Timelessly Timely: Voltaire Today

I Is Voltaire Obsolete?

No one would deny that Voltaire still occupies an important and
well-deserved place in the history of ideas. Few will dispute his greatness
as an historian and his genius as a satirist. At the same time, few will
defend his greatness as a poet or his profundity as a philosopher. While
his histories are still readable and his contes still enchanting, his epic and
dramatic poetical works with their cardboard characters and inflated
rhetoric certainly seem to have rightly been put in moth balls. But what
of Voltaire the thinker? Do his ideas have any relevance to the
contemporary world?

First of all, as these very questions are still lively topics for discussion,
we can be assured that, whatever the final view of Voltaire's relevance
more than two hundred and seventy-five years after his birth, he is not
yet dead. Some, no doubt, deny that the thoughts of an
eighteenth-century philosophe who flourished in a long-gone "age of
enlightenment" can be of use to a century such as ours, with its highly
complex, rapidly developing technological societies. What did Voltaire
know of computers, atomic fission, DNA, test-tube babies, behavioral
engineering, space satellites, and future shock? His stories may still be
gems, but his ideas are fossils.

But are they?

We don't think so. And we are not alone.

In this concluding chapter we will briefly refer to seven areas in which,
we believe, Voltaire still has something of value to relate to
twentieth-century men and women. Not that our list is intended to be
exhaustive. Far from it. Had space permitted, we would have liked to
have considered Voltaire's relevance to education, to ecology, to science
fiction, to occultism, to rites of passage, and so on. But brief as our
discussion of Voltaire's topicality must be, it will suggest, we hope, why
the Voltairian, an endangered species in the world today, is not yet
extinct.

Voltairian? Here is one of the best definitions of the species that we have
come across.

A Voltairian is a man who is bent on seeing clearly in all
matters; in religion and philosophy he is willing to believe only
that
which he understands, and to accept ignorance in all the
rest; he
values reality more than speculation, and simplifies ethics as
well as
dogma, both for the sake of practical virtues; in politics he
favors a
moderation that guarantees natural freedom, as well as the
freedoms of
conscience, of expression, and of person; one which
eliminates as much
evil and brings about as much good as possible, and places
justice
among the most desirable goods; in the arts he appreciates
restraint
and truth above all; he hates hypocrisy, fanaticism and bad
taste with
a passion and, not limiting himself to hating these, he will
fight
them to the bitter
end.1


II Bridging the Two Cultures: "Poet and Physicist"

One way in which Voltaire remains relevant to our own times lies in his
awareness of the need for attaining, through education, a perspective on
life that bridges the gap between what C. P. Snow calls the "two
cultures"--the humanities and the sciences.2 An artist by inclination and
talent, he undertook the arduous task of reeducating himself in his
maturity, immersing himself in the science and philosophy of his day until
he could understand and articulate the "new language" of Locke, Leibniz,
and Newton. He was proud to think of himself as both a poet and a
physicist. At least up until the middle of his century he kept up with the
latest philosophical and scientific ideas, writing lucid popularizations of
them in order to spread far and wide the gospel of enlightment. For a
while he even engaged in scientific experiments--on fire and motive
forces. Although these remained strictly in the amateur class, they
revealed the extent of his commitment to applying scientific methods to
the discovery of new truths. Thus he provided a model for his large
readership to emulate in their search for knowledge. Margaret Sherwood
Libby in her study The Attitude of Voltaire to Magic and the Sciences
refers to him as a "philosophical journalist" who was interested in doing
more than merely gathering material from others in order to write
readable books.3 The breadth of his interest, his determination to
formulate for himself the new theories, to assimilate and evaluate them,
made him more than a mere popularizer. As Libby writes,

He seemed above all an ardent student, a perpetual
undergraduate, whose university was the Europe of the
eighteenth
century, whose professors were the great men of his time,
one who took
many courses, refused to specialize to any extent and wrote
exercises
and essays partly for sheer enjoyment and desire to excel,
partly to
fix the information in his own
mind.4


After the middle of the century Voltaire all but abandoned his attempt to
stay abreast of new developments in the sciences. He became far more
interested in launching his concerted attack on the "infamy" of religious
bigotry in which he used as ammunition whatever scientific and
philosophical ideas he had previously acquired that might suit his purpose.
Nevertheless, he remained throughout his life a remarkably well informed
and broadly educated man, a true generalist. He certainly would have
agreed with Snow that a person lacking a knowledge and appreciation of
scientific culture, no matter how well educated he may be in the
humanities, is impoverished and only half educated. He would, at the
same time, have considered as uncouth a scientist who had no training in
the humanities and lacked a poetic imagination. Voltaire saw no reason
why "the study of physics should crush the flowers of poetry."5 And he
was equally convinced that the study of poetry would not spoil the fruit
of scientific investigation.

In our age of fragmentation and specialization the example of Voltaire as
a mind that bridged the two cultures can be salutary. Someone has said
that a person has two educations, the one he is given and the one he
gives himself. The Jesuits provided Voltaire with the first; for the second,
he was his own tutor. True offspring of the enlightenment, he left behind
his reliance upon the tutelage of others to think and to learn for himself.
His was truly a liberal education, encompassing ultimately the totality of
reality. Voltaire, educator, still has much to teach us.

