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Wonder as a way of life

We are here now. A philosophy of life
Forfatter: Jostein Gaarder
Forlag: Kagge Forlag, (Norge)
PHILOSOPHY / Jostein Gaarder conveys a mixture of worry and wonder.




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

Philosophy of life can be a bit of a dangerous activity to embark on. It quickly turns into loose wonder in a text without substance and rigor, where the author's pretensions boil over like porridge in an overcooked pot, and the contents flow outwards.

Jostein Gaarder has shown many times before that he masters the genre. I experience that his wonder is real, and that the concern that lies beneath, and that gives form and strength to the wonder, is also so.

This book is for his six grandchildren; they are the ones who will take over the earth. What exactly is he that an older man leaves them? This book serves both as a kind of summary of his earlier writings, and as an open letter to the world: "What does the world look like towards the end of the 21st century?"

The wonder of the world, of the fact that the world just as well could not exist.

I myself have only met Jostein Gaarder once, and it was at a Wittgenstein seminar at the Walaker hotel in Sogn, and I understand well why he was there: the wonder of the world, of the fact that the world could not exist as well as to exist, and what at all brought it to sudden existence, both philosophers have in common – although the way of expressing wonder is different.

Anecdotal

The weakness of the book is that the author jumps too quickly from topic to topic. When he writes that he experiences himself as a stranger, and that he wakes up with an alien next to him in bed every single morning, namely himself, I wish he could go deeper into the topic. Instead, he leaves this interesting topic just a few lines later and wants to share with us a completely different experience. In that sense, I think the book will be too anecdotal. What does it really mean to experience oneself as a stranger in this way? How does it really feel? I won't know that. He trusts more that the reader recognizes himself in the description, and that it is therefore not necessary to go into detail. This makes the book a bit tame.

Jostein Gaarder

He also doesn't take the time to delve into the interesting topic of telepathy, but is content to flirt with it a little. The same applies to the phenomenon of parapsychology. He claims that it is not possible to give parapsychology any kind of scientific justification. But here it is possible that his perception of what scientific justification entails is too limited.

If this book pretended to be more than light whipped cream, he could, for example, draw in the research of Rupert Sheldrake, who, for example, has researched the telepathic abilities of animals. When repeated experiments on animals regarding the phenomenon of telepathy actually confirm that animals have telepathic abilities, then surely that is scientific enough?

"Wonder light"

The problem with Gaarder's wonder is that it stops before it gets really interesting; unfortunately it becomes a bit like "wonder light". He is clearly afraid of breaking with the framework of the scientific paradigm that all of us here in the north have grown up with. And that's a shame. He keeps wonder as his attitude to life, but wonder must contain something other than just wonder to be really exciting? Take a statement like: "People have always had different sets of ideas about supernatural beings. Perhaps it has never happened in the history of mankind that such beings have revealed themselves or in any way declared themselves to be any human or any people, and the reason for that may be the very simplest, namely that such beings do not exist.

Here, Gaarder probably makes it too easy for himself. The point of supernatural beings is that they only reveal themselves through their absence. They are there, but they are still not there. That's exactly what makes it so scary. An acquaintance of mine, a well-known author, experienced, for example, that his dog was kicked several meters away in the garden of an old house where he had spent the night. I once interviewed a man who had written his sociology thesis on ghosts. It had been a joke for over twenty years in a shop near the Swedish border. The scary thing is that such experiences happen against people's will, and that they challenge our accepted perceptions of reality, yes, that they move beyond rationality. This contributes to putting people in deep doubt about who they themselves are, and whether their perception of reality is really the right one.

Gaarder is simply too intolerant in his encounter with the supernatural.

In this sense, I feel that Gaarder puts an end to it too early. He stops where it could have become really interesting, and is simply too intolerant in his encounter with the supernatural. Of course ghosts don't exist, but still they are there. Perhaps in another dimension that crosses our own? That's what makes the world such a strange place. Yet there are many who doubt their own fixed beliefs, even after a greater reality threatens to explode their consciousness. The can do not give up your materialistic world view.

A mediator

That does not prevent Gaarder from being a good writer and a good teacher. He is obviously someone that young people want to listen to. He knows a lot of history, and he conveys his insights in a good and exemplary way. But we probably have to leave it to a younger generation to question the accepted truths about what is and isn't acceptable.

Henning Næs
Henning Næss
Literary critic in MODERN TIMES.

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