The latest set of teaching company I’ve been listening to is U Penn Professor Alan Charles Kors on Voltaire. I’m really glad I picked this one – it was a fairly random, thus serendipitous, pick.
Kors describes Voltaire as an elusive thinker. Voltaire admitted as much: “The secret to being boring is to reveal everything.” The take-away impression I have of Voltaire’s method, via Kors’s lectures, is of questioning rather than pronouncing. Voltaire’s approach reminds me of that which Plato ascribed to Socrates, more gadfly than know-it-all.
Although Candide is all I remember reading, the little philosophical tale is rightly picked by high-school curricula-crafters as a glimpse to the prolific author. I read it maybe 15 years ago – and I remember it having fun with the idea that we live in the best of possible worlds; and I remember really liking Candide’s closing charge to “cultivate our garden,” stemming from the advice he got that doing so “keeps away three great evils: boredom, vice, and need.” Luckily, I still have my copy of Voltaire’s little philosphical tales – looks like I paid $0.45 for it, used, at the Bookshop in Chapel Hill. But that questioning of (or, poking at) Pangloss’s rigidly held view that this is the best of possible worlds – and the fairly limp non-conclusion – is, from what I understand, fully Voltairian.
Candide resulted partly from Voltaire’s anguish at the horrific 1755 earthquake in Lisbon, and the clash that disasters (and human-generated pain) have with Leibnizian Optimism – that this is the best of all possible worlds (God alone is perfect; in creating the world, God had at its disposal all possible worlds; because God is benevolent, God could logically only have created the best of all potential worlds). Voltaire seems to have consistently adhered to a notion of what we now call intelligent design. So, it is not surprising he would see some logic in Optimism. But, the 1755 quake, and generally the problem of bad things happening, were ultimately irredeemable for Voltaire. He could not stomach the optimist reply to Lisbon – Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote that the earthquake was a helpful gesture from God towards simpler, agrarian living. People are not supposed to love in cramped cities; earthquakes don’t cause such harm in pastoral societies. Against that thinking, Voltaire wrote Candide. The comfort that we can find against pain and tragedy is to till our earthly garden and cultivate our human bonds.
In any event, let me bring this around to something.
We’re long interested in the Constitutional founding here on OR, and I’m wondering how Voltaire fits in the mix. John Adams mentions him a few times in letters to Jefferson as “the greatest literary character” of the 18th century, and he (Adams; Jefferson’s letters don’t outright mention Voltaire) mentions reading Voltaire’s works. But I don’t find Adams relying on Voltaire directly to make philosophical conclusions. Would they have felt like heirs to Voltaire?; rivaling thinkers?; did they think Voltaire affected their political philosophy? I constantly thought of Jefferson while listening to Kors’s lectures. I think Jefferson has some of Voltaire’s eagerness to question; and to put on an aegis of open-minded query; to argue a point without full self-awareness / self-criticism; but, to have the propensity to come around to a fairly opposite view in another time.
I’m interested in Voltaire’s time in England, and subsequent Letters on England. This ties back to the Founders question – Voltaire praises the legal and normative English setting, favorably comparing the pluralistic (religiously) society to France. Around the same time, Blackstone summarized the English common law in his Commentaries. And about a decade later, the U.S. declared independence and, after another decade, framed the Constitution. Had the Founders read Letters on England while contemplating how to create a legal structure that would foster the society the Voltaire praised?
What I’m particularly interested in, for purposes of the Voltaire-Blackstone-to Jefferson line of thinking mentioned above, is Voltaire’s thinking on natural law. Blackstone’s Commentaries, from what I understand, adopt the notion that history consisted of a progression of improvement to the present. Natural law helped determine the common law. Natural law is potentially what Jefferson relied upon when pronouncing self-evident truths; at least, Jeremy Bentham thought so when ridiculing the Declaration. Elusive Voltaire wrote an entry on Natural Law in his Philosophical Dictionary. He seems to criticize (with Bentham?) the notion that there can be self-evident “just and un-just.” It will be good to dig in a bit more into this, and the intellectual backdrop to the founding.
There is something to Voltaire’s style – his way of thinking – that resonates in the system of law that we created, with due credit to English common law. I wonder if there was a bit of anti-aristocratic sentiment that flowed through to the Founders; the same type of sentiment that precludes most politicians, even today, from running in the character of an aristocrat. Bush’s brush clearing, indeed, is only an update to Franklin’s coonskin cap.
Jesuits schooled Voltaire in a style that focused on forming strong arguments that predicted points of opposition (much like a legal brief). Voltaire’s writing (early on, I think it was drama) got him into some aristocratic circles. But, he was not aristocratic, and was not defended by aristocrats when he got into a snaffoo with an actual aristocrat. So, Voltaire took an exile to England. I have to imagine that his experience with aristocracy in France shaded his opinion of England. I wonder if he always had a chip on his shoulder. From the lectures, I know Voltaire writes about pluralistic religious society in England; I’m not sure what else he covers.
For now, we’ll close with this line from that entry in the Philosophical Dictionary:
“You are right, there is a natural law; but it is still more natural to many people to forget it.”
