Sophie's World

by Jostein Gaarder

Thus humans have the capacity to rise above bodily needs and behave rationally. In this sense the mind is superior to the body. Our legs can age and become weak, the back can become bowed and our teeth can fall out – but two and two will go on being four as long as there is reason left in us.

Spinoza was part of the same rationalistic tradition. He wanted his ethics to show that human life is subject to the universal laws of nature. We must therefore free ourselves from our feelings and our passions. Only then will we find contentment and be happy, he believed.’

Only when we are free to develop our innate abilities can we live as free beings. But we are just as much determined by inner potential and outer opportunities as the Stone Age boy on the Rhine, the lion in Africa, or the apple tree in the garden.’

The goal is to comprehend everything that exists in an all-embracing perception. Only then will we achieve true happiness and contentment. This was what Spinoza called seeing everything “sub specie aeternitatis.”’

By primary qualities he meant extension, weight, motion and number, and so on. When it is a question of qualities such as these, we can be certain that the senses reproduce them objectively. But we also sense other qualities in things. We say that something is sweet or sour, green or red, hot or cold. Locke calls these secondary qualities. Sensations like these – color, smell, taste, sound – do not reproduce the real qualities that are inherent in the things themselves. They reproduce only the effect of the outer reality on our senses.’

Locke had first and foremost emphasized that the legislative and the executive power must be separated if tyranny was to be avoided.

as Hume put it: If we take in our hands any volume … let us ask, “Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number?” No. “Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence?” No. Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.’

‘We soon realize that our idea of “heaven” is compounded of a great many elements. Heaven is made up of “pearly gates,” “streets of gold,” “angels” by the score and so on and so forth.

But Hume emphasizes that all the elements we put together in our ideas must at some time have entered the mind in the form of “simple impressions.” A person who has never seen gold will never be able to visualize streets of gold.’

‘Anyway, Hume opposed all thoughts and ideas that could not be traced back to corresponding sense perceptions. He said he wanted to “dismiss all this meaningless nonsense which long has dominated metaphysical thought and brought it into disrepute.”

‘So the feeling of having an unalterable ego is a false perception. The perception of the ego is in reality a long chain of simple impressions that you have never experienced simultaneously. It is “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed one another with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement,” as Hume expressed it. The mind is “a kind of theater, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, slide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.”

I am not the same today as I was yesterday. There is nothing of which I can say “this is mine,” said Buddha, and nothing of which I can say “this is me.” There is thus no “I” or unalterable ego.’

You might say that with Hume’s philosophy, the final link between faith and knowledge was broken.’

Hume’s philosophy of experience. He would have added that the child has not yet become a slave of the expectations of habit; he is thus the more open-minded of you two. I wonder if the child is not also the greater philosopher? He comes utterly without preconceived opinions. And that, my dear Sophie, is the philosopher’s most distinguishing virtue. The child perceives the world as it is, without putting more into things than he experiences.’

The laws of nature are neither reasonable nor unreasonable, they simply are. The expectation that the white billiard ball will move when it is struck by the black billiard ball is therefore not innate. We are not born with a set of expectations as to what the world is like or how things in the world behave. The world is like it is, and it’s something we get to know.’

‘The fact that one thing follows after another thus does not necessarily mean there is a causal link. One of the main concerns of philosophy is to warn people against jumping to conclusions. It can in fact lead to many different forms of superstition.’

Hume said you can never draw conclusions from is sentences to ought sentences.

Highly disputable, given that many acts of morality are hereditary, and can be observed in other species, certainly not all, but at least for us, it has proven to be a successful evolutionary strategy. (but certainly it wasn't known in Hume's time) Another argument is from probability, the more people do good and expect to receive good in return, the more good there will be in the world.

‘The soul yearns to fly home on the wings of love to the world of ideas. It longs to be freed from the chains of the body

the empiricists were right up to a point. The rationalists had almost forgotten the importance of experience, and the empiricists had shut their eyes to the way our own mind influences the way we see the world.’

But that does not only apply to others, it also applies to you yourself. You must not exploit yourself as a mere means to achieving something, either.’

according to Kant, it is this good will which determines whether or not the action was morally right, not the consequences of the action. Kant’s ethics is therefore also called a good will ethic.’

