A-Z 2021 H: Siddhartha (Hermann Hesse, 1922)

 

You know, I've encountered this book before.  I hadn't read it before, mind; rather, a class on world religions that I was going to take years and years ago but ended up dropping before the end of the first week had it on the syllabus.

So, the book on the table today is Hermann Hesse's novella, Siddhartha.  This is an incredible book, for a number of reasons, not least of which is that it does actually do a good job of bringing the concepts of samsara and nirvana into very clear view for someone not familiar with them.  There's a general sense in Western culture as a whole for what Buddhism is teaching about nirvana, but very few who don't actively practice Eastern religions have a solid idea of what the actual nature of that state is, which does give some good value to this read.

The book itself is about the life of Siddhartha, a member of the Brahmin caste, who decides early on that the religious life that has been set out for him by his father doesn't interest him and that instead, he wants to give up the comfortable life that exists for him and go into the wilderness, to become an ascetic and search for enlightenment in other ways.  This leads him to encounter the Gautama Buddha (not-coincidentally also one whose original name was Siddhartha, though the text of the book doesn't mention this), an experience which sends him into a life of learning from everything, trying the lives of a rich merchant and a poor ferryman before finally reaching his own enlightenment and, presumably, escape from the cycle of samsara.

It's a beautifully-written book, and Joachim Neugroschel's translation retains the lyrical quality of the work.  The language is almost dream-like at times, flowing like a river and pulling the reader along on Siddhartha's journey to enlightenment.  While Siddhartha is really the only character who is fully built out into three dimensions, the supporting cast, drifting in and out of his journey, are all making their own similar journeys, though perhaps not all with as much success as his own spiritual awakening.

So, with the book review part of this post done, let's look a little more at what's actually going on in this work.  The overall theme seems to be that you can teach knowledge, but you cannot teach wisdom, and any attempt to do so will just sound foolish.  Wisdom must be learned from the self, through experience with the world, and can only be found when you're not looking for it.  As long as you actively search, the search itself will keep you from finding enlightenment.

The key concept to be aware of here is, again, samsara.  Generally, those of us in the Western world have an understanding of the Eastern religions in question here, Buddhism and Hinduism, that really begins and ends with reincarnation and possibly karma if you look a bit deeper.  Coming from a primarily Abrahamic cultural background, these aren't concepts that are easy to really understand properly, simply because that background gives an idea that you get one pass at life, and how you conduct yourself will determine what your afterlife will be.  This isn't the understanding of life that Eastern religions have, where everything is instead seen as cyclical, with the eternal return to life and traversal of the world as a core aspect of the soul's existence.  The world is seen as illusory, as a source of suffering, and the escape from that world into enlightenment and peace, the nirvana state, is the only way out of the endless cycle.  Everything, every action, every encounter, everything around us, is all part of samsara, the constant metempsychosis shaped in each cycle by karma, the return of all good and ill that you created in the world being brought back around to you in the next life, that all are trapped within, for better or worse.

This is where the message of searching being counterproductive comes into play.  Nirvana is a state of being free from desire, pain, and guilt; the act of searching for it, therefore, is succumbing to a desire.  Siddhartha only reaches his enlightenment when he gives up even the search for it, releases himself from the pain that comes of his life experiences and the path he has taken by understanding that his life has, itself, come in a cycle, and discovers the underlying oneness of everything.  He exists in a simple life, in the end, simply ferrying travelers across the river that has become his world, that is the source of his final escape from samsara even as he realizes that water itself is fundamentally caught in its own eternal cycle.

The river is everything, and everything is contained in the river.

A-Z 2021 G: Faust (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1808/1832)

This was going to be two posts, but no, I should treat this as one long work, albeit one that would be ridiculously long and expensive to produce.  Goethe's Faust is perhaps a harder work to get a firm handle on than I expected, largely because my only previous exposure to the Faust legend is through Christopher Marlowe's 1592 play Doctor Faustus.  While Marlowe held closely to the legend in his treatment, Goethe's drama goes rather farther afield, resulting in a work that is about more than simply hubris and wastefulness.

Faust comes in two parts, with a gap of indeterminate length between the two parts of the narrative.  The thematic concerns of the two differ, as well, with the first part focusing on human sorts of concerns, while the second jumps into a mythic space that operates far more in the realm of allegory than anything else.

