Sophie’s World: History of Philosophy (part 2)

This post is a continuation of one of my previous posts.

Renaissance

A dialogue between Jorunn and Sophie: “Nobody can even answer those philosophical questions! – Yes, but at school, they don’t even teach us to ask such questions!”

Philosophy and science broke away more and more from the theology of the Church. […] More people now emphasized that we cannot reach God through rationalism because God is in all ways unknowable. The important thing for a man was not to understand the divine mystery but to submit to God’s will. […] Thus the basis was created for two powerful upheavals […] the Renaissance and the Reformation.

The renaissance period is when “there was an unrivaled development in all spheres of life. Art and architecture, literature, music, philosophy, and science flourished as never before.”.

Now it was said that every investigation of natural phenomena must be based on observation, experience, and experiment. We call this the empirical method.

[…]

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.

[…]

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.

The philosopher then does a brief introduction of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton.

Where was God in all this new stuff? It was simpler when the earth was the center and God and the planets were upstairs. […] But that was not the greatest challenge. When Newton had proved that the same natural laws applied everywhere in the universe, one might think that he thereby undermined people’s faith in God’s omnipotence. But Newton’s own faith was never shaken. He regarded the natural laws as proof of the existence of the great and almighty God.

[…]

The Renaissance resulted in a new religiosity. As philosophy and science gradually broke away from theology, a new Christian piety developed. Then the Renaissance arrived with its new view of man. This had its effect on religious life. The individual’s personal relationship to God was now more important than his relationship to the Church as an organization.

The Baroque

The philosophers Spinoza and Descartes lived in the Baroque period. Shakespeare also lived in this period.

Life is a theatre. 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.

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.

A typical Baroque feature is describing the earthly and the here and now—and the celestial and the hereafter. Similar to Plato’s distinction between the concrete world of the senses and the immutable world of ideas.

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.

Newton thought the world was one big mechanic machine. 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.

Leibniz pointed out that the difference between the material and the spiritual is that the material can be broken up into smaller and smaller bits, but the soul cannot even be divided into two.

Hilde’s role is even more difficult to understand. It appears that she and Sophie are in some way connected, just as Alberto and Hilde’s father are connected, but the connection remains beyond our reach. […] Gaarder has found a way to place a clear distinction between philosophy and science. […] Although philosophy has progressed, in the sense that each new philosopher has taken into account the arguments of the preceding ones, the same questions persist throughout the history of philosophy. Philosophy is a continual task for humanity. It is the asking of questions that may not be answerable in an attempt to better understand our existence. And the literal importance that it has for Sophie and Alberto can be taken as a metaphor for just how critical it is for everyone.

Study guide

Descartes

Descartes, originally a mathematician, was the first significant philosophy system-builder (similar to a formal mathematical system). He was followed by Spinoza and Leibniz, Locke and Berkeley, Hume and Kant. He was a rationalist (only reason can give us specific knowledge) and a dualist (mind-body).

[…] Descartes tried to work forward from this zero point. He doubted everything, and that was the only thing he was certain of. But now something struck him: one thing had to be true, and that was that he doubted. When he doubted, he had to be thinking, and because he was thinking, it had to be certain that he was a thinking being. Or, as he himself expressed it: Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am).

Descartes now asked himself if there was anything more he could perceive with the same intuitive certainty. He came to the conclusion that in his mind he had a clear and distinct idea of a perfect entity. This was an idea he had always had, and it was thus self-evident to Descartes that such an idea could not possibly have come from himself. The idea of a perfect entity cannot have originated from one who was himself imperfect, he claimed. Therefore the idea of a perfect entity must have originated from that perfect entity itself, or in other words, from God. That God exists was therefore just as self-evident for Descartes as that a thinking being must exist.

Descartes […] maintains that there are two different forms of reality—or two ‘substances.’ One substance is thought, or the ‘mind,’ the other is extension, or matter.

Spinoza

Jesus preached a ‘religion of reason’ which valued love higher than all else. Spinoza interpreted this as meaning both love of God and love of humanity.

A philosopher must help people to see life in a new perspective. One of the pillars of Spinoza’s philosophy was indeed to see things from the perspective of eternity. […] Spinoza didn’t only say that everything is nature. He identified nature with God. He said God is all, and all is in God.

Spinoza rejects Descartes’ split that everything consists of either thought or extension – according to him, everything is one.

It may well be that God has infinitely more attributes than ‘thought’ and ‘extension,’ but these are the only two that are known to man

Similarly to Stoics, Spinoza thought that everything happens out of necessity.

God is not a puppeteer who pulls all the strings, controlling everything that happens. A real puppet master controls the puppets from outside and is therefore the ‘outer cause’ of the puppet’s movements. But that is not the way God controls the world. God controls the world through natural laws. So God—or nature—is the ‘inner cause’ of everything that happens.

“Nothing can be ruled out. But we should doubt everything.”
“For all we know, our entire life could be a dream.”
“But let’s not jump to conclusions. There could be a simpler explanation.”

