voltaire taking on, literally
destroying, the French Enlightenment which he has helped to create. Paris (Constantinople) a place you
supply with swedes and parsnips but avoid if your goal is wisdom and sound
sense. If my interpretation is
correct a very different gloss can be put on Candide’s relationship to the Critical Philosophers. Pace Peter Gay: the novel doesn’t support his thesis, but
demolishes it. Voltaire’s
contention is that Enlightenment thinking is as absurd as the previous
scholasticism; like them it prefers to gaze at itself in the mirror, to marvel
at its own beautiful ideas, rather than stretching over the windowsill to
observe the human traffic below; with its mud and abuse and its foul
streets. Facts are irrelevant –
our theories will replace them!
Like many theologians before and since they couldn’t see the point of
spending any time on such trivial ugliness. “No, Pierre. Don’t’ waste our water washing the front pavement. One day all the roads of Paris will be
laid with stone and cleaned by state officials. Until then we must use the water for better things.” “Do you want me to clean the cherubs,
sir?” “Why of course!” Voltaire’s solution to this solipsism
is extreme: the best way to improve the world is not to think about it at
all! So much for this new world of
intellect! And this, surely, is Candide’s value: it is not just attacking the author’s
ideological enemies but a particular type of mind, common throughout the
ages. And here is a thought
(always I get carried away): would Peter Gay have appeared in Candide if Voltaire had lived long enough to read The
Enlightenment: An Interpretation? A second thought while you’re still
thinking about the first: would Gay have recognised himself in it?
The novel is a pilgrim’s progress from a highly
rational premise to a completely irrational conclusion – from all thinking to
all doing; from Pangloss to Candide.
The pupil has learned that he must doubt the theories of his master, but
then makes the fundamental (and all too common) error of rejecting them in
their entirety. The result? He has replaced one catchall
explanation with another – only the surface quality of them has changed, his
Turkish garden much poorer than the Baron’s wealthy estate.
Peter Gay is right to insist that Candide is constantly
questioning the world around him.
Thrown into new and confusing situations he tries to make sense of them;
and in the process discovers that his old ideas are essentially unsound. His education is thus a progressive
emptying out of the content of his childhood lessons. Gay is right to emphasise the process. What he misses is that it leads to an
unsound conclusion, which, just like the novel’s beginning (the best of all possible worlds did exist, the Baron’s estate was real), is based on too narrow
empirical grounds – the hero’s own experiences. Moreover, because he wants to prove a theory Gay once again
goes too far; this time asserting that Candide is the critical philosopher in
practice. His proof? The hero constantly argues with
everyone he meets. This wasn’t’ my
impression, although I agree that the book is a type of bildungsroman; Candide learning from his experiences, in large
part by talking to people with differing opinions. He is thus qualitatively different from Pangloss who is
trapped within an idée fixe which
he imposes on every situation. Of
course, our contrasting views arise from a difference in interpretation and
emphasis, although Gay’s reference to Chapter 21 to prove his point does
suggest he lacks subtlety; the real problem with his analysis - he is not so
much wrong, although he is that, as too crude and analytically clumsy.
…the twenty-first
chapter has what must be one of the most expressive chapter headings of the
century – “Candide and Martin Approach the Coast of France and Argue.”
Yet in my translation the title is
What Candide and Martin
discussed as they approached the coast of France.
In the most recent Penguin edition we read:
Candide and Martin
approach the coast of France, philosophizing all the way
These titles seem far closer to the spirit of the
chapter, which is mostly a conversation between two people with different
opinions about everything (there are the beginnings of an argument towards the end,
but we assume, given the foregoing, that it won’t be very aggressive or
illuminating).xxii If Candide really was interested in
dialectic, rather than just listening to other people’s views he would argue
vociferously to justify his own position.
That he does not suggests the passive nature of his intellect – Candide
doesn’t think his way into a new mindset, he lets circumstances do the work for
him. Experience and other people’s
ideas slowly wear away the “common sense” understanding he learned as child,
until, when nothing is left of Pangloss’ influence, he is ready to absorb a
very different message – from the Turkish farmer. Candide doesn’t think is way into a new way of life. He meanders into it by accident. That is, the hero of this book is no
role model for anyone who wants to seriously learn about the world and change
it. He is no scholar. Indeed, he is rather egoistic and
selfish:
‘For my part,’ said
Candide, ‘I have no curiosity to see France. You will appreciate that after spending a month in Eldorado
a man is not interested in seeing anything in the world except Lady Cunégonde…”
These are the authentic words of a man in love. Probably not unrelated to this is
Candide’s obsession with a single idea – he has learned his lessons from
Pangloss too well. These kinds of
minds are not conducive to a sceptical and critical attention to reality. They are not British empiricists, no matter
what professor Gay writes…
Candide is propaganda in [sic] behalf of empiricism, a dramatization
of Newton’s methods.
If this argument were true we would read about
Candide’s experimental work and his mathematical reasoning. Yet the hero is no scientist. He is an unsophisticated bourgeois! Gay is reading a worldview into a fable
that is far more complicated than a simple clash of two fashionable theories:
British empiricism against Leibniz’s rationalism. That said, the general thrust of his remarks is correct: the
overall structure of this satire is a clash between these two meta-theories,
his horrendous experiences demolishing the philosophic rationalism that Candide
imbibed as a child. But although this clash takes place, and we see
metaphysical reason defeated by experience, the conclusion is not the obvious
one assumed by Gay. British
empiricism doesn’t triumph.
