consumed the dry grass ever more hungrily. It took her a while to put out the
fire by stamping on it.
Thank goodness! Sophie glanced down at the blackened grass. She
was holding a box of matches in her hand.
She couldn’t have started the fire herself, could she?
When she met Alberto outside the cabin she told him what had
happened.
“Scrooge was the miserly capitalist in A Christmas Carol, by Charles
Dickens. You probably remember the little match girl from the tale by Hans
Christian Andersen.”
“I didn’t expect to meet them here in the woods.”
“Why not? These are no ordinary woods, and now we are going to talk
about Karl Marx. It is most appropriate that you have witnessed an example of
the tremendous class struggles of the mid-nineteenth century. But let’s go
inside. We are a little more protected from the major’s interference there.”
Once again they sat at the little table by the window facing the lake.
Sophie could still feel all over her body how she had experienced the little lake
after having drunk from the blue bottle.
Today, both bottles were standing on the mantelpiece. There was a
miniature model of a Greek temple on the table.
“What’s that?” asked Sophie.
“All in good time, my dear.”
Alberto began to talk: “When Kierkegaard went to Berlin in 1841, he
might have sat next to Karl Marx at Schel-ling’s lectures. Kierkegaard had
written a master of arts thesis on Socrates. About the same time, Marx had
written a doctoral thesis on Democritus and Epicurus—in other words, on the
materialism of antiquity. Thus they had both staked out the course of their
own philosophies.”
“Because Kierkegaard became an existentialist and Marx became a
materialist?”
“Marx became what is known as a historical materialist. But we’ll come
back to that.”
“Go on.”
“Each in his own way, both Kierkegaard and Marx took Hegel’s
philosophy as their point of departure. Both were influenced by Hegel’s mode
of thought, but both rejected his ‘world spirit,’ or his idealism.”
“It was probably too high-flown for them.”
“Definitely. In general, we usually say that the era of the great
philosophical systems ended with Hegel. After him, philosophy took a new
direction. Instead of great speculative systems, we had what we call an
existential philosophy or a philosophy of action. This was what Marx meant
when he observed that until now, ‘philosophers have only interpreted the
world in various ways; the point is to change it.’ These words mark a
significant turning point in the history of philosophy.”
“After meeting Scrooge and the little match girl, I have no problem
understanding what Marx meant.”
“Marx’s thinking had a practical—or political—objective. He was not only
a philosopher; he was a historian, a sociologist, and an economist.”
“And he was a forerunner in all these areas?”
“Certainly no other philosopher had greater significance for practical