TL;DR - 9/10, One of my new all-time fav books! For philosophical scholarly types, thoughtful aesthetes, anybody in academia, and perhaps even spirituTL;DR - 9/10, One of my new all-time fav books! For philosophical scholarly types, thoughtful aesthetes, anybody in academia, and perhaps even spiritually-adjacent folk. Non-traditional narrative structure lacking action / fictional historical biography. Discusses the external-oriented life of action vs. the inward-oriented life of mind and pursuit of truth & beauty, whether one lives as a part of history or apart from it, the nature of self-directed growth vs. that of losing one's individuality as part of something greater, and more. Finally, it features the super awesome *Glass Bead Game* which seeks to unify all fields into a single discipline of study / artistic mode of expression.
"These rules, the sign language and grammar of the Game, constitute a kind of highly developed secret language drawing upon several sciences and arts, but especially mathematics and music...capable of expressing and establishing interrelationships between the content and conclusions of nearly all scholarly disciplines. The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colors on his palette. All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual property on all this immense body of intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on an organ. And this organ has attained an almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost beyond number. Theoretically this instrument is capable of reproducing in the Game the entire intellectual content of the universe."
Our story is primarily written from the perspective of 25th-century historians looking back at an undefined past period and chronicling the life of our main character, Joseph Knecht. His life takes place many years after major wars ravaged Europe. These events slowly led to the development of a fictional province, Castalia, separated from the world around it, reserved for a monk-like but secular community of scholars whose primary goal is to live the life of the mind without much regard for politics, economics, or technological advancement. Central to this motivation and their order is the preservation and synthesis of all arts, sciences, & humanities. To pursue this, they have systematically incorporated many fields of study into a single discipline and medium of expression that forms the core of their order and aesthetic worship, The Glass Bead Game.
This novel starts off with an introduction to the origins and development of The Game. Like many artifacts of mankind, the foundations of The Game have been shaped by the particular historical trajectory of the zeitgeist & cultural womb that birthed it. A significant section of the novel is devoted to critiquing a prior period called The Age of Feuilleton (from which we might agree that this represents a critique of our culture in Hesse's time). This era was marked by an incredible degree of intellectual freedom and unfettered growth of what we might call a culture of opinions, trends, and disconnected hyper-specialized trivia, an "era emphatically bourgeois" and superficial information consumption. From Hesse:
"We must confess that we cannot provide an unequivocal definition of those products from which the age takes its name, the feuilletons. They seem to have formed an uncommonly popular section of the daily newspapers, were produced by the millions, and were a major source of mental pabulum for the reader in want of culture. They reported on, or rather "chatted" about, a thousand-and-one items of knowledge."
"A torrent of zealous scribbling poured out over every ephemeral incident, and in quality, assortment, and phraseology all this material bore the mark of mass goods rapidly and irresponsibly turned out."
The historians of the future further comment on their surprise at not only how people seemed to devour this chit-chat for their daily reading, but actually thought it was what constituted the standard educational diet of a good citizen, with all that mattered was to link a well-known name to a current topic of interest.
Perhaps more surprisingly, this was not only limited to a critique of the average person on the streets, but also the large number of intellectuals that helped produce content for this machine, as well as those younger people and supposed educated class where entertaining or impassioned lectures were consumed and distilled into one or two catchwords with an accompanying picture (memes anyone?) based on works they'll probably never read. Hesse explains:
"The life of the mind in the Age of the Feuilleton might be compared to a degenerate plant which was squandering its strength in excessive vegetative growth, and the subsequent corrections to pruning the plant back to the roots. The young people...attending a university and taking a nibble of this or that from the dainties offered by celebrated and loquacious professors who without authority offered them the crumbs of what had once been higher education."
Furthermore, this critique by future historians seems to take on an almost moralistic angle of spiritual corruption in that these people were engaging in all of this in hopes of serving as a temporary salve to their existential dread, spasmodically moving through life with no real belief in a tomorrow.