The general form of the Faust legend is that a scholar who wants to know things beyond human understanding makes a deal with the devil Mephistopheles in order to gain access to those secrets of magic for a set length of time, at which point he will be dragged bodily to Hell forever.  Marlowe held tightly to this narrative; the second half of Doctor Faustus is largely made up of Faust running around being a ridiculous buffoon and wasting the time he bought at the cost of his soul.  Goethe gets this out of the way very early on, and instead uses the legend as a framework to build a far more ambitious tale upon.

The first, and possibly most important, change that Goethe offers is in the nature of the deal between Faust and Mephistopheles.  Faust is frustrated by the limits of human knowledge, and how he can never experience a moment of satisfaction knowing that there are whole realms that he can never even become aware of.  Rather than summoning the devil himself, however, the devil instead comes to him directly, offering a wager that Mephisto can find a way to bring about that satisfaction.  If Faust ever finds himself in a moment that he would want to last forever, the devil wins his soul.

Interestingly, this wager seems to be OKed by God Himself; one of the two prelude scenes in Part One features God and the devil agreeing that the wager is OK.  This has some echoes of the biblical Job, where the Adversary requires the go-ahead from the boss in order to begin.  Of course, Faust is being given everything he desires in order to try to steal his soul, rather than being punished needlessly because...  Well, it's not worth getting into the whole philosophical and theological question of Job here.  Suffice it to say that Goethe's Mephisto got permission for what he's doing from the big guy upstairs.

Faust Part One starts out looking much like Doctor Faustus, with Mephisto's first attempts to reach a quick win backfiring spectacularly; an old scholar who longs for ever more knowledge just isn't going to be that interested in drunken buffoonery, and when the devil tries to tempt him with pleasures of the flesh, the only one Faust is interested in is a girl far too innocent and pure for the devil to work in her.  Suddenly, the Tragedy of Faust becomes the Tragedy of Gretchen as we are shown the effects of Faust's interest upon her.  He manages to win her heart, appearing as a noble who is strangely drawn to the innocent commoner, but the manipulations result first in the death of her mother, then with the devil killing her brother in a duel, and finally with her becoming shunned by the community due to getting pregnant by Faust.

In the end, the baby winds up drowned by Gretchen in order to spare the child the life that has resulted, and the girl herself winds up imprisoned and sentenced to death.  Faust, who has left her by then, sees a vision of her while he's caught up in a witches' Walpurgis Night festival, but is delayed by a truly bizarre take on A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Mephisto trying to keep Faust under thumb; the only indication we get that this doesn't end as a complete loss for everyone involved is a disembodied voice announcing that Gretchen has been redeemed through her own prayers and pleas to Heaven.  Faust himself is left grieving.

And that's where Part One ends.  Literally.  Mephisto announces that Gretchen is dead, the Voice declares her soul saved, and Faust laments.  It's three lines of text and then it's just... Done.

And then Goethe took 30 years to write the second half, which wasnt even published until after his death.

So, with that cliffhanger ending, we'd surely expect this to be addressed in Part Two, but no.  Instead, it opens with Faust exhausted in a flower field, being sung first to sleep then awake by Ariel from The Tempest for some reason, being assured that the spirits of Nature are siding with him and the elves should restore him to good humor.  Which... Ok then.  A little surreal, but given that the fairies and spirits were running around during Walpurgis Night, not totally out of left field.

Next, we're introduced to the Holy Roman Emperor, who is just installing Mephisto as his new fool.  That's surely a good thing to do, as this leads quickly to drunken revelries in which many of the Roman mythic nymphs, along with the Moirae and the Erinyes, show up in the palace to cavort and maybe get the Emperor drunk enough to think that printing paper currency guaranteed against buried treasure that's surely there even though it hasn't actually been dug up is a good idea.  Definitely a good way to get yourself out of debt.

This leads into Faust deciding that the best life for him would be as the husband of Helen of Troy, and we get a Classical Walpurgis Night sequence, featuring a homunculus floating around in a jar, a succession of Roman mythic figures, and Mephisto running around feeling inadequate because he has no power to meaningfully work in a pagan framework. Eventually, he is forced to borrow the form of one of the Graeae in order to have any ability to interact with the narrative.  Meanwhile, Faust inserts himself formally into the Classical narrative by rescuing Helen from her post-Troy fate as a human sacrifice by Menelaus(‽), so that he can take her to Elysium and live a life with her in a blending of Classical and Romantic philosophy, taking the place of Achilles as the father of Euphorion, only to suffer the preordained death of that winged youth due to... whichever one of the many ways of causing him to fall to his death actually happens, because it occurs somewhere up above the top of the stage curtains.  It's a play, remember.  

This whole sequence may or may not be all a dream.  This is a truly strange play.

