[table=100%,#ffffff,#000000,1][tr][td]Counterpoint ¡Ktwo or more melodies sounding together¡K Hilde sat up in bed. That was the end of the story of Sophie and Alberto. But what had actually happened? Why had her father written that last chapter? Was it just to demonstrate his power over Sophie's world? Deep in thought, she took a shower and got dressed. She ate a quick breakfast and then wandered down the garden and sat in the glider. She agreed with Alberto that the only sensible thing that had happened at the garden party was his speech. Surely her father didn't think Hilde's world was as chaotic as Sophie's garden party? Or that her world would also dissolve eventually? Then there was the matter of Sophie and Alberto. What had happened to the secret plan? Was it up to Hilde herself to continue the story? Or had they really managed to sneak out of it? And where were they now? A thought suddenly struck her. If Alberto and Sophie really had managed to sneak out of the story, there wouldn't be anything about it in the ring binder. Everything that was there, unfortunately, was clear to her father. Could there be anything written between the lines? There was more than a mere suggestion of it. Hilde realized that she would have to read the whole story again one or two more times. *** As the white Mercedes drove into the garden, Alberto dragged Sophie with him into the den. Then they ran into the woods in the direction of the major's cabin. "Quickly!" cried Alberto. "It's got to happen before he starts looking for us." "Are we beyond the major's reach now?" "We are in the borderland." They rowed across the water and ran into the cabin. Alberto opened a trapdoor in the floor. He pushed Sophie down into the cellar. Then everything went black. In the days that followed, Hilde worked on her plan. She sent several letters to Anne Kvamsdal in Copenhagen, and a couple of times she called her. She also enlisted the aid of friends and acquaintances, and recruited almost half of her class at school. In between, she read Sophie's World. It was not a story one could be done with after a single reading. New thoughts about what could have happened to Sophie and Alberto when they left the garden party were constantly occurring to her. On Saturday, June 23, she awoke with a start around nine o'clock. She knew her father had already left the camp in Lebanon. Now it was just a question of waiting. The last part of his day was planned down to the smallest detail. Later in the morning she began the preparations for Midsummer Eve with her mother. Hilde could not help thinking of how Sophie and her mother had arranged their Midsummer Eve party. But that was something they had done. It was over, finished. Or was it? Were they going around right now, decorating everywhere? Sophie and Alberto seated themselves on a lawn in front of two large buildings with ugly air vents and ventilation canals on the outside. A young couple came walking out of one of the buildings. He was carrying a brown briefcase and she had a red handbag slung over one shoulder. A car drove along a narrow road in the background. "What happened?" asked Sophie. "We made it!" "But where are we?" "This is Oslo." "Are you quite sure?" "Quite sure. One of these buildings is called Chateau Neuf, which means 'the new palace.' People study music there. The other is the Congregation Faculty. It's a school of theology. Further up the hill they study science and up at the top they study literature and philosophy." "Are we out of Hilde's book and beyond the major's control?" "Yes, both. He'll never find us here." "But where were we when we ran through the woods?" "While the major was busy crashing the financial adviser's car into an apple tree, we seized the chance to hide in the den. We were then at the embryo stage. We were of the old as well as of the new world. But concealing ourselves there was something the major cannot possibly have envisaged." "Why not?" "He would never have let us go so easily. As it was, it went like a dream. Of course, there's always the chance that he was in on it himself." "What do you mean?" "It was he who started the white Mercedes. He may have exerted himself to the utmost to lose sight of us. He was probably utterly exhausted after everything that had been going on . . ." By now the young couple were only a few yards away. Sophie felt a bit awkward, sitting on the grass with a man so much older than herself. Besides, she wanted someone to confirm what Alberto had said. She got up and went over to them"Excuse me, would you mind telling me the name of this street?" But they ignored her completely. Sophie was so provoked that she asked them again. "It's customary to answer a person, isn't it?" The young man was clearly engrossed in explaining something to his companion: "Contrapuntal form operates on two dimensions, horizontally, or melodically, and vertically, or harmonically. There will always be two or more melodies sounding together . . ." "Excuse me for interrupting, but. . ." "The melodies combine in such a way that they develop as much as possible, independently of how they sound against each other. But they have to be concordant. Actually it's note against note." How rude! They were neither deaf nor blind. Sophie tried a third time, standing ahead of them on the path blocking their way,She was simply brushed aside. "There's a wind coming up," said the woman. Sophie rushed back to Alberto. 'They can't hear me!" she said desperately--and just as she said it, she recalled her dream about Hilde and the gold crucifix. "It's the price we have to pay. Although we have sneaked out of a book, we can't expect to nave exactly the same status as its author. But we really are here. From now on, we will never be a day older than we were when we left the philosophical garden party." "Does that mean we'll never have any real contact with me people around us?" "A true philosopher never says 'never.' What time is it?" "Eight o'clock." "The same as when we left Captain's Bend, of course." "This is the day Hilde's father gets back from Lebanon." "That's why we must hurry." "Why--what do you mean?" "Aren't you anxious to know what happens when the major gets home to Bjerkely?" "Naturally, but. . ." "Come on, then!" They began to walk down toward the city. Several people passed them on the way, but they all walked right on by as if Sophie and Alberto were invisible. Cars were parked by the curbside all the way along the street. Alberto stopped by a small red convertible with the top down. "This will do," he said. "We must just make sure it's ours." "I have no idea what you mean." "I'd better explain then. We can't just take an ordinary car that belongs to someone here in the city. What do you think would happen when people noticed the car driving along without a driver? And anyway, we probably wouldn't be able to start it." "Then why the convertible?" "I think I recognize it from an old movie." "Look, I'm sorry, but I'm getting tired of all these cryptic remarks." "It's a make-believe car, Sophie. It's just like us. People here only see a vacant space. That's all we have to confirm before we're on our way." They stood by the car and waited. After a while, a boy came cycling along on the sidewalk. He turned suddenly and rode right through the red car and onto the road. "There, you see? It's ours!" Alberto opened the door to the passenger seat. "Be my guest!" he said, and Sophie got in. He got into the driver's seat. The key was in the ignition, he turned it, and the engine started. They drove southward out of the city, past Lysaker, Sandvika, Drammen, and down toward Lillesand. As they drove they saw more and more Midsummer bonfires, especially after they had passed Drammen. "It's Midsummer, Sophie. Isn't it wonderful?" "And there's such a lovely fresh breeze in an open car. Is it true that no one can see us?" "Only people of our own kind. We might meet some of them. What's the time now?" "Half past eight." "We'll have to take a few shortcuts. We can't stay behind this trailer, that's for sure." They turned off into a large wheatfield. Sophie looked back and saw that they had left a broad trail of flattened stalks. "Tomorrow they'll say a freak wind blew over the field," said Alberto. *** Major Albert Knag had just landed at Kastrup Airport outside Copenhagen. It was half past four on Saturday, June 23. It had already been a long day. This penultimate lap had been by plane from Rome. He went through passport control in his UN uniform, which he was proud to wear. He represented not only himself and his country. Albert Knag represented an international legal system--a century-old tradition that now embraced the entire planet. He carried only a flight bag. He had checked the rest of his baggage through from Rome. He just needed to hold up his red passport. "Nothing to declare." Major Albert Knag had a nearly three-hour wait in the airport before his plane left for Kristiansand. He would have time to buy a few presents for his family. He had sent the present of his life to Hilde two weeks ago. Marit, his wife, had put it on her bedside table for her to discover when she woke up on her birthday. He had not spoken with Hilde since that late night birthday call. Albert bought a couple of Norwegian newspapers, found himself a table in the bar, and ordered a cup of coffee. He had hardly had time to skim the headlines when he heard an announcement over the loudspeakers: "This is a personal call for Albert Knag. Albert Knag is requested to contact the SAS information desk." What now? He felt a chill down his spine. Surely he was not being ordered back to Lebanon? Could something be wrong at home? He quickly reached the SAS information desk. "I'm Albert Knag." "Here is a message for you. It is urgent." He opened the envelope at once. Inside lay a smaller envelope. It was addressed to Major Albert Knag, c/o SAS Information, Kastrup Airport, Copenhagen. Albert opened the little envelope nervously. It contained a short note: Dear Dad, Welcome home from Lebanon. As you can imagine, I can't even wait till you get home. Forgive me for having you paged over the loud-speakers. It was the easiest way. P.S. Unfortunately a claim for damages has arrived from financial adviser Ingebrigtsen regarding a stolen and wrecked Mercedes. P.S. P.S. I may be sitting in the garden when you get here. But you might also be hearing from me before that. P.S. P.S. P.S. I'm rather scared of staying in the garden too long at a time. It's so easy to sink into the ground in such places. Love from Hilde, who has had plenty of time to prepare your homecoming. Major Albert Knag's first impulse was to smile. But he did not appreciate being manipulated in this manner. He had always liked to be in charge of his own life. Now this little vixen in Lillesand was directing his movements in Kastrup Airport! How had she managed that? He put the envelope in his breast pocket and began to stroll toward the little shopping mall. He was just about to enter the Danish Food deli when he noticed a small envelope taped to the store window. It had MAJOR KNAG written on it with a thick marker pen. Albert took it down and opened it: Personal message for Major Albert Knag, c/o Danish Food, Kastrup Airport. Dear Dad, please buy a large Danish salami, preferably a two-pound one, and Mom would probably like a cognac sausage. P. S. Danish caviar is not bad either. Love, Hilde. Albert turned around. She wasn't here, was she? Had Mark given her a trip to Copenhagen so she could meet him here? It was Hilde's handwriting ... Suddenly the UN observer began to feel himself observed. It was as if someone was in remote control of everything he did. He felt like a doll in the hands of a child. He went into the shop and bought a two-pound salami, a cognac sausage, and three jars of Danish caviar. Then he continued down the row of stores. He had made up his mind to buy a proper present for Hilde. A calculator, maybe? Or a little radio--yes, that was what he would get. When he got to the store that sold electrical appliances, he saw that there was an envelope taped to the window there too. This one was addressed to "Major Albert Knag, c/o the most interesting store in Kastrup." Inside was the following note: Dear Dad, Sophie sends her greetings and thanks for the combined mini-TV and FM radio that she got for her birthday from her very generous father. It was great, but on the other hand it was a mere bagatelle. I must confess, though, that I share Sophie's liking for such bagatelles. P.S. In case you haven't been there yet, there are further instructions at the Danish Food store and the big Tax Free store that sells wines and tobacco. P.S. P.S. I got some money for my birthday, so I can contribute to the mini-TV with 350 crowns. Love, Hilde, who has already stuffed the turkey and made the Waldorf salad. A mini-TV cost 985 Danish crowns. That could certainly be called a bagatelle in comparison with how Albert Knag felt about being directed hither and thither by his daughter's sneaky tricks. Was she here--or was she not? From that moment on, he was constantly on guard wherever he went. He felt like a secret agent and a marionette rolled into one. Was he not being deprived of his basic human rights? He felt obliged to go into the Tax Free store as well. There hung a new envelope with his name on it. The whole airport was becoming a computer game with him as the cursor. He read the message: Major Knag, c/o the Tax Free store at Kastrup. All I need from here is a bag of gumdrops and some marzipan bars. Remember it's much more expensive in Norway. As far as I can recall, Mom is very fond of Campari. P.S. You must keep all your senses alert the whole way home. You wouldn't want to miss any important messages, would you? Love from your most teachable daughter, Hilde. Albert sighed despairingly, but he went into the store and shopped as instructed. With three plastic carriers and his flight bag he walked toward Gate 28 to wait for his flight. If there were any more messages they would have to stay there. However, at Gate 28 he caught sight of another white envelope taped to a pillar: "To Major Knag, c/o GATE 28, Kastrup Airport." This was also in Hilde's handwriting, but the gate number seemed to have been written by someone else. It was not easy to judge since there was no writing to compare it with, only block letters and digits. He took it down. This one said only "It won't be long now." He sat down on a chair with his back against the wall. He kept the shopping bags on his knees. Thus the proud major sat stiffly, eyes straight ahead, like a small child traveling alone for the first time. If Hilde was here, she was certainly not going to have the satisfaction of dis-covering him first. He glanced anxiously at each passenger that came in. For a while he felt like an enemy of the state under close surveillance. When the passengers were finally allowed to board the plane he breathed a sigh of relief. He was the last person to board. As he handed over his boarding pass he tore off another white envelope that had been taped to the check-in desk. Sophie and Alberto had passed Brevik, and a little later the exit to Kragera. "You're going awfully fasf," said Sophie. "It's almost nine o'clock. He'll soon be landing at Kjevik. But we won't be stopped for speeding." "Suppose we smash into another car?" "It makes no difference if it's just an ordinary car. But if it's one of our own . . ." "Then what?" "Then we'll have to be very careful. Didn't you notice that we passed the Bat Mobile." "No." "It was parked somewhere up in Vestfold." "This tourist bus won't be easy to pass. There are dense woods on each side of the road." "It makes no difference, Sophie. Can't you get it into your head?" So saying, he swung the car into the woods and drove straight through the trees. Sophie breathed a sigh of relief. "You scared me." "We wouldn't feel it if we drove into a brick wall." "That only means we're spirits of the air compared to our surroundings." "No, now you're putting the cart before the horse. It is the reality around us that's an airy adventure to us." "I don't get it." "Listen carefully, then. It is a widespread misunderstanding that spirit is a thing that is more 'airy' than vapor. On the contrary. Spirit is more solid than ice." "That never occurred to me." "And now I'll tell you a story. Once upon a time there was a man who didn't believe in angels. One day, while he was out working in the woods, he was visited by an angel." "And?" "They walked together for a while. Then the man turned to the angel and said, 'All right, now I have to admit that angels exist. But you don't exist in reality, like us."What do you mean by that?' asked the angel. So the man answered, 'When we came to that big rock, I had to go around it, but I noticed that you just glided through it. And when we came to that huge log that lay across the path, I had to climb over it while you walked straight through it.' The angel was very surprised, and said 'Didn't you also notice that we took a path that led through a marsh? We both walked right through the mist. That was because we were more solid than the mist.' "Ah." "It's the same with us, Sophie. Spirit can pass through steel doors. No tanks or bombers can crush anything that is of spirit." "That's a comfort." "We'll soon be passing Ris0r, and it's no more than an hour since we left the major's cabin. I could really use a cup of coffee." When they got to Fiane, just before S0ndeled, they passed a cafeteria on the lefthand side of the road. It was called Cinderella. Alberto swung the car around and parked on the grass in front of it. Inside, Sophie tried to take a bottle of Coke from the cooler, but she couldn't lift it. It seemed to be stuck. Further down the counter, Alberto was trying to tap coffee into a paper cup he had found in the car. He only had to press a lever, but even by exerting all his strength he could not press it down. This made him so mad that he turned to the cafeteria guests and asked for help. When no one reacted, he shouted so loudly that Sophie had to cover her ears: "I want some coffee!" His anger soon evaporated, and he doubled up with laughter. They were about to turn around and leave when an old woman got up from her chair and came toward them. She was wearing a garish red skirt, an ice-blue cardigan, and a white kerchief round her head. She seemed more sharply defined than anything else in the little cafeteria. She went up to Alberto and said, "My my, how you do yell, my boy!" "Excuse me." "You want some coffee, you said?" "Yes, but. . ." "We have a small establishment close by." They followed the old woman out of the cafeteria and down a path behind it. While they walked, she said, "You are new in these parts?" "We might as well admit it," answered Alberto. "That's all right. Welcome to eternity then, children." "And you?" "I'm out of one of Grimm's fairy tales. That was nearly two hundred years ago. And where are you from?" "We're out of a book on philosophy. I am the philosophy teacher and this is my student, Sophie." "Hee hee! That's a new one!" They came through the trees to a small clearing where there were several cozy-looking brown cottages. A large Midsummer bonfire was burning in a yard between the cottages, and around the bonfire danced a crowd of colorful figures. Sophie recognized many of them. There were Snow White and some of the seven dwarfs, Mary Poppins and Sherlock Holmes, Peter Pan and Pippi Longstocking, Little Red Ridinghood and Cinderella. A lot of familiar figures without names had also gathered around the bonfire--there were gnomes and elves, fauns and witches, angels and imps. Sophie also caught sight of a real live troll. "What a lot of noise!" exclaimed Alberto. "That's because it's Midsummer," said the old woman. "We haven't had a gathering like this since Valborg's Eve. That was when we were in Germany. I'm only here on a short visit. Was it coffee you wanted?" "Yes, please." Not until now did Sophie notice that all the buildings were made out of gingerbread, candy, and sugar icing. Several of the figures were eating directly off the facades. A baker was going around repairing the damage as it occurred. Sophie ventured to take a little bite off one corner. It tasted sweeter and better than anything she had ever tasted before. Presently the old woman returned with a cup of coffee. "Thank you very much indeed." "And what are the visitors going to pay for the coffee?" "To pay?" "We usually pay with a story. For coffee, an old wives' tale will suffice." "We could tell the whole incredible story of humanity," said Alberto, "but unfortunately we are in a hurry. Can we come back and pay some other day?" "Of course. And why are you in a hurry?" Alberto explained their errand, and the old woman commented: "I must say, you certainly are a pair of greenhorns. You'd better hurry up and cut the umbilical cord to your mortal progenitor. We no longer need their world. We belong to the invisible people." Alberto and Sophie hurried back to the Cinderella cafeteria and the red convertible. Right next to the car a busy mother was helping her little boy to pee. Racing along and taking shortcuts, they soon arrived in Lillesand. SK 876 from Copenhagen touched down at Kjevik on schedule at 9:35 p.m. While the plane was taxied out to the runway in Copenhagen, the.major had opened the envelope hanging from the check-in desk. The note inside read: To Major Knag, as he hands over his boarding pass at Kastrup on Midsummer Eve, 1990. Dear Dad, You probably thought I would turn up in Copenhagen. But my control over your movements is more ingenious than that. I can see you wherever you are, Dad. The fact is, I have been to visit a well-known Gypsy family which many, many years ago sold a magic brass mirror to Great-grandmother. I have also gotten myself a crystal ball. At this very moment, I can see that you have just sat down in your seat. May I remind you to fasten your seat belt and keep the back of your seat raised to an upright position until the Fasten Seat Belt sign has been switched off. As soon as the plane is in flight, you can lower the seat back and give yourself a well-earned rest. You will need to be rested when you get home. The weather in Lillesand is perfect, but the temperature is a few degrees lower than in Lebanon. I wish you a pleasant flight. Love, your own witch-daughter, Queen of the Mirror and the Highest Protector of Irony. Albert could not quite make out whether he was angry or merely tired and resigned. Then he started laughing. He laughed so loudly that his fellow passengers turned to stare at him. Then the plane took off. He had been given a taste of his own medicine. But with a significant difference, surely. His medicine had first and foremost affected Sophie and Alberto. And they--well, they were only imaginary. He did what Hilde had suggested. He lowered the back of his seat and nodded off. He was not fully awake again until he had gone through passport control and was standing in the arrival hall at Kjevik Airport. A demonstration was there to greet him. There were eight or ten young people of about Hilde's age. They were holding signs saying: WELCOME HOME, DAD -- HILDE IS WAITING IN THE GARDEN -- IRONY LIVES. The worst thing was that he could not just jump into a taxi. He had to wait for his baggage. And all the while, Hilde's classmates were swarming around him, forcing him to read the signs again and again. Then one of the girls came up and gave him a bunch of roses and he melted. He dug down into one of his shopping bags and gave each demonstrator a marzipan bar. Now there were only two left for Hilde. When he had reclaimed his baggage, a young man stepped forward and explained that he was under the command of the Queen of the Mirror, and that he had orders to drive him to Bjerkely. The other demonstrators dispersed into the crowd. They drove out onto the E 18. Every bridge and tunnel they passed was draped with banners saying: "Welcome home!", "The turkey is ready," "I can see you, Dad!" When he was dropped off outside the gate at Bjerkely, Albert Knag heaved a sigh of relief, and thanked the driver with a hundred crown note and three cans of Carlsberg Elephant beer. His wife was waiting for him outside the house. After a long embrace, he asked: "Where is she?" "She's sitting on the dock, Albert." Alberto and Sophie stopped the red convertible on the square in Lillesand outside the Hotel Norge. It was a quarter past ten. They could see a large bonfire out in the archipelago. "How do we find Bjerkely?" asked Sophie. "We'll just have to hunt around for it. You remember the painting in the major's cabin." "We'll have to hurry. I want to get there before he arrives." They started to drive around the minor roads and then over rocky mounds and slopes. A useful clue was that Bjerkely lay by the water. Suddenly Sophie shouted, "There it is! We've found it!" "I do believe you're right, but don't shout so loud." "Why? There's no one to hear us." "My dear Sophie--after a whole course in philosophy, I'm very disappointed to find you still jumping to conclusions." "Yes, but. . ." "Surely you don't believe this place is entirely devoid of trolls, pixies, wood nymphs, and good fairies?" "Oh, excuse me." They drove through the gate and up the gravel path to the house. Alberto parked the car on the lawn beside the glider. A little way down the garden a table was set for three. "I can see her!" whispered Sophie. "She's sitting down on the dock, just like in my dream." "Have you noticed how much the garden looks like your own garden in Clover Close?" "Yes, it does. With the glider and everything. Can I go down to her?" "Naturally. I'll stay here." Sophie ran down to the dock. She almost stumbled and fell over Hilde. But she sat down politely beside her. Hilde sat idly playing with the line that the rowboat was made fast with. In her left hand she held a slip of paper. She was clearly waiting. She glanced at her watch several times. Sophie thought she was very pretty. She had fair, curly hair and bright green eyes. She was wearing a yellow summer dress. She was not unlike Joanna. Sophie tried to talk to her even though she knew it was useless. "Hilde--it's Sophie!" Hilde gave no sign that she had heard. Sophie got onto her knees and tried to shout in her ear: "Can you hear me, Hilde? Or are you both deaf and blind?" Did she, or didn't she, open her eyes a little wider? Wasn't there a very slight sign that she had heard something--however faintly? She looked around. Then she turned her head sharply and stared right into Sophie's eyes. She did not focus on her properly; it was as if she was looking right through her. "Not so loud, Sophie," said Alberto from up in the car. "I don't want the garden filled with mermaids." Sophie sat still now. It felt good just to be close to Hilde. Then she heard the deep voice of a man: "Hilde!" It was the major--in uniform, with a blue beret. He stood at the top of the garden. Hilde jumped up and ran toward him. They met between the glider and the red convertible. He lifted her up in the air and swung her around and around. Hilde had been sitting on the dock waiting for her father. Since he had landed at Kastrup, she had thought of him every fifteen minutes, trying to imagine where he was now, and how he was taking it. She had noted all the times down on a slip of paper and kept it with her all day. What if it made him angry? But surely he couldn't expect that he would write a mysterious book for her-- and then everything would remain as before? She looked at her watch again. Now it was a quarter past ten. He could be arriving any minute. But what was that? She thought she heard a faint breath of something, exactly as in her dream about Sophie. She turned around quickly. There was something, she was sure of it. But what? Maybe it was only the summer night. For a few seconds she was afraid she was hearing things. "Hilde!" Now she turned the other way. It was Dad! He was standing at the top of the garden. Hilde jumped up and ran toward him. They met by the glider. He lifted her up in the air and swung her around and around. Hilde was crying, and her father had to hold back his tears as well. "You've become a grown woman, Hilde!" "And you've become a real writer." Hilde wiped away her tears. "Shall we say we're quits?" she asked. "We're quits." They sat down at the table. First of all Hilde had to have an exact description of everything that had happened at Kastrup and on the way home. They kept bursting out laughing. "Didn't you see the envelope in the cafeteria?" "I didn't get a chance to sit down and eat anything, you villain. Now I'm ravenous." "Poor Dad." "The stuff about the turkey was all bluff, then?" "It certainly was not! I have prepared everything. Mom's doing the serving." Then they had to go over the ring binder and the story of Sophie and Alberto from one end to the other and backwards and forwards. Mom brought out the turkey and the Waldorf salad, the rose wine and Hilde's homemade bread. Her father was just saying something about Plato when Hilde suddenly interrupted him: "Shh!" "What is it?" "Didn't you hear it? Something squeaking?" "No." "I'm sure I heard something. I guess it was just a field mouse." While her mother went to get another bottle of wine, her father said: "But the philosophy course isn't quite over." "It isn't?" "Tonight I'm going to tell you about the universe." Before they began to eat, he said to his wife, "Hilde is too big to sit on my knee any more. But you're not!" With that he caught Marit round the waist and drew her onto his lap. It was quite a while before she got anything to eat. "To think you'll soon be forty ..." When Hilde jumped up and ran toward her father, Sophie felt her tears welling up. She would never be able to reach her . . 

