Sophie's World

by Jostein Gaarder

Myth of the Cave.

Plato’s point was that the relationship between the darkness of the cave and the world beyond corresponds to the relationship between the forms of the natural world and the world of ideas. Not that he meant that the natural world is dark and dreary, but that it is dark and dreary in comparison with the clarity of ideas. A picture of a beautiful landscape is not dark and dreary either. But it is only a picture.

According to Plato, the human body is composed of three parts: the head, the chest, and the abdomen. For each of these three parts there is a corresponding faculty of the soul. Reason belongs to the head, will belongs to the chest, and appetite belongs to the abdomen. Each of these soul faculties also has an ideal, or ‘virtue.’ Reason aspires to wisdom, Will aspires to courage, and Appetite must be curbed so that temperance can be exercised. Only when the three parts of the body function together as a unity do we get a harmonious or ‘virtuous’ individual.

At school, a child must first learn to curb its appetites, then it must develop courage, and finally reason leads to wisdom.

Women, he asserted, have exactly the same powers of reasoning as men, provided they get the same training and are exempt from child rearing and housekeeping.

(Plato was the first philosopher to advocate state-organized nursery schools and full-time education.)

All in all, we can say that Plato had a positive view of women – considering the time he lived in. In the dialogue Symposium, he gives a woman, the legendary priestess Diotima, the honor of having given Socrates his philosophic insight.

And if you hated doing homework it would probably be a bad idea to become a teacher.

There was a saying: The devil finds work for idle hands.

to Aristotle the ‘forms’ were in the things, because they were the particular characteristics of these things. So Aristotle disagreed with Plato that the ‘idea’ chicken came before the chicken. What Aristotle called the ‘form’ chicken is present in every single chicken as the chicken’s particular set characteristics – for one, that it lays eggs. The real chicken and the ‘form’ chicken are thus just as inseparable as body and soul.

The highest degree of reality, in Plato’s theory, was that which we think with our reason. It was equally apparent to Aristotle that the highest degree of reality is that which we perceive with our senses. Plato thought that all the things we see in the natural world were purely reflections of things that existed in the higher reality of the world of ideas – and thereby in the human soul. Aristotle thought the opposite: things that are in the human soul were purely reflections of natural objects. So nature is the real world.

Aristotle pointed out that nothing exists in consciousness that has not first been experienced by the senses. Plato would have said that there is nothing in the natural world that has not first existed in the world of ideas. Aristotle held that Plato was thus ‘doubling the number of things.’

Aristotle held that all our thoughts and ideas have come into our consciousness through what we have heard and seen. But we also have an innate power of reason. We have no innate ideas, as Plato held, but we have the innate faculty of organizing all sensory impressions into categories and classes.

Aristotle decided that reality consisted of various separate things that constitute a unify of form and substance. The ‘substance’ is what things are made of, while the ‘form’ is each thing’s specific characteristics.

‘Substance’ always contains the potentiality to realize a specific ‘form.’ We could say that ‘substance’ always strives towards achieving an innate potentiality. Every change in nature, according to Aristotle, is a transformation of substance from the ‘potential’ to the ‘actual.’

Aristotle invented that game. We ought to give Plato the credit for having invented hide-and-seek. Democritus has already been credited with having invented Lego.

Aristotle’s logic was based on the correlation of terms,

According to Aristotle, nonliving things can only change through external influence. Only living things have the potentiality for change.

Aristotle divides ‘living things’ into two different categories. One comprises plants, and the other creatures. Finally, these ‘creatures’ can also be divided into two subcategories, namely animals and humans.

All living things (plants, animals, humans) have the ability to absorb nourishment, to grow, and to propagate. All ‘living creatures’ (animals and humans) have in addition the ability to perceive the world around them and to move about. Moreover, all humans have the ability to think – or otherwise to order their perceptions into various categories and classes. So there are in reality no sharp boundaries in the natural world. We observe a gradual transition from simple growths to more complicated plants, from simple animals to more complicated animals. At the top of this ‘scale’ is man – who according to Aristotle lives the whole life of nature. Man grows and absorbs nourishment like plants, he has feelings and the ability to move like animals, but he also has a specific characteristic peculiar to humans, and that is the ability to think rationally. Therefore, man has a spark of divine reason,

Aristotle imagined the movement of the stars and the planets guiding all movement on Earth. But there had to be something causing the heavenly bodies to move. Aristotle called this the ‘first mover,’ or ‘God.’ The ‘first mover’ is itself at rest, but it is the ‘formal cause’ of the movement of the heavenly bodies, and thus of all movement in nature.

Man can only achieve happiness by using all his abilities and capabilities. Aristotle held that there are three forms of happiness. The first form of happiness is a life of pleasure and enjoyment. The second form of happiness is a life as a free and responsible citizen. The third form of happiness is a life as thinker and philosopher.

