The Problem Of Evil In Voltaire's Candide

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While more conspicuously a response of disposition to Philosophical Optimism, Candide, Or Optimism, also discloses Voltaire’s personal beliefs on one’s role in society. The components of extreme calamity and Candide’s failure to live a relatively perfect life alludes to the fact that one must nurture their own virtues and exist simply. Disasters fall upon Candide - the protagonist and titular character; these misfortunes serve to explicate the faults within favored doctrines (such as the solutions to the Problem of Evil), but also to imply that our compliance in leaving our lives in the hands of fate or an otherworldly god when the responsibility evidently lies to one’s self. Cultivating our gardens - or developing dexterity, and remaining self-concerned are the principle factors that Voltaire insists are needed to live a subjectively happy life.
Voltaire suggests that the amendment of personal strife exists in simply ridding it of stronger evils, these evils not so overt as rape or war (those of which Voltaire …show more content…
Enriching our prowess is what the Turk – the modest man in the end of the novella – suggests is the answer to subsisting “…for when man was put into the Garden of Eden, he was put there with the idea that he should work the land; and this proves that man was not meant to be idle” (Voltaire 128). The Turk proposes that the concept of living completely self-satisfied and unchallenged suffices as a plausible reason that people find themselves unhappy and unfulfilled. While attaining wealth is often an achievement sought out by many, the Turk reminds us that remaining idle and halting our developments are major reasons we as a race find ourselves crestfallen and lonely; we must first refine ourselves before attempting to change any other aspects of society. The Turk also
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