[table=100%,#ffffff,#000000,1][tr][td]Our Own Time ... man is condemned to be free¡K The alarm clock showed 11:55 p.m. Hilde lay staring at the ceiling. She tried to let her associations flow freely. Each time she finished a chain of thoughts, she tried to ask herself why. Could there be something she was trying to repress? If only she could have set aside all censorship, she might have slid into a waking dream. A bit scary, she thought. The more she relaxed and opened herself to random thoughts and images, the more she felt as if she was in the major's cabin by the little lake in the woods. What could Alberto be planning? Of course, it was Hilde's father planning that Alberto was planning something. Did he already know what Alberto would do? Perhaps he was trying to give himself free rein, so that whatever happened in the end would come as a surprise to him too. There were not many pages left now. Should she take a peek at the last page? No, that would be cheating. And besides, Hilde was convinced that it was far from decided what was to happen on the last page. Wasn't that a curious thought? The ring binder was right here and her father could not possibly get back in time to add anything to it. Not unless Alberto did something on his own. A surprise ... Hilde had a few surprises up her own sleeve, in any case. Her father did not control her. But was she in full control of herself? What was consciousness? Wasn't it one of the greatest riddles of the universe? What was memory? What made us "remember" everything we had seen and experienced? What kind of mechanism made us create fabulous dreams night after night? She closed her eyes from time to time. Then she opened them and stared at the ceiling again. At last she forgot to open them. She was asleep. When the raucous scream of a seagull woke her, Hilde got out of bed. As usual, she crossed the room to the window and stood looking out across the bay. It had gotten to be a habit, summer and winter. As she stood there, she suddenly felt a myriad of colors exploding in her head. She remembered what she had dreamt. But it felt like more than an ordinary dream, with its vivid colors and shapes ... She had dreamt that her father came home from Lebanon, and the whole dream was an extension of Sophie's dream when she found the gold crucifix on the dock. Hilde was sitting on the edge of the dock--exactly as in Sophie's dream. Then she heard a very soft voice whispering, "My name is Sophie!" Hilde had stayed where she was, sitting very still, trying to hear where the voice was coming from. It continued, an almost inaudible rustling, as if an insect were speaking to her: "You must be both deaf and blind!" Just then her father had come into the garden in his UN uniform. "Hilde!" he shouted. Hilde ran up to him and threw her arms around his neck. That's where the dream ended. She remembered some lines of a poem by Arnulf 0verland: Wakened one night by a curious dreamand a voice that seemed to be speaking to melike a far-off subterranean stream,I rose and asked: What do you want of me? She was still standing at the window when her mother came in. "Hi there! Are you already awake?" "I'm not sure..." "I'll be home around four, as usual." "Okay, Mom." "Have a nice vacation day, Hilde!" "You have a good day too." When she heard her mother slam the front door, she slipped back into bed with the ring binder. "I'm going to dive down into the major's unconscious. That's where I'll be until we meet again." There, yes. Hilde started reading again. She could feel under her right index finger that there were only a few pages left. When Sophie left the major's cabin, she could still see some of the Disney figures at the water's edge, but they seemed to dissolve as she approached them. By the time she reached the boat they had all disappeared. While she was rowing she made faces, and after she had pulled the boat up into the reeds on the other side she waved her arms about. She was working desperately to hold the major's attention so that Alberto could sit undisturbed in the cabin. She danced along the path, hopping and skipping. Then she tried walking like a mechanical doll. To keep the major interested she began to sing as well. At one point she stood still, pondering what Alberta's plan could be. Catching herself, she got such a bad conscience that she started to climb a tree. Sophie climbed as high as she could. When she was nearly at the top, she realized she could not get down. She decided to wait a little before trying again. But meanwhile she could not just stay quietly where she was. Then the major would get tired of watching her and would begin to interest himself in what Alberto was doing. Sophie waved her arms, tried to crow like a rooster a couple of times, and finally began to yodel. It was the first time in her fifteen-year-old life that Sophie had yodeled. All things considered, she was quite pleased with the result. She tried once more to climb down but she was truly stuck. Suddenly a huge goose landed on one of the branches Sophie was clinging to. Having recently seen a whole swarm of Disney figures, Sophie was not in the least surprised when the goose began to speak. "My name is Morten," said the goose. "Actually, I'm a tame goose, but on this special occasion I have flown up from Lebanon with the wild geese. You look as if you could use some help getting down from this tree." "You are much too small to help me," said Sophie. "You are jumping to conclusions, young lady. It is you who are too big." "It's the same thing, isn't it?" "I would have you know I carried a peasant boy exactly your age all over Sweden. His name was Nils Hol-gersson." "I am fifteen." "And Nils was fourteen. A year one way or the other makes no difference to the freight." "How did you manage to lift him?" "I gave him a little slap and he passed out. When he woke up, he was no bigger than a thumb." "Perhaps you could give me a little slap too, because I can't sit up here forever. And I'm giving a philosophical garden party on Saturday." "That's interesting. I presume this is a philosophy book, then. When I was flying over Sweden with Nils Holgers-son, we touched down on Marbacka in Varmland, where Nils met an old woman who was planning to write a book about Sweden for schoolchildren. It was to be both instructive and true, she said. When she heard about Nils's adventures, she decided to write a book about all the things he had seen on gooseback." "That was very strange." "To tell you the truth it was rather ironic, because we were already in that book." Suddenly Sophie felt something slap her cheek and the next minute she had become no bigger than a thumb. The tree was like a whole forest and the goose was as big as a horse. "Come on, then," said the goose. Sophie walked along the branch and climbed up on the goose's back. Its feathers were soft, but now that she was so small, they pricked her more than they tickled. As soon as she had settled comfortably the goose took off. They flew high above the treetops. Sophie looked down at the lake and the major's cabin. Inside sat Al-berto, laying his devious plans. "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 cafe that's just opened at the Main Square. Cafe 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 Cafe 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 cafes 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-huh." "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 cafe?" "It was not quite accidental, I confess. Sartre himself spent a lot of time in cafes. He met his life-long companion Simone de Beauvoir in a cafe. 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 own 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 a//en 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 to-day." "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 cafe 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, un-pleasant 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." "I agree." "Her main work, published in 1949, was called The Second Sex." "What did she mean by that?" "She was talking about women. In our culture women are treated as the second sex. Men behave as if they are the subjects, treating women like their objects, thus depriving them of the responsibility for their own life." "She meant we women are exactly as free and independent as we choose to be?" "Yes, you could put it like that. Existentialism also had a great influence on literature, from the forties to the present day, especially on drama. Sartre himself wrote plays as well as novels. Other important writers were the Frenchman Albert Camus, the Irishman Samuel Beckett, Eugene lonesco, who was from Romania, and Witold Gombro-wicz from Poland. Their characteristic style, and that of many other modern writers, was what we call absurdism. The term is especially used about the 'theater of the absurd.' " "Ah." "Do you know what we mean by the 'absurd'?" "Isn't it something that is meaningless or irrational?" "Precisely. The theater of the absurd represented a contrast to realistic theater. Its aim was to show the lack of meaning in life in order to get the audience to disagree. The idea was not to cultivate the meaningless. On the contrary. But by showing and exposing the absurd in ordinary everyday situations, the onlookers are forced to seek a truer and more essential life for themselves." "It sounds interesting." "The theater of the absurd often portrays situations that are absolutely trivial. It can therefore also be called a kind of 'hyperrealism.' People are portrayed precisely as they are. But if you reproduce on stage exactly what goes on in the bathroom on a perfectly ordinary morning in a perfectly ordinary home, the audience would laugh. Their laughter could be interpreted as a defense mechanism against seeing themselves lampooned on stage." "Yes, exactly." "The absurd theater can also have certain surrealistic features. Its characters often find themselves in highly unrealistic and dreamlike situations. When they accept this without surprise, the audience is compelled to react in surprise at the characters' lack of surprise. This was how Charlie Chaplin worked in his silent movies. The comic effect in these silent movies was often Chaplin's laconic acceptance of all the absurd things that happen to him. That compelled the audience to look into themselves for something more genuine and true." "It's certainly surprising to see what people put up with without protesting." "At times it can be right to feel: This is something I must get away from--even though I don't have any idea where to go." "If the house catches fire you just have to get out, even if you don't have any other place to live." "That's true. Would you like another cup of tea? Or a Coke maybe?" "Okay. But I still think you were silly to be late." "I can live with that." Alberto came back with a cup of espresso and a Coke. Meanwhile Sophie had begun to like the cafe ambience. She was also beginning to think that the conversations at the other tables might not be as trivial as she had supposed them to be. Alberto banged the Coke bottle down on the table with a thud. Several people at the other tables looked up. "And that brings us to the end of the road," he said. "You mean the history of philosophy stops with Sartre and existentialism?" "No, that would be an exaggeration. Existentialist philosophy has had radical significance for many people all over the world. As we saw, its roots reach far back in history through Kierkegaard and way back to Socrates. The twentieth century has also witnessed a blossoming and a renewal of the other philosophical currents we have discussed." "Like what?" "Well, one such current is Neo-Thomism, that is to say ideas which belong to the tradition of Thomas Aquinas. Another is the so-called analytical philosophy or logical empiricism, with roots reaching back to Hume and British empiricism, and even to the logic of Aristotle. Apart from these, the twentieth century has naturally also been influenced by what we might call Neo-Marxism in a myriad of various trends. We have already talked about Neo-Darwinism and the significance of psychoanalysis." "Yes." "We should just mention a final current, materialism, which also has historical roots. A lot of current science can be traced back to the efforts of the pre-Socratics. For example, the search for the indivisible 'elemental particle' of which all matter is composed. No one has yet been able to give a satisfactory explanation of what 'matter' is. Modern sciences such as nuclear physics and biochemistry are so fascinated by the problem that for many people it constitutes a vital part of their life's philosophy." "The new and the old all jumbled together . . ." "Yes. Because the very questions we started our course with are still unanswered. Sartre made an important observation when he said that existential questions cannot be answered once and for all. A philosophical question is by definition something that each generation, each individual even, must ask over and over again." "A bleak thought." "I'm not sure I agree. Surely it is by asking such questions that we know we are alive. And moreover, it has always been the case that while people were seeking answers to the ultimate questions, they have discovered clear and final solutions to many other problems. Science, research, and technology are all by-products of our philosophical reflection. Was it not our wonder about life that finally brought men to the moon?" "Yes, that's true." "When Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, he said 'One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.' With these words he summed up how it felt to be

[table=100%,#ffffff,#000000,1][tr][td]Freud ... the odious egoistic impulse that had emerged in her... Hilde Moller Knag jumped out of bed with the bulky ring binder in her arms. She plonked it down on her writing desk, grabbed her clothes, and dashed into the bathroom. She stood under the shower for two minutes, dressed herself quickly, and ran downstairs. "Breakfast is ready, Hilde!" "I just have to go and row first." "But Hilde... !" She ran out of the house, down the garden, and out onto the little dock. She untied the boat and jumped down into it. She rowed around the bay with short angry strokes until she had calmed down. "We are the living planet, Sophie! We are the great vessel sailing around a burning sun in the universe. But each and every of us is also a ship sailing through life with a cargo of genes. When we have carried this cargo safely to the next harbor--we have not lived in vain..." She knew the passage by heart. It had been written for her. Not for Sophie, for her. Every word in the ring binder was written by Dad to Hilde. She rested the oars in the oarlocks and drew them in. The boat rocked gently on the water, the ripples slapping softly against the prow. And like the little rowboat floating on the surface in the bay at Lillesand, she herself was just a nutshell on the surface of life. Where were Sophie and Alberto in this picture? Yes, where were Alberto and Sophie? She could not fathom that they were no more than "electromagnetic impulses" in her father's brain. She could not fathom, and certainly not accept, that they were only paper and printer's ink from a ribbon in her father's portable typewriter. One might just as well say that she herself was nothing but a conglomeration of protein compounds that had suddenly come to life one day in a "hot little pool." But she was more than that. She was Hilde Moller Knag. She had to admit that the ring binder was a fantastic present, and that her father had touched the core of something eternal in her. But she didn't care for the way he was dealing with Sophie and Alberto. She would certainly teach him a lesson, even before he got home. She felt she owed it to the two of them. Hilde could already imagine her father at Kastrup Airport, in Copenhagen. She could just see him running around like mad. Hilde was now quite herself again. She rowed the boat back to the dock, where she was careful to make it fast. After breakfast she sat at the table for a long time with her mother. It felt good to be able to talk about something as ordinary as whether the egg was a trifle too soft. She did not start to read again until the evening. There were not many pages left now. Once again there was a knocking on the door. "Let's just put our hands over our ears," said Alberto, "and perhaps it'll go away." "No, I want to see who it is." Alberto followed her to the door. On the step stood a naked man. He had adopted a very ceremonial posture, but the only thing he had with him was the crown on his head. "Well?" he said. "What do you good people think of the Emperor's new clothes?" Alberto and Sophie were utterly dumbfounded. This caused the naked man some consternation. "What? You are not bowing!" he cried. "Indeed, that is true," said Alberto, "but the Emperor is stark naked." The naked man maintained his ceremonial posture. Alberto bent over and whispered in Sophie's ear: "He thinks he is respectable." At this, the man scowled. "Is some kind of censorship being exercised on these premises?" he asked. "Regrettably," said Alberto. "In here we are both alert and of sound mind in every way. In the Emperor's shameless condition he can therefore not cross the threshold of this house." Sophie found the naked man's pomposity so absurd that she burst out laughing. As if her laughter had been a prearranged signal, the man with the crown on his head suddenly became aware that he was naked. Covering his private parts with both hands, he bounded toward the nearest clump of trees and disappeared, probably to join company with Adam and Eve, Noah, Little Red Riding-hood, and Winnie-the-Pooh. Alberto and Sophie remained standing on the step, laughing. At last Alberto said, "It might be a good idea if we went inside. I'm going to tell you about Freud and his theory of the unconscious." They seated themselves by the window again. Sophie looked at her watch and said: "It's already half past two and I have a lot to do before the garden party." "So have I. We'll just say a few words about Sigmund Freud." "Was he a philosopher?" "We could describe him as a cultural philosopher, at least. Freud was born in 1 856 and he studied medicine at the University of Vienna. He lived in Vienna for the greater part of his life at a period when the cultural life of the city was flourishing. He specialized early on in neurology. Toward the close of the last century, and far into our own, he developed his 'depth psychology' or psychoanalysis." "You're going to explain this, right?" "Psychoanalysis is a description of the human mind in general as well as a therapy for nervous and mental disorders. I do not intend to give you a complete picture either of Freud or of his work. But his theory of the unconscious is necessary to an understanding of what a human being is." "You intrigue me. Go on." "Freud held that there is a constant tension between man and his surroundings. In particular, a tension--or conflict--between his drives and needs and the demands of society. It is no exaggeration to say that Freud discovered human drives. This makes him an important exponent of the naturalistic currents that were so prominent toward the end of the nineteenth century." "What do you mean by human drives?" "Our actions are not always guided by reason. Man is not really such a rational creature as the eighteenth-century rationalists liked to think. Irrational impulses often determine what we think, what we dream, and what we do. Such irrational impulses can be an expression of basic drives or needs. The human sexual drive, for example, is just as basic as the baby's instinct to suckle." "Yes?" "This in itself was no new discovery. But Freud showed that these basic needs can be disguised or 'sublimated,' thereby steering our actions without our being aware of it. He also showed that infants have some sort of sexuality. The respectable middle-class Viennese reacted with abhorrence to this suggestion of the 'sexuality of the child' and made him very unpopular." "I'm not surprised." "We call it Victorianism, when everything to do with sexuality is taboo. Freud first became aware of children's sexuality during his practice of psychotherapy. So he had an empirical basis for his claims. He had also seen how numerous forms of neurosis or psychological disorders could be traced back to conflicts during childhood. He gradually developed a type of therapy that we could call the archeology of the soul." "What do you mean by that?" "An archeologist searches for traces of the distant past by digging through layers of cultural history. He may find a knife from the eighteenth century. Deeper in the ground he may find a comb from the fourteenth century--and even deeper down perhaps an urn from the fifth centuryB.C." "Yes?" "In a similar way, the psychoanalyst, with the patient's help, can dig deep into the patient's mind and bring to light the experiences that have caused the patient's psychological disorder, since according to Freud, we store the memory of all our experiences deep inside us." "Yes, I see." "The analyst can perhaps discover an unhappy experience that the patient has tried to suppress for many years, but which has nevertheless lain buried, gnawing away at the patient's resources. By bringing a 'traumatic experience' into the conscious mind--and holding it up to the patient, so to speak--he or she can help the patient 'be done with it,' and get well again." "That sounds logical." "But I am jumping too far ahead. Let us first take a look at Freud's description of the human mind. Have you ever seen a newborn baby?" "I have a cousin who is four." "When we come into the world, we live out our physical and mental needs quite directly and unashamedly. If we do not get milk, we cry, or maybe we cry if we have a wet diaper. We also give direct expression to our desire for physical contact and body warmth. Freud called this 'pleasure principle' in us the id. As newborn babies we are hardly anything but id." "Go on." "We carry the id, or pleasure principle, with us into adulthood and throughout life. But gradually we learn to regulate our desires and adjust to our surroundings. We learn to regulate the pleasure principle in relation to the 'reality principle.' In Freud's terms, we develop an ego which has this regulative function. Even though we want or need something, we cannot just lie down and scream until we get what we want or need." "No, obviously." "We may desire something very badly that the outside world will not accept. We may repress our desires. That means we try to push them away and forget about them." "I see." "However, Freud proposed, and worked with, a third element in the human mind. From infancy we are constantly faced with the moral demands of our parents and of society. When we do anything wrong, our parents say 'Don't do that!' or 'Naughty naughty, that's bad!' Even when we are grown up, we retain the echo of such moral demands and judgments. It seems as though the world's moral expectations have become part of us. Freud called this the superego." "Is that another word for conscience?" "Conscience is a component of the superego. But Freud claimed that the superego tells us when our desires themselves are 'bad' or 'improper/ not least in the case of erotic or sexual desire. And as I said, Freud claimed that these 'improper' desires already manifest themselves at an early stage of childhood." "How?" "Nowadays we know that infants like touching their sex organs. We can observe this on any beach. In Freud's time, this behavior could result in a slap over the fingers of the two- or three-year-old, perhaps accompanied by the mother saying, 'Naughty!' or 'Don't do that!' or 'Keep your hands on top of the covers!'" "How sick!" "That's the beginning of guilt feelings about everything connected with the sex organs and sexuality. Because this guilt feeling remains in the superego, many people--according to Freud, most people--feel guilty about sex all their lives. At the same time he showed that sexual desires and needs are natural and vital for human beings. And thus, my dear Sophie, the stage is set for a lifelong conflict between desire and guilt." "Don't you think the conflict has died down a lot since Freud's time?" "Most certainly. But many of Freud's patients experienced the conflict so acutely that they developed what Freud called neuroses. One of his many women patients, for example, was secretly in love with her brother-in-law. When her sister died of an illness, she thought: 'Now he is free to marry me!' This thought was on course for a frontal collision with her superego, and was so monstrous an idea that she immediately repressed it, Freud tells us. In other words, she buried it deep in her unconscious. Freud wrote: 'The young girl was ill and displaying severe hysterical symptoms. When I began treating her it appeared that she had thoroughly forgotten about the scene at her sister's bedside and the odious egoistic impulse that had emerged in her. But during analysis she remembered it, and in a state of great agitation she reproduced the pathogenic moment and through this treatment became cured.' " "Now I better understand what you meant by an archeology of the soul." "So we can give a general description of the human psyche. After many years of experience in treating patients, Freud concluded that the conscious constitutes only a small part of the human mind. The conscious is like the tip of the iceberg above sea level. Below sea level--or below the threshold of the conscious--is the 'subconscious,' or the unconscious." "So the unconscious is everything that's inside us that we have forgotten and don't remember?" "We don't have all our experiences consciously present all the time. But the kinds of things we have thought or experienced, and which we can recall if we 'put our mind to it,' Freud termed the preconscious. He reserved the term 'unconscious' for things we have repressed. That is, the sort of thing we have made an effort to forget because it was either 'unpleasant','improper,' or 'nasty.' If we have desires and urges that are not tolerable to the conscious, the superego shoves them downstairs. Away with them!" "I get it." "This mechanism is at work in all healthy people. But it can be such a tremendous strain for some people to keep the unpleasant or forbidden thoughts away from consciousness that it leads to mental illness. Whatever is repressed in this way will try of its own accord to reenter consciousness. For some people it takes a great effort to keep such impulses under the critical eye of the conscious. When Freud was in America in 1909 lecturing on psychoanalysis, he gave an example of the way this repression mechanism functions." "I'd like to hear that!" "He said: 'Suppose that here in this hall and in this audience, whose exemplary stillness and attention I cannot sufficiently commend, there is an individual who is creating a disturbance, and, by his ill-bred laughing, talking, by scraping his feet, distracts my attention from my task. I explain that I cannot go on with my lecture under these conditions, and thereupon several strong men among you get up and, after a short struggle, eject the disturber of the peace from the hall. He is now repressed, and I can continue my lecture. But in order that the disturbance may not be repeated, in case the