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

by Jostein Gaarder

  “We can?”

  “Before you go out in the morning, you cannot know what you will see or experience during the day. But you can know that what you see and experience will be perceived as happening in time and space. You can moreover be confident that the law of cause and effect will apply, simply because you carry it with you as part of your consciousness.”

  “But you mean we could have been made differently?”

  “Yes, we could have had a different sensory apparatus. And we could have had a different sense or time and a different feeling about space. We could even have been created in such a way that we would not go around searching for the cause of things that happen around us.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Imagine there’s a cat lying on the floor in the living room. A ball comes rolling into the room. What does the cat do?”

  “I’ve tried that lots of times. The cat will run after the ball.”

  “All right. Now imagine that you were sitting in that same room. If you suddenly see a ball come rolling in, would you also start running after it?”

  “First, I would turn around to see where the ball came from.”

  “Yes, because you are a human being, you will inevitably look for the cause of every event, because the law of causality is part of your makeup.”

  “So Kant says.”

  “Hume showed that we can neither perceive nor prove natural laws. That made Kant uneasy. But he believed he could prove their absolute validity by showing that in reality we are talking about the laws of human cognition.”

  “Will a child also turn around to see where the ball came from?”

  “Maybe not. But Kant pointed out that a child’s reason is not fully developed until it has had some sensory material to work with. It is altogether senseless to talk about an empty mind.”

  “No, that would be a very strange mind.”

  “So now let’s sum up. According to Kant, there are two elements that contribute to man’s knowledge of the world. One is the external conditions that we cannot know of before we have perceived them through the senses. We can call this the material of knowledge. The other is the internal conditions in man himself—such as the perception of events as happening in time and space and as processes conforming to an unbreakable law of causality. We can call this the form of knowledge.”

  Alberto and Sophie remained seated for a while gazing out of the window. Suddenly Sophie saw a little girl between the trees on the opposite side of the lake.

  “Look!” said Sophie. “Who’s that?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know.”

  The girl was only visible for a few seconds, then she was gone. Sophie noticed that she was wearing some kind of red hat.

  “We shall under no circumstances let ourselves be distracted.”

  “Go on, then.”

  “Kant believed that there are clear limits to what we can know. You could perhaps say that the mind’s ‘glasses’ set these limits.”

  “In what way?”

  “You remember that philosophers before Kant had discussed the really ‘big’ questions—for instance, whether man has an immortal soul, whether there is a God, whether nature consists of tiny indivisible particles, and whether the universe is finite or infinite.”

  “Yes.”

  “Kant believed there was no certain knowledge to be obtained on these questions. Not that he rejected this type of argument. On the contrary. If he had just brushed these questions aside, he could hardly have been called a philosopher.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Be patient. In such great philosophical questions, Kant believed that reason operates beyond the limits of what we humans can comprehend. At the same time, there is in our nature a basic desire to pose these same questions. But when, for example, we ask whether the universe is finite or infinite, we are asking about a totality of which we ourselves are a tiny part. We can therefore never completely know this totality.”

  “Why not?”

  “When you put the red glasses on, we demonstrated that according to Kant there are two elements that contribute to our knowledge of the world.”

  “Sensory perception and reason.”

  “Yes, the material of our knowledge comes to us through the senses, but this material must conform to the attributes of reason. For example, one of the attributes of reason is to seek the cause of an event.”

  “Like the ball rolling across the floor.”

  “If you like. But when we wonder where the world came from—and then discuss possible answers—reason is in a sense ‘on hold.’ For it has no sensory material to process, no experience to make use of, because we have never experienced the whole of the great reality that we are a tiny part of.”

  “We are—in a way—a tiny part of the ball that comes rolling across the floor. So we can’t know where it came from.”

  “But it will always be an attribute of human reason to ask where the ball comes from. That’s why we ask and ask, we exert ourselves to the fullest to find answers to all the deepest questions. But we never get anything firm to bite on; we never get a satisfactory answer because reason is not locked on.”

  “I know exactly how that feels, thank you very much.”

  “In such weighty questions as to the nature of reality, Kant showed that there will always be two contrasting viewpoints that are equally likely or unlikely, depending on what our reason tells us.”

  “Examples, please.”

  “It is just as meaningful to say that the world must have had a beginning in time as to say that it had no such beginning. Reason cannot decide between them. We can allege that the world has always existed, but con anything always have existed if there was never any beginning? So now we are forced to adopt the opposite view.

  “We say that the world must have begun sometime— and it must have begun from nothing, unless we want to talk about a change from one state to another. But can something come from nothing, Sophie?”

  “No, both possibilities are equally problematic. Yet it seems one of them must be right and the other wrong.”

  “You probably remember that Democritus and the materialists said that nature must consist of minimal parts that everything is made up of. Others, like Descartes, believed that it must always be possible to divide extended reality into ever smaller parts. But which of them was right?”

