Sophie's World

by Jostein Gaarder

As soon as she concentrated on being alive now, the thought of dying also came into her mind. The same thing happened the other way around: only by conjuring up an intense feeling of one day being dead could she appreciate how terribly good it was to be alive.

You can’t experience being alive without realizing that you have to die, she thought. But it’s just as impossible to realize you have to die without thinking how incredibly amazing it is to be alive.

For the first time she began to feel that at school as well as everywhere else people were only concerned with trivialities. There were major problems that needed to be solved.

What is the most important thing in life? If we ask someone living on the edge of starvation, the answer is food. If we ask someone dying of cold, the answer is warmth. If we put the same question to someone who feels lonely and isolated, the answer will probably be the company of other people. But when these basic needs have been satisfied – will there still be something that everybody needs? Philosophers think so. They believe that man cannot live by bread alone. Of course everyone needs food. And everyone needs love and care. But there is something else – apart from that – which everyone needs, and that is to figure out who we are and why we are here.

I say it now: the only thing we require to be good philosophers is the faculty of wonder.

It seems as if in the process of growing up we lose the ability to wonder about the world. And in doing so, we lose something central – something philosophers try to restore.

For various reasons most people get so caught up in everyday affairs that their astonishment at the world gets pushed into the background. (They crawl deep into the rabbit’s fur, snuggle down comfortably, and stay there for the rest of their lives.)

So the myth tried to give people an explanation for something they could not understand. But a myth was not only an explanation. People also carried out religious ceremonies related to the myths.

Although we humans do not always think alike or have the same degree of reason, Heraclitus believed that there must be a kind of ‘universal reason’ guiding everything that happens in nature.

Empedocles believed that there were two different forces at work in nature. He called them love and strife. Love binds things together, and strife separates them.

Empedocles was right. The only way we can accept the transformations we can see with our own eyes – without losing our reason – is to admit the existence of more than one single basic substance.

She decided that philosophy was not something you can learn; but perhaps you can learn to think philosophically.

Each single Lego block can be part of a truck one day and part of a castle the day after. We could also say that Lego blocks are ‘eternal.’ Children of today can play with the same blocks their parents played with when they were little.

‘Superstitious.’ What a strange word. If you believed in Christianity or Islam, it was called ‘faith.’ But if you believed in astrology or Friday the thirteenth it was superstition! Who had the right to call other people’s belief superstition?

But the more she did, the more clearly she saw that knowing what you don’t know is also a kind of knowledge. The stupidest thing she knew was for people to act like they knew all about things they knew absolutely nothing about.

The ability to give birth is a natural characteristic. In the same way, everybody can grasp philosophical truths if they just use their innate reason. Using your innate reason means reaching down inside yourself and using what is there.

A philosopher is therefore someone who recognizes that there is a lot he does not understand, and is troubled by it. In that sense, he is still wiser than all those who brag about their knowledge of things they know nothing about. ‘Wisest is she who knows she does not know,’ I said previously. Socrates himself said, ‘One thing only I know, and that is that I know nothing.’

The difference between school-teachers and philosophers is that schoolteachers think they know a lot of stuff that they try to force down our throats. Philosophers try to figure things out together with the pupils.’

Philosophers will try to ignore highly topical affairs and instead try to draw people’s attention to what is eternally ‘true,’ eternally ‘beautiful,’ and eternally ‘good.’

Absolutely everything that belongs to the ‘material world’ is made of a material that time can erode, but everything is made after a timeless ‘mold’ or ‘form’ that is eternal and immutable.

Plato came to the conclusion that there must be a reality behind the ‘material world.’ He called this reality the world of ideas; it contained the eternal and immutable ‘patterns’ behind the various phenomena we come across in nature. This remarkable view is known as Plato’s theory of ideas.

Plato’s point is that we can never have true knowledge of anything that is in a constant state of change. We can only have opinions about things that belong to the world of the senses, tangible things. We can only have true knowledge of things that can be understood with our reason.

