11: Hermann Hesse: Searching for an Ethos of Humanity
Karl-Josef Kuschel
I believe in nothing in the world so deeply, no conception is so holy
to me, as unity, the conviction that everything in the world forms a
divine whole, and that the “I” takes itself too seriously.
—Hermann Hesse, A Guest at the Spa
When it comes to spiritual guidance and the art of living, Hesse readers like to turn to key quotes, such as the one above, to compensate for the alleged soullessness and meaninglessness of the modern world. They like to let the words of the poet take them on a “journey to within,” and let themselves be enchanted by sentences such as these:
To see through the world, to explain it, to scorn it—this may be the business of great thinkers. But what interests me is being able to love the world, not scorn it, not to hate it and myself, but to look at it and myself and all beings with love and admiration and reverence.
1Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha, trans. Susan Bernofsky (New York: The Modern Library, 2008), 122–23.Love, admiration, reverence … and if one then considers that Hesse was one of only a few authors of German literature in the twentieth century who ventured beyond the European horizon and into the spirituality of Asia; a thinker who emphasized like no other the “ancient notion of unity,” the unity of humanity, the unity of the spirit in spite of all the world’s diversity, then one can plausibly consider him a source of orientation in our era of worldwide communication, globalized economics, cosmopolitan awareness, and human responsibility: a true world citizen.
However, those who simply pick out convenient soundbites are guilty of misappropriating his work. They have understood nothing of what moved this author, what he experienced, the struggles he faced before he was able to write the sentences quoted at the start of this essay. They ignore the complex and painful process of growth that led to the key insights in his life and work. For instance, they close their eyes to his religious crisis in 1892, in which a desire to liberate himself from the strict religious socialization of his pietist Swabian upbringing and his need to overcome traumatic experiences in church boarding schools, asylums, and clinics had led to suicidal fantasies and a death wish. This liberation had its roots in the pietist environment he grew up in. Both his parents had worked as missionaries in India. Cultural and religious artefacts from India, including statues, clothing, images, and books, filled his parental home. Paradoxically enough, it was in the small, Swabian town of Calw of all places that Hesse encountered the world of other religions and cultures, which expanded his horizons.
Hesse then set off “to India” in 1911, but he never actually set foot on Indian soil. He visited Indonesia and Ceylon but was forced to cut his travels short for health reasons. He did, however, gain enough of an insight into the realities of European colonialism that he began to question the traditional Christian missionary triumphalism over the so-called heathens of the world. Hesse’s short story “Robert Aghion”
(1912) signals this break. It is the tale of an Englishman who is sent to India by an English missionary society through a combination of civilized colonialist arrogance and exclusivist Christian salvation that is typical of the time, in order to, in the words of a British planation manager, “bring this godless rabble a smattering of civilization and some conception of decency.”
2Hermann Hesse, “Robert Aghion,” in Stories of Five Decades, trans. Denver Lindley and Ralph Manheim (London: Harper Collins, 1976), 221. In striking contrast, Robert Aghion opens himself up to the overwhelming richness of the foreign culture, but also the moral and spiritual otherness of India’s religions. The experiences Hesse has his protagonists undergo are an antidote to the European arrogance and Christian intolerance inherent in their original missions: instead of the condemnation or even annihilation of other faiths, the joyful coexistence of religions; instead of the self-righteous uniformization of believers, the acceptance of diverse creativity and the appreciation of colorful sensuality; and instead of an obsession with conversion, inner peace and serene calm from the center of one’s own faith.
Indeed, during his voyage, Hesse himself first became aware of the feeling of
unity and a close sense of kinship of all human beings. The “last and greatest reward” of his journey to Southeast Asia, he acknowledged, was “that over and beyond the boundaries of nations and the quarters of the globe there is humanity.”
3Hermann Hesse, “Remembrance of India,” in Autobiographical Writings, trans. Denver Lindley (New York: Farra, Strauss and Girouz, 1972), 67–68. The sense of the unity of humanity, as Hesse discovered, initially springs from an empirical experience of the world. The more sustained this experience, the more it transforms into a universal ethos that is directed towards all nations and peoples under the banner of “brotherhood and inner equality.”
