Was Voltaire an actually genius writer, or simply a genius shitposter?

You can't be the one without being the other.

Memes aside he is very important in the story of why western civilisation came out on top.

>>1482695
How? He just wrote some books that nobody here even read, did memeing about HRE really got him such impact on history?

>>1482703
It was mostly his successful attacks on the remnants of feudalism and the poisonous influence of superstition and religion in Europe.

It just happened that the Holy Roman Empire was precisely that: a highly religious non-state, remnant of Feudalism.

>>1482751
Interesting, he surely seems like one of the most important writers in history.

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Rousseau: "je l'hairais davantage si je le meprisais moins", "I'd hate him more were I to scorn him less".

Saying voltaire was anything near great is basically admitting you have no idea about philosophy and literature and your pantheon of great people is exactly what you hear people describe as great.

>>1482683

Poor man's Rabelais.

>>1482703
>He just wrote some books that nobody here even read
That's false
His poetry is mediocre, his plays are meh (still better than Crébillon and the others but still), his letters are funny, his tales are shit.
He isn't really (at least in my opinion) a "great writer", but his influence in the XVIIIth century and on western literature is very important.

>philosopher
Voltaire isn't a "philosopher", he's a "thinker" at best.

>>1484521

I think Ambrose Bierce is a good example of someone who achieved what Voltaire was trying to.

>>1482683
>genius writer, or simply a genius shitposter?
What's the difference?

still salty about his "canada is just snow" banter

fucker had never even been here

>>1484173
Rousseau was a major faggot and a hypocrite. Fuck off.

>>1484912
And wrong and poisonous to boot. I'm not one of those "the Enlightenment was a mistake" morons but it'd have been a lot better without Rousseau's influence.

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>>1484410
Damn, you beat me to it.

>>1482760
Goethe called him the greatest writer the world has ever had

>>1485120
Opinions mean nothing from Krauts

>>1484952
which is because...

>>1482683
There's a difference?

>>1485256
>Napoleon commented that till he was sixteen he "would have fought for Rousseau against the friends of Voltaire, today it is the opposite...The more I read Voltaire the more I love him. He is a man always reasonable, never a charlatan, never a fanatic."

>>1484847
What? No, absolutely not.
Voltaire was a playwright/poet and irony/wit is just one part of his writings

>>1485699
>>>oltaire inspired Napoleon to commit his atrocities

>>1484521
Candide was pretty damn funny tho.

>>1487239
Candide is utter trash

>>1487232

What atrocities? Modern democracy and law?

>>1487603
Found the Christcuck.

>>1487663
>Christcuck
I'm not. He just purposely misunderstood Leibniz for the sake of satire. It's just pure bad faith.
Candid is one of the worst thing Voltaire ever wrote in my opinion.

>>1487692

Candide really is a shitty book.

>>1482683
Yes.

>>1487692
That's fucking bullshit, theodicy is the worst thing Liebniz has ever come up with. Voltaire rightly skewers the atrocious concept from every angle, sometimes caricaturing it, but it's not "bad faith" any more than his mockeries of German nobility, the Inquisition etc. If you can't stand Voltaire you shouldn't be able to read Pratchett without popping a blood vessel.

>>1487741
Not to mention, I don't believe he was mocking only Leibniz but all thinkers who accepted theodicy and teleology, from Aquinas to modern Creationists.
Indeed, the banana argument and the endless adhoc explanations for spandrels and other biological phenomena shows that Pangloss walks among us.

>>1487741
>theodicy is the worst thing Liebniz has ever come up with
Did I said anything about the Theodicy being the pinnacle of Leibniz's system?

>Voltaire rightly skewers the atrocious concept from every angle
He never demonstrates that the concept of "best of all worlds POSSIBLE" is incorrect.

