Sophie's World

by Jostein Gaarder

  “Of course. But first let us try to familiarize ourselves with the period they lived in. Have a seat.”

  They sat in the same places as before, Sophie in the big armchair and Alberto Knox on the sofa. Between them was the coffee table with the book and the casket. Alberto removed his wig and laid it on the writing desk.

  “We are going to talk about the seventeenth century—or what we generally refer to as the Baroque period.”

  “The Baroque period? What a strange name.”

  “The word ‘baroque’ comes from a word that was first used to describe a pearl of irregular shape. Irregularity was typical of Baroque art, which was much richer in highly contrastive forms than the plainer and more harmonious Renaissance art. The seventeenth century was on the whole characterized by tensions between irreconcilable contrasts. On the one hand there was the Renaissance’s unremitting optimism—and on the other hand there were the many who sought the opposite extreme in a life of religious seclusion and self-denial. Both in art and in real life, we meet pompous and flamboyant forms of self-expression, while at the same time there arose a monastic movement, turning away from the world.”

  “Both proud palaces and remote monasteries, in other words.”

  “Yes, you could certainly say that. One of the Baroque period’s favorite sayings was the Latin expression ‘carpe diem’—‘seize the day.’ Another Latin expression that was widely quoted was ‘memento mori,’ which means ‘remember that you must die.’ In art, a painting could depict an extremely luxurious lifestyle, with a little skull painted in one corner.

  “In many senses, the Baroque period was characterized by vanity or affectation. But at the same time a lot of people were concerned with the other side of the coin; they were concerned with the ephemeral nature of things. That is, the fact that all the beauty that surrounds us must one day perish.”

  “It’s true. It is sad to realize that nothing lasts.”

  “You think exactly as many people did in the seventeenth century. The Baroque period was also an age of conflict in a political sense. Europe was ravaged by wars. The worst was the Thirty Years’ War which raged over most of the continent from 1618 to 1648. In reality it was a series of wars which took a particular toll on Germany. Not least as a result of the Thirty Years’ War, France gradually became the dominant power in Europe.”

  “What were the wars about?”

  “To a great extent they were wars between Protestants and Catholics. But they were also about political power.”

  “More or less like in Lebanon.”

  “Apart from wars, the seventeenth century was a time of great class differences. I’m sure you have heard of the French aristocracy and the Court of Versailles. I don’t know whether you have heard much about the poverty of the French people. But any display of magnificence presupposes a display of power. It has often been said that the political situation in the Baroque period was not unlike its art and architecture. Baroque buildings were typified by a lot of ornate nooks and crannies. In a somewhat similar fashion the political situation was typified by intrigue, plotting, and assassinations.”

  “Wasn’t a Swedish king shot in a theater?”

  “You’re thinking of Gustav III, a good example of the sort of thing I mean. The assassination of Gustav III wasn’t until 1792, but the circumstances were quite baroque. He was murdered while attending a huge masked ball.”

  “I thought he was at the theater.”

  “The great masked ball was held at the Opera. We could say that the Baroque period in Sweden came to an end with the murder of Gustav III. During his time there had been a rule of ‘enlightened despotism,’ similar to that in the reign of Louis XIV almost a hundred years earlier. Gustav III was also an extremely vain person who adored all French ceremony and courtesies. He also loved the theater…”

  “…and that was the death of him.”

  “Yes, but the theater of the Baroque period was more than an art form. It was the most commonly employed symbol of the time.”

  “A symbol of what?”

  “Of life, Sophie. I don’t know how many times during the seventeenth century it was said that ‘Life is a theater.’ It was very often, anyway. The Baroque period gave birth to modern theater—with all its forms of scenery and theatrical machinery. In the theater one built up an illusion on stage—to expose ultimately that the stage play was just an illusion. The theater thus became a reflection of human life in general. The theater could show that ‘pride comes before a fall,’ and present a merciless portrait of human frailty.”

  “Did Shakespeare live in the Baroque period?”

  “He wrote his greatest plays around the year 1600, so he stands with one foot in the Renaissance and the other in the Baroque. Shakespeare’s work is full of passages about life as a theater. Would you like to hear some of them?”

  “Yes.”

  “In As You Like It, he says:

  All the world’s a stage,

  And all the men and women merely players.

  They have their exits and their entrances;

  And one man in his time plays many parts.

  “And in Macbeth, he says:

  Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

  That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

  And then is heard no more: it is a tale

  Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

  Signifying nothing.”

  “How very pessimistic.”

  “He was preoccupied with the brevity of life. You must have heard Shakespeare’s most famous line?”

  “‘To be or not to be: that is the question.’”

  “Yes, spoken by Hamlet. One day we are walking around on the earth—and the next day we are dead and gone.”

  “Thanks, I got the message.”

  “When they were not comparing life to a stage, the Baroque poets were comparing life to a dream. Shakespeare says, for example: ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep…’”

  “That was very poetic.”

