Sophie's World

by Jostein Gaarder

people have tried to eradicate pests with various pesticides. At first, this can produce excellent results. But when you spray a field or an orchard with pesticides, you actually cause a miniature ecocatastrophe for the pests you are trying to eradicate. Due to continual mutations, a type of pest develops that is resistant to the pesticide being used. Now these “winners” have free play, so it becomes harder and harder to combat certain kinds of pest simply because of man’s attempt to eradicate them. The most resistant variants are the ones that survive, of course.’

‘Those that have lost in the struggle for existence have disappeared, you see. It takes many millions of years to select the winning numbers for each and every species of vegetable and animal on the earth. And the losing numbers – well, they only make one appearance. So there are no species of animal or vegetable in existence today that are not winning numbers in the great lottery of life.’ ‘Because only the best have survived.’

our planet was quite different from the way it looks today. Since there was no life, there was no oxygen in the atmosphere. Free oxygen was first formed by the photosynthesis of plants. And the fact that there was no oxygen is important. It is unlikely that life cells – which, again, can form DNA – could have arisen in an atmosphere containing oxygen.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because oxygen is strongly reactive. Long before complex molecules like DNA could be formed, the DNA molecular cells would be oxidized.’

the atmosphere protected life from the harmful cosmic radiation. Strangely enough, this radiation, which was probably a vital “spark” in the formation of the first cell, is also harmful to all forms of life.’

What matters our creative endless toil, When, at a snatch, oblivion ends the coil?

‘And is it not also a consequence of Darwin’s theory that we are part of something all-encompassing, in which every tiny life form has its significance in the big picture? We are the living planet, Sophie! We are the great vessel sailing around a burning sun in the universe. But each and every one of us is also a ship sailing through life with a cargo of genes. When we have carried this cargo safely to the next harbor – we have not lived in vain.

‘Freud held that there is a constant tension between man and his surroundings. In particular, a tension – or conflict – between his drives and needs and the demands of society.

‘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.’

Freud called neuroses. One of his many women patients, for example, was secretly in love with her brother-in-law. When her sister died of an illness, she thought: “Now he is free to marry me!” This thought was on course for a frontal collision with her superego, and was so monstrous an idea that she immediately repressed it, Freud tells us. In other words, she buried it deep in her unconscious. Freud wrote: “The young girl was ill and displaying severe hysterical symptoms. When I began treating her it appeared that she had thoroughly forgotten about the scene at her sister’s bedside and the odious egoistic impulse that had emerged in her.

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!’

“Suppose that here in this hall and in this audience, whose exemplary stillness and attention I cannot sufficiently commend, there is an individual who is creating a disturbance, and, by his ill-bred laughing, talking, by scraping his feet, distracts my attention from my task. I explain that I cannot go on with my lecture under these conditions, and thereupon several strong men among you get up and, after a short struggle, eject the disturber of the peace from the hall. He is now repressed, and I can continue my lecture. But in order that the disturbance may not be repeated, in case the man who has just been thrown out attempts to force his way back into the room, the gentlemen who have executed my suggestion take their chairs to the door and establish themselves there as a resistance, to keep up the repression. Now, if you transfer both locations to the psyche, calling this consciousness, and the outside the unconscious, you have a tolerably good illustration of the process of repression.”’

‘From now on I’ll watch all my words very carefully.’ ‘Even if you do, you won’t be able to escape from your unconscious impulses. The art is precisely not to expend too much effort on burying unpleasant things in the unconscious. It’s like trying to block up the entrance to a water vole’s nest. You can be sure the water vole will pop up in another part of the garden. It is actually quite healthy to leave the door ajar between the conscious and the unconscious.’

‘The harder you try to forget something, the more you think about it unconsciously?’

‘After many years of experience with patients – and not least after having analyzed his own dreams – Freud determined that all dreams are wish fulfillments.

But in adults, the wishes that are to be fulfilled in dreams are disguised. That is because even when we sleep, censorship is at work on what we will permit ourselves. And although this censorship, or repression mechanism, is considerably weaker when we are asleep than when we are awake, it is still strong enough to cause our dreams to distort the wishes we cannot acknowledge.’

‘Yes. Freud believed that the dream was a “disguised fulfillment of a repressed wish.”

‘Recent research shows that we dream for about twenty percent of our sleeping hours, that is, between one and two hours each night. If we are disturbed during our dream phases we become nervous and irritable. This means nothing less than that everybody has an innate need to give artistic expression to his or her existential situation. After all, it is ourselves that our dreams are about. We are the directors, we set up the scenario and play all the roles.

Maybe the imagination creates what is new, but the imagination does not make the actual selection. The imagination does not “compose.” A composition – and every work of art is one – is created in a wondrous interplay between imagination and reason, or between mind and reflection. For there will always be an element of chance in the creative process. You have to turn the sheep loose before you can start to herd them.’

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. We are like actors dragged onto the stage without having learned our lines, with no script and no prompter to whisper stage directions to us. We must decide for ourselves how to live.’

‘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.

He was not what we call a nihilist.’ ‘What is that?’ ‘That is a person who thinks nothing means anything and everything is permissible. Sartre believed that life must have meaning. It is an imperative. But it is we ourselves who must create this meaning in our own lives. To exist is to create your own life.’

The theater of the absurd represented a contrast to realistic theater. Its aim was to show the lack of meaning in life in order to get the audience to disagree. The idea was not to cultivate the meaningless. On the contrary. But by showing and exposing the absurd in ordinary everyday situations, the onlookers are forced to seek a truer and more essential life for themselves.’

that existential questions cannot be answered once and for all. A philosophical question is by definition something that each generation, each individual even, must ask over and over again.’

‘I’m not sure I agree. Surely it is by asking such questions that we know we are alive. And moreover, it has always been the case that while people were seeking answers to the ultimate questions, they have discovered clear and final solutions to many other problems. Science, research, and technology are all by-products of our philosophical reflection. Was it not our wonder about life that finally brought men to the moon?’

‘Publishing such books is a big commercial enterprise. It’s what most people want.’ ‘Why, do you think?’ ‘They obviously desire something mystical, something different to break the dreary monotony of everyday life. But it is like carrying coals to Newcastle.’

‘It would be a coincidence, anyway. The point is, people collect coincidences like these. They collect strange – or inexplicable – experiences. When such experiences – taken from the lives of billions of people – are assembled into books, it begins to look like genuine data. And the amount of it increases all the time. But once again we are looking at a lottery in which only the winning numbers are visible.’

‘All true philosophers should keep their eyes open. Even if we have never seen a white crow, we should never stop looking for it. And one day, even a skeptic like me could be obliged to accept a phenomenon I did not believe in before. If I did not keep this possibility open I would be dogmatic, and not a true philosopher.’

‘She is lucky, I agree. But she who wins the lot of life must also draw the lot of death, since the lot of life is death.’ ‘But still, isn’t it better to have had a life than never to have really lived?’ ‘We cannot live a life like Hilde – or like the major for that matter. On the other hand, we’ll never die.

‘The only way we can look out into space, then, is to look back in time. We can never know what the universe is like now. We only know what it was like then. When we look up at a star that is thousands of light-years away, we are really traveling thousands of years back in the history of space.’

‘You and I also began with the Big Bang, because all substance in the universe is an organic unity. Once in a primeval age all matter was gathered in a clump so enormously massive that a pinhead weighed many billions of tons. This “primeval atom” exploded because of the enormous gravitation. It was as if something disintegrated. When we look up at the sky, we are trying to find the way back to ourselves.’