We could say that reason is eternal and universal precisely because it only expresses eternal and universal states.

In short, we can only have inexact conceptions of things we perceive with our senses. But we can have true knowledge of things we understand with our reason.

Plato believed similarly that all natural phenomena are merely shadows of the eternal forms or ideas. But most people are content with a life among shadows. They give no thought to what is casting the shadows. They think shadows are all there are, never realizing even that they are, in fact, shadows. And thus they pay no heed to the immortality of their own soul.

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 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.

‘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.’

The ‘form’ of a thing, then, says something about its limitation as well as its potentiality.

The ‘material cause’ is that the moisture (the clouds) was there at the precise moment when the air cooled. The ‘efficient cause’ is that the moisture cools, and the ‘formal cause’ is that the ‘form,’ or nature of the water, is to fall to the earth. But if you stopped there, Aristotle would add that it rains because plants and animals need rainwater in order to grow. This he called the ‘final cause.’ Aristotle assigns the raindrops a life-task, or ‘purpose.’

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

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.

But the highest form of human fellowship is only to be found in the state.

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.

‘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.)

Related languages often lead to related ideas.

Indian, Greek, and Norse mythology all have obvious leanings toward a philosophic, or ‘speculative,’ view of the world.

All three Western religions – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – share a Semitic background.

We said that the most important of the senses for Indo-Europeans was sight. How important hearing was to the Semitic cultures is just as interesting. It is no accident that the Jewish creed begins with the words: ‘Hear, O Israel!’ In the Old Testament we read how the people ‘heard’ the word of the Lord, and the Jewish prophets usually began their sermons with the words: ‘Thus spake Jehovah (God).’ ‘Hearing’ the word of God is also emphasized in Christianity.

But the Christian churches are full of pictures of Jesus and God, you are probably thinking. True enough, Sophie, but this is just one example of how Christendom was influenced by the Greco-Roman world. (In the Greek Orthodox Church – that is, in Greece and in Russia – ‘graven images,’ or sculptures and crucifixes, from Bible stories are still forbidden.)

The key words are ‘Messiah,’ ‘Son of God,’ and ‘Kingdom of God.’ At first it was all taken politically. In the time of Jesus, there were a lot of people who imagined that there would come a new ‘Messiah’ in the sense of a political, military, and religious leader of the caliber of King David. This ‘savior’ was thus looked upon as a national deliverer who would put an end to the suffering of the Jews under Roman domination.

When we talked about Socrates, we saw how dangerous it could be to appeal to people’s reason. With Jesus we see how dangerous it can be to demand unconditional brotherly love and unconditional forgiveness. Even in the world of today we can see how mighty powers can come apart at the seams when confronted with simple demands for peace, love, food for the poor, and amnesty for the enemies of the state.

But even in our day most people will agree that human reason is certainly not capable of disproving the existence of God.

‘Yes, perhaps he can. But not “now.” For God, time does not exist as it does for us. Our “now” is not God’s “now.” Because many weeks pass for us, they do not necessarily pass for God.’

We are living under what is possibly the world’s closest surveillance.’

And these three discoveries – the compass, firearms, and the printing press – were essential preconditions for this new period we call the Renaissance.’

Toward the end of the Middle Ages, cities had developed, with effective trades and a lively commerce of new goods, a monetary economy and banking. A middle class arose which developed a certain freedom with regard to the basic conditions of life. Necessities became something that could be bought for money. This state of affairs rewarded people’s diligence, imagination, and ingenuity. New demands were made on the individual.’

But humanism has always had a shadow side. No epoch is either purely good or purely evil. Good and evil are twin threads that run through the history of mankind. And often they intertwine.

Ever since the Renaissance, mankind has been more than just part of creation. Man has begun to intervene in nature and form it after his own image. In truth, “what a piece of work is man!”’

When Newton had proved that the same natural laws applied everywhere in the universe, one might think that he thereby undermined people’s faith in God’s omnipotence. But Newton’s own faith was never shaken. He regarded the natural laws as proof of the existence of the great and almighty God.