Category: Humanities

Quotes from Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha and What Nietzsche has in common with Buddha

Notes and Quotes from Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha

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Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha is one of those books everyone must read. Not only because it’s a classic, nor because Hesse is the winner of the 1946 Nobel Prize in literature, but because reading Siddhartha will make the reader, whoever he is, (a tiny bit) wiser (even if he doesn’t plan on becoming a Buddhist).

Where Buddha and Nietzsche Briefly Meet

Sitting at my desk in my study, the book in my hands, I’m thinking about this quote:

Seeking means having a goal, but finding means being free, open, having no goal.

– Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

Having a goal chains you to it…
Have no goal unchains you…

The goal is a target; to hit the target, one must aim at it; to aim at a target, one must focus on it alone; therefore, the person who has a goal only sees through the rifle scope that is aimed at the object; and consequently, the surrounding world, the one outside his field of vision, ceases to matter and eventually disappears. Any thing or event that cannot be linked to (or get him closer to) his object of desire is a distraction, an obstacle, a waste of time. The determined, enterprising man’s world is limited, small, so small that the free spirit (trapped in it) feels claustrophobic. He lives in the parameters of his goal. The aimless man’s world, on the other hand, is much larger, boundless — most importantly, much slower…

For a moment, we find ourselves at an intersection where Buddha and Nietzsche briefly meet. In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche writes that “the unceasing desire to create is vulgar.” He then adds: “If a man is something, it is not really necessary to do anything — and yet he does a great deal. There is a human species higher even than the ‘productive’ man.”

More Quotes from Hesse’s Siddhartha:

The opposite of every truth is also just as true! It is like this: A truth can be expressed and cloaked in words only if it is one-sided. Everything that can be thought in thoughts and expressed in words is one-sided, only a half.

– Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

Wisdom is not expressible. Wisdom, when a wise man tries to express it, always sounds like foolishness.

– Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

Let seeing through the world, explaining it, looking down on it, be the business of great thinkers. The only thing of importance to me is being able to love the world, without looking down on it, without hating it and myself — being able to regard it and myself and all beings with love, admiration, and reverence.

– Herman Hesse, Siddhartha
Marcus Aurelius on Death and Being Forgotten

Reading Marcus Aurelius: Don’t Forget that You’ll Be Forgotten

Chris Khatsch1 Comment

In Meditations1 in general, but especially in Book 7, Marcus Aurelius keeps reminding us that, no matter who we are and no matter what we do, sooner or later, we will be forgotten. My favorite quote summarizing this is:

Close is the time when you will forget all things; and close, too, the time when all will forget you.

– Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

But when one reads this as a standalone quote, one can may come to various conflicting conclusions. So, let’s look at the other quotes and see what we understand from them.

How many whose praises were once widely sung are now consigned to oblivion; and how many who sang their praises are now departed and gone?

– Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Everything material disappears very swiftly into the universal substance, and swiftly too every cause is reabsorbed into the universal reason, and very swiftly the memory of everything is buried in eternity.

– Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

On fame: Look at the minds and see what they are like, and the sort of things that they flee from and those that they pursue. And reflect, too, that just as sand dunes are always drifting over one another and concealing what came before, so in life also, what comes earlier is very swiftly hidden by all that piles up afterwards.

– Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

And in another place, he says, “How many a Chrysippus, how many a Socrates, how many an Epictetus has time already engulfed.” And then, he also says things like, “In no time at all both you and the wrongdoer will be dead…”

So, what does it mean for the Stoic to remember that he’ll be forgotten? It is to be aware of his mortality and embrace it.

Some may say here, of course, that every adult on the planet knows that he’s eventually going to die. Yes, that is true; however, even with that knowledge, most live as if they’re never going to die. That is what separates the Stoic from the rest. As Ernest Becker puts it in The Denial of Death,2 “Everything that man does in his symbolic world is an attempt to deny and overcome his grotesque fate.” Conversely, we have the Stoic who wakes up every day and takes the pill that reminds him of his impermanence.

For the Stoic, freedom really begins when you stop desiring to be remembered, when you stop being afraid to be forgotten. That’s when you stop caring about the opinions of others and start living for yourself, doing good for its own sake.

