when i was in high school i read siddhartha and demian (which i think should be among required extracurricular reading for all high school students). these books really influenced me a lot. i've always felt like a bit of a loner, but like an observer. an eternal outsider looking in on something i can never really be part of. yet i have always nonetheless felt an intense connection with the rest of humanity despite my isolation. even more, in my more "present" moments i relish the connection that i can feel between me and everything else here (at the risk of betraying my hippie roots).
i happened to pick up a journal i randomly kept in high school and i had copied a section of demian into my journal. i thought i would repost it here, too. it was nice to revisit it. the following comes from the introduction (i'm not sure if this is from the original introduction, but the book was originally published in german in 1919 and in english a few years later).
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What a real living human being is made of seems to be less understood today than at any time before.... [Each human being] represents a unique and valuable experiment on the part of nature... If we were not something more than unique human beings, if each one of us could really be done away with once and for all by a single bullet, storytelling would lose all purpose. But every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again. That is why every man's story is important, eternal, sacred; that is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous, and worthy of every consideration. In each individual the spirit has become flesh, in each man the creation suffers, within each one a redeemer is nailed to the cross.... I do not consider myself less ignorant than most people. I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me. My story is not a pleasant one; it is neither sweet not harmonious, as invented stories are; it has the taste of nonsense and chaos, of madness and dreams - like the lives of all men who stop deceiving themselves.
Each man's life represents a road toward himself, an attempt at such a road, the intimation of a path. No man has ever been entirely and completely himself. Yet each one strives to become that - one in an awkward, the other in a more intelligent way, each as best he can.... Each [man] represents a gamble on the part of nature in creation of the human. We all share the same origin.... But each of us ... strives toward his own destiny. We can understand one another, but each of us is able to interpret himself to himself alone.
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I love this because it's one of those works that straddles the humanities and social sciences, and the mid 1800s through the early 1900s was a very interesting time intellectually. Evident in his writing is Hesse's thinking about some of the same things that motivated the work of Simmel. He is playing with questions that drive intellectuals of the time such as Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, notably: what holds society together and what is the role of the "individual" especially in regards to larger contexts? What is the relationship of religion to individuals and society?
Clearly Simmelian notions of individual identity as intersecting group memberships are evident. Even Marx talks about class consciousness as necessasry for social development, implicating a social psychological aspect. in addition, thinkers of the time that we now hold as canonical were increasingly looking at religion in new ways. Weber and Durkheim both gathered anthropological data on religions to propose theories about how society works, leading Durkheim to focus on ideas such as totems, rituals, and collective effervescence as mechanisms of social cohesion, and leading to Weber's focus on the institutionalization of rituals and beliefs. In both theories we see evidence of a more functionalist view of religion, as a way of keeping society together (Weber emphasizing that part less so than Durkheim). These guys were looking increasingly at "other" religions as a way to understand their own. It is almost always easier to see something we have not grown up with as social object that can be studied, as opposed to a Truth that must be taken for granted. The challenge is seeing the objectivity in that Truth: how are the Truths that we live by themselves created and maintained by individuals and our institutions?
Hesse, as someone destined and expected to go into the Protestant ministry, eventually got to a point where he could look outside the Truth he had always known, and see the motivation behind social institutions such as religion. He was influenced by eastern religions and philosophies, but unlike Weber, who wrote a social scientific book about it (the sociology of religion, still one of my favorites) and several articles (chinese literati, for example), Hesse played around with the ideas and alternative Truths themselves, incorporating them into his works in fascinating ways for people who have ever felt disillusioned from mainstream or the taken-for-granted mundane everyday western Truth, such as myself. We can play with these Truths and yet, we don't have to give up one Truth to believe in another ("within each one a redeemer is nailed to the cross"). We can form our own Truth, and that is actually the road we are all travelling.
In a more practical, less philosophical way, Hesse's perspective introduced me to (prepared me for?) buddhism. this introduction is what allowed me to get through my friend allen's death so many years ago. when he died i was so confused, because i hadn't seen him in many many months. we hadn't spoken, and so i couldn't miss him any more than i already did; it made my grieving very confusing. i remember staring out the window during classes watching the trees lose their bright yellow and red leaves, thinking about his smile and his silly happy laugh. i never felt like he was really gone. then one day i was walking across campus. although the trees were losing their leaves, there were still some bright red remnants of fall. i was walking with someone, i don't even remember who. all of a sudden, the wind blew from behind me. i felt it blow across my back and up through my hair. it caught me off guard and i looked up to see it make its way across the grass and ruffle the scattered red leaves in the distant trees. for some reason i thought to myself, "it's allen." i realized that even though he was gone, the relationship that we had was still there. even if i died too, our relationship would remain. because a connection between people is bigger than the people themselves. thought about in that sense, a person is bigger than the person him or herself. all the people i know influence me to a certain degree, some more deeply than others. even people that are no longer in my life have influenced me. how can we possibly be "individuals" in the sense of isolated, self-sufficient beings? the whole purpose of being here is to interact. there's nothing else to do! these interactions are what makes up a society, not the individuals within it. so, allen's still here. just as Hesse is still here, even though he died in 1962. these interactions and relationships are critical, but the "individual" is still a real constraint on these interactions ("we can understand one another, but each of us is able to interpret himself to himself alone"). the task is to recognize the beauty and limitations of social interaction and relationships.
i'm thankful for all the interactions that have made me who i am today as an individual, and that have simultaneously made me a member of this community (which in turn influences my individual identity in a Simmelian way). it's the social that allows us to see ourselves as individuals. we see ourselves in relation to the "other" (see also Patricia Hill Collins). so even though our search for individual identity aims at creating a "unique individual," this can only be done in comparison with the society in which one exists, using aspects such as group membership that are socially contextual. the search itself is driven and influenced by contextual factors ("what a real living human being is made of seems to be less understood today than at any time before").
i wish you the best on your own journey!!
with love and individualized solidarity,
charity :)
ps-contrast to: "Life is a tale told by an idiot--full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." William Shakespeare (eternal optimist)
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