H. Hesse: The Glass Bead Game — The Future of an Illusion
A General Introduction to its Play and Theology, by Jason Giannetti
I. Prelude
Famous for announcing in 1882 “God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!”[1] in 1888 Friedrich Nietzsche also famously lamented, “Almost two thousand years and not one new god!”[2] In order for a new god to emerge, the old god had to be dead and buried. Nietzsche spoke not to his own time but to “philosophers of the future.”[3] In the aftermath of the death of God — no, the murder of God — Nietzsche asks, “What festivals of atonement, what holy games will we have to invent for ourselves?”[4]
In the “Preface” to Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, Harry Haller directs the attention of the young fictional author of the Preface to a work of Novalis. He reads:
‘Most men will not swim before they are able to.’ Is that not witty? Naturally they won’t swim! They are born for the solid earth, not for the water. And naturally they won’t think. They are made for life, not for thought. Yes, and he who thinks, what’s more, he who makes thought his business, he may go far in it, but he has bartered the solid earth for the water all the same, and one day he will drown.[5]
A little later in the “Preface,” Haller remarks:
Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. . . . Now there are times when a whole generation is caught in this way between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standard, no security, no simple acquiescence. Naturally, everyone does not feel this equally strongly. A nature such as Nietzsche’s had to suffer our present ills more than a generation in advance.[6]
Notably, Hesse’s last novel, his magnum opus, The Glass Bead Game/Magister Ludi[7], ends with the protagonist, the Master of the Castalian Order, Knecht, drowning in an upper altitude chilly lake in the mountains during a swim at dawn. Perhaps this suggests, intertextually, that Knecht attempted to swim before he was able; attempted to think in an age not ready for his thought.
My suggestion here is that we are now entering into a second Axial Age. We are moving between two ages; from the theistic age of the previous two millennia to the ludic age to which The Glass Bead Game belongs and has appeared for us like a relic from the future, an as-of-yet-uninterpreted holy scripture from a synod of a dawning century.
Nietzsche announced not only the death of God, but also, inextricably related to that death/murder, the demise of Truth. On the one hand, “we” — modernity — had killed God through the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, and its powerful tool, empiricism. Nietzsche, however, is quick to point out that the seeds for this deicide were already contained in the religion itself. Jesus’ focus on Truth (“I am the Way, the Light, and the Truth”) and his portrayal of Truth as singular and exclusive, paved the way for the “ascetic ideal” — the myopic quest for truth. This quest, conjoined with the engine of empiricism, led to the “Higher Criticism” of Biblical studies, the debunking of “myth,” “magic,” and “miracles,” and finally the eroding of faith.
Nietzsche applauded this courageous move and saw it as the spark of a new creative crucible in which would be forged the philosophers of the future. As he said, “Indeed, we philosophers and ‘free spirits’ feel, when we hear the news that the old god is dead, as if a new dawn shone on us; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, premonitions, expectations.”[8]
Nietzsche was keen enough to see that this crucifixion of God on the ‘T’ of Truth also bore within it the seeds of Truth’s own undoing. With the death of the monotheistic God and, by extension, the singular Truth, new possibilities for knowledge and life would open up in the abyss, but the deicide also heralded in the demise of grand narratives, for when the cruel and unflinching eye of critical theory was turned on the theoretical underpinnings of Truth itself, it was found to be wanting.
However, with the close of the previous Axial Age, there are far-reaching ramifications that upend the foundations of society and culture. The death of God, the marginalization of myth, the disbelief in grand narratives, the rise of the philosophy, psychology, and hermeneutics of suspicion, and the cold critique of epistemology all serve to sever humanity from its millennia-old tether to the earth.
Myth and religion, whatever other functions they may have performed, have historically bonded people and society together within a culture. They have transformed people into a people. At the center of many religions — from the Roman polytheism to Judaism and Christianity, and Hinduism — was fire: The Vestals of the Hearth in Rome, the Eternal Flame of the sacrificial fire at the Temple in Jerusalem, the chancel lamp in Catholicism, and Agni in Hinduism. Just as the campfire creates a magic circle by illuminating the night, cooking the food, providing the sustenance and the space for the sacred stories to be told, warming the body and creating communion among those congregated and participating in the feast, so too through the transplantation of fire to home-hearth of the family and from there to the consecrated rite of the religion, fire has been the seat of sanctified space. At the core of culture is cult and in the center of the cult is the flame that radiates in a circle and rises from earth to heaven.
“But what conditions are required for myths to devlop this degree of power?” asks Rüdiger Safranski. “Surely, they can do so only if they are considered to have truth value.”[9]
In the aftermath of the Enlightenment’s excoriating and deracinating religion, with the demythologizing of thought also went the bonds that united culture. Nietzsche called for not only philosophers of the future, but also a new myth, perhaps a new religion. Early on, Nietzsche saw in the art and mythos of Wagner the possibility for this new foundation, but he soon found Wagner and his art to be wanting, to be too Christian and too nationalist. Further, as Safranski notes, “myths considered from an aesthetic point of view cannot maintain the impact required to consolidate a ‘cultural movement’ into a state of unity.”[10]
Later in his career, Nietzsche would present a new gospel for the future based upon an ancient figure — Zoroaster or Zarathustra. But sublime as this new holy man was, he was not the founder of a new religion, the harbinger of a new myth.
The power of myth resides in its pervasiveness, its ubiquity, its transparency such that it hides in plain sight. Myth is incorporated and alive to the extent that it is unrecognized as such. Once called out, once delineated, once labeled as “myth,” then the power and currency of the myth itself is diminished. “Aesthetics can be decked out in myth, but not transformed into a religions event.”[11] Contrary to Plato, myth grows organically — from the ground up.
Further, these mystagogues, Nietzsche and Wagner, were mistaken in their understanding of the relation between art and religion. Art is not a coequal with religion, nor is it a coextensive rival that could fill the vacuum left by the demise of its companion. Rather, religion is but one of the many manifestations of the genus, art.