4Hesse, “Remembrance of India,” 68.This empirically grounded ethos was heightened by Hesse’s growing understanding of unity based on Indian religious and philosophical thought. To understand this, it should be noted that before he set out on his journey, Hesse began studying Indian and Chinese classics including the Bhagavad-Gita, The Sayings of Confucius, the Tao Te Ching, and later the I Ching in the then completely new, now classic edition by German Sinologist Richard Wilhelm. Beyond these texts, he also familiarized himself with the pioneering works of the fields of German Indology and Buddhology, which were very much in their infancy back then. These included Hermann Oldenberg’s now classic biography of Buddha, Paul Deussen’s era-defining translations of Vedic scriptures, and Karl-Eugen Neumann’s translation of the speeches of Buddha. Richard Wilhelm was a particularly influential source; he began as a missionary in the German colony of Tsingtao in north-eastern China in 1899, and in a parallel with Hesse, felt the need to free himself from the constraints of European Christian missionarism. In Wilhelm, Hesse saw a “forerunner and role model, a harmonious human, the synthesis of East and West”:
In China, in his intense engagement with ancient Chinese wisdom and in his close and amicable exchanges with learned Chinese scholars over years, he has lost neither his Christianity nor his Swabian-Thuringian Germanism; nor has he forgotten Jesus, Plato, and Goethe or his healthy, strong, Western pleasure in work and education. He has not run away from any European problem, nor has he balked at any call to life on-going; neither has he succumbed to intellectual nor aesthetic quietism, but rather, step-by-step, he has accomplished both the befriending and the fusion of the two great ancient ideals, he has reconciled China and Europe, yang and yin, thought and action, efficacy and tranquility.
5Hermann Hesse, “Ein Mittler zwischen China und Europa,” in Sämtliche Werke, 20 vols., ed. Volker Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001–2007) [=SW], vol. 20, 333–34.The outbreak and course of the First World War plunged Hesse into a deep, personal, and professional crisis. He could neither continue the bourgeois existence of a husband and father, nor continue to write the pleasing stories and novels he had previously. This period marked a painful turning point in his life. While Hesse had been able to live a relatively “bourgeois” life in Gaienhofen on the shore of Lake Constance (from 1904 to 1912) and Berne (from 1912 to 1917), a psychological crisis caused by the war, the death of his father, and the breakdown of his marriage led him to seek help with the psychoanalysts Josef Bernhard Lang and Carl Gustav Jung and, eventually, to cut all ties and move alone to Ticino (specifically the town of Montagnola) to begin a new chapter in his literary career. Key texts from this period are Demian (1917), Klein und Wagner (May–June 1919), and Klingsors letzter Sommer (Klingsor’s Last Summer, July–August 1919).
There is a radical change in the way Hesse now writes about his protagonists. To be sure, even the characters in his early novels, from
Peter Camenzind to
Knulp, are victims of their fears, doubts, and crises, of unrequited love, failing productivity, and society’s indifference—they are problematic, sensitive, and complex people. But from this point on Hesse wrote characters who carry a fatal contradiction within themselves. There is a man by the name of Klein, who is the image of decency, order, and tradition. And yet within Klein we also find Wagner, in whose soul dwells “crime,” as well as rebellion and the flouting of obligations, even hatred for his wife, flight, loneliness and “perhaps suicide.”
6Hermann Hesse, “Klein and Wagner,” in Klingsor’s Last Summer, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), 57. While Klein is a subdued man of sexual restraint, Wagner is tormented by phantasies of blood orgies and the vision of the quadruple murder/suicide of himself and his family. In short, if Klein is a “decent man,”
7Hesse, “Klein and Wagner,” 56. then Wagner is the “murderer and hunted man within him, but … also the composer, the artist, the genius, the seducer, lover of life and the senses, luxury.”
8Hesse, “Klein and Wagner,” 116. “Wagner”? This is “the collective name for everything repressed, buried, scanted in the life of Friedrich Klein, the former civil servant.”
