Sophie\'s World / Foucault Theories

Sophie's World / Foucault Theories

Sophie's World - like many novels and human stories as well - can bring truth to light in the mind of the reader and observer as a link between knowledge and power. The first theory of Michel Foucault ("Knowledge, Power, and Truth") holds that knowledge is always "linked to power" and knowledge has the power to "make itself true." Further, Foucault says, power is not necessarily brutal or "repressive" and moreover the power can be expressed through understanding (knowledge) and cultural values. These values are found throughout Sophie's World. It is Foucault's belief that when speaking of truth, one must understand the cultural context of that truth (i.e., what is believed as being true throughout time in a given culture at a given time); there is an underlying "regime of truth," he explained, based on the setting, and context.

Foucault-focused knowledge in one aspect of Sophie's story is plain to see when Sophie and Alberto become aware of the fact that they are fictional; they thought they were real, and the knowledge of their real nature over a period of time made itself true. What Sophie thought she knew about herself and the things around her guided how she behaved; she had no idea until her 15th birthday that she was a pawn in her father's philosophical work of fiction, which in turn, is merely the fictional approach to philosophical knowledge expressed in a novel by Gaarder.

In her "travels" through history, as she meets with high-visibility philosophical theories and witnesses cultural settings in the many time periods philosophers lived in, all of those instances have their own "regime of truth" for her, because her knowledge of them makes them true.

When the dog Hermes speaks, for example, is that just a fictional tool of the author whose manuscript Sophie is a part of, a character in? The knowledge of having believed that the dog spoke makes it true. To wit, on page 260 (paperback version) the dog "began to shudder violently" and his jaws "began to vibrate but Hermes neither growled nor barked"; he opened his mouth and said "Happy birthday Hilde!" And although she must have only imagined it, and in a moment the dog is barking normally as though to mask the earlier words spoken, "deep down" she became convinced that the dog indeed had spoken. Truth is linked to knowledge and that is power in the mind of Sophie.

The novel's characters and dialogue helps put forward Foucault's first "knowledge is linked to power" theory. Indeed, the theories and philosophies of the great men that Sophie runs across in her world of fiction and reality and the collision of truth and power help convey to the reader what Foucault has put forward. On page 261-262 Alberto raises the issue of "rationalism" (in the 17th Century Descartes believed reason is the essential source of knowledge and that man has "certain innate" ideas in his mind prior to any experience). Alberto, as part of the novel's didactic (teaching) theme, then contrasts Descartes' rationalism with 18th Century philosophers including Locke, Hume, and Berkeley who were "empiricists."

The empiricist (including the original empiricist thinker Aristotle) believed that "all knowledge of the world" is derived from what our senses tell us. Englishman John Locke, Alberto explains (263), believed that prior to any experience, the human mind is "bare and empty as a blackboard before the teacher arrives." But when we begin having experiences, the truth comes clear because now we have knowledge of those experiences, and the blackboard begins to have writing on it, and knowledge conveyed through it, Locke believed. "Each society has its regime of truth," Foucault wrote (1980, p. 131); and clearly many of the 18th Century leading philosophers believed in the empiricist approach to knowledge, so this type of thinking became "the truth" in that window of time in history.