man who has just been thrown out attempts to force his way back into the room, the gentlemen who have executed my suggestion take their chairs to the door and establish themselves there as a resistance, to keep up the repression. Now, if you transfer both locations to the psyche, calling this con-sciousness, and the outside the unconscious, you have a tolerably good illustration of the process of repression.' " "I agree." "But the disturber of the peace insists on reentering, Sophie. At least, that's the way it is with repressed thoughts and urges. We live under the constant pressure of repressed thoughts that are trying to fight their way up from the unconscious. That's why we often say or do things without intending to. Unconscious reactions thus prompt our feelings and actions." "Can you give me an example?" "Freud operates with several of these mechanisms. One is what he called parapraxes--slips of the tongue or pen. In other words, we accidentally say or do things that we once tried to repress. Freud gives the example of the shop foreman who was to propose a toast to the boss. The trouble was that this boss was terribly unpopular. In plain words, he was what one might call a swine." "Yes?" "The foreman stood up, raised his glass, and said 'Here's to the swine!' " "I'm speechless!" "So was the foreman. He had actually only said what he really meant. But he didn't mean to say it. Do you want to hear another example?" "Yes, please." "A bishop was coming to tea with the local minister, who had a large family of nice well-behaved little daughters. This bishop happened to have an unusually big nose. The little girls were duly instructed that on no account were they to refer to the bishop's nose, since children often blurt out spontaneous remarks about people because their repressive mechanism is not yet developed. The bishop arrived, and the delightful daughters strained themselves to the utmost not to comment on his nose. They tried to not even look at it and to forget about it. But they were thinking about it the whole time. And then one of them was asked to pass the sugar around. She looked at the distinguished bishop and said, 'Do you take sugar in your nose?' " "How awful!" "Another thing we can do is to rationalize. That means that we do not give the real reason for what we are doing either to ourselves or to other people because the real reason is unacceptable." "Like what?" "I could hypnotize you to open a window. While you are under hypnosis I tell you that when I begin to drum my fingers on the table you will get up and open the window. I drum on the table--and you open the window. Afterward I ask you why you opened the window and you might say you did it because it was too hot. But that is not the real reason. You are reluctant to admit to yourself that you did something under my hypnotic orders. So you rationalize." "Yes, I see." "We all encounter that sort of thing practically every day." "This four-year-old cousin of mine, I don't think he has a lot of playmates, so he's always happy when I visit. One day I told him I had to hurry home to my mom. Do you know what he said?" "What did he say?" "He said, she's stupid!" "Yes, that was definitely a case of rationalizing. The boy didn't mean what he actually said. He meant it was stupid you had to go, but he was too shy to say so. Another thing we do is project." "What's that?" "When we project, we transfer the characteristics we are trying to repress in ourselves onto other people. A person who is very miserly, for example, will characterize others as penny-pinchers. And someone who will not admit to being preoccupied with sex can be the first to be incensed at other people's sex-fixation." "Hmm." "Freud claimed that our everyday life was filled with unconscious mechanisms like these. We forget a particular person's name, we fumble with our clothes while we talk, or we shift what appear to be random objects around in the room. We also stumble over words and make various slips of the tongue or pen that can seem completely innocent. Freud's point was that these slips are neither as accidental nor as innocent as we think. These bungled actions can in fact reveal the most intimate secrets." "From now on I'll watch all my words very carefully." "Even if you do, you won't be able to escape from your unconscious impulses. The art is precisely not to expend too much effort on burying unpleasant things in the unconscious. It's like trying to block up the entrance to a water vole's nest. You can be sure the water vole will pop up in another part of the garden. It is actually quite healthy to leave the door ajar between the conscious and the unconscious." "If you lock that door you can get mentally sick, right?" "Yes. A neurotic is just such a person, who uses too much energy trying to keep the 'unpleasant' out of his consciousness. Frequently there is a particular experience which the person is desperately trying to repress. He can nonetheless be anxious for the doctor to help him to find his way back to the hidden traumas." "How does the doctor do that?" "Freud developed a technique which he called free association. In other words, he let the patient lie in a relaxed position and just talk about whatever came into his or her mind--however irrelevant, random, unpleasant, or embarrassing it might sound. The idea was to break through the 'lid' or 'control' that had grown over the traumas, because it was these traumas that were causing the patient concern. They are active all the time, just not consciously." "The harder you try to forget something, the more you think about it unconsciously?" "Exactly. That is why it is so important to be aware of the signals from the unconscious. According to Freud, the royal road to the unconscious is our dreams. His main work was written on this subject--The Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1900, in which he showed that our dreams are not random. Our unconscious tries to communicate with our conscious through dreams." "Go on." "After many years of experience with patients--and not least after having analyzed his own dreams--Freud determined that all dreams are wish fulfillments. This is clearly observable in children, he said. They dream about ice cream and cherries. But in adults, the wishes that are to be fulfilled in dreams are disguised. That is because even when we sleep, censorship is at work on what we will permit ourselves. And although this censorship, or repression mechanism, is considerably weaker when we are asleep than when we are awake, it is still strong enough to cause our dreams to distort the wishes we cannot acknowledge." "Which is why dreams have to be interpreted " "Freud showed that we must distinguish between the actual dream as we recall it in the morning and the real meaning of the dream. He termed the actual dream image--that is, the 'film' or 'video' we dream--the manifest dream. This 'apparent' dream content always takes its material or scenario from the previous day. But the dream also contains a deeper meaning which is hidden from consciousness. Freud called this the latent dream thoughts, and these hidden thoughts which the dream is really about may stem from the distant past, from earliest childhood, for instance." "So we have to analyze the dream before we can understand it." "Yes, and for the mentally ill, this must be done in conjunction with the therapist. But it is not the doctor who interprets the dream. He can only do it with the help of the patient. In this situation, the doctor simply fulfills the function of a Socratic 'midwife,' assisting during the interpretation." "I see." "The actual process of converting the latent dream thoughts to the manifest dream aspect was termed by Freud the dream work. We might call it 'masking' or 'coding' what the dream is actually about. In interpreting the dream, we must go through the reverse process and unmask or decode the motif to arrive at its theme." "Can you give me an example?" "Freud's book teems with examples. But we can construct a simple and very Freudian example for ourselves. Let us say a young man dreams that he is given two balloons by his female cousin . . ." "Yes?" "Go on, try to interpret the dream yourself." "Hmm ... there is a manifest dream, just like you said: a young man gets two balloons from his female cousin." "Carry on." "You said the scenario is always from the previous day. So he had been to the fair the day before--or maybe he saw a picture of balloons in the newspaper." "It's possible, but he need only have seen the word 'balloon,' or something that reminded him of a balloon." "But what are the latent dream thoughts that the dream is really about?" "You're the interpreter." "Maybe he just wanted a couple of balloons." "No, that won't work. You're right about the dream being a wish fulfillment. But a young man would hardly have an ardent wish for a couple of balloons. And if he had, he wouldn't need to dream about them." "I think I've got it: he really wants his cousin--and the two balloons are her breasts." "Yes, that's a much more likely explanation. And it presupposes that he experienced his wish as an embarrassment." "In a way, our dreams make a lot of detours?" "Yes. Freud believed that the dream was a 'disguised fulfillment of a repressed wish.' But exactly what we have repressed can have changed considerably since Freud was a doctor in Vienna. However, the mechanism of dis-guised dream content can still be intact." "Yes, I see." "Freud's psychoanalysis was extremely important in the 1920s, especially for the treatment of certain psychiatric patients. His theory of the unconscious was also very significant for art and literature." "Artists became interested in people's unconscious mental life?" "Exactly so, although this had already become a predominant aspect of literature in the last decade of the nineteenth century--before Freud's psychoanalysis was known. It merely shows that the appearance of Freud's psychoanalysis at that particular time, the 1890s, was no coincidence." "You mean it was in the spirit of the times?" "Freud himself did not claim to have discovered phenomena such as repression, defense mechanisms, or rationalizing. He was simply the first to apply these human experiences to psychiatry. He was also a master at illustrating his theories with literary examples. But as I mentioned, from the 1920s, Freud's psychoanalysis had a more direct influence on art and literature " "In what sense?" "Poets and painters, especially the surrealists, attempted to exploit the power of the unconscious in their work." "What are surrealists?" "The word surrealism comes from the French, and means 'super realism.' In 1924 Andre Breton published a 'surrealistic manifesto,' claiming that art should come from the unconscious. The artist should thus derive the freest possible inspiration from his dream images and strive toward a 'super realism,' in which the boundaries between dream and reality were dissolved. For an artist too it can be necessary to break the censorship of the conscious and let words and images have free play." "I can see that." "In a sense, Freud demonstrated that there is an artist in everyone. A dream is, after all, a little work of art, and there are new dreams every night. In order to interpret his patients' dreams, Freud often had to work his way through a dense language of symbols--rather in the way we interpret a picture or a literary text." "And we dream every single night?" "Recent research shows that we dream for about twenty percent of our sleeping hours, that is, between one and two hours each- night. If we are disturbed during our dream phases we become nervous and irritable. This means nothing less than that everybody has an innate need to give artistic expression to his or her existential situation. After all, it is ourselves that our dreams are about We are the directors, we set up the scenario and play all the roles. A person who says he doesn't understand art doesn't know himself very well." "I see that." "Freud also delivered impressive evidence of the wonders of the human mind. His work with patients convinced him that we retain everything we have seen and experienced somewhere deep in our consciousness, and all these impressions can be brought to light again. When we experience a memory lapse, and a bit later 'have it on the tip of our tongue' and then later still 'suddenly remember it,' we are talking about something which has lain in the unconscious and suddenly slips through the half-open door to consciousness." "But it takes a while sometimes." "All artists are aware of that. But then suddenly it's as if all doors and all drawers fly open. Everything comes tumbling out by itself, and we can find all the words and images we need. This is when we have 'lifted the lid' of the unconscious. We can call it inspiration, Sophie. It feels as if what we are drawing or writing is coming from some outside source." "It must be a wonderful feeling." "But you must have experienced it yourself. You can frequently observe inspiration at work in children who are overtired. They are sometimes so extremely overtired that they seem to be wide awake. Suddenly they start telling a story--as if they are finding words they haven't yet learned. They have, though; the words and the ideas have lain 'latent' in their consciousness, but now, when all caution and all censorship have let go, they are surfacing. It can also be important for an artist not to let reason and reflection control a more or less unconscious expression. Shall I tell you a little story to illustrate this?" "Sure." "It's a very serious and a very sad story." "Okay." "Once upon a time there was a centipede that was amazingly good at dancing with all hundred legs. All the creatures of the forest gathered to watch every time the centipede danced, and they were all duly impressed by the exquisite dance. But there was one creature that didn't like watching the centipede dance--that was a tortoise." "It was probably just envious." "How can I get the centipede to stop dancing? thought the tortoise. He couldn't just say he didn't like the dance. Neither could he say he danced better himself, that would obviously be untrue. So he devised a fiendish plan." "Let's hear it." "He sat down and wrote a letter to the centipede. 'O incomparable centipede,' he wrote, 'I am a devoted admirer of your exquisite dancing. I must know how you go about it when you dance. Is it that you lift your left leg number 28 and then your right leg number 39? Or do you begin by lifting your right leg number 17 before you lift your left leg number 44? I await your answer in breathless anticipation. Yours truly, Tortoise." "How mean!" "When the centipede read the letter, she immediately began to think about what she actually did when she danced. Which leg did she lift first? And which leg next? What do you think happened in the end?" "The centipede never danced again?" "That's exactly what happened. And that's the way it goes when imagination gets strangled by reasoned deliberation." "That was a sad story." "It is important for an artist to be able to 'let go.' The surrealists tried to exploit this by putting themselves into a state where things just happened by themselves. They had a sheet of white paper in front of them and they began to write without thinking about what they wrote. They called it automatic writing. The expression originally comes from spiritualism, where a medium believed that a departed spirit was guiding the pen. But I thought we would talk more about that kind of thing tomorrow." "I'd like that." "In one sense, the surrealist artist is also a medium, that is to say, a means or a link. He is a medium of his own unconscious. But perhaps there is an element of the unconscious in every creative process, for what do we actually mean by creativity?" "I've no idea. Isn't it when you create something?" "Fair enough, and that happens in a delicate interplay between imagination and reason. But all too frequently, reason throttles the imagination, and that's serious because without imagination, nothing really new will ever be created. I believe imagination is like a Darwinian system." "I'm sorry, but that I didn't get." "Well, Darwinism holds that nature's mutants arise one after the other, but only a few of them can be used. Only some of them get the right to live." "So?" "That's how it is when we have an inspiration and get masses of new ideas. Thought-mutants occur in the consciousness one after the other, at least if we refrain from censoring ourselves too much. But only some of these thoughts can be used. Here, reason comes into its own. It, too, has a vi

[table=100%,#ffffff,#000000,1][tr][td]Darwin ¡Ka ship sailing through life with a cargo of genes¡K Hilde was awakened on Sunday morning by a loud bump. It was the ring binder falling on the floor. She had been lying in bed reading about Sophie and Alber-to's conversation on Marx and had fallen asleep. The reading lamp by the bed had been on all night. The green glowing digits on her desk alarm clock showed 8:59. She had been dreaming about huge factories and polluted cities; a little girl sitting at a street corner selling matches--well-dressed people in long coats passing by without as much as a glance. When Hilde sat up in bed she remembered the legislators who were to wake up in a society they themselves had created. Hilde was glad she had woken up in Bjer-kely, at any rate. Would she have dared to wake up in Norway without knowing whereabouts in Norway she would wake up? But it was not only a question of where she would wake up. Could she not just as easily have woken up in a different age? In the Middle Ages, for instance--or in the Stone Age ten or twenty thousand years ago? Hilde tried to imagine herself sitting at the entrance to a cave, scraping an animal hide, perhaps. What could it have been like to be a fifteen-year-old girl before there was anything called a culture? How would she have thought? Could she have had thoughts at all? Hilde pulled on a sweater, heaved the ring binder onto the bed and settled down to read the next chapter. Alberto had just said "Next chapter!" when somebody knocked on the door of the major's cabin. "We don't have any choice, do we?" said Sophie. "No, I suppose we don't," said Alberto. On the step outside stood a very old man with long white hair and a beard. He held a staff in one hand, and in the other a board on which was painted a picture of a boat The boat was crowded with all kinds of animals. "And who is this elderly gentleman?" asked Alberto. "My name is Noah." "I guessed as much." "Your oldest ancestor, my son. But it is probably no longer fashionable to recognize one's ancestors." "What is that in your hand?" asked Sophie. "This is a picture of all the animals that were saved from the Flood. Here, my daughter, it is for you." Sophie took the large board. "Well, I'd better go home and tend the grapevines," the old man said, and giving a little jump, he clicked his heels together in the air and skipped merrily away into the woods in the manner peculiar to very old men now and then. Sophie and Alberto went inside and sat down again. Sophie began to look at the picture, but before she had a chance to study it, Alberto took it from her with an authoritative grasp. "We'll concentrate on the broad outlines first." "Okay, okay." "I forgot to mention that Marx lived the last 34 years of his life in London. He moved there in 1849 and died in 1883. All that time Charles Darwin was living just outside London. He died in 1882 and was buried with great pomp and ceremony in Westminster Abbey as one of England's distinguished sons. So Marx and Darwin's paths crossed, but not only in time and space. Marx wanted to dedicate the English edition of his greatest work, Capital, to Darwin, but Darwin declined the honor. When Marx died the year after Darwin, his friend Friedrich En-gels said: As Darwin discovered the theory of organic evolution, so Marx discovered the theory of mankind's historical evolution." "I see." "Another great thinker who was to link his work to Darwin was the psychologist Sigmund Freud. He also lived his last years in London. Freud said that both Darwin's theory of evolution and his own psychoanalysis had resulted in an affront to mankind's naive egoism." "That was a lot of names at one time. Are we talking about Marx, Darwin, or Freud?" "In a broader sense we can talk about a naturalistic current from the middle of the nineteenth century until quite far into our own. By 'naturalistic' we mean a sense of reality that accepts no other reality than nature and the sensory world. A naturalist therefore also considers mankind to be part of nature. A naturalistic scientist will exclusively rely on natural phenomena--not on either rationalistic suppositions or any form of divine revelation." "And that applies to Marx, Darwin, and Freud?" "Absolutely. The key words from the middle of the last century were nature, environment, history, evolution, and growth. Marx had pointed out that human ideologies were a product of the basis of society. Darwin showed that mankind was the result of a slow biological evolution, and Freud's studies of the unconscious revealed that people's actions were often the result of 'animal' urges or instincts." "I think I understand more or less what you mean by naturalistic, but isn't it best we talk about one person at a time?" "We'll talk about Darwin, Sophie. You may recall that the pre-Socratics looked for natural explanations of the processes of nature. In the same way that they had to distance themselves from ancient mythological explanations, Darwin had to distance himself from the church's view of the creation of man and beast." "But was he a real philosopher?" "Darwin was a biologist and a natural scientist. But he was also the scientist of recent times who has most openly challenged the Biblical view of man's place in Creation." "So you'll have to say something about Darwin's theory of evolution." "Let's begin with Darwin the man. He was born in the little town of Shrewsbury in 1809. His father, Dr. Robert Darwin, was a renowned local physician, and very strict about his son's upbringing. When Charles was a pupil at the local grammar school, his headmaster described him as a boy who was always flying around, fooling about with stuff and nonsense, and never doing a stroke of anything that was the slightest bit useful. By 'useful,' the headmaster meant cramming Greek and Latin verbs. By 'flying around,' he was referring among other things to the fact that Charles clambered around collecting beetles of all kinds." "I'll bet he came to regret those words." "When he subsequently studied theology, Charles was far more interested in bird-watching and collecting insects, so he did not get very good grades in theology. But while he was still at college, he gained himself a reputation as a natural scientist, not least due to his interest in geology, which was perhaps the most expansive science of the day. As soon as he had graduated in theology at Cam-bridge in April 1831, he went to North Wales to study rock formations and to search for fossils. In August of the same year, when he was barely twenty-two years old, he received a letter which was to determine the course of his whole life . . ." "What was the letter about?" "It was from his friend and teacher, John Steven Hens-low. He wrote: 'I have been requested to ... recommend a naturalist to go as companion to Captain Fitzroy, who has been commissioned by the government to survey the southern coasts of South America. I have stated that I consider you to be the best qualified person I know of who is likely to undertake such a situation. As far as the financial side of it is concerned, I have no notion. The voyage is to last two years ... ' " "How can you remember all that by heart?" "A bagatelle, Sophie." "And what did he answer?" "He wished ardently to grasp the chance, but in those days young men did nothing without their parents' consent. After much persuasion, his father finally agreed-- and it was he who financed his son's voyage. As far as the 'financial side' went, it was conspicuous by its absence." "Oh." "The ship was the naval vessel HMS Beagle. It sailed from Plymouth on December 27, 1831, bound for South America, and it did not return until October of 1836. The two years became five and the voyage to South America turned into a voyage round the world. And now we come to one of the most important voyages of discovery in recent times." "They sailed all the way round the world?" "Yes, quite literally. From South America they sailed on across the Pacific to New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa. Then they sailed back to South America before setting sail for England. Darwin wrote that the voyage on board the Beagle was without doubt the most significant event in his life." "It couldn't have been easy to be a naturalist at sea." "For the first years, the Beagle sailed up and down the coast of South America. This gave Darwin plenty of opportunity to familiarize himself with the continent, also inland. The expedition's many forays into the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific west of South America were of decisive significance as well. He was able to collect and send to England vast amounts of material. However, he kept his reflections on nature and the evolution of life to himself. When he returned home at the age of twenty-seven, he found himself renowned as a scientist. At that point he had an inwardly clear picture of what was to become his theory of evolution. But he did not publish his main work until many years after his return, for Darwin was a cautious man--as is fitting for a scientist." "What was his main work?" "Well, there were several, actually. But the book-which gave rise to the most heated debate in England was The Origin of Species, published in 1859. Its full title was On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. The long title is actually a complete resume of Darwin's theory." "He certainly packed a lot into one title." "But let's take it piece by piece. In The Origin of Species, Darwin advanced two theories or main theses: first, he proposed that all existing vegetable and animal forms were descended from earlier, more primitive forms by way of a biological evolution. Secondly, that evolution was the result of natural selection." "The survival of the fittest, right?" "That's right, but let us first concentrate on the idea of evolution. This, in itself, was not all that original. The idea of biological evolution began to be widely accepted in some circles as early as 1800. The leading spokesman for this idea was the French zoologist Lamarck. Even before him, Darwin's own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had suggested that plants and animals had evolved from some few primitive species. But none of them had come up with an acceptable explanation as to how this evolution happened. They were therefore not considered by churchmen to be any great threat." "But Darwin was?" "Yes, indeed, and not without reason. Both in ecclesiastic and scientific circles, the Biblical doctrine of the immutability of all vegetable and animal species was strictly adhered to. Each and every form of animal life had been created separately once and for all. This Christian view was moreover in harmony with the teachings of Plato and Aristotle." "How so?" "Plato's theory of