9Hesse, “Klein and Wagner,” 116. Klein
and Wagner—a fatal concurrence of the contradictions in humanity itself—this is what Hesse was now beginning to describe like no other writer of German literature at the time.
The artist Klingsor, the titular character of Hesse’s novella Klingsor’s Last Summer, provides a particularly clear example of the new direction in Hesse’s writing. Klingsor is obsessed with painting a portrait of himself over one summer. This novella, too, is all about enduring the concurrence of contradictory states in one and the same person. To this end, Klingsor’s self-portrait must make many faces visible:
Here is man, ecce homo, the weary, greedy, wild, childlike, and sophisticated man of our late age, the European man who wants to die, overstrung by every longing, sick from every vice, enraptured by foreknowledge of his doom, ready for any kind of progress, ripe for any kind of retrogression, submitting to fate and pain like the drug addict to his poison, lonely, hollowed-out, age-old, at once Faust and Karamazov, beast and sage, wholly exposed, wholly without ambition, wholly naked, filled with childish dread of death and filled with weary readiness to die.
10Hermann Hesse, Klingsors letzter Sommer, SW 8:330.For Hesse, Europe had revealed itself to be a “seriously ill neurotic,” doomed to “ruin.”
11Hermann Hesse, “Die Brüder Karamasow oder: Der Untergang Europas,” SW 18:126. It is no coincidence that
Klingsor’s Last Summer plays out both in a magic garden in Ticino and at the same time somewhere between China, India, Africa, and Oceania. Aside from Goethe’s
West-East Divan, and the Chinese poets Li Tae Pe and Du Fu, it is above all an Armenian astrologer, a “messenger from the East,” through whom Asian spirituality gains in influence. It is this man who teaches Klingsor “magical thinking,” namely the realization that all the world’s contradictions are just illusions of human understanding, but in reality converge in a final act of magical-mystical unity.
12Hesse, Klingsors letzter Sommer, SW 8:314–15. Hesse had first outlined this “homecoming of the tired European spirit to the Asiatic mother”
13Hesse, “Die Brüder Karamasow oder: Der Untergang Europas,” SW 18:130. in 1919, and also hinted at this new-found position in his Dostoevsky essay “A Glimpse into Chaos,” written at almost exactly the same time: “it is the rejection of every strongly held system of ethics and morality in favor of a comprehensive
laissez-faire.”14Hesse, “Die Brüder Karamasow oder: Der Untergang Europas,” SW 18:126.It was precisely this that Hesse also had to learn for himself; how to understand everything, how to accept the value in everything, and to overcome the contradictions within himself by working through them. Everything that his Christian-Pietistic upbringing had rendered as opposites, good versus evil, sin versus virtue, guilt versus innocence, God versus the devil, now had to be assembled anew. A reconciliation had to follow, a reconciliation within his own heart. In other words: deliverance was to come from the acceptance of images of his own soul that had been rendered contradictory by his upbringing. To this end, two tenets of Indian-Verdic philosophy helped him; namely the thinking that it is not just the division between the (worldly) “I” and the (transcendental or true) “self,” as well as the belief that every individual is part of a greater whole, from which one must not isolate oneself. Everything has value and meaning. Hesse realized that what people understand as opposites and contradictions are in fact just their perceptions, while in truth, everything is a manifestation of the great unity.
This idea was cemented in a poem written by Hesse in September 1914 that already showed the influence of the war on him. Notably, it bears the title “Bhagavad-Gita”:
Hour after hour I lay sleepless once more,
incomprehensible sorrow, the soul full and sore.
Fire and death I saw on earth blaze,
innocent thousands rotting, suffering, in their graves.
And in my heart I the renounced war
and the unseeing God this senseless pain bore.
But lo then, in my hour of bleak
loneliness, memory did to me speak,
and the maxim of peace to me it told
from an Indian book of the gods, age-old:
“The two do equate, war and peace,
for the realm of the spirit death cannot reach.
Whether the veil of peace rises or falls,
the world’s woes remain undiminished in all.
And so you must struggle and lie not still;
that strength stirs in you is God’s will.
