PREVIEW-Episode 62: Voltaire’s Novel “Candide”

0:00 Unknown speaker: This is a Partially Examined Life episode preview. You can purchase the full episode individually or support the podcast. To get all of our episodes, review your options@partiallyexaminedlife.com support.

0:20 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 62 is something like is life good? We read Candide or Optimism, the philosophical novel by Voltaire from 1759. You can join the discussion, get the text, read loads of supplemental material at partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer.

0:47 Seth: You normally say, broadcasting from Madison, Wisconsin.

0:50 Mark: We can just all say our names

0:52 Wes: and then we can, well, what if we all say from in Madison?

0:55 Mark: Yes, this is Mark Linsenmayer speaking to you from Madison, Wisconsin.

0:59 Seth: And this is Seth Paskin coming to you from Madison, Wisconsin.

1:05 Wes: This is Wes Alwan visiting Madison, Wisconsin.

1:08 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey in Madison, Wisconsin.

1:12 Mark: So why the hubbub? Why the strange locale?

1:15 Seth: Well, the hubbub is about the fact that after three and a half years of doing this podcast, this will be the first time that we are all simultaneously present in the at the same time. Dylan and I are meeting each other for the first time in person. And Wes and Mark and I are seeing each other. I am seeing them for the first time in, I believe, 15 years in person.

1:39 Wes: And this is my first time meeting Dylan as well.

1:41 Dylan: And therefore it's my first time meeting Wes himself.

1:46 Mark: Our first time that we can make gestures at each other that you, the listeners, cannot hear. We can say, open a Ho Ho. Other people can say, what the hell are you doing opening a Ho Ho.

1:56 Wes: This is the first time I've actually done the podcast with clothing on and sober.

2:06 Seth: Certainly at least one of those things is ditto for me.

2:10 Mark: I'm suppressing the joke that I would want to make that is too obscene for this crowd.

2:15 Wes: Well, you can edit it out. Let's hear it.

2:19 Mark: That normally the energy in the show comes from being able to climax at a certain point. But yeah,

2:28 Wes: I'm eating Ho Ho.

2:33 Seth: I might have a joke to follow that up, but I don't think it would be very flattering or appropriate either. So let's move on.

2:40 Mark: So, Candide, is this even a work of philosophy? Why are we bothering to do this?

2:45 Wes: Yeah, how did we end up doing this?

2:47 Seth: Yeah, who suggested this?

2:48 Dylan: Yeah, whose idea was it?

2:49 Mark: I believe we were looking for something that we could prepare quickly. That was the idea. And I put forth a few Suggestions. And Wes was very excited about this one, so we had to do this. But it was fun.

3:01 Wes: Yeah. I was excited to do work of fiction. But how did you end up suggesting it was something.

3:05 Mark: You know, I think it was in a philosophy class rather than like a great books class. But I had read this a long time ago and just didn't remember that much about it. I know a few people have recommended we cover Voltaire. And so it got in my mind. It seems especially apropos since we just did MacIntyre in his Contra Enlightenment thing, to actually read somebody who represents the Enlightenment. Nobody represents the Enlightenment like Voltaire. He was setting the trends. He was the man. Descartes and Newton and those guys might have actually produced the substance, but Voltaire, he was the style.

3:36 Dylan: Well, yeah, and he's got a certain kind of not merely embracing relationship with the Enlightenment.

3:42 Mark: Right.

3:42 Dylan: If Descartes a member of the Enlightenment, he's certainly no friend to Descartes in that respect.

3:46 Wes: Yes, right. He defended the new Newtonian mechanics against the old Cartesian and to some extent Leibnizian mechanics, although those are very different things.

3:55 Mark: And I didn't really ever understand what the substance of that debate was. Do we even want to try to address it in a couple sentences?

4:03 Wes: I think some of it has to do with the idea of gravity being action at a distance. I think for early mechanics, I think Descartes and others embraced the intuitive idea that for bodies to act on each other, they had to be touching. And so if you couldn't see them actually touching each other and imposing force on each other, that way it worked through the ether, through some sort of hydraulics or fluid mechanics, say. I'm not really sure of the details.

