Leibniz in Other Worlds

GRAEME HUNTER Leibniz in Other Worlds It is a commonplace among general readers to believe that the philosopher Leibniz is aptly and accurately portrayed as Pangloss in Voltaire's Candide. Such is the merit of that philosophical satire that it seems, as it were, to carry with it its own certificate of success. It is equally habitual and common, however, for historians of philosophy to repudiate Dr Pangloss as a weak caricature of the German master. Such a split between the partisans and non-partisans of Leibniz was indeed foretold as early as the critical notice of Candide which appeared in the Journal Encyclopedique in 1759 (15.3.1759, p 122): Les partisans de Leibniz, au lieu d'y voir une refutation de l'optimisme, n'y verront d'une bout a l'autre qu'un plaisanterie qui fait beaucoup rire, et ne prouve rien; ses adversaires soutiendront que Ia refutation est complette, parce que Ie systeme de Leibniz n'etant qu'un roman, on ne peut Ie combattre que par un autre roman. Scholarly treatment of Candide has been extensive and has of course moved subtly between these poles. However, as is to be expected, it typically sets out to determine what the actual goal of this highly ambiguous work was. It has been maintained, for example, that really Voltaire wished to criticize the Wolffians rather than the Leibnizians, that it was really Shaftesbury or Pope, rather than either Wolff or Leibniz, who was at issue, or that it was optimistic philosophy rather than optimistic philosophers which was the butt of Voltaire's ridicule.1 I shall approach things somewhat differently here. IvIy question does not concern what Voltaire intended by Candide, but rather what he accomplished by it, in so far as it relates to the philosophy of Leibniz. Hypothesizing that Voltaire did set out to criticize Leibniz, I shall be concerned in the main with evaluating his success. That such an approach will yield no definite insight into Voltaire's intentions I admit from the start. But I will claim for it two very significant advantages. First, it will illustrate an important but undervalued aspect of Leibniz's views. Second, it will disclose, independently of its particular success or failure, the mechanisms by which a work of literature is able to criticize a philosophical doctrine at all. UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 55, NUMBER 1, FALL 1985 LEIBNIZ 65 My focus will be the sequence of events recounted in Candide and my question to what extent that sequence of events may be regarded as a criticism ofthe Leibnizian philosophy of optimism. This is a philosophical question and it asks, in other words, whether Candide constitutes an extended global counterexample to the philosophy of Leibniz, which, while meeting the general suppositions of Leibniz's theory, shows it to be false in its consequences. The standard view of historians of philosophy is that Candide simply fails to meet even minimal standards of criticism. They think Pangloss to be not just a one-sided but a false representation of Leibniz,2 and ofcourse ifPangloss is not Leibniz, then the critique attempted in Candide can never get started. The claim that Leibniz is mis- (as opposed to under-) represented in Candide I hold to be false and shall illustrate my claim in what follows. More unfortunate than the falsity of this view, however, is that complacency in it forestalls an appreciation of how and why Voltaire's criticism really fails and makes appear trivial what is in reality rather interesting and worthy of investigation. There is no doctrine attributed to Pangloss which is not in fact held by Leibniz, though naturally some of the consequences drawn from the doctrines (e.g. that noses were made to prop up spectacles [p 119])3 are not drawn by Leibniz. However, the following ten teachings propounded by Pangloss are all central points in Leibniz's Theodicy: (a) for every event there is a cause or reason why it occurred (p 119; cf Theodicy I, sect 44); (b) the ultimate reason for all things is that they are best (p 119; cf Theodicy II, 123); (c) the world is fully determinate, i.e. things in...