Voltaire
Crush intolerance with reason and irony.
Voltaire (1694 – 1778, France) : enlightenment and empiricism. Reason must judge everything, religion included. It shows that an order as skilful as the world's implies an intelligent maker: Voltaire believes in God, but not in dogmas or Churches. On AskPhilosophy: 5 reconstructed arguments, 4 quotes checked word for word against the original texts, and 3 common beliefs examined; every text carries an authenticity badge (written by the author, posthumous, student notes, reported, apocryphal).
Why he matters
He brought Locke and Newton to France and invented a new weapon for philosophy: irony. His fight for Jean Calas, a Protestant wrongly executed in 1762, made him the great voice of toleration. Candide remains one of the most widely read philosophy books in the world.
His times
Twice imprisoned in the Bastille as a young man, exiled to England (1726-1728), he later lived far from Paris, near the Swiss border, at Ferney. His Philosophical Letters were burned (1734). Almost all his fighting books appeared without his name, and he often denied writing them.
His positions
click a row to see the evidenceA convinced deist: the order of the world proves an intelligent maker, "without fearing that I shall be obliged to change my opinion". But he rejects revelations and dogmas, and admits he does not know whether this God is infinite or created matter.
A follower of Locke: we know nothing except through experience, and there are no innate ideas.
A moderate scepticism: about God, the soul or the origin of evil, we move "from suspicion to suspicion" and reach only "very few certainties". He presents himself as an "ignorant philosopher".
He refuses to decide: "I am body and I think, I know no more." With Locke, he holds that God could have given thought to matter, against Descartes's dualism.
Everything has a cause, our volitions included. Being free is only being able to do what one wills: "Your will is not free, but your actions are." He admits he thought otherwise when young.
All peoples share the same notion of just and unjust, independent of laws and religions. He believes it willed by the Supreme Being, but acquired through reason and feeling, not innate.
Reason examines and judges; the will does not choose what we believe: "We are here not to talk, but to examine." His tributes to revelation are mostly read as caution or irony.
Reason does not tell us why we are here ("the book of fate is closed to us"). What remains is hope in a future and useful action: "we must cultivate our garden". Readers debate what this ending means.
Against Pascal he takes "the side of humanity": we are "neither so wicked nor so unhappy" as Pascal says. But he also sees humans made savage by fanaticism.
He admires England, which limited the power of kings and lets thirty religions live in peace. He defends freedom of thought and equal justice, but not democracy: he relies rather on enlightened princes.
A natural law, the same everywhere, whose principle is the golden rule: "Do not that to another which thou wouldst not he should do unto thee." He also judges morality by its usefulness to society.