Sophie’s World: History of Philosophy (part 3)

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

Since the story evolves more quickly in this part compared to the other parts, there will be likely a lot of spoilers here, so I won’t be masking them out.

The Enlightenment

Hilde continues reading the book. As she reads she figured out that her father is the one who puts the words in Alberto’s mouth (as the book’s author), so she decides that the comparison between her with God is not so crazy after all. She was curious to find out what will happen with Sophie and Alberto, especially now that they themselves know that it was Hilde’s father who decides everything.

Although “knew” was perhaps an exaggeration. It was nonsense to think they knew anything at all. Wasn’t it only her father who let them know things?

Alberto talks with Sophie and he’s trying to find a “trick” to “get out” of Hilde’s father’s world:

The trick would be if we could manage to do something all on our own—something the major would not be able to discover.

– How can we do that if we don’t even exist?

Who said we don’t exist? The question is not whether we are, but what we are and who we are. Even if it turns out that we are merely impulses in the major’s dual personality, that need not take our little bit of existence away from us. […] I am attempting to find an Archimedian point [from Archimedes “Give me a firm point on which to stand and I will move the earth”]. That’s the kind of point we must find to move ourselves out of the major’s inner universe. But we must finish our course of philosophy first.

Many of the French Enlightenment philosophers were intrigued by the English natural sciences, and also by British philosophy, in particular Locke and his political philosophy. Once they went back to France, their aim was to start “enlightening” the masses for a better society. A lot of focus was on the education of children and of the people. This led to the founding of the science of pedagogy. The Enlightenment philosophers wanted to make sure everybody was having equal rights simply by being born (natural rights).

“The Enlightenment philosophers thought that once reason and knowledge became widespread, humanity would make great progress. It could only be a question of time before irrationalism and ignorance would give way to an ‘enlightened’ humanity. This thought was dominant in Western Europe until the last couple of decades. Today we are no longer so convinced that all ‘developments’ are to the good.”

[…]

It was observed that the so-called primitive peoples were frequently both healthier and happier than Europeans, and this, it was said, was because they had not been ‘civilized.’ Rousseau proposed the catchphrase, ‘We should return to nature.’ For nature is good, and man is ‘by nature good; it is the civilization which ruins him.’

Kant

Immanuel Kant was one of the first philosophers to teach philosophy at a university. While previously philosophy was mostly categorized between empiricism and rationalism, Kant’s view was that both points were partly right and partly wrong.

According to Kant, there are two forms of intuition: time and space. These forms precede every experience. These are not attributes of the real world, but rather belong to the human condition. Kant says that even the law of causality is a human condition – the cause and effect are in our minds.

Kant claimed that it is not only mind which conforms to things. Things also conform to the mind. Kant called this the Copernican Revolution in the problem of human knowledge – [a revolution] just as new and just as radically different from former thinking as when Copernicus claimed that the earth revolved around the sun and not vice versa.

Kant draws a line between “things in themselves” and “things as they appear to us”. We cannot know what the world is like “in itself”, but only what it is “for us”.

Two elements that contribute to knowledge:

• Material of knowledge – external conditions that we can’t know before we perceived them through our senses
• Form of knowledge – internal conditions such as the perception of events as happening in time and space and as processed according to the law of causality

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. […] Where both reason and experience fall short, there occurs a vacuum that can be filled by faith (Christianity).

It is a moral necessity to assume the existence of God.

Kant

The ability to tell right from wrong is just as innate as all the other attributes of 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.

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.

Kant believed we had no freedom if we lived only as creatures of the senses, but if we obey universal reason we are free and independent.

Alberto also says that Albert Knag cannot contradict reason, and that is their only weapon against him.

[…]

We cannot completely understand the world and, since our own minds are a part of that world, we therefore cannot entirely know our own mind. So Hilde’s father, although he is the one writing about Alberto and Sophie, may not know exactly what he has done with them.

[…]

We cannot rule out the possibility that Sophie and Alberto exist outside the book because we cannot know for sure that the characters do not exist somewhere else. After going through approximately 2000 years of philosophy, we have returned to one of its earliest truths—the only thing we can really know is that we know nothing.