The final segment of the play features Faust, back in reality, deciding that he wants to control nature, and sets about a plan to reclaim a section of land from the sea through dykes and dams, only to be interrupted by a war that the Emperor got involved in and having to sort it out.  He eventually reaches a point where he can see that the moment he would want to prolong, the endpoint of his wager... he even says out loud, where Mephisto can hear, that the moment is nigh... then drops dead of old age, not having reached it.  The devil decides this means he's won, and prepares to take Faust's soul to Hell, only to have a flight of angels overwhelm him with flowers and take Faust off to Paradise, as Gretchen has successfully interceded on his behalf with the Virgin Mary.

So... yeah.  That happened.  This is somewhat unique as, so far as I can tell, it's the first time that the Faust legend is depicted with a positive ending for the titular scholar.  The second half is far less referenced than the first, perhaps because it's a far more... I'd almost say esoteric work.  The allegory and symbolism is thick here, far more than the comparatively straight-forward first half, and the story harder to keep a solid handle on.  It also has a far more complicated relationship with the fourth wall, with several times where the characters on stage seem to slowly wind up in the audience, and Mephistopheles himself repeatedly talking directly to the audience.  It's not quite to the point of being Modernism, but certainly prefigures it.  This is actually an unusual trait for the devil; he says several times that his power has begun to wane to the point that he needs lesser demons to assist him with his machinations, yet he seems somehow able to reach forward and take this bit of forward-looking dramatic license.

There's a lot to unpack in here, to say the least.  I'm pretty much certain that I'll be coming back to Faust again at a later date, when I'm perhaps a little better-established in my knowledge of the Classical literature that is so heavily referenced here.

Also when I have a copy of Part Two that doesn't have a binding that's falling apart.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One (Friedrich Nietzsche, 1883-1885)

Nietzsche. It’s one of those names that gets thrown around whenever someone wants to ‘explain’ a particularly potent case of sociopathy, someone who thinks they can get away with doing things with impunity. The two murderers in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, inspired by real-life murderers Leopold and Loeb, use his writings as an excuse for why they choose to hold a dinner party for their victim’s family, with the body in a trunk in the same room. It’s proof that they’re übermenschen, Supermen, they say. They even invite the professor who introduced them to Nietzsche’s writings because they think he’ll be impressed that they’ve taken to his teachings so well.

That… really isn’t what Thus Spoke Zarathustra is trying to do, though.

Admittedly, I’m not certain precisely what it actually is trying to do, but I think I’ve at least managed to suss out the general shape of it. This might be the toughest read I’ve yet encountered in here, just from a sheer ideaspace standpoint.

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A good starting place might be to address the writing style. Nietzsche is generally known for a certain succinct quality to his writing, choosing words to make his thoughts as plain as possible. This is very much not that; rather, we’re looking at something akin to the writer channeling Walt Whitman’s mindset and “sounding [his] barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” Zarathustra is exuberant in his desire to sound his ideas and opinions, to teach his philosophy to the people, to make sure that everyone knows that “God is dead,” and that the age to come will be the age of the Superman.

That Zarathustra’s ideals are laughed down by the masses, saying that they would rather become like Zarathustra’s “Ultimate Man,” who lives a life of luxury and relaxation without any strife or anything to trouble them, and which stands opposed to the Superman. Despairing, he goes in search of people who will be more receptive to his ideas.

Reading this right after The Time Machine, I couldn’t help but think that the Ultimate Man feels like the predecessor to the Eloi, but I doubt the two are related. However, the idea that the Ultimate Man represents the, well… ultimate endpoint of human desires for comfort and relaxation, leads directly in that direction.

The work as a whole is separated into four sections, each being one of the four volumes that Nietzsche published in the 1880s. The first gives the initial explanations of the Superman/Ultimate Man dichotomy, explains the differences and gives the general shape of the Superman; the second features Zarathustra expanding on his teachings to his disciples; the third is Zarathustra’s journey to return home after leaving the disciples, and commentary on the world and cultures as he travels; and the fourth concerns a group of pilgrims searching for Zarathustra because they are ‘Higher Men’ who believe themselves to be in a position to become somehow better.

The most important takeaway may be the specific way that Nietzsche, through Zarathustra, suggests that we get to the world in which the Superman can exist. Multiple times throughout the book, he describes Man as being a bridge of sorts, between the animal and the Superman. Man has, through sheer force of will, what is described as will to power, ascended to be the pinnacle of what animals can be. This will to power is defined as one of the primary characteristics of the Superman, that he is more interested in shaping his world than in even his own life. The Superman has no fear of self-injury, no outside influence shaping what he wants to create, nothing stopping him from pursuing the challenges he desires, or what he wants to do with himself. He is above all but his own desire to rule himself, living selfishly above all else.