Yes, art comes to the aid of religion — in music, dance, poetry, tapestries, stained glass, and all manner of other adornments. But art is no handmaiden to religion. Rather, religion and all it entails — ritual, deities, power — has its genesis in the prodigious outpouring from the Castalian spring. “God is a name for the creative power of man.”[12]
Art itself is holy because “the creative power of man” leads us to wonder at the source of that creative power — a source that originates beyond man and which remains shrouded in mystery because it is also beyond man’s ken.
However, it should be noted that understanding religion’s origins in art does not reduce religion to a merely aesthetic experience. Alan Watts once said in a lecture on religion:
I want to make one thing absolutely clear. I am not a Zen Buddhist, I am not advocating Zen Buddhism, I am not trying to convert anyone to it. I have nothing to sell. I’m an entertainer. That is to say, in the same sense, that when you go to a concert and you listen to someone play Mozart, he has nothing to sell except the sound of the music. He doesn’t want to convert you to anything. He doesn’t want you to join an organization in favor of Mozart’s music as opposed to, say, Beethoven’s. And I approach you in the same spirit as a musician with his piano or a violinist with his violin. I just want you to enjoy a point of view that I enjoy.[13]
This way of presenting one’s view about a religion may sound wonderfully ecumenical, tolerant, and enlightened. It may well be the way that Watts understood himself and what he was doing. However, as concerns religion, it is problematic because it makes it sound as if all religions, and in particular Zen Buddhism, are merely a matter of aesthetic preference akin to whether one prefers the Impressionists over the Cubists. This is incongruous because religion, on its own terms, presents itself as dealing with questions of ultimate significance: absolute good and absolute evil; the immortality of the soul and its fate; how I should act vis-à-vis myself and others; the meaning of life. As much as Watts might like to think that Buddhism in general and Zen in particular is above the fray of these other religions that are actively trying to convert people, the fact is that Buddhism and Zen also take up these very same questions of ultimate significance and have a stance on them — a stance that is not merely to be appreciated aesthetically, but lived, incorporated, existentially and religiously.
But, you may ask, if religion is merely an expression of artistic creation, as is argued herein, then why would one have any greater commitment to it than one has to Mozart, Beethoven, Impressionism, or Cubism?
In order to answer this question, we need to back up one level further in order to see art in its larger context.
Art and religion, aesthetics and theology, or, mythically speaking, Menaka and Vishwamitra — these two now entwined, now estranged figures — are the dream emanation of Lila, play.
As Johan Huizinga elucidates in his seminal work, Homo Ludens, the structure of both art and religion participate in all the essential features of “play.” He sums up those formal characteristics of play as follows:
a free activity standing quite consciously outside ‘ordinary’ life as being ‘not serious’, but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. . . . It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings. . . .[14]
In his study, Huizinga finds that “play” can adhere to a wide-ranging swath of human activities. As he says:
All play moves and has its being within a play-ground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course. Just as there is no formal difference between play and ritual, so the ‘consecrated spot’ cannot be formally distinguished from the play-ground. The arena, the card-table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc., are all in form and function play-grounds, i.e., forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain. All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart.[15]
Though it is, perhaps, somewhat easier to identify the characteristics of art with play since many in our culture do not see art as “serious” and we in fact use the word “play” to describe a dramatic performance, it may be somewhat more incredulous to associate the solemn rites of religion with this thing that we often see as a trivial matter — play. Huizinga adroitly brings to the fore evidence supporting his thesis for including religion within the sphere of play.
The ritual act has all the formal and essential characteristics of play which we enumerated above, particularly in so far as it transports the participants to another world. This identity of ritual and play was unreservedly recognized by Plato as a given fact. He had no hesitation in comprising the sacra in the category of play. ‘I say that a man must be serious with the serious,’ he says (Laws, vii, 803). ‘God alone is worthy of supreme seriousness, but man is made God’s plaything, and that is the best part of him. Therefore every man and woman should live life accordingly, and play the noblest games and be of another mind from what they are at present. . . . Life must be lived as play, playing certain games, making sacrifices, singing and dancing, and then a man will be able to propitiate the gods. . . .’
The Platonic identification of play and holiness does not defile the latter by calling it play, rather it exalts the concept of play to the highest regions of the spirit. We said at the beginning that play was anterior to culture; in a certain sense it is also superior to it or at least detached from it. In play we may move below the level of the serious, as the child does; but we can also move above it — in the realm of the beautiful and the sacred.[16]
Furthermore, Plato’s statements above can be misleading because they contrast play and seriousness (although they also suggest that religion is the most serious form of play). As Huizinga says:
[I]n language the play-concept seems to be much more fundamental than its opposite. The need for a comprehensive term expressing ‘not-play’ must have been rather feeble, and the various expressions for ‘seriousness’ are but a secondary attempt on the part of language to invent the conceptual opposite of ‘play’. They are grouped round the ideas of ‘zeal’, ‘exertion’, ‘painstaking’, despite the fact that in themselves all these qualities may be found associated with play as well. . . .
The play-concept as such is of a higher order than is seriousness. For seriousness seeks to exclude play, whereas play can very well include seriousness.[17]
Given these observations about play and its relation specifically to religion and more broadly to culture, we begin to see that though “myth” has been debunked, devalued, and delimitated in our society as something apart from “truth,” and thus has lost its hold over us, play (of which myth and religion are outcroppings) has not. In fact, despite Huizinga’s greatly elucidating the play-concept in his book and inaugurating “ludic studies,” to a very large extent he and his work have been overlooked by academia and society at large and “ludic studies” remains in an embryonic stage. To the extent that Huizinga’s analyses and those who have followed in his wake (such as Roger Caillois, Jacques Ehrmann, James P. Carse, et al.) have not permeated modern consciousness the way the ideas of Freud and Jung have, we still live in the unconscious and unrecognized field of play. And, as such, this field is still fertile for the cultivation of new myths, new gods, new religions.
