First at bat is Candide by Voltaire. Since I seem to be viewing all the literature we read in this class on the lookout for the theme of a quest, I see no reason to discontinue that and shall go at these selections with that in mind. At first, the story doesn't seem to be about a quest. It's about a naive boy who falls in love, gets drafted into the army, travels throughout Europe and the New World, undergoes a ridiculously long series of misfortunes (people casually die and come back to life), and finally settles down near Constantinople with some people he has picked up in his journeys. Although it didn't begin as a search for something in particular, when he settles down he has found something, and that is a purpose to his existence.
Candide was told that the world was the best of all possible worlds (as a student in Calculus 3, I wasn't real fond of the mockery of Leibniz, and I am a supporter of Leibniz only to mock Isaac Newton). Therefore, he believes only good things should happen to him and that the world owes him a living. (Hmm, sounds like a lot of people nowadays.) I would like to pause a moment and ask a question of philosophers in general.
WHY MUST YOU ONLY OFFER TWO ALTERNATIVES TO A WORLD VIEW?????
It's always either-or. Either the world is completely evil, chaotic, and purposeless, or the world is wonderful and full of sunshine and butterflies and rainbows and we should all be rolling in milk and honey.
WHY???
Christianity's approach is both-and. Our world was created to be a perfect world. But then it was messed up. Messed up spectacularly, in fact. So therefore it is a very good thing that has gone terribly wrong, just like humanity- in fact, humanity is the reason the world has gone wonky. So there is meaning and purpose to life and the world, but things still get messed up.
Okay, rant over. Candide at the end of his travels meets an old man who works his little farm with his children and therein finds all the contentment and produce he needs to survive. Candide and Co. seize upon this and each work the trade at which they are good. They thrive and become content. Sometimes the idiot philosopher still wants to speculate on stuff; Candide, beyond tired of it all, just says that that is all well and good, but they must continue to work.
It's a nice moral, I admit, and one that I agree with, but the tortuous pattern of reasoning that Voltaire took to get there is beyond me. I must confess a certain animosity towards Voltaire.
And then there came Rousseau. (Turns out I've been misspelling his name. I suppose I'm sorry. I really don't like him, either, on general principles- literally.) Rousseau didn't start out with a quest, either, but he apparently had learned something by the end of his life, because he wrote a book to share his life lessons with everyone. That's probably true of most people. We don't start out as infants looking for the meaning to life; we save that until we're teenagers or having a mid-life crisis.
Nevertheless, you can only live so long before you learn something, and everyone, even if unconsciously, desires a meaning and a purpose, I think. I can't remember the person who said it or even how the quote went exactly, but it went something like this: it's not pain that man hates, but the not knowing why. There's also this, by Friedrich Nietzsche (of all people): "Man can live with almost any how, as long as he has a why."
Rousseau seems to have ended up with the theory that this world is the best of all possible worlds (*sigh*), since he believes that Nature has given us all the most perfect nature possible for us and that society only ruins it. I would like to know what he means by 'Nature'. Does he mean an impersonal, chaotic, random sequence of events that evolved humans out of pond scum, or does he mean Nature as an agent of God, or does he mean some sort of pantheism or paganism? It's a very important point! I'd like to know where he's coming from so I can follow his pattern of thought and thus his argument throughout the reading.
Sadly, he doesn't offer much in the way of clarification. He just wants to talk about his feelings. Seriously, his feelings. I don't know about the rest of you, ladies, but any guy who wants to talk about his feelings is pretty much a big red flag in my books.
Rousseau was, of course, a frontrunner of the Romantic movement. Romanticism was in full or in part a reaction to the preceding period of the Enlightenment, which exalted reason and logic and all that jazz (as parodied in Gulliver's Travels). Any theory which takes something to an extreme will generally be succeeded by a theory that takes the opposite extreme, as this shows.
Again, WHY is it always either-or? It's either logic and reason or feelings and sentiment. Why can't it be both? We are creatures of both bodies and souls- intellects and feelings. We want both. We can't focus on our feelings and gross appetites without leaving our minds and reason behind, and thus losing one half of our selves, and we can't focus on our logic and abstract reason without leaving our hearts and bodies behind, and thus also being torn in two. We're not a race of Spocks or animals.
We're both.
This is why I find heresies depressing, in general.
I would also like to state that I found Rousseau personally disturbing. I am following a policy of Brutal Honesty in this blog, which is politically incorrect in the extreme and may cost me my good grades some day (I think truth should be supported whever it is found), so I'm just going to say that his opening was very egotistical, especially without any explanation of why he thinks he is so wonderful and how there will be another person without him, but even more than that... HE WAS EIGHT YEARS OLD!
Eight years old... and having creepy obsessions with women. And then believing himself in love with two different women at the age of 11-12. YIKES.
This is a very sad demonstration of children growing up way too fast... There is a reason why I on general principles dislike the depictions of children in advertising. Children are innocent and anyone who cares about them should take pains to ensure that they stay innocent. It's like glass- fragile but beautiful. If you hit it, it will shatter instantly, but if you don't touch it, it'll endure forever. (Illustration taken from G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy.)
...I have just realized exactly how fundamental that book has become to my way of thinking and looking at the world/life/people. I also realize that this is something to be celebrated.
Three cheers for the Apostle of Common Sense!
It was the best one I could find of him on Catholic Memes.
Perhaps I should say a word about Orthodoxy, since it ties in with the quest for truth them that I have been nattering about on this post. Orthodoxy isn't a story about G. K. Chesterton; it's about his journey for, you guessed it, orthodoxy. He set out to find a religion that made sense to him, and found, when he outlined it, that it was Christianity. He just wanted truth, so he searched for it. And, as it was promised, he sought and found.
In Orthodoxy, he lays out his journey of discovery, and though it might seem ludicrously simple once you have grasped the fact he is making, it's really profound. Some of the simplest things are the most profound, really.
In Pace Christi,
Elyse
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