Sophie's World

by Jostein Gaarder

“Right from the start, his friend and colleague Friedrich Engels contributed to what was subsequently known as Marxism. In our own century, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and many others also made their contribution to Marxism, or Marxism-Leninism.”

“Hegel had pointed out that historical development is driven by the tension between opposites—which is then resolved by a sudden change. Marx developed this idea further. But according to Marx, Hegel was standing on his head.” “Not all the time, I hope.” “Hegel called the force that drives history forward world spirit or world reason. This, Marx claimed, is upside down. He wished to show that material changes are the ones that affect history. ‘Spiritual relations’ do not create material change, it is the other way about. Material change creates new spiritual relations. Marx particularly emphasized that it was the economic forces in society that created change and thus drove history forward.”

Marx realized that there was an interactive or dialectic relation between bases and superstructure, we say that he is a dialectical materialist.

“So far we can conclude that it is the mode of production in a society which determines which political and ideological conditions are to be found there. It is not by chance that today we think somewhat differently—and have a somewhat different moral codex—from the old feudal society.”

“Marx believed that in all phases of history there has been a conflict between two dominant classes of society. In antiquity’s slave society, the conflict was between free citizen and slave. In the feudal society of the Middle Ages, it was between feudal lord and serf; later on, between aristocrat and citizen. But in Marx’s own time, in what he called a bourgeois or capitalist society, the conflict was first and foremost between the capitalists and the workers, or the proletariat. So the conflict stood between those who own the means of production and those who do not. And since the ‘upper classes’ do not voluntarily relinquish their power, change can only come about through revolution.”

“Before he became a communist, the young Marx was preoccupied with what happens to man when he works.

“That, briefly, was Marx’s point. How we work affects our consciousness, but our consciousness also affects the way we work. You could say it is an interactive relationship between hand and consciousness. Thus the way you think is closely connected to the job you do.”

“Under the capitalist system, the worker labors for someone else. His labor is thus something external to him—or something that does not belong to him. The worker becomes alien to his work—but at the same time also alien to himself. He loses touch with his own reality. Marx says, with a Hegelian expression, that the worker becomes alienated.”

Together with Engels, he published a Communist Manifesto in 1848. The first sentence in this manifesto says: ‘A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism.’”

it is inherent in the capitalist system that it is marching toward its own destruction. In that sense, capitalism is ‘progressive’ because it is a stage on the way to communism.”

“But he is not the only one thinking in this way, which means that production as a whole is continually being made more effective. Factories become bigger and bigger, and are gradually concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. What happens then, Sophie?” “Er…” “Fewer and fewer workers are required, which means there are more and more unemployed. There are therefore increasing social problems, and crises such as these are a signal that capitalism is marching toward its own destruction. But capitalism has a number of other self-destructive elements. Whenever profit has to be tied up in the means of production without leaving a big enough surplus to keep production going at competitive prices…”

“For a period, we get a new ‘class society’ in which the proletarians suppress the bourgeoisie by force. Marx called this the dictatorship of the proletariat. But after a transition period, the dictatorship of the proletariat is replaced by a ‘classless society,’ in which the means of production are owned ‘by all’—that is, by the people themselves. In this kind of society, the policy is ‘from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.’ Moreover, labor now belongs to the workers themselves and capitalism’s alienation ceases.”

“Marxism led to great upheavals. There is no doubt that socialism has largely succeeded in combating an inhumane society. In Europe, at any rate, we live in a society with more justice—and more solidarity—than Marx did. This is not least due to Marx himself and the entire socialist movement.”

“After Marx, the socialist movement split into two main streams, Social Democracy and Leninism. Social Democracy, which has stood for a gradual and peaceful path in the direction of socialism, was Western Europe’s way. We might call this the slow revolution. Leninism, which retained Marx’s belief that revolution was the only way to combat the old class society, had great influence in Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa. Each in their own way, both movements have fought against hardship and oppression.”

