Candide
I enjoyed reading Candide. I found the paper a little harder though. Every definition that I could come up with for Enlightenment seemed to go against something in Candide. Voltaire was having such a good time making fun of the optimism and pessimism. It is almost hard to see him as an enlightenment thinker.
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It’s easy to get caught up in the hyperbole of Candide and the pessimism vs. optimism, but I think there’s a lot of the Enlightenment in there, too. Think of our Declaration of Independence, written at the height of that period, which proclaims our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
That said, I would agree that Voltaire had a lot of his own axes to grind, and in spite of him making fun of the rich and snobby, I think there was something of the elitist in him, too. (Meaning I don’t think he had much truck with the riff-raff in his personal life.)
I agree that it was difficult to pin down a definition of enlightenment for the response paper without copying something from a book. I also found the same problem when I tried to write how Candide was written and the characteristics of the Enlightenment…they didn’t go together all the time. Do you think that was on purpose so Voltaire could make a point since his work Candide was not (according to him) his masterpiece….??