4:29 Dylan: Vortex vortices.

4:31 Wes: Okay, vortices. So Newton just said, no, it's action at a distance. And we don't need these hypotheses about these intermediate causal factors or mechanisms like vortices.

4:42 Dylan: Newton explicitly says, I solved this problem, but I'm not going to really worry about what the fundamental metaphysics of it is. So part of the reason for the insistence on things touching and for someone like Descartes was a kind of metaphysical predisposition to have causes accounted for differently than Leibniz do it, but nonetheless explicitly requiring the cause. Whereas Newton, that says, well, they act at a distance, it acts in this way. I can show it rationally, mathematically. There's more to be said about it, but I'm not going to really worry about it. I should have brought my Principia.

5:14 Mark: No, you should not have brought your Principia.

5:17 Dylan: There's a very famous quote about this in Newton.

5:19 Unknown speaker: I offer no hypothesis.

5:20 Dylan: That is exactly what I said, I offer no hypothesis. And so that's either scandalous or brilliant, depending on what you think. In some ways it's pragmatic. In some ways it's the beginning of the worst part of science and sort of not being worried about efficient things or only worrying about efficient things. And also the sort of very pragmatic part of science which says, I'm going to try to solve this problem and if I have to sort it out later, I'll sort it out later.

5:44 Unknown speaker: Well, sort of. It's a movement away from worrying about mechanisms, specifically. Right.

5:49 Dylan: Metaphysical mechanism.

5:50 Unknown speaker: Yeah. So you have these bodily movements that are correlated and you can write equations for that, and that's your science. And if you can't really do anything empirically to establish a mechanism, then you have to forget about that. Leibniz is actually a whole different can of worms because he invented the calculus simultaneously with Newton and he made great contributions to science, including kinetic energy. But Leibniz still wanted to talk about the metaphysical basis of kinetic energy, which he called vis viva. So Leibniz was still wedded to this early rationalist speculation that was part of science then. And with Newton, you're getting away from that. And I think that's. That's what Voltaire embraces, this sort of hardline empiricist approach.

6:35 Mark: All right, well, to celebrate getting rid of action at a distance, and because my wife is down here taking pictures, which you can see on the website, I must come over to you and strike you.

6:47 Unknown speaker: What am I supposed to do in response to that?

6:49 Mark: I was supposed to say ouch.

6:50 Seth: You're supposed to stop.

6:52 Dylan: Yes. Oh, right.

6:53 Mark: Okay, here's the picture.

6:55 Unknown speaker: Ouch.

6:56 Seth: I'm just wondering if anybody has ever uttered the phrase before. I should have brought my Principia with me.

7:03 Wes: Come to St. John's all right.

7:06 Mark: But the thing that we came to talk about today was the Candide was his ethical philosophy, his view on. His view on philosophy, for one thing,

7:16 Seth: or one particular philosopher at least.

7:18 Mark: Yes. His objection to Descartes and Leibniz. Leibniz in particular. His rationalism, how that extended to the problem of evil, which I believe Wes read all about. Do you want to fill us in or as a high level, before we go into that detail, Candide is just about a guy running around and a lot of crappy stuff happens to him and his teacher at the beginning of the story was a Leibniz disciple who insisted that this is the best of all possible worlds and showing by example that that is an unsupportable thesis. So there's a hugely over simplistic way of reacting to the philosophical content of the book.

7:55 Unknown speaker: So say what the problem of evil is. The problem is that there's lot of evil in the world. And if God is all knowing and all powerful, you would think he would be capable of creating a world without evil or without so much evil. And so it looks like an argument against the existence of God, although at that time it was more an argument about God's nature, whether God was benevolent and all powerful and so on and so forth. So you can take it either as well, there must not be a God, because God is by definition all powerful and all knowing. Or you could take an alternative route and say, well, God must have certain limitations because of the existence of evil.

8:32 Dylan: It's also probably worth noting that this subtitle optimism, that optimism is kind of a popular culture thing. This notion of optimism at the time and this philosophy of Leibniz's is a kind of phenomenon in the 1750s, something like that, as an answer to the question of evil, which is sort of occupying some part of the public consciousness, that the response would be by one of the eminent thinkers, well, this is the best of all possible worlds. And therefore there's got to be compensating fact for whatever evil you have, there is something good to be seen in it. And then therefore you have optimism.