III "Philosophe, Heal Thyself!": Therapist Voltaire

I have studied medicine as Madame Pimbesche learned legal
customs--in pleading; I have read Sydenham, Freind,
Boerhaave. I know
that this art can only be a conjectural one . . . I have
concluded
that one must be one's own doctor, live on a careful diet, aid
nature
from time to time, never force her, but above all know how to
suffer,
grow old, and
die.6


The attitude toward life and toward the art by which it may be
sustained, expressed by Voltaire in the above passage from one of his
letters to a physician, suggests another reason why he is still timely
today. Throughout his long, eventful, and often traumatic life, he
developed a practical philosophy that made it possible for him to face
crises, to adjust to change, and to continue to live on productively for
more than seven decades. The attitude toward life and death that
sprang from this philosophy and some of the insights that supported it
still have value and relevance to contemporary readers.

First and foremost, he followed Epicurus in drawing attention to the
importance of health as the basis for all goods, material as well as
mental. It quickly becomes obvious to all readers of Voltaire's letters that
he was always concerned, usually overconcerned, about his health.
Although he undoubtedly had several real ailments, he was in fact a
confirmed hypochondriac. From his youth, when he shrank from excesses
which might have damaged his fragile health, to his old age, when he
complained to his physician that he was crushed by "eighty-four years
and eighty-four maladies," physical well-being was to him of paramount
importance.7 In itself, nothing about all this is unique or laudable, but the
objectivity and sensitivity with which Voltaire was able to view his own
(and his friends') physical condition was unusual, and the advice that he
gave was often remarkably sensible.

Basically Voltaire's way to ataraxia--absence of pain in the body and
mind--was to cooperate rather than to interfere with nature. Cleanliness,
exercise, simple and healthful diet, and avoidance of extremes were
among his most frequent recommendations. "What medicine will make you
digest? Exercise. What will regain your strength? Sleep. What will diminish
your incurable ills? Patience."8 Such was his advice. Medicine, as he
stated in his Philosophical Dictionary, is basically "clearing up, cleaning
up, and keeping up the house that one cannot rebuild."9 Like all arts, it
consists, he held, of doing what is appropriate.

The proper nourishment and care of the body must be accompanied by
attitudes, habits, and conceptions conducive to the attainment and
maintenance of an enlightened mind. Like Epicurus, Voltaire held that fear
of death is one of the chief obstacles to enlightened happiness, and he
was equally determined to overcome it. His attempt to do this is most
evident in his letters to his lifetime friend, Mme du Deffand, who, after
having become blind, was often subject to fits of deep depression during
which she questioned the value of living and expressed her fear of dying
to her friends, most of all to Voltaire. In responding to his old friend's
pessimistic reflections, he formulated clearly the life-affirming philosophy
by which he lived and by which he himself would eventually die. In a
typical passage from one of these letters, he wrote:

I think, everything considered, we should never think of
death: the thought is good for nothing except to poison life.
The main
thing is not to suffer; as for the moment of death, it's as
insensible
as the moment of sleep. The people who announce it
ceremoniously are
the enemies of the human race; we must prevent them from
ever getting
close to us. Death is nothing at all; only the idea is sad.
Therefore,
let's never think of it, and live from day to day. Let's get up
each
morning saying: What shall I do today for my health and
amusement? At
our age everything comes down to just
that.10


Thus, for Voltaire, as for Epicurus, death itself is nothing of great
importance. So long as we live we have experiences through our sense
organs, but at death these sense organs cease to operate and we can
therefore experience nothing at all. Why fear nothing? But along with his
Epicurean rejection of the fear of death, Voltaire maintained a stoical
resignation to it, which was an offspring, perhaps, of his confirmed belief
in scientific determinism. As he formulated it in another letter to Mme du
Deffand:

This is, perhaps, madam, what I would suggest as a remedy
. . . You couldn't help but write the very philosophic and very
sad
letter that I received from you; and I am writing to you, of
necessity, that courage, resignation to nature's laws,
profound
disdain for all forms of superstition, the superior pleasure of
knowing oneself to be of a different kind from fools, and the
exercise
of the faculty of reason are true
consolations.11


This was the belief by which Voltaire supported his everyday life into the
ripeness of old age while he calmly awaited the dissolution of his being.
To him, as to Spinoza, philosophy was a meditation not on death but on
life. Long before Bertrand Russell, but in strikingly similar terms, he
formulated his own "free man's worship." In our day, Voltaire's
clear-headed and tenacious affirmation of the value of life can offer
refreshment to those who, like Mme du Deffand, still feel that it is a
misfortune to be born, and that the remedy of the misfortune--death--is
even worse than the disease.

