Sophie's World

by Jostein Gaarder

  “A short sightseeing tour will have to be sufficient today,” said the goose, flapping its wings again and again.

  With that, it flew in to land at the foot of the tree which Sophie had so recently begun to climb. As the goose touched down Sophie tumbled onto the ground. After rolling around in the heather a few times, she sat up. She realized with amazement that she was her full size again.

  The goose waddled around her a few times.

  “Thanks a lot for your help,” said Sophie.

  “It was a mere bagatelle. Did you say this was a philosophy book?”

  “No, that’s what you said.”

  “Oh well, it’s all the same. If it had been up to me, I would have liked to fly you through the whole history of philosophy just as I flew Nils Holgersson through Sweden. We could have circled over Miletus and Athens, Jerusalem and Alexandria, Rome and Florence, London and Paris, Jena and Heidelberg, Berlin and Copenhagen…”

  “Thanks, that’s enough.”

  “But flying across the centuries would have been a hefty job even for a very ironic goose. Crossing the Swedish provinces is far easier.”

  So saying, the goose ran a few steps and flapped itself into the air.

  Sophie was exhausted, but when she crawled out of the den into the garden a little later she thought Alberto would have been well pleased with her diversionary maneuvers. The major could not have thought much about Alberto during the past hour. If he did, he had to have a severe case of split personality.

  Sophie had just walked in the front door when her mother came home from work. That saved her having to describe her rescue from a tall tree by a tame goose.

  After dinner they began to get everything ready for the garden party. They brought a four-meter-long table top and trestles from the attic and carried it into the garden.

  They had planned to set out the long table under the fruit trees. The last time they had used the trestle table had been on Sophie’s parents’ tenth anniversary. Sophie was only eight years old at the time, but she clearly remembered the big outdoor party with all their friends and relatives.

  The weather report was as good as it could be. There had not been as much as a drop of rain since that horrid thunderstorm the day before Sophie’s birthday. Nevertheless they decided to leave the actual table setting and decorating until Saturday morning.

  Later that evening they baked two different kinds of bread. They were going to serve chicken and salad. And sodas. Sophie was worried that some of the boys in her class would bring beer. If there was one thing she was afraid of it was trouble.

  As Sophie was going to bed, her mother asked her once again if Alberto was coming to the party.

  “Of course he’s coming. He has even promised to do a philosophical trick.”

  “A philosophical trick? What kind of trick is that?”

  “No idea…if he were a magician, he would have done a magic trick. He would probably have pulled a white rabbit out of a hat…”

  “What, again?”

  “But since he’s a philosopher, he’s going to do a philosophical trick instead. After all, it is a philosophical garden party. Are you planning to do something too?”

  “Actually, I am.”

  “A speech?”

  “I’m not telling. Good night, Sophie!”

  Early the next morning Sophie was woken up by her mother, who came in to say goodbye before she went to work. She gave Sophie a list of last-minute things to buy in town for the garden party.

  The minute her mother had left the house, the telephone rang. It was Alberto. He had obviously found out exactly when Sophie was home alone.

  “How is your secret coming along?”

  “Ssh! Not a word. Don’t even give him the chance to think about it.”

  “I think I held his attention yesterday.”

  “Good.”

  “Is the philosophy course finished?”

  “That’s why I’m calling. We’re already in our own century. From now on you should be able to orient yourself on your own. The foundations were the most important. But we must nevertheless meet for a short talk about our own time.”

  “But I have to go to town…”

  “That’s excellent. I said it was our own time we had to talk about.”

  “Really?”

  “So it would be most practical to meet in town, I mean.”

  “Shall I come to your place?”

  “No, no, not here. Everything’s a mess. I’ve been hunting for hidden microphones.”

  “Ah!”

  “There’s a café that’s just opened at the Main Square. Café Pierre. Do you know it?”

  “Yes. When shall I be there?”

  “Can we meet at twelve?”

  “Okay. Bye!”

  At a couple of minutes past twelve Sophie walked into Café Pierre. It was one of those new fashionable places with little round tables and black chairs, upturned vermouth bottles in dispensers, baguettes, and sandwiches.

  The room was small, and the first thing Sophie noticed was that Alberto was not there. A lot of other people were sitting at the round tables, but Sophie saw only that Alberto was not among them.

  She was not in the habit of going into cafés on her own. Should she just turn around and leave, and come back later to see if he had arrived?

  She ordered a cup of lemon tea at the marble bar and sat down at one of the vacant tables. She stared at the door. People came and went all the time, but there was still no Alberto.

  If only she had a newspaper!

  As time passed, she started to look around. She got a couple of glances in return. For a moment Sophie felt like a young woman. She was only fifteen, but she could certainly have passed for seventeen—or at least, sixteen and a half.

  She wondered what all these people thought about being alive. They looked as though they had simply dropped in, as though they had just sat down here by chance. They were all talking away, gesticulating vehemently, but it didn’t look as though they were talking about anything that mattered.

