Living The Worst Or The Best.

Reading Candide chapter 12 twelve may me again think about in Pangloss philosophy. How “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds”. Candide believes on this philosophy and so does Lady Cunegonde, even though they question it sometimes because of bad things that happen to them. It’s interesting to see how still after the philosophy had been proved wrong they still believe it. Even the same Pangloss being hanged proves that that way of thinking does not work. “”If this is the best of all possible worlds, he said to himself, what can the rest be like?”(37) it is hard for them to imagine what can actually be good, if what is supposed to be good really seems bad?

The old woman’s story is a perfect example for this. She has gone through rape, slavery, and poverty. Has been able to experience human evil and that contradicts Pangloss philosophy and his way of viewing life in such an optimistic way. What can be optimistic of all that happened to her? Telling her story she mentions how many people wanted to kill themselves including her, “a hundred times I wanted to kill myself, but always I loved life more.”(57). This may be a way of Voltaire saying that really it is up to you what you want to do with your life. After all the suffering she gone through, the normal thing to desire is to stop living in that miserable world but for some reason she still wanted to live. We are the ones who choose if in life we see things for the best or for the best worst.

I see it as if Voltaire was teaching us that lesson, when really he is making fun of those who actually think “that all is for the best”(20). Those optimistic people who at some point are pathetic. In life there are situation where no matter how optimistic you are you have to accept that a negative outcome will come, and that there is no way that the outcome may be for the best, it is bad but it happened because that’s life.