9:09 Unknown speaker: Well, Leibniz's solution is kind of a version of a lot of earlier scholastic thinkers, St. Augustine, for instance, where you, I mean, you can go a number of routes. You can say, well, on the whole, the world is really, really good. If you look at the specific parts of the world, you can say, okay, this specific thing that happened is evil, and so on and so forth. But if you looked at the big picture, you would see that it's good and actually is the because God would be required to pick the best of all possible worlds. So that's basically Leibniz's route. It's a little more complicated than that.

9:42 Dylan: It makes a lot of sense to me that Leibniz would want to think about it this way, both because of his universalism and as an inventor of differential calculus and integral calculus and the inventor of vis viva and the notion of energy, he wants to take the whole and say the whole is some kind of extreme. And the way in which the individual components of it are behaving, that you have individual evils and individual discrepancies doesn't matter to the fact that the whole both is one thing that has to have some kind of characteristic, and two, that it is an extremum of some sort. That is, it's the best.

10:18 Unknown speaker: So it's like taking a summation in calculus. You get a much different result than just the individual infinitesimals.

10:24 Dylan: That's right. That's right. You could have an infinite number of numbers that you add and subtract from one another, and you get one that infinite will converge to that. And he is one of the people who does a lot of work on these kinds of infinite series. Each of those individual parts don't detract from the fact that there's this one extremum that's utterly perfect, and there's that kind of universalist thinking going on. It also reminded me a little bit of things like Kant's question of the philanthropic right to lie, where he argues that you shouldn't do that really on the basis of a kind of universal good, that lying just contributes to the lack of goodness in the world. So there's no justification for doing it. It's the same kind of thing that you understand each individual, each action, each happening as being radically part of a whole, not individual in its own right.

11:14 Seth: Yeah. I don't want to jump too much in the book to try to address what Wes just brought up about scholastic history, but at least Voltaire is pretty clearly calling out Leibniz's rationalism and his getting to this conclusion of the best of all possible worlds. A priori. He's not thinking that. It's Leibniz saying, well, this part might be bad and this part might be bad, but on the whole it's good. In fact, there's no empirical content whatsoever to Leibniz's assertion, and that's precisely what the book is, kind of. So in that sense, it's not coming from that same tradition or that same line of thinking anyway, that you mentioned.

11:50 Unknown speaker: Yeah, and it's. And actually, Leibniz's argument is a little bit different from this line of thinking. This is just a simpler way to put it. Leibniz actually has a more sophisticated variation of this. The whole is more than the sum of its evil parts. But it's interesting, you know, the way Voltaire goes at Leibniz and Candide. One of Leibniz's doctrines involves the plenum, which is to say that in the best of all possible worlds, every possibility is actualized. He thinks of possibilities as these things striving to sort of come into being. And they're actually because of his theory of monads, they're not inconsistent with each other, so they can.

Can all be realized. So you get a. Even though there's a simplicity of scientific laws, you get this maximal variety in the world, which is a good thing, including so for instance, all the variations in forms, species and subspecies. And what's interesting about Candide is you get that sense of a plenum of all this stuff happening, except most of it is bad. It's like he's teasing Leibniz. Yes, every possibility is actualized, but most possibilities suck.

12:52 Seth: Yeah. And listeners who aren't aware we do have a previous episode on Leibniz that it might be worth your time to go back and listen to. Because a lot of the stuff that Leibniz says sounds really crazy until you spend a little time with it and then you understand that it's totally awesome. It's totally awesome.

13:09 Unknown speaker: You gotta smoke a joint, really sit

13:11 Wes: down and appreciate it.

13:12 Mark: I think it's a significant rhetorical move that Voltaire is not attempting to parse Leibniz's argument, that it's much like my dismissal of slavery in the recent Aristotle episode. It was. This is such an obviously bullshit thing that I'm not gonna take your argument and parse it apart because it's bullshit and it's not worth my time. And that goes into Voltaire's overall. Eschewel. Is that a word? Eschew.

