When Alice Meets Socrates

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).

The question then becomes: Do the beings who have been perceived into existence have any degree of freedom to depart from the author’s script and write their own? And do there exist any intermediate beings (angels, perhaps) who can help them in this endeavor? As Alberto and Sophie survey the Enlightenment, the Romantic period, and the existentialist philosophers, they arrive at possible answers to this question, and prepare–with the help of an unknown sympathizer–to put them into action on the eve of the summer solstice, during Sophie’s fifteenth birthday celebration.

Sophie’s World, although dense and lengthy, is an entertaining brain-teaser of a novel. Paulette Moller’s translation will not win any prizes for colloquial elegance, but it is straightforward and accessible. That the book covers only Western philosophy should hardly be taken as a criticism–it’s long enough as it is, and no author can be all things to all people in one book. Moreover, it is obvious that Gaarder is anxious to display his raised feminist consciousness: that he chooses a reflective adolescent girl as the philosopher’s pupil is significant, allowing him to make apologetic qualifiers about the misogyny of thinkers like Aristotle and Aquinas, and to praise others–like John Stuart Mill and Simone de Beauvoir–for taking gender seriously as a category of analysis.

I found this particular tactic somewhat strained, however, because the actual adult women in the novel–the mothers of Sophie and Hilde–are painted as rather bewildered and beleaguered people who do their best to keep families together in the face of fatherly absence, and who fail to understand the intellectual journey their daughters have embarked upon. (Sophie’s mother can only invoke drugs, sex, and incipient mental illness as explanations for her daughter’s suddenly acquired philosophical passion.) The fathers–and father surrogates, like Knox–are portrayed as the intellectual rescuers of daughters from the dreary domesticity and dead-end jobs that have become the lot of their mothers, even though the latter are the only stable, day-to-day presence in the lives of their children. The result is less a critical reflection on the history of gender relations than a suggestion that certain unusual women–those who think like and identify with the agenda of powerful men (and are young and attractive to boot)–may be graciously assimilated into the philosophical old-boy network. This “add women and stir” form of feminism is admittedly better than leaving women functionally invisible, but it still leaves a lot to be desired.

Finally, except for Gaarder’s treatment of the late classical, medieval, and Renaissance periods, there is little sense of the importance of theology to the history of philosophy, and vice versa. (Interestingly, Gaarder’s NPR interviewer faulted him on this very point.) Gaarder is deliberately evasive about his own world-view; as a historian, he wants to portray each intellectual period so vividly that Sophie will be caught up completely in each as it is presented. In this he succeeds admirably: like students in a personality theory course who are convinced Freudians the week Freud is taught and become Rogerians two weeks later, Sophie thinks like a Platonist in the early part of the course, like an empiricist in the middle, and like an existentialist toward the end.

The novel does make clear that, like his fellow Scandinavian Kierkegaard, Gaarder has little use for the state-church kind of piety-cum-civil religion that Sophie has been exposed to in school, but it is less than clear what he would put in its place–except, perhaps, an expanded philosophy curriculum. The one hint he gives us comes in the form of a crucifix, lost by Hilde, which turns up both in Sophie’s dream and in the latter’s bed when she awakes, and which appears to confirm that Sophie’s world–and her actions and aspiritions–are more than mere ephemera in the mind of a Norwegian army major who aspires to a literary career. But here I may be reading too much of my theistic agenda into the novel’s complex plot: other readers will have to judge this for themselves.

-Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen is professor of philosophy at Eastern College. With Anne Carr, she edited Religion, Feminism, and the Family, just published by Westminster John Knox.