Sophie's World
Sophie's World
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Jostein Gaarder on Sophie's World
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A shame too specific to ignoreThe immediate trigger was not a grand ambition but a small, uncomfortable scene Gaarder played out in his head after finishing his previous novel, ‘The Solitaire Mystery’, in which a thirteen-year-old boy encounters Greek philosophy. He followed the boy forward in his imagination, into a bookstore, and what he found there settled the matter.
I just imagined, after I’d written that book, that this boy would now probably go into a bookstore or a library and ask the librarian for a book on philosophy. And the librarian would have to say ‘No. Nothing for you. You’re too young. You must go away.’ And then I felt ashamed, and a little angry as well.
The shelves that should have held accessible philosophy were not empty in the early 1990s. They held something else, and Gaarder’s objection to that substitute was precise: it was not the subject matter he disputed but the removal of the question.
I think this alternative philosophy is very much instant philosophy. You buy a cheap paperback and all of a sudden you are in a strange realm wondering and wondrous. For me philosophy is to do with asking questions, but alternative philosophy gives the answers too quickly.
He expected the book to reach almost no one. He was so certain of its commercial irrelevance that he framed the conversation with his wife as a practical negotiation over how much time he could afford to spend on a project with no real income attached.
I told my wife, I’m now writing a real odd book, you know, it’s for very very few readers, it’s a novel about the history of philosophy, and we will have no real income from that book, I think, I said. And she said so write it quickly then. [paraphrased from audio]
He took her advice. The book was written in three months, with two young sons at home making anything slower impractical.
How he wrote it
A girl who rescued a manualBefore Sophie existed, the book had a different opening register entirely. Gaarder has described almost writing a flat declarative statement about human beings always having asked philosophical questions. Sophie as a fourteen-year-old protagonist arrived later and changed what kind of book this could be: once she was on the page, philosophy could unfold as her personal discovery rather than as instruction passed down from above.
For many women, it is very important to try to understand something. For men, it is very important to be understood.
Making the protagonist a girl was deliberate. Gaarder connected it to the Greek word for wisdom being feminine, and to what he had observed across a decade of classroom teaching.
He stopped the history of philosophy at roughly 1900, and he gave two reasons. The first was honest about his limits as an author. The second was structural, rooted in what he believed the book was actually for.
The most obvious is that I am not an expert on 20th Century philosophy. I don’t want to teach philosophy in isolation. I want to show connections and put things in context. Give young people some roots.
The book’s eventual reach across forty languages puzzled many observers, and Gaarder has offered a consistent explanation. It locates the cause not in the philosophy itself but in how the philosophy arrives.
I think the reason is narrative. Our brains are wired to respond to story, and Sophie’s World presents philosophical ideas in the form of a story. Most people think that philosophy has to be very difficult to read, and boring. But when you present these ideas in a narrative, they realise that this isn’t true.
His classroom years fed directly into this conviction about story as a delivery mechanism. Before he wrote novels full-time, the test of whether an explanation worked was whether a room of teenagers stayed with him.
I believe a good teacher is a good storyteller. Humans can store a lot of information in their brain but they react emotionally to a story.
The personal thread
A promise made in adolescenceYears before he taught philosophy to anyone, Gaarder was the teenager who found the universe’s existence astonishing and could not make his friends share the feeling. He has described turning to them with the question of whether it was strange that the universe existed at all and receiving near-indifference in return. He made himself a promise then, and the book is in part its repayment.
To wonder about life is not something we learn, it is something we forget.
Teaching high school philosophy for roughly ten years gave that adolescent conviction an institutional form, but leaving the classroom created a specific pressure. He felt he could not close that door before the conversations he had been having with students found their way into a book. As he told Ramona Koval in Melbourne, the classroom processes felt too alive to simply abandon.
I couldn’t just leave all these interesting processes in the classroom with the students... I had to write the book first. [paraphrased from audio]
What he wants us to sit with
The word ‘why’ as a civic actHe has made the same political argument about philosophy in interviews across three decades, with the same word at its center. The argument is not that philosophy produces good citizens as a side effect; it is that a society that discourages the question is already structurally broken.
A sane society brings up young people to ask critical questions. The most important word in the English language is the word ‘why’, and you should teach young people to use this word.
The emotional counterpart to that civic argument is quieter. Where the political case asks what philosophy does for a society, this one asks what wonder does for a person, and its answer is that wonder is not an achievement but a default state that most of us are trained out of before we notice the loss.
The universe is a great mystery. I am really more interested in questions than in giving answers. Where did the world come from? The question has an answer, even though I cannot get to it. It is a good question. It is like a crime that has not been solved.
Philosophy Now asked him, in the early 1990s, whether academic philosophy had failed to reach the public. His answer identified the cause as a failure of access rather than of interest, and pointed to where he thought the discipline originally lived.
I wanted to bring it back to the marketplace.
For Gaarder, the book was not a popularization of something that belonged to universities. It was a return of something that had been taken from anyone who wandered into an agora with a question they could not silence.