To become a Stoic, one must first remember that he’ll be forgotten.

[1] Here I am again, revisiting Marcus Aurelius, reading Meditations. The last time I opened Meditations and shared quotes from it was years ago. But there’s something about this book that makes you want to pick it up again (and again). No wonder interest in Stoicism has spiked in recent years. A book that was written 2,000 years ago that is packed with great advice and a philosophy that comes in handy in the 21st century. (Although, in a book I read recently — The Tragic Mind by Robert D. Kaplan — I came across a passage that said Stoicism is a philosophy suited for slaves. This is, of course, something to think about… but later.)

[2] Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death. The Free Press, 1997.

Book Review and Quotes from Robert D Kaplan's The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power

Notes and Quotes from Robert D. Kaplan’s The Tragic Mind

Chris Khatsch1 Comment

The main message of Robert D. Kaplan’s The Tragic Mind is this: that political leaders and decision makers ought to think tragically. They need to be aware that, although there is good and evil in the world, politics is more often about a “battle of good against good.” They also need to be aware that, even though a decision must be made, political outcomes cannot always be win-win or even win-lose. Sometimes, all possible outcomes are lose-lose outcomes, and the decision maker must choose which lose-lose outcome is best.

Notes on The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power

The Hobbesian Kaplan. — Kaplan is Hobbesian. He almost always prefers order over chaos because, like Hobbes, he seems to believe that the state of nature is a state of war. As Hobbes put it in Leviathan, “There is always war of everyone against everyone. Hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man.”1 Correspondingly, Kaplan writes, “The fact that the state should monopolize the use of violence rescues us from the worst of fates: anarchy.” And “even the worst regime is less dangerous and terrifying than no regime at all.” (Here, however, one must ask: What would the colonized man say? What would someone who has read Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth say? Is it better to be dehumanized but for there to be order, or is it better to be free but for there to be chaos? Would you rather die free or live without dignity as a slave? These are questions worth asking.)

Crito Inverted. — Kaplan writes that “the state comes before humanity.” And later in the book, with Melville’s Billy Budd given as an example, we see how this also means that the law comes before the individual. Again, Kaplan talks about “the tragic necessity of order above all other concerns.” And repeats Camus’s words on Billy Budd: “In allowing the young sailor, a figure of beauty and innocence whom he dearly loves, to be condemned to death, Captain Vere submits his heart to the law.” In a way, what we have here is Plato’s Crito inverted. In Crito, Socrates says that the law is like a father and the individual is like a child. The individual belongs to the state; therefore, he must obey the law even if unjust. So, when Crito comes to help him escape, Socrates chooses to remain in his cell and, therefore, die. In the first story, then, the punisher proceeds with the punishment even when he doesn’t want to; in the second story, the punished person accepts his punishment even when he gets an opportunity to escape it. Why? Simply because the law is the law.

The Burden of Power. — Most people live in a black-or-white world. Or, at least, they believe they do. For them, there’s the right thing to do and there’s the wrong thing to do. Kaplan says that “it is so much easier to be an intellectual or an artist — or a journalist — than to be a king or political leader.” Why? Because a political leader’s job is far more complex and much more nuanced than the outsider can imagine. “The truths that journalists speak aloud are not just the truths that those in power obscure, but often the truths that the powerful are very much aware of but cannot do or say anything about publicly, for fear of making the situation even worse.”

Quotes from Robert D. Kaplan’s The Tragic Mind

Fate is something we do to ourselves and afterward blame the gods.

– Robert D. Kaplan, The Tragic Mind

To be wise is one thing, but to struggle against impersonal forces of fate when defeat seems certain constitutes true greatness.

– Robert D. Kaplan, The Tragic Mind

History rarely repeats and usually doesn’t even rhyme, despite the line often misattributed to Mark Twain.

– Robert D. Kaplan, The Tragic Mind

To comprehend your own insignificance is neither defeatism nor cowardice but the opposite. Once again, to act, and to act bravely, even in the face of no great result, constitutes the ultimate in human grandeur.

– Robert D. Kaplan, The Tragic Mind

[1] The original text, in Hobbes’ weird-old English, goes like this: “There Is Alwayes Warre Of Every One Against Every One Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man.”