But if a thousand victories from your struggle result,
the heart of the world beats on untouched.”
15Hermann Hesse, “Bhagavad-Gita,” SW 10:221–22.Hesse was able to take the idea of the unity of being from the
Bhagavad-Gita. In its eleventh chapter, the hero Arjuna receives a great vision of God, which is given to him as the only human being. Here, he sees the world in God’s “body,” he sees God’s “radiance” warming “this universe” and filling all the “space between heaven and earth.”
16Bhagavadgita: Des Erhabenen Gesang, trans. L. von Schroeder (Munich: Diedrichs, 1978), 72 (BG 11,20). The key verse tells us: “Concentrated at one place in the person of that supreme Deity, Arjuna then beheld the whole universe with its manifold divisions.”
17Bhagavadgita, trans. Schroeder, 71 (BG 11,13).However, in his 1922 novel Siddhartha, Hesse took a decisive step further and created an initial connection between the basic idea of unity of being and, for the first time, a second key concept: love. Indeed, the vision of unity becomes the foundation for Siddhartha’s characteristic ethos of love for all living creatures. In the final conversation between Govinda, a disciple of Buddha, and Siddhartha, Siddhartha once again distances himself from the Buddha’s teaching. For the Buddha, the world is only image, only illusion (“maya”), and consequently he rejected all love of and attachment to the world and preached a radical path to overcome the world. Siddhartha, however, does not get involved in this discussion, but promotes a love for all things stemming from the connectedness of all with all. This key insight can now be formulated as:
If they are illusions, then I also am illusion, and so they are always of the same nature as myself. That is why I can love them. And here is a doctrine at which you will laugh. It seems to me, Govinda, that love is the most important thing in the world. It may be important to great thinkers to examine the world, to explain and despise it. But I think it is only important to love the world, not to despise it, not for us to hate each other, but to be able to regard the world and ourselves and all beings with love, admiration, and respect.
18Hesse, Siddhartha, SW 3:468.The origins of this are, of course, by no means as Indian as Hesse would have his audience believe in the subtitle to
Siddhartha. If we apply strict Indological criteria, as advised by Indologist Paul Hacker in his research on Schopenhauer and the ethics of Hinduism and further expanded in the work of Friedrich Huber on the manipulation of Indian traditions in
Siddhartha, then the Vedantic concept of unity was by no means originally connected to an ethos of love. Here, Hesse was relying on a Eurocentric interpretation of the Vedantic tradition found in the work of Schopenhauer and, specifically, Schopenhauer’s disciple Paul Deussen. For the latter, who sought to criticize Christianity, the Vedantic tradition was superior to Christianity in that the Upanishadic idea of unity provided the initial justification necessary for the Christian commandment of love. According to Deussen, “the Gospels quite correctly establish as the highest law of morality, ‘Love your neighbor as yourselves.’” He then goes on to question, however, “but why should I do so …? The answer is not in the Bible … but in the Veda, in the great formula ‘That art Thou,’ which gives in three words the combined sum of metaphysics and morals.”
19Deussen quoted in translation by Paul Hacker, Philology and Confrontation: Paul Hacker on Traditional and Modern Vedanta, ed. Wilhelm Halbfass (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995), 304–5. Thus, “you should love your neighbor as yourselves because you are your neighbor”
20Hacker, Philology and Confrontation, 304–5. and because it is “mere illusion that leads you to believe that your neighbor is something different from you.” Here, we can already see substantial amounts of wishful thinking within Deussen’s work. Hesse, too, got caught up in such wishfulness when writing about his own experiences in relation to Siddhartha:
From an Indian perspective, in the sense of the Upanishads and all of pre-Buddhist philosophy, that is, my neighbor is not merely “a person like me,” rather he is Me, he is one with me, because the division between him and me, between You and I, is illusion, maya. Within this interpretation, the potential ethical significance of neighborly love is also completely exhausted. Because once you recognize that the world is one entity, it rapidly becomes apparent that it is senseless for the individual parts and members of this whole to hurt one another.