  She suddenly came to think of Kierkegaard, who had said that what characterized the crowd most was their idle chatter. Were all these people living at the aesthetic stage? Or was there something that was existentially important to them?

  In one of his early letters to her Alberto had talked about the similarity between children and philosophers. She realized again that she was afraid of becoming an adult. Suppose she too ended up crawling deep down into the fur of the white rabbit that was pulled out of the universe’s top hat!

  She kept her eyes on the door. Suddenly Alberto walked in. Although it was midsummer, he was wearing a black beret and a gray hip-length coat of herringbone tweed. He hurried over to her. It felt very strange to meet him in public.

  “It’s quarter past twelve!”

  “It’s what is known as the academic quarter of an hour. Would you like a snack?”

  He sat down and looked into her eyes. Sophie shrugged.

  “Sure. A sandwich, maybe.”

  Alberto went up to the counter. He soon returned with a cup of coffee and two baguette sandwiches with cheese and ham.

  “Was it expensive?”

  “A bagatelle, Sophie.”

  “Do you have any excuse at all for being late?”

  “No. I did it on purpose. I’ll explain why presently.”

  He took a few large bites of his sandwich. Then he said:

  “Let’s talk about our own century.”

  “Has anything of philosophical interest happened?”

  “Lots…movements are going off in all directions. We’ll start with one very important direction, and that is existentialism. This is a collective term for several philosophical currents that take man’s existential situation as their point of departure. We generally talk of twentieth-century existential philosophy. Several of these existential philosophers, or existentialists, based their ideas not only on Kierkegaard, but on Hegel and Marx as well.”

  “Uh-h
uh.”

  “Another important philosopher who had a great influence on the twentieth century was the German Friedrich Nietzsche, who lived from 1844 to 1900. He, too, reacted against Hegel’s philosophy and the German ‘historicism.’ He proposed life itself as a counterweight to the anemic interest in history and what he called the Christian ‘slave morality.’ He sought to effect a ‘revaluation of all values,’ so that the life force of the strongest should not be hampered by the weak. According to Nietzsche, both Christianity and traditional philosophy had turned away from the real world and pointed toward ‘heaven’ or ‘the world of ideas.’ But what had hitherto been considered the ‘real’ world was in fact a pseudo world. ‘Be true to the world,’ he said. ‘Do not listen to those who offer you supernatural expectations.’”

  “So…?”

  “A man who was influenced by both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche was the German existential philosopher Martin Heidegger. But we are going to concentrate on the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, who lived from 1905 to 1980. He was the leading light among the existentialists—at least, to the broader public. His existentialism became especially popular in the forties, just after the war. Later on he allied himself with the Marxist movement in France, but he never became a member of any party.”

  “Is that why we are meeting in a French café?”

  “It was not quite accidental, I confess. Sartre himself spent a lot of time in cafés. He met his life-long companion Simone de Beauvoir in a café. She was also an existential philosopher.”

  “A woman philosopher?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What a relief that humanity is finally becoming civilized.”

  “Nevertheless, many new problems have arisen in our time.”

  “You were going to talk about existentialism.”

  “Sartre said that ‘existentialism is humanism.’ By that he meant that the existentialists start from nothing but humanity itself. I might add that the humanism he was referring to took a far bleaker view of the human situation than the humanism we met in the Renaissance.”

  “Why was that?”

  “Both Kierkegaard and some of this century’s existential philosophers were Christian. But Sartre’s allegiance was to what we might call an atheistic existentialism. His philosophy can be seen as a merciless analysis of the human situation when ‘God is dead.’ The expression ‘God is dead’ came from Nietzsche.”

  “Go on.”

  “The key word in Sartre’s philosophy, as in Kierkegaard’s, is ‘existence.’ But existence did not mean the same as being alive. Plants and animals are also alive, they exist, but they do not have to think about what it implies. Man is the only living creature that is conscious of its own existence. Sartre said that a material thing is simply ‘in itself,’ but mankind is ‘for itself.’ The being of man is therefore not the same as the being of things.”

  “I can’t disagree with that.”

  “Sartre said that man’s existence takes priority over whatever he might otherwise be. The fact that I exist takes priority over what I am. ‘Existence takes priority over essence.’”

  “That was a very complicated statement.”

  “By essence we mean that which something consists of—the nature, or being, of something. But according to Sartre, man has no such innate ‘nature.’ Man must therefore create himself. He must create his own nature or ‘essence,’ because it is not fixed in advance.”

  “I think I see what you mean.”

  “Throughout the entire history of philosophy, philosophers have sought to discover what man is—or what human nature is. But Sartre believed that man has no such eternal ‘nature’ to fall back on. It is therefore useless to search for the meaning of life in general. We are condemned to improvise. We are like actors dragged onto the stage without having learned our lines, with no script and no prompter to whisper stage directions to us. We must decide for ourselves how to live.”

  “That’s true, actually. If one could just look in the Bible—or in a philosophy book—to find out how to live, it would be very practical.”

