Candide is a rare and beautiful thing in literature; a concise, timeless expression of human experience and behaviour in culture and nature. The author’s skill, tethering objects together on the surface of an otherwise rough or disorderly ocean to form a narrative, to make sense, is a rational exercise, certainly, and Voltaire was a master of its exploitation. But any book is an offering to the reader, an opportunity to mingle or mix without reference to logic, and to compare private, physical experience with immaterial, external ideas.
A book is not an experience.
Experience is truth. Interpretation of experience is false or, at the very least, an idea which is merely associated with the experience – like the rules of a game, we can read and obey (follow the rules), or just open the box, play it and see what happens. Metaphor does not depend on special knowledge, it refers to general experience – that’s what makes it useful, vital even. To say an experience is like another experience (that a specific experience is like a general experience) conveys the impression of the experience in a simple, and therefore beautiful, or poetic, way, indirectly.
A work of fiction is not for the body though the body is its conduit. Though the author’s manipulation of objects into events may be resonant, physically as well as mentally, nothing actually effects the body of the reader. The seated audient travels in the mind, but not to the places of an author’s imagining. For a bell to ring it must first be hit, of course. Sound is movement, and being emotionally “moved” is an effective metaphor for the figurative resonance of bodies, having been hit by objects, events, or ideas. When the author’s “tongue” hits the “bell” of apperception it may or may not ring true. It depends on the immaterial form of the reader’s apperception (all different, all the same), as much as it does on the material which has been used to create that tongue (the author’s experience). The broader the resonance the greater the chance of success for a work of art; for cultural resonance is a measure of fitness for the environment.
Voltaire’s Candide is the tale of a naive ‘everyman’, filled from birth with a pompous and rather flowery philosophy. The characters’ beliefs are born of excessive, and therefore habitual, empirical evidence drawn from an exclusive, privileged environment. It may be summed up with the aphorism:
Too much of a good life may lead a person to believe life is good.
This idea, disparaged in the novel, is a real one, a philosophy of optimism, popular at the time of Voltaire’s writing, and Gottfried Leibniz is the responsible real-life author. It did not resonate with Voltaire who rips it to shreds with Candide.
Leibniz, in his philosophical work, deferred substantially to religion, (perhaps understandably since the contemporaneous Catholic church was slaughtering anyone who even looked as if they didn’t believe in God) – and he stated that the world was “the best of all possible worlds” because God had created it. And, because God is omnipotent, He might easily have chosen not to create the world. But He did create it. The world, therefore, is a masterpiece of God’s design and who are we to criticise the result? Leibniz draws attention to the presence of indisputable truths – phenomena, the naturally occurring objects and subjects of the world – and implies that their existence is real because God has willed them into reality. They could just as well not exist. This was the principle of sufficient reason espoused by Leibniz; the free will and therefore the choices made by God (in creating or, indeed, not creating) meant that the world could only be “the best of all possible worlds”. If anything was absent it was therefore deemed to be unnecessary by this supposition.
These are the values that Voltaire deposited in the mind of his fictional hero, Candide. He made a bell of deluded optimism and threw it out to be struck by the various tongues to which Candide was exposed, within the many cultures to which he was laterally led. In so doing he came upon countless, almost endless opportunities for resonance, or the lack thereof.
