Summary of Voltaire’s “The Good Braham”
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In Voltaire’s story the Brahman is “a very wise man, of marked intellect and great learning” who lives with his companions in a beautifully decorated home with “charming gardens attached.” Nearby lives “a narrow-minded old Indian woman: she was a simpleton, and rather poor.”
One day the Brahman says to Voltaire “I wish I had never been born.” Why would he say this? The Brahman replies that after forty years of study he is still ignorant and this fills him with”humiliation and disgust.” He lives in time but doesn’t know what time is; he lives between two eternities and doesn’t know what eternity is; he is composed of matter but doesn’t know how matter gives rise to thought; he doesn’t know the cause of his actions or why he exists at all. When others ask him about such things he has nothing to offer them.
Furthermore, he doesn’t know the nature of Brahma or why evil is pervasive. And neither the ancient texts nor the suggestions of others help. This leads him to anguish. “I am ready sometimes to despair when I think that after all my seeking I do not know whence I came, whither I go, what I am or what I shall become.” It seemed to Voltaire that the Brahman’s “unhappiness increased in proportion as his understanding developed and his insight grew.”
The same day Voltaire meets the old woman and asks her “if she has ever been troubled by the thought that she was ignorant of the nature of her soul.” But she doesn’t understand the question or any of the Brahman’s philsophical questions. Instead, “provided she could obtain a little Ganges water wherewith to wash herself, thought herself the happiest of women.”
Now Voltaire returns to the Brahman and inquires, “Are you not ashamed to be unhappy when at your very door there lives an old automaton who thinks about nothing, and yet lives contentedly?” The Brahman replies, “You are right, I have told myself a hundred times that I should be happy if I were as brainless as my neighbor, and yet I do not desire such happiness.”
Voltaire agrees that happiness is not worth the price of being a simpleton. Yet, he notes, this reveals a contradiction. For if the problem is how to be happy “what does it matter whether one has brains or not?” Moreover, those who are content seem more certain of their contentment “whereas those who reason are not certain they reason correctly.” So the question of happiness and the question of reason are related.
It appears then that there is a tension between happiness and reason. Voltaire doesn’t resolve this tension and his conclusion is ambivalent. “But on reflection it seems that to prefer reason to felicity is to be very senseless. How can this contradiction be explained?”
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A few questions.
Would you rather be a happy simpleton or a sometimes sad rationalist who accepts ht life is often absurdDoes simplemindedness typically lead to a happier life than a more intellectual rational one?Can an educated person who believes that intellectual pursuits leads to unhappiness simply stop thinking in order to be happier?Should a happy, content, uneducated person risk becoming unhappy by becoming better educated?
