VOLTAIRE'S DILEMMA: METHOD VERSUS METAPHYSICS

We have seen that in the "Sixième discours" of the Discours en vers sur l'homme, Voltaire endorses Pope's condemnation of generic pride, a condemnation that was grounded on the doctrine of the Great Chain of Being. The Great Chain, however, flies in the face of Voltaire's Newtonianism in more than one respect. Newton's theory of gravitation, unlike Descartes's theory of vortices and the older Aristotelian physics, postulates a universe that is not a plenum but that contains empty space, and a principle of attraction that, accordingly, can operate across vacuums. The Great Chain of Being, which presupposes plenitude and the absence of gaps, on the other hand, may be seen to be tied to the older conception of physics. And indeed, when Voltaire eventually came to reject the Chain of Being outright, he, like Johnson, would do so partly on the ground that it was inconsistent with the Newtonian physics of vacuity.37 But when he wrote the Discours, Voltaire had not yet rejected the

Great Chain, and although he had attacked the Cartesian plenum at length in the Elémens de la philosophie de Newton,38 he was not yet ready to bring the critique of the plenum to bear on the philosophy of cosmic optimism.

Although the Voltaire of the Discours is not yet ready to discard the Great Chain of Being or to confront its relationship to Newtonian physics, he is acutely troubled by its relationship to Newtonian and Baconian epistemology. The Chain is not observable; it is not verifiable by any experimental procedures. It is the product of a grandiose leap beyond the data of experience.

Voltaire's view of intellectual method, as we have seen, does not allow him to accept this sort of reasoning. He would like to be able to invoke the Great Chain in support of his view of human nature, but he cannot. The poet challenges himself by means of an interlocutor:

"Montre-moi, si tu peux, cette chaîne invisible
Du monde des esprits et du monde sensible;
Cet ordre si cach<A0233. de rant d'êtres divers,
Que Pope après Platon crut voir dans l'univers."

Show me, if you can, this invisible chain, stretching from the spiritual world to the one that we perceive, this hidden order, made up of so many diverse beings, which Pope, following Plato, thought that he could see.

But he cannot answer this challenge:

Vous me pressez en vain; cette vaste science,
Ou passe ma portée, ou me force au silence.
Mon esprit, reserré sous le compas français,
N'a point la liberté des Grecs et des Anglais.

You press me in vain; this vast knowledge is either beyond my ken or humbles me into silence. My mind, enclosed by narrow French horizons, is not as freewheeling as the minds of the Greeks and the English.

Unable to rise to the metaphysical heights of Pope, Voltaire is forced into silence: "Pope adroit de tout dire, et moi je dois me taire" (DVH, 415; 416) (Pope can say whatever he pleases, but I must hold my tongue).

This, then, is Voltaire's dilemma: he accepts Pope's view of

human nature and of humanity's place in the order of things, but he is prevented from setting forth the theoretical foundation upon which this view is built. If he remains silent, he leaves his entire poem without its philosophical justification. But how can he embrace Pope's metaphysical hypothesis unless, like Pope, he hypothesizes?

Voltaire's solution comes immediately after the line just quoted, "moi je dois me taire," and it comes in the form of a fable. The fable has as its most significant antecedent a couplet from Pope's Essay: "While Man exclaims, 'See all things for my use!' / 'See man for mine!' replies a pampered goose" (Essay, 3, 44-45). While Voltaire's elaboration of this conceit follows Pope in undermining the anthropocentric hypothesis, it does so in such a way as to avoid asserting the hypothesis that stands in opposition to the foolish self-importance of men and geese—namely, the hypothesis of the Chain of Being.

Purporting to be a translation, by a Jesuit in Peking, of a Chinese book, the fable deals in the first place with various animals that think the world was created for their benefit. The mouse thinks that

"Ces montagnes de lard, éternels aliments,
Sont pour nous en ces lieux jusqu'à ia fin des temps."

"These mountains of bacon, endless supply of food, have been placed here for our everlasting benefit."

and that mice are God's masterpiece, "la fin, le but de tes ouvrages." As for cats, they have been put on earth for the benefit of mice:

"Les chats sont dangereux et prompts à nous manger;
Mais c'est pour nous instruire et pour nous corriger."
(DVH, 416)

"Cats are dangerous and eager to eat us; but this serves to instruct us and to correct our faults."

The mouse is followed by other animals who make the same sorts of claims for their respective species. The ass's claim that the world was made for the benefit of asses is based largely on the fact that the members of his species are served by humans:

"L'homme est né mon esclave, il me panse, il me ferre,
Il m'étrille, il me lave, il prévient roes désirs,
Il bâtit mon sérail, il conduit mes plaisirs."

"Man is born to serve me. He grooms me, he gives me shoes, he combs me, he washes me, he anticipates my desires, he provides me with a harem, he arranges my pleasures."

This human being who grooms him and ministers to his needs is seen by the pampered ass as envious of the gifts that nature has conferred upon asses:

"Et je ris, quand je vois cet esclave orgueilleux
Envier l'heureux don que j'ai reçu des cieux."

