Life's meaning is found in nature - Hermann Hesse's Genius Philosophy

Do you sometimes get the feeling that life is  a little stifling? Do you feel that perhaps you’re a free-spirited animal stuck in a human  body? Do you feel like a lone wolf that does not fit in society?

These are the questions this  German-Swiss novelist tackled in his writings. Hermann Hesse was a novelist, poet, and painter,  just like the Russian genius Mikhail Lermontov. Both had profound psychological crises and both  had amazing insights into the human psyche.

And both were amazing writers and that’s where  the similarities end. Lermontov died aged 26 while Hesse lived to be 85 and also managed  to win a Nobel Prize in literature. So today, I will discuss his life and summarise two of his  best known novels Steppenwolf and Siddhartha.

So get yourself some Swiss cheese and German  sausage and beer and let’s talk Hesse. Life (2260=14mins) Hermann Hesse was born in 1877 in what was part of the German Empire. Due to his father being born  in Estonia, at his birth, Hesse was the citizen of both the Russian Empire and the German empire. 

In addition to his eastern European link, on his mother’s side, he also had a connection with  Eastern philosophy and India through his maternal grandfather’s Christian missionary work and in  fact his own mother was born in India, which influenced his writing and philosophy. His famous  novel, Siddhartha is a fictionalised biography of the Buddhist’s journey of self-actualisation.  Hesse also grew up in a somewhat religious household and his father worked at a publishing  house producing religious and educational texts.

So from an early age, he was curious about the  purpose as well as the nature of human life. Also his grandfather, a philosopher and philologist  specialising in Asian languages, encouraged the young boy to read. He showed great interest in  poetry and music and had a talent for writing.

So Hesse’s parents were born in Eastern  Europe and India, he himself was born in Calw, southern Germany. In 1881 when he was 4  years old, they moved to Basel, Switzerland, and as result, his parents’ exotic tales from  exotic lands shaped his identity as someone who was a stranger or even alien in Basel.  This is a recurring theme in his writing, especially in Steppenwolf.

As a child he  experienced bouts of depression and took refuge in the little nature his town could  afford. He spent hours observing the streets, a bridge and river in town, which provided him  with vivid details for his fiction later on. He was educated in Latin as well as at  a religious seminary, where he learnt classic Greek.

But he wasn’t happy. So  he moved from school to school and had a tough time with his parents. His teenage  years were the toughest as he went through rebellion, suicide attempt, mental institution,  alcohol and smoking.

In 1894, when he was 17, he became an apprentice at a clocktower factory.  In the German-speaking world, apprenticeship is an important rite of passage for any person. He  got bored of the mechanical and monotonous work, so a year and half later he changed job  and became an apprentice at a bookshop, where he discovered Nietzsche, who introduced him  to the duality of human reason and human passion, which took him to ancient Greek philosophy and  the romantic German writers such as Schilling, and Goethe.

In fact the journey from making clocks to  sorting books is a perfect metaphor for the shift as he moved from a deeply rational, mechanical job  of making clocks to poetry, Nietzschean artistic philosophy and the romanticist’s rebellion against  science and reason and a vision of returning back to nature. And Nietzsche’s philosophy also damaged  his religious morality and replaced it with artistic beauty as the ultimate goal of life.  These are the exact themes of Hesse’s novels, as escape from the prison of modern rationalistic  lifestyle, into the beauty of nature.

He began writing poetry and his first poem, titled  Madonna, was published in 1896 when he was 19. Two years later he published his prose collection,  titled One Hour After Midnight, but it didn’t sell. Disillusioned with Germany, he moved to  Basel in 1899 to work at an antique book shop.

In Switzerland, every able-bodied man is required  to serve a military service, but due to his eye problem, he was spared the compulsory military  service. He wasn’t in the best of health as he suffered from headaches and nerve disorder. To  ease the pain, just like Nietzsche and many other Romantic poets of the previous centuries,  he travelled to Italy.