13:39 Unknown speaker: Eshul.

13:40 Mark: Rejection of.

13:40 Unknown speaker: I've never heard anyone use it.

13:41 Mark: Actually a rejection of metaphysics as being more or less a waste of time. There was even something. So he wrote this philosophical dictionary which has just a lot of little bits and pieces, little tiny essays on a lot of different.

13:53 Dylan: Like testicles.

13:54 Mark: We were reading something before he started.

13:56 Seth: He has an entry on testicles in his philosophical dictionary.

14:00 Wes: Yes, it's more like a funny sophical dictionary.

14:03 Mark: One of the things I was reading about, that is one of the places I forget what metaphysical topic talking about. But pretty much he stops, says, you know, happily, none of this really matters for our action. You know, which view you have in the metaphysics here is not going to affect your morality either way. And so that's what he was ultimately concerned about. He was, you know, his big objections to Descartes and Leibniz and this. It was to the intellectual climate that they were creating in France at the time. And he didn't like that.

14:28 Unknown speaker: He liked.

14:29 Mark: Politically, he was a anti authoritarian. He was a Liberal of some sort, the French Revolution, which, you know, who knows whether he would approve of that or not. But they considered Voltaire one of their main influences. So he. If you think this is the best of all possible worlds, then it's not a great motivation to go politically, to do something, to improve things, to get new people in power, etc. That was the main problem that, you know, he liked Cartesian doubt, for instance, but then thought that Descartes cheated and didn't really even have an argument for God.

He kind of did the same thing with Descartes on God in the philosophical dictionary that he does to Leibniz here. He doesn't actually go in. And of course, he must have read the Meditations. It's not long. It was a major thing. But he doesn't feel the need to dive in and like, parse it up. At least that I'm aware of. There probably folks listening that are more familiar with. Actually, from what I understand, pretty much nobody is. Unless you're like a historian of that period, is deeply familiar with the philosophical work of Voltaire, that he's just not one of the guys that's on their radar.

But in any case, most of what

15:26 Unknown speaker: he wrote was plays and poems.

15:28 Mark: Yes, yes. And when he did do philosophy, I mean, most of what he did. Right. He wrote.

15:31 Dylan: He wrote hundreds and hundreds of pages, thousands of pages.

15:34 Mark: And he wrote candide in what, two weeks or something?

15:36 Wes: I heard.

15:36 Dylan: Yeah, when he was 65 years old.

15:38 Unknown speaker: Yeah, it was very 20,000 letters. And he was basically a blogger and. Yeah, that's. Yeah, basically the blogger of his day. And Dylan, you were mentioning the printing press, new technology, the way the Internet is new to us.

15:52 Mark: Right. So, you know, it's not that he took Descartes arguments, for instance, and parsed them out. And I'm participating in the philosophical academy, and this is my objection to my predecessor is like he wasn't playing that game. He was taking it from a populist angle and saying, this is pretty obviously bullshit. You know, I approve of the overall skeptical tone. So actually, as a sort of philosopher as a whole, like, he comes down in. We had a Montaigne episode in the skeptical tradition. And much like Montaigne, you know, one of his big complaints is about people's overestimation of the intellect and really what metaphysicians could. Can you really come up with anything? Like, it's not that it's. There's something attractive about the enterprise doing philosophy. It's rich intellectual work. But what you come up with Is not necessari.

16:39 Unknown speaker: Something that's.

16:39 Mark: It's not going to save the world. You don't need to go to the depths that metaphysicians do to tend your garden. As the book concludes.

16:47 Seth: Did you just spoil that?

16:48 Mark: I spoiled it.

16:49 Seth: Did you just spoiler out there?

16:52 Unknown speaker: So skepticism was very influential at this time. There's sort of a revival of at some point, the work by Sextus Empiricus, an ancient skeptic, had been published. And it's very influential on Descartes and Montaigne. And I think, via Descartes and Montaigne, on Voltaire. I don't think he was digging deep into the classics. Well, no, actually, Voltaire had a strong classic education. But the point is that for Descartes, skepticism was really methodological. He was trying to get beyond skepticism by using that as a starting point to flesh out these solid foundations that were really gonna. Where you could erect some structure which was beyond skepticism. And for Montaigne and I think for Voltaire, skepticism is really, to some extent, an endpoint that really informs the way you live life.