  “The Spanish dramatist Calderón de la Barca, who was born in the year 1600, wrote a play called Life Is a Dream, in which he says: ‘What is life? A madness. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a story, and the greatest good is little enough, for all life is a dream…’”

  “He may be right. We read a play at school. It was called Jeppe on the Mount.”

  “By Ludvig Holberg, yes. He was a gigantic figure here in Scandinavia, marking the transition from the Baroque period to the Age of Enlightenment.”

  “Jeppe falls asleep in a ditch…and wakes up in the Baron’s bed. So he thinks he only dreamed that he was a poor farmhand. Then when he falls asleep again they carry him back to the ditch, and he wakes up again. This time he thinks he only dreamed he was lying in the Baron’s bed.”

  “Holberg borrowed this theme from Calderón, and Calderón had borrowed it from the old Arabian tales, A Thousand and One Nights. Comparing life to a dream, though, is a theme we find even farther back in history, not least in India and China. The old Chinese sage Chuang-tzu, for example, said: ‘Once I dreamed I was a butterfly, and now I no longer know whether I am Chuang-tzu, who dreamed I was a butterfly, or whether I am a butterfly dreaming that I am Chuang-tzu.’”

  “Well, it was impossible to prove either way.”

  “We had in Norway a genuine Baroque poet called Petter Dass, who lived from 1647 to 1707. On the one hand he was concerned with describing life as it is here and now, and on the other hand he emphasized that only God is eternal and constant.”

  “God is God if every land was waste, God is God if every man were dead.”

  “But in the same hymn he writes about rural life in Northern Norway—and about lumpfish, cod, and coalfish. This is a typical Baroque feature, describing in the same text the earthly and the here and now—and the celestial and the hereafter. It is all very reminiscent of Plato’s distinction between the concrete world of the senses an
d the immutable world of ideas.”

  “What about their philosophy?”

  “That too was characterized by powerful struggles between diametrically opposed modes of thought. As I have already mentioned, some philosophers believed that what exists is at bottom spiritual in nature. This standpoint is called idealism. The opposite viewpoint is called materialism. By this is meant a philosophy which holds that all real things derive from concrete material substances. Materialism also had many advocates in the seventeenth century. Perhaps the most influential was the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. He believed that all phenomena, including man and animals, consist exclusively of particles of matter. Even human consciousness—or the soul—derives from the movement of tiny particles in the brain.”

  “So he agreed with what Democritus said two thousand years before?”

  “Both idealism and materialism are themes you will find all through the history of philosophy. But seldom have both views been so clearly present at the same time as in the Baroque. Materialism was constantly nourished by the new sciences. Newton showed that the same laws of motion applied to the whole universe, and that all changes in the natural world—both on earth and in space—were explained by the principles of universal gravitation and the motion of bodies.

  “Everything was thus governed by the same unbreakable laws—or by the same mechanisms. It is therefore possible in principle to calculate every natural change with mathematical precision. And thus Newton completed what we call the mechanistic world view.”

  “Did he imagine the world as one big machine?”

  “He did indeed. The world ‘mechanic’ comes from the Greek word ‘mechane,’ which means machine. It is remarkable that neither Hobbes nor Newton saw any contradiction between the mechanistic world picture and belief in God. But this was not the case for all eighteenth-and nineteenth-century materialists. The French physician and philosopher La Mettrie wrote a book in the eighteenth century called L’homme machine, which means ‘Man—the machine.’ Just as the leg has muscles to walk with, so has the brain ‘muscles’ to think with. Later on, the French mathematician Laplace expressed an extreme mechanistic view with this idea: If an intelligence at a given time had known the position of all particles of matter, ‘nothing would be unknown and both future and past would lie open before their eyes.’ The idea here was that everything that happens is predetermined. ‘It’s written in the stars’ that something will happen. This view is called determinism.”

  “So there was no such thing as free will.”

  “No, everything was a product of mechanical processes—also our thoughts and dreams. German materialists in the nineteenth century claimed that the relationship of thought to the brain was like the relationship of urine to the kidneys and gall to the liver.”

  “But urine and gall are material. Thoughts aren’t.”

  “You’ve got hold of something central there. I can tell you a story about the same thing. A Russian astronaut and a Russian brain surgeon were once discussing religion. The brain surgeon was a Christian but the astronaut was not. The astronaut said, ‘I’ve been out in space many times but I’ve never seen God or angels.’ And the brain surgeon said, ‘And I’ve operated on many clever brains but I’ve never seen a single thought.’”

  “But that doesn’t prove that thoughts don’t exist.”

  “No, but it does underline the fact that thoughts are not things that can be operated on or broken down into ever smaller parts. It is not easy, for example, to surgically remove a delusion. It grows too deep, as it were, for surgery. An important seventeenth-century philosopher named Leibniz pointed out that the difference between the material and the spiritual is precisely that the material can be broken up into smaller and smaller bits, but the soul cannot even be divided into two.”

  “No, what kind of scalpel would you use for that?”

  Alberto simply shook his head. After a while he pointed down at the table between them and said:

  “The two greatest philosophers in the seventeenth century were Descartes and Spinoza. They too struggled with questions like the relationship between ‘soul’ and ‘body,’ and we are now going to study them more closely.”

