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We Must Take Sides

On the Russo-Turkish war and the opera Voltaire declines to take sides; he takes one on a question he calls a trifle: whether there is a God.

by Voltaire48 passages held

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Original title
Il faut prendre un parti, ou le principe d'action
First published
(aged 78)
Original language
French

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Overview

Système de la nature, published in 1770 under the name of a dead man, was Baron d'Holbach's work and described a universe of matter and motion with no God behind it. Voltaire had already answered it in an article on God, and in this essay he returned to the attack. Its argument is that the order of the world proves a single, eternal intelligence, which runs everything by fixed laws. Those laws take in human beings too: a person is free to do what he wants, Voltaire holds, but not free to choose what he wants, and vice remains vice, so the wicked must still be restrained. The essay then turns into a debate. An atheist, a Manichaean who needs a second god to account for evil, a pagan, a Jew and a Turk each speak in turn; a theist answers all of them, owning that the origin of evil still troubles him and suggesting that a made world cannot be as perfect as the being who made it; and a citizen asks every party to burn its books of controversy and read Cicero, Montaigne and La Fontaine instead. In the essay's section on evil Voltaire dates his writing to 24 August 1772, the two-hundredth anniversary of the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre, when Catholic mobs in Paris began killing the city's Protestants. Condorcet, in the life of Voltaire he published after Voltaire's death, judged that it held perhaps the strongest proofs of a supreme being that anyone had yet assembled.

Key concepts

What does the essay mean by the principle of action?

The force behind all movement in nature. Suns turn, blood circulates, even corpses break down into plants that feed the living, and something must drive it all. The essay argues that this principle is a single intelligence, which it also calls God, and that it acts in everything, including every thought and wish a human being has.

Why does the essay say the world has always existed?

Because its maker's nature is to act. A God who had done nothing for an eternity and then formed a few globes some years ago would be an idle God, one the essay calls good for nothing, and nothing can come from nothing. So the world is God's work and yet as eternal as he is, the way light is as old as the sun.

What does being free to do but not free to will mean?

That we are free when we can act on what we want, but we do not choose what we want. Every wish has a cause, and a cause that failed to produce its effect would be no cause at all. For a person to will without a cause would be as absurd as a cloud telling the wind it does not wish to be driven.

What is the liberty of indifference, and why does the essay reject it?

The supposed power to will without any cause at all. The essay answers with a fable: if every creature could will that way, God would have to confess that he foresees nothing, that the world he made is a vast anarchy, and that the wicked might do the opposite of whatever he foretold just from malice. A world run by law leaves no room for such a power.

What is Manichaeism, the two-god answer to evil?

The belief that there are two gods, one the author of good and the other of evil, because a good intelligence cannot also be the source of evil. The essay's Manichaean traces the doctrine to Zoroaster and the Parsees who still follow him, and names the two rivals Ormuzd, the good god, and Ahriman, the evil one, who divide light and darkness between them.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

One Mover, One Mind

Of all the quarrels of the day, only one is worth taking a side on: whether there is a God. The answer comes from nature's uniform laws, which point to a single intelligence rather than to blind matter or to rival powers.

The argument climbs from effects to their cause, by analysis, since proving God from first principles seems beyond our poor ideas. Gravitation holds on every globe, and the oak and the nut tree never agreed to grow alike: one mover, then. If a wax model of an animal needs a clever artist, the living original needs one too. Yet this mind is nowhere proved infinite. It is present wherever something exists, and nothing obliges us to set its throne in an empty, imaginary space.

  • theology
  • reason
  • evidence
  • science
  • epistemology
  • skepticism

Enter a dialogue

Free to Do, Not Free to Will

If the laws that hold the planets hold every human wish too, is anyone the author of what they do? No, comes the answer, and morality and punishment survive it.

Human beings, like snails and dogs, have received everything and given themselves nothing. Nobody knows what idea will come to them in the next minute, and in dreams, a third of life, we are plainly moved by a power not our own. A soul that made its thoughts at will would be a little god lodged in the body, which is absurd. What is left is a freedom to act on what we want. Vice stays vice, as disease stays disease, and the wicked must still be restrained.

  • human nature
  • morality
  • justice
  • desire
  • law

Enter a dialogue

Evil, Argued Around One Table

If one good intelligence runs everything, where does evil come from? Denying evil is ruled out from the start, and seven voices, from an atheist to a plain citizen, each try another answer.

Nature feeds every species on the corpses of its enemies, and no council of the clergy has ever called that butchery an evil. Epicurus's dilemma, that God either could not or would not prevent evil, meets no answer but a sigh. The Atheist concludes that a God bound by necessity is useless, and the Manichaean splits the world between a good god and an evil one. The Theist settles for a single maker whose works cannot be as perfect as he is. The Citizen asks everyone to stop disputing.

  • evil
  • suffering
  • optimism
  • pessimism
  • religious pluralism
  • religious toleration
  • sectarianism
  • violence
  • compassion

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
48
distinct concepts
112
by passages held, corpus-wide
#659

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “causality” and “free will”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 6 concepts, joined by 8 pairings. 30 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
causalityfree will5
causalitydeterminism3
determinismfree will3
determinismhuman nature2
determinismnatural theology1
free willhuman nature1
human naturenatural theology1
human natureproblem of evil1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1734 Philosophical Letters (Lettres philosophiques)

    Written out of the English stay that began in 1726 and published a quarter-century before Candide; it cost Voltaire his place in Paris and set out the programme that his later campaigns pursued.

     EN
  2. 1759 Candide (Candide, ou l'Optimisme)

    The most widely read of Voltaire's philosophical tales, a short novel published in the year he bought Ferney; its quarrel with optimism began in his poem on the Lisbon earthquake three years earlier.

     EN
  3. 1762 The Sermon of the Fifty (Sermon des cinquante)

    Among Voltaire's anti-Christian pamphlets, the one his posthumous editors counted the first to attack the religion directly; the arguments it set down came back in many of the tracts he wrote over the following decades.

     EN
  4. 1763 Treatise on Tolerance (Traité sur la tolérance)

    Voltaire's contribution to his own campaign for Jean Calas, the best known of the wrongly condemned people he defended from Ferney; it appeared two years before the verdict was overturned.

     EN
  5. 1764 Philosophical Dictionary (Dictionnaire philosophique portatif)

    An alphabet that kept growing: begun as a single pocket volume, it was enlarged through the 1760s and swollen after Voltaire's death into the combined dictionary his editors assembled.

     EN
  6. 1772 We Must Take Sides (Il faut prendre un parti, ou le principe d'action) you are here EN
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