21Hermann Hesse, “Brief an W. S. von Ende April 1941,” in Materialien zu Hermann Hesses “Siddhartha,” vol. 1, ed. Volker Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975), 225.We have now reached the most profound justification for this fundamental idea, namely that for Hesse the idea of the unity of humankind was not just an ethno-political demand wrested from a world in chaos (which is a fundamental distinction between him and the innumerable moralists, educators, and geopolitical activists of his time), but also a deep religious-philosophical experience out of which an ethos, an ideal, a normative standard and motivation could grow: de-separation and de-enemization out of love for all living beings. They are “always my equal!” This ethos is universal. “Siddhartha,” Hesse could then write openly, “is the confession of a man of Christian heritage and upbringing …, who has endeavored to understand other religions, in particular those around Indian and Chinese belief systems. I sought to fathom the common denominators between all faiths and forms of human piety, that which is above national difference, that which can be believed in and worshipped by every individual.”
22Hermann Hesse, “An die persischen Leser des ‘Siddhartha’” (1958), SW 12:213.Hence, the ideas of being all-understanding and of allowing everything its validity are not morally indifferent, nor can they be misused to create hierarchies of ethnic groups, and such critiques of Hesse have always been misguided. Hesse’s experience of unity was the direct opposite of insincere moralizing and standardized heteronomy. It is the root cause of an unbiased morality, of an ethics of being rather than an ethics of obligation, an ethos for the human condition without ethnic tension. Hesse once wrote to an acquaintance: “the existence of a spiritual world without boundaries or morals is as self-evident to me as the continued existence of a God above the Kaiser is to a devout man.”
23Hermann Hesse, “Brief aus Bern vom 13. 10. 1915,” in Gesammelte Briefe, vol. 1, ed. Volker Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 294. Everything is founded in the experience of unity, which, following on from “Siddhartha” Hesse knew to formulate clearly:
I believe in nothing in the world so deeply, no conception is so holy to me, as unity, the conviction that everything in the world forms a divine whole, that the “I” takes itself too seriously. I had suffered much pain in my life, had done much that was stupid and unpleasant, but again and again I had managed to free myself, to forget my “I,” and yield to the feeling of oneness, to recognize that the division between inner and outer, between “I” and the world, is an illusion and to enter willingly with eyes closed into the unity.
24Hermann Hesse, Kurgast, SW 11:84. Translation: Hermann Hesse, A Guest at the Spa, in: Autobiographical Writings, ed. Theodore Ziolkowski (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973), 121.Have we now discovered Hesse the philosopher and ethicist of humanity? Yes and no. Yes, because these words from 1923 summarize Hesse’s credo for the rest of his life. No, because Hesse’s emphasis on unity is always accompanied by the experience of unfathomable inner turmoil. We can always find this other side in his work: the experience of the fractured, the animalistic, the sickening. To see all “beings with love, admiration, and respect”?
25Hesse, Siddhartha, SW 3:468 That would remain a fiction for Hesse himself. Life provided other experiences for him, and he confronted them with a
radical ruthlessness against himself. Perhaps this is where Hesse’s true greatness as a writer lay: in the total ruthlessness with which, even as he grew older, he was prepared to face up to the hidden inscrutabilities of his own soul, which he often aesthetically camouflaged or concealed by means of a bourgeois façade. Texts such as
Tagebuch eines Entgleisten (Journal of One Who Has Been Derailed) or
Krisis: Ein Stück Tagebuch (Crisis: Pages from a Diary) serve as telling evidence of this.
26These are published in SW 4:247–56 and 211–46, respectively.The hope for reconciliation that shines through in Siddhartha once again falls into shadow. In Hesse’s subsequent novel, Steppenwolf (1926), very different experiences that were only hinted at before are condensed into a captivating literary parable that uncannily reflects the period. The fractures at the center of humanity return as a theme but to a much a greater degree. Where the “wolf-like” nature of the well-behaved civil servant Friedrich Klein was explored almost exclusively as fantasy in “Klein und Wagner,” in this new novel Hesse lets the lonely, fifty-year-old protagonist Harry Haller explore, try out, and experience everything both physically and psychologically; no longer just alcohol and inebriation, but a whole spectrum of sexual experiences, drug-induced ecstasies, destructive and aggressive tendencies, and suicidal fantasies.
