Posted By BillHeise on May 31, 2009

I went to Ripon College because the drinking age in Wisconsin was 18. Not an auspicious start for college career. However, I was interested in learning. The problem was that I had been launched on my learning experience only a year before. And when I got to college, it was not at all what I thought it should be. I thought it would be more like a monastery, recessed from the world in which great ideas were discussed. It turned out not to be the case. What I found instead were a lot of people discussing, not the great books and ideas, but issues of more immediate concern: what time the bars opened.

When I got into my sophomore year, I realized that the one teacher that I would have to take most of my classes with was a classical Freudian—he told me once proudly that he was the only person in the college, including the psychology department, who had read the all the works of Freud. I wasn’t really all that interested in Freud. I was of the Jung camp, which I thought (with some justification, I might add) was a little more literary and a little less psychological.

That year I hit upon, just by chance, a work by Herman Hesse which changed my life completely. It encapsulated the difference between what I thought my education should be and what it actually was. It was entitled The Glass Bead Game. It was his last work, a work for which he won the Noble prize in literature in 1946.

In it, he attempted to set out a world in the future in which academics have been split apart from the world entirely. They live in the universities—know collectively as Castilia—where they have constructed a glass bead game. The game is a metaphor for academic achievement set apart from the ordinary concerns of ordinary people, who were a little too rough, a little too bourgeois to appreciate the finer points of Castilian learning.

[See the links at the bottom of the Wikipedia article for examples of real glass bead games.]

I believe I missed the point of the book.

Hesse’s Point in The Glass Bead Game

Hesse’s point in The Glass Bead Game was to set Castilian serenity in the midst of a turbulent world. Hesse wrote a friend in 1945 that Castilia was “a metaphor for stability in the midst of flux” (The Glass Bead Game Introduction xv). What happened to his aesthetic ideal was the interference of  post-war events:

At least two factors contributed to change in Hesse’s attitude toward the ideal which he had been striving to portray in some way works for almost 20 years. First, the sheer reality of contemporary events—the disintegration of the Weimer Republic, the rise of Hitler, the horrors of Nazism—opened Hesse’s eyes to the failure of the intellectuals and convinced him of the futility of any spiritual realm divorced wholly from contemporary social reality. (The Glass Bead Game Introduction xvi)

Hesse decided that he needed to have his hero, Joesph Knecht, break free of his serene existence as the master of the game and venture forth into the world to teach others what he knows. So, at the height of his powers and at the pinnacle of his career as head of the Castilian order, he walks away from his duties and goes back to bring his serene aesthetic sense to the larger world. He does so by taking a job as a tutor to the son (Tito) of one of his old bourgeois friends, Plinio Designori.

Tito was a very active young man, and he takes his serene new tutor, who has lived his life to its full potential but who never entered into the world of politics or history, out for a swim. The old tutor drowns instantly.

Apparently, Herman Hesse meant this by having his novel end in this way:

By quitting Castilia, Knecht fulfills two functions. He serves as Castilia by warning it, through his example, to forsake its posture of arrogant and self-indulgent autonomy, which can lead ultimately only to its destruction. And he makes a commitment by putting spirit and intellect at the service of the world outside in the person of his pupil, the youth Tito. Knecht’s death has been variously interpreted, and certainly that final scene has symbolic overtones of standard dimensions. But Hesse made its basic meaning quite clear in a letter of 1947. “He leads behind a Tito for whom the sacrificial death of a man vastly superior to him will remain forever an admonition and an example.” The spiritual ideal, once attained, has now been put back into the service of life. (The Glass Bead Game Introduction xvii)

My Misreading

Okay, I missed that. I read it differently.

I was fascinated by the character of Plinio Designori. He was a hospitant, a member of a wealthy and worldly family who sent their children to the university for training before they left the protective atmosphere of academia and went back to the world. Hesse describes him this way:

Plinio Designori, then, was one such hospitant whom Joseph Knecht—slightly his junior—encountered in Waldzell. He was a talented young man, particularly brilliant in talk and debate, fiery and somewhat restive in temperament. His presence often troubled Headmaster Zbinden, for although he was a good student and gave no cause for reprimands, he made no effort to forget his exceptional position as a hospitant and to fall into line as inconspicuously as possible. On the contrary, he frankly and belligerently professed a non-Castalian, worldly point of view. Inevitably, a special relationship sprang up between these two students. Both were extremely gifted and both had a vocation; these qualities made them brothers, although in everything else they were opposites. (92)

It was in this outsider that I placed my faith. So, being an outsider in academia I decided to follow the path laid out by Plinio Designori. I dropped out of school and was determined to study more fully on my own than I could ever have studied in the restricted atmosphere of a college or university.

I reasoned thus. Joseph Knecht was what Herbert Marcuse would call a one-dimensional person. He’d sealed himself off from the world in an ivory tower in order to pursue his studies to their full potential. However, as a consequence, he was not involved in the daily activity of people within the world.

