(Hermann Hesse web image)
In 1944, the darkest year in world history, Hermann Hesse wrote this poem called "Precious, Lady of the World":
The world has been reduced to pieces,
We once loved her,
Death to us now
There are no more obstacles.
Don't blame the world,
She used to be colorful and colorful,
Ancient legends
Still cut her image.
We would like to say goodbye to her great game
With gratitude,
She has blessed us with joy and sorrow,
Give us a lot of love.
Precious, Lady of the World, may you be again
Dressed young, glamorous,
The happiness and sorrow you have given,
We've had enough. (Translated by Ou Fan)
Who is this "Lady of the World" whom Hesse is going to say goodbye to in his later years? Before this question, there is another doubt: people often personify something in the world, but how can the "world" itself be given the image of a person? Where there is an image, there is a boundary, which means that the "world" is not boundless, but distinguishes it from other "non-worlds" of existence or attributes. Tracing back to the source, in the Middle Ages, the Lady of the World (Frau Welt) is a beautiful and rotten back, symbolizing the world (weltlich) Everything is fleeting, and all beauty will eventually decay. The moral is naturally to exhort people not to cling to the splendor of the world, but to concentrate on waiting for the bliss of heaven. The medieval people who created this cautionary image must first recognize another transcendent and immortal scale, and the sculptors of the time served this order by carving the image of the Lady of the World in Worms Cathedral.
In modern times, the attributes and status of the "Lady of the World" have changed greatly. Fifteen years before Hesse bid her farewell in his poem, he wrote about her in his lifelong favorite, Narciss and Goldmund. Although the novel is set in the Middle Ages, its author is a modern man. Modern man no longer recognizes the kingdom of heaven or the other world after death, and the world of life becomes the only one. Modern secularity forms the basis of Goldmund's life, and true medieval people could not have written such stories.
Narcisse and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse
Goldmund was taught in a monastery as a young man, and after being reminded by Narciss, he realized that his nature was not suitable for being a monk, so he took the initiative to leave to live a wandering life. His wandering life is half like the travels of Prince Shakya, and half like the novels of the tramp; it is more mundane than the former, and more transcendent than the latter. Until he met Narciss again on the eve of his death sentence, fortunately released and returned to the monastery, he realized on his deathbed that the "mother of mankind" he had pursued all his life had never been far from him, "not my hands shaped her image, but she shaped me", because life, love, hunger, death, everything in the world is her. The "Mother of Mankind" he pursues does not have the dichotomy between the mundane and the other side in the cautionary meaning of the medieval "Lady of the World", but it has another meaning carried by her image, that is, the finiteness of existence: desire, life and beauty are fleeting. After accepting the loneliness and smallness of the individual's existence in the world, if a person still refuses to seek comfort and sustenance on the other shore, where will he go?
The first limitation encountered by the wanderer Goldmond was the poverty of material deprivation. This finiteness is imposed on him by the external world. The homeless do not possess anything that cannot be carried with them, which is very different from the settled bourgeoisie. Goldmund came from the world of the monasteries to the world of the proletarians, from a world of contempt for matter to a world without property, passing only halfway through and crossing the world of the settled bourgeoisie. However, material poverty did not limit the growth of Goldmund's soul, but rather became an opportunity for self-transcendence, because the wandering proletarian had a more acute sense of fleeting, dying things than those who settled in the bourgeoisie.
The second limitation of Goldmund's encounter is the fate of the dead. Each of his realizations was inspired by life-and-death opportunities: the face of a woman during childbirth, the dead fish in the fish market, the bones of the Black Death, Lena's "beautiful and terrible" look when he killed the rapist, the birth mother he saw in his heart on the eve of the death sentence, and the face of his mother who broke her ribs and knew that death was coming. The contemplation of the fate of death is the enlightenment of modern man, whose finitude is, on the one hand, fragile and pitiful, but on the other hand, it is precisely because of this finiteness that time has meaning, and the world has completeness, without dissipating into the boundless wasteland.
The third limitation that Goldmund encountered was the limitation of human skill: tangible sculptures were difficult to shape the fluid experience of life, and mortal skills could not convey mystery. However, Through the art of iconography, Goldmund solidifies the passing experience into eternity and becomes a powerful proof of existence. The joys and memories of his difficult wandering life stemmed mostly from the beauty of women and the love and pleasure they brought him, and his wandering ended with the realization that his years had passed but had nothing; the former was how perishable, and the latter was the realization of this perishability when he reflected on himself. Everything in the world will eventually disappear, and art is anti-nihilism. He learned to sculpt in Master Nicklaus's workshop, but when he realized that day after day, art would degenerate into decoration, beauty would fall into beauty, skill would degenerate into technology, and statues would degenerate into dead objects, he left the workshop and set out on the wandering path again. Goldmund grasps existence in the sense of generation, and the generation that emerges in the rheology is the result of the activity of the will.
