From Hermann Hesse to the Brain Research
by Christian Messerli
After a long-standing occupation with Hesse and Jung I have turned to the
Neurosciences, and here particularly the brain research. Yes, this has just in the
last time made enormous progress with the picture giving methods like MRI and
PET as well as the registration of action potentials from single nerve cells in the
animal experiment or intra operationem even in man, and it becomes more or less
a kind of leading science. There are two directions of scools of brain
investigators: There are dualists, among whom are many philosophers and
spiritual scientists, for whom brain and consciousness, spirit and body are two
separate things. On the other side are the determinists or also monists, for whom
" the brain makes the soul". Gerhard Roth and Wolf Singer are outstanding
personalities between those ones. The latter wrote a little book in conversation
form titled „A new conception of man?“. The two researchers say that the free
will is an illusion and „the self is not the master in its own house". This fact
would have consequences for the court practice and the bringing up of children,
where Singer notices, though, that nothing at all basic would change despite the
new cognitions. Jung thought in the same direction, as he established that the morals are probably an innate gift like the intelligence. But in his time, one still knew nothing of the stamp phase of early childhood with the possibility of permanently new networkings and panneling actions of the nerve cells in the brain. Roth justifies
his conviction of the end of the free will with the experiments of the American Benjamin Libet, who pointed out with students that the conscious decision for
example for raising a finger follows the readiness potential in the limbic system,
i.e. in the unconcious. Much criticism was mainly practiced of it since most
decision goes in front of a whole process of to and fro, before you definitely
decide. Singer supports his statement more on facts of the phylo- and
ontogenesis, where the cerebral cortex in man extended enormously and with
that the consciousness has arisen obviously in an evolutionary way. Then arose,
too, that the metaphysical should be postponed further, like the question "what
was approximately on the question before the Big Bang?" or the Heidegger's "
Why on the whole there is something and not rather nothing?“. One can explain
many phenomena today, which were mysterious or demonic in earlier times. Yes,
much would still be interesting and the area is very thrilling. Is the Platonic,
Christian conception of man at the end-point of its development today? asks
Thomas Metzinger in the NZZ . Yes, it then would be so that there is no
resurrection after the death but only an endless deep sleep. Jung and Hesse
believed both in a further life after death, the former described it much more
concretely. And so simple, as believes mainly Roth, doesn‘t obviously be the matter of the free will. There are decisions more comlicated than to lift a finger, f.e. the choice of the partner or of the profession or the condition, where the Jungian collision of duties begins to play a role. Here the conscient and the inconscient must collaborate closely, the head has to consult the heart and vice versa.
In that whole matter we must not tip out the child with the bath and expire in libertinism or fatalism or in a nostalgic romanticizing standpoint against the humanism. Although started with the abolition of Latin for the study of medicine, the whole cultural evolution of the ancient times over the Middle Ages up to the modern times is simply not invalid. And the great moral genii like Christ, Socrates,Buddha and Lao Tse remain unequalled examples.
Religious contents resemble much more to the language of the poets than to the scientific way of thinking. The theory of relativity would have been found of an other one sooner or later if there had not been Einstein, but Beethoven's symphonies are conceivable only through him.
I had a dream:
We hiked up a mountain road from the west with a group. The road was covered,
broad enough for a car, with enormously steep and irregular rubble or gravel. I
went with quick steps and was surprised how well I could do it. Otherwise this
didn‘t use to be the case. I was ahead of all others. Such a spinner really already
came down the way contrary to us by a car. How this one had got up at all? He
slid down more than he drove, he finally crossed our walking group. He left on
both sides a deep shipping channel in the soft gray gravel. We further got up
into woods. From there we saw high above toward the east a SAC (Swiss Alpine
Club) cottage almost in dizzy height on a sunny mountain ridge, which steeply
towered on the two sides, and, built up to the west, a little less considerable, but
equally boldly constructed, second hut. The mountain guide distributed us pieces
of paper, on which we should write to which of the two huts we wanted to go up
and on the other side down again. It should go down from the east to Czechia,
from the west to Denmark. I did not know how to make up my mind, hesitated
and finally wrote down both. The pieces of paper were gathered and it turned out
that my father had voted for the eastern variant. He explained this, namely that
one then could reach back Switzerland and with that get homeward walking over
several passes and there on to the lowland. Mrs X had, however, preferred the
Danish possibility. The guide was not so happy with my "solution". Finally we
went down the same way again, which we had come up. I came in to a
conversation with another person of the group, and it turned out that both of us
knew an area in Switzerland, in my native country, where it was not
mountaineous but quite romantic with a light grove of moss and flowers,
everything beautiful and lovely there with a gargling small brooklet. Both of us
dreamt of the place.