When I was young, I thought that it was possible to escape from the academic tower back into the world, and I thought this would provide me a fuller experience than remaining in academia itself. After all, I was not terribly impressed by my initial college experience. It seems to me that Herman Hesse had hit the nail on the head with his portrait of academia. And so when Joseph Knecht attempts to bridge the gap between his academic experience in the real world, he fails completely and dies almost instantly. I did not want to reach the end of my life as an academic only to suddenly realize that I had been a one-dimensional man. I wanted it all.

The Academic Experience

The academic world went in a different direction within the “space” laid out by Hermann Hesse. Hesse himself had recognized the genius of Friedrich Nietzsche, and had included him in the novel as Joseph’s “brilliant but unstable friend” Fritz Tegularius (Wikipedia) However, in Hesse’s mind, Tegularius was not a centered human being. Instead, he lived at (and for) the margins of existence. Joseph was the centered man who could play the game without the interference and turbulence of an unstable personality.

Dropping Out and In

In 1981, I was not confident that I could get a good enough education in college. And so I dropped out, preferring to study deeply on my own, rather than studying shallowly in an academic setting. This gave me the best of both worlds. I was able to get myself a very strong education, which was not forthcoming when I was in college the first time, and I was able to learn about how the world actually works.

For me, this was a significant experience, because I was able to appreciate the world of business. This is not to say that I thought the business world was a realm of the unlimited possibility. I thought that the business world was limited, just as Hesse had explained, and so after four years I reapplied to school. I got in, and was forever after an “A” student.

But after I back to school I did not forget the lessons that I had learned. I knew people who were happy owning carwashes and collecting golf balls in their abundant spare time. It wasn’t for me, but happiness is happiness. It doesn’t really matter how you come about the state of satisfaction. This attitude towards business did not bother me at all as an undergraduate.

Ideal and Real in Graduate School

However when I got into graduate school, I realize that there is an academic bias towards the course that I set myself when I read The Glass Bead Game. The broad feeling was that you could not be happy unless you had the intellectual experience at the foundation of your being. Everyone else in the universe was simply a living their life blind to the truth about themselves, about the world, and about their relationships with others. I became the enemy, because it seems to my academic colleagues that I was holding onto “false consciousness,” which is a Marxist term for people who are so blind to their own circumstances that they actually believe things that those of a “higher” mentality have transcended.

This mentality runs deep within the academic community. Since the academic community is comprised people who are interested in the intellectual approach to life, and since they are almost always “the smartest people in the room,” they get used to being smarter than everybody else in their narrow field. They may know less than other people in their department, but when they go home they’re still much smarter than anybody they used to know.

This insulates them from alternate points of view. And rather than open themselves up to other points of view, they decided everyone else is wrong. After all, they have studied for years, while their ungrateful students do not even attempt to partake fully of the knowledge that these underpaid and quite well-educated—I do not say over educated, because I don’t believe that one can be over educated—professors are offering them. This sets them in the position of always knowing more than the person they are conversing with.

The “Free” Professions

Hesse gives voice to this academic snobbery when he is talking about “the free professions.”

The Magister Musicae drew the young man aside and stood with him under one of the giant trees. An almost sly smile puckered the skin around his eyes into little wrinkles as he replied: “Your name is Knecht,* my friend, and perhaps for that reason the word `free’ is so alluring for you. But do not take it too seriously in this case. When the non- Castalians speak of the free professions, the word may sound very serious and even inspiring. But when we use it, we intend it ironically. Freedom exists in those professions only to the extent that the student chooses the .profession himself. That produces an appearance of freedom, although in most cases the choice is made less by the student than by his family, and many a father would sooner bite off his tongue than really allow his son free choice. But perhaps that is a slander; let us drop this objection. Let us say that the freedom exists, but it is limited to the one unique act of choosing the profession. Afterward all freedom is over. When he begins his studies at the university, the doctor, lawyer, or engineer is forced into an extremely rigid curriculum which ends with a series of examinations. If he passes them, he receives his license and can thereafter pursue his profession in seeming freedom. But in doing so he becomes he is dependent on the slave of base powers;on success, on money, on his ambition, his hunger for fame, on whether or not people like him. He must submit to elections, must earn money, must take part in the ruthless competition of castes, families, political parties, newspapers. In return he has the freedom to become successful and well- to-do, and to be hated by the unsuccessful, or vice versa, For the elite pupil and later member of the Order, every- thing is the other way around. He does not `choose’ any profession. He does not imagine that he is a better judge of his own talents than are his teachers. He accepts the place and the function within the hierarchy that his superiors choose for him-if, that is, the matter is not reversed and the qualities, gifts, and faults of the pupil compel the teachers to send him to one place or another. In the midst of this seeming unfreedom every electus enjoys the greatest imaginable freedom after his early courses. Whereas the man in the `free’ professions must submit to a narrow and rigid course of studies with rigid examinations in order to train for his future career, the electus, , as soon as he begins studying independently, enjoys so much freedom that there are many who all their lives choose the most abstruse and frequently almost foolish studies, and may continue without hindrance as long as their conduct does not degenerate. The natural teacher is employed as teacher, the natural educator as educator, the natural translator as translator; each, as if of his own accord, finds his way to the place in which he can serve, and in serving be free. Moreover, for the rest of his life he is saved from that `freedom’ of career which means such terrible slavery. He knows nothing of the struggle for money, fame, rank; he recognizes no parties, no dichotomy between the individual and the office, between what is private and what is public; he feels no dependence upon success. Now do you see, my son, that when we speak of the free professions, the word `free’ is meant rather humor¬ously.” (73-75)

