Book Review: Jostein Gaarder, ‘Sophie’s World’, London:
Phoenix, 1994 (pb. 436 pp.)

Who are you? Where did the world come from? A fourteen-year-old
Norwegian schoolgirl, Sophie Amundsen, found these questions on
a piece of paper in her mailbox. Enigmatic philosopher Albert
Knox then takes her on a 400-page journey through 3000 years of
Western philosophy.

Gaarder (like Will Durant and Bertrand Russell) attempts
to summarize Philosophy 101, without trivializing the subject.
He succeeds. A Daily Telegraph review says this is philosophy’s
answer to Stephen Hawking’s ‘A Brief History of Time’. Right.

But I’m not sure that he succeeds as well with his
allegorical Alice-in-Wonderland kind of backdrop, except to keep
us wondering and reading. I was in the wrong queue when gifts
of fantasy-appreciation were handed out. Without unpacking/spoiling
it for you, my hunch is that the mysteries and coincidences in
that story-thread have something to do with the counterpointing
of either fate-vs.-freedom or imagination-vs.- -reality, or left-vs.-right
brain, or reason-vs.-unreason. Make up your own mind on that one.
But Sophie’s a real teenager who gets painful periods and keeps
secrets and argues with her mum and maturely tidies her stuff.
And has an enquiring mind and asks intelligent questions. Good
girl.

There are some anomalies in Gaarder’s approach. He’s
critical of Aristotle’s sexism but employs sexist language himself.
He’s not critical enough of the ‘He who knows what is good will
do good’ Socratic naivety. I would sometimes have preferred the
term ‘panentheism’ (rather than ‘pantheism’) to describe God’s
being present in everything. The distinction there is important.
(Sure, Spinoza’s notion that ‘God is all and all is in God’ is
pure pantheism). ‘Darwin _proved_ (my emphasis) that mankind had
developed from animals’ (p.176). Did he?

As an evangelical Christian, I reckon his summaries
of the life and teachings of Jesus and of Christian theology are
even-handed. ‘The severe ethical demands made by Jesus in the
Sermon on the Mount were not only to teach what the will of God
meant, but also to show that no man (sic.) is righteous in the
eyes of God. God’s mercy is boundless, but we have to turn to
God and pray for his forgiveness’ (p.133). Not bad. ‘To the people
he met on his way he said ‘Your sins are forgiven you for his
name’s sake’ (p.132). Uh? [Augustine] ‘pointed out that there
are limits to how far reason can get you in religious questions.
Christianity is a divine mystery that we can only perceive through
faith’ (p.147). Right on. And I like his question on p.326: ‘Was
Jesus a Christian?’ (Email me for my response to that one). Christians
who find too many miracles where they ain’t will be nervous here
and there (like on p.389 where he reminds us that the reward offered
by the English skeptics’ society for proof of anything supernatural
hasn’t yet been claimed). But occasionally you’ll stumble across
an ‘aha’ thing. Like: ‘since angels have no body they can never
die’ (p.154).

Philosophy is, in essence, ‘loving wisdom’ (hopefully
in both senses). Samples: ‘Democritus once said that he would
rather discover a new cause of nature than be the King of Persia’
(p.39). ‘Over the entrance to the temple at Delphi was a famous
inscription: KNOW THYSELF! …Man must never believe himself to
be more than mortal’ (p.46). ‘Wisest is she who knows she does
not know’ (p.51). ‘Any one question can be more explosive than
a thousand answers’ (p.58). ‘The method of all true philosophers:
it is important to ask but there is no haste to provide the answer’
(p.340). ‘A philosophical question is by definition something
that each generation, each individual, must ask over and over
again’ (p.384). ‘A true philosopher never says "never".’
(p.406)

A good, racy read, which helped in some areas of
my philosophical ignorance. It should be required reading for
every intelligent teenager – and for adults like me who pursued
several humanities degrees without touching the subject. Silly!
(Was it Goethe who said ‘if you cannot draw on three thousand
years you are living from hand to mouth’?).

…..

