Week 32 of the humanities crash course continued the exploration of two influential French thinkers of the 18th Century: Rousseau and Voltaire. I read the first book of the former’s Confessions and the latter’s picaresque novel, Candide. I also watched a classic French film from the 1950s that continued the traditions of the silent era. I didn’t much like any of them.
Readings
Let’s start with Confessions, one of the first modern autobiographies. Rousseau was disliked by many of his contemporaries, and he wrote this book toward the end of his life as a sort of justification and means to influence his legacy. It’s a “warts and all” memoir that leans into his (many) flaws.
Book one focuses on Rousseau’s early years leading up to his adolescence. He comes across as petulant and independent. He admits to petty crimes and other shortcomings. This should be endearing, but to me, he came across as self-absorbed. I didn’t like the time I spent in his company and doubt I’ll ever read the rest of the book.
I disliked Voltaire even more. His novel’s full title is Candide, Or the Optimist — and that sets the stage: this is a supposedly humorous takedown of optimistic people. By “optimism” here, we mean people who always see the bright side of things and can see no wrong in anything that happens.
The novel’s main character, Candide, and his companions go through one awful situation after another. Candide’s mentor, a philosopher named Pangloss, believes that whatever happens is for the best. This includes being disfigured by venereal disease, hanged by the inquisition, enslaved, and on and on.
It’s stoicism taken to ridiculous ends, leading to a passive acceptance of abhorrent situations. That is indeed folly, but that’s not what I understand by “optimism.” Instead, Voltaire is mocking Leibniz’s argument that we live in the best of all possible worlds.
Ridiculous is the right word here: Voltaire’s purpose is to ridicule this position. These are straw men and women doing stupid things for stupid reasons — i.e., it’s clearly satire. But you can hear echoes of Voltaire’s ironic tone — minus its lighthearted stance — in social media today, where it’s become wearisome and corrosive.
Audiovisual
Music: Music by two favorites: French impressionist composers Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy. I’ve heard many of their works. This week, I just played their “Essentials” playlists in Apple Music.
Arts: French impressionist painters. As with some other artists we’ve examined recently, these are overly familiar — but their approach still seems startlingly fresh when compared to their predecessors.
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Impression, Sunrise by Claude Monet via Wikipedia
Cinema: Jacques Tati’s MON ONCLE. Although he shot this film in the 1950s, Tati — a former mime — was clearly working in the earlier style of silent film-era stars like Chaplin and Keaton.
I’d never seen any of Tati’s films. What struck me most was how much Rowan Atkinson and Wes Anderson owe to his style. (The former has explicitly cited Tati as an inspiration.) This film led me to see their work as part of the silent film tradition.
Reflections
Previously in the course, we explored the question of why God would allow evil in the world. (Most obviously in The Book of Job.) The question before us this week is how we humans should respond. I haven’t read Leibniz, but Voltaire’s mocking rejoinder made me dig a bit deeper.
The sense I get is Leibniz argued for a perfect creation — that is, because God is omnipotent and good, he made the best of all possible worlds. If this is the case, the best we can do is make peace with things as they are, even when circumstances are harrowing. Voltaire seems to say, “Are you nuts? We don’t have to take this!”
Well enough, but then what? Voltaire doesn’t offer anything beyond an ironic smirk. I was reminded of Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Masses, where he argues that contemporary social movements are more interested in tearing down the existing order than in proposing workable alternatives. As I wrote in my book notes,
This newly mobilized (literally) public’s default stance isn’t towards reform or revolution, but a nihilistic drive to destroy existing systems without proposing workable alternatives. The situation came to a head in 2011, a year of turmoil that included the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement in the U.S., the Indignados protests in Spain, and more. These movements sought to undo the status quo (in the case of Egypt, toppling the long-standing Mubarak regime), with no viable suggestions for what to put in their place. “The public opposes,” Mr. Gurri tells us, “but does not propose.”
Voltaire struck me as the godfather of such nihilistic stances.