But even in Steppenwolf there are also currents and figures pulling in the other direction. They are the “immortals,” namely Goethe and Mozart, who embody an ability to coexist with the bourgeois world and a capacity for “humor.” By the end, the Steppenwolf (Haller) is supposed to understand that a humorful, serene relationship can be forged with this crumbling, fractured world; a playful way of dealing with all the psychological diversity of human beings. Laughter and humor are ways of understanding the world without condemning it; of living in the world without falling victim to its structures; of coexisting with ambivalence beyond simple ignorance—as often found in the “bourgeois.” Laughter and humor can be ways to reconcile the self with the world, to reconcile the self with our own mortality and fractured nature.
From the beginning of the 1930s Hesse’s work had been developing more and more in the direction of constructing an alternative spiritual world. Chaos ceased to be part of the texts; instead, it became the context of the time against which Hesse was writing. This chaos took the form of European fascism and German megalomania: the “world civil war,” as Thomas Mann put it in a letter to Hesse.
27Thomas Mann, “Letter to Hermann Hesse, 13 July 1941,” in The Hesse/Mann Letters, ed. Anni Carlsson and Volker Michels (London, Peter Owen: 1976), 87. His major works in this period,
Die Morgenlandfahrt (The Journey to the East, 1932) and
Das Glasperlenspiel (The Glass Bead Game, 1943) were no longer the products of his own life crisis, rather they were the product of a man who had matured through the course of his path through life. They were no longer glimpses into the abyss, rather they were critical visions of the future, fed by the yearning “to experience everything imaginable simultaneously.”
28Hermann Hesse, The Journey to the East, trans. Hilda Rosner (New York: Picador 1956), 28 (SW 4:547).The contrast could not be sharper between the Nazis’ increasing barbarization of politics, the jarringly excessive nationalism and racist contempt for everything non-German or non-Germanic, and the “League of Voyagers to the East” as constructed by Hesse. This league constitutes an association of people in Asia and Europe—artists of all kinds, intellectuals of all stripes—who are as well informed about the Middle Ages as they are about the present, who feel as welcome in a “Chinese temple” where the “incense sticks glow under the bronze Maya” as they do in one of the King of Siam’s colonies, where “libations and burnt offerings” are made between the stone Buddhas.
29Hermann Hesse, “Die Morgenlandfahrt,” SW 4:548. The League’s narrative is not intended as a political scheme in the crude sense, it is not some kind of “Völkerverbrüderungsunternehmung” (enterprise of global brotherhood).
30Hesse, “Die Morgenlandfahrt,” SW 4:559. It remains a fairy tale, and yet this fairy tale of an association of the like-minded, who could count Zoroaster and Lao Tzu amongst its forebears as much as Albertus Magnus, Cervantes, Sterne, Novalis, and Baudelaire, is, when put in the temporal context of the fascist tide, of politically relevant resistance.
And the
Glass Bead Game? Here the central idea is that in the future of the third millennium, in a province called Castalia, there will be an order of spiritually educated people who know how to grasp and structurally unify everything “humankind has produced in terms of knowledge, high thought, and works of art from its creative age.”
31Hermann Hesse, Das Glasperlenspiel, SW 5:11. This order is committed to a heritage that reaches back to Pythagoras and the ancient Chinese, and has absorbed Arabic-Moorish thought, as well as scholasticism and humanism. A global literary project that strove for a “universal language,” a “world language,” which is derived from all the sciences and arts, and which can therefore express what is common to all human beings: “knowledge of the tragedy of humanity, affirmation of human destiny, bravery, and serenity.”
