Voltaire and Rousseau: Details of a Rivalry about Evil and Providence

Authors: Sanchez R

DOI: 10.23880/phij-16000263

Volume 5, Issue 3

Abstract

Voltaire and Rousseau set themselves a great goal: the happiness of the human being. They worried about what harms him: one will attack despotism, bigotry, intolerance, both of them talk about dogmas; the other will denounce the institutions that pervert and degrade, at the same time that it evidenced the longing for innocence and a not very well understood “golden age” of Humanity, in a century characterized by the thought of origins. One will be more devastating when using the ingenuity of art to ridicule and convince; the other goes more towards himself, to his heart, as a criteria of moral rectitude. However, they cultivated a memorable controversy between them, of which we will refer to: a) the will, freedom, social inequality and democracy; b) the end of a conception of providence and evil; c) the Volterian campaign to discredit Rousseau; d) their mutual deism; e) Candide and the mockery of the ideas of Leibniz and Rousseau; f) a theory of misfortune, chance and pessimism (Voltaire) in the face of a regulatory and inactive optimism, although pleasant (Rousseau). The poem that Voltaire dedicates to the Lisbon earthquake (1755), to which Rousseau gave an incisive response, is one of the central reasons for this controversy. In the century of the glorification of reason, Voltaire and Rousseau are the party poopers, but for different reasons. Both became staunch critics of the promise of reason and the trust placed in it. Both fought for tolerance and for a Christianity separate from politics. However, the differences will be numerous and very marked. At the very least, Voltaire’s mettle could not exist without the consideration of his adversaries, “living or abstract”, according to Valéry, while Rousseau’s was marked by a shyness that made him move on various planes made difficult by his relationship with the others, as Starobinski has shown. In the end, we will have to have a debate about a cautious pessimism, supported by facts and history, against an optimism based on hope; that is, between freedom and providence. That is why, instead of continuing to call the 18th century the Enlightenment or the philosophers’ century, we should insist on classifying it as the “chiaroscuro” century, because not everything was, in effect, this absolute trust in the powers of reason, culture, society, laws. Voltaire and Rousseau live in the same century, although their differences marked the transition of an era. Goethe noted that with Voltaire “it will be the old world that ends, while with Rousseau it is a new world that begins.” There are several incompatibilities: from humor, taste, even inclinations, exaggerated awareness of their forces, to a divided public opinion, condemnatory in the case of Rousseau, supposedly fueled by Voltaire, who was in charge of preparing pamphlets written in a way anonymously against him. One belonging to a wealthy social class, the other, emanated from the fertile soil of poverty and abandonment. If nature had already done something on its part, society will end up placing them in irreconcilable extremes, precisely at a time when the figure of the “celebrity”, different from the glory of the hero and mere bourgeois reputation, was being born.

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