In 1756, Swiss-born philosopher and political theorist Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) wrote a letter responding to Voltaire’s poem on the Lisbon earthquake—a poem in which Voltaire expressed a mix of intellectual and emotional discontent with the idea that human suffering on the scale of Lisbon’s can be reconciled with the existence of an omnipotent, beneficent God (see previous post). Rousseau’s response to Voltaire includes arguments centering on the deleterious effects of the construction choices of Lisbon’s residents (“nature did not construct twenty thousand houses of six to seven stories there, and …if the inhabitants of this great city had been more equally spread out and more lightly lodged, the damage would have been much less and perhaps of no account”), but the letter looks beyond the particular case of Lisbon to consider the problem of evil more generally.
“Letter from J.-J. Rousseau to Mr. de Voltaire, August 18, 1756”
… I expected from [your poem on the disaster of Lisbon] some results more worthy of the humanity which appears to have inspired you to write it. You reproach Pope and Leibniz for condemning our misfortunes, in maintaining that everything is good, and you so amplify the picture of our miseries that you aggravate the feeling of them: instead of the consolations for which I hoped, you only cause me to be afflicted. One might say that you fear that I do not see well enough how unfortunate I am; and it seems you expect to placate me a good deal by proving to me that everything is bad.
Do not deceive yourself on this, Sir; it happens entirely to the contrary of what you maintain. This optimism that you find so cruel, nevertheless consoles me in the very miseries that you depict to me as intolerable.
Pope’s poem sweetens my troubles and leads me to patience; yours embitters my pains, invites me to grumbling, and depriving me of everything beyond a troubled hope, it reduces me to despair… “Man, have patience,” Pope and Leibniz tell me. “Your ills are a necessary consequence of your nature, and of the constitution of this universe. The eternal and beneficent Being who governs you would have liked to safeguard you from them. Of all the economies possible, he has chosen the one which combined the least bad with the most good, or (to say the same thing more bluntly, if it is necessary) if he has not done better, it is that he could not do better.”
What does your poem now tell me? “Suffer forever, wretches. If there is a God who has created you, no doubt he is omnipotent; he could have prevented all your ills: do not hope then that they will ever end; for one would not know how to see why you exist, if it is not to suffer and die.” I do not know what such a doctrine could possess that is more consoling than optimism and even fatalism. As for me, I acknowledge it appears to me even crueler than Manichaeism. If perplexity concerning the origin of evil forces you to alter one of the perfections of God, why do you wish to justify his power at the expense of his goodness? If it is necessary to choose between two errors, I like the first one even better.
You do not wish, Sir, that your work be regarded as a poem against Providence; and I shall indeed restrain myself from giving it this name, although you have characterized as a book against the human race a writing wherein I pleaded the cause of the human race against itself. I know the distinction that must be made between an author’s intentions, and the consequences that can be drawn from his doctrine. The just defense of myself obliges me only to have you observe, that in depicting human miseries, my purpose was excusable, and even praiseworthy, as I believe, for I showed men how they caused their miseries themselves, and consequently how they might avoid them.
I do not see that one can seek the source of moral evil other than in man free, perfected, thereby corrupted; and as for physical ills, if sensitive and impassive matter is a contradiction, as it seems to me, they are inevitable in any system of which man is a part; and then the question is not at all why is man not perfectly happy, but why does he exist? Moreover I believe I have shown that with the exception of death, which is an evil almost solely because of the preparations which one makes preceding it, most of our physical ills are still our own work. Without departing from your subject of Lisbon, admit, for example, that nature did not construct twenty thousand houses of six to seven stories there, and that if the inhabitants of this great city had been more equally spread out and more lightly lodged, the damage would have been much less, and perhaps of no account. All of them would have fled at the first disturbance, and the next day they would have been seen twenty leagues from there, as gay as if nothing had happened; but it is necessary to remain, to be obstinate about some hovels, to expose oneself to new quakes, because what is left behind is worth more than what can be brought along. How many unfortunate people have perished in this disaster because of one wanting to take his clothes, another his papers, another his money? Is it not known that the person of each man has become the least part of himself, and that it is almost not worth the trouble of saving it when one has lost all the
rest?
You would have wished (and who would not have wished the same) that the quake had occurred in the middle of a wilderness rather than in Lisbon… Should it be said then that the order of the world ought to change according to our whims, that nature ought to be subjugated to our laws, and that in order to interdict an earthquake in some place, we have only to build a City there?…
You think along with Erasmus that few people would want to be reborn in the same conditions in which they have lived; …whom should I believe that you have consulted on that? Some rich people, perhaps, sated by false pleasures, but ignorant of genuine ones, always bored with life and always trembling over losing it; perhaps some literary people, of all the orders of men the most sedentary, the most unhealthy, the most reflective, and consequently the most unhappy. Do you want to find some men of better composition, or at least commonly more sincere, and who, forming the greatest number, at least because of that ought to be heard by preference? Consult an honest bourgeois who will have spent an obscure and tranquil life without projects and without ambition; a good artisan, who lives commodiously by his trade; even a peasant, not from France, where it is claimed that it is necessary to cause them to die of misery, in order for them to enable us to live, but of the country, for example, where you are, and generally of any free country…
On the good of the whole, preferable to that of its parts, you have man say: “I ought to be as dear to my master, I, a thinking and feeling being, as the planets which probably do not feel at all.” Undoubtedly this material universe ought not to be dearer to its Author than a single thinking and feeling being. But the system of this universe which produces, conserves, and perpetuates all the thinking and feeling beings ought to be dearer to him than a single one of these beings; he can therefore, despite all his goodness, or rather through his very goodness, sacrifice something of the happiness of individuals to the conservation of the whole. I believe, I hope, I am worth more in the eyes of God than the land of a planet; but if the planets are inhabited, as is probable, why would I be worth more in his eyes than all the inhabitants of Saturn? These ideas have been nicely turned to ridicule. It is certain that all the analogies favor this population, and that it is only human pride that might be opposed. But this population being assumed, the conservation of the universe seems to have, for God himself, a morality which multiplies itself by the number of inhabited worlds…
To return, Sir, to the system that you attack, I believe that one cannot examine it suitably without distinguishing carefully particular evil, whose existence no Philosopher has ever denied, from the general evil that the optimist denies. It is not a question of knowing whether each one of us suffers or not; but whether it be good that the universe exists, and whether our ills be inevitable in the constitution of the universe. Thus . . . in place of Everything is good, it would be more worthwhile to say: The whole is good, or Everything is good for the whole. Then it is quite evident that no man would know how to give direct proof either for or against; for these proofs depend on a perfect knowledge of the constitution of the world and of the purpose of its Author, and this knowledge is incontestably above human intelligence. The true principles of optimism can be drawn neither from the properties of matter, nor from the mechanics of the universe, but only by inference from the perfections of God who presides over everything; so that one does not prove the existence of God by the system of Pope, but the system of Pope by the existence of God, and it is incontrovertible that from the question of Providence is derived that of the origin of evil. But if these two questions have not been better treated, the one before the other, it is because one has always reasoned so badly on Providence that the absurd things that have been spoken about it have gravely confused all the corollaries that could be drawn from this great and consoling dogma.