ideas presupposed that all animal species were immutable because they were made after patterns of eternal ideas or forms. The immutability of animal species was also one of the cornerstones of Aristotle's philosophy. But in Darwin's time there were a number of observations and finds which were putting traditional beliefs to the test." "What kind of observations and finds were they?" "Well, to begin with an increasing number of fossils were being dug out. There were also finds of large fossil bones from extinct animals. Darwin himself was puzzled to find traces of sea creatures far inland. In South America he made similar discoveries high up in the mountains of the Andes. What is a sea creature doing in the Andes, Sophie? Can you tell me that?" "No." "Some believed that they had just been thrown away there by humans or animals. Others believed that God had created these fossils and traces of sea creatures to lead the ungodly astray." "But what did scientists believe?" "Most geologists swore to a 'catastrophe theory/ according to which the earth had been subjected to gigantic floods, earthquakes, and other catastrophes that had destroyed all life. We read of one of these in the Bible--the Flood and Noah's Ark. After each catastrophe, God renewed life on earth by creating new--and more perfect-- plants and animals." "So the fossils were imprints of earlier life forms that had been wiped out after these gigantic catastrophes?" "Precisely. For example, it was thought that fossils were imprints of animals that had failed to get into the Ark. But when Darwin set sail on the Beagle, he had with him the first volume of the English biologist Sir Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology. Lyell held that the present geology of the earth, with its mountains and valleys, was the result of an interminably long and gradual evolution. His point was that even quite small changes could cause huge geological upheavals, considering the aeons of time that have elapsed." "What kind of changes was he thinking of?" "He was thinking of the same forces that prevail today: wind and weather, melting ice, earthquakes, and elevations of the ground level. You've heard the saying about a drop of water wearing away a stone--not by brute force, but by continuous dripping. Lyell believed that similar tiny and gradual changes over the ages could alter the face of nature completely. However, this theory alone could not explain why Darwin found the remains of sea creatures high up in the Andes. But Darwin always remembered that tiny gradual changes could result in dramatic alterations if they were given sufficient time." "I suppose he thought the same explanation could be used for the evolution of animals." "Yes, that was his thought. But as I said before, Darwin was a cautious man. He posed questions long before he ventured to answer them. In that sense he used the same method as all true philosophers: it is important to ask but there is no haste to provide the answer." "Yes, I see." "A decisive factor in Lyell's theory was the age of the earth. In Darwin's time, it was widely believed that about 6,000 years had elapsed since God created the earth. That figure had been arrived at by counting the generations since Adam and Eve." "How naive!" "Well, it's easy to be wise after the event. Darwin figured the age of the earth to be 300 million years. Because one thing, at least, was clear: neither Lyell's theory of gradual geological evolution nor Darwin's own theory of evolution had any validity unless one reckoned with tremendously long periods of time." "How old is the earth?" "Today we know that the earth is 4.6 billion years old." "Wow!" "Up to now, we have looked at one of Darwin's arguments for biological evolution, namely, the stratified deposits of fossils in various layers of rock. Another argument was the geographic distribution of living species. This was where Darwin's scientific voyage could contribute new and extremely comprehensive data. He had seen with his own eyes that the individuals of a single species of animal within the same region could differ from each other in only the minutest detail. He made some very interesting observations on the Galapagos Islands, west of Ecuador, in particular." "Tell me about them." "The Galapagos Islands are a compact group of volcanic islands. There were therefore no great differences in the plant and animal life there. But Darwin was interested in the tiny differences. On all the islands, he came across giant tortoises that were slightly different from one island to another. Had God really created a separate race of tortoises for each and every island?" "It's doubtful." "Darwin's observations of bird life on the Galapagos were even more striking. The Galapagos finches were clearly varied from island to island, especially as regards the shape of the beak. Darwin demonstrated that these variations were closely linked to the way the finches found their food on the different islands. The ground finches with steeply profiled beaks lived on pine cone seeds, the little warbler finches lived on insects, and the tree finches lived on termites extracted from bark and branches ... Each and every one of the species had a beak that was perfectly adapted to its own food intake. Could all these finches be descended from one and the same species? And had the finches adapted to their surroundings on the different islands over the ages in such a way that new species of finches evolved?" "That was the conclusion he came to, wasn't it?" "Yes. Maybe that was where Darwin became a 'Darwinist'--on the Galapagos Islands. He also observed that the fauna there bore a strong resemblance to many of the species he had seen in South America. Had God once and for all really created all these animals slightly different from each other--or had an evolution taken place? Increasingly, he began to doubt that all species were immutable. But he still had no viable explanation as to how such an evolution had occurred. But there was one more factor to indicate that all the animals on earth might be related." "And what was that?" "The development of the embryo in mammals. If you compare the embryos of dogs, bats, rabbits, and humans at an early stage, they look so alike that it is hard to tell the difference. You cannot distinguish a human embryo from a rabbit embryo until a very late stage. Shouldn't this indicate that we are distant relatives?" "But he had still no explanation of how evolution happened?" "He pondered constantly on [yell's theory of the minute changes that could have great effect over a long period of time. But he could find no explanation that would apply as a general principle. He was familiar with the theory of the French zoologist Lamarck, who had shown that the different species had developed the characteristics they needed. Giraffes, for example, had developed long necks because for generations they had reached up for leaves in the trees. Lamarck believed that the characteristics each individual acquires through his own efforts are passed on to the next generation. But this theory of the heredity of 'acquired characteristics' was rejected by Darwin because Lamarck had no proof of his bold claims. However, Darwin was beginning to pursue another, much more obvious line of thought. You could almost say that the actual mechanism behind the evolution of species was right in front of his very nose." "So what was it?" "I would rather you worked the mechanism out for yourself. So I ask: If you had three cows, but only enough fodder to keep two of them alive, what would you do?" "I suppose I'd have to slaughter one of them." "All right... which one would you slaughter?" "I suppose I'd slaughter the one that gave the least milk." "Would you?" "Yes, that's logical, isn't it?" "That is exactly what mankind had done for thousands of years. But we haven't finished with your two cows yet. Suppose you wanted one of them to calve. Which one would you choose?" "The one that was the best milker. Then its calf would probably be a good milker too." "You prefer good milkers to bad, then. Now there's one more question. If you were a hunter and you had two gundogs, but had to give up one of them, which one would you keep?" "The one that's best at finding the kind of game I shoot, obviously." "Quite so, you would favor the better gundog. That's exactly how people have bred domestic animals for more than ten thousand years, Sophie. Hens did not always lay five eggs a week, sheep did not always yield as much wool, and horses were not always as strong and swift as they are now. Breeders have made an artificial selection. The same applies to the vegetable kingdom. You don't plant bad potatoes if there are good seed potatoes available, and you don't waste time cutting wheat that yields no grain. Darwin pointed out that no cows, no stalks of wheat, no dogs, and no finches are completely alike. Nature produces an enormous breadth of variation. Even within the same species, no two individuals are exactly alike. You probably experienced that for yourself when you drank the blue liquid." "I'll say." "So now Darwin had to ask himself: could a similar mechanism be at work in nature too? Is it possible that nature makes a 'natural selection' as to which individuals are to survive? And could such a selection over a very long period of time create new species of flora and fauna?" "I would guess the answer is yes." "Darwin could still not quite imagine how such a natural selection could take place. But in October 1838, exactly two years after his return on the Beagle, he chanced to come across a little book by the specialist in population studies, Thomas Malthus. The book was called An Essay on the Principle of Population. Malthus got the idea for this essay from Benjamin Franklin, the American who in-vented the lightning conductor among other things. Franklin had made the point that if there were no limiting factors in nature, one single species of plant or animal would spread over the entire globe. But because there are many species, they keep each other in balance." "I can see that." "Malthus developed this idea and applied it to the world's population. He believed that mankind's ability to procreate is so great that there are always more children born than can survive. Since the production of food can never keep pace with the increase in population, he believed that huge numbers were destined to succumb in the struggle for existence. Those who survived to grow up-- and perpetuate the race--would therefore be those who came out best in the struggle for survival." "That sounds logical." "But this was actually the universal mechanism that Darwin had been searching for. Here was the explanation of how evolution happens. It was due to natural selection in the struggle for life, in which those that were best adapted to their surroundings would survive and perpetuate the race. This was the second theory which he proposed in The Origin of Species. He wrote: The elephant is reck-oned the slowest breeder of all known animals,' but if it had six young and survived to a hundred, 'after a period of from 740 to 750 years there would be nearly nineteen million elephants alive, descended from the first pair.' " "Not to mention all the thousands of cods' eggs from a single cod." "Darwin further proposed that the struggle for survival is frequently hardest among species that resemble each other the most. They have to fight for the same food. There, the slightest advantage--that is to say, the infinitesimal variation--truly comes into its own. The more bitter the struggle for survival, the quicker will be the evolution of new species, so that only the very best adapted will survive and the others will die out." "The less food there is and the bigger the brood, the quicker evolution happens?" "Yes, but it's not only a question of food. It can be just as vital to avoid being eaten by other animals. For example, it can be a matter of survival to have a protective camouflage, the ability to run swiftly, to recognize hostile animals, or, if the worst comes to the worst, to have a repellent taste. A poison that can kill predators is quite useful too. That's why so many cacti are poisonous, Sophie. Practically nothing else can grow in the desert, so this plant is especially vulnerable to plant-eating animals." "Most cacti are prickly as well." "The ability to reproduce is also of fundamental importance, obviously. Darwin studied the ingenuity of plant pollination in great detail. Flowers glow in glorious hues and exude delirious scents to attract the insects which are instrumental in pollination. To perpetuate their kind, birds trill their melodious tones. A placid or melancholy bull with no interest in cows will have no interest for genealogy either, since with characteristics like these, its line will die out at once. The bull's sole purpose in life is to grow to sexual maturity and reproduce in order to propagate the race. It is rather like a relay race. Those that for one reason or another are unable to pass on their genes are continually discarded, and in that way the race is continually refined. Resistance to disease is one of the most important characteristics progressively accumulated and preserved in the variants that survive." "So everything gets better and better?" "The result of this continual selection is that the ones best adapted to a particular environment--or a particular ecological niche--will in the long term perpetuate the race in that environment. But what is an advantage in one environment is not necessarily an advantage in another. For some of the Galapagos finches, the ability to fly was vital. But being good at flying is not so necessary if food is dug from the ground and there are no predators. The reason why so many different animal species have arisen over the ages is precisely because of these many niches in the natural environment." "But even so, there is only one human race." "That's because man has a unique ability to adapt to different conditions of life. One of the things that amazed Darwin most was the way the Indians in Tierra del Fuego managed to live under such terrible climatic conditions. But that doesn't mean that all human beings are alike. Those who live near the equator have darker skins than people in the more northerly climes because their dark skin protects them from the sun. White people who expose themselves to the sun for long periods are more prone to skin cancer." "Is it a similar advantage to have white skin if you live in northern countries?" "Yes, otherwise everyone on earth would be dark-skinned. But white skin more easily forms sun vitamins, and that can be vital in areas with very little sun. Nowa-days that is not so important because we can make sure we have enough sun vitamins in our diet. But nothing in nature is random. Everything is due to infinitesimal changes that have taken effect over countless generations." "Actually, it's quite fantastic to imagine." "It is indeed. So far, then, we can sum up Darwin's theory of evolution in a few sentences." "Go ahead!" "We can say that the 'raw material' behind the evolution of life on earth was the continual variation of individuals within the same species, plus the large number of progeny, which meant that only a fraction of them survived, the actual 'mechanism,' or driving force, behind evolution was thus the natural selection in the struggle for survival. This selection ensured that the strongest, or the 'fittest,' survived." "It seems as logical as a math sum. How was The Origin of Species received?" "It was the cause of bitter controversies. The Church protested vehemently and the scientific world was sharply divided. That was not really so surprising. Darwin had, after all, distanced God a good way from the act of creation, although there were admittedly some who claimed it was surely greater to have created something with its own innate evolutionary potential than simply to create a fixed entity." Suddenly Sophie jumped up from her chair. "Look out there!" she cried. She pointed out of the window. Down by the lake a man and a woman were walking hand in hand. They were completely naked. "That's Adam and Eve," said Alberto. "They were gradually forced to throw in their lot with Little Red Rid-inghood and Alice in Wonderland. That's why they have turned up here." Sophie went to the window to watch them, but they soon disappeared among the trees. "Because Darwin believed that mankind was descended from animals?" "In 1871 Darwin published The Descent of Man, in which he drew attention to the great similarities between humans and animals, advancing the theory that men and anthropoid apes must at one time have evolved from the same progenitor. By this time the first fossil skulls of an extinct type of man had been found, first in the Rock of Gibraltar and some years later in Neanderthal in Germany. Strangely enough, there were fewer protests in T871 than in 1859, when Darwin published The Origin of Species. But man's descent from animals had been implicit in the first book as well. And as I said, when Darwin died in 1882, he was buried with all the ceremony due to a pioneer of science." "So in the end he found honor and dignity?" "Eventually, yes. But not before he had been described as the most dangerous man in England." "Holy Moses!" " 'Let us hope it is not true,' wrote an upper-class lady, 'but if it is, let us hope it will not be generally known.' A distinguished scientist expressed a similar thought: 'An embarrassing discovery, and the less said about it the better.' " "That was almost proof that man is related to the ostrich!" "Good point. But that's easy enough for us to say now. People were suddenly obliged to revise their whole approach to the Book of Genesis. The young writer John Ruskin put it like this: 'If only the geologists would leave me alone. After each Bible verse I hear the blows of their hammers.' " "And the blows of the hammers were his doubts about the word of God?" "That was presumably what he meant. Because it was more than the literal interpretation of the story of creation that toppled. The essence of Darwin's theory was the utterly random variations which had finally produced Man. And what was more, Darwin had turned Marv into a product of something as unsentimental as the struggle for existence." "Did Darwin have anything to say about how such random variations arose?" "You've put your finger on the weakest point in his theory. Darwin had only the vaguest idea of heredity. Something happens in the crossing. A father and mother never get two identical offspring. There is always some slight difference. On the other hand it's difficult to produce anything really new in that way. Moreover, there are plants and animals which reproduce by budding or by simple cell division. On the question of how the variations arise, Darwin's theory has been supplemented by the so-called neo-Darwinism." "What's that?" "All life and all reproduction is basically a matter of cell division. When a cell divides into two, two identical cells are produced with exactly the same hereditary factors. In cell division, then, we say a cell copies itself." "Yes?" "But occasionally, infinitesimal errors occur in the process, so that the copied cell is not exactly the same as the mother cell. In modern biological terms, this is a mutation. Mutations are either totally irrelevant, or they can lead to marked changes in the behavior of the individual. They can be directly harmful, and such 'mutants' will be continually discarded from the large broods. Many diseases are in fact due to mutations. But sometimes a mutation can give an individual just that extra positive characteristic needed to hold its own in the struggle for existence." "Like a longer neck, for instance?" "Lamarck's explanation of why t

[table=100%,#ffffff,#000000,1][tr][td]Marx ¡K a spectre is haunting Europe¡K Hilde got off her bed and went to the window facing the bay. When she had started to read this Saturday, it was still Sophie's fifteenth birthday. The day before had been Hilde's own birthday. If her father had imagined that she would get as far as Sophie's birthday yesterday, he had certainly not been realistic. She had done nothing but read all day long. But he was right that there would only be one more birthday greeting. It was when Alberto and Sophie had sung Happy Birthday to her. Very embarrassing, Hilde thought. And now Sophie had invited people to a philosophical garden party on the very day her father was due back from Lebanon. Hilde was convinced something would happen that day which neither she nor her father were quite sure of. But one thing was certain: before her father got home to Bjerkely he would get a scare. That was the least she could do for Sophie and Alberto, especially after they had appealed for help ... Her mother was still down in the boathouse. Hilde ran downstairs to the telephone. She found Anne and Ole's number in Copenhagen and called them. "Anne Kvamsdal." "Hi, this is Hilde." "Oh, how are you? How are things in Lillesand?" "Fine, with vacation and everything. And Dad gets back from Lebanon in a week." "Won't that be great, Hilde!" "Yes, I'm looking forward to it. That's actually why I'm calling..." "It is?" "I think he's landing at Kastrup around 5 p.m. on Saturday the 23rd. Will you be in Copenhagen then?" "I think so." "I was wondering if you could do something for me." "Why, of course." "It's kind of a special favor. I'm not even sure if it's possible." "Now you're making me curious ..." Hilde began to describe her plan. She told Anne about the ring binder, about Sophie and Alberto and all the rest. She had to backtrack several times because either she or Anne were laughing too hard. But when Hilde hung up, her plan was in operation. She would now have to begin some preparations of her own. But there was still plenty of time. Hilde spent the remainder of the afternoon and the evening with her mother. They ended up driving to Kris-tiansand and going to the movies. They felt they had some catching up to do since they had not done anything special the day before. As they drove past the exit to Kjevik airport, a few more pieces of the big jigsaw puzzle Hilde was constructing fell into place. It was late before she went to bed that night, but she took the ring binder and read on. When Sophie slipped out of the den through the hedge it was almost eight o'clock. Her mother was weeding the flowerbeds by the front door when Sophie appeared. "Where did you spring from?" "I came through the hedge." "Through the hedge?" "Didn't you know there was a path on the other side?" "But where have you been, Sophie? This is the second time you've just disappeared without leaving any message." "I'm sorry, Mom. It was such a lovely day, I went for a long walk." Her mother rose from the pile of weeds and gave her a severe look. "You haven't been with that philosopher again?" "As a matter of fact, I have. I told you he likes going for long walks." "But he is coming to the garden party, isn't he?" "Oh yes, he's looking forward to it." "Me too. I'm counting the days." Was there a touch of sharpness in her voice? To be on the safe side, Sophie said: "I'm glad I invited Joanna's parents too. Otherwise it might be a bit embarrassing." "I don't know ... but whatever happens, I am going to have a talk with this Alberto as one adult to another." "You can borrow my room if you like. I'm sure you'll like him." "And another thing. There's a letter for you." "There is?" "It's stamped UN Battalion." "It must be from Alberto's brother." "It's got to stop, Sophie!" Sophie's brain worked overtime. But in a flash she hit on a plausible answer It was as though she was getting inspiration from some guiding spirit. "I told Alberto I collect rare postmarks. And brothers also have their uses." Her mother seemed to be reassured. "Dinner's in the fridge," she said in a slightly more amicable tone. "Where's the letter?" "On top of the fridge." Sophie rushed inside. The envelope was stamped June 15, 1990. She opened it and took out a little note: What matters our creative endless toil, When at a snatch, oblivion ends the coil? Indeed, Sophie had no answer to that question. Before she ate, she put the note in the closet together with all the other stuff she had collected in the past weeks. She would learn soon enough why the question had been asked. The following morning Joanna came by. After a game of badminton, they got down to planning the philosophical garden party. They needed to have some surprises on hand in case the party flopped at any point. When Sophie's mother got home from work they were still talking about it. Her mother kept saying: "Don't worry about what it costs." And she was not being sarcastic! Perhaps she was thinking that a "philosophical garden party" was just what was needed to bring Sophie down to earth again after her many weeks of intensive philosophical studies. Before the evening was over they had agreed on everything, from paper lanterns to a philosophical quiz with a prize. The prize should preferably be a book about philosophy for young people. If there was such a thing! Sophie was not at all sure. Two days before Midsummer Eve, on Thursday, June 21, Alberto called Sophie again. "Sophie." "And Alberto." "Oh, hi! How are you?" "Very well indeed, thank you. I think I have found an excellent way out." "Way out of what?" "You know what. A way out of the mental captivity we have lived in for much too long." "Oh, that." "But I cannot say a word about the plan before it is set in motion." "Won't it be too late then? I need to know what I am involved in." "Now you're being na'i've. All our conversations are being overheard. The most sensible thing would be to say nothing." "It's as bad as that, huh?" "Naturally, my child. The most important things must happen when we are not talking." "Oh." "We are living our lives in a fictional reality behind the words in a long story. Each single letter is being written on an old portable typewriter by the major. Nothing that is in print can therefore escape his attention." "No, I realize that. But how are we going to hide from him?" "Ssh!" "What?" "There's something going on between the lines as well. That's just where I'm trying to be tricky, with every crafty ruse I know." "I get it." "But we must make the most of the time both today and tomorrow. On Saturday the balloon goes up. Can you come over right now?" "I'm on my way." Sophie fed the birds and the fish and found a large lettuce leaf for Govinda. She opened a can of cat food for Sher-ekan and put it out in a bowl on the step as she left. Then she slipped through the hedge and out to the path on the far side. A little way further on she suddenly caught sight of a spacious desk standing in the midst of the heather. An elderly man was sitting at it, apparently adding up figures. Sophie went over to him and asked his name. "Ebenezer Scrooge," he said, poring over his ledgers again. "My name is Sophie. You are a businessman, I presume?" He nodded. "And immensely rich. Not a penny must go to waste. That's why I have to concentrate on my accounts." "Why bother?" Sophie waved and walked on. But she had not gone many yards before she noticed a little girl sitting quite alone under one of the tall trees. She was dressed in rags, and looked pale and ill. As Sophie walked by, she thrust her hand into a little bag and pulled out a box of matches. "Will you buy some