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English translation: the one who was mocked by Voltaire for being deliriously optimistic / blissfully oblivious to facts
| 09:31 May 10, 2019 |
| English language (monolingual) [PRO] Art/Literary - Other / term | |||||||
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|  Selected response from: Daryo United Kingdom Local time: 10:53 | ||||||
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| 4 | the one who was mocked by Voltaire for being deliriously optimistic / blissfully oblivious to facts |
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| Discussion entries: 8 | |
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1 day 3 hrs confidence: 
| The one Voltaire parodied in Candide as Dr. Pangloss, who said: "All is well in this the best ... the one who was mocked by Voltaire for being deliriously optimistic / blissfully oblivious to facts Explanation: "The one Voltaire parodied in Candide as Dr. Pangloss, who said: "All is well in this the best possible of worlds."? I wonder who is Dr. Pangloss? the short explanation: a character in a satirical book entitled "Candide, ou l'Optimisme" dating from 1759, written by a French philosopher named Voltaire. But I doubt that these facts are going to be much helpful in themselves. Only when you put them in the context of French and European history, of the life and ways of thinking of Voltaire do they start to make sense. But that is far from being a short story. As you could have guessed it from the interviewer's question, Voltaire used this character to mock Leibnitz's philosophy of optimism. Throughout the whole story of Candide all sort of horrors keep happening while the character of Dr. Pangloss keeps defending Leibnitz's philosophy of optimism by repeating the mantra of "tout est au mieu dans le meilleur des mondes" (all is the best it could be in the best of possible worlds). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltaire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Wilhelm_Leibniz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755_Lisbon_earthquake so... getting close to "what this sentence means?" (1) Kadare mentioned Leibnitz as "the first one to to make a serious study of Albanian language" (2) the reaction from the interviewer was to bring to attention another unrelated aspect of Leibnitz's work, his "philosophy of optimism" summarised in a slightly oversimplified way by "All is well in this the best possible of worlds.", that philosophy being best known for having been mocked by Voltaire through the character of Dr. Pangloss. The study of Albanian language and the philosophy of optimism being two completely unrelated facets of Leibnitz's work, we can only guess what would make the interviewer jump from one to the other. There might be some clues in the rest of the interview. Maybe an ironical reminder that Albania at the time when Kadare was writing was not exactly "the best of all possible worlds"? |
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