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

by Jostein Gaarder

  “What’s the matter with you now?” her mother called after her.

  In a flash Sophie was back again.

  “In a minute you’ll see what he looks like. And then I hope you’ll let me be.”

  She waved the video cassette and went over to the VCR.

  “Did he give you a video?”

  “From Athens...”

  Pictures of the Acropolis soon appeared on the screen. Her mother sat dumbfounded as Alberto came forward and began to speak directly to Sophie.

  Sophie now noticed something she had forgotten about. The Acropolis was crowded with tourists milling about in their respective groups. A small placard was being held up from the middle of one group. On it was written HILDE ... Alberto continued his wandering on the Acropolis. After a while he went down through the entrance and climbed to the Areopagos hill where Paul had addressed the Athenians. Then he went on to talk to Sophie from the square.

  Her mother sat commenting on the video in short utterances:

  “Incredible... is that Alberto? He mentioned the rabbit again... But, yes, he’s really talking to you, Sophie. I didn’t know Paul went to Athens ...”

  The video was coming to the part where ancient Athens suddenly rises from the ruins. At the last minute Sophie managed to stop the tape. Now that she had shown her mother Alberto, there was no need to introduce her to Plato as well.

  There was silence in the room.

  “What do you think of him? He’s quite good-looking, isn’t he?” teased Sophie.

  “What a strange man he must be, having himself filmed in Athens just so he could send it to a girl he hardly knows. When was he in Athens?”

  “I haven’t a clue.”

  “But there’s something else ...”

  “What?”

  “He looks very much like the major who lived in that little hut in the woods.”

  “Well maybe it is him, Mom.”

  “But nobody has seen him for over fifteen years.”

  “He probably moved around a lot... to Athens, maybe.”

  Her mother shook her head. “When I saw him sometime in the seventies, he wasn’t a day younger than this Alberto I just saw. He had a foreign-sounding name...”

  “Knox?”

  “Could be, Sophie. Could be his name was Knox.”

  “Or was it Knag?”

  “I can’t for the life of me remember ... Which Knox or Knag are you talking about?”

  “One is Alberto, the other is Hilde’s father.”

  “It’s all making me dizzy.”

  “Is there any food in the house?”

  “You can warm up the meatballs.”

  Exactly two weeks went by without Sophie hearing a word from Alberto. She got another birthday card for Hilde, but although the actual day was approaching, she did not receive a single birthday card herself.

  One afternoon she went to the Old Town and knocked on Alberto’s door. He was out, but there was a short note attached to his door. It said:

  Happy birthday, Hilde! Now the great turning point is at hand. The moment of truth, little one. Every time I think about it, I can’t stop laughing. It has naturally something to do with Berkeley, so hold on to your hat.

  Sophie tore the note off the door and stuffed it into Alberto’s mailbox as she went out.

  Damn! Surely he’d not gone back to Athens? How could he leave her with so many questions unanswered?

  When she got home from school on June 14, Hermes was romping about in the garden. Sophie ran toward him and he came prancing happily toward her. She put her arms around him as if he were the one who could solve all the riddles.

  Again she left a note for her mother, but this time she put Alberto’s address on it.

  As they made their way across town Sophie thought about tomorrow. Not about her own birthday so much— that was not going to be celebrated until Midsummer Eve anyway. But tomorrow was Hilde’s birthday too. Sophie was convinced something quite extraordinary would happen. At least there would be an end to all those birthday cards from Lebanon.

  When they had crossed Main Square and were making for the Old Town, they passed by a park with a playground. Hermes stopped by a bench as if he wanted Sophie to sit down.

  She did, and while she patted the dog’s head she looked into his eyes. Suddenly the dog started to shudder violently. He’s going to bark now, thought Sophie.

  Then his jaws began to vibrate, but Hermes neither growled nor barked. He opened his mouth and said:

  “Happy birthday, Hilde!”

  Sophie was speechless. Did the dog just talk to her? Impossible, she must have imagined it because she was thinking of Hilde. But deep down she was nevertheless convinced that Hermes had spoken, and in a deep resonant bass voice.

  The next second everything was as before. Hermes gave a couple of demonstrative barks—as if to cover up the fact that he had just spoken with a human voice— and trotted on ahead toward Alberto’s place. As they were going inside Sophie looked up at the sky. It had been fine weather all day but now heavy clouds were beginning to gather in the distance.

  Alberto opened the door and Sophie said at once:

  “No civilities, please. You are a great idiot, and you know it.”

  “What’s the matter now?”

  “The major taught Hermes to talk!”

  “Ah, so it has come to that.”

  “Yes, imagine!”

  “And what did he say?”

  “I’ll give you three guesses.”

  “I imagine he said something along the lines of Happy Birthday!”

  “Bingo.”

  Alberto let Sophie in. He was dressed in yet another costume. It wasn’t all that different from last time, but today there were hardly any braidings, bows, or lace.

  “But that’s not all,” Sophie said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Didn’t you find the note in the mailbox?”

