Free Candide Essays: Impossibility Of The Happy Life :: Candide essays

Candide: The Impossibility Of The Happy Life This paper's focus is Voltaire's view of human happiness. Specifically, it will argue that Voltaire, in Candide, says that human happiness is impossible. Voltaire believes this for three reasons. First, Voltaire presents mankind in the novel spending all its life worried about personal problems of the moment. When people in Candide have no problems, Voltaire indicates, they do not feel happy but become bored instead. Their emotional lives swing between worries and boredom with almost no periods of prolonged happiness. Secondly, Voltaire believes human happiness is impossible because the world as he presents it in Candide is full of selfish people whose actions spoil the well being of all their fellow human beings. Thirdly, Voltaire believes human happiness is impossible because governments are so violent and organized religion is so corrupt that they ruin the lives of millions through war and exploitation. These points may be amply demonstrated through an analysis of Candide itself and also through the views of important critics. To best appreciate this novel, however, some background concerning its origins and its relationship to the author's preoccupations should be mentioned. Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire lived from 1694-1778. He was an author and a philosopher whose philosophy stressed rationality, democracy and scientific inquiry. These interests can all be seen in Candide, for example, which has a philosopher for a main character and which satirizes the philosophy of Leibnitz throughout the text. The novel Candide was written in response to the earthquake of 1759 which hit Lisbon and resulted in the instantaneous and indiscriminate deaths of thousands. Appalled by the horrible deaths of so many innocent people, Voltaire was at this time also incensed by Leibnitz who wrote that given the worlds God might have created, by choosing to endow mankind with free will, "the world we live in is the best of all possible worlds." To Voltaire, this response to the earthquake amounted to an abominable moral complacency and indifference by philosophers such as Leibnitz, who Voltaire felt seemed to accept all the other normal suffering and injustice i n the world. Hence in Candide, Voltaire relentlessly satirizes Leibnitz's formulation by shifting the stress to "this is the best of all possible worlds" and bringing up the line every time a character encounters a horrible calamity or atrocity. However, it should be added that Voltaire's hatred of injustices perpetrated by the aristocracy, the church and the state--all of which he satirizes in Candide--also grew out of his personal experiences.