Mindless work wears the laurels as it jogs out of that last
sentence…
Gay’s mistake is his attempt to replicate the general
structure of the fable into each of its component parts; all of the
Enlightenment must be squeezed into this tiny novel; an elephant into a mouse
hole. This leads to strange
effects. Championing the critical
method he replicates precisely the mindset of his heroes: like them he thinks
he is being critical and analytical when he in fact is doing theology by
another name. Religion gets in
everywhere! Oh dear me.
[ii] Consider Anita Brookner’s comment on Diderot:
“For
passion, in the eighteenth-century understanding of the word, presents itself
as an eminently agreeable state, a sort of hectic vitality which gives one full
licence to change one’s mien, stance and opinion fifty times within the
hour. People thus enabled to go
skidding along the paths traced out by their senses – and Diderot is the
supreme example – did not get on terribly well with those in the grip of an idée
fixe.” (Soundings)
This
passage is highly suggestive: sensibility not critical thinking was the reason
Paris was so attracted to the British empiricists.
[iii] Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World.
For the contrary view see Jonathan
Israel’s Radical
Enlightenment. What is clear from these vastly
contrasting books is that there was a significant shift in European
thought. They show there was an
Enlightenment, although it was not a single unitary phenomenon. Like any revolution it fragmented into
numerous sects; many of which retained large swathes of the culture of the ancien
regime; and particularly so in its
early stages – again like revolutions intellectual movements change over time,
often increasing in radicalism until they collapse under their own absurdities.
[iv] For a brilliant act of intellectual recovery that
demonstrates this point for the 17th century see Quentin Skinner’s Liberty
Before Liberalism, which resurrects
the lost movement of Roman republicanism that was later squeezed out of history
by the advocates of the divine right of kings and a liberalism based on some
kind of social contract theory.
[xi] Or if their world is shattered, and they are suddenly
forced to think for themselves – such as the invasion of an occupying army that
destroys the Baron’s estate.
[xiii] For a brilliant short story that both describes how
this occurs and explains why it happens see Gogol’s The
Portrait. In Tolstoy’s War
and Peace Prince Andrei
experiences the same process when he gives up his country retreat for court society. Although everyone wants to talk to him
about his original ideas, he finds he no longer has time to conceive them.
[xiv] Elsewhere in this section he admits the truth about
the novel but quickly passes on.
You have to be quick to catch this professor!
“In
the late 1750s when he wrote Candide,
Voltaire still defined action as thoughtful resignation to reality; a few years
later, after and partly through Candide, resignation gave way to tireless and polemical action – just as the
Enlightenment itself was moving toward overt and bellicose action.”
This
contradicts his earlier statement:
“Candide
is not called a philosophical tale
for nothing: the reader is purged, not through pity and terror, but through
reason, and hence roused to rational action.” (My emphasis)
Here
is an academic struggling between his “scholarly care and his scholarly
presuppositions” (to quote C.M. Bowra, The
Creative Experiment). It is the reason why this section is so
messy. He so wants Candide to be a clarion call for radical moral action, which
proves the truth of his theory about the critical philosophy. And yet when he reads the book he
discovers a different message that he cannot quite assimilate. Yet he is truthful, and that is why we
can see the tensions, the contradictions, the mess even, of his
exposition.
For
an excellent account of how an ideologue who is not truthful turns facts into
ideology see Richard J. Evans: Telling
Lies About Hitler. In one extraordinary chapter he
shows how over time Irving was able to transform an inconvenient fact that
disproved his theories into its exact opposite – a fact that proved them.
[xv] See Mary Midgley’s The
Myths We Live By for the mythic
role of the Enlightenment in the 20th century.
[xvi] For example: the First Cognitive Revolution, created
by the Cartesians, was completely lost in the reaction to Descartes. It was rediscovered in the 20th century by Noam Chomsky; who found out about it only after he instigated the
Second Cognitive Revolution in the 1950s.
(New
Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind)
[xvii] It is an extraordinary experience when reading Locke’s An
Essay Concerning Human Understanding to realise just how little his contemporaries knew about the natural
world. Indeed, one of the
assumptions behind this book is that there will be much that will never be
known – a far too pessimistic conclusion, as subsequent scientific research has
proved.
[xviii] For my contention that Eldorado really isn’t a
paradise, see my Neither the Future Nor the Past.
[xix] According to the recent Penguin
edition:
“Voltaire
came across references to buttock-eating in a history of the Celtic peoples
published in 1741, which in turn cites St Jerome, according to whom the Scots
would feast on the buttocks of young boys, and the breasts of young girls, when
they had no game to eat.”
A fourth
century saint is hardly the most
reliable of sources for an 18th century tale about Muslim pirates.
[xx] This may be an aspect of the intellectual culture of
Gay’s time, where some of the most prestigious academic disciplines made an
enormous effort to try and separate fact from value – thus the influence of the
Analytic philosophy in America and Britain, where one of its central arguments,
deriving G.E. Moore, was that an ought cannot be derived from an is;
creating a tendency towards specialist technical concerns rather than with life
as it is actually lived. For a
fascinating discussion of this culture see Bryan Magee’s Confessions
of a Philosopher: A Journey Through Western Philosophy; although he distinguishes between a more tolerant
America and a Puritan Britain. A critical
analysis of Moore’s impact on ethical theory can be found in Heart
and Mind by Mary Midgley; while
her wonderful Wisdom,
Information & Wonder traces
the wider history of this modern philosophic tradition. The Myths We Live By places it within a wider mythic framework.
[xxii] Indeed this is confirmed in the new translation. This “dispute”, we are told, may actual
calm Candide down!
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