The first who spoiled the cause of God are the Priests and the Devout, who do not allow that anything occurs according to the established order, but always have Divine justice intervene in purely natural events, and in order to be sure of their occurrence, punish and chastise the wicked, put to the proof or requite the good indiscriminately with some benefits or misfortunes, according to the event. For myself, I do not know whether it is a good Theology; but I find it a bad manner of reasoning, to base the proofs of Providence indiscriminately on the pros and cons, and to attribute to it unselectively everything which would equally occur without it.
The Philosophers, in their turn, hardly seem to me to be more reasonable, when I see them blame Heaven that they are not insensitive, cry that all is lost when they have a tooth ache, or when they are poor, or when they have been robbed, and charge God, as Seneca says, to watch over their valise. If some tragic accident had caused Cartouche or Caesar to perish in their infancy one would have said: What crimes have they committed? These two brigands lived, and we say: Why were they permitted to live? In contrast the devout person will say in the first instance: God wanted to punish the father by taking his son from him; and in the second: God preserved the child for the chastisement of the people. Thus, whatever part nature might have taken, Providence is always right among the Devout and always wrong among the Philosophers. Perhaps in the order of things human it is neither wrong nor right, because everything keeps to the shared law, and because there is no exception for anyone. It is to be believed that particular events are nothing here below in the eyes of the Master of the universe, that his Providence is only universal, that he is content to preserve the genera and the species, and to preside over the whole without being disturbed by the manner in which each individual spends this brief life…
To think rightly in this respect, it seems that things ought to be considered relatively in the physical order, and absolutely in the moral order: with the result that the greatest idea that I can give myself of Providence is that each material being be disposed the best way possible in relation to the whole, and each intelligent and sensitive being the best way possible in relation to himself; which signifies in other terms that for whom ever feels his existence, it is worth more to exist than not to exist. But it is necessary to apply this rule to the total duration of each sensitive being, and not to several particular instances of its duration, such as human life; which shows how much the question of Providence depends on that of the immortality of the soul in which I have the good fortune to believe, without being unaware that reason can doubt it, and on that of the eternity of punishments which neither you nor I, nor ever a man thinking well of God, will ever believe.
If I restore these different questions to their common principle, it seems to me that they are all related to that of the existence of God. If God exists, he is perfect; if he is perfect, he is wise, powerful, and just; if he is wise and powerful, all is good; if he is just and powerful, my soul is immortal; if my soul is immortal, thirty years of life are nothing for me, and are perhaps necessary for the maintenance of the universe. If one grants me the first proposition, never will one shake those following; if one denies it, it is not necessary to dispute over its consequences…
As for me, I naively admit to you that neither the pro nor the con seems to me demonstrated on this point by the lights of reason, and that if the Theist bases his sentiments only on probabilities, the Atheist, even less precise, seems to me only to base his own on some contrary possibilities. Moreover, the objections, on both sides, are always insoluble because they take in some things of which men have no genuine idea at all. I agree to all that, and yet I believe in God quite as strongly as I believe in any other truth, because to believe and not to believe are the things which depend least on me, because the state of doubt is a state too violent for my soul, because when my reason wavers, my faith cannot for long remain in suspense, and is determined without it, that at least a thousand subjects of preference entice me from the most consoling side and join the weight of hope to the equilibrium of reason…
I cannot refrain, Sir, from noting in this connection a quite singular opposition between you and me over the subject of this letter. Surfeited with glory, and undeceived by vain grandeur, you live free in the bosom of abundance; quite sure of immortality, you philosophize peacefully on the nature of the soul; and if the body or the heart suffers, you have Tronchin for a doctor and for a friend: however, you find only evil on the Earth. And I, obscure, poor, and tormented by an incurable malady, I meditate with pleasure in my retreat, and find that all is good. From whence might these apparent contradictions come? You yourself have explained it: you enjoy, but I hope, and hope adorns everything.
I have as much difficulty in leaving this tiresome letter as you will have in finishing it. Pardon me, great man, for a zeal which is perhaps indiscreet, but which would not be vented on you, if I esteemed you less.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (Second Discourse), Polemics, and Political Economy (The Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol. 3), ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly, trans. Judith R. Bush, Roger D. Masters, Christopher Kelly, and Terence Marshall (Hanover: Dartmouth College/University Press of New England, 1992), 108-21.