Now: here’s an attempt to summarize A Brief History
of Western Philosophy in 170 lines (with some help from Jostein
Gaarder’s ‘Sophie’s World’:

Who am I? Why am I here? Where does the world come
from? If there’s a God, who created God…? Life is mystery. ‘The
only thing we require to be good philosophers is the faculty of
wonder…’ (p.10)

Modern philosophy began in Greece, about 600 BCE,
when *Natural philosophers* critiqued received wisdom from religion,
myths (eg. Homer’s) and oral traditions. Parmenides opined that
‘Nothing can change’ but Heraclitus said ‘Everything changes’.
Empedocles believed nature has four elements – earth, air, fire
and water – and two forces: love which binds, and strife which
separates. But what drives these forces? Fate? Destiny? God? The
*Sophists* taught Greeks to be skeptical, agnostic about such
‘absolutes’…

The enigmatic gadfly *Socrates* (like Jesus later),
never published anything, tormented people with subversive questions,
criticized injustice, and was therefore executed. ‘One thing I
know,’ he said, ‘and that is that I know nothing… He who knows
what good is will do good.’ His death deeply affected his disciple
*Plato*, who wondered about a true/ideal society, developing a
‘theory of ideas’ to explain realities behind the material world.
One idea: souls exist before they inhabit a body!

For Plato ‘reality’ was _thinking_ with our reason;
for *Aristotle* it’s what we _perceive_ with our senses. Aristotle
put things into categories – animal, vegetable, mineral (a game
he invented), living/nonliving etc. He posited ‘God’ as ‘first
mover’, asked ‘How should we live?’, advocated a ‘Golden Mean’
in human relationships (extremes are dangerous), and suggested
three forms of government (monarchy, aristocracy, polity). But
he believed women were ‘incomplete men’ – a view which prevailed
(despite Jesus) throughout much of Western history.

Then there were *Cynics* (happiness isn’t dependent
on externals), *Stoics* (monists – ‘spirit’/’matter’ are all one)
and *Epicureans* (‘Live for the moment’): these had their roots
in the teaching of Socrates. But for the *Neoplatonists* (like
Plotinus) everything is one; everything is God; our aim (as Mystics
put it) is to become one with God (who is beyond rational understanding).
Plato – and Indo-European cultures generally – believed in the
transmigration of the soul: history is cyclical. But the Semites
had a linear view of history. And into this context comes *Jesus*,
claiming divinity, forgiving sins, offering eternal life to his
followers, and appearing to many astonished people after he’d
died.

Seminal Christian thinkers include *Paul*, and *Augustine*
(who ‘christianized’ Plato). They taught that understanding follows
faith, not the other way around. Evil is ‘the absence of God’:
the battle between good and evil is played out in history. *Aquinas*
went further, rationalizing Augustinian theology: his system became
the foundation of medieval Catholicism. Aquinas believed he could
prove God’s existence on the basis of Aristotle’s philosophy.
(Unfortunately, he agreed with Aristotle’s view of women).

The *Renaissance* witnessed such discoveries as the
compass, firearms and the printing press, but more importantly,
a new humanism believed we are of infinite value, rather than
(as Augustine taught) principally sinners. Thus humans can have
a personal relationship with God rather than to the church-as-
organization (a powerful precursor to the Protestant Reformation).
A new ‘scientific method’ birthed the technical advances which
led to the modern Industrial Revolution. Knowledge now has _practical_
value: ‘Knowledge is power’ said English philosopher Francis Bacon.
Bridging the Renaissance and the Baroque period is the mighty
*William Shakespeare*, with his emphasis on life as theatre –
and life as brief (‘to be or not to be, that is the question!’).
So there’s a continuing tension between ‘idealism’ (life is mainly
spiritual in essence) and materialism. (The argument still rages:
the Russian astronaut doesn’t find God in space; the surgeon doesn’t
find a thought).

Now *Descartes*, the father of modern philosophy,
and his famous ‘Cogito, ergo sum’ – ‘I think, therefore I am.’
Descartes was a ‘dualist’: mind and body, for example, are two
distinct entities. Like Descartes *Spinoza* was part of the rationalist
tradition and was perhaps the first to examine the Bible ‘critically’.
But whereas Descartes believed in the existence of a transcendent
God, Spinoza was a monist and pantheist, identifying nature with
God. God was an ‘inner cause’ not an ‘outer’ one. Everything happens
through necessity (ie. Spinoza was a ‘determinist’).

The British *Empiricists* – Locke, Berkeley and Hume
– believed we derive knowledge primarily through the senses. Knowledge
can’t be independent of experience. Aristotle had said, ‘There
is nothing in the mind except what was first in the senses.’ Before
we perceive anything, the mind is tabula rasa – an empty slate
– said *Locke*. After sensing something we reflect on it. Locke
believed, however, that you can know that God exists through reason.
And his notions of ‘natural rights’ and ‘division of powers’ were
forerunners of later liberal ideas.