The word romanticism has Rome in it.  Today some romanticist rebels  move to Romania, perhaps for the same reason. In 1902, when his mother died, he didn’t  attend her funeral.

In the same year, he got lucky as one publisher published his  novel Peter Camenzind, which was a success, to an extent that Sigmund Freud, the father  of psychoanalysis loved it. The novel is about a man’s search for meaning and identity  in the chaos and confusion that surrounds him, sandwiched between nature and modernity. It helped  the urbanised people to appreciate nature more and lead a more natural approach to their highly  mechanical lives.

This must have influenced Franz Kafka who saw how bleak and dark modern life had  become. The success of this novel allowed Hesse to become a full time writer. But it did more  than that.

Now that he was financially capable, he got married and the couple nested along  Lake Constance and produced three children. In 1906, he published his second novel,  Beneath the Wheel which criticises the German education system for focusing too  much on mechanical knowledge and less on personal development and spiritual growth.  It’s highly autobiographical as it depicts a young boy at a school that only focused  on his grades and when he starts working, he feels empty on the inside, and the end is  extremely tragic for the young man.

In 1910, he published his third novel, Gertrude, taking  a more Nietzschean Birth of Tragedy style in which the Apollon reason and Dionysian passion  come together, but it is not his best work. Around this time, he also discovered Schopenhauer  which piqued his interest in eastern philosophy, which also coincided with his marriage  troubles. So in 1911, he travelled to Asia, visiting Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Burma.

But  it turned out these places didn’t match the romantic notion he had in his head.  As Proust said it is the imagination that makes some places more beautiful. When you  visit those places, the one you imagined was far more beautiful.

He returned home but home wasn’t  a peaceful place either. They moved house but it didn’t solve the marriage troubles. Maybe  bigger events could bring domestic peace?

In 1914, Europe had enough of having  too much peace, so started a world war.  Hesse wasn’t happy at home. So what  do unhappy men do?

They volunteer to fight. He registered to fight for the German  Empire. Since he wasn’t fit for combat, he found himself looking after the prisoners  of war.

Incidentally, Carl Jung, another Swiss, was doing the exact same job during the war,  but in Switzerland, a neutral country. While Hesse was quick to volunteer his service to the  German army, he wasn’t nationalistic. He wrote a piece saying, quote: "That love is greater  than hate, understanding greater than ire, peace nobler than war, this exactly is what this  unholy World War should burn into our memories, more so than ever felt before.

” Now we know why  he went to war, to escape his marital conflict at home. Tolstoy was right, disillusioned men  are always easy to recruit for war. But Hesse’s message of peace brought a lot of hate.

German  newspapers attacked him on social media. I mean he received hate letters through the post and  in the newspaper. Now you get hate messages on your smartphone.

Back then you had to change  houses, now you can just turn your phone off. To make matters worse, his father died  in 1916, his son became seriously ill and his wife was diagnosed with schizophrenia.  Now, his family needed him more than Germany, so left the army to help his family.

This further  worsened his psychological crisis, so he sought help from psychotherapist and guess what, he  came across none other than the man himself. Carl Jung. The two became close friends through  Jung’s disciple, Josef Lang and the two exchanged letters frequently.

This encounter had a huge  impact on Hesse and his creative writing. In 1919, he published Demian under a pseudonym, telling  the story of a man caught up between this world, which is nothing but illusion, and the spiritual  world, which is the real world. This has a clear Hindu and Buddhist theme that the world we  consider to be real is nothing but illusion and superficial created by our ego.

And each  individual has a unique path to find god. But the novel also has Jungian archetypes and  symbolism. The main character wakes up from the world of illusions to claim his real self,  which Jung called the process of individuation.

The same year, Hesse left his family home and  settled alone in a castle-like building close to a river and a couple of bridges, which resembles  his childhood environment in Calw. Here he also started painting, just like MrJung. For the  first time, in many years, Hesse was happy, calling it ”the fullest, most prolific, most  industrious and most passionate time of my life.

