Hermann Hesse on Wonder and the Right Purpose of Education – The Marginalian
It goes again that what makes life livable is our ability – our willingness – to walk through the wonderful world struck by reality. The most amazing thing about surprise is that it knows no scale, no phase, no phase – it can be found in a geranium or a galaxy, a river burble or Goldberg transformations. “A leaf of grass is not under the task of star travel,” wrote Walt Whitman, the eternal saint of miracles.
The wonder, after all, is what we see when we look and the rich return of learning how to look. GK Chesterton knew this when, in his wonderful meditation on the dandelion and the meaning of life, he realized that the purpose of creative life, of full life, is to dig “a wonderful sunrise.” Dylan Thomas realized that “children who look at the stars wonder, purpose and destiny.” Rachel Carson knew it when she insisted that the greatest gift a parent can give a child is “a sense of wonder so indestructible that it will last a lifetime, as a permanent antidote to the boredom and depression of later years, the unhealthy preoccupation with artificial things, the alienation from our sources of power.” Goethe knew when he said: “I am here, to wonder!”
How we can live in that knowledge with the full force of our creative potential is what Hermann Hesse (July 2, 1877-August 9, 1962) explores in the concept of the soul of the century included in the. Butterflies: Thought, Myth, and Verse (public library).
Regarding Goethe's immortality, Hesse writes:
Wonder is where it begins, and although wonder is where it ends, it is not an empty path. Whether you are looking at a piece of moss, a crystal, a flower, or a golden beetle, a clouded sky, a calm sea, the great sigh of its swell, or a butterfly wing with shiny ribs, contours, and a bright bezel of its edges, the variety of texts, the various variations, the interpretation of various texts and their symbols. the inspired transformation and the shades of its colors – whenever I encounter a part of nature, whether with my eyes or one of the five senses, whenever I feel drawn, enchanted, opening myself for a moment to its presence and epiphanies, that time allows me to forget the shy world, blind of human need, and instead of thinking or issuing orders, rather than finding all that, fighting or doing everything. “miracles,” like Goethe, and this miracle not only establishes my brotherhood with him, other poets, and intellectuals, and makes me a brother of those wonderful things that I see and experience as a living world: butterflies and moths, beetles, clouds, rivers and mountains, because while I wander the path of miracles, I briefly escape the world of separation and enter the world of separation.
But while we are born awake to wonder, our cultural conditioning and indoctrination – what we call our education – often keeps us out of it. A century before scientists came to study the psychology and biology of magic, a century before our so-called liberal arts education became an intellectual farming industry, Hesse complains:
Our universities fail to guide us on the easy paths to wisdom… Instead of teaching a sense of fear, they teach the very opposite: calculation and measurement of happiness, rationality over magic, a strong hold on scattered individual parts over the relation of the whole to the whole. These are not schools of wisdom, after all, but schools of knowledge, although they take for granted what they cannot teach – the power of experience, the power of movement, the Goethean sense of wonder.
Fill in Nietzsche on the true value of education and pioneering neuroscientist Charles Scott Sherrington on our spiritual obligation to question, then revisit Hesse on the wisdom of the inner voice, solitude and the courage to be yourself, and the day he found the meaning of life in a tree.