matches?" she asked, holding them out to Sophie. Sophie felt in her pockets to see if she had any money with her. Yes--she found a crown. "How much are they?" "One crown." Sophie gave the girl the coin and stood there, with the box of matches in her hand. "You are the first person to buy anything from me for over a hundred years. Sometimes I starve to death, and other times the frost does away with me." Sophie thought it was perhaps not surprising if the sale of matches was not especially brisk here in the woods. But then she came to think of the businessman she had just passed. There was no reason for the little match girl to die of starvation when he was so wealthy. "Come here," said Sophie. She took the girl's hand and walked with her back to the rich man. "You must see to it that this girl gets a better life," she said. The man glanced up from his paperwork and said: "That kind of thing costs money, and I said not so much as a penny must go to waste." "But it's not fair that you're so rich when this girl is so poor," insisted Sophie. "It's unjust!" "Bah! Humbug! Justice only exists between equals." "What do you mean by that?" "I had to work my way up, and it has paid off. Progress, they call it." "If you don't help me, I'll die," said the poor girl. The businessman looked up again from his ledgers. Then he threw his quill pen onto the table impatiently. "You don't figure in my accounts! So--be off with you--to the poorhouse!" "If you don't help me, I'll set fire to the woods," the girl persisted. That brought the man to his feet, but the girl had already struck one of her matches. She held it to a tuft of dry grass which flared up instantly. The man threw up his arms. "God help me!" he shouted. "The red cock has crowed!" The girl looked up at him with a playful smile. "You didn't know I was a communist, did you?" The next minute, the girl, the businessman, and the desk had disappeared. Sophie was once again standing alone while the flames consumed the dry grass ever more hungrily. It took her a while to put out the fire by stamping on it. Thank goodness! Sophie glanced down at the blackened grass. She was holding a box of matches in her hand. She couldn't have started the fire herself, could she? When she met Alberto outside the cabin she told him what had happened. "Scrooge was the miserly capitalist in A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens. You probably remember the little match girl from the tale by Hans Christian Andersen." "I didn't expect to meet them here in the woods." "Why not? These are no ordinary woods, and now we are going to talk about Karl Marx. It is most appropriate that you have witnessed an example of the tremendous class struggles of the mid-nineteenth century. But let's go inside. We are a little more protected from the major's interference there." Once again they sat at the little table by the window facing the lake. Sophie could still feel all over her body how she had experienced the little lake after having drunk from the blue bottle. Today, both bottles were standing on the mantelpiece. There was a miniature model of a Greek temple on the table. "What's that?" asked Sophie. "All in good time, my dear." Alberto began to talk: "When Kierkegaard went to Berlin in 1841, he might have sat next to Karl Marx at Schel-ling's lectures. Kierkegaard had written a master of arts thesis on Socrates. About the same time, Marx had written a doctoral thesis on Democritus and Epicurus--in other words, on the materialism of antiquity. Thus they had both staked out the course of their own philosophies." "Because Kierkegaard became an existentialist and Marx became a materialist?" "Marx became what is known as a historical materialist. But we'll come back to that." "Go on." "Each in his own way, both Kierkegaard and Marx took Hegel's philosophy as their point of departure. Both were influenced by Hegel's mode of thought, but both rejected his 'world spirit,' or his idealism." "It was probably too high-flown for them." "Definitely. In general, we usually say that the era of the great philosophical systems ended with Hegel. After him, philosophy took a new direction. Instead of great speculative systems, we had what we call an existential philosophy or a philosophy of action. This was what Marx meant when he observed that until now, 'philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.' These words mark a significant turning point in the history of philosophy." "After meeting Scrooge and the little match girl, I have no problem understanding what Marx meant." "Marx's thinking had a practical--or political--objective. He was not only a philosopher; he was a historian, a sociologist, and an economist." "And he was a forerunner in all these areas?" "Certainly no other philosopher had greater significance for practical politics. On the other hand, we must be wary of identifying everything that calls itself Marxism with Marx's own thinking. It is said of Marx that he only became a Marxist in the mid-1840s, but even after that he could at times feel it necessary to assert that he was not a Marxist." "Was Jesus a Christian?" "That, too, of course, is debatable." "Carry on." "Right from the start, his friend and colleague Friedrich Engels contributed to what was subsequently known as Marxism. In our own century, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and many others also made their contribution to Marxism, or Marxism-Leninism." "I suggest we try to stick to Marx himself. You said he was a historical materialist?" "He was not a philosophical materialist like the atomists of antiquity nor did he advocate the mechanical materialism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But he thought that, to a great extent, it was the material factors in society which determined the way we think. Material factors of that nature have certainly been decisive for historical development." "That was quite different from Hegel's world spirit." "Hegel had pointed out that historical development is driven by the tension between opposites--which is then resolved by a sudden change. Marx developed this idea further. But according to Marx, Hegel was standing on his head." "Not all the time, I hope." "Hegel called the force that drives history forward world spirit or world reason. This, Marx claimed, is upside down. He wished to show that material changes are the ones that affect history. 'Spiritual relations' do not create material change, it is the other way about. Material change creates new spiritual relations. Marx particularly emphasized that it was the economic forces in society that created change and thus drove history forward." "Do you have an example?" "Antiquity's philosophy and science were purely theoretical in purpose. Nobody was particularly interested in putting new discoveries into practice." "They weren't?" "That was because of the way the economic life of the community was organized. Production was mainly based on slave labor, so the citizens had no need to increase production with practical innovations. This is an example of how material relations help to affect philosophical reflection in society." "Yes, I see." "Marx called these material, economic, and social relations the basis of society. The way a society thinks, what kind of political institutions there are, which laws it has and, not least, what there is of religion, morals, art, philosophy, and science, Marx called society's superstructure." "Basis and superstructure, right." "And now you will perhaps be good enough to pass me the Greek temple." Sophie did so. "This is a model of the Parthenon temple on the Acropolis. You have also seen it in real life." "On the video, you mean." "You can see that the construction has a very elegant and elaborate roof. Probably the roof with its front gable is what strikes one first. This is what we call the superstructure." "But the roof cannot float in thin air." "It is supported by the columns." "The building has very powerful foundations--its bases--supporting the entire construction. In the same way, Marx believed that material relations support, so to speak, everything in the way of thoughts and ideas in society. Society's superstructure is in fact a reflection of the bases of that society." "Are you saying that Plato's theory of ideas is a reflection of vase production and wine growing?" "No, it's not that simple, as Marx expressly points out. It is the interactive effect of society's basis on its superstructure. If Marx had rejected this interaction, he would have been a mechanical materialist. But because Marx realized that there was an interactive or dialectic relation between bases and superstructure, we say that he is a dialectical materialist. By the way, you may care to note that Plato was neither a potter nor a wine grower." "All right. Do you have any more to say about the temple?" "Yes, a little. Could you describe the bases of the temple?" "The columns are standing on a base that consists of three levels--or steps." "In the same manner we will identify three levels in the bases of society. The most basic level is what we may call society's conditions of production. In other words, the natural conditions or resources that are available to society. These are the foundation of any society, and this foundation clearly determines the type of production in the society, and by the same token, the nature of that society and its culture in general." "You can't have a herring trade in the Sahara, or grow dates in northern Norway." "You've got it. And the way people think in a nomadic culture is very different from the way they think in a fishing village in northern Norway The next level is the society's means of production. By this Marx meant the various kinds of equipment, tools, and machinery, as well as the raw materials to be found there." "In the old days people rowed out to the fishing grounds. Nowadays they use huge trawlers to catch the fish." "Yes, and here you are talking about the next level in the base of society, namely, those who own the means of production. The division of labor, or the distribution of work and ownership, was what Marx called society's 'production relations.' " "I see." "So far we can conclude that it is the mode of production in a society which determines which political and ideological conditions are to be found there. It is not by chance that today we think somewhat differently--and have a somewhat different moral codex--from the old feudal society." "So Marx didn't believe in a natural right that was eternally valid." "No, the question of what was morally right, according to Marx, is a product of the base of society. For example, it is not accidental that in the old peasant society, parents would decide whom their children married. It was a question of who was to inherit the farm. In a modern city, social relations are different. Nowadays you can meet your future spouse at a party or a disco, and if you are sufficiently in love, you'll find somewhere to live." "I could never have put up with my parents deciding who I was to marry." "No, that's because you are a child of your time. Marx emphasized moreover that it is mainly society's ruling class that sets the norms for what is right or wrong. Because 'the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.' In other words, history is principally a matter of who is to own the means of production." "Don't people's thoughts and ideas help to change history?" "Yes and no. Marx understood that conditions in society's superstructure could have an interactive effect on the base of society, but he denied that society's superstructure had any independent history of its own. What has driven historical development from the slave society of antiquity to the industrial society of today has primarily been determined by changes in the base of society." "So you said." "Marx believed that in all phases of history there has been a conflict between two dominant classes of society. In antiquity's slave society, the conflict was between free citizen and slave. In the feudal society of the Middle Ages, it was between feudal lord and serf; later on, between aristocrat and citizen. But in Marx's own time, in what he called a bourgeois or capitalist society, the conflict was first and foremost between the capitalists and the workers, or the proletariat. So the conflict stood between those who own the means of production and those who do not. And since the 'upper classes' do not voluntarily relinquish their power, change can only come about through revolution." "What about a communist society?" "Marx was especially interested in the transition from a capitalist to a communist society. He also carried out a detailed analysis of the capitalist mode of production. But before we look at that, we must say something about Marx's view of man's labor." "Go ahead." "Before he became a communist, the young Marx was preoccupied with what happens to man when he works. This was something Hegel had also analyzed. Hegel believed there was an interactive, or dialectic, relationship between man and nature. When man alters nature, he himself is altered. Or, to put it slightly differently, when man works, he interacts with nature and transforms it. But in the process nature also interacts with man and transforms his consciousness." "Tell me what you do and I'll tell you who you are." "That, briefly, was Marx's point. How we work affects our consciousness, but our consciousness also affects the way we work. You could say it is an interactive relationship between hand and consciousness. Thus the way you think is closely connected to the job you do." "So it must be depressing to be unemployed." "Yes. A person who is unemployed is, in a sense, empty. Hegel was aware of this early on. To both Hegel and Marx, work was a positive thing, and was closely connected with the essence of mankind." "So it must also be positive to a worker?" "Yes, originally. But this is precisely where Marx aimed his criticism of the capitalist method of production." "What was that?" "Under the capitalist system, the worker labors for someone else. His labor is thus something external to him--or something that does not belong to him. The worker becomes alien to his work--but at the same time also alien to himself. He loses touch with his own reality. Marx says, with a Hegelian expression, that the worker becomes alienated." "I have an aunt who has worked in a factory, packaging candy for over twenty years, so I can easily understand what you mean. She says she hates going to work, every single morning." "But if she hates her work, Sophie, she must hate herself, in a sense." "She hates candy, that's for sure." "In a capitalist society, labor is organized in such a way that the worker in fact slaves for another social class. Thus the worker transfers his own labor--and with it, the whole of his life--to the bourgeoisie." "Is it really that bad?" "We're talking about Marx, and we must therefore take our point of departure in the social conditions during the middle of the last century. So the answer must be a resounding yes. The worker could have a 12-hour working day in a freezing cold production hall. The pay was often so poor that children and expectant mothers also had to work. This led to unspeakable social conditions. In many places, part of the wages was paid out in the form of cheap liquor, and women were obliged to supplement their earnings by prostitution. Their customers were the respected citizenry of the town. In short, in the precise situation that should have been the honorable hallmark of mankind, namely work, the worker was turned into a beast of burden." "That infuriates me!" "It infuriated Marx too. And while it was happening, the children of the bourgeoisie played the violin in warm, spacious living rooms after a refreshing bath. Or they sat at the piano while waiting for their four-course dinner. The violin and the piano could have served just as well as a diversion after a long horseback ride." "Ugh! How unjust!" "Marx would have agreed. Together with Engels, he published a Communist Manifesto in 1848. The first sentence in this manifesto says: A spectre is haunting Europe--the spectre of Communism." "That sounds frightening." "It frightened the bourgeoisie too. Because now the proletariat was beginning to revolt. Would you like to hear how the Manifesto ends?" "Yes, please." "The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workingmen of all countries, unite!" "If conditions were as bad as you say, I think I would have signed that Manifesto. But conditions are surely a lot different today?" "In Norway they are, but they aren't everywhere. Many people still live under inhuman conditions while they continue to produce commodities that make capitalists richer and richer. Marx called this exploitation." "Could you explain that word, please?" "If a worker produces a commodity, this commodity has a certain exchange-value." "Yes." "If you now deduct the workers' wages and the other production costs from the exchange-value, there will always be a certain sum left over. This sum was what Marx called profit. In other words, the capitalist pockets a value that was actually created by the worker. That is what is meant by exploitation." "I see." "So now the capitalist invests some of his profit in new capital--for instance, in modernizing the production plant in the hope of producing his commodity even more cheaply, and thereby increasing his profit in the future." "That sounds logical." "Yes, it can seem logical. But both in this and in other areas, in the long term it will not go the way the capitalist has imagined." "How do you mean?" "Marx believed there were a number of inherent contradictions in the capitalist method of production. Capitalism is an economic system which is self-destructive because it lacks rational control." "That's good, isn't it, for the oppressed?" "Yes; it is inherent in the capitalist system that it is marching toward its own destruction. In that sense, capitalism is 'progressive' because it is a stage on the way to communism." "Can you give an example of capitalism being self-destructive?" "We said that the capitalist had a good surplus of money, and he uses part of this surplus to modernize the factory. But he also spends money on violin lessons. Moreover, his wife has become accustomed to a luxurious way of life." "No doubt." "He buys new machinery and so no longer needs so many employees. He does this to increase his competitive power." "I get it." "But he is not the only one thinking in this way, which means that production as a whole is continually being made more effective. Factories become bigger and bigger, and are gradually concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. What happens then, Sophie?" "Er. . ." "Fewer and fewer workers are required, which means there are more and more unemployed. There are therefore increasing social problems, and crises such as these are a signal that capitalism is marching toward its own destruction. But capitalism has a number of other self-destructive elements. Whenever profit has to be tied up in the means of production without leaving a big enough surplus to keep production going at competitive prices . . ." "Yes?" ", . . what does the capitalist do then? Can you tell me?" "No, I'm afraid I can't." "Imagine if you were a factory owner. You cannot make ends meet. You cannot buy the raw materials you need to keep producing. You are facing bankruptcy. So now my question is, what can you do to economize?" "Maybe I could cut down on wages?" "Smart! Yes, that really is the smartest thing you could do. But if all capitalists were as smart as you--and they are--the workers would be so poor that they couldn't afford to buy goods any more. We would say that purchasing power is falling. And now we really are in a vicious circle. The knell has sounded for capitalist private property, Marx would say. We are rapidly approaching a revolutionary situation." "Yes, I see." "To make a long story short, in the end the proletariat rises and takes over the means of production." "And then what?" "For a period, we get a new 'class society' in which the proletarians suppress the bourgeoisie by force. Marx called this the dictatorship of the proletariat. But after a transition period, the dictatorship of the proletariat is replaced by a 'classless society,' in which the means of production are owned 'by all'--that is, by the people themselves. In this kind of society, the policy is 'from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.' Moreover, labor now belongs to the workers themselves and capitalism's alienation ceases." "It all sounds wonderful, but what actually happened? Was there a revolution?" "Yes and no. Today, economists can establish that Marx was mistaken on a number of vital issues, not least his analysis of the crises of capitalism. And he paid insufficient attention to the plundering of the natural environment--the serious consequences of which we are experiencing today. Nevertheless . . ." "Nevertheless?" "Marxism led to great upheavals. There is no doubt that socialism has largely succeeded in combating an inhumane society. In Europe, at any rate, we live in a society with more justice--and more solidarity--than Marx did. This is not least due to Marx himself and the entire socialist movement." "What happened?" "After Marx, the socialist movement split into two main streams, Social Democracy and Leninism. Social Democracy, which has stood for a gradual and peaceful path in the direction of socialism, was Western Europe's way. We might call this the slow revolution. Leninism, which retained Marx's belief that revolution was the only way to combat the old class society, had great influence in Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa. Each in their own way, both movements have fought against hardship and oppression." "But didn't it create a new form of oppression? For example in Russia and Eastern Europe?" "No doubt of that, and here again we see that everything man touches becomes a mixture of good and evil. On the other hand, it would be unreasonable to blame Marx for the negative factors in the so-called socialist countries fifty or a hundred years after his death. But maybe he had given too little thought to the

[table=100%,#ffffff,#000000,1][tr][td]Romanticism ¡Kthe path of mystery leads inwards¡K Hilde let the heavy ring binder slide into her lap. Then she let it slide further onto the floor. It was already lighter in the room than when she had gone to bed. She looked at the clock. It was almost three. She snuggled down under the covers and closed her eyes. As she was falling asleep she wondered why her father had begun to write about Little Red Ridinghood and Winnie-the-Pooh ... She slept until eleven o'clock the next morning. The tension in her body told her that she had dreamed intensely all night, but she could not remember what she had dreamed. It felt as if she had been in a totally different reality. She went downstairs and fixed breakfast. Her mother had put on her blue jumpsuit ready to go down to the boathouse and work on the motorboat. Even if it was not afloat, it had to be shipshape when Dad got back from Lebanon. "Do you want to come down and give me a hand?" "I have to read a little first. Should I come down with some tea and a mid-morning snack?" "What mid-morning?" When Hilde had eaten she went back up to her room, made her bed, and sat herself comfortably with the ring binder resting against her knees. *** Sophie slipped through the hedge and stood in the big garden which she had once thought of as her own Garden of Eden . . . There were branches and leaves strewn everywhere after the storm the night before. It seemed to her that there was some connection between the storm and the fallen branches and her meeting with Little Red Ridinghood and Winnie-the-Pooh. She went into the house. Her mother had just gotten home and was putting some bottles of soda in the refrigerator. On the table was a delicious-looking chocolate cake. "Are you expecting visitors?" asked Sophie; she had almost forgotten it was her birthday. "We're having the real party next Saturday, but I thought we ought to have a little celebration today as well." "How?" "I have invited Joanna and her parents." "Fine with me." The visitors arrived shortly before half-past seven. The atmosphere was somewhat formal--Sophie's mother very seldom saw Joanna's parents socially. It was not long before Sophie and Joanna went upstairs to Sophie's room to write the garden party invitations. Since Alberto Knox was also to be invited, Sophie had the idea of inviting people to a "philosophical garden party." Joanna didn't object. It was Sophie's party after all, and theme parties were "in" at the moment. Finally they had composed the invitation. It had taken two hours and they couldn't stop laughing. Dear. . . You are hereby invited to a philosophical garden party at 3 Clover Close on Saturday June 23 (Midsummer Eve) at 7 p.m. During the evening we shall hopefully solve the mystery of life. Please bring warm sweaters and bright ideas suitable for solving the riddles of philosophy. Because of the danger of woodland fires we unfortunately cannot have a bonfire, but everybody is free to let the flames of their imagination flicker unimpeded. There will be at least one genuine philosopher among the invited guests. For this reason the party is a strictly private arrangement. Members of the press will not be admitted. With regards,Joanna Ingebrigtsen (organizing committee) and Sophie Amundsen (hostess) The two girls went downstairs to their parents, who were now talking somewhat more freely. Sophie handed the draft invitation, written with a calligraphic pen, to her mother. "Could you make eighteen copies, please." It was not the first time she had asked her mother to make photocopies for her at work. Her mother read the invitation and then handed it to Joanna's father. "You see what I mean? She is going a little crazy." "But it looks really exciting," said Joanna's father, handing the sheet on to his wife. "I wouldn't mind coming to that party myself." Barbie read the invitation, then she said: "Well, I must say! Can we come too, Sophie?" "Let's say twenty copies, then," said Sophie, taking them at their word. "You must be nuts!" said Joanna. Before Sophie went to bed that night she stood for a long time gazing out of the window. She remembered how she had once seen the outline of Alberto's figure in the darkness. It was more than a month ago. Now it was again late at night, but this was a white summer night. Sophie heard nothing from Alberto until Tuesday morning. He called just after her mother had left for work. "Sophie Amundsen." "And Alberto Knox." "I thought so." "I'm sorry I didn't call before, but I've been working hard on our plan. I can only be alone and work undisturbed when the major is concentrating wholly and com-pletely on you." "That's weird." "Then I seize the opportunity to conceal myself, you see. The best surveillance system in the world has its limitations when it is only controlled by one single person ... I got your card." "You mean the invitation?" "Dare you risk it?" "Why not?" "Anything can happen at a party like that." "Are you coming?" "Of course I'm coming. But there is another thing. Did you remember that it's the day Hilde's father gets back from Lebanon?" "No, I didn't, actually." "It can't possibly be pure coincidence