<aside> 💡 This essay is not about Voltaire’s ideas nor the strawman he erected to lampoon in Candide. I hadn’t read about any of those things when I read Candide, so my reactions are just my own and they came years after I’d read the book. The connection is only in my coming to realize that there might in fact be something very deeply right and good about how the cosmos is unfolding. When I realized it might just be the best way I could imagine making a universe, I recalled this phrase from Candide and went from there. This essay introduces some ideas that I’ve distilled into a few newer posts: The microcosmic GapTheory and the macrocosmic Good In Conflict, as well as the relational LoveInGapTheory. Another important extension is SeeingEvilInProgress, which was written in response to a comment referencing the piece in the APDG forums.
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Voltaire’s *Candide* contains a character named Pangloss, who throughout the story insists that “We live in the best of all possible worlds.” He supports this belief by pointing out that everything in the world is neatly made to work with everything else; for example, he’d say that we have noses shaped the way we do because it allows us to have eyeglasses. So, to him the wonderful help which eyeglasses represent shows how very good a thing it is that we have the noses we have. By this kind of reasoning he sees the whole world as most benevolently and intricately assembled for the good of human experience. Yet the entire story of Candide is written to prove Pangloss to be a fool. For as he espouses and proclaims his theoretical and naively optimistic philosophy, he and his friends experience every kind of torture and misfortune that human lives can encounter. Apparently, life is hell for them, and it’s even suggested that the reason their lives are so hellish is because they are propelled on their way in life by Pangloss’s theory. Had they not believed life to be so benevolent, they would not have set themselves up for such catastrophe at every turn.
Thus Voltaire seemed to be out to suggest that realism and pragmatism, and perhaps even some cynicism, are all necessary ingredients in the philosophy of the happy human. With this suggestion I tend to concur. Yet I have also come to learn on my own that there’s something right about Pangloss’s theory, more than it seems Voltaire would give him credit for. It’s a semantically tricky assertion, “We live in the best of all possible worlds,” so I think it’s easily confused. With some recent consideration, it finally came to me how to tease out the true value of the idea which I’ve suspected for some time.
It seems pretty clear that the reason Voltaire felt the need to shoot holes in the idea is that almost no one in all of human history has looked at the world, with its rampant suffering, chosen evils, errors, accidents, injustices, inequities, and general chaotic character, and been able to see it as good, much less “best”. This is understandable, and I’ll say right here at the beginning that to support the assertion does not mean to condone suffering, encourage evil, or in any other way to overlook or contribute to those things that we know as evil. Instead, what I’m sharing here has to do with lining up the sources of all these ideas that fly around this assertion in a way that makes it possible to embrace simultaneously an aversion to evil, a genuine and rationally supportable sense of optimism, and a deep love and respect for the life that exists here and now. It seems to me that all these are necessary philosophical building blocks for living an empowered life as a sentient being.
There are simplistic ways to support the assertion which for me don’t do the trick, and I want to mention them only to get them out of the way. One might note, “Certainly if one believes that this is the only world, then of course it must be the best one.” Or if one looks at the word “possible” and sees it as the demonstration of what’s real while believing that reality is objective, then “all possible worlds” is logically reduced to be the one we actually live in presently; so again in this way, we must by default and lack of alternatives live in the best of all possible worlds. But believing this way does not empower and does not respect what free will contributes to the progress of existence. I also think this line of thought is founded on a flaw, specifically the belief that what’s possible could ever be demonstrated in what’s real.
To get some value out of the assertion, one must really get straight just what that word “possible” is all about, and how it relates to human perception, and from there how it relates to evil and what is to be done about it.
The most important thing to recognize is that what’s possible is only what sentient beings can imagine. In other words, the realm of possibility is entirely imaginary by definition; it is never what actually is. If what’s possible were what already is, then we would immediately call it reality and we would imagine something else that isn’t real yet and call that possible instead! And I’d like to point out that the word “yet” there is extremely pivotal, even magical, for it strongly suggests a right relationship to the whole concept of time and how it relates to purpose and meaning. What we’re looking at here is the very nature of sentience and its consequent dispositions, which I find exciting.
To imagine is the amazing and unique capacity of the sentient being.
We dream, we hope, we envision the possible. These visions then guide our actions, a most holy and incredibly powerful process which we label free will or choice.
