A question occurred to me while reading Candide: Is Pangloss only a critique of Leibniz’s best of all possible worlds tautology, or is Pangloss a walking critique of logical thinking itself? My current thinking is that Candide is a more ambiguous discussion of the nature of human existence, where physical suffering is used to debunk the so-called perfect world, but also human longing leads to the abandonment of the nearly perfect Eldorado.

Logic, a favorite of enlightenment thinking, is what Pangloss is using in his assertion that this is the best of all possible worlds. Reminiscent of the contemporary new age assertion that everything happens for a reason, I am interested in the discussion as it highlight the impossibility of perfection, in fact it reveals the absurdity of the idea of a perfect society. Yet even as Candide comes up against example after example of reasons to question the notion that this is the best of all possible worlds, he also experiences Eldorado, a tiny isolated utopia where the gems and minerals Europeans view as riches are not seen as anything special. Despite its peace and ease, Candide choses not to stay in Eldorado. We could conclude from his decision to leave that even the seemingly perfect garden is lacking something important, kind of like the way the initial paradise in Rasselas was unsatisfying.

So then I was wondering if Voltaire is using the three gardens, at the beginning, middle, and end of the book, to argue that at least happiness is possible in this world. Maybe seeking perfection is the enemy of happiness. Candide gets kicked out of the first garden, enjoys the Eldorado garden but chooses to leave, and finally is resigned to the third garden where manual labor allows for some contentedness and freedom from philosophical speculations.

Adorno and Horkheimer assert “On their way toward modern science human beings have discarded meaning. The concept is replaced by the formula, the cause by rules and probability. Causality was only the last philosophical concept on which scientific criticism tested its strength, because it alone of the old ideas still stood in the way of such criticism, the latest secular form of the creative principle” (3). The formulaic nature of the assertion that this is the best of all possible worlds is exactly where meaning is lost: Because this is the world that exists, it is better than any imaginary world.

Logic is central to utopian thinking because so much of utopian thought is about system building. The argument seems to be that if we could just be more rational, we would arrive at our destined perfection. But it is the emotional that is lacking, or maybe even the non-rational. It is certainly illogical for Candide to leave Eldorado, so why does he do it? Because the idea of returning to Europe with great wealth is irresistible, or the idea of living without his love spoils what is otherwise a paradise? Either way, it is not logic that he persues, and maybe the suggestion that while a perfect society is possible, it is not actually desirable.

What is most promising to me about this investigation is the question of alternatives to logic. If logic and perfectability fail us, what choice to do we have other than to be content with society as it is? Or to pursue non-rational approaches to living together as a society? This suggests other ways of knowing. Adorno and Horkheimer describe Bacon’s idea of enlightenment “The “happy match” between human understanding and the nature of things that he envisaged is a patriarchal one: the mind, conquering superstition, is to rule over disenchanted nature” (2). Investigating the irrational could suggest explanations for why we always leave the perfect garden. Contrary to Enlightenment thinking, the perfect society for humans would have to have space for the irrational, but is Candide’s abandonment of philosophy an argument for the non-rational society? It seems more like a survival tactic for all the the trauma he faced throughout the novel.

In my readings of utopian texts this semester I have been sensitive to the aesthetics of science—that is, our subjective perception of science and the means by which this perception colors our interpretation of the world. By the nineteenth century, a scientific aesthetic had become relatively fixed, partly due to the obvious physical presence of a number of disruptive technologies such as steam power, electricity, and applied chemistry. As we have seen, however, subjective perceptions of science in the seventeenth century were much more fluid. Depending on the observer, natural philosophy could be a social force that upheld fixed hierarchies, as in Bacon’s New Atlantis, or could facilitate a more disruptive epistemology, as in Cavendish’s Blazing World. This indeterminacy is similar to the unfixed quality we’ve observed in discourses about race from the period, and differs profoundly from the relatively fixed stereotypes about “projectors” and “antiquarians” that emerge in the eighteenth century.

One central concept that might serve as a locus for these general observations is air. Natural philosophy in this period is deeply concerned with pneuma, a Greek concept that meant “wind” or “sprit” and was often used to describe the breath, as in our modern “pneumonia.” Early modern texts approached air in ways that often conjoined the spirit, as in “numinous”—and the element of air, as in the case of the New Atlanteans being taken for “a land of magicians, that sent forth spirits of the air into all parts, to bring them news and intelligence of other countries.” A similar conception of pneuma is given in the interactions between Prospero and Ariel in The Tempest, published about sixteen years before New Atlantis. By the mid-1600s, Cavendish is still clearly influenced by these conceptions of early modern magic—most clearly in her interactions with “disembodied spirits”—but this portrayal of air and spirit is elaborately justified by the scientific theories laid out in her Observations.

Fundamentally, early modern science was as much about explicating spiritual phenomena as it was about exploring physical laws. Indeed, Cavendish and others explicitly conflate the two, contending that the spirit was a material entity. Most interesting to me, however, is the alteration that takes place between this period and the early eighteenth century. Swift strives to explode the validity of both science and spirit in Gulliver’s Travels—literally, in the case of the dog fatally subjected to inflation by a set of bellows and left to be resuscitated “by the same operation.”

For my paper, I intend to trace these conjoined concepts of spirit and air. I’ll also be drawing on Hook and Boyle’s (often gruesome) experiments with vacuum chambers and the investigations of van Helmont, the originator of the term “gas,” into pneumatic chemistry and vitalism. I haven’t nailed down the exact angle I’ll take, but I’m starting to get a sense of the means by which this conception of pneuma changed from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth century, and I’m looking forward to investigating further.