32Hesse, Das Glasperlenspiel, SW 5:35 and 38.The Glass Bead Game, when seen from a contemporary perspective, reads as the literary and theologically unwieldy attempt at a revocation of Genesis 11, a retraction of humankind’s Babylonian confusion of languages. The novel is nothing less than a post-Babylonian world-literary and cosmopolitan enterprise, committed to the idea of interlinking all knowledge, not in some esoteric, playful elitism, but rather as a monument to the intellect as a counterforce to the nationalist brutalization and technicist appropriation of intelligence in all its unwieldiness, something which requires considered contemplation. At the same time, it offers a resistance to the zeitgeist, which favors speed and efficiency at all costs, and the swift availability of and consumability of all goods. The Glass Bead Game is a difficult book in some ways, and the resistance readers commonly experience when engaging with it demands a slowing down that mirrors what the novel shows to be required to spiritually penetrate the world’s complexity. The Glass Bead Game is thus a polyphony of the different attributes of Hesse, Montagnola’s aging teacher of wisdom.
Some twenty years earlier, Hesse wrote about his encounter with the young Hindu scholar Kalidas Nag in Besuch aus Indien (Visit from India, 1922):
I no longer placed any value in immersing myself in as many Eastern wisdoms and cults. I saw how a thousand of today’s admirers of Lao-Tze knew less about Tao than Goethe, who had never heard the word Tao. I knew that there was a subterranean, timeless world of values and spirit, in Europe as in Asia, that had neither been killed by the invention of the locomotive nor by Bismarck, and that, moreover, it was good and right to live in this timeless world, in the peace of a spiritual world of which Europe, Asia, the Vedas, the Bible, Buddha, and Goethe had an equal share.
33Hermann Hesse, Besuch aus Indien, SW 13:423.“To experience everything imaginable simultaneously” is what is at stake in all of the world’s major religions. Hesse was never able to submit himself to one religion and its claims to totality; rather he scrutinized religions through the prism of one criterion: were they able to make people cognizant of the total unity of reality? In concrete terms, Hesse expects religious teachings to respect the multiplicity of the world, and to remind us that oneness underlies this multiplicity:
For me the highest utterances of mankind are those … mysterious sayings and parables in which the great world antitheses are recognized simultaneously as necessary and as illusion. The Chinese Lao-tse invented several such sayings in which the two poles of life for a lightning instant seem to touch each other. Even more nobly and simply, even more intimately, this same miracle is performed in many sayings of Jesus. I know nothing in the world so deeply affecting as this: that a religion, a teaching, a school of psychology should through the millennia elaborate the doctrine of good and evil, of right and wrong, constantly more subtly and rigorously, making higher demands on righteousness and obedience, only to end finally at the summit with the magic perception that ninety-nine righteous persons are of less value in the eyes of God than one sinner at the moment of repentance.
34Hesse, A Guest at the Spa, 168.From this passage, we can see that the older Hesse embodies and conceptualizes a rather unique form of cosmopolitanism and that, in the age of globalization especially, such a form of cosmopolitanism arguably requires realization more than ever. What era, if not ours, has cultivated and propagated the technological prerequisites that make possible the emergence of a globally networked consciousness? And yet, our everyday experiences demonstrate that the globalization of the world economy and of communication technology does not automatically mean opening ourselves up to other cultures and religions of the world. Expectations that the networking of markets and means of communication would automatically lead to a universal globalization of consciousness, to a greater understanding of the other and the “foreign,” or even to more planetary solidarity, remain, thus far, unfulfilled.
On the contrary, the dissolution of global economic boundaries does not correspond to a global dissolution of intercultural and interreligious communication. Often, we find that new regional fragmentation, the solidifying of fundamentalism and aggressively destructive searches for identity present significant obstacles to the expansion of global networks. This is particularly true when it comes to cultural matters, including religion. Cultural reactionism is characterized by conscious resistance to economic homogenization. Economic globalization seems to foster processes of cultural and religious fragmentation. The World Wide Web can be used and abused. The horrors of social exploitation, religious fanaticism, and political extremes are also globalized phenomena.