"And I laugh when I see this proud slave envying the blessed gift that I have received from heaven."

The series of presumptuous animals is capped with the appearance of man, who makes his anthropocentric claims, reminiscent of those that Pope had put into the mouth of pride:

"Je suis puissant et sage;
Cieux, terres, éléments, tout est pour mon usage:
L'océan fut formé pour porter mes vaisseaux;
Les vents sont mes courriers, les astres mes flambeaux.
Ce globe qui des nuits blanchit les sombres voiles
Croît, décroît, fuit, revient, et préside aux étoiles:
Moi, je préside à tout." (DVH, 416; 417)

I am powerful and wise; the sky, the earth, the elements, everything exists for my benefit. The ocean was formed to carry my ships. The winds are my couriers, the stars my torches. Like the orb that brightens the dark veils of night, that waxes, wanes, departs, and returns, that rules over the stars, so do I rule over everything.

At this point in Voitaire's "récit veritable," we are in a position to see how the "Chinese" fable represents a resolution of Voltaire's dilemma. It must first be noted, however, that the resolution cannot lie in the mere fictionality of the fable. For according to the traditional view, a fable's fictionality is merely a veneer over its deeper philosophical truth. Houdar de la Motte, in his Discours sur la fable (1719), put the matter as follows:

Il faut donc se proposer d'abord quelque verité à faire entendre; et c'est l'avantage particulier de la fable d'y forcer, pour ainsi dire, son auteur. En beaucoup d'autres ouvrages on peut se déterminer parce que les faits ont d'agréable ou de touchant . . . sans aucune vûe d'y renfermer quelque instruction. Mais ce serait une chose monstrueuse d'imaginer une fable sans dessein d'instruire. Son essence est de . . . signifier . . . quelqu'autre chose que ce qu'elle dit à la lettre. . . . La fable est une philosophie déguisée, qui ne badine que pour instruire, et qui instruit toujours d'autant mieux qu'elle amuse.39

One must begin by having in mind some truth that one wishes to transmit; the spedal advantage of the fable is that it demands this, as it were, of the author. With many other genres, it is enough for the author to have in mind some incidents that are charming or touching . . . without any design to include some sort of lesson. But to imagine a fable that is not designed to instruct is to imagine something monstrous. A fable's very essence is to . . . signify . . . something other than what it says literally. . . . The fable is a disguised philosophy, one that is fun only in order to be instructive and that is more instructive than it is amusing.

What the fable says "á la lettre' is, of course, what it says about particular characters and events. The reader of La Fontaine's "Le Corbeau et le Renard," for example, recognizes that the particular characters and events are fictive, that statements about the fox and the crow and their activities do not ask to be believed. But the reader also recognizes that when the fox makes general assertions about the nature of flattery, these assertions are meant to be seen as the author's own and as claiming to be true. Thus, the essence of the traditional fable is its implicit or explicit generalizations about the world.

Since the fable was conventionally recognized as a vehicle for making general statements that purported to be true, Voltaire could not avoid hypothesizing simply by placing his hypotheses in a fable. To resolve his dilemma, he needed to produce a special sort of fable, one that not only refrained from claiming to be true with regard to its particular assertions about individual characters and events but that even went so far as to refrain from claiming to be true with regard to its larger hypotheses, its generalizations about the world. And it needed to do so in such a way as to underline Voltaire's sympathy for Pope's hypothesis. It needed, in short, to support a hypothesis without hypothesizing. Voltaire began to

develop such a fable, though in a tentative and partial form, in the "Chinese tale" that we have been examining.

We can more readily understand the significance of Voltaire's procedure if we compare his view of hypothesis to the modern one. As I indicated earlier, modern theories of the role of hypothesis in scientific or, more generally, intellectual method, while insisting that hypotheses are indispensable, would not challenge Voltaire's contention that a hypothesis is an imaginative leap, a fiction. According to W. V. Quine and J. S. Ullian, for example, "What we try to do in framing a hypothesis is to explain some otherwise unexplained happenings by inventing a plausible story, a plausible description or history of a relevant portion of the world."40 A conventional extension of this view would be that the best hypothesis is the best story, the one that is most plausible. Accordingly, an efficient way to attack a given hypothesis would be by offering a better hypothesis, a second story that is more plausible than the first.

But a more plausible hypothesis, in addition to attacking a prior hypothesis, may also advance its own truth claims. Rather than merely undermining the other hypothesis, it may offer to supplant it. Such a double function, however, would be unwelcome, if, like Voltaire, one considered hypothesizing to be a violation of proper intellectual method. It is also possible, however, for a second hypothesis to be no more and no less plausible than the hypothesis that it is contesting. Such a counterhypothesis, while making no truth claims of its own, would undermine the plausibility of the original hypothesis. For if two opposing hypotheses are equally plausible, then there are no rational grounds for accepting either one as an adequate explanation of the data. Thus, one can undermine a hypothesis without seriously offering one's own alternative and without accepting the validity of hypothetical reasoning.