IV Knowing that One Does Not Know: A True Disbeliever

We are, of course, an ignorant lot; even the best of us
knows how to do only a few things well; and of what is
available in
knowledge of fact, whether of science or of history, only the
smallest
part is in any one man's
knowing.12


This statement could very well have been taken from Voltaire's work, The
Ignorant Philosopher. The author is, however, one of the great scientists
of the twentieth century, J. Robert Oppenheimer. The sceptical spirit, so
strong in Voltaire, is another of the features of his thought that seems
useful to our age of rapid and unpredictable change, proliferation of
novelty, and impending "future shock." It might also provide a counterfoil
to the wide variety of contemporary dogmas and cults that are
sometimes adjoined to fanatical proselytizing and violence. Although in
Voltaire doubting is never absolute--he does, of course, accept as
provable at least God, gravity, and geometry--it was an attitude of mind
that helped him, as it might help us, to cope with stress and to adjust to
the unexpected.

For Voltaire's ignorant philosopher, as for Socrates, philosophy was only a
refined sense of one's own ignorance. For his Good Brahmin, ignorance
had grown rather than diminished with the passing years, humbling him
and at times making life seem nearly unbearable. As he, Job-like,
exclaims,

I was born, I live in time, and I do not know what time
is; I find myself in a point between two eternities . . . and I
have
no idea of eternity; I am made up of matter, I think, I have
never
been able to discover what it is that produces thought . . .
Not only
the origin of my thoughts is unknown to me, but the origin of
my
movements is equally hidden. I do not know why I exist . . . I
am
ready sometimes to fall into despair when I think that after all
my
studies I do not know where I come from, nor who I am, nor
where I am
going, nor what I shall
become.13


While this passage is characteristic of Voltaire's scepticism in its
Pascalian mood, it totally lacks the scathing wit and mocking humor so
often associated with his doubting. The giant Micromegas's conversation
with the earthling philosophers is a good case in point.14 His admiration
for the tiny but apparently rational beings turns to disgust and
indignation when they describe their habitual squabbling in time of peace
and purposeless slaughtering in time of war. The giant's impulse (which
he only with difficulty checks) is to take a few steps and stamp out "this
whole anthill of ridiculous assassins."

Bertrand Russell, incidentally, finds this passage from Micromegas even
more tragically appropriate in our century than when it was written more
than two hundred years ago.15 In describing the influence that Voltaire
had upon his own thinking, Russell points out that he had learned to
agree with the philosophe's belief that no opinion should be held with
fervor. "When a man holds some opinion with immense fervor, and you
believe this opinion to be false," Russell writes, "you should not--so I
think Voltaire held--endeavor to cause the opposite opinion to be held
with fervor."16 If you can know something to be the case, for example,
that seven times eight is fifty-six, you don't hold it with fervor, Russell
argues. Only doubtful or demonstrably false opinions are usually asserted
with fervor. Russell believes that it is the excess of moral fervor that
provides the impetus to violence and war. For when two competing sides
are equally fervent in their convictions that they, and they alone, are
right, ferocious feelings are triggered and violence erupts. In place of this
irrational and troublesome emotion, Russell, following Voltaire, would put
scepticism and ridicule. Ridicule, he holds, is quite an appropriate and
powerful weapon to use against dogmatists who preach doctrines as
absolutely certain, when a confession of ignorance would be more
rational and more honest.17 With Voltaire he would advise, "Laugh and
you shall crush them."

Today's "true disbelievers" continue, in the spirit of Voltaire, and for much
the same reasons, to use ridicule as a weapon against fanatical "true
believers." Even though they themselves are doubtful they can know
anything with absolute certainty, Voltairians, like their model and like
Socrates, at least believe that others are far less wise than they when
these nonsceptics claim not only to know the absolute truth, but to have
an absolute monopoly on it. At least the Voltairians can allow themselves
the satisfaction of deflating these dangerous windbags with the sharp
pricks of their scepticism and ridicule.

V Watching a World Go Madder: Comic Genius

If Voltaire lives on today, it is, for the great majority of his readers,
because of his sense of humor. Like Aristophanes and Mark Twain, he
was one of the world's great comic geniuses. Along with his support of
the more traditional human freedoms he also supported one equally
important, the freedom to laugh. Laughter was, for him, as we have
already pointed out, a powerful weapon in everyman's fight for liberation
from the forces of fanaticism, intolerance, and tyranny. "Laugh, and you
shall crush them," was his advice to the dissatisfied, the repressed, and
the exploited. And while he lived, the rich and powerful feared the torrent
of laughter that could be directed against them by a flick of his pen, the
most deadly weapon that he wielded.

