Voltaire and His Thoughts on the Enlightenment

Voltaire was a French philosophe, and one of the most influential figures during the Enlightenment. Voltaire wrote over seventy volumes with a great variety of genres. His Enlightenment ideas were built on several essential elements---- senses, reason, emphasis on science, deist belief and a rationalized government. According to Enlightenment thinkers, senses were an essential element of their ideas. Human beings were capable of using their senses to observe the universe. By using their individual senses, people discovered new ideas and reassessed their original values more critically. In the story Candide, Candide “had been brought up never to judge things for himself”(72). He never had a chance to observe the outside world until he was expelled from the Baron’s heavenly castle.
Candide’s teacher, Pangloss, was an optimistic philosopher who believed the world was perfect. Pangloss had never observed the world through his senses until he started over as a tramp. Pangloss always told Candide and Cunégonde, “everything is for the best”(6), which they thought repeatedly as their lives went on. Cunégonde expresses her desperation to Candide, “Pangloss deceived me cruelly when he told me that all was well with the world”(19). She started to reassess Pangloss’ optimism critically because she suffers from the real world and find it no longer a heavenly place as she used to think. When Candide reached the heavenly Kingdom of El Dorado, he said to Cacambo,
“If our friend Pangloss had seen Eldorado, he would do no longer have said that castle of Thunder-ten-Tronckh was the best place on earth. It just goes to show: travel’s the thing” (40).
Candide now realized that the Baron’s castle was not the best place in the world. He travelled and observed new things, which in turn contradicted his previous knowledge. When he saw the dying black man at the border, he was shocked, and said to himself, “I shall finally have to renounce your [Pangloss] optimism”(48). From