Call out “Panglossing”, Change the Conversation, and Cultivate your own Nonsense (the Philosophy of Voltaire and Matt Colville)
Introducing new words into our vocabulary allows us to describe certain patterns of behaviour more effectively, but also to notice these patterns in the first place. Think, for example, of the effectiveness of the neologisms “mansplaining” or “sonder”. Words are so powerful that it is worthwhile to not limit ourselves to what is already in the dictionary. Instead we should dare to coin new terms that might change the discussions we can have. I propose that adopting “pangloss” as a verb can help us call out the attitude of those who uncritically assume that a thing must have a good reason for being the way that it is if the “competent authorities” have designed this thing.
In his own words, Matt Colville is someone who seeks to “change the conversation”, to inflect the Discourse so as to disrupt the “quick consensus forming machine” of social media. Many people know of him as a game designer, fewer people know him as the gadfly philosopher he shows himself to be on live streams, yet the two are intertwined, and the people who really know him as a game designer know him as someone who gave himself the intellectual and social tools to step back and think. In this short Youtube video titled “Professor Pangloss”, he gives a life lesson that I think we should heed. I recommend that you watch it, but if you don’t, I shall talk about its wisdom all the same, in what follows.
Some context: Pangloss is the name of a character in Candide, he is a satirical portrait of Leibniz, written by Voltaire. Through this story, Voltaire makes fun of an important doctrine of Leibniz’s philosophy, an answer to the problem of evil, an answer according to which God has made it so that we live in the best of all possible worlds (which explains and relativizes the evils that we see). At the moment, I don’t know enough about Leibniz to know whether this doctrine is treated fairly or not. Is this doctrine really the sophisticated version of a naive optimism about the status quo? I don’t know. At present, what I care about more is the naive version, and also the idea that philosophers should get creative in combating this kind of sophistry. Take the name “Pangloss” for example. It is quite inspired and creative: britannica.com notes that “The name Pangloss—from the Greek elements pan-, “all,” and glōssa, “tongue”—suggests glibness and garrulousness.” It is such a fitting name for someone who reflexively and pedantically comes in the defence of the status quo: you always get the sense that these people’s default mode is “talk first, ask questions later”, and they will chime in on any topic. “Pangloss”, as a word, sounds good and we’ll be able to use this to our advantage.
Matt Colville’s video has the same target than me in mind: it is less about Leibnizians specifically and more about people having an unphilosophical status-quo abiding attitude, especially in regards to territory that they feel the “competent authorities” must have already thoroughly explored. For instance, Colville tells an anecdote about cars. An acquaintance of his wrongly assumes that if the car works a certain way, it must be that it was physically impossible to design it in a better way. Somehow they think the designer cannot make mistakes (the designer in question has admitted since that they had made a mistake). Another acquaintance grants that in certain conditions designers can be mistaken, but they consider high stake domains like “Formula 1” to be an exception, since everyone has an incentive to produce the best possible design for maximum speed and efficiency. After some pushback from Matt Colville, this person gets a “philosophical conversion” moment: the scales fall from their eyes, as they finally understand that even when the stakes are high, people are eminently fallible.
You see this kind of thing happen all the time. I remember hearing someone say “The Covid pandemic is over. We know this because Lockdown is over and the government wouldn’t want us to get sick. It’s not in their interest.” I also remember someone saying “I am voting for Donald Trump. He will not do anything to immigrants, since they are so important to the economy. It’s not in our interest.” Those are real things that I heard real people say, I am not inventing it to make my point. To take another example, I don’t think I’ve had a single conversation outside of my home about the media produced by corporations where my interlocutor’s basic assumption wasn’t “I may not agree with it, but the corporation does what is in their financial interest and they know what is in their financial interest; they’re at least experts on that”. Interestingly, Candide also features a dark reflection of Pangloss called Martin, who is a manichean philosopher who believes that he can see the perfect evil design of the devil at work, side by side with the perfect design of God. People who criticize corporations but uncritically assume that those corporations are being evil competently make me think of this Martin character.
Matt Colville got into the habit of fighting back against this attitude by exclaiming: “Professor Pangloss, we meet again!” on his live streams. It’s funny and clever. As for me, I was wondering if we could not turn “Pangloss” into a verb. In my house, we’ve been trying it out, and it seems to work: “oh, they’re panglossing again” we bemoan. I feel like there is also an interesting resemblance with the verb “to gloss over something”. I could very well hear someone say “They are panglossing over the pandemic”. And finally, for the dark reflection of it, when you are panglossing over flaws that you say you do not approve of and yet cannot help but ascribe mastermind-level competence to, we’ll call it “Martining” after the Martin character… Yeah no, that last one is not going to catch on, I think. But perhaps, since the phrase “with extra steps” has become a meme, we could describe someone who is Martining by calling it what it is: “just Panglossing with extra steps”, the pre-established harmony of evil.