II. Interlude
We, those “philosophers of the future,” to whom Nietzsche addressed his exhortations, we have to admit that now, in the early part of the 21st century, Nietzsche’s predictions for Europe and America have not come to pass, at least, not yet. Rather than the gradual disillusionment with religion, coinciding with an ever greater inclination towards materialism, empiricism, decadence, and eventually culminating in a great No saying of nihilism, our current age seems to be fragmenting into pockets of regressive turns to fundamentalism, nationalism, and racism while certain ‘elites’ have moved beyond nihilism into what Nietzsche called, “Experimenters.”
The birth pangs of the new Axial Age were neither as rapid nor as direct as Nietzsche may have contemplated. Though disenchantment with traditional religion may have been widespread among the intelligentsia of Nietzsche’s day, so much so that his proclamation that God is dead was hardly novel at the time, the course of the repercussions of that great death are far from over. Indeed, Nietzsche’s prediction of the struggle to do away with the “shadows” seems to be even more relevant today than when he proclaimed:
After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave — a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. — And we — we still have to vanquish his shadow, too.[18]
There are many places throughout the world today where these tremendous, gruesome shadows still inspire deeds of the sort seen in the bloodiest years of the first Axial Age. But in our time, they are just shadows. Shadows that need to be vanquished, no doubt, but, it seems to me that the movements toward fundamentalism, nationalism, racism are now reacting to the deafening silence of the old god and the dark dusk that has enveloped the world in the aftermath of the demise of the godhead, rather than zealous affirmations of the god’s glory and power.
However, contrary to this retrograde movement, there is the zeitgeist of what could be called The American Way of Play. The genealogy of this way surely has a lineage going back to the US being “The New World,” being a young nation, a nation born of revolution and breaking with tradition, and with exploration, adventure, and risk. But it also has to do with Hollywood, Disney, Baseball, Football, and Capitalism — all of which are uniquely Americana and squarely in the gaming spirit of illusion, agon, and ilinx. America’s superficiality, its frivolity, its trifling — from “The Simple Life” with Paris Hilton to the Buffoonery of Donald Trump, from the ubiquity of video games to the gambling of venture capitalism — is all of a piece with its underlying ethos of games, play, and fun. The Beach Boys to Bretton-Woods, for Americans it’s all make believe. American ingenuity says, “If it fails, just start over.”
For this attitude Americans are admired and despised the world over. However, hate the spirit of levity or love it, it has been exported to all corners of the world, making sport of seriousness and finding entertainment in extremities. Even in Nietzsche’s time, this characteristic of America was evident. As he pointed out, “the faith of the Americans today that is more and more becoming the European faith as well: The individual becomes convinced that he can do just about everything and can manage almost any role, and everybody experiments with himself, improvises, makes new experiments, enjoys his experiments; and all nature ceases and becomes art.”[19]
It is, perhaps, out of this American joie de virve that we can find also the “new species of philosophers” of which Nietzsche said, “[T]hese philosophers of the future may have a right — it might also be a wrong — to be called attempters [tempters/experimenters].”[20] Of these new philosophers, Nietzsche warned:
if a man is praised today for living ‘wisely’ or ‘as a philosopher,’ it hardly means more than ‘prudently and apart.’ Wisdom — seems to the rabble a kind of escape, a means and trick for getting well out of a wicked game. But the genuine philosopher — as it seems to us, my friends? — lives ‘unphilosophically’ and ‘unwisely,’ above all imprudently, and feels the burden and the duty of a hundred attempts and temptations of life — he risks himself constantly, he plays the wicked game –[21]
Thus, Nietzsche advised, “For believe me: the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is — to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas!”[22]
It is out of this spirit of profound play, extreme exuberance, joy, and daring experimentation — a spirit of music, you might say — that the idea of the Glass Bead Game may come to fruition.
III. Ludi Sacri
Published in 1943, only five years after Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game/Magister Ludi tells the tale of Joseph Knecht and his advancement through the ranks of the hierarchy of Castalia and Glass Bead Game players. The text has frequently been categorized as a bildungsroman, that is, a coming of age story of education, cultivation, and character formation. But it is more than that. Through the biography of Knecht, we, the readers, are presented with a sketch of a new possibility; what we might call a “post secular” religious order.
Set in the twenty-third century, Hesse depicts a civilization that has survived the “Century of Wars”[23] and other catastrophes. Another name for this historical era of crisis is the “Age of the Feuilleton,”[24] presumably due to the proliferation and popularity of flatulent writing of the time.
The turbulent century was part of a general trajectory, partially articulated in our first two sections above, but succinctly summarized in the text’s Introduction:
Since the end of the Middle Ages, intellectual life in Europe seems to have evolved along two major lines. The first of these was the liberation of thought and belief from the sway of all authority. In practice this meant the struggle of Reason, which at last felt it had come of age and won its independence, against the domination of the Roman Church.[25]
This evolution is a cultural shift from Robert Kegan’s Third Order of mental complexity, Interpresonal, to the Fourth Order, Institutional[26] — that of the Enlightenment. But, an ominous overtone can be heard in the phrase, “liberation. . . from. . . all authority.” In other words, this movement of thought towards freedom is potentially dangerous if unbounded by any limit greater than itself.
“The second trend,” we are told, “was the covert but passionate search for a means to confer legitimacy on this freedom, for a new and sufficient authority arising out of Reason itself.”[27] In other words, is there any standard outside of human thought by which human reason can be measured? It seems as if society in general and thought in particular floundered for a time in this sea of freedom. They searched for a transcendental touchstone by which the mind of Man could be measured.
That age needed a hero in the sense that Joseph Campbell speaks of a hero as the person “of self-achieved submission. But submission to what? That precisely is the riddle that today we have to ask ourselves and that it is everywhere the primary virtue and historic deed of the hero to have solved.”[28] In the biography of Joseph Knecht, it is exactly this submission that is achieved and which makes him a hero. He is the “Magister,” the master, but, as his name indicates (“Knecht” is the German equivalent to the English “knight” and the original meaning of that medieval designation was “servant”) he is the master of serving and submission; at first to the authority of the hierarchy, but then to a greater authority.