The two cottages symbolize my short-term situation between natural science and
religion. My father once elected the free economy theory as a true antithesis to
the Marxism-Leninism, as it was represented in Czechoslovakia before the turn,
with atheism, materialism, reductionism. He did not shy away around great
efforts to get home again. He was, by the way, a enthusiastic alpinist during his
life. Mrs X on the contrary, a former faithful patient, who went mountain
climbing again and again despite her serious asthma, asked me once, as I was
still thick, whether I would take it with her. She also loved a glass of wine in the
evening. She embodies the maternal element, like my wife. Perhaps the way over
Denmark also leads to Sweden to the mother country (My wife is Swedish). But
how to match them? The question causes difficulties for even many more
famous men than me. After quite a long time of uncertainty I read in the Internet
the ideas of a female student: „Religion and natural science are two wings, on
which the human spirit can grow and the human soul can make progress. One
can fly by no means with one wing alone. If somebody wants to try to fly only
with the wing of religion, he would land quickly in the marsh of superstition,
while on the other hand he not only would make no progress either, but fall
down to the hopeless morass of materialism. "
O yes that‘s it, I have the solution now, how the contradiction would have to be
overcome: By flying one could look down to the two areas, to the west like to
the east at the same time, if one could move so to speak between sky and soil,
one could vault into the airs and head home over Central Europe. However, it is
clear that man could never fly under its own steam such as the bird, he needs
technology to this and he has quite often also fallen. Is it the same here as in the
case of brain and consciousness? But everything is not technology since it is
added to this the indescribable feeling of happiness in the air, which has for
certain an immaterial character. And in thought one can fly far even infinitely. I
have flown already several times, mostly in the dream with a kind of airplane, and
it always was beautiful, a feeling of liberty and sublimity really near the infinite.
And with a helicopter one could overfly and land near the two SAC huts, or with
a jet one could manage the trick to rage even over two countries.
If I deal with the discussions presented above about the brain research, the
"Glass Bead Game" of Hermann Hesse finally comes to my mind, and here that
great sentence particularly, which has really touched me as a high school student
already and seems to me to summarize the "condition humaine" in an
unbelievably compact way. It seems here that natural science delivers a
confirmation of an ancient Indian wisdom. This is fantastic. Apparently this has
been known always. I can recite it by heart:
" And then how was it with the virtues, with the serenity, with keeping time, with
bravery? They got small but they lasted. If there indeed was no arbitrary walking
but only a beeing leaded, if there was no high-handed transcending, but only a
turning of the room around the individual stationary in its middle, so there were
nevertheless the virtues which kept their value and their magic, they consisted in
affirmation instead of denying, in obeying instead of avoiding and perhaps a
little also in the behaviour, that one acted and thought so as if one were reigning
and active, that one accepted uncheckedly the life and the self-deception, this
reflection with the appearance of self-determination and responsibility, that the
human beeing was created more for the actions than for recognizing, more
compulsively than intellectual.“
So one could imagine that such a game also could include elements of natural
sciences, and Hesse writes in the introduction of the history of the Glass Bead
Game, after having addressed the origin of it about the mathematician academies
of the seventeenth and eighteenth century: „Every movement of the spirit
towards the ideal aim of a Universitas Litterarum, every platonic academy, every
sociability of an intellectual elite, every overtures between exact and freer
sciences, every reconciliation test between science and art or science and religion
was based on the same eternal idea.“ So one could think that, if one tries to
realize the idea of the „glass bead game“ in reality, as this has been done, or
simply by spinning further the thread of Hermann Hesse in fancy, then one also
could include elements of exact sciences in such a game, and so Hermann Hesse
once again would be for me the greatest and most comprehensive among my
so-called „Prophets ". Hesse indeed knew only a little of natural science, but he
was, however, probably less sceptical about technology than it sometimes has the
appearance, and so we find not only the scene with firing automobiles but also
Mozart with the radio in the "magical theater" in the „Steppenwolf“.
Dreams are not foams (Träume sind keine Schäume) but they have a great
symbolic power and can astonishingly clarify a situation, so that one through an
inspiration mostly finds a new way. I have the tendency to esteem intellect too
highly, what may be a general illness of our time. I must get humble and see that
we cannot manage everything wilfully, that the ego swims in an ocean of the
unconscious. It does not need at all to be a question of God and the eternity but of
quite practical things where the respect for and at the same time the confidence in
the unconscious are in demand. The unconscious gets rebellious and
unpredictable, if one wants to repress it and push it aside. The right measure is in
the middle, together w i t h the unconcious, combined in one cord, the result
otherwise is a disastrous polarization. One must let the things happen. With
respect to consciousness one shall get as modest as Socrates who said: I know
that I know nothing.