  “Oh, that. I threw it away at once.”

  “I don’t care if he laughs every time he thinks of Berkeley. But what is so funny about that particular philosopher?”

  “We’ll have to wait and see.”

  “But today is the day you’re going to talk about him, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, today is the day.”

  Alberto made himself comfortable on the sofa. Then he said:

  “Last time we sat here I told you about Descartes and Spinoza. We agreed that they had one important thing in common, namely, that they were both rationalists.”

  “And a rationalist is someone who believes strongly in the importance of reason.”

  “That’s right, a rationalist believes in reason as the primary source of knowledge, and he may also believe that man has certain innate ideas that exist in the mind prior to all experience. And the clearer such ideas may be, the more certain it is that they correspond to reality. You recall how Descartes had a clear and distinct idea of a ‘perfect entity,’ on the basis of which he concluded that God exists.”

  “I am not especially forgetful.”

  “Rationalist thinking of this kind was typical for philosophy of the seventeenth century. It was also firmly rooted in the Middle Ages, and we remember it from Plato and Socrates too. But in the eighteenth century it was the object of an ever increasing in-depth criticism. A number of philosophers held that we have absolutely nothing in the mind that we have not experienced through the senses. A view such as this is called empiricism.”

  “And you are going to talk about them today, these empiricists?”

  “I’m going to attempt to, yes. The most important empiricists—or philosophers of experience—were Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, and all three were British. The leading rationalists in the seventeenth century were Descartes, who was French; Spinoza, who was Dutch; and Leibniz, who was German. So we usually make a distinction between British empiricism and Continental rationalism.”

  “What a lot of difficult words! Could you repeat the meaning of empiricism?”

&
nbsp; “An empiricist will derive all knowledge of the world from what the senses tell us. The classic formulation of an empirical approach came from Aristotle. He said: ‘There is nothing in the mind except what was first in the senses.’ This view implied a pointed criticism of Plato, who had held that man brought with him a set of innate ‘ideas’ from the world of ideas. Locke repeats Aristotle’s words, and when Locke uses them, they are aimed at Descartes.”

  “There is nothing in the mind... except what was first in the senses?”

  “We have no innate ideas or conceptions about the world we are brought into before we have seen it. If we do have a conception or an idea that cannot be related to experienced facts, then it will be a false conception. When we, for instance, use words like ‘God,”eternity,’ or ‘substance,’ reason is being misused, because nobody has experienced God, eternity, or what philosophers have called substance. So therefore many learned dissertations could be written which in actual fact contain no really new conceptions. An ingeniously contrived philosophical system such as this may seem impressive, but it is pure fantasy. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers had inherited a number of such learned dissertations. Now they had to be examined under a microscope. They had to be purified of all hollow notions. We might compare it with panning for gold. Most of what you fish up is sand and clay, but in between you see the glint of a particle of gold.”

  “And that particle of gold is real experience?”

  “Or at least thoughts that can be related to experience. It became a matter of great importance to the British empiricists to scrutinize all human conceptions to see whether there was any basis for them in actual experience. But let us take one philosopher at a time.”

  “Okay, shoot!”

  “The first was the Englishman John Locke, who lived from 1632 to 1704. His main work was the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, published in 1690. In it he tried to clarify two questions. First, where we get our ideas from, and secondly, whether we can rely on what our senses tell us.”

  “That was some project!”

  “We’ll take these questions one at a time. Locke’s claim is that all our thoughts and ideas issue from that which we have taken in through the senses. Before we perceive anything, the mind is a ‘tabula rasa’—or an empty slate.”

  “You can skip the Latin.”

  “Before we sense anything, then, the mind is as bare and empty as a blackboard before the teacher arrives in the classroom. Locke also compared the mind to an unfurnished room. But then we begin to sense things. We see the world around us, we smell, taste, feel, and hear. And nobody does this more intensely than infants. In this way what Locke called simple ideas of sense arise. But the mind does not just passively receive information from outside it. Some activity happens in the mind as well. The single sense ideas are worked on by thinking, reasoning, believing, and doubting, thus giving rise to what he calls reflection. So he distinguished between ‘sensation’ and ‘reflection.’ The mind is not merely a passive receiver. It classifies and processes all sensations as they come streaming in. And this is just where one must be on guard.”

  “On guard?”

  “Locke emphasized that the only things we can perceive are simple sensations. When I eat an apple, for example, I do not sense the whole apple in one single sensation. In actual fact I receive a whole series of simple sensations—such as that something is green, smells fresh, and tastes juicy and sharp. Only after I have eaten an apple many times do I think: Now I am eating an ‘apple.’ As Locke would say, we have formed a complex idea of an ‘apple.’ When we were infants, tasting an apple for the first time, we had no such complex idea. But we saw something green, we tasted something fresh and juicy, yummy ... It was a bit sour too. Little by little we bundle many similar sensations together and form concepts like ‘apple,”pear,”orange.’ But in the final analysis, all the material for our knowledge of the world comes to us through sensations. Knowledge that cannot be traced back to a simple sensation is therefore false knowledge and must consequently be rejected.”