As we are told, in the “Age of the Feuilleton, men came to enjoy an incredible degree of intellectual freedom, more than they could stand. For while they had overthrown the tutelage of the Church completely, and that of the State partially, they had not succeeded in formulating an authentic law they could respect, a genuinely new authority and legitimacy.”[29] This passage suggests to me, in its claim of overcoming the State and, presumably, the ideologies thereof, that there is a movement from Fourth order of mental complexity to Fifth, Interindividual — a level of thought that is beyond allegiances to ethnicities, creeds, dogmas, idols and ideals. Finding all the “isms” to be morally, intellectually, and aesthetically bankrupt, the society found itself “confronting a void.”[30]
After passing through the crucible of these trying times and witnessing the disastrous results, society comes to its senses and realizes:
[T]he continuance of civilization depends on this strict schooling [of the Glass Bead Game]. People know, or dimly feel, that if thinking is not kept pure and keen, and if respect for the world of the mind is no longer operative, ships and automobiles will soon cease to run right, the engineer’s slide rule and the computations of banks and stock exchanges will forfeit validity and authority, and chaos will ensue. It took long enough in all conscience for realization to come that the externals of civilization — technology, industry, commerce, and so on — also require a common basis of intellectual honesty and morality.[31]
The Order and the Glass Bead Game, while, in themselves, seem to be pretty adornments on the engine of civilization, in reality, are “the guardians of culture.”[32] As such, they preserve the standards of intellectual weights and measures, so to speak, without which the engine of civilization could not run.
But what is the Glass Bead Game? Much ink, and many pixels (many theses about the Game are on various web pages) have been spilt trying to elucidate, or create, such a Game. But the fact of the matter, as Peter Wolfendale has so tersely reflected, “The hypothetical austerity of Castalia forms the basis of the speculative richness of the Game.”[33]
Nevertheless, let us attempt, at least, to sketch some important aspects of the Game that can be derived from the text.
In the “General Introduction” to the Glass Bead Game and its history (for the layman), the narrator eschews the thought that the introduction is “intended as a textbook of the Glass Bead Game; indeed no such thing will ever be written. The only way to learn the rules of this Game of games is to take the usual prescribed course, which requires many years; and none of the initiates could ever possibly have any interest in making these rules easier to learn.”[34] In other words, it is only by playing the Game that the rules of the Game are learned and there does not appear to be any set of instructions on how to play it. Presumably this is because, on my interpretation at least, the Game itself is the “game” of interpretation, exegesis, analysis, synthesis, hermeneutics, and semiology. Thus, if there was a Glass Bead Game instruction book, it would be subject to Gödel’s incompleteness theorem — it would be interpreted according to certain rules not included in the rulebook or it would presume knowledge of the rules of the rulebook in order to be read and understood.
Like Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, the Glass Bead Game plays with ideas, but is also itself an idea. As the Introduction says, “like every great idea, [the Game] has no real beginning; rather, it has always been at least the idea of it.”[35]
The Introduction does sketch some antecedents to the Game, namely: the Pythagoreans, the Gnostics, “the runes of Novalis’s hallucinatory visions.”[36] To these we might add the following incomplete list:
Plato’s Academy
Aristotle’s Lyceum
Yavneh
The Cabalists
Abelard’s Paraclet
Alcott’s Summer Conversational Series
The Invisible College
Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove
We are told by way of the layman’s introduction:
The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colors on his palette. All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual property — on all this immense body of intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on an organ. And this organ has attained an almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost beyond number. Theoretically this instrument is capable of reproducing in the Game the entire intellectual content of the universe.[37]
The Introduction describes the evolution of the Game. It originates with Bastian Perrot of Calw, a musicologist who also wrote a treatise on counterpoint.
Soon it was adopted by mathematicians and “began to acquire something approaching a consciousness of itself and its possibilities.”[38] I imagine this implies also a consciousness of its limits as well, such as is found with Gödel’s understanding of mathematical axioms.
From there it spread to other disciplines. “The astronomers, the classicists, the scholastics, the music students all played their Games according to their ingenious rules, but the Game had a special language and set of rules for every discipline and subdiscipline.”[39] But the Game was in need of “universality, for rising above all the disciplines.”[40] It “longed for philosophy, for synthesis.”[41] A great leap was made by Lusor (a.k.a. Joculator) Basiliensis. He was able to give it the universality and the “rapprochement between the exact and the more liberal disciplines.”[42] “After Joculator Basiliensis’ grand accomplishment, the Game rapidly evolved into what it is today: the quintessence of intellectuality and art, the sublime cult, the unio mystica of all separate members of the Universitas Literarum. In our lives it has partially taken over the role of art, partially that of speculative philosophy.”[43] Thus, the Glass Bead Game is frequently referred to as the “Game of games” since it leaped above the other disciplines, each of which has its own rules, plays its own game.
However, “it still was lacking in an essential element.” As the Introduction tells us:
Up to that time every game had been a serial arrangement, an ordering, grouping, and confronting of concentrated concepts from many fields of thought and aesthetics. . . . Only after some time did there enter into the Game. . . the idea of contemplation.[44]
Eventually “contemplation became . . . the main thing. This was the necessary turning toward the religious spirit.”[45]
This turn is crucial and a tension exists between the Game as intellectual and aesthetic endeavor and the Game as religious practice. It is said by a Magister Ludi, Master Thomas von der Trave, no less, to Joseph Knecht:
Probably you too sometimes incline, as most good Glass Bead Game players do in their youth, to use our Game as a kind of instrument for philosophizing. My words alone will not cure you of that, but nevertheless I shall say them: Philosophizing should be done only with legitimate tools, those of philosophy. Our Game is neither philosophy nor religion; it is a discipline of its own, in character most akin to art. It is an art sui generis. One makes greater strides if one holds to that view from the first than if one reaches it only after a hundred failures. The philosopher Kant. . . once said that theological philosophizing was ‘a magic lantern of chimeras.’ We should not make our Glass Bead Game into that.[46]
Neither philosophy nor religion! What can we make of this then? First, it is important to remember that the views promulgated within the text are particular characters’ views. There is no omniscient narrator. Second, if, as I have suggested, this is a game of interpretation, then it would seem that philosophy does indeed have its own legitimate tools and that the Game can and does incorporate philosophy and its tools into it and thus is not equal to or the same as philosophy. Similarly, the same could be said of religion vis-à-vis the Game.
