Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  Finally we conclude our business with the Hesse novel.  It is quite short -- really a novella rather than a novel. So we do it no harm with this 'mere' three posts. In the second of these posts we discussed Emil Sinclair's relationship with Pistorius. I'll move on here, as Sinclair did.  In time, Sinclair learns Pistorius' limitations.  Pistorius deserves credit for understanding that the existing religions are inadequate, he fancies himself the priest of a new one but ... his mind and conversation keeps moving backward, not forward, so he is incapable of effectively being the harbinger of something new.  "He knew too much of Egypt, of India, of Mithras, of Abraxas. His love was attached to ideas with which the world was already familiar." They have a falling out.  Sinclair grows tired of Pistorius' "piecing together ... of religious forms which had been handed down." He tells Pistorius as much, and the two men part.  Sinclair is now 18, it...

I described this book in this blog less than one year ago, as one of the landmark works of a neglected golden age of intellectual activity in the western world, the period from 1880 to and including 1920. Hermann Hesse is best known in the Anglophone world anyway for a very different work, SIDDHARTHA. But that wasn't published until 1922, a little bit outside of the somewhat arbitrary limit of the golden age in question.  And its force may be lessened by its universality. DEMIAN was published in 1919. Its subtitle is THE STORY OF EMIL SINCLAIR'S YOUTH and ES has the narrative voice. I am in possession both of an English and (through an accident I will not discuss) a Spanish language translation of the original German text.  Hesse, who was born in 1877, did not pass away until 1962.  He wrote a forward to this book, again getting into character as Emil Sinclair, quite late in life, in 1960.  The third paragraph of that forward begins this way: "Authors, in writing no...