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In its place, however, a new mechanical causality was introduced that attempted to explain the world in equally comprehensive terms through the mechanisms of an inert matter acting by direct contact and action alone. He thought that the rich were favoured by the political situation and that . Yet Humes target remained traditional philosophy, and his contribution was to extend skepticism all the way to the point of denying the feasibility of transcendental philosophy itself. Voltaire adopted a stance in this text somewhere between the strict determinism of rationalist materialists and the transcendent spiritualism and voluntarism of contemporary Christian natural theologians. Public philosophic campaigns such as these that channeled critical reason in a direct, oppositionalist way against the perceived injustices and absurdities of Old Regime life were the hallmark of philosophie as Voltaire understood the term. Philosophy was also a part of this mix, and during the Regency the young Voltaire was especially shaped by his contacts with the English aristocrat, freethinker,and Jacobite Lord Bolingbroke. Both Hume and Voltaire began with the same skepticism about rationalist philosophy, and each embraced the Newtonian criterion that made empirical fact the only guarantor of truth in philosophy. For one, these two sides of Voltaires intellectual identity were forever intertwined, and he never experienced an absolute transformation from one into the other at any point in his life. First as a law student, then as a lawyers apprentice, and finally as a secretary to a French diplomat, Voltaire attempted to fulfill his fathers wishes. The first step in this direction involved a dispute with his onetime colleague and ally, Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis. But he was also a different kind of writer and thinker. Although only a few of his works are still read, he continues to be held in worldwide repute as a courageous crusader against tyranny, bigotry, and cruelty. After his return to France, Voltaire worked hard to restore his sources of financial and political support. Here one sees the debt that Voltaire owed to the currents of Newtonianism that played such a strong role in launching his career. On the other hand, he recognises the existence of God. It may seem at first that Voltaire views humanity in a dismal light and merely locates its deficiencies, but in fact he also reveals attributes of redemption in it, and thus his view of human nature is altogether much more balanced and multi-faceted. Such explanations, Voltaire argued, are fictions, not philosophy, and the philosopher needs to recognize that very often the most philosophical explanation of all is to offer no explanation at all. His literary debut occurred in 1718 with the publication of his Oedipe, a reworking of the ancient tragedy that evoked the French classicism of Racine and Corneille. This act served as a tribute to the connections that the revolutionaries saw between Voltaires philosophical program and the cause of revolutionary modernization as a whole. I am a firm believer in the Voltaire quote that "the more things change, the more they stay the same". Ultimately, The Creature is rejected by humanity, and he reacts by seeking revenge upon Victor, killing his friends, family, and finally Victor. In particular, Voltaire fought vigorously against the rationalist epistemology that critics used to challenge Newtonian reasoning. But was this rigorous mathematical and empirical description a philosophical account of bodies in motion? Before it appeared, Voltaire attempted to get official permission for the book from the royal censors, a requirement in France at the time. He did the same during the brief revival of the so-called vis viva controversy triggered by du Chtelets treatise, defending the empirical and mechanical conception of body and force against those who defended Leibnizs more metaphysical conception of the same thing. 449 Copy quote. J.B. Shank Along with Rousseau, Franois-Marie d'Arouet, commonly known as his pen name Voltaire, was the primary philosopher of the Enlightenment. The great debate between Samuel Clarke and Leibniz over the principles of Newtonian natural philosophy was also influential as Voltaire struggled to understand the nature of human existence and ethics within a cosmos governed by rational principles and impersonal laws. He also learned how to play the patronage game so important to those with writerly ambitions. At the center of the Newtonian innovations in natural philosophy was the argument that questions of body per se were either irrelevant to, or distracting from, a well focused natural science. Montesquieus 1721 Lettres Persanes, which offered a set of fictionalized letters by Persians allegedly traveling in France, and Swifts 1726 Gullivers Travels were clear influences when Voltaire conceived his work. Moreover, to the extent that eighteenth-century Newtonianism provoked two major trends in later philosophy, first the reconstitution of transcendental philosophy la Kant through his Copernican Revolution that relocated the