that he lets you arrange a philosophical garden party the same day as he gets home to Bjerkely." "I didn't think about it, as I said." "I'm sure he did. But all right, we'll talk about that later. Can you come to the major's cabin this morning?" "I'm supposed to weed the flower beds." "Let's say two o'clock, then. Can you make that?" "I'll be there." Alberto Knox was sitting on the step again when Sophie arrived. "Have a seat," he said, getting straight down to work. "Previously we spoke of the Renaissance, the Baroque period, and the Enlightenment. Today we are going to talk about Romanticism, which could be described as Europe's last great cultural epoch. We are approaching the end of a long story, my child." "Did Romanticism last that long?" "It began toward the end of the eighteenth century and lasted till the middle of the nineteenth. But after 1850 one can no longer speak of whole 'epochs' which comprise poetry, philosophy, art, science, and music." "Was Romanticism one of those epochs?" "It has been said that Romanticism was Europe's last common approach to life. It started in Germany, arising as a reaction to the Enlightenment's unequivocal emphasis on reason. After Kant and his cool intellectualism, it was as if German youth heaved a sigh of relief." "What did they replace it with?" "The new catchwords were 'feeling,"imagination,"experience,' and 'yearning.' Some of the Enlightenment thinkers had drawn attention to the importance of feel-ing--not least Rousseau--but at that time it was a criticism of the bias toward reason. What had been an undercurrent now became the mainstream of German culture." "So Kant's popularity didn't last very long?" "Well, it did and it didn't. Many of the Romantics saw themselves as Kant's successors, since Kant had established that there was a limit to what we can know of 'das Ding an sich.' On the other hand, he had underlined the importance of the ego's contribution to knowledge, or cognition. The individual was now completely free to interpret life in his own way. The Romantics exploited this in an almost unrestrained 'ego-worship,' which led to the exaltation of artistic genius." "Were there a lot of these geniuses?" "Beethoven was one. His music expresses his own feelings and yearnings. Beethoven was in a sense a 'free' artist--unlike the Baroque masters such as Bach and Handel, who composed their works to the glory of God, mostly in strict musical forms." "I only know the Moonlight Sonata and the Fifth Symphony." "But you know how romantic the Moonlight Sonata is, and you can hear how dramatically Beethoven expresses himself in the Fifth Symphony." "You said the Renaissance humanists were individualists too." "Yes. There were many similarities between the Renaissance and Romanticism. A typical one was the importance of art to human cognition. Kant made a considerable contribution here as well. In his aesthetics he investigated what happens when we are overwhelmed by beauty--in a work of art, for instance. When we abandon ourselves to a work of art with no other intention than the aesthetic experience itself, we are brought closer to an experience of 'das Ding an sich.' " "So the artist can provide something philosophers can't express?" "That was the view of the Romantics. According to Kant, the artist plays freely on his faculty of cognition. The German poet Schiller developed Kant's thought further. He wrote that the activity of the artist is like playing, and man is only free when he plays, because then he makes up his own rules. The Romantics believed that only art could bring us closer to 'the inexpressible.' Some went as far as to compare the artist to God." "Because the artist creates his own reality the way God created the world." "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. "Novalis, one of the young geniuses, said that 'the world becomes a dream, and the dream becomes reality.' He wrote a novel called Heinrich von Ofterdingen set in Medieval times. It was unfinished when he died in 1801, but it was nevertheless a very significant novel. It tells of the young Heinrich who is searching for the 'blue flower' that he once saw in a dream and has yearned for ever since. The English Romantic poet Coleridge expressed the same idea; saying something like this: What if you slept? And what if, in your sleep, you dreamed? And what if, in your dream, you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower? And what if, when you awoke, you had the flower in your hand? Ah, what then?" "How pretty!" "This yearning for something distant and unattainable was characteristic of the Romantics. They longed for bygone eras, such as the Middle Ages, which now became enthusiastically reappraised after the Enlightenment's negative evaluation. And they longed for distant cultures like the Orient with its mysticism. Or else they would feel drawn to Night, to Twilight, to old ruins and the supernatural. They were preoccupied with what we usually refer to as the dark side of life, or the murky, uncanny, and mystical." "It sounds to me like an exciting period. Who were these Romantics?" "Romanticism was in the main an urban phenomenon. In the first half of the last century there was, in fact, a flourishing metropolitan culture in many parts of Europe, not least in Germany. 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." "I would never have dared rent a room to a Romantic!" "The first generation of Romantics were young in about 1 800, and we could actually call the Romantic Movement Europe's first student uprising. The Romantics were not unlike the hippies a hundred and fifty years later." "You mean flower power and long hair, strumming their guitars and lying around?" "Yes. It was once said that 'idleness is the ideal of genius, and indolence the virtue of the Romantic.' It was the duty of the Romantic to experience life--or to dream himself away from it. Day-to-day business could be taken care of by the philistines." "Byron was a Romantic poet, wasn't he?" "Yes, both Byron and Shelley were Romantic poets of the so-called Satanic school. Byron, moreover, provided the Romantic Age with its idol, the Byronic hero--the alien, moody, rebellious spirit--in life as well as in art. Byron himself could be both willful and passionate, and being also handsome, he was besieged by women of fashion. Public gossip attributed the romantic adventures of his verses to his own life, but although he had numerous liaisons, true love remained as illusive and as unattainable for him as Novalis's blue flower. Novalis became engaged to a fourteen-year-old girl. She died four days after her fifteenth birthday, but Novalis remained devoted to her for the rest of his short life." "Did you say she died four days after her fifteenth birthday?" "Yes . . ." "I am fifteen years and four days old today." "So you are." "What was her name?" "Her name was Sophie." "What?" "Yes, it was. . ." "You scare me. Could it be a coincidence?" "I couldn't say, Sophie. But her name was Sophie." "Go on!" "Novalis himself died when he was only twenty-nine. He was one of the 'y¢Xun9 dead.' Many of the Romantics died young, usually of tuberculosis. Some committed suicide . . ." "Ugh!" "Those who lived to be old usually stopped being Romantics at about the age of thirty. Some of them went on to become thoroughly middle-class and conservative." "They went over to the enemy, then." "Maybe. But we were talking about romantic love. The theme of unrequited love was introduced as early as 1774 by Goethe in his novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. The book ends with young Werther shooting himself when he can't have the woman he loves . . ." "Was it necessary to go that far?" "The suicide rate rose after the publication of the novel, and for a time the book was banned in Denmark and Norway. So being a Romantic was not without danger. Strong emotions were involved." "When you say 'Romantic/ I think of those great big landscape paintings, with dark forests and wild, rugged nature ... preferably in swirling mists." "Yes, one of the features of Romanticism was this yearning for nature and nature's mysteries. And as I said, it was not the kind of thing that arises in rural areas. You may recall Rousseau, who initiated the slogan 'back to nature.' The Romantics gave this slogan popular currency. Romanticism represents not least a reaction to the Enlightenment's mechanistic universe. It was said that Romanticism implied a renaissance of the old cosmic consciousness." "Explain that, please." "It means viewing nature as a whole; the Romantics were tracing their roots not only back to Spinoza, but also to Plotinus and Renaissance philosophers like Jakob Bohme and Giordano Bruno. What all these thinkers had in common was that they experienced a divine 'ego' in nature." "They were Pantheists then . . ." "Both Descartes and Hume had drawn a sharp line between the ego and 'extended' reality. Kant had also left behind him a sharp distinction between the cognitive 'I' and nature 'in itself.' Now it was said that nature is nothing but one big 'I.' The Romantics also used the expressions 'world soul' or 'world spirit.' " "I see." "The leading Romantic philosopher was Schelling, who lived from 1775 to 1854. He wanted to unite mind and matter. All of nature--both the human soul and physical reality--is the expression of one Absolute, or world spirit, he believed." "Yes, just like Spinoza." "Nature is visible spirit, spirit is invisible nature, said Schelling, since one senses a 'structuring spirit' everywhere in nature. He also said that matter is slumbering intelligence." "You'll have to explain that a bit more clearly." "Schelling saw a 'world spirit' in nature, but he saw the same 'world spirit' in the human mind. The natural and the spiritual are actually expressions of the same thing." "Yes, why not?" "World spirit can thus be sought both in nature and in one's own mind. 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." "That's a very lovely thought." "For many Romantics, philosophy, nature study, and poetry formed a synthesis. Sitting in your attic dashing off inspired verses and investigating the life of plants or the composition of rocks were only two sides of the same coin because nature is not a dead mechanism, it is one living world spirit." "Another word and I think I'll become a Romantic." "The Norwegian-born naturalist Henrik Steffens--whom Wergeland called 'Norway's departed laurel leaf because he had settled in Germany--went to Copenhagen in 1801 to lecture on German Romanticism. He characterized the Romantic Movement by saying, 'Tired of the eternal efforts to fight our way through raw matter, we chose another way and sought to embrace the infinite. We went inside ourselves and created a new world ... ' " "How can you remember all that?" "A bagatelle, child." "Go on, then." "Schelling also saw a development in nature from earth and rock to the human mind. He drew attention to very gradual transitions from inanimate nature to more complicated life forms. It was characteristic of the Romantic view in general that nature was thought of as an organism, or in other words, a unity which is constantly developing its innate potentialities. Nature is like a flower unfolding its leaves and petals. Or like a poet unfolding his verses." "Doesn't that remind you of Aristotle?" "It does indeed. The Romantic natural philosophy had Aristotelian as well as Neoplatonic overtones. Aristotle had a more organic view of natural processes than the mechanical materialists . . ." "Yes, that's what I thought. . ." "We find similar ideas at work in the field of history. A man who came to have great significance for the Romantics was the historical philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder, who lived from 1744 to 1803. He believed that history is characterized by continuity, evolution, and design. We say he had a 'dynamic' view of history be-cause he saw it as a process. The Enlightenment philosophers had often had a 'static' view of history. To them, there was only one universal reason which there could be more or less of at various periods. Herder showed that each historical epoch had its own intrinsic value and each nation its own character or 'soul.' The question is whether we can identify with other cultures." "So, just as we have to identify with another person's Situation to understand them better, we have to identify with other cultures to understand them too." "That is taken for granted nowadays. But in the Romantic period it was a new idea. Romanticism helped strengthen the feeling of national identity. It is no coinci-dence that the Norwegian struggle for national independence flourished at that particular time--in 1814." "I see." "Because Romanticism involved new orientations in so many areas, it has been usual to distinguish between two forms of Romanticism. There is what we call Universal Romanticism, referring to the Romantics who were preoccupied with nature, world soul, and artistic genius. This form of Romanticism flourished first, especially around 1800, in Germany, in the town of Jena." "And the other?" "The other is the so-called National Romanticism, which became popular a little later, especially in the town of Heidelberg. The National Romantics were mainly interested in the history of 'the people,' the language of 'the people,' and the culture of 'the people' in general. And 'the people' were seen as an organism unfolding its innate potentiality--exactly like nature and history." "Tell me where you live, and I'll tell you who you are." "What united these two aspects of Romanticism was first and foremost the key word 'organism.' The Romantics considered both a plant and a nation to be a living organism. A poetic work was also a living organism. Language was an organism. The entire physical world, even, was considered one organism. There is therefore no sharp dividing line between National Romanticism and Universal Romanticism. The world spirit was just as much present in the people and in popular culture as in nature and art." "I see." "Herder had been the forerunner, collecting folk songs from many lands under the eloquent title Voices of the People. He even referred to folktales as 'the mother tongue of the people.' The Brothers Grimm and others began to collect folk songs and fairy tales in Heidelberg. You must know of Grimm's Fairy Tales." "Oh sure, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Rumpelstiltskin, The Frog Prince, Hansel and Gretel . . ." "And many more. In Norway we had Asbj0rnsen and Moe, who traveled around the country collecting 'folks' own tales.' It was like harvesting a juicy fruit that was suddenly discovered to be both good and nourishing. And it was urgent--the fruit had already begun to fall. Folk songs were collected; the Norwegian language began to be studied scientifically. The old myths and sagas from heathen times were rediscovered, and composers all over Europe began to incorporate folk melodies into their compositions in an attempt to bridge the gap between folk music and art music." "What's art music?" "Art music is music composed by a particular person, like Beethoven. Folk music was not written by any particular person, it came from the people. That's why we don't know exactly when the various folk melodies date from. We distinguish in the same way between folktales and art tales." "So art tales are ... ?" "They are tales written by an author, like Hans Christian Andersen. The fairy tale genre was passionately cultivated by the Romantics. One of the German masters of the genre was E.T.A, Hoffmann." "I've heard of The Tales of Hoffmann." "The fairy tale was the absolute literary ideal of the Romantics--in the same way that the absolute art form of the Baroque period was the theater. It gave the poet full scope to explore his own creativity." "He could play God to a fictional universe." "Precisely. And this is a good moment to sum up." "Go ahead." "The philosophers of Romanticism viewed the 'world soul' as an 'ego' which in a more or less dreamlike state created everything in the world. The philosopher Fichte said that nature stems from a higher, unconscious imagination. Scheliing said explicitly that the world is 'in God.' God is aware of some of it, he believed, but there are other aspects of nature which represent the unknown in God. For God also has a dark side." "The thought is fascinating and frightening. It reminds me of Berkeley." "The relationship between the artist and his work was seen in exactly the same light. The fairy tale gave the writer free rein to exploit his 'universe-creating imagination.' And even the creative act was not always completely conscious. The writer could experience that his story was being written by some innate force. He could practically be in a hypnotic trance while he wrote." "He could?" "Yes, but then he would suddenly destroy the illusion. He would intervene in the story and address ironic comments to the reader, so that the reader, at least momentarily, would be reminded that it was, after all, only a story." "I see." "At the same time the writer could remind his reader that it was he who was manipulating the fictional universe. This form of disillusion is called 'romantic irony.' Henrik Ibsen, for example, lets one of the characters in Peer Gynt say: 'One cannot die in the middle of Act Five.' " "That's a very funny line, actually. What he's really saying is that he's only a fictional character." "The statement is so paradoxical that we can certainly emphasize it with a new section." "What did you mean by that?" "Oh, nothing, Sophie. But we did say that Novalis's fiancee was called Sophie, just like you, and that she died when she was only fifteen years and four days old ..." "You're scaring me, don't you know that?" Alberto sat staring, stony faced. Then he said: "But you needn't be worriedthat you will meet the same fate as Novalis's fiancee." "Why not?" "Because there are several more chapters." "What are you saying?" "I'm saying that anyone reading the story of Sophie and Alberto will know intuitively that there are many pages of the story still to come. We have only gotten as far as Romanticism." "You're making me dizzy." "It's really the major trying to make Hilde dizzy. It's not very nice or him, is it? New section!" *** Alberto had hardly finished speaking when a boy came running out of the woods. He had a turban on his head, and he was carrying an oil lamp. Sophie grabbed Alberto's arm. "Who's that?" she asked. The boy answered for himself: "My name is Aladdin and I've come all the way from Lebanon." Alberto looked at him sternly: "And what do you have in your lamp?" The boy rubbed the lamp, and out of it rose a thick cloud which formed itself into the figure of a man. He had a black beard like Alberto's and a blue beret. Floating above the lamp, he said: "Can you hear me, Hilde? I suppose it's too late for any more birthday greetings. I just wanted to say that Bjerkely and the south country back home seem like fairyland to me here in Lebanon. I'll see you there in a few days." So saying, the figure became a cloud again and was sucked back into the lamp. The boy with the turban put the lamp under his arm, ran into the woods, and was gone. "I don't believe this," said Sophie. "A bagatelle, my dear." "The spirit of the lamp spoke exactly like Hilde's father." "That's because it was Hilde's father--in spirit." "But. . ." "Both you and I and everything around us are living deep in the major's mind. It is late at night on Saturday, April 28, and all the UN soldiers are asleep around the major, who, although still awake, is not far from sleep himself. But he must finish the book he is to give Hilde as a fifteenth birthday present. That's why he has to work, Sophie, that's why the poor man gets hardly any rest." "I give up." "New section!" Sophie and Alberto sat looking across the little lake. Alberto seemed to be in some sort of trance. After a while Sophie ventured to nudge his shoulder. "Were you dreaming?" "Yes, he was interfering directly there. The last few paragraphs were dictated by him to the letter. He should be ashamed of himself. But now he has given himself away and come out into the open. Now we know that we are living our lives in a book which Hilde's father will send home to Hilde as a birthday present. You heard what I said? Well, it wasn't 'me' saying it." "If what you say is true, I'm going to run away from the book and go my own way." "That's exactly what I am planning. But before that can happen, we must try and talk with Hilde. She reads every word we say. Once we succeed in getting away from here it will be much harder to contact her. That means we must grasp the opportunity now." "What do we say?" "I think the major is just about to fall asleep over his typewriter--although his fingers are still racing feverishly over the keys ..." "It's a creepy thought." "This is the moment when he may write something he will regret later. And he has no correction fluid. That's a vital part of my plan. May no one give the major a bottle of correction fluid!" "He won't get so much as a single coverup strip from me!" "I'm calling on that poor girl here and now to rebel against her own father. She should be ashamed to let herself be amused by his self-indulgent playing with shad-ows. If only we had him here, we'd give him a taste of our indignation!" "But he's not here." "He is here in spirit and soul, but he's also safely tucked away in Lebanon. Everything around us is the major's ego." "But he is more than what we can see here." "We are but shadows in the major's soul. And it is no easy matter for a shadow to turn on its master, Sophie. It requires both cunning and strategy. But we have an opportunity of influencing Hilde. Only an angel can rebel against God." "We could ask Hilde to give him a piece of her mind the moment he gets home. She could tell him he's a rogue. She could wreck his boat--or at least, smash the lantern." Alberto nodded. Then he said: "She could also run away from him That would be much easier for her than it is for us. She could leave the major's house and never return. Wouldn't that be fitting for a major who plays with his 'universe-creating imagination' at our expense?" "I can picture it. The major travels all over the world searching for Hilde. But Hilde has vanished into thin air because she can't stand living with a father who plays the fool at Alberto's and Sophie's expense." "Yes, that's it! Plays the fool! That's what I meant by his using us as birthday amusement. But he'd better watch out, Sophie. So had Hilde!" "How do you mean?" "Are you sitting tight?" "As long as there are no more genies from a lamp." "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." "And?" "Now it is possible that this soul is Hilde M0ller Knag's father. He is over there in Lebanon writing a book on philosophy for his daughter's fifteenth birthday. When Hilde wakes up on June 15, she finds the book on her bedside table, and now she--and anyone else--can read about us. It has long been suggested that this 'present' could be shared with others." "Yes, I remember." "What I am saying to you now will be read by Hilde after her father in Lebanon once imagined that I was telling you he was in Lebanon ... imagining me telling you that he was in Lebanon." Sophie's head was swimming. She tried to remember what she had heard about Berkeley and the Romantics. Alberto Knox continued: "But they shouldn't feel so cocky because of that. They are the last people who should laugh, because laughter can easily get stuck in their throat." "Who are we talking about?" "Hilde and her father. Weren't we talking about them?" "But why shouldn't they feel so cocky?" "Because it is feasible that they, too, are nothing but mind." "How could they be?" "If it was possible for Berkeley and the Romantics, it must be possible for them. Maybe the major is also a shadow in a book about him and Hilde, which is also about us, since we are a part of their lives." "That would be even worse. That makes us only shadows of shadows." "But it is possible that a completely different author is somewhere writing a book about a UN Major Albert Knag, who is writing a book for his daughter Hilde. This book is about a certain Alberto Knox who suddenly begins to send humble philoso

