Jean-Luc Godard

In this best of all possible worlds, all must be for the best. This is the main point of satire in Voltaire's classic "Candide." It's often taken that Voltaire is correct in his critisism of this philosophy simply because he is Voltaire, but he really fails to argue the main points of the philosophy. Throughout the novella, Voltaire attempts to demonstrate the absudity of the concept through a string of unfortunate events that cause the main character much grief and sadness. The main character remains optimistic by sticking to his belief that all is for the best. Even as he is flogged and beaten he remains sure that all is for the best.
While this seems absurd to the reader, it doesn't disprovc the theory or provide any alternative to the problem of evil. The problem of evil is one of the classic debates in philosophy and the concept behind Candide's optimism seems to be one of the best explanations for it. Personally, I can't find any way to refute it. So I ask you, in this best of all possible worlds, is all really for the best?

tecoyah

In short, Yes.
If one believes that everything is there to teach, and there are no truly "negative experiences" then life is all for the good.
Personal perspective is the reality of the individual, and thus creates the reality of optimism, or its polar opposite.

__________________
Holding onto anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned. - Buddha

asaris

No, this is not the best of all possible worlds. In fact, there is no such thing. It has to be a sufficiently good possible world, since God is good, but what measures would one use to determine what was the best possible world? Too many of them might be mutually incompatible, or merely admit of no maxima.

__________________
"Die Deutschen meinen, daß die Kraft sich in Härte und Grausamkeit offenbaren müsse, sie unterwerfen sich dann gerne und mit Bewunderung:[...]. Daß es Kraft giebt in der Milde und Stille, das glauben sie nicht leicht."

"The Germans believe that power must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then submit themselves gladly and with admiration[...]. They do not believe readily that there is power in meekness and calm."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

:::OshnSoul:::

What you resist persists
and all things happen for a reason.
I know that and it comes naturally for me to be optomistic, because even though I may not be aware right away of the reason for something happening, I will see it eventually. Worrying or getting upset over thigns that happen in my life would lessen the opportunity for me to gain from those experiences. Instead, I accept the event/experience, see why it is happening, and what I made contribution to the cause of the event or experience. I keep observing, but also giving thanks for what I have in my life now.
It's not per-say "for the best"- because that is an opinion- a relative term. You could say that all things happen for a reason, and all things do work out. You need to know the cold to know hot, etc.

wilbjammin

There's a reason that in the end he was happy tending to his part of the garden.

It is hard to understand any writing without the context of the author's other works and other beliefs. I will say that there was not much worse that could happen to Candide, but the key was that he was following his heart. It truly is a testiment to the absurd human passions. In pursuing something - anything - with passion it is hard to go "wrong". There truly is no negative to good though... there is a reason for every action that we make, including inaction and self-destruction.

Reminiscent of Sisyphus being the pinnacle of absurd action, Candide is the pinnacle of optimism in the face of horror. If Sisyphus can be happy, so can we. If Candide can be optimistic, so can we.

__________________
Innominate.

Jean-Luc Godard

what measures would one use to determine what was the best possible world?

Like you said, God is good, and God created this world, therefore this world must be the best. This really gets into issues with what exactly is "good' and what is 'evil' but by most definitions, God is good and all that is good is God. So in order to refute the theory that all is for the greater good, one would have to rationalize an eternally good God with a world that is less than good. There is no "sufficiently good" world as an eternally good God would have to make this the best possible worlds. If a world is "sufficient" then there is obviously room for improvment, improvment that an eternally good God would be required to make.

Jean-Luc Godard

I may have misread the tone of your post, but it seems to me that you are making out Candide to be a tale demonstrating the versatility of the human spirit rather than a satire critisizing Leibniz's philosophy of optimism. Voltaire thought that blind optimism like Candide's was absurd, the character that shares his views the most is not Candide but rather Martin, the realist.

In pursuing something - anything - with passion it is hard to go "wrong".

Hitler pursued his final solution with passion and went pretty "wrong" for all parties, himself included.


There truly is no negative to good though...

I fail to see what you mean by this statement, it seems to me that there is always a negative to any good.

asaris

Godard--

First of all, I'm not convinced God *has* to create the best of all possible worlds, even if there were such a thing. Mind you, at the end of the day I'd probably agree, but I know top notch Philosophers who would disagree (Peter VanInwagen, for example).

As to the possibility of there being a best possible world, let me ask you the following questions.
1. Horses are good, right? So how many horses does the best possible world have? Is there an optimal number of horses?
2. Is a world with intelligent, conscious creatures necessarily better than one without them?
3. What about the null-world, the world without anything other than God? What makes that world worse than this one?
4. Is a world with Asaris better than one without Asaris? What if God could only either create a world with Asaris or a world with Jones, but not a world with both? On what basis could we say one is better than the other?

__________________
"Die Deutschen meinen, daß die Kraft sich in Härte und Grausamkeit offenbaren müsse, sie unterwerfen sich dann gerne und mit Bewunderung:[...]. Daß es Kraft giebt in der Milde und Stille, das glauben sie nicht leicht."

"The Germans believe that power must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then submit themselves gladly and with admiration[...]. They do not believe readily that there is power in meekness and calm."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

wilbjammin

Candide demonstrates just how out of hand things can get, and I found myself laughing at how extreme his situation became repeatedly. The more he followed his passions, the more suffering he experienced. Humans are like this, and at the end we are wondering if any of it was worth it... but we also see that Candide felt at every step of the way that he had to do what he was doing.