Locke

Rationalist thinking was typical for philosophers of the seventeenth century. But in the eighteenth century, it was the object of criticism. Several philosophers held the view of empiricism: we have absolutely nothing in the mind that we have not experienced through the senses.

The most important empiricists were Locke, Berkeley, and Hume (all British). The rationalists in the seventeenth century were Descartes (French), Spinoza (Dutch), and Leibniz (German). This makes the distinction between British empiricism and Continental rationalism.

An empiricist derives all knowledge of the world from what the senses tell us. Locke’s claim is that before we perceive anything, the mind is a ‘tabula rasa’—or an empty slate.

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.

Locke was one of the first philosophers in more recent times to be interested in sexual roles. He had a great 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

Sophie questions whether Hilde’s father created this world for Sophie and whether she is living in it.

Hume

Hume’s philosophy: two types of perceptions: impressions and ideas (recollection of impressions). “Burning on a hot oven is ‘impression.’ Afterward, you can recollect that you burned yourself.”

As an empiricist, Hume proposed the return to our spontaneous experience of the world.

No philosopher ‘will ever be able to take us behind the daily experiences or give us rules of conduct that are different from those we get through reflections on everyday life’

An impression can be either simple or complex:

Hume’s point is that we sometimes form complex ideas for which there is no corresponding object in the physical world

An example is Pegasus, a winged horse. In this, the mind has done a cutting out and pasting stuff.

Buddha saw life as an unbroken succession of mental and physical processes which keep people in a continual state of change. The infant is not the same as the adult; I am not the same today as I was yesterday. Hume similarly pointed out that we have no underlying “personal identity”.

Hume would say that you have experienced a stone falling to the ground many times. But you have never experienced that it will always fall. It is usual to say that the stone falls to the ground because of the law of gravitation. But we have never experienced such a law. We have only experienced that things fall. […] That’s exactly Hume’s point. You are so used to the one thing following the other that you expect the same to happen every time you let go of a stone. This is the way the concept of what we like to call ‘the unbreakable laws of nature’ arises.

Hume emphasized that the expectation of one thing following another does not lie in the things themselves, but in our minds, and that expectation is associated with the habit. He helps us understand how much of what we think we understand about the world may be due our habit of seeing things happen the same way.

The fact that one thing follows after another thus does not necessarily mean there is a causal link. One of the main concerns of philosophy is to warn people against jumping to conclusions.

Berkeley

My own soul can be the cause of my own ideas—just as when I dream—but only another will or spirit can be the cause of the ideas that make up the ‘corporeal’ world. Everything is due to that spirit which is the cause of ‘everything in everything’ and which ‘all things consist in’.

We can moreover claim that the existence of God is far more clearly perceived than the existence of man. Everything we see and feel is an effect of God’s power.

Berkeley

The whole world around us and our whole life exists in God. He is the one cause of everything that exists. We exist only in the mind of God.

I believe there is something of the divine mystery in everything that exists. We can see it sparkle in a sunflower or a poppy. We sense more of the unfathomable mystery in a butterfly that flutters from a twig— or in a goldfish swimming in a bowl. But we are closest to God in our own soul. Only there can we become one with the greatest mystery of life. In truth, at very rare moments we can experience that we ourselves are that divine mystery.

[Alberto] thinks that Hilde’s father is writing or telling their story for his daughter’s amusement.

[…]

Sophie’s World presents us with the possibility that our existence may not really be what we believe it to be. To fully understand our existence, we can rely on the philosophers Sophie has studied. As long as what happened to Sophie does not happen to us, we can go on believing that we are not the figments of someone else’s imagination. While we cannot know for sure either way, perhaps Gaarder is pointing out that it is better not to know. If we knew, like Sophie does, that our entire lives were created by some other mind and that we did not actually exist, it would be a somewhat depressing realization. On the other hand, the fact that we cannot know leads us to look at our lives in a different way. Berkeley points out that we cannot be sure even of the world. In a way, such an uncertainty only makes life itself seem more magical.

Study guide

Bjerkely

Spoiler paragraph start.

This chapter was most interesting regarding the story. Sophie was looking forward to this chapter, and I wonder why! The chapter is about relativism or meta-levels. Basically, the story starts when Hilde’s father is handing her the book “Sophie’s World”, and as Hilde starts reading the book, we see the interpretation of the book from her perspective. Hilde is a girl which Sophie used to keep getting mysterious cards about. In the story, Sophie was noticing some weird events such as finding a random scarf, etc. Hilde figures that the book is about her but feels for Sophie because “She must have been totally confused!” because of those random events. But, Hilde also notices weird events and wonders how could that happen. In a momentary vision of absolute clarity, Hilde knew that Sophie was more than just paper and ink. She really existed.

Spoiler paragraph finish.

Gaarder connects the idea that Sophie is a part of Albert Knag’s imagination to Berkeley’s philosophy. We know all along that Sophie is a character in a book, because we can read that book. Sophie’s life does not continue unless we decide to read more of the book. As a result, it is impossible to ignore the possibility that the same could be true of our own lives.

Study guide