But even when Voltaire was most engaged as a writer he was not always
diabolical with the humorous weapons of which he was a master. He
recognized that laughter could also relieve boredom, alleviate pain, and
reconcile men, at least for the moment, to the facts of life and death.
For, after all, while laughter could be precipitated by human foibles it was
quite natural for humans to laugh as a simple expression of joy. "Laughter
always arises from a gaiety of disposition absolutely incompatible with
contempt and indignation," he once wrote.18 This would leave out the
laughter of ridicule of which he was a past master. Although Voltaire
never dealt with the aesthetics of comedy to the extent that he did with
that of tragedy, his practice shows that he had many strings on his
comic lyre, and the range of his comic devices were as wide as they
were varied. Here we can only mention a few.19

Voltaire was capable of Rabelaisian buffoonery (e.g., in his mock-epic on
Joan of Arc, La Pucelle) and of Swiftian irony (e.g., Micromegas). He
could compose an aphorism as coldly witty and as devastatingly cutting
as La Rochefoucauld (e.g., "To forgive our enemies their virtues--that is
a greater miracle"). He could also formulate a paradox as memorable as
any by his later imitator Oscar Wilde: "The multitude of books is making
us ignorant." Like Aristophanes he recognized fully the manifold humor in
the relations between the sexes (e.g., "God created women only to tame
men"). Long before Mark Twain, he was using wit to suggest man's gross
inhumanity to man (e.g., "The punishment of criminals should be of use;
when a man is hanged he is good for nothing"). He sounds to us at times
like an eighteenth-century Will Rogers: "The art of government consists
in taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to
the other." At other times he reveals himself as the true precursor of H.L.
Mencken: "In the great game of human life one begins by being a dupe
and ends up by being a rogue."

Even though Voltaire said little about why he chose the devices he did to
achieve the effects he intended, his practice was so consistent that one
can usually infer the principles by which his humor and wit operated.
Sometimes his comic effect springs from an implied sense of superiority,
as when he, the refined French gourmet, states that "England has
forty-two religions and two sauces." Sometimes he achieves the effect
by sardonic incongruity: "I knew I was among civilized men because they
were fighting so savagely." He is also capable of achieving comic effects
by releasing inhibitions about sexual relationships, as when he writes:
"The husband who desires to surprise is often very much surprised
himself." His range of comic devices included exaggeration (e.g., "The
fate of a nation has often depended upon the good or bad digestion of a
prime minister") and understatement (e.g., "Common sense is not so
common"). He exploited fully both irony of expression (e.g., "A clergyman
is one who feels himself called upon to live without working at the
expense of radicals who work to live") and irony of situation ("I was never
ruined but twice: once when I lost a lawsuit, and once when I won one").
His writings are liberally sprinkled with wisecracks such as "A woman can
keep one secret--her age" and epigrams (e.g., "When it is a question of
money, everybody is of the same religion"). He resorts to riddles and
clever repartee in his contes. When Zadig is asked "What is the thing
that we receive without giving thanks, enjoy without knowing how, give
to others when we don't know where we are, and lose without knowing
it," he replies "Life."20 When Cacambo asks Candide, "What is optimism?",
Candide replies: "Alas, it is the mania of maintaining that all is well when
we are miserable!"21 Even Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary has
sometimes been considered to be a sophisticated jokebook.

Voltaire is at his best, however, when he is not just being funny but
when he is hurling the thunderbolts of his wit to chastise a villain or to
fell an enemy. Then he can be ruthless, devastating, lethal. One has only
to recall the effect his Diatribe of Doctor Akakia had upon Maupertuis as
an example of the effectiveness of his brilliant and sometimes cruel wit.
When he finally disappeared from the eighteenth-century scene, it can
truly be said that he was sorely missed. For, as two contemporary
historians have pointed out, "for sixty years this sparkling little
Frenchman bestrode Europe like a Colossus, lashing fools with his
sarcasm, pouring acid on bigots, fighting obscurantism with unmatched
irony."22

Suppose Voltaire were to come back to earth today. Would he find
equally tempting targets to attack with his satirical pen? Our modern
world would indeed offer him abundant material for a new Candide,
Micromegas, or Philosophical Dictionary. The spectacle of great powers
stockpiling atomic weapons in order to assure peace would certainly
horrify him. A recent war, supposedly waged to protect a foreign people
but which ended by virtually destroying that people's land, would send
him into peals of shrill laughter. The development of nations which in the
name of freedom, progress, and peace continually and brutally repress
their artists and writers would drive him to further satiric fury, and link
him to such modern satirists as Eugene Zamiatin and George Orwell.
Scathing irony would also be Voltaire's response to our suicidal
destruction of the world's natural resources under the guise of
development. With what painful surprise would he note the fatal contrast
between our gigantic technological advances and the total lack of our
ethical growth! He would surely say, with his fellow playwright
Beaumarchais, that "I hasten to laugh at everything, for fear of being
obliged to weep." Grim laughter indeed would be his response to a world
which, long after the warning of Candide, has grown only madder, and
become bloodier than the eighteenth century could ever have dreamed
of.

"We still need, as in Voltaire's time," writes George R. Havens, "to learn
how to ridicule and laugh out of court all the host of intolerable abuses
which beset us."23

VI Grating Incongruities: Analyst of the Absurd

Voltaire's highly developed sense of the absurd is another of his
characteristics that make him still relevant to a century in which "The
Absurd" has become a major aesthetic category. "Absurd," as the
contemporary playwright Eugene Ionesco sees it, "is that which is devoid
of purpose . . . Cut off from his religious, metaphysical, and
transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless,
absurd, useless."24 Ionesco and other practitioners of the Theatre of the
Absurd, unlike philosophers, do not argue in the abstract; they present
the human condition concretely upon the stage as they see it, with all its
contradictions and incongruities. Voltaire did precisely the same in
Candide. There, he presented an absurd world of which man tries, in vain,
to make sense. The glaring contradiction between expectation and
reality, between ideal and fact, awakens in the reader mixed feelings of
outrage and amusement corresponding to those of the author.