However, at a number of important points within the text we are presented with religious language to describe the Game, its players, and its traditions — one might say ‘rites.’ We are told, for instance, that the Game “represented an elite, symbolic form of seeking for perfection, a sublime alchemy, an approach to that Mind which beyond all images and multiplicities is one with itself — in other words, to God.”[47]
About the public matches, we are told that “the innermost ring of reverent and devoted participants. . . [give the Games] their ceremonial character and keeps them from devolving into mere aesthetic displays. To these real players and devotees, the Ludi Magister is a prince or high priest, almost a deity.”[48]
Clearly there is something of a mystical experience for the devotees of the Game at its upper echelons, as we are told:
For the dark interior, the esoterics of the Game, points down into the One and All, into those depths where the eternal Atman eternally breathes in and out, sufficient unto itself. One who had experienced the ultimate meaning of the Game within himself would by that fact no longer be a player; he would no longer dwell in the world of multiplicity and would no longer be able to delight in invention, construction, and combination, since he would know altogether different joys and raptures.[49]
Of those who play the Game, we are told:
Generations ago this famous Game had begun as a kind of substitute for art, and for many it was gradually developing into a kind of religion, allowing highly trained intellects to indulge in contemplation, edification, and devotional exercises.[50]
Even so, the revered Father Jacobius, speaking from firmly within the Roman Catholic tradition, critiques the Game and its adherents as follows:
You are great scholars and aesthetes, you Castalians. You measure the weight of the vowels in an old poem and relate the resulting formula to that of a planet’s orbit. That is delightful, but it is a game. And indeed your supreme mystery and symbol, the Glass Bead Game, is also a game. I grant that you try to exalt this pretty game into something akin to a sacrament, or at least to a device for edification. But sacraments do not spring from such endeavors. The game remains a game.[51]
Further, Father Jacobus regarded the Order “as an imitation of the Christian models, and a fundamentally blasphemous imitation since the Castalian Order had no religion, no God, and no Church as its basis.”[52] And Father Jacobus “saw no real religious attitude in [Castalia].”[53]
To which, Joseph Knecht replies “You mean, reverend Father, that we lack the foundation of theology?”[54]
What are we to make of these statements? Is the Glass Bead Game a religion or not? My suggestion is that the Game, which sees as one of its antecedents the ancient Pythagoreans, could be viewed much the same way its historical predecessor. Within the Pythagorean school there emerged two factions with different orientations to the order. One sect, the mathēmatikos, saw their work to be an intellectual endeavor. The other camp, the akousmatikoi, viewed it as a religious order and were dedicated to the “esoteric” teachings.[55] I believe we get these shifting views of the Game within the text from various characters because, as of the fictional time of the writing of the text, it has not yet been definitively decided what the Game is. Perhaps it does not have to be. Perhaps a tension and indeterminacy is, in fact, part of the Game itself. Part of the essential quality of any and all games is that they are in play. There is always something indeterminate about them.
Thus, we are told, “the Game could be played in a supreme and sacred sense; but he had also seen that the majority of players and students of the Game, and even some of the leaders and teachers, by no means shared that lofty and sacramental feeling for the Game. They did not regard the Game language as a lingua sacra, but more as an ingenious kind of stenography.”[56] It appears then, that the degree to which the Game is a religion depends upon one’s orientation to its mode of play. We are also informed that the Games public performances produce a “sense of ceremony and sacrifice, of mystic union of the congregation at the feet of the divine.”[57] And of the great public Game, The Ludus anniversaries or sollemnis, “was a festival not without its high religious and moral importance.”[58] However, even so, “For believers [the festival] possessed the sacramental force of true consecration; for unbelievers it was at least a substitute for religion; and for both it was a bath in the pure springs of beauty.”[59]
Just as for the Pythagoreans of old, the axioms, formulae, and theories of mathematics cold be a purely intellectual activity or could be a way of reading and interpreting the text of God which required, beyond pure intelligence, a purified body and spirit as well, so too the Game could be one or the other for the Castallians.
Even the highly skeptical Father Jacobus, through conversing with Knecht, grew curious about the Game and eventually “asked to be introduced to the theory of the Glass Bead Game. . . for he sensed that there lay the secret of the Order and what might be called its faith or religion.”[60] Keen as his mind was and attuned to matters of the spirit, he “resolutely proceeded in his shrewd and energetic way straight toward its center.”[61]
These observations, however, turn on the personal, subjective, interior experience of the gamers. Externally, through the centuries, the Game certainly took on all the external trappings of religious ritual. We are told that “the Game slowly began to be enriched by a new function, for it became a public ceremonial.”[62] And throughout the text we are given lavish descriptions of those ceremonies.
Yet, we are given precious little explicit description of the Game, its rules, its theory, how to play it, or its central insight or truth. Quite the contrary. We are actually told by way of analogy to music, “To be candid, I myself, for example, have never in my life said a word to my pupils about the ‘meaning’ of music; if there is one, it does not need my explanations. . . . [H]ave respect for the ‘meaning,’ but do not imagine that it can be taught.”[63] Suggesting, yet again, that the only way into the Game is through the playing of the Game.
As to what one finds at the so-called “center” of the Game, to which so many passages refer, we are told (in words consistent with so much of Hesse), “The doctrine you desire, absolute, perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long for a perfect doctrine, my friend. Rather you should long for the perfection of yourself. The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught.”[64] The Game is learned through playing and the truth is learned through living. Despite the overwhelming, even monstrously weighted proclivity toward theory, abstraction, and ideas throughout the text, there is a profound, if understated, counterpoint or antipodinal movement toward life, lived experience, and praxis.
Indeed, throughout the text, throughout Knecht’s growth, development, ever expanding horizons, and his ever more profound “awakenings,” we see that the movement of the text, the protagonist, and Mind is toward rapprochement. Like Siddhartha from Hesse’s empinonymous novel, who eventually occupies the position of the ferryman, bridging the two worlds, within Knecht and within Castalia there is a continual attempt to connect the various fields that have drifted apart through the Age of Feuilleton. There are numerous examples from the text that exemplify this. At first, the bridge is purely intellectual: between science and art; exact and liberal disciplines. In a conversation with Father Jacobus, the narrator tells us:
[P]erhaps Castalian culture was merely a secularized and transitory offshoot of Christian culture in its Occidental form. . . . In similar fashion Johann Albrecht Bengel, whom they both venerated, had in his time served a small and transitory sect without neglecting his duties to the Eternal. Piety, which is to say faithful service and loyalty up to the point of sacrificing one’s life, was part and parcel of every creed and every stage of individual development; such service and loyalty were the only and valid measure of devoutness.[65]
Johann Albrecht Bengel was a precursor of Knecht (indeed, it seems that Knecht/Hesse planned to pen “a life” based upon or about Bengel) insofar as Bengel tried to achieve a similar rapprochement in his own time, both between various sects, and, as Knecht remarks, between the disciplines themselves:
Bengel once told friends of a cherished plan of his. He hoped, he said, to arrange and sum up all the knowledge of his time, symmetrically and synoptically, around a central idea. That is precisely what the Glass Bead Game does. . . . But what Bengel meant was not just a juxtaposition of the fields of knowledge and research, but an interrelationship, an organic denominator. And that is one of the basic ideas of the Glass Bead Game.[66]
Other forms of rapprochement that appear in the text include intellectual rigor and meditation as well as faith and doubt. As is commented upon by the narrator about Knecht, “He had already learned by experience that faith and doubt belong together, that they govern each other like inhaling and exhaling. . . .”[67]
However, on a higher plane, there is the attempt at rapprochement between Castalia and the Church, as exemplified by the relationship between Knecht and Father Jacobus; the rapprochement between East and West, as exemplified by the relationship between Knecht and Elder Brother; as well as the rapprochement between the vita contemplativa and the vita activa, or between thought/theory and life/activity, as exemplified by the relationship between Knecht and Plinio Designori.
It is clear that the higher up Knecht moves in the hierarchy, the greater the level of rapprochement he embodies. The rapprochement that is exemplified by the characters of Elder Brother, Father Jacobus, and Plinio Designori all represent, in different ways, the same, ultimate and most difficult rapprochement of the text — that between mind and body, spirit and earth, eternity and time, thought and action, Castallia and the world. Another way of putting this is that Knecht is in search of a rapprochement between himself (who never knew his mother and, as is abundantly conspicuous throughout the novel, lacks almost any relation with any woman whatsoever) and his mother, the Great Feminine, the “principle” (if you will) of procreation, change, fertility, pain, blood, and ultimately, death. (But to say “principle” is to reinscribe this “figure” back into the realm of theory, rather than what Knecht is searching for, flesh-and-blood reality.)
His whole life and career, Knecht pursued his path up the hierarchy, not out of ambition, or vainglorious seeking of status, but out of one desire — a desire that is epitomized in his mentor, the old Music Master. Knecht is granted a glimpse of that for which he searches when he visits his teacher and friend just before the Music Master’s death. As he says, “At that moment I was conquered. Something of his cheerful silence, something of his patience and calm, passed into me; and suddenly I understood the old man and the direction his nature had taken, away from people and toward silence, away from words and toward music, away from ideas and toward unity.”[68]
Early in his experience with the Glass Bead Game, while examining “a problem in linguistic history,” he became “powerfully gripped by the vision of transitoriness: the way before our eyes such a complex, ancient, venerable organism, slowly built up over many generations, reaches its highest point, which already contains the germ of decay.”[69] It is this insight — into not only language, but institutions such as Castalia itself, as well as organisms such as Knecht himself — that creates terrible doubt deep within Knecht’s breast. Perhaps as a reaction to that fear, Knecht delves deeply into the Game. As he says:
I suddenly realized that in the language, or at any rate in the spirit of the Glass Bead Game, everything actually was all-meaningful, that every symbol and combination of symbols led not hither and yon, not to single examples, experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge. Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.[70]
However, after achieving the pinnacle of the hierarchy, Knecht reflects that “he now stood at the end of this road, by no means at the heart of the universe and the innermost core of truth.”[71] At best, he was at the center of only one part of the universe, but this part left out a great deal — literally its own ground.
Along with his wavering between doubt and faith, fear of ephemera and insight into the eternal, there is also another oscillation that is with him since his first being admitted to Waldzell. As the biographer says of Knecht, “The two tendencies or antipodes of this life, its Yin and Yang, were the conservative tendency toward loyalty, toward unstinting service of the hierarchy on the one hand, and on the other hand the tendency toward ‘awakening,’ toward advancing, toward apprehending reality.”[72] This is a bildungsroman and so we would expect to see the protagonist move through the various stages of mental development which alternate between connection with community and independence. Most of the struggle found in the transitions from Kegan’s second to fourth orders of mental complexity are elided over in the text. By the time we get to close third-person narrative about Knecht, he is already well into fourth order (that of ideology), if not fifth, in which he literally plays with ideas in all their contradictory and paradoxical permutations. Fourth order is rather individualist and not afraid to break with norms, conventions, and societal constraints. Knecht’s good friend and coconspirator, Fritz Tegularius, who “invariably sided with the individual against authority,”[73] seems to be very fourth order. But Knecht, towards the middle to end of the novel, appears to be striving to break into sixth order (if that’s possible).
