In the present article, I dissect key elements of Hermann Hesse’s famous novel, the Glass Bead Game (Glasperlenspiel) in order to make them fertile for Cultural Psychology. I originate from the idea ...that the Glass Bead Game can be understood as a universal language that relies on open ideographs, thus signs that can be combined and structured for multiple purposes. Yet, this universal language is not solely a play; it has an educational drive to educate the mind and to help the individual reaching inner harmony. This play comes into being only when listening to the play of other people interacting with me and me meditating upon the multiple meaning making opportunities of it. I argue that such a perspective is in close accordance with the actual task of Cultural Psychology helping to unravel how people do relate to their environments and the impact that results from this ecological interaction. However, I appeal interested readers in trying to better institutionalize such a cultural psychological purpose of serving the individual in order for Cultural Psychology to be a sustainable and long-lasting science unlike the Glass Bead Game that became an end in itself.
When Richard Strauss composed his Vier letzte Lieder (1948) he was 84 and psychologically exhausted by the sufferings of the war years and subsequent isolation. The four songs are not really a cycle ...and perhaps not even 'Lieder' in the traditional sense of the word (eminent musicologists prefer to call them Gesänge); however, they undoubtedly represent Strauss's farewell to life and art. Sunset, autumn and the approaching night which is first and foremost a leavetaking from life: on these themes, which connect together the three poems by Hermann Hesse and the fourth, Im Abendrot, by Joseph Eichendorff, Strauss resorts to a musical symbolism that trascends the borders of each Lied, and transforms coloraturas into idealised, rarefied arabesques. The systematic interweaving of instrumental and vocal singing also reaches such a degree of parity as to make the customary concept of accompaniment wholly inadequate and incongruous. On the one hand, Strauss takes up elements that had been dear to him since his youth, on the other, he rethinks and surpasses them by imagining a vocality that borders on abstraction: the words themselves become mere sound. In the Vier letzte Lieder there is a transparency of writing typical of the late style of the great composer in which the technical dominance is such that it goes unnoticed and becomes a spontaneous reinvention of a past that is irrevocably lost, but still alive in memory: so much so that all of the last Strauss seems to find a synthesis in these four truly 'last' pages of metamorphosis and farewell.
In the German translation history of the Daodejing, the version rendered by the renowned German sinologist, Richard Wilhelm, has vigorously propelled the study of Laozegetics in Germany and stands as ...a translation of historical and scholarly significance. Wilhelm complemented the concise main text through the use of diverse, precise, and appropriate paratexts, granting his translation both readability and academic rigor. This ensures the admiration of general readers and the recognition of professional scholars. Tailored to the linguistic preferences and educational levels of German readers, Wilhelm frequently employed highly recognizable theological, philosophical, and literary concepts within the German cultural system to elucidate the Daodejing. This translation strategy effectively satisfies the expectation horizon of target readers. In the paratexts, Wilhelm constructs a philosophical framework of Daoism, compares the thought of Confucianism and Daoism, and broadens the dialogue between Chinese philosophical thought and Western intellectual traditions, thereby bestowing upon the Daodejing a renewed vitality in the German-speaking world.
Hermann Hesses Roman Der Steppenwolf (1927) erzählt die Geschichte von Harry Haller, einem menschenfeindlichen "Wolf aus der Steppe", der von sich glaubt, die Seele eines eines Menschen und eines ...Wolfs zu haben. Eines Abends, als Haller die Straßen der Stadt durchwandert, sieht er eine Tür inmitten einer alten Steinmauer mit der Inschrift: Magisches Theater; Eintritt nicht für jedermann U+0336 nicht für jedermann (Hesse 1978: 37). Das „Magische Theater“ ist der Ort, an dem Haller schließlich sich selbst gegenübersteht und mit seiner inneren Aufruhr auseinandersetzt. Der folgende Auszug stammt aus dem Teil zum „Magischen Theater“ im Roman Der Steppenwolf. Haller sieht eine Tür mit der Inschrift: Anleitung zum Aufbau der Persönlichkeit – Erfolg garantiert (Hesse 1978: 208) und ein Schachspieler gibt ihm eine Lektion in Persönlichkeitsentwicklung, indem dieser zu Haller sagt: „Wie der Dichter aus einer Handvoll Figuren ein Drama schafft, so bauen wir aus den Figuren unsres zerlegten Ichs immerzu neue Gruppen, mit neuen Spielen und Spannungen, mit ewig neuen Situationen. Sehen Sie!“.
This study delineated the templestay experience in the context of the authenticity of tourism. To understand the phenomenon of templestay experience, the study applied the hermeneutic phenomenology ...method. Furthermore, the researcher tried to approach the experience with an open perspective in observing essential meanings and lived phenomena. From the hermeneutic guide, the study discovered “structure of perceptions (situation, emotion, thought, action),” “perceptual experiences (rational experience, sentimental experience, judgmental experience, experimental experience),” and “experiential authenticity (superficial authenticity, situational authenticity, relational authenticity, space-time authenticity, existential authenticity)” from the lived templestay experience and developed a “descriptive model of the integrative phenomenon of templestay experience.” This study suggests the possibility of discovering new phenomena by expanding the boundaries of the perceptions of the authentic experience of tourism.
Wittgenstein explores learning through practice in the Philosophical Investigations by means of an extended analogy with games. However, does this concern with learning also necessarily extend to ...education, in our institutional understanding of the word? While Wittgenstein's examples of language learning and use are always shared or social, he does not discuss formal educational institutions as such. He does not wish to found a ‘school of thought’, and is suspicious of philosophy acting as a theory that can be applied to other areas of life. While Wittgenstein's focus on developing independent thinking was neither individualistic nor anti‐institutional, it did, however, focus on developing the thinking of his students rather than theorising about how this could be applied on a large scale. An analysis of Hermann Hesse's novel, The Glass Bead Game will help us to pick up where Wittgenstein deliberately left off—thinking about how (or if) one can institutionalise learning methods that encourage thinking for oneself. These differences in the writers’ treatment of education will become evident in the differences between their game analogies. While language‐games combat our ‘craving for generality’ in Philosophical Investigations, the Glass Bead Game represents this craving, and how it manifests itself throughout history in disciplines other than logic and philosophy of language. It also represents the potential for institutions to become insular, exclusive communities.
These reflections originate in an encounter I had with Mary Douglas in the mid‐1980s, when she had a regular visiting appointment at my university. Arriving at my office for the first time one day ...before we headed to lunch together, she paused at the threshold to take in the wall of volumes before her and exclaimed “My favorite book!” before making a beeline for the one item in my Douglas collection that you are probably not picturing. The book she singled out was Rules and Meanings (hereafter R&M), a compilation claiming “philosophical forebears for a course of anthropology that I like to teach” (9). Published in 1973, R&M is subtitled The Anthropology of Everyday Knowledge, Selected Readings. This anthology's 319 pages comprise forty‐five selections by thirty‐four different authors from anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, sociology, and more, including a few surprises: for example, writings by someone identified only as “Mrs Humphry” (author of Manners for Women, a 1897 etiquette guide), by the avant‐garde composer John Cage, and by the Nobel Prize–winning novelist Hermann Hesse, whose works (e.g., Siddhartha, The Glass Bead Game) were 1960s countercultural best sellers.
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