The danger of listening to literary figures:

The danger of listening to literary figures: I don’t see why Voltaire should make fun of Leibniz in Candide when the latter said that God made this “the best of all possible worlds…” Voltaire cannot logically do otherwise, he wrote the play that this is the best of all possible worlds, simply, because the rest of them suck even more. Literary figures think they have a duty to comment on philosophers and thinkers. They are without shame. They don’t know what’s going on any more than you or I do. They don’t know what’s real either, Descartes, in his Fifth Meditation, asks, “How would you know, when you wake up, that an Evil Genius hadn’t rearranged the world while you were asleep?” We are all living in the Matrix and we don’t even know it.