At this juncture, the adventure begins. As the narrator comments, “He had already explored all the possibilities the office provided for the utilization of his energies and had reached the point at which great men must leave the path of tradition and obedient subordination and, trusting to supreme, indefinable powers, strike out on new, trackless courses where experience is no guide.” As is well known, Joseph Campbell once counselled to “Follow your bliss.”[74] Knecht did this. But few recall Campbell’s corollary: “Where there’s a way or path, it is someone else’s path.”[75] After following his bliss along the well-worn routes of the hierarchy, the time had come for Knecht to make his own path and that path led him back to the world.
Early on, in his polite debates with Father Jacobus, Knecht extolled the virtues of the Glass Bead Game. He said, “[W]e go even further into the realms of pure mind, or if you prefer, pure abstraction; in our Glass Bead Game we analyze those products of the sages and artists into their components, we derive rules of style and patterns of form from them, and we operate with these abstractions as though they were building blocks.” To which the gentle Father replied, “But not everyone can spend his entire life breathing, eating, and drinking nothing but abstractions. . . . Abstractions are fine, but I think people also have to breathe air and eat bread.”[76]
Yes, Knecht succeeded to some degree in winning over Father Jacobus to the Glass Bead Game, but it was not a zero-sum-game. Jacobus was successful in “awakening” Knecht to the earth beneath his feet upon which Castalia built castles in the sky. In many respects, Elder Brother, Jacobus, and Designori perform for Knecht the act that Max Stirner and Friedrich Nietzsche after him performed for the idealists and essentialists: smashing their beautiful but sterile and hermetically sealed glass bubbles of names, concepts, and ideas and thereby putting them in touch with truth as reality.
It is interesting that Knecht’s first love is music and music is his entry into the ever widening circles of knowledge and the Glass Bead Game. Knecht’s ideal music is that of Bach and throughout the text the play of the Glass Bead Game is frequently compared to music and most particularly that of Bach with all its contrapuntal harmonies, counterpoint, and thematic variations, as in his fugues. The Glass Bead Game itself operates in a similar manner with a beautiful, shimmering melody of an ideal meritocracy of minds played on top and a low, ominous, counterpoint of reality that threatens to shatter the dream image.
Rather than keep the gritty antipode at bay, Knecht literally dives right in. This results in his tragic (or comic?) death, but his loss could also be understood as a sacrificial offering in the service of the great rapprochement between Castalia and the world. It is, at least, a possibility.
The Glass Bead Game was Hesse’s last great work, but it has a postscript. Interestingly enough, in 1960, Hesse wrote a letter to his cousin, Wilhelm Gundert, who had recently published a translation of the Blue Cliff Record, a classic Zen text. In the letter expressing his admiration of Zen, Hesse assumes the name of Joseph Knecht and addresses it to Carlo Ferromonte, Kencht’s classmate from Waldzell. This is a very apropos coda to The Glass Bead Game insofar as the text’s movement toward rapprochement between idea and real and its search for profound, vital truth is, in many respects, completely consistent with the aims of Zen and its humble, earthy anecdotes.[77]
Zen, like The Glass Bead Game, exists in an indeterminate state of tension between abstract thought and recurring refrains that repudiate the illusory nature of words and phrases, ideals, concepts, and ideas. Of the plethora of parables and metaphors that one could point to in the Zen tradition that exemplifies this, the parable of the finger pointing at the moon is perhaps most illustrative. The saying, oft quoted in Zen lore and found in The Blue Cliff Record, reads, “pointing at the moon with one’s finger: the moon is not the finger.”[78] The moon, a celestial orb like a beautiful illuminated glass bead by night, is the symbol of enlightenment. The finger pointing at it is a metaphor for words, phrases, symbolic language, concepts, ideas. To mistake the finger for the moon is to fail to see both the finger and the moon. Only by direct viewing of the moon does one see the moon. Only by direct experience of enlightenment does one become enlightened. Or, as Alan Watts has said, in a manner akin to Father Jacobus’ gentle reminder above about the dangers of abstractions and the necessities of breathing air and eating food, reading the word “water” does not quench thirst, perusing a menu does not satisfy hunger.[79]
IV. A Ludicrous Proposal
Where does this all leave us as regards a program for a post-secular religion? It is far from clear that the Glass Bead Game is a religion. However, it is a distinct possibility that it could be. Yet, we raised the point earlier that religions are distinct from aesthetic phenomena, particularly because they are not merely a matter of taste, but implicate matters of ultimate concern. Is it possible that the Glass Bead Game can and does address these matters? I believe it is possible. Insofar as the Game gathers within it philosophy, religion, and all the other realms of culture, including art and the sciences, it seems quite evident to me that, to the extent that these various fields take up matters of ultimate concern, so too does the Game.
The difference is that the Game does not take up these questions from one fixed perspective, from a certain limited vantage point, from a doctrinally tethered sphere. Rather, as has been mentioned, the Game is sui generes — perhaps because it lacks a doctrine, a dogma, a theology. But that does not imply that the Game’s perspective is in any way “objectively true” or that it simply reinscribes a grand narrative. That is certainly not the case. What the Game does succeed in doing is taking up a wider sphere of perspectives without being limited by the narrowness of any one of them. In this sense, to see things sub specie ludi is more flexible and manifold than any other perspective, including the fictitious sub specie aeternetatis. In other words, sub specie ludi is another way of describing Nietzsche’s “perspectivism” that allows an array of views and interpretations to become manifest.
As has been reiterated numerous times through The Glass Bead Game, the Game itself and its adherents can and do take up questions of ultimate concern in various ways. And just as the oldest tales of the Bible, the Vedas, and the fairytales of Europe all promulgated an ethos through stories without necessarily proffering any imperatives of the “Thou shalt” variety, and certainly prior to any “theology” per se, so too is it possible, through the Universitas Literarum, for the community of gamers to take up and create a comportment toward these questions of ultimate concern.