Martin Esslin correctly said of the Theatre of the Absurd that it
"transcends the categories of comedy and tragedy and combines laughter
with horror."25 We might say the same of Candide, for in it Voltaire, like
Bertold Brecht later, administers a kind of shock therapy which achieves
an "alienation effect." The reader does not identify with the characters
but assumes a cool, objective attitude, as does Candide at the end,
when he says, "that's all very well said, but in the meantime we must
cultivate our garden."

From a somewhat different perspective, Albert Camus in The Myth of
Sisyphus finds the basis of the absurd in "that divorce between the mind
that desires and the world that disappoints, my nostalgia for unity, this
fragmented universe and the contradiction that binds them together."26
The "Myth of Candide" created by Voltaire is a perfect illustration of this
perspective, for what else is his hero but the personification of the
precarious human balancing act between fact and fiction? A
contemporary Voltairian scholar, Patrick Henry, in a study of Voltaire and
Camus on the absurd, has shown how both "realized that reason would
never fathom metaphysics or the problems of evil and human destiny."27
Yet both thinkers refused to renounce reason and take the leap of faith
which might have resolved the contradictions they faced. Comparing
Candide with Meursault in Camus' Stranger, Henry sees both heroes as
strangers to other men and to themselves.28 Eventually both break
through their habitual illusions and reach a higher level of
self-consciousness and individuality. Neither commits suicide, although, in
Henry's view, Candide's teacher Dr. Pangloss commits "philosophical
suicide" by his unswerving adherence to optimism. Meursault lives without
hope and dies happy. Candide lives on, but after renouncing all hope of
achieving a perfect love or a perfect society. "Voltaire maintains the
absurd paradox," Henry concludes, "proclaiming the absurd on the one
hand and elevating life on the other."29

In a similar view, other commentators have seen in Candide, and even in
Zadig, paradigms of the committed existentialist hero. Thomas C.
Greening sees Candide as "the peer of Camus' Sisyphus in his progress
from naive optimism and passive vulnerability" to a freely chosen task.30
Greening extols Candide for taking a stand and thereby committing
himself, simultaneously affirming his imprisonment in the world and his
freedom. Voltaire's Zadig also has his contemporary admirers who make
him out to be a hero of the absurd. "In his role as exemplary hero," writes
George A. Perla, "Zadig must pass through the stages of credulity, doubt,
and despair, and shed his naive assumptions before he can discover
within himself a unifying principle which will free him for a purposive
existence and beneficial action upon the world."31

Whether or not all this is reading too much into Voltaire's characters and
contes, it at least makes clear that Voltaire's art still speaks to us.

VII Beyond Utopia/Dystopia: Voltaire, Meliorist

Today Voltaire recommends himself to those who, while rejecting the
possibility of ever achieving a utopia, nevertheless continue to work for a
better world. Voltaire remains a critic of utopias and a mentor of
meliorists. Imaginary societies may offer aesthetic gratification and
psychological balm, but there seems little chance of their ever becoming
functional realities. Instead of wasting our time longing for a non-existing
paradise, we had better turn our attention to improving conditions as
they are. "The best," in Voltaire's opinion, "is the enemy of the good."
Like Henry David Thoreau, he believed he came into the world not to
make it into a perfect place in which to live, but to live in it. "The
terrestrial paradise is where I am," he summed up his viewpoint in The
Man of the World. Far better to own one chateau at Ferney than a dozen
castles in Eldorado. The message of Candide is also the message of
Voltaire's entire life: don't rationalize, but work; don't utopianize, but
improve. We must cultivate our own garden, for no one is going to do it
for us.

Nor has this enlightened horticulture become outmoded. A recent
commentator, Merle L. Perkins, for example, considers Voltaire's concept
of international order far from fossilized today.32 And some of his ideas on
war and peace, Perkins argues, are still quite sound and relevant:

In our own day, if there has been partial success in
establishing new institutions as the means of peace, it can
accurately
be said that they are dependent on some of the conditions
which
Voltaire saw as prerequisite: reduction of distrust and
superstition
among peoples; the elevation of diplomacy above the
Machiavellian
tradition; redefinition of concepts of sovereignty to stress
defense
more than
aggrandizement.33


Henry Meyer, another scholar who agrees with Perkins on the
contemporaneousness of Voltaire's thought, has shown how Voltaire, the
peace-loving philosophe, was far in advance of his time (and, in some
respects, of ours) in denouncing war, in deploring its destruction of life
and property, and in probing its origins in human nature and history.34
Voltaire may not have hit on solutions to our common problems, nor did
he propose plans for infallible peace as did his contemporary, the Abbe de
St. Pierre, but he did ask the right questions and he suggested the
direction in which we might be able to find some answers.