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>Holy
>Roman
>Empire
hhahahahhaha
such wit

>>1487603
Go fuck yourself

>>1487797
>He never demonstrates that the concept of "best of all worlds POSSIBLE" is incorrect.
He shows the absurd implications of it, and points out that going "God works in mysterious ways, you can't know better than an omniscient deity, God is perfect so he created the best world possible" is nothing but mystical masturbation used to handwave everything away.
He doesn't destroy the concept with formal logic, but he makes it plain to anyone dazzled by Leibniz's treatise that it's corrupt apology and a waste of time, worthy of scorn and laughter.
Furthermore, it's incredible that you accuse Voltaire of bad faith when theodicy was almost certainly born in bad faith or intellectual dishonesty. It's a classic case of belief in belief.

>>1487853
How's highschool?

>>1482683
Pretty much just a shitposter. None of his ideas were new or revolutionary, his political ideas were pretty much "The English aristocracy is so much better than our own aristocracy" and "The Prussian monarch with ill-defined limits to his power is so much better than the French monarch with ill-defined limits to his powers", he tried and failed to emulate Shakespeare and did nothing of note other than constantly shitting on Rousseau, a man who -agree or disagree with him- actually bothered thinking up something new that's discussed and debated to this very day.

>>1485699
And that agreement was pretty much "the masses can't be trusted". If I wanted criticism to egalitarian democracy, I'd go to Plato. Or Thomas Aquinas. Or one of the literally hundreds of men who did it better than Voltaire.

>>1487858
>He shows the absurd implications of it
By showing muh wars, muh tears? No it isn't enough.

>but he makes it plain to anyone dazzled by Leibniz's treatise that it's corrupt apology and a waste of time, worthy of scorn and laughter.
That's pure pathos, it isn't enough to (I'm paraphrasing you) : "skewers the atrocious concept from every angle".
It's absurd to refute a whole system by saying "it doesn't suit me, it is too painful therefore I consider it as illogical".

>Furthermore, it's incredible that you accuse Voltaire of bad faith when theodicy was almost certainly born in bad faith or intellectual dishonesty
Baseless assertion. And Voltaire is obviously dishonest, he was too intelligent to have misunderstood Leibniz.

>>1487894
Pretty much this. The only good thing he did was to force French theater to stop blandly imitating Corneille/Racine/Molière/Rotrou and to try new things.

>>1487896
>No it isn't enough.
You're the kind of sucker who won't believe he's getting scammed no matter how many times people try to point it out to him until he realizes his bank account is empty, and even then he'll hang onto the hope that the scammer might still bring his money back, because he heard from "reputable sources" that the scammer is a good person and there's no way a good person would steal his money. That's theodicy proponents in a nutshell.

>It's absurd to refute a whole system by saying "it doesn't suit me, it is too painful therefore I consider it as illogical".
When formal logic leads someone to superficially rational but obviously misguided and sterile conclusions, you may have to resort to irrational arguments to slap him out of it and force him to look at the abomination he birthed.
And yes, he did attack the concept from every angle.

>he was too intelligent to have misunderstood Leibniz.
He didn't misunderstand him at all. I'm starting to think you have misunderstood Voltaire, however.

>>1484410
>>1484912
>>1484952
My niggas

>>1487943
>You're the kind of sucker who won't believe he's getting scammed no matter how many times people try to point it out to him until he realizes his bank account is empty, and even then he'll hang onto the hope that the scammer might still bring his money back, because he heard from "reputable sources" that the scammer is a good person and there's no way a good person would steal his money.
This is a pointless analogy, no arguments, no undoubtful premises, no logical advancement, no correlated conclusion.

>obviously misguided and sterile conclusions
>obviously
Using such words will not make your point more true

>And yes, he did attack the concept from every angle.
Not the "possible" part (which is the core of Leibniz's point...).

>He didn't misunderstand him at all
That is precisely what I am saying. He purposely modified it to fit for his satire which is pure bad faith.

>I'm starting to think you have misunderstood Voltaire, however
I've read at least 3/5 of Voltaire's œuvre and his thought is nowhere near complex or difficult to understand.