” Around this time he wrote his most famous  novel, Siddhartha, which was published in 1922. It tells the story of a Nepalese Brahmin  man whose journey of self-discovery allows him to achieve enlightenment through the teachings  of the Buddha. Two years later, Hesse was married again to a woman 20 years younger than him.

This  time to a singer. Two artists living together? Look at what happened to Van Gogh and Gauguin? 

So the marriage was volatile and chaotic and didn’t last very long. Artists are more like  animals, because in order to be a creative genius you have to tap into your inner beast that  is run by chaos. A century earlier Schopenhauer said that the blind will obey no law but  its own to be aimless, chaotic and blind.

Speaking of the inner beast, in 1927, Hesse  turned that inner volatility into a novel and published Steppenwolf, perhaps his greatest  novel, about a man who finds himself in a tangle, between a human on the outside and an animal  on the inside. In the novel, Hesse explores how humans have struggled between the individualistic  side as an animal and the group side as a human. In other words, a lone wolf on the inside, but  part of a society or a hive on the outside.

As a result we all live a very lonely existence  despite being surrounded by many people. The protagonist thinks he is half human and half wolf  from the Eurasian steppes who roams alone but this very realisation brings a psychological  crisis for him. It’s a depressing novel, full of suicidal ideas as well as free use  of drugs and explicit sex.

The novel is like opening a wound and staring at it without averting  your gaze. We can only find freedom on the inside, because we are tamed wolves on the outside. The  Buddha was right, peace only comes from within.

In 1930, he published another great novel,  Narcissus and Goldmund, set in Medieval Germany. This was also influenced by Nietzsche  philosophy, more specifically his first book, the Birth of Tragedy in which he lamented western  civilisation ignoring the passionate side of human life. In the novel, Narcissus is the Apollon  rational and thoughtful character while Goldmund is the Dionysian passionate character who later  comes to embody both the rational and passionate by becoming a sculptor which requires you rational  faculty as well as your passion for creativity.

In 1931, Hesse married again. Perhaps third  time lucky. A year later he published his novel, Journey to the East, the title referring to  a major Chinese classic, Journey to the West, both about discovering Buddhist spirituality.

The  story is about a religious sect all made of famous fictional or historical characters including  Plato, Mozart, Tristram Shandy, my favourite and many more who all head to east, a journey  through time and space in search of the truth. However, in the real world, things were changing  in Germany. In 1933, a man with a funny moustache came to power.

Hesse was married to a Jewish woman  so he raised concern, writing, quote: "It is the duty of spiritual types to stand alongside the  spirit and not to sing along when the people start belting out the patriotic songs their leaders  have ordered them to sing. ”— Hermann Hesse. Once again, the German newspapers and publishers  attacked Hesse and banned his books.

You think cancel culture is new, it has been around since  the dawn of time. So during the war years, Hesse spent long hours distracting himself by focusing  on writing his final novel, The Glass Bead Game, which came out in 1943 in Switzerland  because the Germans refused to publish him. Why?

Because he was cancelled in Germany.  And 3 years later the novel helped him win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946. So if you are  cancelled, sit in a quiet room and write a novel.

The novel is a kind of Bildungsroman coming of  age story centring on a young boy’s education, mastery of the game, career rise within an  order to finally becoming the head of the organisation called Castalian Order.  The novel emphasises discipline and order which people craved after the  chaos of the 20th century in Europe. After winning the Nobel Prize, Hesse stopped  writing novels, perhaps he had climbed the biggest mountains so lost motivation.

But he  continued writing essays and short stories. He also spent hours reading letters he received  after his fame grew more internationally. He died in 1962, aged 85 years old.

Today,  he is not only read in the German world, but around the world. He influenced many German  and non-German writers. His influence went beyond literature.

