We saw the late great Don Williams virtually revived and performing "live" with the Nashville Symphony Friday. When I first came to Nashville decades ago I thought I didn't like country music, until I heard his rendition of Bob McDill's Good Ole' Boys Like Me. Remarkable! (Why didn't he make the cut in your film, Ken Burns?)
On Saturday I enjoyed (virtually) the Nats' big parade and celebration, showing that it is indeed possible to unite the nation's capital. Bigger turnout than the last presidential inauguration (for all I know).
Yesterday was autumnally beautiful and sunny. My wife suggested our first walk around Radnor Lake ("Nashville's Walden") in many months of Sundays. Seemed like half of Nashville had the same idea, we had to park and walk from the church across Granny White, but it was worth it. So glad we didn't stay in with the Titans but got out with the ducks and turtles and herons. (And then Parnassus, and the Whole Foods smorgasbord.)
And he's mentioned in Jennifer Michael Hecht's first book, The End of the Soul: Scientific Modernity, Atheism, and Anthropology in France: "Denis Diderot, one of the few Enlightenment figures to take the step past deism and present an atheist picture of the world... The materialists also made great use of Diderot's irreverent, quippish style, mocking the church and reveling in the freedom and pride of unbelief."
In her later Doubt: A History, Hecht relates David Hume's 1763 visit to the Paris salon of Baron d'Holbach. Diderot, d'Holbach, and sixteen other brazenly free-thinking attendees were in the house. "This was the first group of actual avowed atheists; no dissembling, no caveats, just no gods, no God, nothing like it... This crowd believed morality was available to anyone through reason."
Hecht: "Diderot explains that one does not disbelieve in order to secure license for oneself. An honest person is honest without threats or supervision, and many a believer is dishonest."
Diderot said: “Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest... the philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has killed a great many philosophers.” And, "What a fine comedy this world would be if one did not play a part in it!"
Diderot, Denis (1713-1784)
French philosopher who edited the Encyclopédie. Diderot promoted Locke's thought in France through his Pensées sur l'interprétation de la nature (1746) and Lettre sur le aveugles (Essay on Blindness) (1749). In his later years, Diderot wrote essays and plays expressing favored Enlightenment themes, including atheism and social contract theory. PhDic
As a philosopher Diderot speculated on free will and held a completely materialistic view of the universe; he suggested all human behavior is determined by heredity. He therefore warned his fellow philosophers against an overemphasis on mathematics and against the blind optimism that sees in the growth of physical knowledge an automatic social and human progress. He rejected the Idea of Progress. In his opinion, the aim of progressing through technology was doomed to fail. He founded his philosophy on experiment and the study of probabilities. He wrote several articles and supplements concerning gambling, mortality rates, and inoculation against smallpox for the Encyclopédie. There he discreetly but firmly refuted d'Alembert's technical errors and personal positions on probability. g'r
Candide and the Lisbon Earthquake
In 1755 an earthquake rocked Lisbon, Portugal, almost destroying the city and surrounding countryside and resulting in the deaths of thousands of people. Voltaire responded to the disaster within weeks with his “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster” (1755). However, his more sustained response to the earthquake came four years later with the publication of Candide (1759).
Voltaire had already written a number of short stories and works of fiction such as Zadig (1747) and Micromégas (1752). Candide, however, would prove one of his most popular and enduring works. The story revolves around the young, naïve Candide (the name “Candide” means “naïve”) who falls in love with Cunegonde, the daughter of his local lord, and is consequently kicked out of the country. He spends the rest of the novella trying to find his lost love and achieve happiness. He is helped on his quest by his tutor, Dr. Pangloss, who espouses a philosophy that this is the best of all possible worlds, a parody of the philosophical system proposed by Gottfried Leibniz. Through beatings, disease, near-death experiences, starvation, and every other imaginable strife, Candide and Pangloss roam the world looking for Cunegonde and believing that all of the problems they face are really for the best.
Voltaire used this novella to grapple with events outside the control of people—like the Lisbon earthquake. Young Candide searches for happiness, but he is met at every turn with disaster. In this way, Voltaire asked why there was suffering in the world, something he felt very keenly himself. (For instance, Voltaire became ill every year on the anniversary of the 1572 St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, an event during the French Wars of Religion when Catholics in France went on a rampage, encouraged by state and church leaders, and killed thousands of Protestants.) In Candide, Voltaire argued against Leibniz’s idea of the principle of sufficient reason, which asserts that everything that happened in the world happened for a reason and because God willed it. When faced with the Lisbon earthquake, Voltaire could not accept that God, or anyone, would have willed it and that somehow the deaths of thousands of people served a higher purpose. The novella ends with Cunegonde, Candide, Pangloss and other characters deciding to live life and learn “to cultivate our garden,” a metaphor that has engendered considerable discussion ever since Voltaire first wrote it. The idea could be taken literally, as a way to avoid the traps of philosophy and urban culture, or more figuratively, as a path for inner contemplation leading to the improvement of the self. Voltaire and the French Enlightenment
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