From these three limitations, the question is not whether Hesse himself is familiar with the writings of Marx, Nietzsche, and his contemporaries Heidegger, or what kind of likes and dislikes he has toward them. Heidegger's inscription for his Complete Works is "the road, not the work"—ideas that stand on paper should only be used as signposts of the road. What is important is that Hesse did show the limitation and transcendence of existence through the path traveled by a wanderer in the cause of thought on which these three thinkers were preoccupied. So Goldmund, though different from Narcisse, is by no means a symbol of "irrationality", on the contrary, he represents a different kind of rationality -
The German philosopher Herbert Bode reduced the ideas of Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger to the weltliche Vernunft in modern philosophy, characterized by "secularism", which not only rejects the other shore, but also has nothing to do with ideals, and is not only anti-religious, but also immoral. Modern moral philosophy, though it no longer recognizes religious authority, still asks "what is the good life" and equates the self with others, acquaintances with strangers, and present people with comers, and this equal view of equality is an infinite ideal; both morality and knowledge pursue an objective perspective from no-where. And world rationality asks, "What kind of life is worth living?", and the question always comes from the perspective of this life, this here and now, and this perspective comes from now-here. The world's rational problem consciousness is based on the finiteness of this existence.
In classical times, the two Socratic questions of "what is a good life" and "what is worth living in a life" were united, and they shared one answer: "The unexamined life is not worth living." This is not because the classical era recognized the metaphysical identity of "knowledge as virtue," but because metaphysics recognized wisdom and the wisdom of the muse, Christ, or human nature in the epochs. Such was the case with Narcisse, a monastery that was both a place of knowledge and a place of practice. In modern times, however, the connection between these two issues has been broken: not only does knowledge no longer mean virtue, but we cannot even prove that the pursuit of knowledge and morality is worth living. The modern individual, who no longer recognizes wisdom, is lonely and limited, neither knowledge nor morality can overcome this loneliness and limitation, and reason cannot promise that the kingdom of reason will eventually be realized in the world.
So, how is transcendence possible in modern human life? The transcendence of the Middle Ages stems from faith, which degrades the limited earthly flesh and places transcendence on the other shore, and the finiteness and transcendence seem incompatible; but the transcendence of modern man is instead stimulated by this finiteness. Animals are poor in the world, pigs are limited but unaware of it; man is aware of this finiteness, but it becomes an opportunity to transcend himself. One of the characteristics of world reason is that it often presents opportunities rather than persistent principles, inquiring about possibilities and placing less emphasis on certainty. The quest for certainty implies the quest for perseverance and is a prerequisite for the formation of stable structures between things and forces. Certainty means predictability in time, but the ideological opportunity of world rationality is fleeting; certainty is based on the "common knowledge" between subjects, but the opportunity of world reason is only open to all people in terms of possibilities, but it is uncertain whether specific people can be enlightened by this opportunity, Nietzsche said that his philosophy is "for all people, and not for anyone" is this meaning. For fleeting opportunities or personal experiences, what matters is possibility rather than certainty.
In Goldmund's wandering career, "proletarianity" is both a crisis of survival and an opportunity to "not cling to" property; in the perception of the perishability of life and beauty, "nothingness" is both a crisis and an opportunity for artistic creativity; in Master Nicklaus's sculpture workshop, the loss of religious truth is both a crisis of technology and an opportunity to set out again towards the mysterious Mother Earth.
Narciss talks about the nature of science: "Nothing is more important than determining differences, science is the art of discernment. For example, if you find something in a person that distinguishes you from others, it's called knowing him. To avoid confusion and confusion, we must make distinctions, and if you want to know what a thing is, you must be able to say what it is not. The pursuit of distinction is the same thing as the pursuit of clarity, and over time the thinker separates himself from the world. The quest for clarity is often born out of those around him who do not belong to him in his heart, trying to deal with the world in a clear and unambiguous way; Narcisse was a medieval monk who loved God more than the world, but this truth was true in every age. Nietzsche saw modern science as a descendant of the ascetic ideal, and Narcisse must have agreed, for he himself was aware of the crisis of nothingness in this form of life, and he understood that his danger was "suffocation in space without air."
However, things are not only the characteristics that distinguish them from other things, but also some impressions and experiences that cannot be clearly explained, and can only lead to enlightenment in a certain moment as an "opportunity". Heidegger once said with a profound prejudice: the attitude of focusing only on the distinction and relation between things and the outside but indifferent to "things themselves", the attitude of maintaining a theoretical or aesthetic distance, that is, a "liberal" attitude, and associating liberalism with metaphysical or technical thought (Heidegger was accustomed to classifying all the ideas he criticized as different aspects of the same kind of thought). In Goldmund's eyes, the distinction is not important, the lines of the faces of the mother who gives birth, the lover of joy, and the painful deceased are so similar, all of which are different faces of the "mother", and all of them are the opportunity to find the mysterious mother of mankind.