Tati, on the other hand, came across as reactionary. MON ONCLE rails against the downsides of modernity — dehumanization, consumerism, etc. — and middle-class values without acknowledging any of their upsides. One would assume his character, M. Hublot, would benefit from refrigeration, antibiotics, and a post-war society with a thriving middle class. But we wouldn’t know it from his merciless lampooning of caricatures. His riposte to the “evils” of the modern world seems to be a deep yearning for a return to a romanticized past.
Both Tati and Voltaire embody an ironic stance that is pervasive today: facile critiques with no nuance or constructive proposals. Freed from the challenges of actually having to improve things within a shared culture in the real world, their fashionable wink-wink irony is highly corrosive to a society. And here we are, Voltaire’s (and to a lesser degree, Tati’s) great-grandchildren.
Although I’m not yet in possession of a firm answer to the question of how to deal with “unfair” circumstances (and I realize that mentioning fairness opens a big can of worms), I know that Voltaire’s stance — which I consider the default for many today — is flat out undesirable, even as it is alluringly clever. This puts me at odds with many of my contemporaries. So be it.
Notes on Note-taking
Even though I didn’t very much like this week’s readings (or film, for that matter,) they did lead to interesting introspection. Even though I didn’t read Leibniz, one can’t understand Candide (and specifically, the Pangloss character) without dipping into Leibniz.
This was a good opportunity to give GPT 5 a trial run. As in previous weeks, I asked for reflections on my notes, helping me refine and deepen my thinking. With the relationship between Voltaire and Leibniz in clearer focus, I then asked for comparisons.
In particular, previous studies led me to ask about the relationship between Leibniz and Voltaire and Buddhism. Buddhism also tackles the question of agency, but I sense its “middle path” approach is more agentic than either Leibniz or Job.
Among our exchanges, ChatGPT produced the following table, which I found helpful:
| Dimension | Leibniz | Voltaire | Buddhism |
|---|---|---|---|
| View of Suffering | Real, but ultimately necessary for a greater good in God’s perfect plan. | Real, often absurd, sometimes meaningless. | Real, inevitable feature of existence (dukkha). |
| Cause of Suffering | Part of the optimal arrangement of the universe; may stem from free will misuse. | Human folly, cruelty, and natural disasters — no ultimate cosmic purpose. | Attachment, craving, and ignorance. |
| Attitude Toward Suffering | Accept it as part of the divine order; trust that it serves a higher purpose. | Expose its absurdity and the folly of justifying it; skepticism toward cosmic explanations. | Accept its reality without judgment; investigate its causes with clarity. |
| Human Agency | Limited — we can act morally, but ultimate outcomes rest in divine providence. | Use reason, satire, and reform to fight injustice; skepticism toward grand plans. | Full responsibility for one’s own conduct; cultivate ethical action and mental discipline to reduce suffering. |
| Risk / Weakness | Can lead to passivity, excusing injustice in the name of divine wisdom. | Can lead to corrosive cynicism and disengagement if critique replaces constructive vision. | Can be misread as fatalism if agency and compassion are underemphasized. |
| Best Strength | Provides meaning, coherence, and moral optimism. | Strips away comforting but false rationalizations; confronts hypocrisy head-on. | Balances clarity about reality with practical, compassionate action; focuses on workable causes and solutions. |
Some of these seem suspect. For example, I’m not sure “use reason, satire, and reform to fight injustice” does justice to Voltaire’s position. But I found this format helpful for thinking about the differences between these lines of thinking — and ChatGPT itself proposed rendering these ideas in a table.
Up Next
Next week, we’re heading into even headier domains. Gioia recommends Descartes’s Discourse on the Method, part 1 of Spinoza’s Ethics, and Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphisics of Morals. I’m excited and a bit apprehensive.
Again, there’s a YouTube playlist for the videos I’m sharing here. I’m also sharing these posts via Substack if you’d like to subscribe and comment. See you next week!