In music, Richard Strauss composed  songs based on Hesse’s writing. In the 60s and 70s, the hippie culture further piqued people’s  interest in Hesse’s eastern philosophy. So many western hippies made their eastern journey  to India in search of enlightenment and spiritual meaning.

Novels Hermann Hesse published 16 novels and novellas, 2 short story collections, 5 poetry collections  and 5 books of nonfiction. The man was a beast of a writer. However, internationally he is known  for two of his novels.

So here, I will summarise and analyse two of his most well-known as well  as profound novels, Siddhartha and Steppenwolf. Siddhartha (1837=11mins) Published in 1922, Siddhartha is Hermann Hesse’s most successful  novel. It tells the story of Siddhartha whose spiritual awakening takes him on a journey  of self-discovery.

While it’s very similar to the story of Siddhartha Gotama or the  Buddha as he is commonly known today who incidentally appears in the novel as Gotama but  the protagonist, Siddhartha is not the Buddha, but someone who lives around the same time.  The title comes from two Sanskrit words, siddha means achieve and artha means search so  putting them together means someone who found what he was looking for. The story is set in ancient  Nepal during the kingdom of Kapilavasta that ruled the area between 6th to 5th century BCE. 

The Buddha was a prince within the Kapilavasta. In search of spiritual wisdom, Siddhartha  leaves his home to become a homeless wanderer and survives on whatever he gets through begging.  His best friend, Govinda, also joins him as they get rid of their worldly possessions and live a  nomadic lifestyle.

Now that they don’t have to work anymore, they meditate and instead of seeking  food, they fast and their only preoccupation is to find spiritual wisdom. When they encounter  Gotama Buddha, they are extremely impressed by the enlightened man. Govinda is so impressed that  he becomes a disciple of the Buddha but Siddhartha has a somewhat different philosophy.

He thinks  each person has a unique path to enlightenment and the Buddha’s path is not only unique to  him and may not fit other people. Here he decides to walk alone. It’s only through our  own individual journey that we can find true meaning and enlightenment. 

Does  this remind you of someone else? Of course, I am talking about Carl  Jung who had a very similar philosophy. As he wanders, he encounters a few people and upon each encounter, the practical  issue of money and worldly possessions becomes very important.

First, he has no money to  cross a river. While the ferryman, Vasudeva, is generous and kind and help him cross without  charging him saying that he would return wealthy someday and pay him, but his encounter with  an extremely good-looking woman, Kamala, tests his desire. The woman compliments Siddhartha’s  good look and intelligence but demands that he ought to have excess resources if he is  contemplating of becoming her lover.

For her, being poor is no excuse and a real deal-breaker.  A man can fight anything, but he cannot fight his desire for a woman. A beautiful woman can bend  any man’s will, no matter how strong he is.

He agrees to forgo his anti-materialism and become  wealthy businessman with a Ferrari in order to win her over. Maybe not a supercar but a a few oxen  with carts. She sends him to work with a difficult and emotionally volatile local businessman, where  Sidhartha’s patience and wit are tested.

But his years of ascetic life has prepared him to be  extremely patient and pliant so he passes it all and becomes very rich. He gets the woman and life is good. He has money,  he has the most beautiful woman and everyone respects him.

As days turn into months and then  years, Siddhartha starts to agitate a bit about life. A voice inside him keeps shouting at him.  While he lives in luxury with a beautiful woman, there is something missing inside him.

He lacks  spiritual fulfilment. One day he decides enough is enough so he leaves his hectic city life and  returns to the river where he almost takes his own life. As he falls asleep, his troubled soul  is only calmed with a mantra or sacred word, Om.

Quote: “And when Siddhartha listened  attentively to this river, to this thousand-voices song, when he listened neither for the sorrow nor  for the laughter, when he did not attach his soul to any one voice and enter into it with his ego  but rather heard all of them, heard the whole, the oneness—then the great song of the thousand  voices consisted only of a single word: Om, perfection. ”—Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha) It’s  here that he also meets his old friend, Govinda who is a wandering buddhist now. At this point,  Siddhartha has experienced the luxurious, yet empty life in the city, so he decides to survive  near the river and lead a simple life.