[table=100%,#ffffff,#000000,1][tr][td]Kant ...the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me... It was close to midnight before Major Albert Knag called home to wish Hilde a happy birthday. Hilde's mother answered the telephone. "It's for you, Hilde." "Hello?" "It's Dad." "Are you crazy? It's nearly midnight!" "I just wanted to say Happy Birthday ..." "You've been doing that all day." "... but I didn't want to call before the day was over." "Why?" "Didn't you get my present?" "Yes, I did. Thank you very much." "I can't wait to hear what you think of it." "It's terrific. I have hardly eaten all day, it's so exciting." "I have to know how far you've gotten." "They just went inside the major's cabin because you started teasing them with a sea serpent." "The Enlightenment." "And Olympe de Gouges." "So I didn't get it completely wrong." "Wrong in what way?" "I think there's one more birthday greeting to come. But that one is set to music." "I'd better read a little more before I go to sleep." "You haven't given up, then?" "I've learned more in this one day than ever before. I can hardly believe that it's less than twenty-four hours since Sophie got home from school and found the first envelope." "It's strange how little time it takes to read." "But I can't help feeling sorry for her." "For Mom?" "No, for Sophie, of course." "Why?" "The poor girl is totally confused." "But she's only ..." "You were going to say she's only made up." "Yes, something like that." "I think Sophie and Alberto really exist." "We'll talk more about it when I get home." "Okay." "Have a nice day." "What?" "I mean good night." "Good night." When Hilde went to bed half an hour later it was still so light that she could see the garden and the little bay. It never got really dark at this time of the year. She played with the idea that she was inside a picture hanging on the wall of the little cabin in the woods. She wondered if one could look out of the picture into what surrounded it. Before she fell asleep, she read a few more pages in the big ring binder. Sophie put the letter from Hilde's father back on the mantel. "What he says about the UN is not unimportant," said Alberto, "but I don't like him interfering in my presentation." "I don't think you should worry too much about that." "Nevertheless, from now on I intend to ignore all extraordinary phenomena such as sea serpents and the like. Let's sit here by the window while I tell you about Kant." Sophie noticed a pair of glasses lying on a small table between two armchairs. She also noticed that the lenses were red. Maybe they were strong sunglasses . . . "It's almost two o'clock," she said. "I have to be home before five. Mom has probably made plans for my birthday." "That gives us three hours." "Let's start." "Immanuel Kant was born in 1724 in the East Prussian town of Konigsberg, the son of a master saddler. He lived there practically all his life until he died at the age of eighty. His family was deeply pious, and his own religious conviction formed a significant background to his philosophy. Like Berkeley, he felt it was essential to preserve the foundations of Christian belief." "I've heard enough about Berkeley, thanks." "Kant was the first of the philosophers we have heard about so far to have taught philosophy at a university. He was a professor of philosophy." "Professor?" "There are two kinds of philosopher. One is a person who seeks his own answers to philosophical questions. The other is someone who is an expert on the history of philosophy but does not necessarily construct his own philosophy." "And Kant was that kind?" "Kant was both. If he had simply been a brilliant professor and an expert on the ideas of other philosophers, he would never have carved a place for himself in the history of philosophy. But it is important to note that Kant had a solid grounding in the philosophic tradition of the past. He was familiar both with the rationalism of Descartes and Spinoza and the empiricism of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume." "I asked you not to mention Berkeley again." "Remember that the rationalists believed that the basis for all human knowledge lay in the mind. And that the empiricists believed all knowledge of the world proceeded from the senses. Moreover, Hume had pointed out that there are clear limits regarding which conclusions we could reach through our sense perceptions." "And who did Kant agree with?" "He thought both views were partly right, but he thought both were partly wrong, too. The question everybody was concerned with was what we can know about the world. This philosophical project had been preoccupying all philosophers since Descartes. "Two main possibilities were drawn up: either the world is exactly as we perceive it, or it is the way it appears to our reason." "And what did Kant think?" "Kant thought that both 'sensing' and 'reason' come into play in our conception of the world. But he thought the rationalists went too far in their claims as to how much reason can contribute, and he also thought the empiricists placed too much emphasis on sensory experience." "If you don't give me an example soon, it will all be just a bunch of words." "In his point of departure Kant agrees with Hume and the empiricists that all our knowledge of the world comes from our sensations. But--and here Kant stretches his hand out to the rationalists--in our reason there are also decisive factors that determine how we perceive the world around us. In other words, there are certain conditions in the human mind that are contributive to our conception of the world." "You call that an example?" "Let us rather do a little experiment. Could you bring those glasses from the table over there? Thank you. Now, put them on." Sophie put the glasses on. Everything around her became red. The pale colors became pink and the dark colors became crimson. "What do you see?" "I see exactly the same as before, except that it's all red." "That's because the glasses limit the way you perceive reality. Everything you see is part of the world around you, but how you see it is determined by the glasses you are wearing. So you cannot say the world is red even though you conceive it as being so." "No, naturally." "If you now took a walk in the woods, or home to Captain's Bend, you would see everything the way you normally do. But whatever you saw, it would all be red." "As long as I didn't take the glasses off, yes." "And that, Sophie, is precisely what Kant meant when he said that there are certain conditions governing the mind's operation which influence the way we experience the world." "What kind of conditions?" "Whatever we see will first and foremost be perceived as phenomena in time and space. Kant called 'time' and 'space' our two 'forms of intuition.' And he emphasized that these two 'forms' in our own mind precede every experience. In other words, we can know before we experience things that we will perceive them as phenomena in time and space. For we are not able to take off the 'glasses' of reason." "So he thought that perceiving things in time and space was innate?" "Yes, in a way. What we see may depend on whether we are raised in India or Greenland, but wherever we are, we experience the world as a series of processes in time and space. This is something we can say beforehand." "But aren't time and space things that exist beyond ourselves?" "No. Kant's idea was that time and space belong to the human condition. Time and space are first and foremost modes of perception and not attributes or the physical world." "That was a whole new way of looking at things." "For the mind of man is not just 'passive wax' which simply receives sensations from outside. The mind leaves its imprint on the way we apprehend the world. You could compare it with what happens when you pour water into a glass pitcher. The water adapts itself to the pitcher's form. In the same way our perceptions adapt themselves to our 'forms of intuition.' " "I think I understand what you mean." "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. "By that he meant that it was 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." "I see now how he could think both the rationalists and the empiricists were right up to a point. The rationalists had almost forgotten the importance of experience, and the empiricists had shut their eyes to the way our own mind influences the way we see the world." "And even the law of causality--which Hume believed man could not experience--belongs to the mind, according to Kant." "Explain that, please." "You remember how Hume claimed that it was only force of habit that made us see a causal link behind all natural processes. According to Hume, we cannot per-ceive the black billiard ball as being the cause of the white ball's movement. Therefore, we cannot prove that the black billiard ball will always set the white one in motion." "Yes, I remember." "But that very thing which Hume says we cannot prove is what Kant makes into an attribute of human reason. The law of causality is eternal and absolute simply because human reason perceives everything that happens as a matter of cause and effect." "Again, I would have thought that the law of causality lay in the physical world itself, not in our minds." "Kant's philosophy states that it is inherent in us. He agreed with Hume that we cannot know with certainty what the world is like 'in itself.' We can only know what the world is like 'for me'--or for everybody. Kant's greatest contribution to philosophy is the dividing line he draws between things in themselves--das Ding an sich-- and things as they appear to us." "I'm not so good at German." "Kant made an important distinction between 'the thing in itself and 'the thing for me.' We can never have certain knowledge of things 'in themselves.' We can only know how things 'appear' to us. On the other hand, prior to any particular experience we can say something about how things will be perceived by the human mind." "We can?" "Before you go out in the morning, you cannot know what you will see or experience during the day. But you can know that what you see and experience will be perceived as happening in time and space. You can moreover be confident that the law of cause and effect will apply, simply because you carry it with you as part of your consciousness." "But you mean we could have been made differently?" "Yes, we could have had a different sensory apparatus. And we could have had a different sense or time and a different feeling about space. We could even have been created in such a way that we would not go around searching for the cause of things that happen around us." "How do you mean?" "Imagine there's a cat lying on the floor in the living room. A ball comes rolling into the room. What does the cat do?" "I've tried that lots of times. The cat will run after the ball." "All right. Now imagine that you were sitting in that same room. If you suddenly see a ball come rolling in, would you also start running after it?" "First, I would turn around to see where the ball came from." "Yes, because you are a human being, you will inevitably look for the cause of every event, because the law of causality is part of your makeup." "So Kant says." "Hume showed that we can neither perceive nor prove natural laws. That made Kant uneasy. But he believed he could prove their absolute validity by showing that in reality we are talking about the laws of human cognition." "Will a child also turn around to see where the ball came from?" "Maybe not. But Kant pointed out that a child's reason is not fully developed until it has had some sensory material to work with. It is altogether senseless to talk about an empty mind." "No, that would be a very strange mind." "So now let's sum up. According to Kant, there are two elements that contribute to man's knowledge of the world. One is the external conditions that we cannot know of before we have perceived them through the senses. We can call this the material of knowledge. The other is the internal conditions in man himself--such as the perception of events as happening in time and space and as processes conforming to an unbreakable law of causality. We can call this the form of knowledge." Alberto and Sophie remained seated for a while gazing out of the window. Suddenly Sophie saw a little girl between the trees on the opposite side of the lake. "Look!" said Sophie. "Who's that?" "I'm sure I don't know." The girl was only visible for a few seconds, then she was gone. Sophie noticed that she was wearing some kind of red hat. "We shall under no circumstances let ourselves be distracted." "Go on, then." "Kant believed that there are clear limits to what we can know. You could perhaps say that the mind's 'glasses' set these limits." "In what way?" "You remember that philosophers before Kant had discussed the really 'big' questions--for instance, whether man has an immortal soul, whether there is a God, whether nature consists of tiny indivisible particles, and whether the universe is finite or infinite." "Yes." "Kant believed there was no certain knowledge to be obtained on these questions. Not that he rejected this type of argument. On the contrary. If he had just brushed these questions aside, he could hardly have been called a philosopher." "What did he do?" "Be patient. In such great philosophical questions, Kant believed that reason operates beyond the limits of what we humans can comprehend. At the same time, there is in our nature a basic desire to pose these same questions. But when, for example, we ask whether the universe is finite or infinite, we are asking about a totality of which we ourselves are a tiny part. We can therefore never completely know this totality." "Why not?" "When you put the red glasses on, we demonstrated that according to Kant there are two elements that contribute to our knowledge of the world." "Sensory perception and reason." "Yes, the material of our knowledge comes to us through the senses, but this material must conform to the attributes of reason. For example, one of the attributes of reason is to seek the cause of an event." "Like the ball rolling across the floor." "If you like. But 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." "But it will always be an attribute of human reason to ask where the ball comes from. That's why we ask and ask, we exert ourselves to the fullest to find answers to all the deepest questions. But we never get anything firm to bite on; we never get a satisfactory answer because reason is not locked on." "I know exactly how that feels, thank you very much." "In such weighty questions as to the nature of reality, Kant showed that there will always be two contrasting viewpoints that are equally likely or unlikely, depending on what our reason tells us." "Examples, please." "It is just as meaningful to say that the world must have had a beginning in time as to say that it had no such beginning. Reason cannot decide between them. We can allege that the world has always existed, but con anything always have existed if there was never any beginning? So now we are forced to adopt the opposite view. "We say that the world must have begun sometime-- and it must have begun from nothing, unless we want to talk about a change from one state to another. But can something come from nothing, Sophie?" "No, both possibilities are equally problematic. Yet it seems one of them must be right and the other wrong." "You probably remember that Democritus and the materialists said that nature must consist of minimal parts that everything is made up of. Others, like Descartes, believed that it must always be possible to divide extended reality into ever smaller parts. But which of them was right?" "Both. Neither." "Further, many philosophers named freedom as one of man's most important values. At the same time we saw philosophers like the Stoics, for example, and Spinoza, who said that everything happens through the necessity of natural law. This was another case of human reason being unable to make a certain judgment, according to Kant." "Both views are equally reasonable and unreasonable." "Finally, we are bound to fail if we attempt to prove the existence of God with the aid of reason. Here the rationalists, like Descartes, had tried to prove that there must be a God simply because we have the idea of a 'supreme being.' Others, like Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, decided that there must be a God because every-thing must have a first cause." "What did Kant think?" "He rejected both these proofs of the existence of God. Neither reason nor experience is any certain basis for claiming the existence of God. As far as reason goes, it is just as likely as it is unlikely that God exists." "But you started by saying that Kant wanted to preserve the basis for Christian faith." "Yes, he opened up a religious dimension. There, where both reason and experience fall short, there occurs a vacuum that can be filled by faith." "That's how he saved Christianity?" "If you will. Now, it might be worth noting that Kant was a Protestant. Since the days of the Reformation, Protestantism has been characterized by its emphasis on faith. The Catholic Church, on the other hand, has since the early Middle Ages believed more in reason as a pillar of faith. "But Kant went further than simply to establish that these weighty questions should be left to the faith of the individual. He believed that it is essential for morality to presuppose that man has an immortal soul, that God exists, and that man has a free will." "So he does the same as Descartes. First he is very critical of everything we can understand. And then he smuggles God in by the back door." "But unlike Descartes, he emphasizes most particularly that it is not reason which brought him to this point but faith. He himself called faith in the immortal soul, in God's existence, and in man's free will practical postulates." "Which means?" "To 'postulate' something is to assume something that cannot be proved. By a 'practical postulate,' Kant meant something that had to be assumed for the sake of 'praxis,' or practice; that is to say, for man's morality. 'It is a moral necessity to assume the existence of God,' he said." Suddenly there was a knock at the door. Sophie got up, but as Alberto gave no sign of rising, she asked: "Shouldn't we see who it is?" Alberto shrugged and reluctantly got up. They opened the door, and a little girl stood there in a white summer dress and a red bonnet. It was the girl they had seen on the other side of the lake. Over one arm she carried a basket of food. "Hi," said Sophie. "Who are you?" "Can't you see I am Little Red Ridinghood?" Sophie looked at Alberto, and Alberto nodded. "You heard what she said." "I'm looking for my grandmother's house," said the girl. "She is old and sick, but I'm taking her some food." "It's not here," said Alberto, "so you'd better get on your way." He gestured in a way that reminded Sophie of the way you brush off a fly. "But I'm supposed to deliver a letter," continued the girl in the red bonnet. With that, she took out a small envelope and handed it to Sophie. Then she went skipping away. "Watch out for the wolf!" Sophie called after her. Alberto was already on his way back into the living room. "Just think! That was Little Red Ridinghood," said Sophie. "And it's no good warning her. She will go to her grandmother's house and be eaten by the wolf. She never learns. It will repeat itself to the end of time " "But I have never heard that she knocked on the door of another house before she went to her grandmother's." "A bagatelle, Sophie." Now Sophie looked at the envelope she had been given. It was addressed "To Hilde." She opened it and read aloud: Dear Hilde, If the human brain was simple enough for us to understand, we would still be so stupid that we couldn't understand it. Love, Dad. Alberto nodded. "True enough. I believe Kant said something to that effect. We cannot expect to understand what we are. Maybe we can comprehend a flower or an insect, but we can never comprehend ourselves. Even less can we expect to comprehend the universe." Sophie had to read the cryptic sentence in the note to Hilde several times before Alberto went on: "We are not going to be interrupted by sea serpents and the like. Before we stop for today, I'll tell you about Kant's ethics." "Please hurry. I have to go home soon." "Hume's skepticism with regard to what reason and the senses can tell us forced Kant to think through many of life's important questions again. Not least in the area of ethics." "Didn't Hume say that you can never prove what is right and what is wrong2 You can't draw conclusions from is - sentence? to ought-sentences." "For Hume it was neither our reason nor our experience that determined the difference between right and wrong. It was simply our sentiments. This was too tenuous a basis for Kant." "I can imagine." "Kant had always felt that the difference between right and wrong was a matter of reason, not sentiment. In this he agreed with the rationalists, who said the ability to distinguish between right and wrong is inherent in human reason. Everybody knows what is right or wrong, not because we have learned it but because it is born in the mind. According to Kant, everybody has 'practical reason,' that is, the intelligence that gives us the capacity to discern what is right or wrong in every case." "And that is innate?" "The ability to tell right from wrong is just as innate as all the other attributes of reason. Just as we are all intelligent beings, for example, perceiving everything as having a causal relation, we all have access to the same universal moral law. "This moral law has the same absolute validity as the physical laws. It is just as basic to our morality as the statements that everything has a cause, or that seven plus five is twelve, are basic to our intelligence." "And what does that moral law say?" "Since it precedes every experience, it is 'formal.' That is to say, it is not bound to any particular situation of moral choice. For it applies to all people in all societies at all times. So it does not say you shall do this or this if you find yourself in that or that situation. It says how you are to behave in all situations." "But what is the point of having a moral law implanted inside yourself if it doesn't tell you what to do in specific situations?" "Kant formulates the moral law as a categorical imperative. By this he means that the moral law is 'categorical,' or that it applies to all situations. It is, moreover, 'imperative,' which means it is commanding and therefore absolutely authoritative." "Kant formulates this 'categorical imperative' in several ways. First he says: Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a Universal Law of Nature." "So when I do something, I must make sure I want everybody else to do the same if they are in the same situation." "Exactly. Only then will you be acting in accordance with the moral law within you. Kant also formulates the 'categorical imperative' in this way: Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end." "So we must not exploit other people to our own advantage." "No, because every man is an end in himself. But that does not only apply to others, it also applies to you yourself. You must not exploit yourself as a mere means to achieving something, either." "It reminds me of the golden rule: Do unto others . . ." "Yes, that is also a 'formal' rule of conduct that basically covers all ethical choices. You could say that the golden rule says the same thing as Kant's universal law of morals." "But surely this is only an assertion. Hume was probably right in that we can't prove what is right or wrong by 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." "I get the feeling that what we are really talking about is conscience. Because everybody has a conscience, don't they?" "Yes. When Kant describes the law of morals, he is describing the human conscience. We cannot prove what our conscience tells us, but we know it, nevertheless." "Sometimes I might only be kind and helpful to others because I know it pays off. It could be a way of becoming popular." "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." "I can feel it my duty to collect money for the Red Cross or the church bazaar." "Yes, and the important thing is that you do it because you know it is right. Even if the money you collect gets lost in the street, or is not sufficient to feed all the mouths it is intended to, you obeyed the moral law. You acted out of good will, and according to Kant, it is this good will which determines whether or not the action was morally right, not the consequences of the action. Kant's ethics is therefore also called a good will ethic." "Why was it so important to him to know exactly when one acts out of respect for moral law? Surely the most important thing is that what we do really helps other peo-pie." "Indeed it is and Kant would certainly not disagree. But only when we know in ourselves that we are acting out of respect for moral law are we acting freely." "We act freely only when we obey a law? Isn't that kind of peculiar?" "Not according to Kant. You perhaps remember that he had to 'assume'or 'postulate' that man has a free will. This is an important point, because Kant also said that everything obeys the law of causality. How, then, can we have a free will?" "Search me." "On this point Kant divides man into two parts in a way not dissimilar to the way Descartes claimed that man was a 'dual creature,' one with both a body and a mind. As material creatures, we are wholly and fully at the mercy of causality's unbreakable law, says Kant. We do not decide what we perceive--perception comes to us through necessity and influences us whether we like it or not. But we are not only material creatures--we are also creatures of reason. "As material beings we belong wholly to the natural world. We are therefore subject to causal relations. As such, we have no free will. But as rational beings we have a part in what Kant calls das Ding an sich--that is, the world as it exists in itself, independent of our sensory impressions. Only when we follow our 'practical reason'-- which enables us to make moral choices--do we exercise our free will, because when we conform to moral law, it is we who make the law we are conforming to." "Yes, that's true in a way. It is me, or something in me, which tells me not to be mean to others." "So when you choose not to be mean--even if it is against your own interests--you are then acting freely." "You're not especially free or independent if you just do whatever you want, in any case." "One can become a slave to all kinds of things. One can even become a slave to one's own egoism. Independence and freedom are exactly what are required to rise above one's desires and vices." "What about animals? I suppose they just follow their inclinations and needs. They don't have any freedom to follow moral law, do they?" "No, that's the difference between animals and humans." "I see that now." "And finally we could perhaps say that Kant succeeded in showing the way out of the impasse that philosophy had reached in the struggle between rationalism and empiricism. With Kant, an era in the history of philosophy is therefore at an end. He died in 1804, when the cultural epoch we call Romanticism was in the ascendant. One of his most quoted sayings is carved on his gravestone in Konigsberg: Two things fill my mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the reflection dwells on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.' " Alberto leaned back in his chair. "That's it," he said. "I think I have told you what's most important about Kant." "Anyway, it's a quarter past four." "But there is just one thing. Please give me a minute." "I never leave the classroom before the teacher is finished." "Did I say that Kant believed we had no freedom if we lived only as creatures of the senses?" "Yes, you said something like that." "But if we obey universal reason we are free and independent. Did I say that, too?" "Yes. Why are you saying it again now?" Alberto leaned toward Sophie, looked deep into her eyes, and whispered: "Don't believe everything you see, Sophie." "What do you mean by that?" "Just turn the other way, child." "Now, I don't understand what you mean at all." "People usually say, I'll believe that when I see it. But don't believe what you see, either." "You said something like that once before." "Yes, about Parmenides." "But I still don't know what you mean." "Well, we sat out there on the step, talking. Then that so-called sea serpent began to flap about in the water." "Wasn't it peculiar!" "Not at all. Then Little Red Ridinghood came to the door. 'I'm looking for my grandmother's house.' What a silly performance! It's just the major's tricks, Sophie. Like the banana message and that idiotic thunderstorm." "Do you think ... ?" "But I said I had a plan. As long as we stick to our reas

