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Ethos
Chapter 20
Explanation and Analysis—Pangloss and Martin:
The two philosophers presented in the novella, Professor Pangloss and Martin, serve as foils for each other, distinguished by both their contrasting personalities and their opposing philosophies. While Professor Pangloss is a philosophical optimist who believes firmly that Earth is “the best of all possible worlds” (in accordance with German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz), Martin, whose depiction is based upon the French philosopher Pierre Bayle, offers a far more skeptical view when Candide confronts him:
[W]hen I cast an eye on this globe, or rather on this little ball, I cannot help thinking that God has abandoned it to some malignant being [...] I scarcely ever knew a city that did not desire the destruction of a neighbouring city, nor a family that did not wish to exterminate some other family. Everywhere the weak execrate the powerful, before whom they cringe; and the powerful beat them like sheep whose wool and flesh they sell. A million regimented assassins, from one extremity of Europe to the other, get their bread by disciplined depredation and murder [...]”
Martin offers a shockingly irreligious view of the world by the standards of Voltaire’s day, suggesting that God not only declines to involve himself in earthly affairs but has even “abandoned” the world “to some malignant building.”
He follows this suggestion by noting the various forms of conflict, injustice, and violence that mar human life. His perspective, then, conflicts dramatically with Pangloss’s faith, treated as absurd by Voltaire, in a divinely ordered and optimal world.
Related Themes:
