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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

Unstructured Reflections on Boredom: A Blurry Definition of Boredom

Chris KhatschLeave a comment

In Part Two of Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche writes: “The proverb, ‘The Hungarian is far too lazy to feel bored,’ gives food for thought. Only the highest and most active animals are capable of being bored. The boredom of God on the seventh day of Creation would be a subject for a great poet.”1 Nietzsche isn’t talking about simple boredom here, which Peter Toohey, who has written one of the most boring books on boredom, defines as “a social emotion of mild disgust produced by a temporarily unavoidable and predictable circumstance.”2 What Nietzsche is talking about is existential boredom, which Toohey cannot fathom.3 (Existential) (but also situational) boredom isn’t laziness, but an excess of energy yearning to be spent elsewhere. It crawls out of your spirit’s deepest and darkest cave when one kind of energy is exhausted and another kind begins to stir. It comes to inform you that something unwelcome is gnawing at your being, chomping on your vitality, eating your time. But only the truly blessed are blessed with the curse of boredom. To be bored by something means that the reciprocity between you and the object has been severed: you no longer have anything worthy to give it, it has nothing worthy to give you, and your attention to it is now forced rather than voluntary. (The bored man is the prisoner of the now that he needs to escape from. The present situation is unwanted, unpleasant, intolerable, et cetera. Note: The “present situation” can be a two-hour workshop and it can also be a whole lifetime.) Boredom is your spirit’s way of transcending the current situation. It is a striving toward a higher or more meaningful mode of being. It is not emptiness but unspent possibility, the tension between what is and what could be, potentialities activated (but pending), a body without organs… When boredom crawls out of your spirit’s cave, it does not know what it wants. All it knows is that it does not want what it has right now. Eventually, it finds a new direction (or an object it desires), and so it crawls towards it. Boredom is a transitional state. It is a movement or, rather, an initiator of movement… But note: Simply moving from one activity to another does not solve boredom. One can pay attention and still be bored. One can be entertained and still be bored. Entertainment is often merely a stimulation without inner engagement or meaning; therefore, not a solution to boredom, but an escape from it. The movement must be from the boring activity to a meaningful activity. “Boredom,” Lars Svendsen writes, “is not a question of work or freedom but of meaning.”4 Boredom, therefore, is a good thing, as Nietzsche implies, and it can be the fertile ground for something meaningful…

Notes and References

[1] Naturally, I do not mean to offend Hungarians. I do not even know where the stereotype comes from. I’m only quoting Nietzsche here. (Nietzsche, Friedrich. Human, All Too Human. Wordsworth Editions Limited, 2014.)

[2] Toohey, Peter. Boredom, A Lively History. Yale University Press, 2012.

[3] A quote from Peter Toohey’s Boredom: “Might not this existential form of boredom, this philosophical or even religious sickness, be best characterized as depression?”

[4] Svendsen, Lars. A Philosophy of Boredom. Reaktion Books, 2011.

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.”