Yet something about our culture seems to cause us to embrace the fallacy that the possible is possible now rather than not yet. For example, one might say that it’s possible for things to be different than they are if only this or that were different. It should be clear that using the word possible in this way is simply contradictory. Possibility is a projection, sourced in a mind, and based on a hypothesized alteration of the variables and facts that make up, not even reality, but the subjective image of reality that’s in the mind doing the projecting. It’s the most basic and common of errors for any sentient being to confuse the image of reality which exists in his own mind (microcosm) for the posited shared reality (macrocosm) in which things actually happen. Whenever we think of possibility as being possible here and now we are expressing this confusion. It’s as if we believe that to imagine a thing is for it to be real now. Yet it’s easy to see that this is not true.
Why then do we take on a sort of angst about possibilities not being reality, complaining about “if only”s and “should be”s? There are many reasonable answers, and I’ll describe one just as an example: Punishment with impatience. We are taught to feel terrible about the separation between what others see as possible about us, and then to despise it, and in most cases to wage war on it. Other people say to us when we are young and impressionable, “You are not living up to my image of what’s possible for you. Fix it, or no love for you.” So that’s just one way in which we get the wrong idea about possibility, but I think it’s safe to say that all of them come from pressures on the psyche which come from socialization. The point is that we are taught to assume that whatever flaw we might consider can be or should have been fixed, i.e. that possibility should somehow be reality in the here and now, even though everything we know about the actual universe continually proves us wrong about that at every turn.
It’s worth taking a look at just what being at war with that gap between possibility and reality means. Most of us don’t just feel it as a directing impulse, the gradual closure and re-expansion of which is to be pursued gently over time. No, for most of us in this culture it’s truly warfare. The enemy (sometimes ourselves) fires at us with guilt and failure and weakness and debt and insufficiency and shame. We fire back with brutal attempts at control, violent struggles to exert power, attempting to beat the world into submission to our imagined possibilities, to close down all possibilities and bring things to a static conclusion. And since the gap only ever exists within our own minds, the war is ultimately always with ourselves. It’s a desperate fight at the closest range, a struggle to the death in the intimate nasty realm of feelings and thoughts and esteem.
With the hating eyes that are born from that perspective, we look out at the world imagining all the time the possibility of a better life for ourselves and for everyone, and we feel the deepest insult, the most complete sense of failure, the pain of guilt and sin which cannot be washed away. In other words, we see evil everywhere and we feel a part of it, identified deeply with it. Indeed, evil is in the eye of the beholder exactly because possibility is in the imagination of the beholder. Evil is how the hating mind interprets the gap between possibility and reality. Evil is all that stuff out there that keeps the possibility from becoming true. We see “evil people” doing always the wrong things, ever failing to make imagined possibilities come to pass, so we wage war on the people. And nature itself seems too slow and cumbersome and messy for what we imagine. Its very being doesn’t measure up to the urgency we feel, and so we wage war on it to control it and shape it into something different. Yet no matter what we do, the gap never goes away. We make a change for the better and our imaginings only shift away again to something still further off. The more we try to defeat the enemy, the larger it gets, accusing us, taunting us. It’s the monster that won’t die, the pursuing demon of nightmares from which one can never run fast enough. Living at war with the gap is hell, plain and simple.
But most important of all, being at war with that gap, all embassy with it being severed, we are not able to see it as the all-important pathway of hope which it truly is. That very gap, the awareness of possibility in light of reality, is the single most powerful, and in fact the only force for good that there is in all the universe. To apply that holy force all we must do is bravely walk the path that it presents to us in reality and in time, allowing for what is not yet to gradually become what is now, according to the laws of the unfolding universe and guided by the directed imaginings and ability to act of brilliant sentient beings. We should not attack the gap; instead we must cherish it with respect and then humbly and persistently pursue its closure. We must become comfortable with the gap, because for the gap to be gone is to be dead as a sentient being. Sentience necessarily implies experiencing that gap. Sentience consists of desire and the ability to predict based on knowledge of the past. It has direction and it has the power of projection. It’s not possible to turn these off and still exist as a soul. The directed projections which we necessarily create at all times, these define the gap that we feel. They can be the source of guilt, pain, and hate, or they can be the source of individuality, hope, and beauty.
We must learn how to stop the war and to be at peace, that is, to appreciate the gap. The gap very really is just the highest expression of ourselves, for the gap represents what we each uniquely see as possible and so it represents exactly what makes us each special and vital to the advancement of good in the world. We must unlearn the lie at the foundation of the warfare model and instead learn to embrace ourselves (as automatic gap-imaginers) in order to coax ourselves down those paths of possibility with the faith and resolution it takes to see it through.