17:41 Dylan: Yeah, I think in Candide, as both funny and acerbic as it is, there's a real background preoccupation with, well, what does this mean to the way you live your life? And even the things he's making fun of satirically and the extreme kind of behaviors of the army and the events that happen to him point back to him just saying, you know, that is not a very enjoyable way to live. And just being preoccupied. Preoccupied with sort of living decently. Not even the idea of living well, but just not getting hunted down. That would be a good start. And what Mark said about authority and the authority of someone like Leibniz and Descartes, I have no idea how this factors in with the general period of the time, but it's clear that the level of political authority, both with the church and with politics in general, is so high.

You know, people get kings and princes and bishops get personally offended by something that Voltaire writes, and he feels the need to flee the country. So the way in which authority works at that time is rightly scary, I think, and very to be fought against. And Voltaire works very hard on that, but he also gets burned a lot.

18:51 Seth: I don't know if this is related to that, Dylan, but one thing I made a note of as I was reading through it, there are a number of points where characters in the book, or Voltaire as the narrator, raised the issue of the law of something. So the law of war dictates that it's okay to do this or that or the law of whatever. And there's a point to be made about the rational faculty versus other things too. But you know, he's sort of contrapositioning or contraposing these laws. But all of the laws are the man made laws, right? The law of war, the law of kings, the law of this, the law of authority, the law of the Portuguese that decide they have an auto da fe to prevent an earthquake.

Right? These are all reasons that are made up by human beings. And in that sense, I think, like you say, Voltaire's explicitly making a loud and conscious reaction to something that is in the structure that human beings create and somehow that ties into this, the metaphysical law. But I'm not quite exactly sure how.

19:53 Unknown speaker: Maybe he's reacting against the sort of inherent authoritarianism of those metaphysical theories, right? The hierarchies and the foundationalism of Descartes and. And arguably you can see those sorts of things as inherently authoritarian, right? Just trying to establish these absolute fundamental truths and derive the rest, other propositions from that and so on, or as

20:14 Mark: being used that way, whether they inherently have it or not, that it's one

20:18 Unknown speaker: of the weapons of power, because it's a priori. I mean, your a priori derivations are sort of reminiscent of, let's say, the bloodlines of kings, that sort of justification for kingly authority. Whereas the kind of Newtonian empiricism that he embraces is arguably inherently populist. It's based on evidence. And if the evidence runs against the prevailing authority of some kind or another, then that authority must be dethroned.

20:43 Seth: Yeah. It seems to me that one of the things that he's doing rhetorically when he says the law of war dictates something which seems to be against Leibniz's law, right? The best of all possible worlds. He's using this empirical law or this man made law or something like that. But at the same time he's also making a point about that law itself, right? About how horrible it is and obviously through the nature of the characters and so forth. So there's kind of like this double move where he's using it as a critical element and then also simultaneously criticizing it.

That I think is what's especially clever. I mean, this is a short for people who haven't read it. This is one of the ones that's worth going out to read. Sometimes we talk about things that I don't think it's worth reading. That's why we do what we do. But this one's worth reading because it's short and it's fast and it's non stop. It's just one hit after another.

21:32 Dylan: You could read it instead of watching a movie. You could do it in a couple hours.

21:35 Seth: Yeah.

21:36 Unknown speaker: Should we give a little plot summary?

21:37 Dylan: Yeah, we should. Starts out with a sex scene.

21:40 Unknown speaker: So I mean, I mean the plot

21:41 Wes: summary is very simple.

21:42 Unknown speaker: Right. If the book takes two hours, it's Candide who lives in this castle. He's not the son of the baron of that castle. Is the implication that he's the bastard son of the baron?

21:52 Mark: He's the bastard son of the baron's sister.

21:54 Unknown speaker: Okay.

21:55 Mark: Probably.