In the first part of his fable, the part described thus far, Voltaire attacks the hypothesis that the world and everything in it exist for the benefit of humankind. He does so by inventing other stories, counterhypotheses, to the effect that the world exists for the sake of mice, or ducks, or sheep, or asses. The poet does not subscribe to any of these stories; rather, he is suggesting that it is no more reasonable to believe that the world was created for humans than to believe that it was created for mice or asses. The stories serve to cancel one another out and thus to undermine the plausibility of the anthropocentric hypothesis.

The sort of fable that emerges from my analysis is one that is fictional not only at the level at which fables are conventionally fictional namely, the level of assertions about particular characters and events—but also at the deeper level at which fables conventionally make assertions about the world. This deeper fiction, however, while not purporting to be true, purports to be no less true than some other assertions about the world, which it thereby undermines. Such fables I call counterhypothetical fictions.41

Voltaire's counterhypothetical fictions, his stories about presumptuous animals, allow him, as we have seen, to attack the anthropocentric hypothesis without implicating himself in the crime of framing positive hypotheses. But they do nothing against the other hypothesis that Voltaire, following Pope, wished to attack—namely, the querulous view that humans could be and ought to be free of their limitations and hence happier than they are. For although anthropocentric claims are rendered ridiculous by the equally plausible claims of the representatives of other species, the assorted animals say nothing about what they could be or ought to be, and their pronouncements have no logical or rhetorical force vis-à-vis human dissatisfaction. When, therefore, the human character, after making his anthropocentric claim, goes on to say, "Je ne suis point encor ce que je devrais être" (I am not yet that which I should be), he steps outside the counterhypothetical structure of the fable.

In undertaking to answer this complaint, and a longer version of it spoken by another character, the remainder of the "Chinese Tale" employs the procedures of traditional fables; it has characters who, speaking for the author, utter general assertions that purport to be true. Thus the Chinese divinity Tien responds to the man's complaint by pointing out that it is he, the god, for whom all else has been made. Everything is as it should be, he declares:

"D'un parfait assemblage instruments imparfaits,
Dans votre rang places demeurez satisfaits."

"An imperfect part of a perfect whole, you should be content with the rank in which you have been placed."

But despite this injunction, a Chinese philosopher sees fit to complain about man's place in the scheme of things:

"Pourquoi suis-je en un point reserré par le temps?
Mes jours devraient aller par delà vingt mille ans;

Ma taille pour le moins dut avoir cent coudées;
D'où vient que je ne puls, plus prompt que mes idées,
Voyager dans la lune, et réformer son cours?
Pourquoi faut-il dormir un grand tiers de mes jours?
Pourquoi ne puis-je, au gré de ma pudique flamme,
Faire au moins en trois mois cent enfants à ma femme?
Pourquoi fus-je en un jour si las de ses attraits?"
(DVH, 417; 417-18)

Why should I be confined to a moment of time? I should be able to live twenty thousand years and more. I should be at least a hundred cubits tall. Why should I not be able, in the twinkle of an eye, to travel to the moon, and to change its orbit? Why should I have to sleep through a full third of my life? Why shouldn't my wife be able to gratify my modest passion and have a hundred or more of my children in three months' time? Why must I lose my desire for her after only a day?

In response, the exasperated god has an angel instruct the philosopher as to why things are the way they are. The angel explains, in words rather reminiscent of the Leibnizian doctrine of compossibility, that to fulfill the philosopher's grandiose desires would not be consistent with other features of the universe, that the earth, for example, would not be able to provide nourishment for the gigantic creatures that the philosopher would have humans become. In sum, the angel explains

"Que l'homme n'est point fait pour ces vastes désirs . . .
Que le travail, les maux, la mort sont nécessaires."
(DVH, 418)

That man is not made for such extravagant desires . . . that toil, disease, and death are his necessary lot.

Thus, through a Chinese god and his angel in a "Chinese" fable, Voltaire has, without explicitly mentioning the Great Chain of Being, nonetheless introduced important aspects of the speculative theodicy upon which both Leibniz and Pope had based their views of human nature. And in so doing, he has dropped the counter-hypothetical procedure by which he had, in the first part of his fable, begun to resolve his dilemma.

Now, I have already pointed out that Voltaire's counterhypothetical fiction of the proud animals is effective only against the anthropocentric hypothesis and not against the querulous hypothesis that human beings could be (and ought to be) free of limitations and

hence happier than they are. It may be that, in the absence of an appropriate counterhypothesis to deal with this second hypothesis, Voltaire felt the need to fall back on philosophizing through the procedure of conventional fables—even though this procedure compromised his attempt to avoid hypothesizing. But, without committing ourselves to speculations concerning Voltaire's motivations for this shift, we may observe that if Voltaire could have devised a better story, a counterhypothetical fiction that could undermine both uncongenial hypotheses at once, there would have been no need to fall back on positive hypothesizing. With such a fiction, the resolution of the dilemma of the Discours would be complete. And it is precisely such a fiction that we find in Micromégas.