  “Both. Neither.”

  “Further, many philosophers named freedom as one of man’s most important values. At the same time we saw philosophers like the Stoics, for example, and Spinoza, who said that everything happens through the necessity of natural law. This was another case of human reason being unable to make a certain judgment, according to Kant.”

  “Both views are equally reasonable and unreasonable.”

  “Finally, we are bound to fail if we attempt to prove the existence of God with the aid of reason. Here the rationalists, like Descartes, had tried to prove that there must be a God simply because we have the idea of a ‘supreme being.’ Others, like Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, decided that there must be a God because everything must have a first cause.”

  “What did Kant think?”

  “He rejected both these proofs of the existence of God. Neither reason nor experience is any certain basis for claiming the existence of God. As far as reason goes, it is just as likely as it is unlikely that God exists.”

  “But you started by saying that Kant wanted to preserve the basis for Christian faith.”

  “Yes, he opened up a religious dimension. There, where both reason and experience fall short, there occurs a vacuum that can be filled by faith.”

  “That’s how he saved Christianity?”

  “If you will. Now, it might be worth noting that Kant was a Protestant. Since the days of the Reformation, Protestantism has been characterized by its emphasis on faith. The Catholic Church, on the other hand, has since the early Middle Ages believed more in reason as a pillar of faith.

  “But Kant went fur
ther than simply to establish that these weighty questions should be left to the faith of the individual. He believed that it is essential for morality to presuppose that man has an immortal soul, that God exists, and that man has a free will.”

  “So he does the same as Descartes. First he is very critical of everything we can understand. And then he smuggles God in by the back door.”

  “But unlike Descartes, he emphasizes most particularly that it is not reason which brought him to this point but faith. He himself called faith in the immortal soul, in God’s existence, and in man’s free will practical postulates.”

  “Which means?”

  “To ‘postulate’ something is to assume something that cannot be proved. By a ‘practical postulate,’ Kant meant something that had to be assumed for the sake of ‘praxis,’ or practice; that is to say, for man’s morality. ‘It is a moral necessity to assume the existence of God,’ he said.”

  Suddenly there was a knock at the door. Sophie got up, but as Alberto gave no sign of rising, she asked: “Shouldn’t we see who it is?”

  Alberto shrugged and reluctantly got up. They opened the door, and a little girl stood there in a white summer dress and a red bonnet. It was the girl they had seen on the other side of the lake. Over one arm she carried a basket of food.

  “Hi,” said Sophie. “Who are you?”

  “Can’t you see I am Little Red Ridinghood?”

  Sophie looked at Alberto, and Alberto nodded.

  “You heard what she said.”

  “I’m looking for my grandmother’s house,” said the girl. “She is old and sick, but I’m taking her some food.”

  “It’s not here,” said Alberto, “so you’d better get on your way.”

  He gestured in a way that reminded Sophie of the way you brush off a fly.

  “But I’m supposed to deliver a letter,” continued the girl in the red bonnet.

  With that, she took out a small envelope and handed it to Sophie. Then she went skipping away.

  “Watch out for the wolf!” Sophie called after her.

  Alberto was already on his way back into the living room.

  “Just think! That was Little Red Ridinghood,” said Sophie.

  “And it’s no good warning her. She will go to her grandmother’s house and be eaten by the wolf. She never learns. It will repeat itself to the end of time “

  “But I have never heard that she knocked on the door of another house before she went to her grandmother’s.”

  “A bagatelle, Sophie.”

  Now Sophie looked at the envelope she had been given. It was addressed “To Hilde.” She opened it and read aloud:

  Dear Hilde, If the human brain was simple enough for us to understand, we would still be so stupid that we couldn’t understand it. Love, Dad.

  Alberto nodded. “True enough. I believe Kant said something to that effect. We cannot expect to understand what we are. Maybe we can comprehend a flower or an insect, but we can never comprehend ourselves. Even less can we expect to comprehend the universe.”

  Sophie had to read the cryptic sentence in the note to Hilde several times before Alberto went on: “We are not going to be interrupted by sea serpents and the like. Before we stop for today, I’ll tell you about Kant’s ethics.”

  “Please hurry. I have to go home soon.”

  “Hume’s skepticism with regard to what reason and the senses can tell us forced Kant to think through many of life’s important questions again. Not least in the area of ethics.”

  “Didn’t Hume say that you can never prove what is right and what is wrong2 You can’t draw conclusions from is - sentence? to ought-sentences.”

  “For Hume it was neither our reason nor our experience that determined the difference between right and wrong. It was simply our sentiments. This was too tenuous a basis for Kant.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “Kant had always felt that the difference between right and wrong was a matter of reason, not sentiment. In this he agreed with the rationalists, who said the ability to distinguish between right and wrong is inherent in human reason. Everybody knows what is right or wrong, not because we have learned it but because it is born in the mind. According to Kant, everybody has ‘practical reason,’ that is, the intelligence that gives us the capacity to discern what is right or wrong in every case.”

