Hermann Hesse On Finding The Soul Beneath The Self And The Key To Finding Peace – The Marginalian

“To be nobody-but-you – in a world where you're doing your best, night and day, to make everyone else – is to fight the hardest battle anyone can fight,” EE Cummings told the hard-working students of the middle-aged stage, long before Virginia Woolf thought up the courage to be yourself.

It is true, of course, that the self is a place of illusion – but it is also the only place where our physical reality and social reality meet to draw the universe into focus, into meaning. It is the key to our quality. It is a strong thread between the mind and the world, woven by consciousness.

Therefore, in the personal context, it depends on our experience of the world.

The challenge comes from the fact that, when tested, there is no single person and standing but a crowd of them that meet at any time to be a temporary totality, only to reconfigure again in the next situation, the next set of expectations, the next postponement of biochemistry. This worries us, because without a strong human mind, it is impossible to preserve your self-image. There is only one ingredient to this confusion – to reveal, often at a shocking cost to the ego, always under this twinkling star, the constant that others may call it. the soul.

Hermann Hesse (July 2, 1877-August 9, 1962) takes up the question of finding the soul beneath man in his 1927 book. Steppenwolf (public library).

You write:

Even the most spiritual and enlightened men* tend to see the world and himself through the lenses of deceptive formulas and artless simplifications – and above all himself. Because it seems to be the innate and essential need of all people to see themselves as a unit. No matter how often and how painfully this illusion is destroyed, it can be repaired again… And if there are suspicions that they have too much power and extraordinarily fragile ideas, as they should, they tear through the illusion of the unity of humanity and see that the identity has been formed by the majority of them and simply put them under the mass of them. lock and key.

Accepting the truth of the bundle is not easy, because it requires searching for a deeper goal of unification, a mysterious thread that binds the bundle. (After all, every day you are faced with the question of what makes you and your friends the same person despite lifelong and psychological changes – a question that is often answered by this illusion of personality.)

Sympathizing with this global vulnerability to deception, Hesse notes:

All selfishness, far from being united, is at its highest level a diverse world, a starry sky, a confusion of species, of regions and classes, of inheritances and powers. It seems to be as essential a necessity as food and breath that every man should be compelled to regard this chaos as a unity and to speak of his selfishness as if it were one and clearly distinct and immutable. Even the best of us share the illusion.

Considering this self-self a form of “visual illusion,” Hesse emphasizes that, with enough courage to break the illusion and enough curiosity about these “different beings” within, one can see through all the “various parts and aspects of the higher unity” and begin to see this unity clearly. You write:

[These selves] build unity and a higher personality; and it is in this supreme unity alone, and not in a few letters, that something true of the soul is revealed.

A generation before Hesse, Whitman, after boldly proclaiming that it contained multitudes, saw in all “a consciousness, a rising thought, independent, detached from all else, calm, like the stars, shining forever.”

We call this, this supreme unity of humanity, the soul.

Knowing that even the soul is doubled, Hesse gives a prescription for resistance to the simple method of deceiving and extracting the soul from a person. Half a century before Bertrand Russell asserted that the key to a fulfilling life is to “make your interests gradually wider and emptier, until gradually the walls of self-consciousness shrink, and your life becomes more integrated into the life of the universe,” wrote Hesse:

Begin the long and tiring and difficult road of life. You will have to multiply your double self many times and grapple with your complexities still. Instead of reducing your world and simplifying your soul, you will have to nurse more of the world and eventually take it all from your painfully enlarged soul, if you are ever to find peace.

Only by expanding and expanding the soul can the self, fluid and fractal, be gently held. And without personal compassion, Hesse reminds us a century before the self-help industry revolutionized this concept, there can be no global compassion and no inner peace:

Loving your neighbor is impossible without loving yourself… Self-hatred is really like selfishness, and in time it breeds isolation and the same despair.

A couple with Virginia Woolf on how to feel your soul, then revisit Hesse on the courage to be yourself, the wisdom of the inner voice, and how to live more.