Voltaire e a tolerância

• Autor(a) principal: Ferreira, Edimar Gonçalves
• Data de Publicação: 2011
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da PUC_SP
• Texto Completo: https://tede2.pucsp.br/handle/handle/11570
• topic: Tolerância; Iluminismo; CNPQ::CIENCIAS HUMANAS::FILOSOFIA

This study discusses the idea of tolerance from the perspective of the eighteenth century French writer and philosopher Voltaire. In that century, tolerance and its philosophical grounds were developed by Voltaire in order to combat errors at the beginning of the modern era specifically, fanaticism and religious intolerance. Philosophers and theoreticians before Voltaire, such as Bayle and Locke, equally invested in tolerance for the good of the nation. But as regards this short period, which represents the century of lights, we realize that it was he who made the greatest effort to eradicate religious fanaticism. A Treatise on Tolerance is just one more work of Voltaire s literary productions that deals with the fight against religious fanaticism. The Calas family history, a subject dealt with in the second chapter of this dissertation, tells of violence against alterity; the other in question is French Protestant Jean Calas, the perfect target for bigoted Catholics. First of all, for tolerance to be induced and experienced by people, it was necessary to use reason in a mature way, which would be the only way to change the insane customs of people living under the spell of superstitions. In the third chapter of this study, reason is seen as an assurance in the advancing fight against religious fanaticism. We realize, however, that it is not religion itself that is the manifestation that must be combatted. According to Voltaire, religion serves as an excellent moral brake for humans who are not able to control their own lives without religion. However, the supreme good of the nation was the most important thing to attain. The laws were to be respected and the church needed to submit to the state in order to enable social tolerance. Voltaire, however, claims that new morals should guide society; morals that were enlightened not by religion, but by reason. Above all, it is these morals that should take the human spirit toward the preservation of the physical and moral well-being of society