‘Golden Mean.’ We must be neither cowardly nor rash, but courageous (too little courage is cowardice, too much is rashness), neither miserly nor extravagant but liberal (not liberal enough is miserly, too liberal is extravagant).

The ethics of both Plato and Aristotle contain echoes of Greek medicine: only by exercising balance and temperance will I achieve a happy or ‘harmonious’ life.

He says that man is by nature a ‘political animal.’ Without a society around us, we are not real people, he claimed. He pointed out that the family and the village satisfy our primary needs of food, warmth, marriage, and child rearing. But the highest form of human fellowship is only to be found in the state.

Aristotle describes three good forms of constitution. One is monarchy, or kingship – which means there is only one head of state. For this type of constitution to be good, it must not degenerate into ‘tyranny’ – that is, when one ruler governs the state to his own advantage. Another good form of constitution is aristocracy, in which there is a larger or smaller group of rulers. This constitutional form must beware of degenerating into an ‘oligarchy’ – when the government is run by a few people. An example of that would be a junta. The third good constitutional form is what Aristotle called polity, which means democracy. But this form also has its negative aspect. A democracy can quickly develop into mob rule. (Even if the tyrannic Hitler had not become head of state in Germany, all the lesser Nazis could have formed a terrifying mob rule.)

in Aristotelian language, the man provides the ‘form’ and the woman contributes the ‘substance.’

Common sense and conscience can both be compared to a muscle. If you don’t use a muscle, it gets weaker and weaker.’

The term Hellenism refers to both the period of time and the Greek-dominated culture that prevailed in the three Hellenistic kingdoms of Macedonia, Syria, and Egypt.

Late Antiquity.

New religious formations arose that could draw on the gods and the beliefs of many of the old nations. This is called syncretism or the fusion of creeds.

Late Antiquity was generally characterized by religious doubts, cultural dissolution, and pessimism. It was said that ‘the world has grown old.’

Hellenistic science, too, was influenced by a blend of knowledge from the various cultures.

Hellenistic philosophy continued to work with the problems raised by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

The Cynics emphasized that true happiness is not found in external advantages such as material luxury, political power, or good health. True happiness lies in not being dependent on such random and fleeting things. And because happiness does not consist in benefits of this kind, it is within everyone’s reach. Moreover, having once been attained, it can never be lost.

Nowadays the terms ‘cynical’ and ‘cynicism’ have come to mean a sneering disbelief in human sincerity, and they imply insensitivity to other people’s suffering.

the Stoics believed that everyone was a part of the same common sense – or ‘logos.’ They thought that each person was like a world in miniature, or ‘microcosmos,’ which is a reflection of the ‘macrocosmos.’ This led to the thought that there exists a universal rightness, the so-called natural law. And because this natural law was based on timeless human and universal reason, it did not alter with time and place. In this, then, the Stoics sided with Socrates against the Sophists.

the Stoics erased the difference between the individual and the universe, they also denied any conflict between ‘spirit’ and ‘matter.’ There is only one nature, they averred. This kind of idea is called monism (in contrast to Plato’s clear dualism or twofold reality).

Cicero (106–43 B.C.). It was he who formed the very concept of ‘humanism’ – that is, a view of life that has the individual as its central focus.

the Stoic Seneca (4 B.C.–A.D. 65) said that ‘to mankind, mankind is holy.’ This has remained a slogan for humanism ever since.

The Stoics, moreover, emphasized that all natural processes, such as sickness and death, follow the unbreakable laws of nature. Man must therefore learn to accept his destiny. Nothing happens accidentally. Everything happens through necessity, so it is of little use to complain when fate comes knocking at the door. One must also accept the happy events of life unperturbed, they thought. In this we see their kinship with the Cynics, who claimed that all external...

‘The highest good is pleasure,’ he said, ‘the greatest evil is pain.’

the atom theory of Democritus

‘Death does not concern us,’ Epicurus said quite simply, ‘because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.’ (When you think about it, no one has ever been bothered by being dead.)

Epicurus summed up his liberating philosophy with what he called the four medicinal herbs: The gods are not to be feared. Death is nothing to worry about. Good is easy to attain. The fearful is easy to endure.

Cynicism, Stoicism, and Epicureanism all had their roots in the teaching of Socrates.

According to Plotinus, the soul is illuminated by the light from the One, while matter is the darkness that has no real existence. But the forms in nature have a faint glow of the One.

A mystical experience is an experience of merging with God or the ‘cosmic spirit.’ Many religions emphasize the gulf between God and Creation, but the mystic experiences no such gulf. He or she has experienced being ‘one with God’ or ‘merging’ with Him.

Related languages often lead to related ideas. This is why we usually speak of an Indo-European ‘culture.’

The culture of the Indo-Europeans was influenced most of all by their belief in many gods. This is called polytheism. The names of these gods as well as much of the religious terminology recur throughout the whole Indo-European area.