>>1488096
Not the guy you're debating but your argument on Leibniz's best of all POSSIBLE outcomes is refuted in Candide through satire wherein Candide multiple times states something to the effect of: "if only there was something I could do to prevent this"

>>1488096
Let me expand the scammer analogy then.

One day you meet some man, and people you trust assure you he is a good man and a genius. Though you haven't really noticed his qualities yourself, they bring forth many rational arguments that convince you beyond doubt that, yes, he must be extremely intelligent and skilled and wants nothing more than to do the most good possible. Some cynics try to attack that conclusion, but there's no fundamental flaw in the reasoning. So you completely trust that he is a good man and a genius.

Eventually he comes to you with a proposal that will make you a billionaire (something involving a Nigerian prince, perhaps). Since you're convinced he is good and a genius, you do everything he tells you to do and give him access to your bank account.
Some of your friends try to point out that his scheme is extremely fishy and you shouldn't trust people so easily, but none of them can disprove the initial arguments that convinced you he is good, so you pay them no mind. And he disappears with all the money in your bank account.
Once again your friends try sounding the alarm, but you chide them because they still cannot prove beyond doubt that he is not a good man. Since you're still convinced he must be a good man, you patiently wait for him to come back with a mountain of cash.

The cash doesn't come. You're starting to worry a bit because he told you it wouldn't take more than a few weeks and he doesn't answer your calls. But you're sure he is a genius and a good man, so you think he must have a very good reason: maybe his plan takes years instead of weeks, but he knows that if he had told you to wait for years you would have turned down his offer and thus lost the chance to be a billionaire, so he lied to you.

>>1488396
Eventually you discover he spent your money to buy a gold-plated limousine. He never told you about that part of the plan. Of course, that doesn't categorically refute the arguments that convinced you he is a good man and a genius, so the limousine must be a necessarily step of the plan to make you a billionaire, even if you're too dumb and ignorant to realize how. Or maybe he isn't even planning to make you a billionaire, he just lied to you as part of his plan to do the most good possible. You ask him directly for details but he refuses to answer. You reason that he can't tell you because it would lead you to modify your behavior and ruin his plan (he is a genius, he can predict that far.) Your friends are exasperated with you, but they still can't categorically prove he isn't planning on doing the most good, so you still trust him.

>>1488397
And so the man does more and more harm to you. When he hits you and spits on you, you reason that it must be part of his plan even if you can't really understand how (it builds character, maybe?) When he kills your friends who doubted him, you conclude that their deaths prevented an even greater evil. When he rapes and kill your mother, it shows your mother had to die for the greater good as well, and though you can't understand why she had to go in this fashion, you're certain that there must have been a good reason. When you can't take his abuse anymore and run away from him, you're satisfied that he must have predicted this, too, and it's all another step in his plan to do the most good possible. And as you die in agony in some hospital bed, you finally conclude that he wasn't planning on doing you good in this life, it was a necessary setup to do you the most good possible in the afterlife.


So if you've bothered reading this far, please tell me, at what point should you actually lose faith, change your mind and realize there's no fucking way any of this happened for the greater good? At what point do you start balancing these events against the chance that your initial reasoning was flawed, even if you still can't figure out how?

>>1482683
I like him, he's fun to read. He's basically the embodiment of whole Enlightenment-era culture, with its posh salons and pseudo-intellectual masturbation.

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"I wish I had never been born!" the Brahmin remarked.

"Why so?" said I.

"Because," he replied, "I have been studying these forty years, and I find that it has been so much time lost...I believe that I am composed of matter, but I have never been able to satisfy myself what it is that produces thought. I am even ignorant whether my understanding is a simple faculty like that of walking or digesting, or if I think with my head in the same manner as I take hold of a thing with my hands...I talk a great deal, and when I have done speaking I remain confounded and ashamed of what I have said."

