Hesse worked on
Siddhartha between
1919 and 1922.
1Ralph Freedman, Hermann Hesse: Pilgrim of Crisis (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 230–37. At the time, constructivist ideas were emerging in the philosophy of science and in the philosophy of education, like in Jean Piaget’s
The Child’s Conception of the World from 1929.
2Jean Piaget, The Child’s Conception of the World, trans. Joan and Andrew Tomlinson (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, [1967] 1929). Constructivism theorizes the process of creating knowledge through experience and communication.
3Jean Piaget, Hesse’s contemporary and compatriot, was one major representative of constructivist learning theory; among other works, see his Science Education and Psychology of the Child (New York: Orion, 1970). Other representative studies include Paul Watzlawick’s How Real is Real? Confusion, Disinformation, Communication (New York: Vintage, 1977). Constructivist theory holds that no independent reality exists outside individual experience: “Any so-called reality is … the
construction of those who believe they have discovered and investigated it.”
4Paul Watzlawick, “Foreword,” in The Invented Reality: How Do We Know What We Believe We Know? Contributions to Constructivism (New York: Norton, 1984), 10.However, constructivist theory argues that intersubjective reality is constructed subconsciously by using experience and reliability as important criteria for deciding whether something is “real”:
5Ernst von Glasersfeld, “An Introduction to Radical Constructivism,” in The Invented Reality: How Do We Know What We believe We Know? Contributions to Constructivism, ed. Paul Watzlawick (New York: Norton, 1984), 17–40, esp. 18. “from the pragmatic point of view, we consider ideas, theories, and ‘laws of nature’ as structures that are constantly exposed to our experiential world (from which we derived them), and either they hold up or they do not.”
6von Glasersfeld, “An Introduction to Radical Constructivism,” 24. This means that we constantly compare our experiences with our assumptions about the world and thereby build up our knowledge about that world.
Since its emergence in the 1920s, constructivist theory has influenced the theory of learning and is still highly influential. Based on constructivist theories, David Kolb developed the concept of a four-stage “experiential learning cycle”:
7David A. Kolb, Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Parsons Education, 2014). “Immediate or concrete experiences are the basis for observations and reflections. These reflections are assimilated and distilled into abstract concepts from which new implications for actions can be drawn. These implications can be actively tested and serve as guidelines in creating new experiences.”
8Kolb, Experiential Learning, 51.In contrast to other theories of knowledge, constructivism is “the study of
how intelligence operates, of the ways and means it employs to construct a relatively
regular world out of the flow of its experience.”
9von Glasersfeld, “An Introduction to Radical Constructivism,” 32 (original emphases). In this respect, especially by emphasizing experience as access to knowledge, constructivist theory approaches one of the goals of Buddhist philosophy: to understand and recognize “the nature of mind.”
10Peter Malinowski, “The Mind, the Buddha, and the Brain,” in From Buddhism to Science and Back, ed. Artur Przybyslawski (Opole, Vélez-Malaga: ITAS 2007), 105. This objective, the imperative to “know thyself,” together with learning through experience, links constructivist theory and Buddhist philosophy and is a central theme of Hesse’s
Siddhartha.