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Gulliver's Travels And Voltaire Analysis

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Most great literary works of the Enlightenment period were influenced by the intellectual exploration of reason at the time. This was certainly the case with Jonathon Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Voltaire’s Candide. Both works explored the concept of reason in detail, questioning its capabilities and its limits. Swift and Voltaire were both engaged in the intellectual discussions of the Enlightenment and the influence of writers such as Pierre Bayle, John Locke, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and David Hume is extremely relevant to the study of their work. This paper will focus on the limitations of human reason as presented in GT and Candide, with focus given to the influence of man’s passions and emotions, as well as the conflict between reason …show more content…

Following his time in Houyhnhnmland, Gulliver begins to see himself as a potential Houyhnhnm, a potentially perfectly reasonable and rational being. However, this state, of course, is not an option for man. The impossibility of perfect reason in man is presented to us clearly when Gulliver attempts to live a life of pure reason. As Kathleen Williams observed, “what is harmless and unavoidable self-satisfaction in a Houyhnhnm becomes in him a fanatic pride”. Pride is not a reasonable trait, it is a vice, one which, hypocritically, Gulliver himself particularly despises. Gulliver fails in his attempt to be perfectly reasonable simply because the life of the Houyhnhnm is not the suitable life for man.
We come to realise the mistake in Gulliver’s desire to be a Houyhnhnm when we reflect upon the fact that they are horses. Here, Swift is using animals as his symbols to make it clear that pure reason and rationality is unavailable to man, and if it was available it would make us something tedious and unhuman. We are meant to accept the limitations of our reason and realise we are neither the irrational, barbarous Yahoos nor the passionless yet perfectly rational Houyhnhnms, we are not animal imlpume or animale rationale, but we are animal rationis capax. (a statement Swift once made in a letter to Alexander

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