Candide
...s claims that it is alright that he has a life threatening disease, because if not for the horrible disease, they would be deprived of the luxury of chocolate. He says that “'private misfortunes make the general good, so that the more private misfortunes there are, the greater the general good'” (Voltaire 9.) “The existentialists say at one that man is anguish. What that means is this: the man who involves himself and who realizes that he is not only the person he chooses to be, but also a lawmaker who is, at the same time, choosing all mankind as well as himself, cannot help feeling of his total and deep responsibility” (NR 667.) Existentialists believe that man lives in anguish. An existentialist would have been unlike Pangloss and upon his realization that he had contracted an STD, he would have simply claimed that it was his own fault for acquiring it, and that he must have truly wanted it if he were to put himself in that situation. Peter Boil said, “If you do something that may be sensible, it is because for some reason you don't want.” While the Enlightenment philosophers believe that good will eventually come out of every negative, or any other, situation, the existentialists believe that man must learn to deal with his despair. Those of the Enlightenment believe that the events that occur in our lives our inevitable, no matter how we try and make a difference, and that those inevitable events will all lead to the greater good. In Candide, a kind companion of Pangloss and Candide, the Anabaptist, is thrown overboard a ship at sea. “Candide drew near and saw his benefactor, who rose above the water one moment and was then swallowed up forever. He was going to jump after him, but was prevented by the philosopher Pangloss, who demonstrated to him that the Bay of Lisbon had made on purpose for the Anabaptist to be drowned” (Voltaire 10.) The Enlightenment philosopher Dr. Pangloss believed that it was meant to be that the Anabaptist drowned in the Bay of Lisbon; that it was fate. The existentialists believe that man has control of his own actions, but that everything else is out of his hands. The first sentence in Sartre's essay “Existentialism” is “Man is nothing but what he makes of himself” (NR 666.) Also, “Ponge, in a very fine article, has said, 'Man is the future of man'” (NR 669.) The existentialists believe that man is responsible for everything that happens to him. Another good example of “optimism” portrayed in Candide is when they arrive at Lisbon and upon their arrival there occurs an earthquake. “The following day...they joined with others in relieving those inhabitants who had escaped death. Some whom they had succoured, gave them as a good a dinner as they could in such disastrous circumstances; true, the repast was mournful, and the company moistened their bread with tears; but Pangloss consoled them, assuring them that things could not be otherwise” (Voltaire 11.) Pangloss says “For...all that is for the best. If there is a volcano at Lisbon, it cannot be elsewhere. It is impossible that things should be other than they are; for everything is right” (Voltaire 11.) “When all is said and done, what we are accused of, at bottom, is not our pessimism, but an optimistic toughness. If people throw up to us our works of fiction in which we write about people that our soft, weak, cowardly, and sometimes even downright bad, it's not because these people are soft, weakly, cowardly, or bad; because if we were to say, as Zola did, that they are that way because of heredity, the workings of environment, society, because of biological or psychological determinism, people would be reassured. They would say, 'Well, that's what we're like, no one can do anything about it.' But when the existentialist writes about a coward, he said that this coward is responsible for his cowardice. He's not like that because he has a cowardly heart of lung or brain; he'...