Sophie’s World: Chapter 27 Summary & Analysis

Hilde sits in her room, having just read Chapter 26 of her book. She’s dizzied by what Alberto and Sophie have just said—even if Sophie is just the product of someone’s imagination, perhaps Hilde and her father are no different. Hilde realizes that Sophie has been speaking directly to her—Sophie is asking Hilde to rebel against her father. Amused and confused, she continues to read Sophie’s World.

In the book, Alberto is teaching Sophie about Hegel. Hegel, born in 1770, criticized much of Romanticism for its lack of precision. He was interested in studying “spirit,” but in a slightly different sense than Schelling. Hegel began with Kant’s notion of the thing in itself—the external world in all its ambiguity and unpredictability. Hegel believed that humans could interact with the external world, changing the very definition of truth in the process. This is a complicated idea, Alberto admits.

Alberto clarifies Hegel’s notion of truth. Most Western philosophers before Hegel believed in a timeless definition of truth, morality, etc. In other words, what’s morally right today was also morally right 3,000 years ago. Hegel challenges this assumption. History, he claimed, is in a constant state of flux, meaning that people are always changing their ideas of what is and isn’t true (Plato had one idea of truth; Kant had another). But it wouldn’t be right to say that Kant was right and Plato was wrong. On the contrary, each period of history gets closer and closer to the truth. The process by which human understanding gets closer to understanding truth is called the development of the “world spirit.” Hegel is unclear about what’s going to happen when mankind reaches a state of enlightenment. He suggests that the world itself (the externalworld, as well as the world of ideas) will become self-conscious.

Hegel described the process by which human understanding gradually gets closer to the world spirit. Whenever a new idea is introduced to the world, it’s followed by a negation of that idea—Hegel calls this the “thesis,” followed by the “antithesis.” For example, when Descartes proposed rationalism, Hume countered it with empiricism. But only with the help of both Hume and Descartes could Kant reach his philosophical position, a combination of empiricism and rationalism. Hegel calls this stage the “synthesis.” In all, this process of ideas is called the “dialectic.” The dialectic is a useful concept for understanding the way humans exchange ideas. Even when two people engage in an argument, their argument usually takes on a dialectical structure: thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

Hegel used the dialectic to analyze the nature of individualism. Hegel questioned the Romantic idea that individuals can get on by themselves. Individuals are always interacting with their community—one could say that individualism is a thesis, and communitarianism is the opposite point of view, the antithesis. Over time, both individualism and communitarianism change in response to each other. The idea that individuals can be free of their societies becomes increasingly far-fetched. In the end, Hegel argued, individuals will become more important in their communities, and communities will begin to respect and honor individuals.

Hegel believed that philosophy is the “mirror of the world spirit.” Sophie finds this interesting, since it reminds her of the brass mirror in her room. She wonders what the “significance” of this mirror could be. Alberto suggests that only Hilde can answer this question.