He becomes friends with the generous ferryman, Vasudeva who  leads his life by taking inspirations and cues, not from people, but from the river. If you listen  carefully, the water tells you everything about life. It’s nature, not cities, that has all the  answers for our human miseries and despairs.

Quote: “They both listened silently to the  water, which to them was not just water, but the voice of life, the voice of Being, the voice of  perpetual Becoming. ” —Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha). Siddhartha is content with his simple life by the river, just like a true Taoist.

Then one  day, he recognises a woman bitten by a snake near the river. It’s his own lover, Kamala and a young  boy who turns out to be Siddhartha’s own son. The snake bite turns out lethal and Kamala dies  leaving the son orphaned.

Jordan Peterson would love the snake in this story. Siddhartha tries to  console the young boy and tries to look after him, but the boy finds a window of opportunity and  makes a run for it. Siddhartha is distraught and desperately tries to find him but the ferryman  tells him that, remember everyone must find their own unique path in life.

As the two men sit by the  river, watching the water glisten and listen to its endless murmurs, time flies like some magical  wind. Here Siddhartha has an epiphany. He realises that he and the river are one.

Not just that, all  his emotions, happiness, despair, suffering and everything in between are nothing but the illusion  of something bigger, something far greater, something beyond his control. It’s part of  the universe. Everything is connected.

This is the moment of enlightenment Siddhartha has been  waiting for all his life. Suddenly he feels peace, not just on the outside but on the inside. He has  become one with the river, one with nature and with the universe.

“Quote: “[River] is everywhere  at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the  current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere and that the present only exists for  it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future. ” —Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha) The ferryman Vasudeva leaves him alone saying  that his job is done and now it’s Siddhartha’s turn to become the ferryman. Years later, his  old pal, Govinda returns to find Siddhartha, now an old man ferrying people across the river. 

He asks for wisdom and Siddhartha says that for every true statement, there is an opposite  statement that’s also true. What? It makes no sense.

How can two opposite statements be true  at the same time? Siddhartha says our language and beliefs have limited us to one truth. One  god.

One side of the story. Nature works in cycles. Nature has no good or bad side.

It has all  sides within itself. Nature is complete. It has everything within itself.

Since we are nature, we  also have everything within us. Siddhartha says we shouldn’t cherry-pick things but instead we must  accept the world as complete. He then asks Govinda to kiss him on his forehead.

As his friend kisses  Siddhartha, Govinda experiences an intense vision that Siddhartha had experienced with Vasudeva  years and years ago. Now, both friends have achieved enlightenment that they are one with the  universe which is timeless and boundless and a complete unit. One of the central themes of Siddhartha is that  we often compartmentalise human experiences into the realm rational and non-rational or  emotional.

For Hesse reason is not enough to truly understand reality. Neither is human  emotions enough to truly experience the vastness of nature. Human consciousness encompasses far  greater faculties than that of rationality.

So to truly understand reality, consciousness  as a whole can help us reach enlightenment, not just reason or sensory experiences. It’s all  a package deal so to speak. Hesse came from a German tradition, where philosophy and science  were always seen through an analytical lens, meaning everything was broken down into  small pieces to analyse each part separately.

So for instance psychoanalysis of Sigmund  Freud and Carl Jung broke down the human psyche into separate parts, such as the  conscious, the unconscious, the ego, etc. Hesse, however, takes a holistic approach  that the human experience cannot be explained or attributed to one mental faculty and cannot  be atomised and analysed without considering the whole of consciousness. Hesse’s approach is  obviously deeply Buddhist as the title and the theme of the story resonate most with Buddhism.

Another important theme is nature. Siddhartha  fails to learn wisdom from people, not even Buddha himself, who is considered the ultimate teacher  in the east. His true teacher turned out to be non-human.