And after a combination of destructive wars and the above, it is here where Hesse's future historians explain the cultural turn towards creating the secular (but still religious in its very uniquely aesthetic way), Castalian Order. An order that cultivates a drive for deep knowledge that cuts across arbitrary disciplinary lines and hints at something more fundamental, lasting, and greater than the empty and dry, fact-based husk of the previous culture, a cultivation of personal meaning and the sense of one's place in the grand arc of the universe. A very Platonistic weaving of ethics, beauty, and truth. In fact, it's interesting to note that Castalia references the mythological Greek naiad-nymph who transformed herself into a fountain at Delphi. And that drinking from the waters of her fountain was not only a rite among the contestants in the Pythian Games where fitness, music, poetry, and painting were celebrated, but also a sacred part of the Delphic Oracles who gave prophecies in the form of poetic dactylic hexameters, all of which seem to hold sacred some sort of pursuit of Truth.
At a very superficial level, this combination of pious monastic-life, knowledge curation, and artistic expression reminds me of other works of fiction like Anathem by Stephenson, or A Canticle for Leibowitz by Miller, and delightful aesthetic vibes with the animated film The Secret of Kells. And the slightly magical bildungsroman element certainly reminds me of the young protagonist in Le Guin's children fantasy novel, A Wizard of Earthsea, growing up and learning the secrets of the Language that governs the world and how ultimately he must seek his own spiritual balance within it.
Like most people, the almost mystical descriptions of The Glass Bead Game are what initially drew me into the book. Hesse explains how the development of The Game grew from a combination of this previous moral bankruptcy and isolated communities of knowledge, and how some dreamed of a new universal language of communication, cutting across all the sciences, humanities, and arts. Here we can see real-life parallels to both C.P. Snow's famous work, The Two Cultures, where he decries the split between the sciences and the humanities and the consequent detriment to society, in addition to Gottfried Leibniz's Characteristica Universalis, in which he sought to represent all forms of knowledge in common symbolism, to which one could eventually calculate on and resolve all disputes with his Calculus Ratiocinator. From Hesse:
"Some dreamed of a new alphabet, a new language of symbols through which they could formulate and exchange their new intellectual experiences…
Such a language...should be able to express the most complex matters graphically, without excluding individual imagination and inventiveness, in such a way as to be understandable to all the scholars of the world"
The historians go on to describe the humble origins of The Game:
"...the pupils at the Cologne Seminary had a rather elaborate game they used to play. One would call out, in the standardized abbreviations of their science, motifs or initial bars of classical compositions, whereupon the other had to respond with the continuation of the piece, or better still with a higher or lower voice, a contrasting theme, and so forth. It was an exercise in memory and improvisation quite similar to the sort of thing probably in vogue among ardent pupils of counterpoint in the days of Schütz, Pachelbel, and Bach—although it would then not have been done in theoretical formulas, but in practice on the cembalo, lute, or flute, or with the voice."
And that this one musician in particular,
"...was adept at playing the violin in the old way, forgotten since 1800, with a high-arched bow and hand-regulated tension of the bow hairs. Given these interests, it was perhaps only natural that he should have constructed a frame, modeled on a child’s abacus, a frame with several dozen wires on which could be strung glass beads of various sizes, shapes, and colors. The wires corresponded to the lines of the musical staff, the beads to the time-values of the notes, and so on. In this way he could represent with beads musical quotations or invented themes, could alter, transpose, and develop them, change them and set them in counterpoint to one another. In technical terms this was a mere plaything, but the pupils liked it...For a time the game of musical exercises was played in this charmingly primitive manner. And as is so often the case, an enduring and significant institution received its name from a passing and incidental circumstance. For what later evolved out of that students’ sport and Perrot’s bead-strung wires bears to this day the name by which it became popularly known, The Glass Bead Game."
From here we witness its popularity shifting from music students to mathematicians, bringing the game a high degree of flexibility and possibility. Once this was achieved we begin to see players showing up from various disciplines and casting their own field into the language of the mathemusical game, eventually abstracting the physical glass beads into a symbolic, calligraphic language of icons, incorporating linguistics and classical philology, astronomy and physics, architecture, the visual arts, and so on, such that one can start from a particular musical piece, connect it with a psychological analysis of poetry from a particular historical figure, and then use the underlying patterns to predict the motion of the stars.