21:56 Unknown speaker: He grows up in this very cushy little world and he has this philosophy tutor, Pangloss, who fills him with all sorts of pie in the sky ideas about the world, including this optimism, this best of all possible worlds idea.

22:10 Mark: And with that, the principle of sufficient reason that Voltaire makes a joke of several times in the story of on the battlefield. You know, it was the bayonets were sufficient reason for a thousand heads to be pierced that day. Or, you know.

22:23 Seth: Yeah.

22:24 Unknown speaker: So he falls in love with the daughter of the Baron Cunegonde and they're caught fooling around. So he gets kicked out of the castle and then all sorts of horrible things happen to him. Basically that's really. He goes to war first. Yeah. So he has lots of traveling, lots of adventures, you know, chapter after chapter with change of scene. And through a lot of it he's really just trying to find Cunegond, who he's still in love with. And eventually he does. As the book goes on and he suffers all these hardships, he becomes arguably more realistic, let's say. And then by the end of the book, we get him and Cunegonde and Pangloss and some other compatriots he's picked up along the way, living together in Turkey. Right.

23:11 Seth: Outside of Constantinople.

23:12 Unknown speaker: Yeah, outside of Constantinople.

23:15 Dylan: Istanbul.

23:16 Unknown speaker: And the final. Yeah, the final lesson. He goes and asks a dervish. What does he ask the dervish?

23:24 Seth: He says, the meaning of life. But is this the best of all possible worlds? And doesn't he say something like, it doesn't matter?

23:30 Unknown speaker: And the dervish shuts the door in his face in kind of disgust. And the conclusion, you get this idea that let's look at the last. Maybe we should read some of this since it's such a great.

23:40 Seth: While you're looking that up. I would say that to say that he goes on in some adventures and endures some hardships is kind of an understatement of the.

23:47 Unknown speaker: Yeah, we'll get to some of the details of the.

23:50 Seth: It's substantially worse than that.

23:52 Dylan: It's not like he has a little bit.

23:53 Seth: It's not like the Tempest where he gets shipwrecked and has to wander around and get fleas, bite his ankles or anything like that. It's a little worse than that.

24:01 Unknown speaker: So in the end, Candide says, I know, also said Candide, that we must cultivate our garden. And then the whole little group entered into this laudable scheme. Each one began to exercise his talents. The little plot yielded fine crops, and so on and so forth. You get this idea that these people who are kind of crazy and unrealistic have finally developed some sort of realism in the capacity to enjoy their lives, even though what happens throughout the book is not really in their control. Right. All this, these terrible things. Of course, that's not the real world either.

That's one of the interesting things about the book. It's, as you know, Candide is this innocent who's cast out into the world, but it's not realistic. The number of bad things that happened to him and then all those sorts of reversals. People die, but then they're not really dead. And that happens more than once for more than one character. So in a way, you could take that. It's just as an allegory of people who are suffering from a lack of a realistic approach to life, including this optimism. In the end, I don't think what the book is counseling is pessimism.

25:06 Mark: Well, I remember being. When I read this in high school or whenever, it was an incredibly disappointing philosophical ending that really, you just got to keep at it. And actually, I read it as a private thing. Like the social is too big and scary and there's nothing really we can do about it. So you need to tend to your garden, deal with your own stuff. And from some of the things I was listening to and reading to prepare for this, probably we'd want to interpret more in a broadly political manner that tending to your garden is nearly equivalent. Translation from the French is something like work the field. It's keep at it, but it's keep trying to remedy these various injustices.

25:47 Wes: And it sounds like he's suggesting withdrawing from the world to some extent.

25:51 Unknown speaker: Right.

25:51 Wes: They've been through all these adventures and traveling, and here they are sort of exiles near Constantinople with their own little commune, let's call it. And it sounds like, yeah, yeah, retreat to the farm, to your Commune and live a simple life. On first blush, I'm not saying that's what it's really, really sad.

26:08 Dylan: I think there's something about that just before where you read Candide is talking to the Turk and he says, you must have a vast and magnificent estate. And the Turk replies, I have only 20 acres of land which my children and I cultivate. Our work keeps us free from three great boredom, vice and poverty. And it's on reflecting about these things as they walk back that Candide decides, well, you know, there's all these kings, they don't seem to be happy in any way. And then this is where two more times this statement of cultivating your garden comes up.

