Man’s Choice Of Condemned Freedom

It’s true. Men are born in chains, but in life, are condemned to be free. We act according to how right it is, depending on our notion of free will. It is said that God put us on Earth for us to take care of the Garden. While in the Garden, Adam and Eve enjoyed of perfect bliss before their fall from God’s grace. Nevertheless, in Candide the garden symbolizes the life of the characters, who duel with their inability to give a good effect to the gifts God has given them. Cause and effect. God gave us the knowledge to create. Instead of using it for good, we used it for evil: “God did not give them twenty-four pounders or bayonets, yet they have made themselves bayonets and guns to destroy each other” (31). We can either have an optimist or pessimist point of view of our fate. By taking into account this quotation, buoyancy is very hard to attain. It was our choice to eat from the Tree Of Knowledge of Good and Evil. We are victims of our free will thus. God put us on the garden to take care of it, but we didn’t.

If we are condemned to be free, it means that in the garden we were never free. If we had stayed in the garden we would’ve never gained knowledge, we became wolves: “Men must have somewhat altered the course of nature; for they were not born wolves, yet they have become wolves” (31). God created us to follow the law of cause and effect. Under this law we would be under his grace, and therefore lack the act of free will. By altering the course of nature, we gain freedom. We were born in chains, but in life were condemned to be free. But this freedom of ours has led us to wage war, kill our benefactors, and become a treacherous race. If we are who we ought to be (an imperfect being), it is quite impossible to believe that God created us. We can make the generalization: God created us. God is perfect. Therefore, we ought to be perfect. The thing is we aren’t. We made of ourselves guns and bayonets to kill each other.

The existence of evil in this world then must be a sign that God is either not entirely good or not all-powerful. But the idea of an imperfect God is incongruous. For Voltaire, the idea that a perfect God has to exist isn’t part of his approach. Hence, he employs satire in order to mock the idea that a world has to be completely good. He ridicules on Candide and Pangloss’ idea of Optimism by making them suffer indignities throughout the novel. These horrors do not serve any evident greater good, but point directly to the cruelty of humanity and the indifference of the natural world. Pangloss struggles to find logic to his arguments: “For it is impossible for things not to be where they are, because everything is for the best” (35). There is a hole present in his logic, and this hole is what Voltaire uses to scorn the ideals of many philosophers in history who’ve never found the knot to the tie. They are just empty words without a meaning. Just as saying: “Man is responsible for his nature and choices” (Sartre). We chose to be free.