The same day I had a conversation with an old woman, his neighbor. I asked her if she had ever been unhappy for not understanding how her soul was made? She did not even comprehend my question. She had not, for the briefest moment in her life, had a thought about these subjects with which the good Brahmin had so tormented himself. She believed in the bottom of her heart in the metamorphoses of Vishnu, and provided she could get some of the sacred water of the Ganges in which to make her ablutions, she thought herself the happiest of women. Struck with the happiness of this poor creature, I returned to my philosopher, whom I thus addressed:

"Are you not ashamed to be thus miserable when, not fifty yards from you, there is an old automaton who thinks of nothing and lives contented?"

"You are right," he replied. "I have said to myself a thousand times that I should be happy if I were but as ignorant as my old neighbor; and yet it is a happiness which I do not desire."

This reply of the Brahmin made a greater impression on me than anything that had passed.

Rousseau a shit.

>>1488396
>Eventually he comes to you with a proposal that will make you a billionaire (something involving a Nigerian prince, perhaps). Since you're convinced he is good and a genius, you do everything he tells you to do and give him access to your bank account.
This part is absolute bullshit. You introduce things that are inexistant in our reasoning. The whole story of money is a bad attempt at ridiculing me and you should feel quite ashamed to use such rhetorical fallacies.

>The cash doesn't come. You're starting to worry a bit because he told you it wouldn't take more than a few weeks and he doesn't answer your calls. But you're sure he is a genius and a good man, so you think he must have a very good reason: maybe his plan takes years instead of weeks, but he knows that if he had told you to wait for years you would have turned down his offer and thus lost the chance to be a billionaire, so he lied to you.
This is absurd because you are accusing me of holding a belief in too high regard while I'm actually trying to riguorously strip every statements while you are just considering that a mere gaze at the human condition is enough to refute Leibniz's Theodicy.

>faith
See higher

>At what point do you start balancing these events against the chance that your initial reasoning was flawed, even if you still can't figure out how?
You are implying that your appreciation of the reality has a normative dimension and that what you consider inadequate with the idea "best of all worlds possible" truly IS inadequate while, in fact (and according to Leibniz), it is absolutely coherent with this idea

And finally I'm not "defending" Leibniz (nor am I thinking that Leibniz is actually correct), I'm just trying to be clear on how Candide didn't disproved Leibniz's Theodicy by simply showing how the world is painful and else. Basically you cannot, with pure pathos, reach the logical rigour of logos (even though you can feign its efficiency). And by the way sorry for my English

>>1488531
just accept that he made you look like a bitch, bitch

>>1488353
It's not a refutation exactly, but a demonstration of how degenerate the reasoning is:
>if I don't anything it's part of God's plan, since this is the best possible world
>of course if I help it's also part of God's plan, best possible world
>if I'm an evil monster it's still part of God's, my crimes are necessary in the best possible world
>No matter what I choose to do, I have acted in the optimal way since this is the best possible world. God led me to this conclusion anyway

>>1488531
>abloo bloo don't ridicule me
If you had a thicker skin you might have learned a valuable lesson about putting a limited weight on pure logic instead of thinking it always trumps "pathos" as you call it.

>This part is absolute bullshit. You introduce things that are inexistant in our reasoning.
If you've been logically convinced that the man is a genius and wants to do the most good, per the premise of the scenario, doesn't it follow that you can trust him with your money? No one provided you with a rational argument that categorically proved you can't trust him, after all.

>you are accusing me of holding a belief in too high regard
I'm accusing "you" (the guy in the story, really) of holding onto a prior conclusion (reached rationally in this scenario) against all odds.

This isn't just about Leibnitz, it's about putting too much faith in prior conclusions and failing to update them when it should have been obvious for a healthy mind to do so. I don't care if you accept theodicy in particular, you have a clear and easily exploitable flaw in your conception of logic itself:
>you cannot, with pure pathos, reach the logical rigour of logos
You may believe you're being rigorous but you're just being rigid and obtuse. If your reasoning leads to you to conclude that someone wants to do the most good and he proceeds to take all your money, spit on you and rape your mother, and you hang onto your conclusion because these things don't decisively refute your reasoning and you can find some way to handwave them away, you might be better served by ditching rationality altogether.

Philosophy is basically shit posting.