A Pocket Philosophical Dictionary

"This book is a series of short squibs on different topics, all, broadly speaking, concerning the Bible and the history of the church, and all designed to make you reflect on what pious Catholics thought were absolute certainties. In the opening article of the Pocket Philosophical Dictionary , Voltaire relates the biblical account of Abraham, making it abundantly clear that the biblical chronology simply defies common sense and reason. In effect, this is a withering attack on the reliability of the Old Testament accounts, but Voltaire maintains a ‘neutral’ voice throughout, and then concludes like this: “The reader is referred to these commentaries, all of them compiled by men subtle and delicate intellect, excellent thinkers, quite devoid of prejudice and not in the least pedantic.” I am quoting here from John Fletcher’s superb translation in the Oxford World Classics series. An important feature of this translation is that John Fletcher keeps the often conversational tone of Voltaire’s ‘philosophical’ style, and doesn’t try to normalise it. These shifts of linguistic register are key to the shock of Voltaire’s irony. He devotes an entire article to circumcision, recounting drily the breadth of scholarship on the subject in order to make the point that the rite is not unique to the Jewish tradition. There is a serious point here about cultural relativism, but the choice of example, combined with the fake familiar tone of voice, make it quintessentially Voltairean: When told that the Hottentots remove one testicle from each of their male children a Parisian is quite taken aback. The Hottentots are perhaps surprised that Parisians hang on to both of theirs. And at other moments, Voltaire seems to be speaking to us directly. Here he is on the all too contemporary topic of fanaticism: What can you say to a man who tells you that he prefers obeying God rather than men, and that as a result he’s certain he’ll go to heaven if he cuts your throat? Normally fanatics are led by scoundrels who supply the weapons . . . This could have been written in a newspaper today, and it’s crucial that the language feels modern. That modern or colloquial feel is equally devastating in the eighteenth century. The church in particular hated it because of its sheer cheekiness—its rudeness and brashness, along with its refusal to treat churchmen with the pomp and ceremony they thought they deserved. A key thing about the Pocket Philosophical Dictionary is that it’s very short. You can read the short articles in sequence, or you can dip in and start reading anywhere—either way, this is a very accessible work. It’s important the Oxford World Classics translation of the Philosophical Dictionary keeps the ‘portatif’ of the original title. This is the pocket philosophical dictionary, and at one level, it can be seen as a response to Diderot’s Encyclopédie . The title ‘ Dictionnaire philosophique portatif ’ is implicitly a rebuke to that great work; you cannot walk about with seventeen folio volumes, but you can put this in your pocket. Partly what Voltaire is saying is that these huge books with their long articles are not a very effective way of changing public opinion. He writes a very funny letter to a friend saying that the authorities are never afraid of books that cost a lot of money. He says if the Bible had cost seventy sesterces in Ancient Rome, then Christianity would never have got off the ground. [ Laughs ]. Whereas a very small portable book—a paperback in today’s terms—that can be easily reprinted is a much more effective polemical weapon. In that respect, he’s very unlike Diderot or Rousseau. You could almost say Voltaire is a biblical scholar. He thinks the Old Testament is completely incoherent. Historically, it consists of different texts written by different people in different periods. He anticipates some of the nineteenth-century German historical criticism of the Bible. He’s saying that there are things here that are internally inconsistent; there are things that don’t make sense. “You could almost say Voltaire is a biblical scholar” He knows the Old Testament back to front, and there are certain details he keeps referring to. For example, there’s a chapter in Ezekiel where someone cooks something in sand and eats it. But, in some translation, Voltaire finds out that he eats shit. This becomes a running gag, that he eats a “ tartine de merde ”—which sounds hilarious, a “shit sandwich”—and Voltaire comes back to this something like a dozen times. Yes, there’s an absurdist side to Voltaire’s humour that is very modern and completely speaks to us. I think he understands that if you keep indignation going for too many pages then it loses its oomph. If people want to be critical of Voltaire, a standard thing to say is: how can you take him seriously, if he makes fun of everything? But there’s another view, which is that to keep the interest of your readers, you need to keep changing your register; you need to have passion and you need to have humour. That will have more impact. Aesthetically, it’s an arguable point. He lives a very long life, so you have to say that he evolves as he goes on. After the Calas affair, what Voltaire learns is that his forte is really in publicising affairs, so he gets interested in things like the reform of the judicial system. Much later, he reinvents himself as a political reformer. That’s more the image that has come down to posterity. We’ve largely forgotten the pre-Calas Voltaire. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . As a fairly young man, he comes to England in the 1720s. People always say that’s a key turning point, and it probably is. In England, he’s confronted by empiricism through the thought of Locke and Newton. That has a big impact. He’s learns English very quickly and meets a lot of famous writers, including Swift and Pope. He’s here for two and a half years and goes back to France and writes the book that is known in French as the Lettres philosophiques . It’s his most important early book—his first major masterpiece—and I would have included it if I had space. It came out in English first as Letters Concerning the English Nation in 1733. People forget that he wrote this for the English as well as for the French. He’s a European author who thinks about cultivating a European readership. In this book, there is a philosophical programme which is essentially about the rise of empiricism. There’s a trajectory that he sketches out: Bacon begins to think of things empirically, then you get Newton, Locke, and the rise of empirical science. This focus on what’s empirically provable sets its face against Descartes who championed the notion of innate ideas. So, Voltaire puts together a sort of package about the heroic rise of empiricism against innate ideas. This is probably his most significant early philosophical contribution. It’s not exactly an original philosophical position but what is original is the narrative he’s creating. Voltaire gives the Enlightenment group their defining story: their self-narrative. If you then go through the 18th century, if you look at d’Alembert’s ‘Discours préliminaire’ in the Encyclopédie , the underlying narrative of ideas is Voltaire’s: it’s that same template of Bacon, Locke, and Newton. “Voltaire gives the Enlightenment group their defining story: their self-narrative” It’s not a new insight, but it’s the narrative that gives cohesion to the party of the philosophes . We underestimate Voltaire because we forget that actually, he created our modern narrative of the Enlightenment. You could have had another narrative: it’s not entirely true that empiricism was only current in England, and that there weren’t empiricists in France. There are French empiricists like Gassendi, but they don’t appear in this narrative. So, Voltaire has had to streamline quite a lot to produce this overarching line. But it was clever and it stuck."