A river. It’s by listening to a river  that he gets his epiphany. In western philosophy nature has generally been seen as wild and often  ugly that needs to be tamed and cleaned.

However, in the east, nature and humans are very much the  same thing. There is no big separation between human and nature, therefore eastern philosophers  based their philosophies and doctrines on nature. For example in Taoism river flow is a perfect  metaphor for human life that we should not resist or force things but simply flow.

In Buddhism and  Hinduism, humans, animals all live within the same cycle of reincarnation. Western philosophy was  influenced by the Judaeo-Christian notion of the Garden of Eden and that we humans are exiled  on earth, therefore we don’t belong here. So Hesse takes us back to nature to reconnect  us with a river.

By listening to water and the sound of water, Siddhartha achieves true  enlightenment that the whole universe is just one and connected. Quote: “I have always  believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always  give it meaning and transform it into something of value. ” —Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha) While the Buddha is a great teacher,  Siddhartha takes a very individualistic approach to enlightenment.

He doesn’t  follow the Buddha like his friend Govinda, instead he goes through his own mistakes to find  enlightenment by himself, albeit with the help of the ferryman and the river. Quote: “Wisdom  cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness  to someone else .

. . Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom.

One can find it, live it, do  wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it. ”—Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha).  So Hesse finds a synergy between Buddhism and the steppe wolf mentality that one has to find  or carve his own path in life, not follow others, no matter how enlightened that teacher might be. 

So don’t look for quick fixes in life but make mistakes and learn from them. But most importantly  listen to nature murmuring, or roaring inside you. There’s a river running inside you.

Steppenwolf (1468=9mins) Steppenwolf was published in 1927 in Germany and the title comes from the German  word for central Asian wolf called steppe wolf. As I said earlier, Hesse wrote the novel after  marrying a singer Ruth Wenger, which turned out to be an extremely tough period in Hesse’s life  as two volatile artistic souls found it hard to live under the same roof. Ruth had many pet  animals while Hesse had no interest in them so they clashed and the marriage only lasted 3 years. 

While the marriage produced no kids, this novel came out after that despairing and lonely period  in his life, which shows his psychological crisis as who he really was. Whether a wolf in human  clothes or a human with a wolf stuck inside him. The story is written by a middle-aged man named  Harry Haller, just like Hesse himself who was in his forties when he wrote the novel.

He finds  himself at odds with the outside world. In other words, he feels he doesn’t really belong to  the world he lives in. He sees that everyone is pretentious and superficial.

Now we know where  JD Salinger got his idea for Holden Caulfield in the Catcher in the Rye as he was too called  everyone phony and pretentious. Hesse’s novel digs deep into the modern human experience  of alienation. Quote: “Man is an onion made up of a hundred integuments, a texture made  up of many threads.

The ancient Asiatics knew this well enough, and in Buddhist Yoga an  exact technique was devised for unmasking the illusion of the personality. The human  merry-go-round sees many changes: the illusion that cost India the efforts of thousands of  years to unmask is the same illusion that the West has laboured just as hard to maintain  and strengthen. ”—Hermann Hesse (Steppenwolf) So Harry Haller is a lost man in the west. 

What does he do? Instead of walking into a church to find meaning, he bumps into a man  handing out flyers for a magic theatre. It’s like meeting a man from the Jehovah’s Witness  who instead of giving him a book about Jesus, he gives Harry a booklet titled Treatise on  the Steppenwolf.

So the story takes a turn away from God and religion towards our evolutionary  animalistic past. We’re in the Jungian territory of Switzerland after all, where the human mind  has a past that we have inherited from other human ancestors but also from other animal species,  forefathers and mothers, including wolves. As Harry reads the booklet, he realises  that it is all about him.

It speaks to him, literary as it addresses him by name. It tells  the story of a man who believes he is half human and half wolf. In other words, the man is stuck  between the human high and the animal low.

