Hesse did not live in the age of cybernetic technologies such as computers and intelligent systems, but some commentators see
The Glass Bead Game as a forerunner of, and inspiration for, computer systems.
1Timothy Leary, “Artificial Intelligence: Hesse’s Prophetic ‘Glass Bead Game,’” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 19, no. 4 (1986): 195–207; Antosik, “Utopian Machines.” In the following, we read
The Glass Bead Game as a prefiguration of cybernetic technologies. As Peter Roberts argues, technology is absent in the novel, except for the Game itself, the mechanisms of which however remain opaque.
2Peter Roberts, “Technology, utopia and scholarly life: Ideals and realities in the work of Hermann Hesse,” Policy Futures in Education 7, no. 1 (2009): 65–74. Roberts suggests that the Game can rise above the separate languages and the distinctive rules of each discipline to achieve a synthesis, a universality. We argue that this is coherent with the domains of systems thinking, which is seen as the basis of cybernetic technology, in which anything can be seen as a system and approached as such.
3Dreyfus, “Between Technē and Technology,” 23–35.Castalia, home of the Glass Bead Game, is a prestigious pedagogical province that exists in the twenty-third century. It symbolizes the desire to find a spiritual refuge from the instrumental regimes and the disintegrated values of external society and the previous Feuilleton era. That time period was characterized by the loss of meaning and truth in the thicket of bourgeois consumerism, individualism, and the mass production of meaningless texts. The Game is the basis for the functioning of Castalia. However, most people there are only playing with meanings inside the ivory tower, and the Castalians’ mindset, according to Theodore Ziolkowski, displays a “total lack of political awareness in the broad sense of the world: human relations.”
4Peter Roberts, “Conscientisation in Castalia: A Freirean Reading of Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game,” Studies in Philosophy and Education 26, no. 6 (2007): 509–23; Theodore Ziolkowski, The Novels of Hermann Hesse: A Study in Theme and Structure (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 320.In light of our discussion of cybernetic technology, the novel’s protagonist Joseph Knecht faces a struggle: on the one hand, he sees the technological self-sufficiency of the Game and life related to it, a small and perfect world, devoid of disorder and crudity, of passions and distractions; on the other hand, he becomes aware of all that is missing from Castalia, that life is “infinitely vaster and richer than the notions a Castalian has of it; that is, it was full of change, history, struggles, and eternally new beginnings. It might be chaotic, but it was the home and native soil of all destinies, all exaltations, all arts, all humanity.”
5Hesse, Magister Ludi, 399–400. Knecht tries to reform Castalia by re-inventing personal teaching and encouraging others to self-reflect. But since he sees no real impact from his efforts, he leaves Castalia and takes on the role of a teacher.
As Roberts argues, the tensions between the Glass Bead Game and the outside world are
lived by Joseph Knecht. If the game is seen as a representation of cybernetic technology, we can see the dangers when it becomes detached from the real lives of humans and an end in itself.
6Roberts, “Conscientisation in Castalia.” We can see that some can live well together with technology but that such a life is estranged from a broader concern for human relationships. In Knecht’s case, we realize the impossibility of combining belief in the Game with a belief in one’s own principles. The death of Knecht can also be read to indicate how leaving Castalia, and the world of technology, is impossible.