remains of metaphysics in the a priori categories of reason, and second, the marginalization of metaphysics altogether through the celebration of philosophical positivism and the anti-speculative scientific method that anchored it, Voltaire should be seen as a major progenitor of the latter. The ongoing defense of the Encyclopdie was one rallying point, and soon the removal of the Jesuitsthe great enemies of Enlightenment, the philosophes proclaimedbecame a second unifying cause. This argument would famously awake Kants dogmatic slumbers and lead to the reconstitution of transcendental philosophy in new terms, but Voltaire had different fish to fry. skepticism, Copyright 2020 by Such skepticism often acted as bulwark for Voltaires defense of liberty since he argued that no authority, no matter how sacred, should be immune to challenge by critical reason. He also advanced this cause by sustaining an unending attack upon the repressive and, to his mind, anti-human demands of traditional Christian asceticism, especially priestly celibacy, and the moral codes of sexual restraint and bodily self-abnegation that were still central to the traditional moral teachings of the day. Swifts Gullivers Travels, which appeared only months before Voltaires arrival, is the most famous exemplar of this new fusion of writing with political criticism. The Newtonians countered that phenomenal descriptions were scientifically adequate so long as they were grounded in empirical facts, and since no facts had yet been discerned that explained what gravity is or how it works, no scientific account of it was yet possible. In addition to his works of prose, his writings focused on challenging common beliefs at the time related to topics like military and political events. Had it been executed, a royal lettre de cachet would have sent Voltaire to the royal prison of the Bastille as a result of his authorship of Lettres philosophiques; instead, he was able to flee with Du Chtelet to Cirey where the couple used the sovereignty granted by her aristocratic title to create a safe haven and base for Voltaires new position as a philosophical rebel and writer in exile. His work Lettres philosophiques, published in 1734 when he was forty years old, was the key turning point in this transformation. 1: The Huron (1771), The History of Jenni (1774), The One-eyed Street Porter, Cosi-sancta (1715), An Incident of Memory (1773), The Travels of Reason (1774), The Man with Forty Crowns (1768), Timon (1755), The King of Boutan (1761), and The City of Cashmere (1760). He wrote as many plays, stories, and poems as patently philosophical tracts, and he in fact directed many of his critical writings against the philosophical pretensions of recognized philosophers such as Leibniz, Malebranche, and Descartes. This article deals with the different theories related to human nature that emerged from the Enlightenment. The Craftsman helped to create English political journalism in the grand style, and for the next three years Voltaire moved in Bolingbrokes circle, absorbing the culture and sharing in the public political contestation that was percolating all around him. Lowell Bair (ed. The position also legitimated him as an officially sanctioned savant. Here, as a frail and sickly octogenarian, Voltaire was welcomed by the city as the hero of the Enlightenment that he now personified. Voltaire also identifies the good and evil that is portrayed in the world and among human nature. Voltaire believed everyone had the right to liberty and hedonism. ), New York: Modern Library, 1992. Open access to the SEP is made possible by a world-wide funding initiative. During these scandals, Voltaire fought vigorously alongside the projects editors to defend the work, fusing the Encyclopdies enemies, particularly the Parisian Jesuits who edited the monthly periodical the Journal de Trevoux, into a monolithic infamy devoted to eradicating truth and light from the world. ), Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003. This made him an advocate for the freedom to question. Voltaire was also, like Socrates, a public critic and controversialist who defined philosophy primarily in terms of its power to liberate individuals from domination at the hands of authoritarian dogmatism and irrational prejudice. The model he offered of the philosophe as critical public citizen and advocate first and foremost, and as abstruse and systematic thinker only when absolutely necessary, was especially influential in the subsequent development of the European philosophy. During this scene, when the country men decide to offer human sacrifices to prevent future earthquakes (Voltaire 14) the author exposes the prideful and depraved aspects of unredeemed, human nature according to scripture. This stance distanced him from more radical deists like Toland, and he reinforced this position by also adopting an elitist understanding of the role of religion in society. Voltaire also defined his own understanding of the soul in similar terms in his own Dictionnaire philosophique. During this rehabilitation, Voltaire also formed a new relationship that was to prove profoundly influential in the