Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy

by Jostein Gaarder

  “Do we have to be educated to be human beings?”

  “Yes, that was the thought. But before we take a closer look at the ideas of Renaissance humanism, we must say a little about the political and cultural background of the Renaissance.”

  Alberto rose from the sofa and began to wander about the room. After a while he paused and pointed to an antique instrument on one of the shelves.

  “What is that?” he asked.

  “It looks like an old compass.”

  “Quite right.”

  He then pointed to an ancient firearm hanging on the wall above the sofa.

  “And that?”

  “An old-fashioned rifle.”

  “Exactly—and this?”

  Alberto pulled a large book off one of the bookshelves.

  “It’s an old book.”

  “To be absolutely precise, it is an incunabulum.”

  “An incunabulum?”

  “Actually, it means ‘cradle.’ The word is used about books printed in the cradle days of printing. That is, before 1500.”

  “Is it really that old?”

  “That old, yes. And these three discoveries—the compass, firearms, and the printing press—were essential preconditions for this new period we call the Renaissance.”

  “You’ll have to explain that a bit more clearly.”

  “The compass made it easier to navigate. In other words, it was the basis for the great voyages of discovery. So were firearms in a way. The new weapons gave the Europeans military superiority over American and Asiatic cultures, although firearms were also an important factor in Europe. Printing played an important part in spreading the Renaissance humanists’ new ideas. And the art of printing was, not least, one of the factors that forced the Church to relinquish its former position as sole disseminator of knowledge. New inventions and instruments began to follow thick and fast. One important instrument, for example, was the telescope, which resulted in a completely new basis for astronomy.”

  “And finally came rockets and space probes.”

  “Now you’re going too fast. But you could say that a process started in the Renaissance finally brought people to the moon. Or for that matter to Hiroshima and Chernobyl. However, it all began with changes on the cultural and economic front. An important condition was the transition from a subsistence economy to a monetary economy. 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.”

  “It’s a bit like the way Greek cities developed two thousand years earlier.”

  “Not altogether untrue. I told you how Greek philosophy broke away from the mythological world picture that was linked to peasant culture. In the same way, the Renaissance middle class began to break away from the feudal lords and the power of the church. As this was happening, Greek culture was being rediscovered through a closer contact with the Arabs in Spain and the Byzantine culture in the east.”

  “The three diverging streams from antiquity joined into one great river.”

  “You are an attentive pupil. That gives you some background on the Renaissance. I shall now tell you about the new ideas.”

  “Okay, but I’ll have to go home and eat.”

  Alberto sat down on the sofa again. He looked at Sophie.

  “Above all else, the Renaissance resulted in a new view of mankind. The humanism of the Renaissance brought a new belief in man and his worth, in striking contrast to the biased medieval emphasis on the sinful nature of man. Man was now considered infinitely great and valuable. One of the central figures of the Renaissance was Marsilio Ficino, who exclaimed: ‘Know thyself, O divine lineage in mortal guise!’ Another central figure, Pica della Mirandola, wrote the Oration on the Dignity of Man, something that would have been unthinkable in the Middle Ages.

  “Throughout the whole medieval period, the point of departure had always been God. The humanists of the Renaissance took as their point of departure man himself.”

  “But so did the Greek philosophers.”

  “That is precisely why we speak of a ‘rebirth’ of antiquity’s humanism. But Renaissance humanism was to an even greater extent characterized by individualism. We are not only human beings, we are unique individuals. This idea could then lead to an almost unrestrained worship of genius. The ideal became what we call the Renaissance man, a man of universal genius embracing all aspects of life, art, and science. The new view of man also manifested itself in an interest in the human anatomy. As in ancient times, people once again began to dissect the dead to discover how the body was constructed. It was imperative both for medical science and for art. Once again it became usual for works of art to depict the nude. High time, after a thousand years of prudery. Man was bold enough to be himself again. There was no longer anything to be ashamed of.”

  “It sounds intoxicating,” said Sophie, leaning her arms on the little table that stood between her and the philosopher.

  “Undeniably. The new view of mankind led to a whole new outlook. Man did not exist purely for God’s sake. Man could therefore delight in life here and now. And with this new freedom to develop, the possibilities were limitless. The aim was now to exceed all boundaries. This was also a new idea, seen from the Greek humanistic point of view; the humanists of antiquity had emphasized the importance of tranquility, moderation, and restraint.”

  “And the Renaissance humanists lost their restraint?”

  “They were certainly not especially moderate. They behaved as if the whole world had been reawakened.