Anyone who becomes involved with Hesse’s works comes to understand that talk of the unity of humanity is only credible if it is doubly legitimized: firstly, through the experience of inner conflict in the human soul and in the cultures of the world, through the experience of pain, the separation from the unfamiliar, and the rejection of the non-self. Secondly, legitimacy is derived from gaining the skill of interfaith dialogue. However, it takes extensive study and disciplined contemplation to achieve this. Without it one cannot truly understand Hesse. His unwieldy, intellectually demanding late work commits its readers to a mode of lifelong transnational, transcultural, interreligious learning, connecting, and communicating. This has nothing to do with elitism. Hesse once described the approach by which he sought to live and which he sought to convey in his writing in a letter to Thomas Mann, at a time of a World War that was shattering humanity:
The Europe that I mean will not be a “shrine of remembrance” but an idea, a symbol, a centre of spiritual strength, just as, for me, the ideas of China, India, Buddha, Kung Fu are not simply pretty recollections, but rather they are the most real, concentrated and substantial things imaginable.
35Hermann Hesse, “Letter to Thomas Mann, 25 October 1946,” in The Hesse/Mann Letters, 104. Original: Hermann Hesse, “Brief an Thomas Mann vom 25. 10. 1946,” in Hermann Hesse—Thomas Mann: Briefwechsel, ed. Anni Carlsson and Volker Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp/S. Fischer, 1968), 219 (see also note 25 there).It is here that we can find connections between Hesse’s work and various ongoing contemporary discourses around global civic society, the enforcement of international law and human rights, religious dialogue and global ethics. Because the ethical impulses in Hesse’s work do not stem from any sense of despair or moralizing cultural critique, they are more urgent today than ever before. Whoever engages with his works will resist any notion of globalization that contains inherent divisions: when people take economic advantage and shy away from intellectual confrontation with world cultures, when they applaud a form of cosmopolitanism that likes to globalize the economy and tourism but not their own consciousness, when they praise the free movement of capital but remain indifferent when it comes to their own processes of learning. However, international cultural and religious dialogue has been recognized in the meantime as a global matter of geopolitical as well as ethical and cultural significance. In the 2001 Bridges to the Future manifesto published by Kofi Annan, the former United Nations Secretary-General, and an international team of academics from a range of disciplines they state:
Our discussion presupposes the existence of shared, universal values. The misguided idea that rationality, freedom, and tolerance, as well as justice and respect for human rights, are attributable to the West has dominated for far too long. This assumption has been challenged in many ways. In fact, some of these values emerged from Asia and Africa before Europe learned to value them. We recognize the existence of a “global common denominator,” which some like to describe as “world civilization,” which to us means shared moral standards and values that are the foundation of a global ethos.
36Kofi Annan et al., Brücken in die Zukunft: Ein Manifest (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2001), 36. The “Manifesto” was substantially shaped by the Tübingen theologian Hans Küng, who initiated a worldwide debate on universal values in the one world society with his programmatic paper “Project Global Ethics” (1993). Other key documents are: Hans Küng, ed., Dokumente zum Weltethos (Munich: Piper, 2002) and Hans Küng, Handbuch Weltethos: Eine Vision und ihre Umsetzung (Munich: Piper, 2012).In Hesse’s work, every reader encounters the figure of the future European, who not only knows their own traditions, but simultaneously allows themselves to be enriched and their minds to broadened by encounters with the other, the foreign. One who can partake in a dialogue on culture and religion without mutual attempts at conversion or rejection. In 1955, Hesse himself wrote via an intermediary—his translator, Kenji Takahashi—to his “readers in Japan”:
A serious yet fertile understanding between East and West remains not only the great, unfulfilled demand of our time in the political and social sphere, but it remains a demand and question central to life in the sphere of spirituality and culture. Today, it is no longer a question of converting the Japanese to Christianity, or the Europeans to Buddhism or Taoism. We should not and do not want to convert or be converted, rather we wish to open ourselves and broaden our minds; we no longer recognize Eastern and Western wisdom as opposing enemies but as opposing poles around which fertile life oscillates.
37Hermann Hesse, “Brief an K. Takahashi vom Mai 1955,” in Gesammelte Briefe, vol. 4, ed. Volker Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 235.As this essay has attempted to show, Hesse’s vision for an ethos for humanity is not behind us, rather its realization is still to come.
—Translated from German by Peter Freeth and Hilary Potter