It’s a paralysing feeling as he struggles to come to  terms with the fact that he can never rise enough to disentangle himself from the animal that he  is. It is like you’re paralysed from waist down and you can never run away from the mud. In  his head, he dreams of clouds while his body is stuck in the ground.

So in other words, we are  in a continuous struggle between the inner animal and the outer goal of achieving immortality as  a human genius. Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy runs very deep in the novel that only a select  few can achieve greatness, which gives Harry a slight hope to continue on living despite  his despair at his human-animal condition. At a funeral, he bumps into the man from the  magic theatre once again.

He asks about the magic theatre but the man refuses to divulge  information saying it is not for everyone. Instead the man tells him about a dance hall.  Harry is not in the mood for dance.

He is seeking magic for his existential crisis. Disappointed,  Harry goes home but on the way he meets a former friend who invites him to his house. They used  to discuss eastern philosophy back in the days.

But now they clash on politics, specifically the  friend’s nationalistic sentiments. Not only that, Harry also picks a fight with the man’s wife over  a statue of Goethe for being too fat and not being a true representation of the genius German poet.  Interestingly, a year after the publication of Steppenwolf, Hesse wrote a short story in 1928  titled Harry, The Steppenwolf which tells the story of a zoo wolf named Harry whose job is to  entertain zoo visitors by destroying portraits and busts of German cultural giants such as Mozart and  Goethe.

Back to the story. Harry has had enough of these pretentious friends. He leaves his friends  house and his despair turns into thoughts of ending it all.

He doesn’t fit anywhere. To delay  his own demise, he wanders the street all night. As he walks in the dark, he comes face to face  with the dance hall the stranger had told him about.

We are in Dostoevsky territory now. The  despairing man’s soul needs a woman to heal it. At the dance hall, he meets Hermine, a woman  who laughs at his despair and self-pity.

Now we know where JK Rowling got her idea for  Harry and Hermine. But more importantly, Harry, for the first time, goes through a kind of  mixed emotion that is strange. On the one hand, he doesn’t like to be mocked by a stranger  woman but on the other hand, she hits a chord inside him and he feels relief.

This also  reminded me of Dostoevsky’s short stories, White Nights and the Dram of A Ridiculous  Man, both of which I have discussed before. Now the friendship between Harry and Megan… Oops,  I meant Harry and Hermine develops into much more. She teaches him to enjoy life through dance, drugs  and women.

Harry thought those were bourgeois indulgences but Hermine says, don’t be stupid.  These are important pleasures of life, no matter how bourgeois they might be. Through Hermine,  Harry also meets Pablo who plays saxophone, who takes him to the magical theatre.

It turns out  to be not real but metaphorical theatre. In the theatre, Harry goes through a fantastic experience  in which he envisions his own life through several parts of a theatre with a giant mirror and many  doors. Perhaps life gives us far too many choices, and experiences but we only have one imagination  as a giant mirror.

So we feel lost at times. So the magic theatre is the human consciousness that  has the ability to make us despair about life but also it is magical in elevating us above that  suffering into a different realm of existence. Steppenwolf is a novel in which Hesse tries  to challenge the conventional notion of what a human is.

Conventionally human is  someone moral, righteous, and good. While Nietzsche challenged that notion by arguing that  greatness in the realm of art and philosophy was far more important than being morally good  and socially nice. A good person only lives for now but a great artist remains immortal. 

So the novel takes that notion that morality and social conventions limit our horizon and the  magic theatre opens up endless possibilities for us. The novel has been criticised for that same  reason that it is a bit immoral. Too much sex and too much drug.

But in reality, human evolution  is as a result of many immoral acts throughout human history. In fact species evolve through  trial and mistakes. In other words, evolution is amoral.

Nature is amoral. So Nietzsche based  his philosophy of ubermenzsch artist on nature, not religion or morality. If life didn’t probe  and poke in all directions, we would still be tiny organisms that live in water or under some rock. 

