5/27/2023 0 Comments Leibniz optimism candide![]() ![]() ![]() From gruesome war to disease, sedition, and deceit, Voltaire misses none of the bad in "the best of all possible worlds." Throughout the course of his saga, Voltaire juxtaposes the raw, unrepressed optimism of one character in the story with exaggerated real-world adventures of pessimism and gloom. Voltaire constructed Candide partially for the purpose of entertainment, but mostly to satirize the fallacy in Leibniz's theory of optimism. In fact, this world must be the best of all possible worlds. Since God is all-good and all-powerful, and since He chose this world out of all possibilities, this world must be good, even if we can't see it as such. This world could have been constructed in a number of different ways. Leibniz's solution casts God as a kind of "optimizer" of the collection of all possibilities. Leibniz took on this central question of theodicy: If God is all-good (omnibenevolent), all-powerful (omnipotent), and all-knowing (omniscient), how do we explain the existence of suffering and injustice in the world? How are we to confront the problem of the existence of evil? The Enlightenment philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, in his 1710 work Essais de Théodicée sur la bonté de Dieu, la liberté de l'homme et l'origine du mal ( Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil), attempted to address this problem. Lisbon burning after the earthquake Voltaire, Candide, and Optimism ![]()
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