with commentary by Salman Rushdie
I teach a course on the problem of evil, and every semester I ask my students the same question: if God is good and all-powerful, why does a child die of cancer? They shift in their seats. Some reach for theodicy — the theological tradition that tries to justify God’s ways to man. Others go quiet. A few get angry. What almost none of them know is that this argument was fought with extraordinary ferocity in the eighteenth century, and that Candide is its most devastating document.
Leibniz's Best of All Possible Worlds
The target was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the German philosopher and mathematician who argued, with genuine rigor, that we live in the best of all possible worlds. This was not naivete. Leibniz meant something precise: that God, being perfect, could only have created the most perfect world logically available, and that the suffering we observe is a necessary feature of a cosmos that is, on balance, better than any alternative. The argument has a certain cold elegance. It also has the disadvantage of being, in Voltaire’s view, completely insane.
Alexander Pope gave the argument its catchiest English form in his Essay on Man in 1733: “Whatever is, is right.” Voltaire read Pope and admired him. Then Lisbon happened. Then the Seven Years’ War. And Voltaire sat down to write a novel whose entire architecture is a sustained, merciless demonstration that whatever is, manifestly, is not right.
Optimism as a System for Looking Away
Pangloss, Candide’s tutor, the novel’s walking embodiment of Leibnizian optimism, is one of the great comic villains in literature precisely because he keeps finding reasons to maintain his position in the face of earthquake, hanging, torture, and syphilis. Every catastrophe becomes evidence of the world’s fundamental perfection. The joke is obvious, and Voltaire knows it. But the joke contains a genuine philosophical argument: that optimism, when it becomes a system, becomes a mechanism for ignoring the actual suffering of actual people. It is a philosophy not of hope but of accommodation.
What Voltaire was also attacking, though less explicitly, was the tradition of theodicy that ran through Christian theology, the attempt to reconcile a benevolent God with a world full of pain. Leibniz was its most technically sophisticated modern proponent, but the problem goes back to Job. Voltaire’s response was essentially Job’s: I don’t care about your system. Look at what is actually happening.
The philosophical tradition Voltaire was drawing on, and in some ways anticipating, is what we might now call empiricism taken to its moral conclusion. If you actually look at the world, as Voltaire insists, relentlessly, chapter after chapter, what you find is not a best of all possible worlds. You find the Inquisition, the slave trade, arbitrary aristocratic cruelty, and natural disasters that kill the faithful on their holiest day. The optimist’s error is not intellectual laziness but a kind of motivated blindness.
The Garden, and the Refusal to Keep Arguing
There is a moment near the end of Candide that I find myself returning to every time I teach it. Candide, having been through everything, arrives at a small farm and announces the novel’s famous conclusion: we must cultivate our garden. Pangloss tries one more time to argue that everything has worked out for the best — that all their suffering was necessary to bring them to this perfect moment. Candide’s response is among the shortest and most devastating in eighteenth-century literature. “That is well said,” he replies, “but we must cultivate our garden.”
It is not an answer to Leibniz. It is a refusal to keep having the argument. And there is something deeply honest about that. It is a recognition that the question of whether this is the best of all possible worlds is, finally, less important than what you are going to do in the one you actually have.
Salman Rushdie understands this. What he does in his Rebind commentary on Candide is press on exactly this turn, when the satirist, having demolished everything, decides what to build. That is what makes his commentary worth listening to. He reads Voltaire not as a museum piece but as someone who went through the fire and had to figure out what came next.