subsequent decades. The only thing that is clear is that the work did cause a sensation that subsequently triggered a rapid and overwhelming response on the part of the French authorities. Figures such as Descartes, Huygens, and Leibniz established their scientific reputations through efforts to realize this goal. How did Voltaire view human nature? ), New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Born Francois-Marie d'Arouet, Voltaire lived from 1694 to 1778. Niven (ed. Voltaire collapsed both challenges into a singular vision of his enemy as backward Cartesianism. Maupertuis had preceded Voltaire as the first aggressive advocate for Newtonian science in France. Translated John Hanna. Voltaire was famous for being a writer, historian, and a philosopher known for his wittiness, his attacks on the Catholic Church, and his support of freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and separation of church and state. Thomas Hobbes believed in the need for an absolute monarchy. Such epistemological battles became especially intense around Newtons theory of universal gravitation. Voltaire. In the last sentence on p. 21, Voltaire introduces the rest of his discussion by suggesting that religious teachers (by "supernatural help") are the sole source of the notion of the soul: reason alone does not suggest it. Yet when asked to explain how bodies were able to act in the way that he mathematically and empirically demonstrated that they did, Newton famously replied I feign no hypotheses. From the perspective of traditional natural philosophy, this was tantamount to hand waving since offering rigorous causal accounts of the nature of bodies in motion was the very essence of this branch of the sciences. New York: Basic Books, 1962. Yet rationality nevertheless dictated that such mechanisms must exist since without them philosophy would be returned to the occult causes of the Aristotelian natural tendencies and teleological principles. First, a full account of Voltaires life is offered, not merely as background context for his philosophical work, but as an argument about the way that his particular career produced his particular contributions to European philosophy. Critics of Voltaire and his program for philosophie remained powerful, however, and they would continue to survive as the necessary backdrop to the positive image of the Enlightenment philosophe as a modernizer, progressive reformer, and courageous scourge against traditional authority that Voltaire bequeathed to later generations. The patronage structures of Old Regime France provided more than economic support to writers, however, and restoring the crdit upon which his reputation as a writer and thinker depended was far less simple. In this way, Enlightenment philosophie became associated through Voltaire with the cultural and political program encapsulated in his famous motto, crasez linfme! (Crush the infamy!). What is human nature according to Rene Descartes? The summary here, therefore, will be largely restricted to scholarly books, with only a few articles of singular import listed. Translated by Peter Gay. It was certainly true that these ideas, especially in their more deistic and libertine configurations, were at the heart of Bolingbrokes identity. The link between Voltaire and Marx was also established through the French revolutionary tradition, which similarly adopted Voltaire as one of its founding heroes. This entanglement of philosophy with social criticism and reformist political action, a contingent historical outcome of Voltaires particular intellectual career, would become his most lasting contribution to the history of philosophy. Voltaire participated, and in the fall of that year when the returns were posted he had made a fortune. This framing was recapitulated by the opponents of the Encyclopdie, who began to speak of the loose assemblage of authors who contributed articles to the work as a subversive coterie of philosophes devoted to undermining legitimate social and moral order. Voltaires own critical discourse against imaginative philosophical romances originated, in fact, with English and Dutch Newtonians, many of whom were expatriate French Huguenots, who developed these tropes as rhetorical weapons in their battles with Leibniz and European Cartesians who challenged the innovations of Newtonian natural philosophy. For Voltaire, those equipped to understand their own reason could find the proper course of free action themselves. Voltaire lived long enough to see some of his long-term legacies start to concretize. Voltaires views on religion as manifest in his private writings are complex, and based on the evidence of these texts it would be wrong to call Voltaire an atheist, or even an anti-Christian so long as one accepts a broad understanding of what Christianity can entail. Voltaire installed himself permanently at Ferney in early 1759, and from this date until his death in 1778 he made the chateau his permanent home and capital, at least in the minds of his intellectual allies, of the emerging French Enlightenment. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm | Du Chtelets father, the Baron de Breteuil, hosted a regular gathering of men of letters that included Voltaire, and his daughter, ten years younger than Voltaire, shared in these associations. The first cause to galvanize this new program was Diderot and dAlemberts Encyclopdie. Voltaires avowed hedonism became a central feature of his wider philosophical identity since his libertine writings and conduct were always invoked by those who wanted to indict him for being a reckless subversive devoted to undermining legitimate social order. Had this assimilationist trajectory continued during the remainder of Voltaires life, his legacy in the history of Western philosophy might not have been so great. Denis Diderot, (born October 5, 1713, Langres, Francedied July 31, 1784, Paris), French man of letters and philosopher who, from 1745 to 1772, served as chief editor of the Encyclopdie, one of the principal works of the Age of Enlightenment. It also accused Leibniz of becoming deluded by his zeal to make metaphysics the foundation of physics. The previous summary describes the general core of the Newtonian position in the intense philosophical contests of the first decades of the eighteenth century. The Voltaire Foundations series Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century changed its name in 2013 to Oxford University Studies on Enlightenment. Translations of Voltaires major plays are found in: Vol. Voltaire was the first person to be honored with re-burial in the newly created Pantheon of the Great Men of France that the new revolutionary government created in 1791. Some readers singled out this part of the book as the major source of its controversy, and in a similar vein the very materialist account of me, or the soul, which appeared in volume 1 of Diderot and dAlemberts Encyclopdie, was also a flashpoint of controversy. His early orientation toward literature and libertine sociability, however, shaped his philosophical identity in crucial ways. Among the philosophical tendencies that Voltaire most deplored, in fact, were those that he associated most powerfully with Descartes who, he believed, began in skepticism but then left it behind in the name of some positive philosophical project designed to eradicate or resolve it. Voltaires inheritance from his father also became available to him at the same time, and from this date forward Voltaire never again struggled financially. With the ascension of Louis XVI in 1774 and the appointment of Turgot as Controller-General, the French establishment began to embrace the philosophes and their agenda in a new way. Franois-Marie Arouet (French: [fswa mai aw]; 21 November 1694 - 30 May 1778) was a French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher ().Known by his nom de plume M. de Voltaire (/ v l t r, v o l-/; also US: / v l-/; French: [vlt]), he was famous for his wit, and his criticism of Christianityespecially of the Roman Catholic Churchand of slavery. Voltaires refusal to defer to such charges, and his vigor in opposing them through a defense of the very libertinism that was used against him, also injected a positive philosophical program into these public struggles that was very influential. In particular, Voltaire met through Bolingbroke Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and John Gay, writers who were at that moment beginning to experiment with the use of literary forms such as the novel and theater in the creation of a new kind of critical public politics. Voltaire sheds light on the psychological idea of optomism versus pessimism. Descartes, Ren | He was tonsured in 1726, though he did not in fact enter the church, and was first educated . Also influential was the example he offered of the philosopher measuring the value of any philosophy according by its ability to effect social change. But he also conceived of it as a machine de guerre directed against the Cartesian establishment, which he believed was holding France back from the modern light of scientific truth. Gardiner Janik, Linda, 1982, Searching for the Metaphysics of Science: The Structure and Composition of Mme. What these examples point to is Voltaires willingness, even eagerness, to publicly defend controversial views even when his own, more private and more considered writings often complicated the understanding that his more public and polemical writings insisted upon. Socratess repeated assertion that he knew nothing was echoed in Voltaires insistence that the true philosopher is the one who dares not to know and then has the courage to admit his ignorance publicly. Bolingbroke, whose address Voltaire left in Paris as his own forwarding address, was one conduit of influence. Voltaire chose the latter, falling once again into the role of scandalous rebel and exile as a result of his writings. Against Leibniz, for example, who insisted that all physics begin with an accurate and comprehensive conception of the nature of bodies as such, Newton argued that the character of bodies was irrelevant to physics since this science should restrict itself to a quantified description of empirical effects only and resist the urge to speculate about that which cannot be seen or measured.