[table=100%,#ffffff,#000000,1][tr][td]The Enlightenent ...from the way needles are made to the way cannons are founded¡K Hilde had just begun the chapter on the Renaissance when she heard her mother come in the front door. She looked at the clock. It was four in the afternoon. Her mother ran upstairs and opened Hilde's door. "Didn't you go to the church?" "Yes, I did." "But... what did you wear?" "What I'm wearing now." "Your nightgown?" "It's an old stone church from the Middle Ages." "Hilde!" She let the ring binder fall into her lap and looked up at her mother. "I forgot the time, Mom. I'm sorry, but I'm reading something terribly exciting." Her mother could not help smiling. "It's a magic book," added Hilde. "Okay. Happy birthday once again, Hilde!" "Hey, I don't know if I can take that phrase any more." "But I haven't... I'm just going to rest for a while, then I'll start fixing a great dinner. I managed to get hold of some strawberries." "Okay, I'll go on reading." Her mother left and Hilde read on. Sophie is following Hermes through the town. In Alberto's hall she finds another card from Lebanon. This, too, is dated June 15. Hilde was just beginning to understand the system of the dates. The cards dated before June 15 are copies of cards Hilde had already received from her dad. But those with today's date are reaching her for the first time via the ring binder. Dear Hilde, Now Sophie is coming to the philosopher's house. She will soon be fifteen, but you were fifteen yesterday. Or is it today, Hilde? If it is today, it must be late, then. But our watches do not always agree . . . Hilde read how Alberto told Sophie about the Renaissance and the new science, the seventeenth-century rationalists and British empiricism. She jumped at every new card and birthday greeting that her father had stuck into the story. He got them to fall out of an exercise book, turn up inside a banana skin, and hide inside a computer program. Without the slightest effort, he could get Alberto to make a slip of the tongue and call Sophie Hilde. On top of everything else, he got Hermes to say "Happy birthday, Hilde!" Hilde agreed with Alberto that he was going a bit too far, comparing himself with God and Providence. But whom was she actually agreeing with? Wasn't it her father who put those reproachful--or self-reproachful--words in Alberto's mouth? She decided that the comparison with God was not so crazy after all. Her father really was like an almighty God for Sophie's world. When Alberto got to Berkeley, Hilde was at least as enthralled as Sophie had been. What would happen now? There had been all kinds of hints that something special was going to happen as soon as they got to that philosopher--who had denied the existence of a material world outside human consciousness. The chapter begins with Alberto and Sophie standing at the window, seeing the little plane with the long Happy Birthday streamer waving behind it. At the same time dark clouds begin to gather over the town. "So 'to be or not to be' is not the whole question. The question is also who we are. Are we really human beings of flesh and blood? Does our world consist of real things--or are we encircled by the mind?" Not so surprising that Sophie starts biting her nails. Nail-biting had never been one of Hilde's bad habits but she didn't feel particularly pleased with herself right now. Then finally it was all out in the open: "For us-- for you and me--this 'will or spirit' that is the 'cause of everything in everything' could be Hilde's father." "Are you saying he's been a kind of God for us?" "To be perfectly candid, yes.He should be ashamed of himself!" "What about Hilde herself?" "She is an angel, Sophie." "An angel?" "Hilde is the one this 'spirit' turns to." With that, Sophie tears herself away from Alberto and runs out into the storm. Could it be the same storm that raged over Bjerkely last night--a few hours after Sophie ran through the town? As she ran, one thought kept going round and round in her mind: "Tomorrow is my birthday*. Isn't it extra bitter to realize that life is only a dream on the day before your fifteenth birthday? It's like dreaming you won a million and then just as you're getting the money you wake up." Sophie ran across the squelching playing field. Minutes later she saw someone come running toward her. It was her mother. The sky was pierced again and again by angry darts of lightning. When they reached each other Sophie's mother put her arm around her. "What's happening to us, little one?" "I don't know," Sophie sobbed. "It's like a bad dream." Hilde felt the tears start. "To be or not to be--that is the question." She threw the ring binder to the end of the bed and stood up. She walked back and forth across the floor. At last she stopped in front of the brass mirror, where she remained until her mother came to say dinner was ready. When Hilde heard the knock on the door, she had no idea how long she had been standing there. But she was sure, she was perfectly sure, that her reflection had winked with both eyes. She tried to be the grateful birthday girl all through dinner. But her thoughts were with Sophie and Alberto all the time. How would things go for them now that they knew it was Hilda's father who decided 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? Still, the problem was the same however you looked at it. As soon as Sophie and Alberto "knew" how everything hung together, they were in a way at the end of the road. She almost choked on a mouthful of food as she suddenly realized that the same problem possibly applied to her own world too. People had progressed steadily in their understanding of natural laws. Could history simply continue to all eternity once the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle of philosophy and science had fallen into place? Wasn't there a connection between the development of ideas and science on the one hand, and the greenhouse effect and deforestation on the other? Maybe it was not so crazy to call man's thirst for knowledge a fall from grace? The question was so huge and so terrifying that Hilde tried to forget it again. She would probably understand much more as she read further in her father's birthday book. "Happy birthday to you ...," sang her mother when they were done with their ice cream and Italian strawberries. "Now we'll do whatever you choose." "I know it sounds a bit crazy, but all I want to do is read my present from Dad." "Well, as long as he doesn't make you completely delirious." "No way." "We could share a pizza while we watch that mystery on TV." "Yes, if you like." Hilde suddenly thought of the way Sophie spoke to her mother. Dad had hopefully not written any of Hilde's mother into the character of the other mother? Just to make sure, she decided not to mention the white rabbit being pulled out of the top hat. Not today, at least. "By the way," she said as she was leaving the table. "What?" "I can't find my gold crucifix anywhere." Her mother looked at her with an enigmatic expression. "I found it down by the dock weeks ago. You must have dropped it, you untidy scamp." "Did you mention it to Dad?" "Let me think ... yes, I believe I may have." "Where is it then?" Her mother got up and went to get her own jewelry case. Hilde heard a little cry of surprise from the bedroom. She came quickly back into the living room. "Right now I can't seem to find it." "I thought as much." She gave her mother a hug and ran upstairs to her room. At last--now she could read on about Sophie and Alberto. She sat up on the bed as before with the heavy ring binder resting against her knees and began the next chapter. Sophie woke up the next morning when her mother came into the room carrying a tray loaded with birthday presents. She had stuck a flag in an empty soda bottle. "Happy birthday, Sophie!" Sophie rubbed the sleep from her eyes. She tried to remember what had happened the night before. But it was all like jumbled pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. One of the pieces was Alberto, another was Hilde and the major. A third was Berkeley, a fourth Bjerkely. The blackest piece of all was the violent storm. She had practically been in shock. Her mother had rubbed her dry with a towel and simply put her to bed with a cup of hot milk and honey. She had fallen asleep immediately. "I think I'm still alive," she said weakly. "Of course you're alive! And today you are fifteen years old." "Are you quite sure?" "Quite sure. Shouldn't a mother know when her only child was born? June 15, 1975 ... and half-past one, Sophie. It was the happiest moment of my life." "Are you sure it isn't all only a dream?" "It must be a good dream to wake up to rolls and soda and birthday presents." She put the tray of presents on a chair and disappeared out of the room for a second. When she came back she was carrying another tray with rolls and soda. She put it on the end of the bed. It was the signal for the traditional birthday morning ritual, with the unpacking of presents and her mother's sentimental flights back to her first contractions fifteen years ago. Her mother's present was a tennis racket. Sophie had never played tennis, but there were some open-air courts a few minutes from Clover Close. Her father had sent her a mini-TV and FM radio. The screen was no bigger than an ordinary photograph. There were also presents from old aunts and friends of the family. Presently her mother said, "Do you think I should stay home from work today?" "No, why should you?" "You were very upset yesterday. If it goes on, I think we should make an appointment to see a psychiatrist." "That won't be necessary." "Was it the storm--or was it Alberto?" "What about you? You said: What's happening to us, little one?" "I was thinking of you running around town to meet some mysterious person ... Maybe it's my fault." "It's not anybody's 'fault' that I'm taking a course in philosophy in my leisure time. Just go to work. School doesn't start till ten, and we're only getting our grades and sitting around." "Do you know what you're going to get?" "More than I got last semester at any rate." Not long after her mother had gone the telephone rang. "Sophie Amundsen." "This is Alberto." "Ah." "The major didn't spare any ammunition last night." "What do you mean." "The thunderstorm, Sophie." "I don't know what to think." "That is the finest virtue a genuine philosopher can have. I am proud of how much you have learned in such a short time." "I am scared that nothing is real." "That's called existential angst, or dread, and is as a rule only a stage on the way to new consciousness." "I think I need a break from the course." "Are there that many frogs in the garden at the moment?" Sophie started to laugh. Alberto continued: "I think it would be better to persevere. Happy birthday, by the way. We must complete the course by Midsummer Eve. It's our last chance." "Our last chance for what?" "Are you sitting comfortably? We're going to have to spend some time on this, you understand." "I'm sitting down." "You remember Descartes?" "I think, therefore I am?" "With regard to our own methodical doubt, we are right now starting from scratch. We don't even know whether we think. It may turn out that we are thoughts, and that is quite different from thinking. We have good reason to believe that we have merely been invented by Hilde's father as a kind of birthday diversion for the major's daughter from Lillesand. Do you see?" "Yes . . ." "But therein also lies a built-in contradiction. If we are fictive, we have no right to 'believe' anything at all. In which case this whole telephone conversation is purely imaginary." "And we haven't the tiniest bit of free will because it's the major who plans everything we say and do. So we can just as well hang up now." "No, now you're oversimplifying things." "Explain it, then." "Would you claim that people plan everything they dream? It may be that Hilde's father knows everything we do. It may be just as difficult to escape his omniscience as it is to run away from your own shadow. However-- and this is where I have begun to devise a plan--it is not certain that the major has already decided on everything that is to happen. He may not decide before the very last minute--that is to say, in the moment of creation. Precisely at such moments we may possibly have an initiative of our own which guides what we say and do. Such an initiative would naturally constitute extremely weak impulses compared to the major's heavy artillery. We are very likely defenseless against intrusive external forces such as talking dogs, messages in bananas, and thunderstorms booked in advance. But we cannot rule out our stubbornness, however weak it may be." "How could that be possible?" "The major naturally knows everything about our little world, but that doesn't mean he is all powerful. At any rate we must try to live as if he is not." "I think I see where you're going with this." "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." "Or our free will?" "I'm working on it, Sophie." "But Hilde's father must be fully aware that you are working on it." "Decidedly so. But he doesn't know what the actual plan is. I am attempting to find an Archimedian point." "An Archimedian point?" "Archimedes was a Greek scientist who said '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." "That would be quite a feat." "But we won't manage to slip away before we have finished the philosophy course. While that lasts he has much too firm a grip on us. He has clearly decided that I am to guide you through the centuries right up to our own time. But we only have a few days left before he boards a plane somewhere down in the Middle East. If we haven't succeeded in detaching ourselves from his gluey imagination before he arrives at Bjerkely, we are done for." "You're frightening me!" "First of all I shall give you the most important facts about the French Enlightenment. Then we shall take the main outline of Kant's philosophy so that we can get to Romanticism. Hegel will also be a significant part of the picture for us. And in talking about him we will unavoidably touch on Kierkegaard's indignant clash with Hegelian philosophy. We shall briefly talk about Marx, Darwin, and Freud. And if we can manage a few closing comments on Sartre and Existentialism, our plan can be put into operation." "That's an awful lot for one week." "That's why we must begin at once. Can you come over right away?" "I have to go to school. We are having a class get-together and then we get our grades." "Drop it. If we are only fictive, it's pure imagination that candy and soda have any taste." "But my grades ..." "Sophie, either you are living in a wondrous universe on a tiny planet in one of many hundred billion galaxies-- or else you are the result of a few electromagnetic impulses in the major's mind. And you are talking about grades! You ought to be ashamed of yourself!" "I'm sorry." "But you'd better go to school before we meet. It might have a bad influence on Hilde if you cut your last school-day. She probably goes to school even on her birthday. She is an angel, you know." "So I'll come straight from school." "We can meet at the major's cabin." "The major's cabin?" ... Click! Hilde let the ring binder slide into her lap. Her father had given her conscience a dig there--she did cut her last day at school. How sneaky of him! She sat for a while wondering what the plan was that Alberto was devising. Should she sneak a look at the last page? No, that would be cheating. She'd better hurry up and read it to the end. But she was convinced Alberto was right on one important point. One thing was that her father had an overview of what was going to happen to Sophie and Alberto. But while he was writing, he probably didn't know everything that would happen. He might dash off something in a great hurry, something he might not notice till long after he had written it. In a situation like that Sophie and Alberto would have a certain amount of leeway. Once again Hilde had an almost transfiguring conviction that Sophie and Alberto really existed. Still waters run deep, she thought to herself. Why did that idea come to her? It was certainly not a thought that rippled the surface. At school, Sophie received lots of attention because it was her birthday. Her classmates were already keyed up by thoughts of summer vacation, and grades, and the sodas on the last day of school. The minute the teacher dismissed the class with her best wishes for the vacation, Sophie ran home. Joanna tried to slow her down but Sophie called over her shoulder that there was something she just had to do. In the mailbox she found two cards from Lebanon. They were both birthday cards: HAPPY BIRTHDAY--15 YEARS. One of them was to "Hilde M0ller Knag, c/o Sophie Amundsen . . ." But the other one was to Sophie herself. Both cards were stamped "UN Battalion--June 15." Sophie read her own card first: Dear Sophie Amundsen, Today you are getting a card as well. Happy birthday, Sophie, and many thanks for everything you have done for Hilde. Best regards, Major Albert Knag. Sophie was not sure how to react, now that Hilde's father had finally written to her too. Hilde's card read: Dear Hilde, I have no idea what day or time it is in Lillesand. But, as I said, it doesn't make much difference. If I know you, I am not too late for a last, or next to last, greeting from down here. But don't stay up too late! Alberto will soon be telling you about the French Enlightenment. He will concentrate on seven points. They are: 1. Opposition to authority 2. Rationalism 3. The enlightenment movement 4. Cultural optimism 5. The return to nature 6. Natural religion 7. Human rights The major was obviously still keeping his eye on them. Sophie let herself in and put her report card with all the A's on the kitchen table. Then she slipped through the hedge and ran into the woods. Soon she was once again rowing across the little lake. Alberto was sitting on the doorstep when she got to the cabin. He invited her to sit beside him. The weather was fine although a slight mist of damp raw air was coming off the lake. It was as though it had not quite recovered from the storm. "Let's get going right away," said Alberto. "After Hume, the next great philosopher was the German, Immanuel Kant. But France also had many important thinkers in the eighteenth century. We could say that the philosophical center of gravity h. Europe in the eighteenth century was in England in the first half, in France in the middle, and in Germany toward the end of it." "A shift from west to east, in other words." "Precisely. Let me outline some of the ideas that many of the French Enlightenment philosophers had in common. The important names are Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau, but there were many, many others. I shall concentrate on seven points." "Thanks, that I am painfully aware of." Sophie handed him the card from Hilde's father. Alberto sighed deeply. "He could have saved himself the trouble ... the first key words, then, are opposition to authority. Many of the French Enlightenment philosophers visited England, which was in many ways more liberal than their home country, and were intrigued by the English natural sciences, especially Newton and his universal physics. But they were also inspired by British philosophy, in particular by Locke and his political philos-ophy. Once back in France, they became increasingly opposed to the old authority. They thought it was essential to remain skeptical of all inherited truths, the idea being that the individual must find his own answer to every question. The tradition of Descartes was very inspiring in this respect." "Because he was the one who built everything up from the ground." "Quite so. The opposition to authority was not least directed against the power of the clergy, the king, and the nobility. During the eighteenth century, these institu-tions had far more power in France than they had in England." "Then came the French Revolution." "Yes, in 1789. But the revolutionary ideas arose much earlier. The next key word is rationalism." "I thought rationalism went out with Hume." "Hume himself did not die until 1776. That was about twenty years after Montesquieu and only two years before Voltaire and Rousseau, who both died in 1778. But all three had been to England and were familiar with the philosophy of Locke. You may recall that Locke was not consistent in his empiricism. He believed, for example, that faith in God and certain moral norms were inherent in human reason. This idea is also the core of the French Enlightenment." "You also said that the French have always been more rational than the British." "Yes, a difference that goes right back to the Middle Ages. When the British speak of 'common sense,' the French usually speak of 'evident.' The English expression means 'what everybody knows,' the French means 'what is obvious'--to one's reason, that is." "I see." "Like the humanists of antiquity--such as Socrates and the Stoics--most of the Enlightenment philosophers had an unshakable faith in human reason. This was so characteristic that the French Enlightenment is often called the Age of Reason. The new natural sciences had revealed that nature was subject to reason. Now the Enlightenment philosophers saw it as their duty to lay a foundation for morals, religion, and ethics in accordance with man's immutable reason. This led to the enlightenment movement." "The third point." "Now was the time to start 'enlightening' the masses. This was to be the basis for a better society. People thought that poverty and oppression were the fault of ig-norance and superstition. Great attention was therefore focused on the education of children and of the people. It is no accident that the science of pedagogy was founded during the Enlightenment." "So schools date from the Middle Ages, and pedagogy from the Enlightenment." "You could say that. The greatest monument to the enlightenment movement was characteristically enough a huge encyclopedia. I refer to the Encyclopedia in 28 volumes published during the years from 1751 to 1772. All the great philosophers and men of letters contributed to it. 'Everything is to be found here,' it was said, 'from the way needles are made to the way cannons are founded.' " "The next point is cultural optimism," Sophie said. "Would you oblige me by putting that card away while I am talking?" "Excuse me." "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. "But this criticism of 'civilization' was already being voiced by French Enlightenment philosophers." "Maybe we should have listened to them." "For some, the new catchphrase was back to nature. But 'nature' to the Enlightenment philosophers meant almost the same as 'reason/ since human reason was a gift of nature rather than of religion or of 'civilization.' 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 civilization which ruins him. Rousseau also believed that the child should be allowed to remain in its 'naturally' innocent state as long as possible. It would not be wrong to say that the idea of the intrinsic value of childhood dates from the Enlightenment. Previously, childhood had been considered merely a preparation for adult life. But we are all human beings--and we live our life on this earth, even when we are children." "I should think so!" "Religion, they thought, had to be made natural." "What exactly did they mean by that?" "They meant that religion also had to be brought into harmony with 'natural' reason. There were many who fought for what one could call a natural religion, and that is the sixth point on the list. At the time there were a lot of confirmed materialists who did not believe in a God, and who professed to atheism. But most of the Enlightenment philosophers thought it was irrational to imagine a world without God. The world was far too rational for that. Newton held the same view, for example. It was also considered rational to believe in the immortality of the soul. Just as for Descartes, whether or not man has an immortal soul was held to be more a question of reason than of faith." "That I find very strange. To me, it's a typical case of what you believe, not of what you know." "That's because you don't live in the eighteenth century. According to the Enlightenment philosophers, what religion needed was to be stripped of all the irrational dogmas or doctrines that had got attached to the simple teachings of Jesus during the course of ecclesiastical history." "I see." "Many people consequently professed to what is known as Deism." "What is that?" "By Deism we mean a belief that God created the world ages and ages ago, but has not revealed himself to the world since. Thus God is reduced to the 'Supreme Being' who only reveals himself to mankind through nature and natural laws, never in any 'supernatural' way. We find a similar 'philosophical God' in the writings of Aristotle. For him, God was the 'formal cause' or 'first mover.' " "So now there's only one point left, human rights." "And yet this is perhaps the most important. On the whole, you could say that the French Enlightenment was more practical than the English philosophy." "You mean they lived according to their philosophy?" "Yes, very much so. The French Enlightenment philosophers did not content themselves with theoretical views on man's place in society. They fought actively for what they called the 'natural rights' of the citizen. At first, this took the form of a campaign against censorship--for the freedom of the press. But also in matters of religion, morals, and politics, the individual's right to freedom of thought and utterance had to be secured. They also fought for the abolition of slavery and for a more humane treatment of criminals." "I think I agree with most of that." "The principle of the 'inviolability of the individual' culminated in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen adopted by the French National Assembly in 178V. This Declaration of Human Rights was the basis for our own Norwegian Constitution of 1814." "But a lot of people still have to fight for these rights." "Yes, unhappily. But the Enlightenment philosophers wanted to establish certain rights that everybody was entitled to simply by being born. That was what they meant by natural rights. "We still speak of a 'natural right' which can often be in conflict with the laws of the land. And we constantly find individuals, or even whole nations, that claim this 'natural right' when they rebel against anarchy, servitude, and oppression." "What about women's rights?" "The French Revolution in 1787 established a number of rights for all 'citizens.' But a citizen was nearly always considered to be a man. Yet it was the French Revolution that gave us the first inklings of feminism." "It was about time!" "As early as 1787 the Enlightenment philosopher Condorcet published a treatise on the rights of women. He held that women had the same 'natural rights' as men. During the Revolution of 1789, women were extremely active in the fight against the old feudal regime. For example, it was women who led the demonstrations that forced the king away from his palace at Versailles. Women's groups were formed in Paris. In addition to the demand for the same political rights as men, they also demanded changes in the marriage laws and in women's social conditions." "Did they get equal rights?" "No. Just as on so many subsequent occasions, the question of women's rights was exploited in the heat of the struggle, but as soon as things fell into place in a new regime, the old male-dominated society was re-introduced." "Typical!" "One of those who fought hardest for the rights of women during the French Revolution was Olympe de Gouges. In 1791--two years after the revolution--she published a declaration on the rights of women. The declaration on the rights of the citizen had not included any article on women's natural rights. Olympe de Gouges now demanded all the same rights for women as for men." "What happened?" "She was beheaded in 1793. And all political activity for women was banned." "How shameful!" "It was not until the nineteenth century that feminism really got under way, not only in France but also in the rest of Europe. Little by little this struggle began to bear fruit. But in Norway, for example, women did not get the right to vote until 1913. And women in many parts of the world still have a lot to fight for." "They can count on my support." Alberto sat looking across at the lake. After a minute or two he said: "That was more or less what I wanted to say about the Enlightenment." "What do you mean by more or less?" "I have the feeling there won't be any more." But as he said this, something began to happen in the middle of the lake. Something was bubbling up from the depths. A huge and hideous creature rose from the surface. "A sea serpent!" cried Sophie. The dark monster coiled itself back and forth a few times and then disappeared back into the depths. The water wa