Voltaire the meliorist always rejected simple answers to complex
questions. In the social scientist Karl Popper's terminology, he was an
advocate of piecemeal rather than total utopian planning. He had seen
the harm done when fanatics, seizing on an idea, no matter how
untenable, sought to force it on their fellow creatures. He detested the
presumption that lay behind the efforts of those who claimed to have the
absolute truth in politics, religion, or ethics through some higher source.
Like Popper, he saw a connection between utopian dreams and violence,
for "true believers" must rely on coercion in order to promote their
schemes.35 (Mohammed was his description of such a type.) It was
better, in his view, to have humanity struggling slowly toward the light
than to have it deceived into thinking that a well-run but un-free society
was the "best of all possible worlds."

Man is to be saved not by faith, but by works. "My greatest work,"
Voltaire said in one of his last poems, "is that I have done a little
good."36 We may never be able to make a utopian world, but we can at
least try to make the world we live in a little less dystopian.

VIII Renewing the Rights of Man: Symbol of Liberty

"His spirit still torments the world like a fever and like a reproach."37 This
statement by Paul Chaponniere about Voltaire's continuing influence
highlights yet another reason why Voltaire remains a potent force. For he
stood for justice, and justice still does not prevail today. Although he
never gave a clear, all-encompassing definition of justice, Voltaire
insisted that it could never exist so long as the essential dignity of man
was not respected and men were not free--free to believe what they
wished and to live according to these beliefs, free to be secure in their
possessions and persons, so long as they did not disturb others. "What
does it mean to be free?" Voltaire asked. "It means to reason correctly,
to know the rights of man; and when they are well known, they are well
defended."38

Voltaire's words would be echoed in the "Declaration of the Rights of
Man" in 1789 after the leaders of the French Revolution had begun to put
the philosophe's precepts into effect. As Renee Waldinger and others
have stated, Voltaire himself may not have foreseen the coming
revolution, which his ideas probably helped to bring about, but
nevertheless its creators widely considered him to be its prophet and
their mentor.39 One of them said of Voltaire in 1791, while the revolution
was in full swing, that "his penetrating vision read into the future and
saw the dawn of freedom, of that regeneration of France the seeds of
which he sowed with equal zeal and courage."40

The spirit of Voltaire has, in fact, tended to be identified with the spirit of
revolution. To some, knowing the poet's contempt for the "rabble" and his
liking for benevolent despots, this itself is highly ironic. After the French
Revolution, the fervor over Voltaire, defender of the Rights of Man,
gradually diminished, and as the political climate changed, his name was
associated with other causes. Yet as Heinrich Heine wrote, "in the
liberation war of humanity, Voltaire's name will be forever memorable."41

In the twentieth century the name of Voltaire again reached its apogee
in 1944, with the liberation of France from Nazi domination.42 All at once
the smiling sage of Ferney became for many people in France and in the
Soviet Union "the symbol of liberty." While some French critics found
Voltaire irrelevant to the times, he was widely hailed by others as "the
prototype of writers of the Resistance."43 Representatives of the freed
French nation joined together to celebrate the 250th anniversary of his
birth. And as one of his admirers remarked, Voltaire had never seemed
younger. "To love Voltaire," another of them, Emile Henriot, proclaimed,
"is to reject automatism, intolerance, and deception; it is to venerate
intelligence; it is to know when it is necessary to say 'No'; above all, it is
to love France."44 After long years of purges and pogroms, dictators and
death camps, mass warfare and saturation bombing, Voltaire's spirit--the
spirit of clarity, reasonableness, justice, and love of life--was seen as a
deintoxicating, restorative force, not only for Frenchmen, but for all
mankind.

More recently, when a President of the United States pronounced that
"our moral sense dictates our clear-cut preference for those societies
which share with us an abiding respect for individual human rights,"45 his
words clearly reflected the Voltairian spirit. It still represents a beacon to
those who long for freedom as well as a strong reproach for those who
deny toleration and justice to others. As the President put it, "because
we are free we can never be indifferent to the fate of freedom
elsewhere."46 Voltaire could not have agreed with him more. And, we
might add, because we are free, we can never be indifferent to Voltaire.
Will and Ariel Durant even went so far as to conclude in their Age of
Voltaire that "when we cease to honor Voltaire we shall be unworthy of
freedom."47

What relevance Voltaire will have to readers of the future is for them, not
for us, to determine. But what Paul Valery said shortly after France's
liberation in 1944 still seems true today: "Voltaire lives, Voltaire endures;
he is timelessly timely" (indefiniment actuel).48

IX Conclusion: The Man in the Ironic Mask

For reasons set forth, then, Voltaire remains a lively, continuing influence
upon our time. If he had not existed, we would have had to invent him.
One of his contemporaries visiting the seventy-year-old philosopher at
Ferney found him even then to be "too great to be contained within the
limits of his country," and called him "a present that nature has given to
the whole world."49 We need Voltaire today, as the world has always
needed him, for what, in the words of Gustave Lanson, he was: "a
procedure, a method of education, a philosophy of life."50 The procedure
was sceptical; the method of education, scientific; the philosophy of life,
humanistic.