‘Did I say that Kant believed we had no freedom if we lived only as creatures of the senses?’ ‘Yes, you said something like that.’ ‘But if we obey universal reason we are free and independent.

‘This yearning for something distant and unattainable was characteristic of the Romantics.

The Romantics were not unlike the hippies a hundred and fifty years later.’

“idleness is the ideal of genius, and indolence the virtue of the Romantic.”

‘The philosophers of Romanticism viewed the “world soul” as an “ego” which in a more or less dreamlike state created everything in the world.

‘At the same time the writer could remind his reader that it was he who was manipulating the fictional universe. This form of disillusion is called “romantic irony.”

Poor Sophie and Alberto! They were just as defenseless against the major’s imagination as a movie screen is against the film projector.

‘A river is also in a constant state of change. That doesn’t mean you can’t talk about it. But you cannot say at which place in the valley the river is the “truest” river.’

‘You cannot single out particular thoughts from antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, or the Enlightenment and say they were right or wrong. By the same token, you cannot say that Plato was wrong and that Aristotle was right. Neither can you say that Hume was wrong but Kant and Schelling were right. That would be an antihistorical way of thinking.’

According to Hegel, history is the story of the “world spirit” gradually coming to consciousness of itself. Although the world has always existed, human culture and human development have made the world spirit increasingly conscious of its intrinsic value.’ ‘How could he be so sure of that?’ ‘He claimed it as a historical reality. It was not a prediction. Anybody who studies history will see that humanity has advanced toward ever-increasing “self-knowledge” and “self-development.” According to Hegel, the study of history shows that humanity is moving toward greater rationality and freedom.

But as soon as one thought is proposed, it will be contradicted by another. A tension arises between these two opposite ways of thinking. But the tension is resolved by the proposal of a third thought which accommodates the best of both points of view. Hegel calls this a dialectic process.’

‘He also called these three stages of knowledge thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.

‘If I reflect on the concept of “being,” I will be obliged to introduce the opposite concept, that of “nothing.” You can’t reflect on your existence without immediately realizing that you won’t always exist. The tension between “being” and “nothing” becomes resolved in the concept of “becoming.” Because if something is in the process of becoming, it both is and is not.’

The Norwegian language manages quite well without Mr Hansen, but Mr Hansen cannot manage without Norwegian. It is thus not the individual who forms the language, it is the language which forms the individual.’

‘According to Hegel, the state is “more” than the individual citizen. It is moreover more than the sum of its citizens. So Hegel says one cannot “resign from society.” Anyone who simply shrugs their shoulders at the society they live in and wants to “find their soul” will therefore be ridiculed.’

There was once a monk who asked Buddha if he could give clearer answers to fundamental questions on what the world is and what a man is. Buddha answered by likening the monk to a man who gets pierced by a poisoned arrow. The wounded man would have no theoretical interest in what the arrow was made of, what kind of poison it was dipped in, or which direction it came from.’

was what Marx meant when he observed that until now, “philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”

‘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.’

“the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.” In other words, history is principally a matter of who is to own the means of production.’

‘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.

In many places, part of the wages was paid out in the form of cheap liquor, and women were obliged to supplement their earnings by prostitution.

The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workingmen of all countries, unite!’

“from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”

‘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.’

Had God once and for all really created all these animals slightly different from each other – or had an evolution taken place?

there was one more factor to indicate that all the animals on earth might be related.’ ‘And what was that?’ ‘The development of the embryo in mammals. If you compare the embryos of dogs, bats, rabbits, and humans at an early stage, they look so alike that it is hard to tell the difference. You cannot distinguish a human embryo from a rabbit embryo until a very late stage.

Giraffes, for example, had developed long necks because for generations they had reached up for leaves in the trees. Lamarck believed that the characteristics each individual acquires through his own efforts are passed on to the next generation. But this theory of the heredity of “acquired characteristics” was rejected by Darwin because Lamarck had no proof of his bold claims.

you would favor the better gundog. 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.

Darwin had been searching for. Here was the explanation of how evolution happens. It was due to natural selection in the struggle for life, in which those that were best adapted to their surroundings would survive and perpetuate the race.