Like I said, it is no wonder that he was happy tending to his garden at the end. If we could be happy tending our gardens, life would be simple and we wouldn't experience as much pain. Humans follow their passions, and to the extremes. This isn't to say that I find Candide to be a hero like I find Sisyphus to be - this is to say that I find Candide to represent the tragedy of the human will to engage in the practice of projecting an image of ourselves into the future containing all of our desires. All is for the best, because reason doesn't typically win and there is no way to prevent people from persuing their passions (whether you think they are noble or atrocious). To all of us, we attempt to follow what is good - good for us. Self-interest defines good (as well as people's mental health).

Candide sees the irony in the statement "In this best of all possible worlds, all must be for the best." He sees that there are possible ways to prevent people from experiencing pain, and yet people end up putting themselves in painful circumstances. People are hopeless in this way, so there is no better world. People cannot be convinced that tending their garden is the best choice until after they have reason to believe that suffering for their goals isn't worth it.

__________________
Innominate.

Jean-Luc Godard

asaris-- You bring up some valid points, but what Leibniz tried to say in his philosophy is that we don't know the optimal number of horses or whether asians are better than no asians. We have to trust that God has made everything out to be as good as possible, because God is good. What this means is that the number of horses we have now IS the number optimal for the greatest good and that having both asians and Jones is also optimal.

wilbjammin-- Hit. Nail. Head. Well stated, I had never looked at Candide quite like that and now that i think about it, I have to agree with you wholeheartedly.

roachboy

outside a theological frame of reference--one either adopted as true, or one adopted in order to ridicule it---the notion of the best of all possible worlds makes no sense. the argument requires that one suppose that a manifold exists somewhere--around the category of "world" for example----this manifold would be made up of stagings of all possible arrangements at once--it is only conceivable in terms of a particular conception of god's mind---in principle, then, if one could access this manifold, one could go shopping there.

or you assume the same thing implicitly, combine it with a belief in a benevolent god, and the conclusion that this might be the best of all possible worlds can follow.

same kind of reasoning can be applied to the "problem of evil"---metaphysics, pure and simple.

if you assume, on the other hand, that the social world is made by human beings as a fundamental aspect of their historical being, then the best you can say is that his manifold is a projection that would function as a mode of explanation for the fact of the social world conditioned by the ideological frame of reference within which the actors operate. evil then becomes a category used to explain--and dehistoricize--questions that otherwise would be understood as political.

i like to use candide as a way of thinking about what it means to be a religious conservative in the states now.

i'd keep writing, but i have to go to a party.
it will not be the best of all possible parties.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

door

Roachboy, your my hero

look- we are talking about completely different types of GOOD here. There is Leibnitzes (I can never spell his damn name) GOOD which is actually not GOOD but rather fully BEST. Then their is the good of Candide which can be called DESIRES.

That is why Voltaire is wrong from the start. His Satire points out only that the desires people have are not always attained, and sometimes the opposit occurs, and so how can this be the BEST POSSIBLE WORLD? This is why ENGLISH scholars and writters should stick to thier schtick (ok, so I don't really believe that at all ).

The answer to Voltaires question is simple. What is most desired isn't always what is GOOD/BEST (in the Leibnitze sense). Isn't it very possible that the best is to experience many things, and have a world with a cornicopia of feelings and events? If that is the case, some people must have hell on earth, and others heaven. Some must spend their days chained and enslaved and others must enslave. That is a very possible explination of what BEST is. Not that I personally think so, but it is.

But this DOES show a problem with Lebnitze- his theory is self-sufficent and yet without proof- this is to say that all L must claim is that WHATEVER the world is IS the perfect world at this moment in time. His evidence is that this is because GOD makes the world perfect. But ask him how he knows God exists? Hopefully he wont (but I think he does) state that God exists, in part because the world is perfect.

WOAH! - Circle time!. (look anything like a MR. Descartes?) But Leibnetze doesn't say this alone, of course.

The problem of evil is being misrepresented here- it is this:

1) God is Benevolent
2) God is all knowing (omnipresent)
3) God is all powerful (omnipotent)
4) God created all things that exist
5) Evil exists

- the problem, of course, is that a Benevolent God can't create evil, right!?

here is where I think the error is- in the interpretation of 1 and 5.
- God is benevolent, but that has NOTHING to do with OUR desires, but rather the GOOD of all. But what is best for all? It seems that what is best is FREEDOM (some will argue this of course). But in a theistic view, God gave man ULTIMATE freedom, knowing he would use it for ill and cause pain. But if freedom is the ULTIMATE Good, then God giving us freedom is the best, most perfect existence (other than God, who has freedom too it seems). So, then, evil is done and had by man!

- Some will say, though, that God still allowed evil, and created it in a sense and so there is still a problem! But to this I reply that evil isn't a possitive thing. Its not like an orange or a person. It doesn't actually exist at ALL! Rather evil is the ABSENCE of some existence. Lets call this existence, for the purpose of debate, Gods will.

- Now if we are part of Gods will, choosing freely to be in accordance with God, then there is no evil. But if even ONE creature goes against God, they have done evil. Here is the Bitch of course: If am am completly "good" I may still experience evil because of others! Hence Candide.

This all make perfect sense then?

So there really isn't a theist problem of evil at ALL.

And as far as Perfect Worlds are concerned, remember- if maximum freedom is best, then the perfect world is one where God only acts when necissary, and man is able to perform moral evil on one another if they choose (at least for a time).

*please note that other "evils" such as tornados and famine are usually accounted in the "problem". How can these exist if God is good etc.? But I would hope that people can seperate NATURAL bads from what "evil" is. But if someone is unwilling, then all I must say is that even the weather dangers only exist because of mans freedom! (it actually says this in Genesis more or less).*