  “You’ve got the point. When people realize they are alive and will one day die—and there is no meaning to cling to—they experience angst, said Sartre. You may recall that angst, a sense of dread, was also characteristic of Kierkegaard’s description of a person in an existential situation.”

  “Yes.”

  “Sartre says that man feels alien in a world without meaning. When he describes man’s ‘alienation,’ he is echoing the central ideas of Hegel and Marx. Man’s feeling of alienation in the world creates a sense of despair, boredom, nausea, and absurdity.”

  “It is quite normal to feel depressed, or to feel that everything is just too boring.”

  “Yes, indeed. Sartre was describing the twentieth-century city dweller. You remember that the Renaissance humanists had drawn attention, almost triumphantly, to man’s freedom and independence? Sartre experienced man’s freedom as a curse. ‘Man is condemned to be free,’ he said. ‘Condemned because he has not created himself—and is nevertheless free. Because having once been hurled into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.’”

  “But we haven’t asked to be created as free individuals.”

  “That was precisely Sartre’s point. Nevertheless we are free individuals, and this freedom condemns us to make choices throughout our lives. There are no eternal values or norms we can adhere to, which makes our choices even more significant. Because we are totally responsible for everything we do. Sartre emphasized that man must never disclaim the responsibility for his actions. Nor can we avoid the responsibility of making our own choices on the grounds that we ‘must’ go to work, or we ‘must’ live up to certain middle-class expectations regarding how we should live. Those who thus slip into the anonymous masses will never be other than members of the impersonal flock, having fled from themselves into self-deception. On the other hand our freedom obliges us to make something of ourselves, to live ‘authentically’ or ‘truly.’”

  “Yes, I see.”

  “This is not least the case as regards our ethical choices. We can never lay the blame on ‘human nature,’ or ‘human frailty’ or anything like that. Now and then it happens that grown men behave like pigs and then blame it on ‘the old Adam.’ But there is no ‘old Adam.’ He is merely a figure we clutch at to avoid taking responsibility for our own actions.”

  “There ought to be a limit to what man can be blamed for.”

  “Although Sartre claimed there was no innate meaning to life, he did not mean that nothing mattered. He was not what we call a nihilist.”

  “What is that?”

  “That is a person who thinks nothing means anything and everything is permissible. Sartre believed that life must have meaning. It is an imperative. But it is we ourselves who must create this meaning in our own lives. To exist is to create your own life.”

  “Could you elaborate on that?”

  “Sartre tried to prove that consciousness in itself is nothing until it has perceived something. Because consciousness is always conscious of something. And this ‘something’ is provided just as much by ourselves as by our surroundings. We are partly instrumental in deciding what we perceive by selecting what is significant for us.”

  “Could you give me an example?”

  “Two people can be present in the same room and yet experience it quite differently. This is because we contribute our own meaning—or our own interests—when we perceive our surroundings. A woman who is pregnant might think she sees other pregnant women everywhere she looks. That is not because there were no pregnant women before, but because now that she is pregnant she sees the world through different eyes. An escaped convict may see policemen everywhere…”

  “Mm, I see.”

  “Our own lives influence the way we perceive things in the room. If something is of no interest to me, I don’t see it. So now I can perhaps explain why I was late today.”

 
; “It was on purpose, right?”

  “Tell me first of all what you saw when you came in here.”

  “The first thing I saw was that you weren’t here.”

  “Isn’t it strange that the first thing you noticed was something that was absent?”

  “Maybe, but it was you I was supposed to meet.”

  “Sartre uses just such a café visit to demonstrate the way we ‘annihilate’ whatever is irrelevant for us.”

  “You got here late just to demonstrate that?”

  “To enable you to understand this central point in Sartre’s philosophy, yes. Call it an exercise.”

  “Get out of here!”

  “If you were in love, and were waiting for your loved one to call you, you might ‘hear’ him not calling you all evening. You arrange to meet him at the train; crowds of people are milling about on the platform and you can’t see him anywhere. They are all in the way, they are unimportant to you. You might find them aggravating, unpleasant even. They are taking up far too much room. The only thing you register is that he is not there.”

  “How sad.”

  “Simone de Beauvoir attempted to apply existentialism to feminism. Sartre had already said that man has no basic ‘nature’ to fall back on. We create ourselves.”

  “Really?”

  “This is also true of the way we perceive the sexes. Simone de Beauvoir denied the existence of a basic ‘female nature’ or ‘male nature.’ For instance, it has been generally claimed that man has a ‘transcending,’ or achieving, nature. He will therefore seek meaning and direction outside the home. Woman has been said to have the opposite life philosophy. She is ‘immanent,’ which means she wishes to be where she is. She will therefore nurture her family, care for the environment and more homely things. Nowadays we might say that women are more concerned with ‘feminine values’ than men.”

  “Did she really believe that?”

  “You weren’t listening to me. Simone de Beauvoir in fact did not believe in the existence of any such ‘female nature’ or ‘male nature.’ On the contrary, she believed that women and men must liberate themselves from such ingrown prejudices or ideals.”