  “And that is innate?”

  “The ability to tell right from wrong is just as innate as all the other attributes of reason. Just as we are all intelligent beings, for example, perceiving everything as having a causal relation, we all have access to the same universal moral law.

  “This moral law has the same absolute validity as the physical laws. It is just as basic to our morality as the statements that everything has a cause, or that seven plus five is twelve, are basic to our intelligence.”

  “And what does that moral law say?”

  “Since it precedes every experience, it is ‘formal.’ That is to say, it is not bound to any particular situation of moral choice. For it applies to all people in all societies at all times. So it does not say you shall do this or this if you find yourself in that or that situation. It says how you are to behave in all situations.”

  “But what is the point of having a moral law implanted inside yourself if it doesn’t tell you what to do in specific situations?”

  “Kant formulates the moral law as a categorical imperative. By this he means that the moral law is ‘categorical,’ or that it applies to all situations. It is, moreover, ‘imperative,’ which means it is commanding and therefore absolutely authoritative.”

  “Kant formulates this ‘categorical imperative’ in several ways. First he says: Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a Universal Law of Nature.”

  “So when I do something, I must make sure I want everybody else to do the same if they are in the same situation.”

  “Exactly. Only then will you be acting in accordance with the moral law within you. Kant also formulates the ‘categorical imperative’ in this way: Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end.”

  “So we must not exploit other people to our own advantage.”

  “No, because every man is an end in himself. But that does not only apply to others, it also applies to you yourself. You must not exploit yourself as a mere means to achieving something, either.”

  “It reminds me of the golden rule: Do unto others . . .”

  “Yes, that is also a ‘formal’ rule of conduct that basically covers all ethical choices. You could say that the golden rule says the same thing as Kant’s universal law of morals.”

  “But surely this is only an assertion. Hume was probably right in that we can’t prove what is right or wrong by reason.”

  “According to Kant, the law of morals is just as absolute and just as universal as the law of causality. That cannot be proved by reason either, but it is nevertheless absolute and unalterable. Nobody would deny that.”

  “I get the feeling that what we are really talking about is conscience. Because everybody has a conscience, don’t they?”

  “Yes. When Kant describes the law of morals, he is describing the human conscience. We cannot prove what our conscience tells us, but we know it, nevertheless.”

  “Sometimes I might only be kind and helpful to others because I know it pays off. It could be a way of becoming popular.”

  “But if you share with others only to be popular, you are not acting out of respect for moral law. You might be acting in accordance with moral law—and that could be fair enough—but if it is to be a moral action, you must have conquered yourself. Only when you do something purely out of duty can it be called a moral action. Kant’s ethics is therefore sometimes called duty ethics.”

  “I can feel it my duty to collect money for the Red Cross or the church bazaar.”

  “Yes, and the im
portant thing is that you do it because you know it is right. Even if the money you collect gets lost in the street, or is not sufficient to feed all the mouths it is intended to, you obeyed the moral law. You acted out of good will, and according to Kant, it is this good will which determines whether or not the action was morally right, not the consequences of the action. Kant’s ethics is therefore also called a good will ethic.”

  “Why was it so important to him to know exactly when one acts out of respect for moral law? Surely the most important thing is that what we do really helps other peo-pie.”

  “Indeed it is and Kant would certainly not disagree. But only when we know in ourselves that we are acting out of respect for moral law are we acting freely.”

  “We act freely only when we obey a law? Isn’t that kind of peculiar?”

  “Not according to Kant. You perhaps remember that he had to ‘assume’or ‘postulate’ that man has a free will. This is an important point, because Kant also said that everything obeys the law of causality. How, then, can we have a free will?”

  “Search me.”

  “On this point Kant divides man into two parts in a way not dissimilar to the way Descartes claimed that man was a ‘dual creature,’ one with both a body and a mind. As material creatures, we are wholly and fully at the mercy of causality’s unbreakable law, says Kant. We do not decide what we perceive—perception comes to us through necessity and influences us whether we like it or not. But we are not only material creatures—we are also creatures of reason.

  “As material beings we belong wholly to the natural world. We are therefore subject to causal relations. As such, we have no free will. But as rational beings we have a part in what Kant calls das Ding an sich—that is, the world as it exists in itself, independent of our sensory impressions. Only when we follow our ‘practical reason’— which enables us to make moral choices—do we exercise our free will, because when we conform to moral law, it is we who make the law we are conforming to.”

  “Yes, that’s true in a way. It is me, or something in me, which tells me not to be mean to others.”

  “So when you choose not to be mean—even if it is against your own interests—you are then acting freely.”