Study guide

Romanticism

Renaissance -> Baroque -> Enlightenment -> Romanticism. As it was Europe’s last common approach to life, the individual was now completely free to interpret life in his own way. The view of Romantics: “the artist can provide something philosophers can’t express”.

Man is only free when he plays, because then he makes up his own rules.

Kant

It was said that the artist had a ‘universe-creating imagination.’ In his transports of artistic rapture he could sense the dissolving of the boundary between dream and reality.

This reminded me of the Law of reversed effort – e.g. how with rational thinking we can not always trigger happiness no matter how hard we chase it, but by e.g. listening to music it comes randomly. Like our minds represent huge trees where every leaf is a neuron and we can’t always trigger any neuron we wish, it happens randomly by consuming art.

The world becomes a dream, and the dream becomes reality.

Novalis

The yearning for something distant and unattainable (nature and nature’s mysteries) was characteristic of the Romantics (isn’t this a universal human characteristic? 🙂)

Romanticism was in the main an urban phenomenon. […] The typical Romantics were young men, often university students, although they did not always take their studies very seriously. They had a decidedly anti-middle class approach to life and could refer to the police or their landladies as philistines, for example, or simply as the enemy. […] The Romantics were not unlike the hippies a hundred and fifty years later.

It was once said that ‘idleness is the ideal of genius, and indolence the virtue of the Romantic.’

Although Byron had numerous liaisons, true love remained illusive and unattainable for him.

Romantics were tracing their roots to philosophers that had in common what’s called a divine “ego”. The leading Romantic philosopher was Schelling, which wanted to unite the mind and matter – similar to Spinoza. “Nature is visible spirit, spirit is invisible nature”.

Novalis could therefore say ‘the path of mystery leads inwards.’ He was saying that man bears the whole universe within himself and comes closest to the mystery of the world by stepping inside himself.

For many Romantics, philosophy, nature study, and poetry formed a synthesis.

Tired of the eternal efforts to fight our way through raw matter, we chose another way and sought to embrace the infinite

Henrik Steffens

Johann Gottfried von Herder viewed history as a process, characterized by continuity, evolution, and design, compared to the Enlightenment philosophers who claimed there was only one universal reason at various periods.

After Universal Romanticism, this earlier phase of Romanticism, came National Romanticism, which was concerned with history, language, and culture of the people.

Study guide

Romanticism strengthened the feeling of national identity.

Try to imagine that everything that happens to us goes on in someone else’s mind. We are that mind. That means we have no soul, we are someone else’s soul. So far we are on familiar philosophical ground. Both Berkeley and Schelling would prick up their ears.

Alberto talking to Sophie about their “escape plan”

I thought GEB had content with self-reference but this chapter was stunning with the meta-levels. “An author who writes about the author of Sophie’s world” – a dialog made by a pair of people, read by another person (as narrated in the book), and then read by me (the reader). Collapsed into the following quote.

All our conversations, all our dialogues are in reality one long monologue.

Hegel

According to Hegel, the “world spirit” is human life, human thought, and human culture. Truth is subjective and thus all knowledge is human knowledge.

What is usually known as Hegel’s philosophy is mainly a method for understanding the progress of history. Hegel’s philosophy teaches us nothing about the inner nature of life, but it can teach us to think productively. […] He believed that the basis of human cognition changed from one generation to the next. There were therefore no eternal truths – no timeless reason. The only fixed point philosophy can hold on to is history itself.

Hegel says that history is like a river.

A river is also in a constant state of change. That doesn’t mean you can’t talk about it. But you cannot say at which place in the valley the river is the ‘truest’ river. […] Hegel claimed that the ‘world spirit’ is developing toward an ever-expanding knowledge of itself. It’s the same with rivers—they become broader and broader as they get nearer to the sea.

[…]

The world spirit realizes itself in three increasing stages—in the individual it is the subjective spirit, in the community the objective spirit, and in art, religion, and philosophy it is the absolute spirit.