It’s of interest at this point to remove the word ‘God’ (a human form with supernatural powers) from the philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz, and replace it with the word, ‘evolution’. This is a fun thing to do with Spinoza too, and with other thinkers of that period, because now we have no fear of being burned at the stake. In a sense, this world and others like it (or not like it) are indeed able to be correctly considered “the best of possible worlds”, within the context of their own unique situations. Instead of a collection of purposeful, divine choices – a design, we might call it – all may be thought of as “best” because a truly democratic system is at work. Under the “laws of physics” and the “forces of nature”, one thing leads to another and everything is given equal opportunity to prove itself. Only that which is able to emerge – in the attendant conditions (which have also emerged under previous conditions) – is that which, in fact, emerges. The ‘fit’ survive the test, or prosper; the world is good because it is also ‘fit’ for the descendants, the heirs or survivors prospering within it. Everything fits and is therefore ‘fit’. The world can be no different because evolution works in one direction, with a single set of tools - the environment. Leibniz was correct – if a thing does not exist it isn’t worthy of existence. But what he didn’t know was that God had not yet finished His work. Evolution continuously creates; things have been (because they fit) and gone (because they ceased to fit), so perfection is only possible in a world where everything is perfect – because all is one. As evolution goes about its business, only the constants are perfect; and what are the constants? The microorganisms.
In nature, accidents occur and are dealt with by assimilating or annihilating their effects. The rapidly lost are never known, and therefore cannot be forgotten. Unknown objects are just not needed in a world which has been designed; and they are not desired in a world which has emerged under its own (evolved) steam. When deadly oxygen filled the atmosphere billions of years ago, a few courageous microorganisms acted with a synergetic vigour that was eventually to result in animal life. Those prokaryotes protected themselves with eukaryotes, oxygen-breathing bodies, as other anaerobic microbes (those requiring an absence of oxygen) became extinct – their stories left undeveloped. With God (and His deliberations) dismissed from the picture, and replaced by evolution – a lustful, urgent, binary process, drawn to ecstasy and recoiling from agony – we are left with a dilemma; the uncanny or exceptional, Homo sapiens – the human animal – protector of surviving anaerobic organisms – and our meat is their armour.
In a world which has ‘evolved’, mindlessly (though some would say mindfully) exploring every option, without mourning or celebrating failure or success, a godlike (or god-creating) organism is arrived at; a maker of conscious choices in a world made of unconscious but always practical solutions to ever-occurring problems. An agent who appears, at first, to be at odds with the environment.
In the non-stop performances of nature, a character comes onstage with a preternatural stop-look-and-listen demeanour. In the presence of perpetual accidents, a universe of attraction – of desire, no less – and repulsion – into that world arrives a moralising animal – an adjudicator. It perceives beyond its natural ability; it interrogates everything it finds; and it comes to the conclusion that a throbbing, lustful, experimental nature is inappropriate and, frankly, disgusting.
It polices nature, finding its fellow organisms criminal and chaotic. It swears that it is not related to any of the accused suspects. And though it is not taking names, it is giving names. And it has given the name of “good” to that which is good for the police, for humanity. And that’s how Voltaire interprets the word; the cultural good supersedes any other potential “good”.
Assuming every organism has the ability to choose, based on various divergent sensory impressions, of desire and necessity – at various levels – let’s be in no doubt: human choices have the broadest impact in the world as we know it. Let every living thing have an element of consciousness, an awareness of the immediate environment if nothing else (and god knows it took forever to even agree on that). And though it might be said that every predator is arrogant and sanguine, proud of its presence and its private knowledge – there is none more proud or sanguine than the Homo sapiens; the wise human (self-named, obviously).
Humanity, through (the creation of a) god, provides an order which grants itself a royal power over the natural world. This then becomes its kingdom. The method for achieving greatness is found to be as follows: first, create an absolute authority; second, have the absolute authority endow you with special powers to wield on their behalf for all eternity; and finally, dissolve or reduce the absolute authority before calling on rival organisms to come and debate the issue. Being the only voice at such a debate, or being the official interpreter for the other, animal voices, brings an obvious advantage.
If they cannot present a case, annihilate them.
