The above excerpt from “Battle of the Machines” constitutes what many consider to be Hesse’s attitude toward technology—that it is something that impedes human flourishing and is an obstacle to living in harmony with nature. Similarly, in the introduction to Ingo Cornils’s
Companion to the Works of Hermann Hesse, he discusses the hostility in Germany towards Hesse and his idealism and estrangement from the modern world, the most salient of which is an article in the magazine
Der Spiegel in 1958 depicting Hesse as “an old man tending his vegetable patch.”
1Ingo Cornils, “From Outsider to Global Player—Hermann Hesse in the Twenty-First Century,” in A Companion to the Works of Hermann Hesse, ed. Ingo Cornils (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009), 6. Hesse’s popularity with the hippie movement in the 1960s further strengthened this view of him as having a fundamentally negative view of technology. It is safe to say that Hesse’s work has been interpreted as creating an overly pessimistic view of the potential of technology.
It is in relation to this understanding of Hesse’s views on technology that we position our chapter. We argue that Hesse had a much more nuanced view of technology, which manifests itself both in his writings and life experiences. Even if Hesse adopted a critical perspective towards technology, he understood that technological progress was unavoidable and unstoppable.
2See Peter Haller, “The Writer in Conflict with His Age: A Study in the Ideology of Hermann Hesse,” Monatshefte 16, no. 3 (1954): 137–47. The actual conflict, he believed, is not between a romantic vision of a life without technology on the one hand, and a fascination with technological progress on the other. Rather, what matters to Hesse is the relationship between a person’s inner world—one’s morality and self-will—and the external, constructed world. What particularly interests him is the
use of technology—how does it enrich some elements of the human soul and yet impoverish others? How do we live well together with technology? We propose that asking these questions anew can correct the global perception of Hesse as a technophobe.
To discuss Hesse’s views on technology is today more important than ever. There are significant debates about the role of technology in the contemporary world, where some argue that technology solves social and environmental challenges, while others warn that an overreliance on technology is the root of the problem.
3For an introduction to these debates, see Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees, Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 1996); Alf Hornborg. The Power of the Machine: Global Inequalities of Economy, Technology, and Environment, vol. 1 (Lanham, MD: Altamira Press, 2001). In their recent book
Power and Progress, Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson argue that technology can have both positive and negative effects, and what matters is the choices we make in relation to it.
4Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, Power and Progress (London: Basic Books, 2023). We argue that reading Hesse today can add nuance to such debates, particularly concerning individuals’ personal relationship to technology. Our chapter broadens analyses of Hesse’s novel
The Glass Bead Game through the lens of digital technology—Stanley Antosik, Michael Peters, and Ingo Cornils reveal similarities between the Game and the computer or the Internet and reflect on the novel’s meaning for contemporary society.
5Stanley Antosik, “Utopian Machines: Leibniz’s Computer and Hesse’s Glass Bead Game,” The Germanic Review 67, no. 1 (1992): 35–45; Michael Peters, “Cybernetics, Cyberspace and the University: Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game and the Dream of a Universal Language,” in Poststructuralism, Politics and Education (Westport, MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1996), 159–76; Ingo Cornils, “Ein Glasperlenspiel im Internet. Hesse lesen im globalen Zeitalter,” in Hermann Hesse und die literarische Moderne, ed. Andreas Solbach (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2004), 399–413. Such a perspective is also taken in Colin Riordan’s analysis of the conflict between industrial society and nature as the main motif of
Peter Camenzind.
6Colin Riordan, “Hermann Hesse and the Ecological Imagination,” in Hermann Hesse Today/Hermann Hesse Heute, ed. Ingo Cornils and Osman Durrani (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005), 95–106. Riordan argues that Camenzind’s inability to resolve this conflict is an indication of Hesse’s awareness of the moral complexity of technological advances. However, as far as we know, Roger Norton’s article from 1968 is the only one that takes a broader perspective, addressing Hesse’s general view of technology. Like us, Norton problematizes the view of Hesse as a luddite.
7See Roger Norton, “Hermann Hesse’s Criticism of Technology,” The Germanic Review 43, no. 4 (1968): 267–73. Yet, Norton’s paper was written over fifty years ago, so the arguments require an update considering the more recent and paradigm-shifting technological developments.
We follow in Norton’s footsteps by arguing that technology, in Hesse’s view, is neither good nor bad in itself. Apart from our main argument that humans’ relationship to technology harbors an irresolvable struggle, we posit a somewhat broader conception of technology, not only focusing on modern, science-based technology, which is apparent when we discuss the example of a cider press. This means we can contribute to adding further nuance to our understanding of Hesse’s views on technology. This enlarged scope opens up a range of sources Norton did not draw upon, such as
Beneath the Wheel. The reason for including simpler forms of technology is to show that Hesse also had a nuanced view of basic technology, in contrast to critics of modern technology, who have overwhelmingly positive notions of simple technology.
8Ernst Friedrich Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (New York: Harper Perennial, 2010 [first published in 1973]). Going beyond Norton, we seek to understand Hesse’s view of technology not only through his published works but also through reading selected biographies about Hesse. This is yet another way to highlight Hesse’s stance toward the technology he experienced in his lifetime, thereby providing an additional dimension beyond his literary works. To reiterate: the question for Hesse and for us is not whether one is for or against technology, but how to live well with technology.
Our reflections are interdisciplinary and guided by a variety of perspectives on the use of technology. Technology is a quite a recent concept in the English language. It was first used in the early twentieth century to refer to the study of mechanical arts, before it came to encompass broader meanings. Today, it is used in a range of ways: it can mean tools, but also skills and knowledge concerned with the production and use of these tools. This chapter will separate technology into three different categories, inspired by the work of David Nye and Hubert Dreyfus.
9David E. Nye, Technology Matters: Questions to Live With (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007); Hubert L. Dreyfus, “Between Technē and Technology: The Ambiguous Place of Equipment in Being and Time,” Tulane Studies in Philosophy 32 (1984): 23–35. First, we have the crafts, which are related to the ancient Greek word “technê,” concerned with skill in arts such as, for example, pottery, bridge-building, or sculpture. Second, we have what could be called modern, industrialized, science-based technology linked to mechanical systems. Third, we have cybernetic technologies, which are technologies or technological systems which can adapt in relation to their environment, using feedback loops. Many digital technologies fall into this category. These categories should not be seen as making up a linear development from crafts to cybernetics, where one replaces the other, but as coexisting technological paradigms.
In the following, we discuss each kind of technology and how Hesse, both in his works and in his life, explored how to live well with it. Given that readers are probably most familiar with his views on modern technology, we start from there, then go back to the more unexplored terrains of craft technology, and finally revisit Hesse’s depiction of the human relationship to cybernetic technologies in the Glass Bead Game.