Because of its pursuit of an underlying singular Truth to all things and multiplicities within itself, more pious thinkers began to associate it with an achievement of perfection, pure being, and fullness of reality, and "[t]hus, 'realizing' was a favorite expression among the players", beginning to incorporate practices of absolute absorption and meditation into the game, such that it was less like a competitive game in the traditional sense of the term, and more like a playful exercise of personal reflection. This last part calls to mind a particular perspective in mathematics known as Game Semantics where we can re-interpret things like mathematical proofs (and by the Curry-Howard Isomorphism programs too) as a game resembling a Socratic dialogue or exchange of information.
This connection between the pursuit of Truth with the expression of Beauty clearly has Pythagorean and Platonistic influences, especially with the whole melding of mathematics and music. And despite opposition by certain philosophers and scientists that generally fall under Korzybski's 'The Map is not the Territory', the significance of these 'Beauty=Truth=Good' ideas have echoed and reverberated many times throughout history, taking the form of Voltaire's Candide, Kepler's Harmonices Mundi, Occam's Razor / Law of Parsimony of 'simplicity is best', and numerous instantiations of the general Variational Principle throughout physics. From the Castalian monks:
"With us scholarship, which is the cult of truth, is chiefly allied also with the cult of the beautiful, and also with the practice of spiritual refreshment by meditation."
And because of this, these same real-life disputes between the Aristotelians vs. Platonists, the Empiricists vs. Rationalists, and even the famous paper by Wigner on The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences arise on whether The Glass Bead Game can really capture all of reality or is it just pure navel-gazing insular introspection of a language talking about itself. You can see this philosophical disagreement being played out between Knecht's mentors:
"Once Knecht confessed to his teacher that he wished to learn enough to be able to incorporate the system of I Ching into the Glass Bead Game. Elder Brother laughed. ‘Go ahead and try,’ he exclaimed. ‘You’ll see how it turns out. Anyone can create a pretty little bamboo garden in the world. But I doubt that the gardener would succeed in incorporating the world in his bamboo grove.'"
versus
"Should we be mindful of dreams?" Joseph asked. "Can we interpret them?"
The Master looked into his eyes and said tersely: "We should be mindful of everything, for we can interpret everything."
With all that said, there are many more ideas this novel touches upon. The culture of ivory tower academia and whether it stands apart from or is embedded within society, the nature of mentorship, the value of neurodiversity and the dance between seemingly contradictory philosophies, the extinguishing of the self as one becomes subsumed within a hierarchy, and many other topics.
Lastly, if you are like me and enjoy thematically pairing up your fictional reads with concurrent non-fictional material for a richer experience, I read this book alongside Rothstein's Emblems of the Mind + Tymoczko's A Geometry of Music. Another decent book would be Mazzola's The Topos of Music. Mazzola has an excellent article of his own discussing The Glass Bead Game and its connections to Category Theoretic ideas (moving beads along string diagrams anyone?), and whose theories are also addressed by the same Tymoczko above. Small world!
CONCLUSION
I'm honestly wondering why I haven't come across this book much sooner, since this simply resonates with my soul. I immediately fell in love with it from just the first 30 or so pages, and it's now ranked as one of my all-time favorite books. Special thanks to my friends Max Krieger + Prathyush from this charming interdisciplinary Discord group based on the "the aesthetics of formal things" for calling my attention to this.
So why the 9/10 rating? I expect most readers will find the cadence tedious, with the slow and non-action-based plot leading to an abrupt ending, followed by poems, and then concluding with 3 short stories. I personally would've chosen a meta-artistic route mirroring the book's themes, incorporating the poems + short stories within the bulk of the book rather than appending them to the end, similar in style to my all-time favorite book, Gödel, Escher, Bach by Hofstadter, or maybe even Cloud Atlas by Mitchell. I would then tastefully & playfully incorporate some classical music...more
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