A modern biochemist, Harold J. Morowitz, recently pointed to "a
fundamental flaw in our educational system" that renders young people
so vulnerable to irrational movements: the omissions from school curricula
of "training in methods of establishing the validity of ideas."51 By failing to
teach students critical thinking, Morowitz believes, "we leave them easy
prey to cult leaders, charismatic politicians and other less bizarre
irrationalism such as food fads."52 As a guideline to such critical thinking,
Voltaire's works can continue to play an important role in present-day
society.

Finally, Voltaire remains a subject of interest and controversy for one last
reason. No one, not even the lifelong Voltaire scholar, has ever
succeeded in totally comprehending the man or in completely unmasking
him. What was Voltaire really like? Who was the genuine man behind the
ironic mask? What was the meaning of that unforgettable smile which the
18th century French sculptor Houdon, among others, immortalized? Was
it the enlightened smile of the Buddha? The compassionate smile of a
Socrates? The sceptical smile of a Montaigne? Perhaps all of these at the
same time, blending into the unique, characteristic smile of that particular
and peculiar man, Voltaire. Even with the ample materials available, no
one can ever penetrate the real Voltaire because we must always
recreate him in our own image, in the light of our own times, and each
age gets the Voltaire it needs and deserves. As William Blake recognized,
life is always "a fiction . . . made up of contradiction."

No one certainly was more contradictory than Voltaire. A staunch
defender of truth, he was at the same time one of the world's
consummate masters of the art of lying. He was a symbol of liberty who
did not believe in free will; a religious sceptic who refused to doubt the
existence of God; an experimentalist whose "passions dictated his
conclusions."53 He was a powerful proponent of toleration for everyone's
ideas except those who attacked his own; a lover of humanity who
hounded to death those whom he loathed; a savior who refused to be
crucified. Courageous and cowardly, affectionate and suspicious, original
and conforming, sincere and hypocritical, rational and impulsive, an
Apollonian and a Dionysian--Voltaire was all this, and more. "He is amoral,
violent, a thief, jealous, petty," says Andre Delattre in Voltaire,
L'impetueux, "but he has, nevertheless, moral grandeur, a healthy heart,
an affectionate, good, and generous nature."54 Few have wished to
defend his character in detail, yet, as Delattre points out, few have
found it possible to condemn it as a whole. For, after all, Voltaire was
only human, and perhaps only a little less imperfect than even the best
of his species.

The final word on Voltaire will never be spoken. Perhaps, as Paul Valery
suggested, he was such a versatile human being that only music could
follow him. "That devil of a man, whose mobility, resources, and
contradictions make him a person that music alone, the most lively music,
could follow."55

Our last word is to remind the reader that Voltaire, first and last, always
thought of himself as a moralist. "Everything must be reduced to moral
philosophy," he stressed.56 He was a moralist not in the tradition of
Moses, Mohammed, and Jesus, but in the tradition of Socrates,
Confucius, and Bertrand Russell. His was a moral philosophy that
emphasized perpetual inquisitiveness and utility, and decried egoism and
fanatical zeal. He pronounced no set of laws which supposedly had divine
sanction. He encouraged no sense of guilt nor demanded expiation of
sins. He claimed no inspiration of a god for his beliefs, collected no
followers or disciples, fomented no holy wars, and initiated no utopian
experiments. Above all, he wanted no martyrs to sacrifice themselves for
his cause. He stood primarily for one thing: sanity. His was a sanity of
reason, of mutual aid, of tolerance, of peace, and of moderation in all
things--even, as the Chinese would insist, in moderation.

Voltaire had reason to smile. His universe was governed not only by
gravity but by levity. The moralist behind the mask loved to live--and to
laugh.

Notes and References

1. Ernest Bersot, quoted in Paul Harvey and J. E. Heseltine (eds.), The
Oxford Companion to French Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), p.
756.

2. C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and A Second Look, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1965).

3. Margaret S. Libby, The Attitude of Voltaire to Magic and the Sciences
(New York: AMS Press, 1966), p. 12.

4. Margaret S. Libby, The Attitude of Voltaire to Magic and the Sciences
(New York: AMS Press, 1966), p. 12.

5. Moland, Vol. 35, p. 19.

6. Moland, Vol. 37, p. 404.

7. Libby, The Attitude of Voltaire to Magic and the Sciences, p. 266.

8. Libby, The Attitude of Voltaire to Magic and the Sciences, pp. 252-53.

9. Libby, The Attitude of Voltaire to Magic and the Sciences, p. 253.

10. Moland, Vol. 41, p. 529.

11. Moland, Vol. 43, p. 223.

12. J. Robert Oppenheimer, Science and Common Sense (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1953), p. 89.

13. Moland, Vol. 21, p. 219-20.

14. Voltaire, "Candide," "Zadig," and Selected Stories, translated by
Donald M. Frame (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1961),
"Micromegas," p. 189.

