David Siegel - The Plenitude of Arboreal Beauty

What struck me as the greatest theme in Philosophical Letters is Voltaire’s fascination with progress. We read in the introduction about a library fund bequeathed to young Voltaire in order to stoke the fire of his precocious curiosity, and Letters is an intermediate result of years of study in disparate fields. Naturally, I began by questioning Voltaire’s motivations and goals: are his interests sincere or does he study for ornamentation and fame? Does he show any expertise or does he simply achieve a conversational aptitude? Against my first impressions, I am left with a reassuring confidence in the nature of Voltaire’s project: he is absolutely committed to discovering the who, what, where, when, why, and how of human progress. He plots humanity’s course through history by studying changes in religious thought, government, medicine, and science. For Voltaire, the invention you might point to and call a crowning achievement is more appropriately the indication of a momentous change in the world. Change is the real achievement, and Voltaire encourages us to study these changes carefully for the betterment of mankind.