Candide Life Is Worth Living Voltaire Earned Term Paper

Candide

LIFE IS WORTH LIVING

Voltaire earned much fame and criticism at the same time for his powerful crusade against injustice and bigotry, expressed in brilliant literature. He went up against the government and the Catholic hierarchy, particularly because of the Grand Inquisition. His character, Candide, was very much patterned after his own personality and experience, but his character begins by believing in goodness as prevailing in the world and ends the same way, despite his (Voltaire's) deadly cynicism. His famous phrase, "the best of possible worlds," has been his landmark, and the question that follows is, "what then are the others?"

He was the satirist par excellence of his time and considered the embodiment of the Enlightenment Period in the 18th century. A mix of success and suffering characterized his whole life, from poor health, to the disapproval of authorities, imprisonments and exiles, but more significantly, his achieving much fame for his biting writing style that won him enemies as well. He rejected, as did the Enlightenment Movement, that divine intervention guided history. Likewise, he believed that the art of government consisted only in taking in as much money s possible from one class and given to another.

He refused to believe that the solution to problems was metaphysical, and although he was religious, he was anti-clerical.

Nonetheless, as a genuine justice crusader, Voltaire was in search of what was just and good, except that he could be looking for the answer in another angle and through another method. He perhaps did not think that goodness and happiness could be found in this present world, but he pursued the same end and sought a life that was worth living.The Enlightenment Movement - This Movement placed reason and rational thought over the spirit. It flourished in the fields of philosophy, science and medicine, which peaked into the French Revolution. It rebelled against superstition, fear and prejudice. Its advocates went up in arms against the aristocracy and the church, as Voltaire sharply personified, for its greed for power and the arrogance of the nobility. It likewise criticized the optimism, especially of the time, that rational thought could correct the evils committed by human beings (SparkNotes 2003). His immortal work, Candide, became the representative literature of the Movement, which lambastes the philosophies of the Movement itself, proving that it was a united one.

Later in his life, Voltaire was hailed by the population as a hero in his enduring campaign against social and political justice. Even after his death, he was both loved and hated: those who loved him buried his remains in consecrated ground and later moved beside Rene Descartes and other great French thinkers. But religious fundamentalists who hated him exhumed his remains them into a pit as someone they hated.

The Story - Voltaire was expressive of his spite towards noble and ruling social class. He did not believe that the "enlightened" monarch could or would use his power to ensure the protection and welfare of his subjects and their rights. Voltaire only thought that the idea of enlightenment would only legitimize a monarch's despotism (SparkNotes).

Candide is every inch an outcry against social and political….....