The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers

Voltaire personified all the greatness and excesses of the Enlightenment, and he so successfully impressed Enlightenment thinking on the broader culture that, as Durant writes, “the battles which he fought for us no longer interest us intimately” (219). Relentlessly prolific and highly influential in his own lifetime, he championed a movement that helped shift power from hereditary and religious authority to a public faith in the power of human reason.

Imprisoned in the Bastille for offending the young Louis XV, Francois-Marie Arouet adopted the pen name Voltaire, and upon his release became a literary celebrity, especially for his plays. After a fight with a powerful aristocrat, he fled to England. This proved a more hospitable environment for writers, and his experience of their scientific progress and political liberty turned him against the “idle aristocracy and tithe-absorbing clergy of France” (228). Returning to his native country, he wrote his great Romantic novellas, which lampoon the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church and the pointless suffering that the higher classes inflict upon the lower.

In his story Zadig, the protagonist endures one tragic mishap after another, particularly because of love affairs, before becoming enslaved and offering the wisdom borne of his experiences to his master. Voltaire was akin to a modern celebrity who corresponded with kings and whose turbulent love life was a subject of public gossip. He took residence with the Prussian King Frederick the Great, until getting into trouble for a poem satirizing Frederick’s chief scientist. Denied re-entry to France, he settled in Geneva and produced much of his best work.

After extensive preparation, Voltaire undertook what Durant regards as “the first philosophy of history—the first systematic attempt to trace the streams of natural causation in the development of the European mind” (243). Once again, he enraged the powerful by allotting great historical importance to Asia, and so the King ordered him permanently banished from France. Moving to Ferney, Switzerland, he became increasingly fixated on the cruelty of nature and pointlessness of conflict, which found its greatest expression in his novella Candide.

In the novella, Candide is a student of the relentlessly optimistic philosopher Dr. Pangloss. As Candide suffers an absurd series of misfortunes and witnesses the grave injustices of the world, Pangloss insists that everything is for the best. Through all his experiences, Candide learns to tune out Pangloss’s lectures, and focuses on the cultivation of his garden. Candide struck a nerve in France, as frustration with its lingering feudal institutions produced a bitter hostility to all forms of received wisdom, kindling fierce commitment to rationality and the common good based solely on empirical metrics. The members of these movements regarded Voltaire as their hero, and he undertook a massive project of writing encyclopedias and dictionaries, even as his philosophy led him toward skepticism of how much human beings can know.

Voltaire remained controversial as he aged. After the French state tortured and executed a young man—who had been found with a copy of Voltaire’s Philosophic Dictionary—for mutilating crucifixes, Voltaire undertook a public campaign against the Church. Employing the motto Ecrasez l’infame (“destroy the infamous thing” [258]), Voltaire championed religious toleration. He challenged the authenticity of the Bible, and mocked Protestants and Catholics for what he regarded as their petty theological squabbles and vicious persecutions. He believed in some kind of “divine organizing intelligence” (262), and praised many of Jesus’s moral teachings, but came to regard religion as a noble lie meant to keep lesser minds in order through fear of divine punishment. His concerns with religion took him away from politics, aside from a general aversion to war and advocacy for reforms, including trial by jury and abolition of the tithe (mandatory payments to the Church).

Here he clashed with another great figure of the Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who matched Voltaire’s comic rationalism with a fiery romanticism. Rousseau regarded civilization itself as the chief source of humanity’s corruption. In a story parodying Rousseau, a man asks an angel, “wilt thou break this pretty statue because it is not wholly composed of gold and diamonds?” and the angel resolves to leave “the world as it goes” (271-72). Voltaire worried that Rousseau’s denunciations of the world would only lead to misery, due to the incredible difficulty in changing the nature of things. This critique would find new life after the bloody excesses of the French Revolution, whose leaders had regarded Rousseau as a hero—but then again, they regarded Voltaire as a hero as well.