So, in my teachers view, I still had one leg in the “free professions,” which were of course completely unfree. And since I was a student, my teachers were teachers, they would simply laugh at my position that the “free professions” were not as unfree as they thought. They, who had no experience whatsoever with the “free professions,” had been trained their whole life to distrust and flee from sucjh unfree professions. This happened to me so often, that by the end of the first semester of graduate school I had decided that I was going to keep my head down. I was going to graduate from college with a PhD. I thought I could remake the profession from within.

The Aging of Heise

Now you may think that this experience of reading The Glass Bead Game was one of the most important experiences in my life, and it was. However, I left school I started working on through a reading list of the greatest novels and plays and poems ever written, and as I progressed through these works, I came to realize that there were more subtle exploration of the ideas that I had encountered in Hermann Hesse. Therefore, even before I returned to college four years later, I had largely forgotten about Hesse’s work.

Years later, I went back and ordered another copy of this book and read it again. I realized what I had realized when I picked up Jung again. My response, I felt, was conditioned by my upbringing as an aristocrat looking for some measure of approval in his environment, which was not as rewarding to me as I thought fit. I realized that I had been a huge snob when I was in school the first time.

But I had moved beyond that youthful aristocratic longing even before I went back to school, and this is one of the reasons that I forgot Hesse’s book. I had misread Hesse. He wasn’t talking about the longing to become a whole person by reintegrating his intellectual life with the life of the bourgeois. Hesse was convinced that the life of the bourgeois was noticeably limited and that without the intrusion by a superior aesthetic and academic elite, they were doomed to failure.

The Meeting of Aged Men

But despite my misreading of Hesse, I felt that I was right to flee the aesthetic, academic life for a fuller life. Hesse’s academia was a search for and the finding of, those permanent elements of human life. There was no element of compromise or play in it.

But there were elements in this book that I had not noticed before. One of these elements was the element of time. For in their youth, these two characters, Joseph and Plinio, are opposite poles of the same experience. Their divergence comes after they go their separate ways: Joseph into the hierarchy, and Plinio into the non-hierarchical society of the bourgeoisie.

However they meet again when they are older, and they meet no longer as rivals, but his friends. The yawning gulf remains, but it is now bridged by their mutual attitude of sympathy and affection for one another. The difference is that they have aged.

I had a different experience since I had left academia at a young age. I actually found a better compromise between these two (ostensibly) contrary positions. I still managed to study, but I also had some practical experience about how the world actually works. And rather than settling, as I thought my academic superiors had settled, for a notion of how they thought the world should work, I had learned that the world works a little differently than people who have only academic training think.

Joseph’s Escape

At the end of the book, Joseph has risen to the top of the hierarchy, and is from there, having mastered the universe of the glass bead game, that he is ready to break out of his enclosed universe to tackle the problems of the world at large. His new life restores him to the feeling of wonder, as he stands in front of a bookcase for the first time in years:

Before dinner his host had left him alone for an hour. Knecht saw a bookcase full of old books which aroused his curiosity. I will reading was another pleasure which he had unlearned and almost forgotten years of abstinence. This moment now reminded him intensely of his student years: to stand before a bookshelf of unknown books, reach out at random, and choose one or another volume, whose gilt or author’s name, format or the color of the binding, appealed to him. (413)

Of course, most of the books were 19th and 20th century “belle-lettres,” but Hesse has given Joseph discriminating taste, and he has Joseph take down a more weighty volume: Wisdom of the Brahmans. He is, in Hesse’s mind, wiser than the man who has the means to collect books, Plinio.

The Wisdom of the Brahmans was, I am sure, an idealistic promise that wisdom could be had if only one was a proper cast. When I was a young man, this would’ve appealed to me. I was suitably cast for the role of savior of civilization in a world clouded by darkness.

But having followed the path of Plinio, rather than the path of Joseph, I wasn’t sure that Hesse’s solution was the only solution to the problem of the reintegration of learning into society. Plinio was not merely a dull version of the shining example of Joseph. He had solutions of his own, solutions of which Joseph was completely unaware. And this is why, in my opinion, Joseph drowns at the end of the book. It is not as a self-sacrifice, but as a judgment on the serious limitations of his worldview.

As an adult, as an American, I thought Hesse’s solution was a bit too exclusive and aristocratic for my taste. In fact, I thought that the idealistic position, which I found rampant throughout my education, was focused exclusively on escape from the world of time. But I thought that time itself was a better measure of success within the world than Joseph, who focused his mind completely on rising above the daily cares of the world to a castle in the sky, could ever understand.

And this was the lesson that I spent the next 30 years of my life pursuing.

Categories: Books, Philosophy
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