It is worth mentioning that This observation of Goldmund alludes to Freud's view of the death of mothers, wives, and mothers of the earth in The Theme of the Three Boxes, the difference being that Freud spent his life trying to establish a psychological science, which Hesse did not consider to be the path of science. Narcisse said goldmond was fortunate not to be a scholar, otherwise he would have become a bad scholar, a mystic. In order for Goldmund to be himself fully, the poet Hesse did not even engage him in the art of poetry, but in sculpture, perhaps because the statues of man are the most silent things in the world; wherever there is language, Narcissian conceptual reason prevails, just as the novel itself must have been written in sober reflection.
Narciss values Goldmund as a man more than all men, but he says that he does not value Goldmund's thoughts, for they are only the thoughts of a child; whenever Goldmund thinks, he is no longer himself; even when Goldmund confesses his confession, Narciss does not take it too seriously. Narcisse was a less tolerant man, he never favored any less intelligent scholar or monk, and philosophers loved not concrete people but ideals within the reach of human nature; it was this love that strengthened the measure of value and made it possible to treat people in reality justly. His love never exceeded his justice, never undermined the rigor of intellectual life. As long as we embark on this path, we must be thorough and extreme. The rationality of the half-hanging child is the most harmful, philosophy is only concerned with those most basic principled distinctions, must be taken step by step, can not be allowed to step on the air, its reason is an inch of loss is to abandon the previous achievements, a step back is to retreat infinitely. However, Narzis, who was very strict with scholars, was particularly tolerant of Goldmund, who used images rather than words, because he knew that his path was not the only way of life: the dignity and power of philosophy came from the seamless, but there was another kind of person, whose beauty lay in loose and active; philosophy pursued airtightness, but there was also another kind of life, but it was sloppy.
Narcisse said: "Of course one can think without imagination ... Thinking does not rely on images, but on concepts and formulas. "It's an abstract, alienated ideal. Only when we retreat far enough can we see certain great truths in their entirety, and only in abstract reflection can the principles of the world be grasped as a whole, not lost by the infinite differences in phenomena, and not swayed by their endless disputes. Narcisse once said that if he had not come to this monastery, his nature would have made him a judge or a politician. This is because conceptual rationality, and even the logic of the thinking on which it is based, is inherently presented in order to connect and unify.
On the contrary, Goldmund was a man who lived completely in phenomena, and he found non-figurative thoughts inconceivable. In his view, the distinction between the near and the distant, the familiar and the strange, is fundamental, that his world begins around him, and that everything else extends from the here and now. The near, large, far and small produced by the method of perspective or perspective is by no means an illusion, the tramp deals only with personal things, while the property of the possessed is an abstract legal relationship, and when this "external thing" in turn dominates and restricts man, "alienation" occurs, and Goldmund flees from it. Marx approached matter with the attitude of creation and enjoyment rather than possession, precisely because creation and enjoyment were direct and appropriation was abstract. Heidegger opposed the technical attitude towards things, which is also abstract. Abstract relations are foreign to world rationality (the underlying logic of communism: when the creation of the beginning and the enjoyment of the terminal are not in harmony, it must be the intermediate abstract political and economic link that is wrong). Goldmund never entered the world of abstract concepts, and he would have agreed with Nietzsche that if the eternal unchanging is equated with truth, and the fleeting is equated with illusion, then "illusion is more valuable than truth." As a sculptor, he would also agree with Nietzsche's praise for the Greeks: "Know how to live: the courage to stay on the surface, the folds, the skin, the worship of appearances, the belief in form, sound, words... The Greeks were superficial – out of depth! ”
Both Narzis's conceptual rationality, which is detached from phenomena, or Goldmund's world rationality, operates day by day in the world in which we live. What is achieved through the contemplation of eternal theory, and inspired by fleeting opportunities, is the common form of human life—logic and love, infinity and finiteness, eternity and transience. On one side is the vastness of the soul that seeks the truth, and on the other side is the brave openness of crossing the existing midnight wasteland. The conceptual rationality represented by Narcisse already provides all the knowledge and justice we need, but what is the importance of world rationality? As Goldmund said last words before his death: No one can love without her, and no one can die without her. Heidegger interprets metaphysical history as the history of forgetting existence and tries to find "another" form of thought, or "non-metaphysical thought." However, Heidegger was unable to retrieve it, and could only faintly hear its call in Hölderlin's poems, and even its naming could only negate the qualitative "other..." or "non...", which is still an abstract rule given by distinction. Narcisse, who was also adept at distinguishing, could only tell Goldmund: You and I are different, you have forgotten yourself! Goldmund, on the other hand, must leave the monastery and spend his life retrieving his memory mother, the Lady of the World, until he dies.
(For a detailed discussion of world rationality, see the author's new book, Rulers on the Earth.)
---