“A moral philosopher called John Rawls attempted to say something about it with the following example: Imagine you were a member of a distinguished council whose task it was to make all the laws for a future society.” “I wouldn’t mind at all being on that council.” “They are obliged to consider absolutely every detail, because as soon as they reach an agreement—and everybody has signed the laws—they will all drop dead.” “Oh…” “But they will immediately come to life again in the society they have legislated for. The point is that they have no idea which position they will have in society.” “Ah, I see.” “That society would be a just society. It would have arisen among equals.”

“In a broader sense we can talk about a naturalistic current from the middle of the nineteenth century until quite far into our own. By ‘naturalistic’ we mean a sense of reality that accepts no other reality than nature and the sensory world. A naturalist therefore also considers mankind to be part of nature. A naturalistic scientist will exclusively rely on natural phenomena—not on either rationalistic suppositions or any form of divine revelation.” “And that applies to Marx, Darwin, and Freud?”

“The ship was the naval vessel HMS Beagle. It sailed from Plymouth on December 27, 1831, bound for South America, and it did not return until October of 1836. The two years became five and the voyage to South America turned into a voyage round the world.

That’s exactly how people have bred domestic animals for more than ten thousand years, Sophie. Hens did not always lay five eggs a week, sheep did not always yield as much wool, and horses were not always as strong and swift as they are now. Breeders have made an artificial selection. The same applies to the vegetable kingdom. You don’t plant bad potatoes if there are good seed potatoes available, and you don’t waste time cutting wheat that yields no grain. Darwin pointed out that no cows, no stalks of wheat, no dogs, and no finches are completely alike. Nature produces an enormous breadth of variation. Even within the same species, no two individuals are exactly alike. You probably experienced that for yourself when you drank the blue liquid.”

“In 1871 Darwin published The Descent of Man, in which he drew attention to the great similarities between humans and animals, advancing the theory that men and anthropoid apes must at one time have evolved from the same progenitor. By this time the first fossil skulls of an extinct type of man had been found, first in the Rock of Gibraltar and some years later in Neanderthal in Germany. Strangely enough, there were fewer protests in 1871 than in 1859, when Darwin published The Origin of Species. But man’s descent from animals had been implicit in the first book as well. And as I said, when Darwin died in 1882, he was buried with all the ceremony due to a pioneer of science.”

“Because oxygen is strongly reactive. Long before complex molecules like DNA could be formed, the DNA molecular cells would be oxidized.” “Really.” “That is how we know for certain that no new life arises today, not even so much as a bacterium or a virus. All life on earth must be exactly the same age. An elephant has just as long a family tree as the smallest bacterium. You could almost say that an elephant—or a human being—is in reality a single coherent colony of monocellular creatures. Because each cell in our body carries the same hereditary material. The whole recipe of who we are lies hidden in each tiny cell.”

“Since there was no oxygen in the atmosphere, there was no protective ozone layer around the earth. That means there was nothing to stop the radiation from the cosmos. This is also significant because this radiation was probably instrumental in forming the first complex molecule. Cosmic radiation of this nature was the actual energy which caused the various chemical substances on the earth to start combining into a complicated macromolecule.”

“Nowadays we know that infants like touching their sex organs. We can observe this on any beach. In Freud’s time, this behavior could result in a slap over the fingers of the two-or three-year-old, perhaps accompanied by the mother saying, ‘Naughty!’ or ‘Don’t do that!’ or ‘Keep your hands on top of the covers!’” “How sick!” “That’s the beginning of guilt feelings about everything connected with the sex organs and sexuality. Because this guilt feeling remains in the superego, many people—according to Freud, most people—feel guilty about sex all their lives. At the same time he showed that sexual desires and needs are natural and vital for human beings. And thus, my dear Sophie, the stage is set for a lifelong conflict between desire and guilt.”