There is a moral at the end of Candide. The hero realizes the importance of growing out of naïveté, and especially the importance of doing that by “cultivating one’s own garden”. In this story, the garden is a literal one, but it’s obvious there is a metaphor at play, and other characters join in on trying to interpret the significance of their new agricultural way of life. Martin says “Let’s work without thinking, that is the only way of making life bearable.” Pangloss keeps saying that all is well in the best of all possible worlds since all the misadventures of the book led to this new modest and prosperous life. Clearly, it was meant to be. Candide, who has now changed enough to be able to interrupt Pangloss and to put him back in his place, always retorts the same thing to him: “That is well said, but we have to cultivate our garden.” What does that ending mean? Part of the answer is that we ought to dare to think for ourselves. We know that just by knowing who Voltaire is.
But I am inclined to think that there is another element at play here. Otherwise what would be the point of writing this philosophical rebuke in the form of such a colourful and adventurous comedy? The additional element is this: it’s fun! It’s delightful! People who are alienated enough from the idea of philosophy being fun will be quick to offer reductive explanations such as: well, such a serious philosopher had to stoop to the level of comedy so as to popularize complex ideas or so as to avoid backlash and censorship. I think this is missing part of the point: the delightfulness of the exercise is an important part of daring to think for yourself. Not just the delight of being combative and biting for the sake of survival, but also the delight of being daring and creative.
It’s fun! Matt Colville has an interesting word for this creative delight: “Nonsense”. It is a destabilizing word he often uses to designate his own stuff: “This is my nonsense”. But you can also use it for other people, in a way that is equally loving: i.e “In Candide, the utopia of El Dorado is Voltaire’s Nonsense”. In this context, “nonsense” can be defined as the pure manifestation of your idiosyncratic interests, which you feel strongly about, but which you also have the good sense of holding onto only lightly. It’s your own personal style. You do not have a dogmatic attachment to your “nonsense” (otherwise you wouldn’t be calling it “nonsense”), but you also have some amount of pride in it, as your own “nonsense” is a defining part of your character and world-view. It’s your own stuff. You’re proud of it. Interestingly, Matt Colville sometimes uses the word “taste” in a way that is very close to this “nonsense”. He will insist that a person who has “Taste” is not someone who views great works as great homework, tediously trying to align their subjective taste with the One Objectively Good Taste known by the true social elites. No, someone who has taste is someone who has developed a highly idiosyncratic, strongly felt, but lightly held opinion of what makes a great work. They defend it, they justify it, but they are aware that in doing so they only explicitate their own personal attitude. They are not interested in what the talkative crowd thinks, they are only interested in dealing with other folks who are also genuinely inspired to create stuff.
I think that to cultivate your own garden, you ought to cultivate our own Nonsense. And I think not many people realize that. When people read Candide and get to the end, they know they are supposed to think about what the ending means, and to wonder what way of life is advertised. But I think very few people realize that part of the way of life that is advertised is to be inspired to write your own Candide! Write your own silly philosophical tale! It’s your turn now! I don’t think it occurs to most people to think in these terms. They view the tale as a means to an end, and they are too shy to put themselves in Voltaire’s shoes. They view the reading of Candide as Great Homework to read, not as fun “nonsense” to emulate. This is too bad because part of reason why people are so quick to pangloss over problems is because they have not freed themselves from the idea that someone somewhere, who is much smarter than them, must have already thought about all there is to think about, thus forcing ordinary mortals to do nothing but play catch-up with masterminds and geniuses. This kills creativity and critical thinking.
We don’t have to write a silly philosophical tale, but we can be inspired to do it, or other things like it. We can fight the sophists creatively, with fun in mind. It is only in that state of mind that I want you to hear the proposal that we might start using “Panglossing” as a verb, or exclaim “Ah, Professor Pangloss, we meet again!”. You might also send panglossians a link to the present blog post or to Matt Colville’s video if you think they are not a lost cause and that they can be in on the joke. As philosophers, we would do well to take a page out of Voltaire or Matt Colville’s book and, for the sake of philosophy, to strike deliberately and strategically against the sophists, with fun inspiring ideas like the Pangloss counter-attack. Join the resistance!
(PS: Hi! Welcome! On this blog, we explore a new philosophical exercise every month. For example, we practiced the many philosophical exercises that Helen de Cruz talked about over the course of their brilliant career. Or to take another example, we practiced an exercise exemplified by Carl Sagan in his Cosmos documentary series: the view from above. Take a look around the blog for more exercises!
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(09/06/2026)
Pierrick Simon
my email: lemiroirtranquille@outlook.fr
(do not hesitate to reach out)
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