Last month, precisely on 21st, the French writer known by Voltaire would complete 320 years-old, so this post is a tribute to this very important writer for the human rights and education. This post is a summary of four articles. The first was published http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltaire. The second was published at https://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/chap4d.html .The third was published http://francois-marie-voltaire.wikispaces.com/Main+Ideas+and+Contributions+to+Enlightenment. The fourth http://rebirthofreason.com/Articles/dickeymf/Philosophical_Foundations_of_the_En.
François Marie Arouet (Voltaire) was born in Paris and died in the same city with 83 years-old. He was an enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher famous for his advocacy of freedom of religion, freedom of speech and separation of church and state. The youngest of the five children, his father was a lawyer. By the time he left school, Voltaire had decided become a writer. From early on, Voltaire had trouble for critiques of the government and religious intolerance. He mainly argued for freedom of thought. He believed in the concept of an enlightenment. In 1726, Voltaire responded to an insult from the young nobleman, whose servants beat him. Since Voltaire was seeking compensation, so he was imprisoned without a trial. This incident marked him. Voltaire's exile in Great Britain lasted nearly three years, and his experiences there greatly influenced his thinking. Voltaire perceived the bourgeoisie to be small and ineffective, the aristocracy to be parasitic and corrupt, the commoners as ignorant, and the church as a static force. Voltaire distrusted democracy with idiocy, given the extremely high rates of illiteracy of the time, and that it was in the rational interest to improve the education. He is remembered is a courageous polemicist who indefatigably fought for civil rights and who denounced the hypocrisies and injustices of his time.
If the guillotine is the most negative image of the French Revolution, then the most positive is surely the Declaration of the Rights of Man. When the revolutionaries drew up the Declaration in 1789, they aimed to topple the institutions surrounding monarchy and establish new ones based on the principles of the Enlightenment, a philosophical movement. The goal of the Enlightenment's proponents was to apply the methods learned from the scientific revolution to the problems of society. Further, its advocates commited themselves to "reason" and "liberty." Knowledge, its followers believed, could only come from the careful study of actual conditions and the application of an individual's reason. Enlightenment writers, such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseau, influenced ordinary readers, politicians, and even heads of state. In the British North American colonies, American revolutionaries put some of their ideas into practice and in the new Constitution of the United States. The Declaration of the Rights of Man, brought together two streams of thought: one from the Anglo-American tradition of legal and constitutional guarantees of individual liberties, the other from the belief that reason should guide all human affairs. The vision of these most idealistic, perhaps truest believers in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, might best be understood not as a utopian dream or resentful opposition, but as a nascent and imperfectly formed, but broad and vibrant theory of an open and democratic society.
Voltaire's main contribution to the Enlightenment was freedom of speech, freedom of press and religion and opposition to monarchy, militarism and slavery. He was a crusader against tyranny and bigotry. He did not want to create a perfect world. He just wanted everyone to know that it could be a better place if we substituted ignorance for knowledge and rational thought. He was a vigorous defender of science. Voltaire had a passion for clarity and reason and he had a horror for the violence.
The "Age of Enlightenment" embodied tremendous intellectual and social advancement. It was a movement in philosophy. The result was much of the cherished progress of the modern world, from human rights to modern liberal democracies. The enlightenment, called the "Age of Reason" can be most appropriately understood as the extension of the same principles of reason Renaissance thinkers applied to three major branches of philosophy but now extended into the remaining, previously divinely governed, areas, ethics, and politics. Where the Renaissance was the rebirth of reason, The Enlightenment was its maturity. Voltaire posed an introspective hypothetical in "The Story of the Good Brahman," You see a good learned man anguishing over so many things he studies and he is unhappy about the world but this stupid person down the river, who never cares or thinks, lives with happiness. He asks everyone, if you can sacrifice your intellect and thought and be as happy as the idiot at the river, would you sacrifice? And none say yes, even though they all claim happiness is the ultimate motivation. Voltaire was probing into a much deeper question, what is the purpose or goal of happiness? Is it mere hedonistic pleasure, or cultivating a particular kind of life according to a standard of decent human potential and morality? Voltaire's conclusions would shape Enlightenment, "the only antidote to suffering and despair is to work to cultivate the human garden." Voltaire's universe was based on reason, and reading translated works on Confucianism, brought into Europe by the Jesuits of the late 1600's, Voltaire no doubt at least found parallels, if not inspiration, in the writing of the scholarly elite of China, who for centuries traveled from province to province serving as spiritual, moral, and political advisors to the ruling class. With the application of reason to every philosophical realm: truth, existence, art, morality, and politics, all the great progress of the modern world: freedom, democracy, science, would be forged, because in cultures that adopted the ideals of the Enlightenment a flourishing to an extent never before seen in the history of humanity would take root, ushering a period of unequaled material affluence, unprecedented scientific growth and unequivocal individual freedom.