So some of it is clearly a little bit of taking care of intending your own things and maybe a little bit of retreat. But also it has something to do with the notion of work, of occupying yourself in a positive way. Not in an alienating work way, but a tending kind of work. Yeah, you're not going to be building pins for a living, but rather it's so thin there about exactly what the virtue of work would be. But it's clear that you're occupying yourself.

27:11 Wes: Is it anti philosophical? It almost sounds.

27:14 Seth: There's just a little further on. Let's work without theorizing.

27:17 Wes: There you go.

27:19 Seth: It's the only way to make life bearable.

27:21 Wes: Yeah.

27:22 Seth: In other words, don't think too much. This is the anti partially examined life text.

27:27 Wes: If you think too maybe it's the

27:29 Mark: partially part that he agrees with us.

27:32 Seth: He says without theorizing. Not always there.

27:35 Dylan: Well, that's the conclusion that Candide comes to. So there's a separate question.

27:39 Seth: It's the conclusion that Martin comes to. Martin, who is a particular character.

27:44 Wes: He's the pessimist. Which is definitely not see him as the pessimist. Spoken like a true pessimist.

27:52 Dylan: He's clearly the opposite of Pangloss.

27:54 Wes: Yeah, he's sort of like Marvin. I kept thinking of Marvin the Martian in the Douglas Adams.

27:58 Seth: He's a stoic. He's not a pessimist. He's a stoic.

28:01 Wes: Or not Marvin the Martian, but Marvin the Robot.

28:04 Mark: Well, he's a Manichean. Right. Manichaean.

28:06 Wes: Manichean.

28:07 Mark: Manichean.

28:07 Seth: Yeah.

28:08 Dylan: The world is a great battle between good and evil and all you have, you have no role in it whatsoever.

28:13 Seth: It's not that you have no role. You should not be surprised when bad things happen because.

28:17 Wes: Well, that the force of evil is sort of on par with God and the force of good and those two things battle. And it's not like God is ascendant and dominant.

28:25 Dylan: It's Star Wars.

28:26 Seth: Yes.

28:28 Wes: You get the dark side of the Force and then the.

28:30 Mark: It's Prometheus. Yes.

28:34 Seth: I didn't see that.

28:34 Mark: I don't know.

28:35 Dylan: It was terrible.

28:36 Mark: I know.

28:37 Seth: I don't know if we're gonna like go through the plot, but take us through the plot.

28:41 Wes: We should delve into some of the

28:42 Seth: good moments just to kind of get into it a little bit so that we have some notions.

28:46 Mark: Can we see more about the attitude for philosophy before we can. There is a three page story that I will link people to that a little more directly says what he thinks about this, which is called Story of a Good Brahmin. There's two characters that are introduced. An old Brahmin, a very wise man of marked intellect and great learning. And he's miserable. He says, I wish I'd never been born. I've been studying for 40 years. That's 40 years wasted. I teach others and am myself ignorant of everything. Such a state of affairs fills my soul with so much humiliation and disgust that my life is intolerable.

And he goes on and on about this pretty much that all the philosophical questions that he brings up, it just is despair that there's more and more things that he can't know. And so this makes him miserable. And yet there's this pull that philosophy has upon us. And you can contrast that with an old woman who lived near this guy, who I asked her if she'd ever been troubled by the thought that she was ignorant of the nature of her soul. She did not even understand my question. Never in all her life had she reflected for one single moment on one single point of those which tormented the Brahmin.

So she has traditional religious beliefs and she's happy. She's ignorant and happy. But then the kicker, page three of this is I put the matter before some philosophers and they were of my opinion. Nevertheless, I've told myself a hundred times that I should be happy if I were as brainless as my neighbor. Yet I do not desire such happiness. So he says, he goes and he asks a lot of people that even though we recognize that philosophy is an evil snare, basically it's not something that we would choose to give up blissful ignorance. This is actually an argument used against utilitarianism.