Hegel also believes in thesis, antithesis, and synthesis (this concept reminded me of some divide-and-conquer algorithms with recurrence relations of the form ):

He also believed that thinking evolves dialectically—one thought leads to its opposite and then we combine the two thoughts to form a new idea that contains the best elements of both

Study guide

Hegel was skeptical of the “individual” and emphasizes the importance of family, civil, and society.

The philosophy lessons and the plotline of the novel have become intertwined.

When we write, we are all aware that often the words that come out seem very different from the thoughts we were trying to express.

We feel that Albert Knag is showing off his power by making Alberto say certain things and also causing section breaks to appear, but we are also made aware that Gaarder is behind everything. The author’s mind has complete control over the characters, but perhaps the author does not always have complete control over his mind. It is likely that when writing this book he had a general idea of what he was going to write but much of it must have been written spontaneously.

Gaarder shows us how much a book is an interaction between author and reader. We can find amusing the fact that the characters in the book are aware of that interaction, but still the interaction itself is important.

Study guide

Kierkegaard

Alberto and Sophie, now fully aware that they’re being controlled by the mayor, see Alice in Wonderland appear and offer Sophie a blue and a red bottle with labels DRINK ME and DRINK ME TOO. Sophie took a sip from the first one and saw how the cabin and the lake and the woods, and even Alberto himself, merge into one – Alberto points out that this is the Romantics’ world spirit (experiencing everything as one big “ego”). After everything returned to normal, Sophie takes a sip from the other bottle and now everything around her seemed to extend infinitely not in depth or breadth but in detail. Alberto points out that this represents individualism – a reaction to the idealism of Romantics.

The point is not to try to find the best way to look at the world but rather that it is important to continually look at it in a new way. Alberto has told Sophie this same thing in many different ways throughout the book, and the potions make it clear that there is something to be gained from each of those two different vantage points.

Study guide

To Kierkegaard, Christianity was both so overwhelming and so irrational that it had to be an either/or. It was not good being ‘rather’ or ‘to some extent’ religious. [But] it was not enough to believe that Christianity is ‘true.’ Having a Christian faith meant following a Christian way of life.

According to Kierkegaard, rather than searching for the Truth with a capital T, it is more important to find the kind of truths that are meaningful to the individual’s life […] The only important thing was each man’s ‘own existence.’

The following quotes were pretty strong:

We must therefore distinguish between the philosophical question of whether God exists and the individual’s relationship to the same question, a situation in which each and every man is utterly alone. Fundamental questions such as these can only be approached through faith. Things we can know through reason, or knowledge, are according to Kierkegaard totally unimportant.

[…]

Eight plus four is twelve. We can be absolutely certain of this. That’s an example of the sort of ‘reasoned truth’ that every philosopher since Descartes had talked about. But do we include it in our daily prayers? Is it something we will lie pondering over when we are dying? Not at all.

[…]

You can never know whether a person forgives you when you wrong them. […] Neither can you know whether a person loves you. It’s something you just have to believe or hope. But these things are more important to you than the fact that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees. You don’t think about the law of cause and effect or about modes of perception when you are in the middle of your first kiss.

Kierkegaard on faith:

If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe. If I wish to preserve myself in faith I must constantly be intent upon holding fast the objective uncertainty, so as to remain out upon the deep, over seventy thousand fathoms of water, still preserving my faith

Kierkegaard

This reminded me of something I’d heard Donald Knuth saying on the existence of God: if you content yourself with some proof or logical argument, you suffer a loss of faith, and with it, a loss of religious passion. It’s better/easier for us for that to remain a mystery. Credo quid absurdum (I believe because it is irrational).

Three stages of living according to Kierkegaard: aesthetic stage (material pleasure), ethical stage, and religious stage. According to him, most people are stuck on the aesthetic stage.

But others make a new leap to the religious stage. […] They choose faith in preference to aesthetic pleasure and reason’s call of duty. And although it can be ‘terrible to jump into the open arms of the living God,’ as Kierkegaard put it, it is the only path to redemption.

To Kierkegaard, the religious stage was Christianity.