“That was very poetic.”
“The Spanish dramatist Calderon de la Barca, who was bom in the year 1600,
wrote a play called Life Is a Dream, in which he says: ‘What is life? A madness. What
is life? An illusion, a shadow, a story, and the greatest good is little enough, for all life
is a dream ...’ “
“He may be right. We read a play at school. It was called Jeppe on the Mount.”
“By Ludvig Holberg, yes. He was a gigantic figure here in Scandinavia,
marking the transition from the Baroque period to the Age of Enlightenment.”
“Jeppe falls asleep in a ditch ... and wakes up in the Baron’s bed. So he thinks
he only dreamed that he was a poor farmhand. Then when he falls asleep again they
carry him back to the ditch, and he wakes up again. This time he thinks he only
dreamed he was lying in the Baron’s bed.”
“Holberg borrowed this theme from Calderon, and Calderon had borrowed it
from the old Arabian tales, A Thousand and One Nights. Comparing life to a dream,
though, is a theme we find even farther back in history, not least in India and China.
The old Chinese sage Chuang-tzu, for example, said: Once I dreamed I was a
butterfly, and now I no longer know whether I am Chuang-tzu, who dreamed I was a
butterfly, or whether I am a butterfly dreaming that I am Chuang-tzu.”
“Well, it was impossible to prove either way.”
“We had in Norway a genuine Baroque poet called Fetter Dass, who lived from
1647 to 1707. On the one hand he was concerned with describing life as it is here and
now, and on the other hand he emphasized that only God is eternal and constant.”
“God is God if every land was waste, God is God if every man were dead.”
“But in the same hymn he writes about rural life in Northern Norway—and
about lumpfish, cod, and coal-fish. This is a typical Baroque feature, describing in the
same text the earthly and the here and now—and the celestial and the hereafter. It is
all very reminiscent of Plato’s distinction between the concrete world of the senses
and the immutable world of ideas.”
“What about their philosophy?”
“That too was characterized by powerful struggles between diametrically
opposed modes of thought. As I have already mentioned, some philosophers believed
that what exists is at bottom spiritual in nature. This standpoint is called idealism. The
opposite viewpoint is called materialism. By this is meant a philosophy which holds
that all real things derive from concrete material substances. Materialism also had
many advocates in the seventeenth century. Perhaps the most influential was the
English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. He believed that all phenomena, including man
and animals, consist exclusively of particles of matter. Even human consciousness—
or the soul—derives from the movement of tiny particles in the brain.”
“So he agreed with what Democritus said two thousand years before?”
“Both idealism and materialism are themes you will find all through the history
of philosophy. But seldom have both views been so clearly present at the same time as
in the Baroque. Materialism was constantly nourished by the new sciences. Newton
showed that the same laws of motion applied to the whole universe, and that all
changes in the natural world—both on earth and in space—were explained by the
principles of universal gravitation and the motion of bodies.
“Everything was thus governed by the same unbreakable laws—or by the same
mechanisms. It is therefore possible in principle to calculate every natural change
with mathematical precision. And thus Newton completed what we call the
mechanistic world view.”
“Did he imagine the world as one big machine?”