*David Hume* believed it’s possible for the mind
to form complex ideas (angels, Pegasus the winged horse, God etc.)
for which there is no corresponding object. And there’s no logical
(as distinct from statistical) justification for deducing ’cause
and effect’…

*George Berkeley*, an Irish philosopher (and Anglican
churchman), argued that you don’t _perceive_ material objects:
all you perceive are your _sensations_. In other words, sensory
phenomena are the only objects of knowledge, and we really only
exist in the mind of God. All we can know is that we are spirit.

The ideas of the French *Enlightenment* philosophers
(Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau) can be summarized (Gaarder,
pp. 260 ff.) under seven headings: opposition to authority, rationalism
(hence ‘Age of Reason’), ‘enlightenment’, cultural optimism, getting
back to nature (and the intrinsic value of childhood), natural
religion, and human rights (‘liberty, equality, fraternity’, Declaration
of the Rights of Man, 1789 etc.)

The great German philosopher *Kant* believed that
knowledge is _both_ ‘in the mind’ and ‘from the senses’. Rationalism
and empiricism on their own went too far. You can’t know ‘the
thing in itself’ but rather ‘the thing for me’. Sure, knowledge
comes through our senses, but must then conform to reason. For
example, did the world have a beginning in time? You may answer
either ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Ditto with belief in God. So why believe
(as Kant did) in the existence of God, immortal souls, and free
will? Ah, ‘moral necessity’ (‘the starry heavens above and the
moral law within’).

*Romanticism* was Europe’s last great epoch. Great
and free artists (like Beethoven, Byron, Shelley) now provide
something the philosophers can’t express. ‘The world becomes a
dream, and the dream becomes reality’ (Novalis). Romantics believed
life was to be _experienced_ (cf. the hippies). You can feel a
‘divine ego’ in nature. Nature/mind/matter/soul/physical reality
are all one, said Schelling.

*Hegel*, a German, said there aren’t any fixed ‘eternal
truths’. Our ‘obvious’ views will not stand the test of time.
Reason is ‘progressive’, moving from ‘thesis’ through ‘antithesis’
to ‘synthesis’. For example, Descartes’ rationalism (thesis) was
contradicted by Hume’s empiricism (antithesis), issuing in Kant’s
synthesis.

But then the Danish philosopher *Kierkegaard* thought
the idealism of the Romantics and Hegel’s ‘historicism’ obscured
the individual’s responsibility. His key question about Christianity
was not ‘Is it true?’ but ‘Is it true _for me_?’ _Proving_ anything
like the existence of God rationally would result in a passionless
religion (like Danish Lutheranism). ‘Credo quia absurdum’: ‘I
believe because it is irrational.’ And therefore, of course, ‘the
truth is always in the minority’. ‘The terrible jump into the
open arms of the living God is the only path to redemption.’

The three modern ‘evolutionists’ Marx (history),
Darwin (biology) and Freud (psychology) were all ‘naturalists’.
They felt we’re the products not of divine intervention or human
reason but natural forces. *Marx* said our main task is not to
understand the world but to change it. What drives history? Economic
forces. The rich and powerful won’t share wealth and power voluntarily,
so change must come through revolution. Workers are alienated:
they labor for the capitalist, who exploits the worker by pocketing
the worker’s earnings. The ideal: a classless society in which
the means of production are owned by all. Its policy: from each
according to their ability, to each according to their need. (The
rest, as they say, is history)…

*Darwin’s* ‘Origin of Species’ (1859) challenged
the assumption that species are ‘immutable’, unchanging. He observed
‘natural selection’ behind the struggle for survival. Species
adapt, change. The church was horrified. One famous response:
‘Let us hope this is not true; but if it is, let us hope it will
not be generally known.’

*Freud* also challenged the idea that we are rational
creatures. Irrational impulses often determine how we think and
behave. Our dreams for example are not random: they are messages
from the unconscious/subconscious realm…

*Modern philosophy* is in flux, influenced by the
existentialists (eg. Heidegger and Sartre: begin with your real
human existence: you are ‘condemned to be free’); Nietzsche (‘God
is dead’; the ‘life force’ of the strong should not be hampered
by the weak); nihilists (‘nothing means anything and everything
is permissible’ Gaarder p.380)…

The modern mix includes neo-this-and-that (neo-Thomism,
neo-Marxism, neo-Christian orthodoxy, neo-Darwinism); materialism,
ecophilosophy, scientific ‘paradigm shifts’, new age mysticisms,
alternative lifestyles, religious fundamentalisms, ‘economic rationalism’…

So where am I? Herbert Butterfield expressed it best:
‘Hold to Christ, and for all else be uncommitted.’