15. Bertrand Russell, "Voltaire's Influence on Me," SVEC, Vol. VI (1958), p.
161.

16. Bertrand Russell, "Voltaire's Influence on Me," SVEC, Vol. VI (1958), p.
161.

17. Bertrand Russell, "Voltaire's Influence on Me," SVEC, Vol. VI (1958), p.
162.

18. Voltaire, Works (Fleming trans.), Vol. VI, Pt. I, pp. 58-59.

19. That Voltaire's wit is still appreciated is evidenced by the large number of
quotations in Evan Esar, Dictionary of Humorous Quotations (New York:
Horizon Press, 1949), pp. 182-84 in which the illustrations in this section are
found.

20. Voltaire, "Candide," "Zadig," and Selected Stories (translated by
Donald M. Frame), p. 171.

21. Voltaire, "Candide," "Zadig," and Selected Stories (translated by
Donald M. Frame), p. 16.

22. James W. Thompson and B. J. Holm, History of Historical Writing
(New York: Macmillan, 1942), p. 66.

23. George R. Havens (ed.), Voltaire's Candide ou l'optimisme (New
York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1969), lxvii.

24. Eugene Ionesco, quoted in Martin Esslin, Theatre of the Absurd (New
York: Anchor Books, 1961), xix.

25. Martin Esslin, Theatre of the Absurd, p. 301.

26. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays (translated by
Justin O'Brien) (New York: Random House, 1955), p. 37.

27. Patrick Henry, "Voltaire and Camus: The Limits of Reason and
Absurdity," SVEC, 138 (1975), p. 249.

28. Patrick Henry, "Voltaire and Camus: The Limits of Reason and
Absurdity," SVEC, 138 (1975), p. 251.

29. Patrick Henry, "Voltaire and Camus: The Limits of Reason and
Absurdity," SVEC, 138 (1975), p. 256.

30. Theodore C. Greening, "Candide: an Existentialist Dream," Journal of
Existentialism, Vol. V (Summer 1965), p. 413.

31. George A. Perla, "Zadig, Hero of the Absurd," SVEC, 143 (1975), p. 52.

32. Merle L. Perkins, "Voltaire's Concept of International Order," SVEC, 5
(1965).

33. Merle L. Perkins, "Voltaire's Concept of International Order," SVEC, 5
(1965) p. 262.

34. Henry Meyer, "Voltaire on War and Peace," SVEC, 144 (1975), p. 192.

35. See Karl Popper, "Utopia and Violence," Hibbert Journal, Vol. XLVI
(1947-1948), pp. 109-116.

36. Voltaire, quoted in Alfred O. Aldridge, Voltaire and the Century of
Light, p. 413.

37. Paul Chaponniere, quoted in Norman L. Torrey, The Spirit of Voltaire,
p. 216.

38. Voltaire, quoted in Renee Waldinger, Voltaire and Reform in the Light
of the French Revolution (Nevene: Droz, 1959), p. 98.

39. Voltaire, quoted in Renee Waldinger, Voltaire and Reform in the Light
of the French Revolution (Nevene: Droz, 1959), pp. 104-107.

40. Regnaud de Saint-Jean-D'Angely, quoted in Marius Roustan, The
Pioneers of the French Revolution (London: Benn, 1926), p. 293.

41. Heine, quoted in Norman L. Torrey, The Spirit of Voltaire, p. 233.

42. See Otis Fellows, "Voltaire in Liberated France," Romanic Review, Vol.
37 (1946), pp. 168-76.

43. See Otis Fellows, "Voltaire in Liberated France," Romanic Review, Vol.
37 (1946), pp. 169-70.

44. See Otis Fellows, "Voltaire in Liberated France," Romanic Review, Vol.
37 (1946), p. 171.

45. Jimmy Carter, Inaugural Address, January 20, 1977.

46. Jimmy Carter, Inaugural Address, January 20, 1977.

47. Will and Ariel Durant, The Age of Voltaire, p. 786.

48. Paul Valery, quoted in Otis Fellows, "Voltaire in Liberated France," p.
170.

49. The Chevalier de Boufflers, quoted in Norman L. Torrey, The Spirit of
Voltaire, p. 1.

50. Lanson, quoted in Torrey, The Spirit of Voltaire, p. 1.

51. Harold J. Morovitz, "A Possible Remedy for Thinking That Leads Youth
into Easy Acceptance of Cult Figures," New York Times, November 26, 1978.

52. Harold J. Morovitz, "A Possible Remedy for Thinking That Leads Youth
into Easy Acceptance of Cult Figures," New York Times, November 26, 1978.

53. Andre Delattre, Voltaire L'impetueux (Paris, Mercure de France, 1957),
pp. 43-44.

54. Andre Delattre, Voltaire L'impetueux (Paris, Mercure de France, 1957),
p. 101.

55. Paul Valery, quoted in Robert M. Adams (ed.), Candide or Optimism
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), p. 192.

56. Voltaire, quoted in Norman L. Torrey, The Spirit of Voltaire, p. 259.

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