As humanity observes the struggles of primitive organisms, it recognises that very same struggle, having personally felt its presence. Sympathy, we might call it. Resonance. The human being exhibits animal traits. It shares incontestable attributes, left right and centre. And even in the process of observing this, it cannot help but notice there are other observers present – other predators – quietly attending to the shared environment. These predators are a threat to humanity and have to be removed or tamed. And so they are. The human creature knows itself to be a thinking and superior being because its observations are redirected inward when the sun goes down. The body is primitive, and prey for another advanced or cunning mind – which is predatory, no less; proud and sanguine, etc. The human mind is discomfited by this association with the lower beasts, and resentful, therefore, of the body from which it cannot be separated. But the two will have to co-exist. The body doesn’t care, and the mind has to suffer this improper relationship. The body is made to perform to please the organising mind – the royal powerhouse, a literal head of state – for it lives in the penthouse, apparently, the apex of the vile (“wild”) body.
The animal, human, having crowned itself sapiens – from the Latin sapient: “to taste, to have taste, to be wise; to perceive” – is now facing a struggle against its animal urgency. It says that animals, other animals, are thoughtless automatons. It creates a moral standard to denounce the urgent behaviour of its own self, the body. It makes laws to restrict unseemly, primitive urges; animal urges. And it builds prisons for those bodies which are acting ill-advisedly upon their own urgency.
The experience of religion is first a feeling and then a sign of intellectualism, advancement – a form of unquestionable knowledge making those in the know seem superior, and therefore higher beings. Their failings are acknowledged and stored away, but exposed in the weak, the inferior; those who are punished on behalf of the others who are hiding upstairs; the hierarchy, who indulge their instincts in private, but are publicly disgusted and accusatory.
Humanity makes every effort to separate itself from its animal source. It does not wish to struggle, like the other beasts, it does not wish to merely survive. It wants to flourish and rule; it wants to be more; to be better and higher.
Humans want to fly.
They were not gifted with this physical potential, but that won’t stop them.
The very urgency, the driving force of evolution itself, is absolutely manifest in human doing, human thinking and being; and the one is at intellectual odds with the other. This anomaly, or duality, is oddly evoked in the Christian myth of Creation as it is written in the Book of Genesis, as presented as a defect in the deity Himself:
When God made the world He made it all with His imagination or will (which, if you remember, we define as striving… related only to the mind). “Let there be…” He said, “…and there was. Let there be this… and there was… Let there be that… and there was…” All of it was made with God’s thought, followed by the sound of His word. And it was good. But there was one single exception to this method of creation.
Human beings were made with God’s hands. They are a work of art, not magic.
And of all the things God made, the human being was the one which brought Him no pleasure whatsoever. The thing which He made in His own image was the thing that betrayed him. Humanity let God down. He was not happy with the results of what he had made out of dust and with His own physical effort. First, He expelled a pair of human beings from the Garden of Eden, and later He exterminated multitudes – all but a single family were “washed away” by a purposeful flood of His design.
Don’t forget this is a work of fiction. It was written by human beings, and it therefore contains a message (or there is a message to be found within it).
fiction (n.)
early 15c., ficcioun, "that which is invented or imagined in the mind," from Old French ficcion "fabrication" (13c.) and directly from Latin fictionem "a fashioning or feigning," noun of action from past participle stem of fingere "to shape, form, devise, feign," originally "to knead, form out of clay".
Religion is an attempt to provide meaning for people in the world. It offers mental comfort, or inner Dom, by depositing the idea that the way we live matters – which is of course correct. Our actions are both causes and effects. We do have meaning – it is quite clear. But knowledge, which is first transformed and then shared by the medium of language, is clouding of judgement. The tension between urgency and agency creates internal struggle which emerges in the world as physical struggle, enmity between cultures, antagonistic rivalry between alien-other agents of consciousness. The different are uncanny, preternatural, and the cause of human hyperawareness, disbelief, dislocation and distrust.
An organism’s meaning is defined by its role in the environment; the objective of its performance. When the meaning is lost, and the organism is found to be meaningless, it can no longer be a part of the environment. It may no longer perform.
We have meaning, but meaning is destroyed by our engagement with purpose.