The ignorant person might be really happy and have all these pleasures and not be haunted by these other things. But still, that's not what the person who understands both options would actually choose. So it's not just happiness that makes for a fulfilling life or something like that. So just to tie that back to this, then he can rag about excessive theorizing and we should just get to work. But really, he's kind of fooling himself. I mean, he clearly, by his own life and the amount of time he spent writing about this crap. He was into it, but he was

30:53 Wes: into it in a less rigorous way, say, than a Leibniz.

30:57 Dylan: There's only so much analysis that he's going to do. And I guess I'm thinking of that in a pretty precise way that he loses patience with cutting and cutting and cutting and cutting and cutting. And there comes a point where he just feels like you've cut it apart. So it's no longer anything that's recognizable in any way. And it's completely pointless to go there. And that's coupled with not feeling despair about that. There's a kind of despair that someone like Pan, maybe not Pangloss, but Martin, maybe reflects. And this notion that you keep going and going and going and going in this metaphysical way to some kind of beginning you're struck with, well, I have no idea where to go. I had this kind of either abyss or this wall or this. I can't know this. And Voltaire thinks that that kind of obsession and frustration is pointless.

31:49 Wes: I think, yeah. And I think we've all experienced it. I mean, it's probably one of the reasons I left grad school. I love philosophy, but when I got into the second literature and into the endless fine distinctions, it began to seem trivial and pointless. You know, it wasn't beautiful. It wasn't what I had gotten into philosophy for. And I thought, what's the point? Why am I wasting my time on this? In philosophy, you're not making money or producing things that are of obvious benefit. And you wonder about how worthwhile it is. And then you know, the argument that it's going to help you live a better life, which is supposedly what it's supposed to help you do, is just another question. It's questionable Philosophy of Self Help.

32:33 Seth: Maybe it would make sense to talk a little bit about how philosophy is employed in the novel, like what people who have the philosophy are using it for and doing. Because if you dial it back to the beginning, and this is in the first couple pages of the book, so I'm not giving anything away if you haven't read it. The main character is Candide, and as we mentioned, he's this bastard son of the sister of this baron In Westphalia, I think is a German. And Pangloss is the court philosopher, but he's the teacher, the instructor of the Baron's kids. And Pangloss is Leibniz as far as this story is concerned. So this is a guy who's getting paid by some rich guy to hang around and teach these kids. And apparently as a side benefit he gets to fuck the maid. I mean, that pretty much is the best of all possible worlds,

33:26 Mark: if you

33:27 Seth: get right down to it. This guy has no reason for believing

33:30 Wes: he had tenure, in other words.

33:33 Mark: Exactly.

33:34 Seth: He had no reason for thinking otherwise than it was the best of all possible worlds. The danger is that Candide believes. In other words, it's not Pangloss so much initially who, it's the people that believe what he says. Everybody in the court thinks, oh well, he's telling the absolute truth because life is so good here. This goes back to the issue about authority and about the practical nature of it. Not so much is the activity good or bad, but how is it being employed to benefit the individual?

34:03 Mark: Well, I also like the fact that seems like the best times in the novel are that Candide spends some time philosophizing with Martin, where he spends some time philosophizing with Pangloss. And then Pangloss and Martin and Candide are all philosophizing together. Those are the good times that they're. When they get to chat things.

34:19 Seth: They're not the good times. You know what they are? They're the time wasting times. It's always on the long seafaring the sea. For 15 days they had to cross the Atlantic and go from Portugal to Buenos Aires. And all they do is talk. And it's like sort of a side note, like, and for the next 14 days they disputed about something and then

34:37 Wes: you have these great moments where something of urgency is happening and Pangloss is still trying to philosophize. So for instance, after the earthquake in Lisbon and Candide is injured, this earthquake is nothing novel, Pangloss replied. The city of Lima in South America underwent much of the same sort of tremor. So here he is theorizing about the earthquake. Nothing is more probable, said Candide. But for God's sake, a little oil and wine for his injuries. What do you mean probable? Replied the philosopher. I regard the case as proved, ignoring this guy's pleas for help. So I love the comic elements there where Pangloss simply doesn't function in the world and continues to theorize when. When he should be doing something.

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