The aphorisms offered as ways of explaining what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ for the Superman’s world are perhaps a little hard to wrap one’s mind around, on first glance. We are told that pride is a great sin, but vanity isn’t. Charity is bad, because it is giving in to other people’s desires; in the world of the Superman, there are no beggars, even if some might be wealthier in certain ways than others. Chastity is bad, because it in fact inflames lusts. Conventional wisdom as to what are Good and Evil are turned on their heads, because those ideas are tied in with religion and, after all, “God is dead.” He brings this up repeatedly. God is dead, and will be replaced with the new Superman, who makes his own choices about what is right and what is wrong.

Perhaps the most important aspect of Nietzsche’s Superman, though, is the concept of what happens after life. Zarathustra very openly decries any belief in an afterlife, instead preaching the concept of the eternal recurrence, where one’s entire life repeats infinitely, forever, such that if one hopes for a particular moment to come repeatedly, they must accept the entirety of their life doing such. The Superman, by Zarathustra’s explanation, lives a life such that every second of their life, both the high points and the low points, is a moment that they would gladly experience again, eternally. They have no regrets.

Zarathustra teaches that no man can become the Superman. It’s something to aspire to, to reach for, but not to attain. Rather, the goal of all people must be to create the world in which the Superman can exist, and this requires a tearing-down of religious thought, a complete rethinking of conventional morality, and apparently a great deal of solitude and living in the mountains as hermits, as any life surrounded by others invites the thoughts and desires of others, and the potential desire to submit to others’ needs. This is a big point: there is no submission of any sort for the Superman. The Superman is thus almost a sort of mythic hero, doing what he desires for the sake of doing it, rather than because he was told to. Even the powerful Hercules was not a Superman, because he feels remorse for what he did in a drunken rage and submits to complete the impossible labours assigned to him.

The one thing most explicitly described as a sin, and indeed the greatest sin in Zarathustra’s mind, is pity. Taking pity upon others is against the ideal of the Superman, because if you take pity, you are submitting your feelings to those of the misfortunate, feeling shame because of the shame they feel for themselves; this is even stated to be the cause of God’s death, that he felt pity for the entire human race and shamed himself to death. The entire fourth book is devoted to this topic; Zarathustra walks the forest because he has heard what he believes to be a cry for help, and encounters a number of “Higher Men” who have come to seek his teachings. Over the course of the book, he guides them all to his cave, where they share a meal together and listen to his teachings, an event directly compared to the biblical Last Supper. During the evening, however, these men show that even where they claim to have cast off their shackles, they are unable to maintain this mindset for even the full evening; every time Zarathustra steps outside for a little fresh air, they relapse in some way, culminating in the entire group starting to worship an ass because a proper replacement for the God would have to be someone who is slow, stupid, and never says ‘no’.

Seriously, they start worshiping a literal pack-ass, because its braying sounds like ‘Ye-a’.

That Zarathustra is disappointed in them makes for quite an understatement; he verbally tears into the whole group, until they renounce the false idol before them. The ass, for its part, doesn’t seem to much care, though someone got it drunk so when the Dionysian revelries that ensue during the night begin, it dances right along with everyone else.

The work as a whole ends on a cliffhanger; apparently Nietzsche planned it out as six volumes, but only wrote four of them. Zarathustra spends the whole work talking of the pride of his eagle and the wisdom of his serpent; they are joined in the last few pages of the book by a lion who, in the prophet’s estimation, indicates that the time to return and preside over the noontide for his followers is at hand. The book simply ends there, though; what would have come is lost to time. We can only wonder what the creation of a world that follows the ideals of Zarathustra might have been, to bring about the Superman.

In any case, by the end of reading, I had a very specific idea of what the Nietzschean Superman looks like in mind, and it’s certainly not what the Nazis were trying to create when they got done reading this book in the early part of the Twentieth Century.

I see the Superman, as described here, as being one of those off-the-grid sorts, living out in the mountains, off the land, not because it’s easy, but because it’s a perpetual challenge for them. The only rules are those they make for themselves, because nobody else is around to enforce anything. They just live a solitary existence, enjoying their life to the fullest and answerable to nobody, because they’re above everyone, figuratively but also literally, living at the high altitides offered by, well… a mountain.

Basically, what I’m getting from all of this is that Nietzsche’s ideal Superman is a doomsday prepper.