We are, as any other organism, evolved. Homo sapiens is the ark built by bacteria to survive the flood of oxygen. We are instinctual, responsive to pleasure and pain; we have similar organs and reproductive methods as many others on the diverse, multiplex limbs, boughs and branches of the family tree. We are good, and we fit, in evolutionary terms. We are urgent. We feed our young like mammals. We are mammals. And if that can’t be done then we feed our young as birds do (bringing them food from elsewhere), though we are not birds (but how we long to fly!). For everything we have, naturally, another creature has the same; we need what is required to live in close connection with the earth, as they do. It is visibly apparent that we come from a line of apes, and prior to that, the great line of organisms which happens to be responsive to the merest of touches. The latter is not so apparent, in the mirror, and for this reason we paint other images onto its glass, to provide context. But this is fiction, mythology, and not to be taken as reasonable. There is no explanation for reality.
The whale’s eye connects us to an environment for which we are not fit, the underwater world. It suggests that the frightening, preternatural wilderness, ocean, contains information regarding who we are. It’s the same all over the planet. Which of us is able to look into the eye of any creature on Earth and not feel the power of seeing and being seen?
And yet.
Perhaps because we are, ourselves, designers, there is a feeling that we are designed. It’s a tough ideology to resist. Remarkable events occur between the numerous and various species in nature. From the microscopic interplay of Water Bears and the behaviour of dividing cells, to the vastness of space and its violent collisions, its centuries-long storms and virulent fires; it just feels designed. There is pattern to be found everywhere. Flowers are colourful, attractive to insects, and fruit is sweet and plentiful; all is reoccurring, for as long as it fits and is fit. Science must be the search for God, we imagine. It must be fate, or destiny, for the world to be the way it is. It feels purposeful. And perhaps it feels purposeful because we are, ourselves, purposeful.
And because we are purposeful we feel there is a purpose to our very presence. We know we are special and we imagine that a choice was made, to make us blessed or worthy. We are deserving, so we take whatever we can. We are tellurian royalty. We elevate certain members of the species (if they do not elevate themselves and save us the bother), and those of their bloodline; they are the symbols of the significance humanity feels for itself.
We extend our physical inputs (eyes, ears, fingers) with technology, to observe that which cannot be experienced otherwise (to see if any microbial kingdoms have rulers with crowns, etc. They do not – but they have wings, damn it!). And likewise we have expanded our outputs, the voices and gestures of Homo sapiens, to confine the world in a web of our ideas. We see for millions and millions of miles into space, snapping our fingers and making things happen. The world’s ideas are our ideas.
The internet demonstrates exactly how urgent the need is there, for humankind to deploy its every thought; to be heard, and to be known, to be considered throughout the universe. We send photographs of food, pages of Shakespeare, and vinyl LPs into the void, hoping. Hoping for what?
An audience.
The human race is, not exactly unsurprisingly, an embodiment of evolution – lustful and pleasure-seeking, desperate to succeed and to breed, and to eliminate the weak, to win at any cost, and to cooperate, too, though it often results in annihilation or assimilation.
Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being.
We know so much, we disregard the awe we felt when learning what we know. Learning is the physical, empirical engagement with process and making sense; whereas knowing amplifies the blessed and worthy feeling of entitlement. Knowledge is a reward. Knowledge is a full belly. But knowing alienates whereas learning is communicative and communal, a banquet. Learning is a performance inclusive of audienting. And this is also symbolic of evolution. Every living thing requires an attractive quality, in order to reproduce; and simultaneously it needs to be attracted by the right colours and smells, in order to survive. The earth is full of desiring and desired organisms. The trick is not to draw the wrong kind of attention.
The only thing that makes us different in the world is that we think we are different. We are as desperate and beautiful and vicious as the rest of nature. We are gods, accidentally created by the universe to do as we please without thought for the future. We resent learning, and love knowing. We suppress nature.
We are deluded.
That’s how it was for Candide. And Voltaire forces him into a world which persistently corrodes each facet of the philosophy he has always believed in.