  “Go ahead. But I’m supposed to be home by seven.”

  Descartes

  …he wanted to clear all the rubble off the site…

  Alberto stood up, took off the red cloak, and laid it over a chair. Then he settled himself once again in the corner of the sofa.

  “René Descartes was born in 1596 and lived in a number of different European countries at various periods of his life. Even as a young man he had a strong desire to achieve insight into the nature of man and the universe. But after studying philosophy he became increasingly convinced of his own ignorance.”

  “Like Socrates?”

  “More or less like him, yes. Like Socrates, he was convinced that certain knowledge is only attainable through reason. We can never trust what the old books tell us. We cannot even trust what our senses tell us.”

  “Plato thought that too. He believed that only reason can give us certain knowledge.”

  “Exactly. There is a direct line of descent from Socrates and Plato via St. Augustine to Descartes. They were all typical rationalists, convinced that reason was the only path to knowledge. After comprehensive studies, Descartes came to the conclusion that the body of knowledge handed down from the Middle Ages was not necessarily reliable. You can compare him to Socrates, who did not trust the general views he encountered in the central square of Athens. So what does one do, Sophie? Can you tell me that?”

  “You begin to work out your own philosophy.”

  “Right! Descartes decided to travel around Europe, the way Socrates spent his life talking to people in Athens. He relates that from then on he meant to confine himself to seeking the wisdom that was to be found, either within himself or in the ‘great book of the world.’ So he joined the army and went to war, which enabled him to spend periods of time in different parts of Central Europe. Later he lived for some years in Paris, but in 1629 he went to Holland, where he remained for nearly twenty years working on his mathematical and philosophic writings.

  “In 1649 he was invited to Sweden by Queen Christina. But his sojourn in what he called ‘the land of bears, ice, and rocks’ brought on an attack of pneumonia and he died in the winter of 1650.”

  “So he was only 54 when he died.”

  “Yes, but he was to have enormous influence on philosophy, even after his death. One can say without exaggeration that Descartes was the father of modern philosophy. Following the heady rediscovery of man and nature in the Renaissance, the need to assemble contemporary thought into one coherent philosophical system again presented itself. The first significant system-builder was Descartes, and he was followed by Spinoza and Leibniz, Locke and Berkeley, Hume and Kant.”

  “What do you mean by a philosophical system?”

  “I mean a philosophy that is constructed from the ground up and that is concerned with finding explanations for all the central questions of philosophy. Antiquity had its great system-constructors in Plato and Aristotle. The Middle Ages had St. Thomas Aquinas, who tried to build a bridge between Aristotle’s philosophy and Christian theology. Then came the Renaissance, with a welter of old and new beliefs about nature and science, God and man. Not until the seventeenth century did philosophers make any attempt to assemble the new ideas into a clarified philosophical system, and the first to attempt it was Descartes. His work was the forerunner of what was to be philosophy’s most important project in the coming generations. His main concern was with what we can know, or in other words, certain knowledge. The other great question that preoccupied him was the relationship between body and mind. Both these questions were the substance of philosophical argument for the next hundred and fifty years.”

  “He must have been ahead of his time.”

  “Ah, but the question belonged to the age. When it came to acquiring certain knowledge, many of
his contemporaries voiced a total philosophic skepticism. They thought that man should accept that he knew nothing. But Descartes would not. Had he done so he would not have been a real philosopher. We can again draw a parallel with Socrates, who did not accept the skepticism of the Sophists. And it was in Descartes’s lifetime that the new natural sciences were developing a method by which to provide certain and exact descriptions of natural processes.

  “Descartes was obliged to ask himself if there was a similar certain and exact method of philosophic reflection.”

  “That I can understand.”

  “But that was only part of it. The new physics had also raised the question of the nature of matter, and thus what determines the physical processes of nature. More and more people argued in favor of a mechanistic view of nature. But the more mechanistic the physical world was seen to be, the more pressing became the question of the relationship between body and soul. Until the seventeenth century, the soul had commonly been considered as a sort of ‘breath of life’ that pervaded all living creatures. The original meaning of the words ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’ is, in fact, ‘breath’ and ‘breathing.’ This is the case for almost all European languages. To Aristotle, the soul was something that was present everywhere in the organism as its ‘life principle’—and therefore could not be conceived as separate from the body. So he was able to speak of a plant soul or an animal soul. Philosophers did not introduce any radical division of soul and body until the seventeenth century. The reason was that the motions of all material objects—including the body, animal or human—were explained as involving mechanical processes. But man’s soul could surely not be part of this body machinery, could it? What of the soul, then? An explanation was required not least of how something ‘spiritual’ could start a mechanical process.”

  “It’s a strange thought, actually.”

  “What is?”

  “I decide to lift my arm—and then, well, the arm lifts itself. Or I decide to run for a bus, and the next second my legs are moving. Or I’m thinking about something sad, and suddenly I’m crying. So there must be some mysterious connection between body and consciousness.”