Quote: “Once it happened, as I lay awake at night, that I suddenly spoke in verses, in verses so  beautiful and strange that I did not venture to think of writing them down, and then in the  morning they vanished; and yet they lay hidden within me like the hard kernel within an old  brittle husk. ”—Hermann Hesse (Steppenwolf) Life’s about exuberance, magical thinking and  constantly probing. Just as Nietzsche said, we have become too human, too tame and too  bland.

So Hesse also questions that while following societal rules and conventions, we  might enjoy life more, but from time to time, we must also indulge in things that are not  morally good or socially acceptable. That’s how society changes. One day a drug is illegal  and the next it is not.

The human side of us wants order but the animal inside always seeks  excitement which necessarily creates chaos. Schopenhauer  said, quote: 'Life swings like a  pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom. ’ In this novel it is between the human  and the wolf.

But more than that. Quote: “His life oscillates, as everyone's does, not merely between  two poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between thousands  and thousands. ”—Hermann Hesse (Steppenwolf) Steppenwolf has the romanticism of the 18th and  19th centuries works such as in the works of Goethe, Emile Bronte’s Wuthering Heights  and some similarities with Jack London’s Call of the Wild.

It does take a psychological  approach to Darwin’s evolutionary biology on how we humans suffer and despair because  we do not really fit in our own skin. Themes: Hermann Hesse grew up in a family that had deep ties with  both European Christian tradition and eastern experience of living in India. His grandfather and  father spent time in India as a missionary so they were very much aware of eastern philosophies of  Upanishad and Buddhism.

So Hesse was influenced by those in his family. But not just that,  or perhaps because of his family connection, he was very much drawn to the works of two German  philosophers known to have had an eastern leaning: Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, both  I have discussed here extensively. As a result, Hesse takes a natural approach to life and  philosophy.

Instead of empathising with a Hegelian or Kantian rationalist approach, Hesse  adapts a psychological approach to writing which is very close to how Schopenhauer and Nietzsche  both of whom explain the meaning or purpose of life. As it turns out, Buddhism and eastern  philosophies in general are much closer to nature than a European rational approach that  often separates humans from nature. In all his writings, Hesse emphasises nature as the  ultimate inspiration for meaning and purpose in life.

If you are lost in the city, go find  yourself in nature. In Siddhartha for instance, the protagonist gains wisdom by listening  closely to a river.  Not only we are from nature, but we are nature, therefore it is nature that we  can find all the answers to our life’s problems.

One of the most influential books for Hesse  was Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy in which the German philosopher studied Greek culture  through its tragedies before the rational philosophy of Socrates. In tragedies the Greek  championed passion alongside reason as being important. In other words, Apollo the god of  reason was counterbalanced by Dionysus the god of passion.  

But when Socrates came along,  he mainly focused on rationality alone and as a result western philosophy somehow chopped off  its passionate arm and grew its rational arm too long. This became the cornerstone of western  outcome-driven lifestyle. Hesse’s writing counters this hectic lifestyle and instead he returns to  nature to the animalistic and natural instinct.

In both Steppenwolf and Siddhartha, nature plays  incredibly important roles. As a result, Hesse’s counter-culture writing had a profound influence  on the 1960s psychedelic movement and the hippie movement that took thousands of westerners to  India in search of wisdom and meaning. In fact, the magic theatre of the Steppenwolf gave  its name to two actual theatres in America, just to show how influential his writing was.

In  fact, Timothy Leary who wrote about the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which I have summarised here,  also was deeply inspired by Hesse’s novels. In other words, Hesse’s writing hit a chord with  those fed up with the hectic life in western cities. Hesse’s ultimate message in Siddhartha  is that nobody can teach you how to find meaning and fulfilment in life, but your own unique  journey of finding meaning for yourself.

In other words no teacher or guru can find  meaning for you. You must carve a path of meaning for yourself. This message resonated  with millions of people who read his novels.

Thank you.