  “At any rate we can be sure that what we see, hear, smell, and taste are the way we sense it.”

  “Both yes and no. And that brings us to the second question Locke tried to answer. He had first answered the question of where we get our ideas from. Now he asked whether the world really is the way we perceive it. This is not so obvious, you see, Sophie. We mustn’t jump to conclusions. That is the only thing a real philosopher must never do.”

  “I didn’t say a word.”

  “Locke distinguished between what he called ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ qualities. And in this he acknowledged his debt to the great philosophers before him— including Descartes.

  “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.”

  “Everyone to his own taste, in other words.”

  “Exactly. Everyone can agree on the primary qualities like size and weight because they lie within the objects themselves. But the secondary qualities like color and taste can vary from person to person and from animal to animal, depending on the nature of the individual’s sensations.”

  “When Joanna eats an orange, she gets a look on her face like when other people eat a lemon. She can’t take more than one segment at a time. She says it tastes sour. I usually think the same orange is nice and sweet.”

  “And neither one of you is right or wrong. You are just describing how the orange affects your senses. It’s the same with the sense of color. Maybe you don’t like a certain shade of red. But if Joanna buys a dress in that color it might be wise to keep your opinion to yourself. You experience the color differently, but it is neither pretty nor ugly.”

  “But everyone can agree that an orange is round.”

  “Yes, if you have a round orange, you can’t ‘think’ it is square. You can ‘think’ it is sweet or sour, but you can’t ‘think’ it weighs eight kilos if it only weighs two hundred grams. You can certainly ‘believe’ it weighs several kilos, but then you’d be way off the mark. If several people have to guess how much something weighs, there will always be one of them who is more right than the others. The same applies to number. Either there are 986 peas in the can or there are not. The same with motion. Either the car is moving or it’s stationary.”

  “I get it.”

  “So when it was a question of ‘extended’ reality, Locke agreed with Descartes that it does have certain qualities that man is able to understand with his reason.”

  “It shouldn’t be so difficult to agree on that.”

  “Locke admitted what he called intuitive, or ‘demonstrative,’ knowledge in other areas too. For instance, he held that certain ethical principles applied to everyone. In other words, he believed in the idea of a natural right, and that was a rationalistic feature of his thought. An equally rationalistic feature was that Locke believed that it was inherent in human reason to be able to know that God exists.”

  “Maybe he was right.”

  “About what?”

  “That God exists.”

  “It is possible, of course. But he did not let it rest on faith. He believed that the idea of God was born of human reason. That was a rationalistic feature. I should add that he spoke out for intellectual liberty and tolerance. He was also preoccupied with equality of the sexes, maintaining that the subjugation of women to men was ‘man-made.’ Therefore it could be altered.”

  “I can’t disagree there.”

  “Locke was one of the first philosophers in more recent times to be interested in sexual roles. He had a gr
eat influence on John Stuart Mill, who in turn had a key role in the struggle for equality of the sexes. All in all, Locke was a forerunner of many liberal ideas which later, during the period of the French Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, came into full flower. It was he who first advocated the principle of division of powers...”

  “Isn’t that when the power of the state is divided between different institutions?”

  “Do you remember which institutions?”

  “There’s the legislative power, or elected representatives. There’s the judicial power, or law courts, and then there’s the executive power, that’s the government.”

  “This division of power originated from the French Enlightenment philosopher Montesquieu. Locke had first and foremost emphasized that the legislative and the executive power must be separated if tyranny was to be avoided. He lived at the time of Louis XIV, who had assembled all power in his own hands. ‘I am the State,’ he said. We say he was an ‘absolute’ ruler. Nowadays we would call Louis XIV’s rule lawless and arbitrary. Locke’s view was that to ensure a legal State, the people’s representatives must make the laws and the king or the government must apply them.”

  Hume

  …commit it then to the flames…

  Alberto sat staring down at the table. He finally turned and looked out of the window.

  “It’s clouding over,” said Sophie.

  “Yes, it’s muggy.”

  “Are you going to talk about Berkeley now?”

  “He was the next of the three British empiricists. But as he is in a category of his own in many ways, we will first concentrate on David Hume, who lived from 1711 to 1776. He stands out as the most important of the empiricists. He is also significant as the person who set the great philosopher Immanuel Kant on the road to his philosophy.”

  “Doesn’t it matter to you that I’m more interested in Berkeley’s philosophy?”

  “That’s of no importance. Hume grew up near Edinburgh in Scotland. His family wanted him to take up law but he felt ‘an insurmountable resistance to everything but philosophy and learning.’ He lived in the Age of Enlightenment at the same time as great French thinkers like Voltaire and Rousseau, and he traveled widely in Europe before returning to settle down in Edinburgh toward the end of his life. His main work, A Treatise of Human Nature, was published when Hume was twenty-eight years old, but he claimed that he got the idea for the book when he was only fifteen.”