It has often been claimed that Albert Einstein said, “Buddhism has the characteristics of what would be expected in a cosmic religion for the future: It transcends a personal God, avoids dogmas and theology; it covers both the natural and the spiritual, and it is based on a religious sense aspiring from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity.”[80] In fact, Einstein never said this.[81] Further, the statement itself is misleading insofar as, though early advocates of Zen in the West such as D.T. Suzuki and Alan Watts often would present Zen as the most universal religion, Zen is, in fact, like all religions, of a particular history, lineage, tradition, customs, rituals, rights, and limitations. Nevertheless, to a certain extent, Buddhism in general and Zen in particular, share many affinities with the Glass Bead Game. Or, to be more accurate, the Game shares with Zen, Buddhism, and Hinduism, their very Eastern approach, which accords to Lila (Divine Play) the highest importance.
What the Game does that the religions of the East do not is provide a new, pluralistic, perspectival, cross-cultural, interdisciplinary, and thoroughly fictional game board or play ground in which all the multifaceted pieces can be juxtaposed, interconnected, combined, deconstructed, and reconstituted.
As has been discussed, the Game lacks any doctrine, dogma, or theology. This is not by chance, nor is it to be counted as a deficit of the Game (as, say, in comparison with other organized religions). Rather, we might suggest, if the Game did have a doctrine, dogma, or theology, it would diminish its luminosity. In the words of Joseph Campbell: “Symbols are only the vehicles of communication; they must not be mistaken for the final term, the tenor, of their reference. No matter how attractive or impressive they may seem, they remain but convenient means, accommodated to the understanding. . . . The problem of the theologian is to keep his symbol translucent, so that it may not block out the very light it is supposed to convey.”[82] The Game has glass beads as its symbols. The beads are a symbol of symbols. Success at the game is to literally keep the beads translucent by not trying to reduce the Game to a literalist interpretation. If there is a “theology” of the Game, then this, perhaps, should be it. This essay is performative of both the Game itself and its “theology.” It is a hermeneutic, a work of semiotics, and it also attempts to keep the symbols translucent in order that the light of “God” may shine through them.
[1] Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §125.
[2] Nietzsche, The Antichrist, §19.
[3] Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §42.
[4] The Gay Science, §125.
[5] Hesse, Steppenwolf
[6] Hesse, Steppenwolf
[7] There are two different English translations with different titles:
[8] Nietzsche, The Gay Science, saying 343, p. 280.
[9] Safranski, Nietzsche, A Philosophical Biography, p. 140.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid., p. 272
[13] Watts, Alan, podcast.
[14] Huizinga, Homo Ludens: a Study of the Play Element in Culture, p. 13.
[15] Ibid., p. 10.
[16] Ibid., pp. 18–19.
[17] Ibid., pp. 44–45.
[18] Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, p. Book 3, Aphorism 142, p. 191.
[19] Nietzsche, The Gay Science, section 356, p. 303.
[20] Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, section 42, p. 52.
[21] Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Part 6 “We Scholars,” Aphorism 205, p. 125.
[22] Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book 4, Aphorism 283, p. 228.
[23] GBG, p. 139.
[24] Ibid., p. 18.
[25] Ibid., p. 19.
[26] See, Kegan, Robert, The Evolving Self, pp. 86–87 and In Over Our Heads, pp. 110–111.
[27] GBG, p. 19.
[28] Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, p. 16.
[29] GBG, p. 19.
[30] Ibid. p. 23.
[31] GBG, p. 35.
[32] GBG, p. 150.
[33] Peter Wolfendale, “Castalian Games,” http://www.glass-bead.org/article/castalian-games/?lang=enview, 04.19.2018. (Emphasis in original.)
[34] GBG, p. 14.
[35] GBG p. 16.
[36] GBG, p. 16.
[37] GBG, p. 15.
[38] Ibid. p. 32.
[39] Ibid. p. 36.
[40] Ibid., p. 36.
[41] Ibid.
[42] Ibid., p. 16.
[43] Ibid. pp. 37–8.
[44] Ibid., p. 38.
[45] Ibid., p. 38.
[46] Ibid., p. 141.
[47] Ibid., p. 40.
[48] Ibid., p. 43.
[49] Ibid., pp. 121–122.
[50] Ibid. p. 136.
[51] Ibid., p. 188.
[52] Ibid., p. 164.
[53] Ibid., p. 188.
[54] Ibid., p. 188.
[55] See, A Presocratics Reader: Selected Fragments and Testimonia, ed. Patricia Curd, trans., Richard, D. McKirahan, Jr., p. 20, quoting Iamblichus, Life of Pythagoras.
[56] GBG, p. 124.
[57] GBG, pp. 206–7.
[58] GBG, p. 204.
[59] GBG, p. 205.
[60] Ibid., p. 195.
[61] Ibid.
[62] Ibid. p. 39.
[63] Ibid., p. 122.
[64] Ibid., p. 83.
[65] Ibid., p. 174.
[66] Ibid. p. 166.
[67] Ibid., p. 134.
[68] Ibid., p. 257.
[69] Ibid., pp. 118–119.
[70] Ibid., p. 119.
[71] Ibid., p. 378.
[72] Ibid., p. 274.
[73] Ibid., p. 334.
[74] Campbell, Joseph, The Power of Myth, p. 285.
[75] Campbell, Joseph, Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation, p. xxix. (I have also seen ascribed to Campbell the quote, “If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path,” but I have not been able to track down the path to the source text of this.
[76] GBG, p. 279.
[77] For more on Hesse and Zen, see Joseph Mileck’s biography, Hermann Hesse: Life and Art, pp. 161–163.
[78] The Blue Cliff Record, trans., Thomas Cleary and J.C. Cleary, Shambalah, Boston, 2005, p. 278.
[79] Watts, Alan, Does It Matter?, pp. 32–35.
[80] Quoted from “Einstein’s Quotes on Buddhism,” Tricycle Magazine, Philip Ryan, October 26, 2007.
[81] See the article, “Einstein’s Quotes on Buddhism,” Tricycle Magazine, Philip Ryan, October 26, 2007.
[82] Campbell, Joseph, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, p. 236.