#Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World, Berkley(영역본)
(요슈타인 가아더, 소피의 세계, 장영은, 현암사)
<감상>
우리가 현재 살아가고 있는 세상은 어떻게 흘러가고 있는 것일까? 세계가 인터넷 통신 아래 하나로 통합되면서 발빠르게 나아가고 있는 가운데, 아직도 소크라테스 운운하는 것은 덜떨어진 사람들의 뒷북치기인가? 그렇지만, 인간으로 산다는 것은 언제나 궁극적인 몇 가지 질문으로부터 자유로울 수가 없다. 고갱은 그러한 질문의 일부를 자신의 그림 제목으로 삼기도 했다. D'où Venons-Nous? Que Sommes-Nous? Où Allons-Nous?(‘우리는 어디서 왔는가? 우리는 무엇인가? 우리는 어디로 가는가?’) 어떤 사람들은 이런 질문에 대해 나름대로의 답을 지니고 있을 것이고, 많은 사람들은 이런 질문이 답이 없는 것에 대한 시간 낭비라고 생각할 것이며, 또 일부 사람들은 우리 삶의 유일한 의의가 이러한 질문에 대한 답을 추구하는 데 있다고 본다.
요슈타인 가아더의 [소피의 세계]는 이 우주와 우리의 삶에 대해 고찰하는 것이 무의미한 시간 때움이 아니라, 삶을 능동적으로 살아가는데 필수불가결한 것이라고 생각하는 이들에게 권하고 싶은 그런 책이다. 이 책은 “서양 철학사”를 소설이라는 틀 안에다 넣어 놓은 그런 형식인데, 추리 소설을 연상케 하는 저자의 착상이나, 글을 엮어 나가는 솜씨 등이 우리를 책 속으로 빨려 들어가게 만든다. 다시 말해 호라티우스가 문학을 두고 말한 <즐겁게 또 유익하게>라는 경구를 잘 구현해 낸 책이라고 할 수 있다. (물론 이 책은 <철학 입문서>에 지나지 않기 때문에 이 책에서 깊이 있는 내용을 기대한다면 실망하게 될 지도 모르겠다.)
*Both Jesus and Socrates were enigmatic personalities, also to their contemporaries. Neither of them wrote down their teachings, so we are forced to rely on the picture we have of them from their disciples. But we do know that they were both masters of the art of discourse. They both spoke with a characteristic self-assuredness that could fascinate as well as exasperate. And not least, they both believed that they spoke on behalf of something greater than themselves. They challenged the power of the community by criticizing all forms of injustice and corruption. And finally--their activities cost them their lives.
The trials of Jesus and Socrates also exhibit clear parallels.
They could certainly both have saved themselves by appealing for mercy, but they both felt they had a mission that would have been betrayed unless they kept faith to the bitter end. And by meeting their death so bravely they commanded an enormous following, also after they had died. (66)
*The pre-Socratics had given a reasonably good explanation of natural change without having to presuppose that anything actually "changed." In the midst of nature's cycle there were some eternal and immutable smallest elements that did not dissolve, they thought. . . . But they had no reasonable explanation for how these "smallest elements" that were once building blocks in a horse could suddenly whirl together four or five hundred years later and fashion themselves into a completely new horse. Or an elephant or a crocodile, for that matter. Plato's point was that Democritus' atoms never fashioned themselves into an "eledile" or a "crocophant." This was what set his philosophical reflections going. (84)
*He<Plato-quoter> was astonished at the way all natural phenomena could be so alike, and he concluded that it had to be because there are a limited number of forms "behind" everything we see around us. Plato called these forms ideas. Behind every horse, pig, or human being, there is the "idea horse," "idea pig," and "idea human being." (85)
*Aristotle thought Plato had turned the whole thing upside down. He agreed with his teacher that the particular horse "flows" and that no horse lives forever. he also agreed that the actual form of the horse is eternal and immutable. But the "idea" horse was simply a concept that we humans had formed after seeing a certain number of horses. The "idea" or "form" horse thus had no existence of its own. To Aristotle, the "idea" or the "form" horse was made up of the horse's characteristics--which define what we today call the horse species.
To be more precise: by "form" horse, Aristotle meant that which is common to all horses. And here the metaphor of the gingerbread mold does not hold up because the mold exists independently of the particular gingerbread cookies. Aristotle did not believe in the existence of any such molds or forms that, as it were, lay on their own shelf beyond the natural world. on the contrary, to Aristotle the "forms" were in the things, because they were the particular characteristics of these things. (107)
*Aristotle pointed out that nothing exists in consciousness that has not first been experienced by the senses. Plato would have said that there is nothing in the natural world that has not first existed in the world of ideas. (108)
*Not infrequently we find in Hinduism and Buddhism on emphasis on the fact that the deity is present in all things(pantheism) and that man can become one with God through religious insight. To achieve this requires the practice of deep self-communion or meditation. Therefore in the Orient, passivity and seclusion can be religious ideals. In ancient Greece, too, there were many people who believed in an ascetic, or religiously secluded, way of life for the salvation of the soul. Many aspects of medieval monastic life can be traced back to beliefs dating from the Greco-Roman civilization. (152)
*Briefly, we can say that Aquinas christianized Aristotle in the same way that St. Augustine christianized Plato in early medieval times. (181)
*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. (329)
*One of his<Kant-quoter> saying is carved on his gravestone in Königsberg: '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.' (337)
*Tell me what you do and I'll tell you who you are. (397) [Marx]
*Maybe the imagination creates what is new, but the imagination does not make the actual selection. The imagination does not 'compose.' A composition--and every work of art is one--is created in a wondrous interplay between imagination and reason, or between mind and reflection. For there will always be an element of chance in the creative process. You have to turn the sheep loose before you can start to herd them. (445)
*Throughout the entire history of philosophy, philosophers have sought to discover what man is--or what human nature is. But Satre 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. (457)