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Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy
By Jostien Gaarder
Translated by Paulette Moller
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
405 pp.; $19, hardcover;
Berkley, $6.99, paper
Jostein Gaarder is a high-school philosophy teacher in Norway whom I first encountered via an interview on National Public Radio in the fall of 1995. That philosophy is regularly taught in the Norwegian high-school curriculum was the first surprise from the interview. The second was that Sophie's World, Gaarder's history of Western philosophy embedded in a science fiction--like novel, was already in its ninth English printing and slated for translation into French, Russian, Korean, Portuguese, and various other languages. Gaarder himself seemed rather bemused by the attention his first book was receiving, and by the fact that (in his words) he was being "shipped around the world like a package" as a result. (Since then, two more books by Gaarder have appeared in English translation.)
After reading Sophie's World, I could understand the unusual enthusiasm the book has generated. I happen to teach a required course in the history of psychology to undergraduate majors in that discipline. Since many psychology majors are neither by training nor inclination attuned to the history of philosophy that makes up the bulk of the course, anything that can reduce their anxiety and capture their attention between textbook chapters and primary source readings is to be welcomed. In my experience, a well-chosen novel can often do the trick: B. F. Skinner's Walden Two has been a mainstay of my history course for years, and Sophie's World now bids fair to become another.
Sophie Amundsen is a 14-year-old high-school student who comes home one day to find two envelopes addressed to her, each containing a single question: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" This marks the beginning of a correspondence course in philosophy, unilaterally initiated by an eccentric but enthusiastic middle-aged, free-lance scholar named Alberto Knox.
He deftly avoids meeting Sophie for the first few weeks, preferring to drop unpredictable installments of the course on her doorstep, in her mailbox, or to send them by canine courier in the form of his golden Labrador, Hermes. Sophie is intrigued--both by the mystery of her teacher's identity and by the continuing questions he poses, each of which she mulls over for a while before a sheaf of notes arrives introducing her to the philosopher of the day, beginning with the pre-Socratics and ending with Marx, Darwin, Freud, and some contemporary theoretical physics. Sophie, who is a precocious example of Piaget's formal-operational stage of development, is soon hooked by Alberto's breezy and vivid pedagogy and the story of Western philosophy that unfolds.
Knox eventually reveals his identity to Sophie--first via a videotaped lecture from the Acropolis in Athens, which he magically recreates in its original reality, then in a secret early-morning rendezvous in a medieval church, where he dons a monk's robe to expound on Augustine and Aquinas.
At this point, the narrative takes on a note of urgency: Alberto has deduced that he and Sophie are fictitious beings engaged in a battle of wills with their literary creator, a Norwegian army major on a NATO assignment in Lebanon. Said major has his own reasons for poking his nose periodically into the story with mysterious postcards and other more dramatic messages to his own teenage daughter, Hilde, all of which (to her bewilderment) he has been sending care of Sophie.
As Alberto's lectures move to the Renaissance and beyond, Sophie learns about the philosophy of the eighteenth-century Anglican bishop George Berkeley and its significance for their situation. Berkeley, you may recall, shared with his fellow empiricists (such as Hobbes, Locke, and Hume) the conviction that sensory data is the main source of human knowledge, and that whatever mental processes we have cannot produce reliable truth unless such sensory input is furnished--thus denying earlier doctrines of innate ideas from the classical and Cartesian philosophical traditions. But as a devout Christian, Berkeley also wanted to challenge the creeping deism and mechanistic materialism that his fellow empiricists had absorbed from Isaac Newton and other luminaries of the scientific revolution. Thus, while he agreed that humans learn about reality through a combination of sensory input and the laws of association, he asserted that the reality we learn about is not brute "matter in motion" but a purely immaterial reality that exists because we perceive it--and, more significantly, because God perceives our perceptions into existence as a stable, lawful reality, interrupted by occasional miracles. In Berkeley's words, "God is intimately present in our consciousness, causing to exist for us the profusion of ideas and perceptions that we are constantly subject to." Humans are thus surrounded not by a universe of material objects, but by the mind of God--hence Berkeley's famous aphorism, esse est percipi (to be perceived is to be).
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