Writing in October 1946, Hesse warns of the potential dangers to the vulnerable subject in an age of increasing dominance by technology and the mechanization of work:
1See the chapter (13) in this volume by Michal Zawadzki, Thomas Lennerfors, and Thomas Cyron, “Struggling with Technology: Hermann Hesse’s View on How to Live Well with Craft, Modern, and Cybernetic Technologies.”In the era of technology, of the excessive value placed on having money and the long working hours, every occupation and every working person, also the well-intentioned, are constantly exposed to the danger of becoming a lifeless part of the machine and to seeing work change from a personal task for which responsibility is borne to an object of standardized factory production.
2Hermann Hesse, “An einen Korrektor,” in Die Briefe 1940–1946: “Grosse Zeiten” hinterlassen grosse Schutthaufen, ed. Volker Michels (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2020), 548–49. (My translation.)Arguably, Hesse’s works and texts are inherently even more important to readers under an economic regime in which neoliberalism has become naturalized as a logic or as a set of “values,” and in a situation in which market-induced precarity and societal atomization are common features of the industrialized world.
3Nicole Smith from the University of Birmingham (UK) defines neoliberalism as an “ideology and policy model that emphasizes the value of free market competition.” Smith, “Neoliberalism,” Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/money/topic/capitalism/Criticisms-of-capitalism (accessed July 21, 2023). Such concerns are not unique to Hesse and have been theorized by thinkers such as sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, who famously termed this current stage of capitalism “liquid modernity.”
4Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2012). He argues that “modernity starts when space and time are separated from living practice and from each other” and when they “cease to be, as they used to be in long premodern centuries.”
5Bauman, Liquid Modernity, 8–9. Consequently, for Bauman, the elimination of many of the previous “patterns and configurations” determining a life course result in “an individualized, privatized version of modernity, with the … responsibility for failure falling primarily on the individual’s shoulders.”
6Bauman, Liquid Modernity, 7–9. Here the individual is seemingly stripped of intrinsic value and supportive social relations and is buffeted by economic winds, which then determine success or failure.
Building on Baumann’s critique of Western modernity, theoretical economist Guy Standing characterizes the new “precariat” in the Western world as not being “part of the ‘working class’ or the ‘proletariat.’ … Many entering the precariat would not know their employer.”
7Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (London: I. B. Tauris, 2021), 7. As if echoing Hesse’s warning about the repetitive standardization of work tasks, Standing emphasizes that the precariat “lack a work-based
identity” and that “when employed, they are in career-less jobs, without traditions of social memory, a feeling they belong to an occupational community steeped in stable practices, codes of ethics and norms of behaviour, reciprocity and fraternity.”
8Standing, The Precariat, 14. Emphasis in original.As many chapters in this volume attest, Hesse remains popular in East Asia. His concerns about alienation in modern life have, for example, been taken up by Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, who, in his stories of magical realism set in contemporary Japan, explores the rootless realm and socioeconomic experiences of the lonely individual in late capitalism. His protagonists shun the mindless boredom of corporate work, the fate of the average Japanese salaryman, who is steeped in the consumerist mentality. The spiritual void that threatens the unique individual in the face of the homogenizing pressures of Japanese society means that Murakami’s protagonists embark on journeys and adopt strategies to protect—“sometimes vigorously, aggressively”—their individual selves, their souls.
9Mathew Strecher, “Haruki Murakami and the Chamber of Secrets,” in Haruki Murakami: Challenging Authors, ed. Mathew Strecher and Paul Thomas (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2016), 44.Around the Western world, these problems gather pace. The number of people working on “zero-hour contracts” in meaningless jobs as low-wage labor has increased rapidly in the last twenty years.
10Guy Standing defines these jobs as the case “when somebody is given a contract but left unsure how many hours, if any, they will be required to work” (Standing, The Precariat, 42). There has been a net increase of around 807,000 people on zero-hour contracts in the UK from 2000 to 2022, when the figure reached 1.03 million people. Statista, https://www.statista.com/statistics/414896/employees-with-zero-hours-contracts-number (accessed March 29, 2023). Competing social groups and individuals in the neoliberal project are valued according to their utility, exploitability, and efficiency in a regime that Marxist geographer David Harvey labeled “flexible accumulation” some thirty years ago.
11David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). According to Harvey, flexible accumulation “rests on flexibility with respect to labour processes, labour markets, products and patterns of consumption” (147). Social theorist Herbert Marcuse, writing even before Harvey in the 1950s, had warned against the rise of the uncritical “one-dimensional man” in a hegemonic, technological capitalist society in which Horkheimer and Adorno recognized culture as an industry “infecting everything with sameness.”
12Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (1964; Abingdon: Routledge Classics, 2002). Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (In German 1944/1947; original English publication 1972; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 94. Yet Marcuse’s dialectic, the insistence on a critical two-dimensional discourse, provides hope and affirms “the existence of a human subject with freedom, creativity, and self-determination who stands in opposition to an object-world.”
13Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, xxvii.More recently, in explaining how we got here, literary theorist and social critic Terry Eagleton presents a telling historiography of the contemporary socioeconomic situation:
Capitalist modernity, so it appeared, had landed us with an economic system which was almost purely instrumental. It was a way of life dedicated to power, profit, and the business of material survival, rather than to fostering the values of human sharing and solidarity. The political realm was more a question of management and manipulation than of the communal shaping of a common life. Reason itself had been debased to mere self-interested calculation. As for morality, this, too, had become an increasingly private affair, more relevant to the bedroom than the boardroom. Cultural life had grown more important in one sense, burgeoning into a whole industry or branch of material production. In another sense, however, it had dwindled to the window-dressing of a social order which had exceedingly little time for anything it could not price or measure.
14Terry Eagleton, The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 22.Hesse had the foresight to anticipate these all-encompassing trends in contemporary modernity in his 1917 essay “Von der Seele” (From the Soul) after observing two young gentlemen, who by chance become passengers in the same train carriage for an hour, interact in the polite social language of everyday life, a language which Hesse describes as anathema to the goals of the soul: “Our two young Europeans in the railway carriage are already further down the path. They show little soul or none at all; they appear to exist only out of organized desires, out of mind, purpose and schemes.”
15Hermann Hesse, “Von der Seele,” in Sämtliche Werke, ed. Volker Michels, 20 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001–2007), vol. 13, 373. (My translation.) Hereafter as SW, with volume and page number. Hesse’s observations point toward a need to shift individual and collective consciousness toward a more holistic and organic spiritual vision. In the following, I address the possibilities open to us under the concept of “spiritual capital,” before exploring how this notion manifests itself textually in two of Hesse’s later works. Finally, I will trace the creation of spiritual capital among Hesse readers around the world, in whom it expresses itself in various observable and discoverable ways.