“So the unconscious is everything that’s inside us that we have forgotten and don’t remember?” “We don’t have all our experiences consciously present all the time. But the kinds of things we have thought or experienced, and which we can recall if we ‘put our mind to it,’ Freud termed the preconscious. He reserved the term ‘unconscious’ for things we have repressed. That is, the sort of thing we have made an effort to forget because it was either ‘unpleasant,’ ‘improper,’ or ‘nasty.’ If we have desires and urges that are not tolerable to the conscious, the superego shoves them downstairs. Away with them!”

“The word surrealism comes from the French, and means ‘super realism.’ In 1924 André Breton published a ‘surrealistic manifesto,’ claiming that art should come from the unconscious. The artist should thus derive the freest possible inspiration from his dream images and strive toward a ‘super realism,’ in which the boundaries between dream and reality were dissolved. For an artist too it can be necessary to break the censorship of the conscious and let words and images have free play.”

“In a sense, Freud demonstrated that there is an artist in everyone. A dream is, after all, a little work of art, and there are new dreams every night. In order to interpret his patients’ dreams, Freud often had to work his way through a dense language of symbols—rather in the way we interpret a picture or a literary text.”

But we are going to concentrate on the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, who lived from 1905 to 1980. He was the leading light among the existentialists—at least, to the broader public. His existentialism became especially popular in the forties, just after the war. Later on he allied himself with the Marxist movement in France, but he never became a member of any party.”

“Both Kierkegaard and some of this century’s existential philosophers were Christian. But Sartre’s allegiance was to what we might call an atheistic existentialism. His philosophy can be seen as a merciless analysis of the human situation when ‘God is dead.’ The expression ‘God is dead’ came from Nietzsche.”

“Sartre said that man’s existence takes priority over whatever he might otherwise be. The fact that I exist takes priority over what I am. ‘Existence takes priority over essence.’” “That was a very complicated statement.” “By essence we mean that which something consists of—the nature, or being, of something. But according to Sartre, man has no such innate ‘nature.’ Man must therefore create himself. He must create his own nature or ‘essence,’ because it is not fixed in advance.”

“Throughout the entire history of philosophy, philosophers have sought to discover what man is—or what human nature is. But Sartre believed that man has no such eternal ‘nature’ to fall back on. It is therefore useless to search for the meaning of life in general. We are condemned to improvise.

“Sartre says that man feels alien in a world without meaning. When he describes man’s ‘alienation,’ he is echoing the central ideas of Hegel and Marx. Man’s feeling of alienation in the world creates a sense of despair, boredom, nausea, and absurdity.”

Sartre experienced man’s freedom as a curse. ‘Man is condemned to be free,’ he said. ‘Condemned because he has not created himself—and is nevertheless free. Because having once been hurled into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.’”

“The theater of the absurd often portrays situations that are absolutely trivial. It can therefore also be called a kind of ‘hyperrealism.’ People are portrayed precisely as they are. But if you reproduce on stage exactly what goes on in the bathroom on a perfectly ordinary morning in a perfectly ordinary home, the audience would laugh. Their laughter could be interpreted as a defense mechanism against seeing themselves lampooned on stage.”

“The absurd theater can also have certain surrealistic features. Its characters often find themselves in highly unrealistic and dreamlike situations. When they accept this without surprise, the audience is compelled to react in surprise at the characters’ lack of surprise. This was how Charlie Chaplin worked in his silent movies. The comic effect in these silent movies was often Chaplin’s laconic acceptance of all the absurd things that happen to him. That compelled the audience to look into themselves for something more genuine and true.”

Alberto pointed down at a particular book, and Sophie gasped as she read the title: Sophie’s World. “Would you like me to buy it for you?” “I don’t know if I dare.” Shortly afterward, however, she was on her way home with the book in one hand and a little bag of things for the garden party in the other.

“Has it struck you that our roles are completely reversed?” asked Alberto after a while.