If you think about it, you may come to the conclusion that a large part of our lives can be summarized in one task: knowing how to manage our doubts. We are incapable of fully knowing everything around us, or even ourselves, but despite that we get frustrated by it, even though it can’t be helped. This leads us to feel obliged to position ourselves in the face of those unanswered questions: which of the possible options will we bet on?
Voltaire, the great French philosopher of the Enlightenment era, decided to address precisely this topic. Given that there are many things we cannot be sure of, what criteria should we follow to trust certain beliefs more and others less? We’ll see now What was Voltaire’s theory and how can it be applied to our daily lives?
The word Voltaire is actually a pseudonym used by the French philosopher and writer François Marie Arouet, born in 1694 in Paris into a middle-class family. Although he studied Law at the university, from a very young age he stood out especially for his writing skills, and as a teenager he had already written a tragedy named Amulius and Numitor.
In 1713, François managed to work at the French embassy in The Hague, and although he was soon expelled from it due to a scandal in which a French refugee was involved, from that moment on he began to gain fame as a writer. and playwright, although his popularity also brought him problems. In fact, he was imprisoned more than once for insulting the nobility, and ended up being banished from France. By then, he had already adopted the pseudonym Voltaire; specifically he did it during one of his exiles to a rural French town.
So Voltaire He was expelled from France in 1726, and headed towards England, a place where he soaked up the philosophy and epistemology of the place. When he returned to France in 1729, he published writings defending the line of thought of materialist philosophers such as John Locke and Newton’s science, areas of knowledge that Voltaire considered had not yet reached a dogmatic and irrational France.
Meanwhile, Voltaire began to enrich himself through speculation and his writings, although many were banned given, among other things, his criticism of the religious fanaticism of Christian roots that was abundant in the country. He died in 1778 in Paris.
Voltaire’s theory of knowledge
The main characteristics of Voltaire’s work are the following.
1. Certainty is absurd
Voltaire’s philosophical starting point may seem pessimistic, but in reality, in the context of his time, it was revolutionary. In Europe, until the time of the Enlightenment, the task of philosophy and much of science had been to rationalize explanations about the way in which the existence of the Christian god was revealed through what could be investigated. Basically, the word of the Church on any subject was taken as good, so that knowledge was built on a structure of dogmas that, as such, could not be questioned.
Voltaire’s epistemological theory begins with a total rejection of dogmatism and a proactive search for valid knowledge obtained through empirical testing.
2. Rejection of nativism
Voltaire completely broke with the rationalist tradition that had taken such strong root in France since René Descartes published his works. This implies, among other things, that for Voltaire We are not born with innate concepts in our brains but we learn entirely through experience.
Since we only depend on experience to learn, and since this is always incomplete and mediated by senses that often betray us, Voltaire concludes that it is impossible to faithfully know the entire truth about what is. real and what is not. This may be discouraging, but any other conclusion cannot be logical.
4. We can manage doubt
Regardless of whether or not we can get to know the exact reflection of what exists, Voltaire believes that what is important is what we do with the doubts we have, and the way in which We learn to discriminate between reasonable possibilities and others that are not How to achieve this?
5. Reject dogmas
This point follows from the previous ones. If doubting is reasonable and innate knowledge does not exist, there is no reason to accept certain ideas as good simply because they are widely accepted or certain institutions defend them very vehemently.
6. The importance of education and science
Absolute certainties may have died, but that, in turn, gives us the possibility of creating more genuine, much better constructed knowledge. Thanks to freedom of expression, critical thinking Nurtured by education and the testing of hypotheses through science, it is possible to bring our ideas closer to the truth.
Thus, what is necessary to manage doubts is, according to Voltaire’s theory, an attitude that leads us to doubt everything, the ability to develop ways of seeing how our beliefs fit with reality, and science, which for this philosopher It would not be just another institution, but a new culturally perfected way to obtain much more reliable information than what we were used to.
Of course, not all of us have scientific measuring devices or data analysis knowledge and tools, but these philosophical principles help us understand something important. To know something, you have to dedicate effort to it, analyze it critically, and go to evidence-based sources of information.