  They became intensely conscious of their epoch, which is what led them to introduce the term ‘Middle Ages’ to cover the centuries between antiquity and their own time. There was an unrivaled development in all spheres of life. Art and architecture, literature, music, philosophy, and science flourished as never before. I will mention one concrete example. We have spoken of Ancient Rome, which gloried in titles such as the ‘city of cities’ and the ‘hub of the universe.’ During the Middle Ages the city declined, and by 1417 the old metropolis had only 17,000 inhabitants.”

  “Not much more than Lillesand, where Hilde lives.”

  “The Renaissance humanists saw it as their cultural duty to restore Rome: first and foremost, to begin the construction of the great St. Peter’s Church over the grave of Peter the Apostle. And St. Peter’s Church can boast neither of moderation nor restraint. Many great artists of the Renaissance took part in this building project, the greatest in the world. It began in 1506 and lasted for a hundred and twenty years, and it took another fifty before the huge St. Peter’s Square was completed.”

  “It must be a gigantic church!”

  “It is over 200 meters long and 130 meters high, and it covers an area of more than 16,000 square meters. But enough about the boldness of Renaissance man. It was also significant that the Renaissance brought with it a new view of nature. The fact that man felt at home in the world and did not consider life solely as a preparation for the hereafter, created a whole new approach to the physical world. Nature was now regarded as a positive thing. Many held the view that God was also present in his creation. If he is indeed infinite, he must be present in everything. This idea is called pantheism. The medieval philosophers had insisted that there is an insurmountable barrier between God and the Creation. It could now be said that nature is divine—and even that it is ‘God’s blossoming.’ Ideas of this kind were not always looked kindly on by the church. The fate of Gior-dano Bruno was a dramatic example of this. Not only did he claim that God was present in nature, he also believed that the universe was infinite in scope. He was punished very severely for his ideas.”

  “How?”

  “He was burned at the stake in Rome’s
Flower Market in the year 1600.”

  “How horrible ... and stupid. And you call that humanism?”

  “No, not at all. Bruno was the humanist, not his executioners. During the Renaissance, what we call anti-humanism flourished as well. By this I mean the authoritarian power of State and Church. During the Renaissance there was a tremendous thirst for trying witches, burning heretics, magic and superstition, bloody religious wars—and not least, the brutal conquest of America. 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. This is not least true of our next key phrase, a new scientific method, another Renaissance innovation which I will tell you about.”

  “Was that when they built the first factories?”

  “No, not yet. But a precondition for all the technical development that took place after the Renaissance was the new scientific method. By that I mean the completely new approach to what science was. The technical fruits of this method only became apparent later on.”

  “What was this new method?”

  “Mainly it was a process of investigating nature with our own senses. Since the fourteenth century there had been an increasing number of thinkers who warned against blind faith in old authority, be it religious doctrine or the natural philosophy of Aristotle. There were also warnings against the belief that problems can be solved purely by thinking. An exaggerated belief in the importance of reason had been valid all through the Middle Ages. Now it was said that every investigation of natural phenomena must be based on observation, experience, and experiment. We call this the empirical method.”

  “Which means?”

  “It only means that one bases one’s knowledge of things on one’s own experience—and not on dusty parchments or figments of the imagination. Empirical science was known in antiquity, but systematic experiments were something quite new.”

  “I guess they didn’t have any of the technical apparatus we have today.”

  “Of course they had neither calculators nor electronic scales. But they had mathematics and they had scales. And it was now above all imperative to express scientific observations in precise mathematical terms. ‘Measure what can be measured, and make measurable what cannot be measured,’ said the Italian Galileo Galilei, who was one of the most important scientists of the seventeenth century. He also said that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics.”

  “And all these experiments and measurements made new inventions possible.”

  “The first phase was a new scientific method. This made the technical revolution itself possible, and the technical breakthrough opened the way for every invention since. You could say that man had begun to break away from his natural condition. Nature was no longer something man was simply a part of. ‘Knowledge is power,’ said the English philosopher Francis Bacon, thereby underlining the practical value of knowledge— and this was indeed new. Man was seriously starting to intervene in nature and beginning to control it.”

  “But not only in a good way?”

  “No, this is what I was referring to before when I spoke of the good and the evil threads that are constantly intertwined in everything we do. The technical revolution that began in the Renaissance led to the spinning jenny and to unemployment, to medicines and new diseases, to the improved efficiency of agriculture and the impoverishment of the environment, to practical appliances such as the washing machine and the refrigerator and pollution and industrial waste. The serious threat to the environment we are facing today has made many people see the technical revolution itself as a perilous maladjustment to natural conditions. It has been pointed out that we have started something we can no longer control. More optimistic spirits think we are still living in the cradle of technology, and that although the scientific age has certainly had its teething troubles, we will gradually learn to control nature without at the same time threatening its very existence and thus our own.”

  “Which do you think?”

  “I think perhaps there may be some truth in both views. In some areas we must stop interfering with nature, but in others we can succeed. One thing is certain: There is no way back to the Middle Ages. 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!’ “

  “We have already been to the moon. What medieval person would have believed such a thing possible?”

  “No, that’s for sure. Which brings us to the new world view. All through the Middle Ages people had stood beneath the sky and gazed up at the sun, the moon, the stars, and the planets. But nobody had doubted that the earth was the center of the universe. No observations had sown any doubt that the earth remained still while the ‘heavenly bodies’ traveled in their orbits around it. We call this the geocentric world picture, or in other words, the belief that everything revolves around the earth. The Christian belief that God ruled from on high, up above all the heavenly bodies, also contributed to maintaining this world picture.”

  “I wish it were that simple!”

  “But in 1543 a little book was published entitled On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres. It was written by the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, who died on the day the book was published. Copernicus claimed that it was not the sun that moved round the earth, it was vice versa. He thought this was completely possible from the observations of the heavenly bodies that existed. The reason people had always believed that the sun went round the earth was that the earth turns on its own axis, he said. He pointed out that all observations of heavenly bodies were far easier to understand if one assumed that both the earth and the other planets circle around the sun. We call this the heliocentric world picture, which means that everything centers around the sun.”

  “And that world picture was the right one?”

  “Not entirely. His main point—that the earth moves round the sun—is of course correct. But he claimed that the sun was the center of the universe. Today we know that the sun is only one of an infinite number of stars, and that all the stars around us make up only one of many billions of galaxies. Copernicus also believed that the earth and the other planets moved in circular orbits around the sun.”

  “Don’t they?”

  “No. He had nothing on which to base his belief in the circular orbits other than the ancient idea that heavenly bodies were round and moved in circles simply because they were ‘heavenly.’ Since the time of Plato the sphere and the circle had been considered the most perfect geometrical figures. But in the early 1600s, the German astronomer Johannes Kepler presented the results of comprehensive observations which showed that the planets move in elliptical—or oval—orbits with the sun at one focus. He also pointed out that the speed of a planet is greatest when it is closest to the sun, and that the farther a planet’s orbit is from the sun the slower it moves. Not until Kepler’s time was it actually stated that the earth was a planet just like other planets. Kepler also emphasized that the same physical laws apply everywhere throughout the universe.”

  “How could he know that?”

  “Because he had investigated the movements of the planets with his own senses instead of blindly trusting ancient superstitions. Galileo Galilei, who was roughly contemporary with Kepler, also used a telescope to observe the heavenly bodies. He studied the moon’s craters and said that the moon had mountains and valleys similar to those on earth. Moreover, he discovered that the planet Jupiter had four moons. So the earth was not alone in having a moon. But the greatest significance of Galileo was that he first formulated the so-called Law of Inertia.”

  “And that is?”

  “Galileo formulated it thus: A body remains in the state which it is in, at rest or in motion, as long as no external force compels it to change its state.”

  “If you say so.”

  “But this was a significant observation. Sinc
e antiquity, one of the central arguments against the earth moving round its own axis was that the earth would then move so quickly that a stone hurled straight into the air would fall yards away from the spot it was hurled from.”

  “So why doesn’t it?”

  “If you’re sitting in a train and you drop an apple, it doesn’t fall backward because the train is moving. It falls straight down. That is because of the law of inertia. The apple retains exactly the same speed it had before you dropped it.”

  “I think I understand.”

  “Now in Galileo’s time there were no trains. But if you roll a ball along the ground—and suddenly let go...”

  “... it goes on rolling ...”

  “... because it retains its speed after you let go.”

  “But it will stop eventually, if the room is long enough.”

  “That’s because other forces slow it down. First, the floor, especially if it is a rough wooden floor. Then the force of gravity will sooner or later bring it to a halt. But wait, I’ll show you something.”

  Alberto Knox got up and went over to the old desk. He took something out of one of the drawers. When he returned to his place he put it on the coffee table. It was just a wooden board, a few millimeters thick at one end and thin at the other. Beside the board, which almost covered the whole table, he laid a green marble.

  “This is called an inclined plane,” he said. “What do you think will happen if I let go the marble up here, where the plane is thickest?”

  Sophie sighed resignedly.

  “I bet you ten crowns it rolls down onto the table and ends on the floor.”

  “Let’s see.”

  Alberto let go of the marble and it behaved exactly as Sophie had said. It rolled onto the table, over the tabletop, hit the floor with a little thud and finally bumped into the wall.

  “Impressive,” said Sophie.

  “Yes, wasn’t it! This was the kind of experiment Galileo did, you see.”