Steppenwolf

Steppenwolf , by Hermann Hesse

Great book, though very irritating. I kept thinking the main character was very childish - that he needed to grow up. And he finally did grow up - at the end of the book. That's what was happening here - it was all a buildup to his finally coming to terms with himself.

There are some interesting ideas expressed here. Some come from Freud. Obviously he was influenced by Freud, but I think I need to read at least one book by Freud to get a more direct feel for him. All I "know" of Freud is what I've read others say about him. I think this idea that there are all these conflicting influences in a person - all of these independent personas is very intruiging. It reminded me of Minsky's "Society of Mind" and Pinker's "How the Mind Works." In those, there are these independent agents struggling for control of various impulses. Minsky's is an earlier work and probably more geared to CS types, but Pinker's book is easily accessible - and more informed by recent research. Before I write a more detailed commentary on Steppenwolf, I'd really like to read some Freud, read Jayne's "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" and also Dennett's "Consciousness Explained."

I think there's something to all this, but I need to read a bit more before I comment further. I'm reminded, though, of something I figured out some time ago, something about the ancient philosophers Plato and Aristotle and that buncha yahoos. Their importance (or so I believe) isn't that they were right, though they probably were on some things. Perhaps I should say that their importance to humanity isn't only that they were right. Their great import is in the fact that they "got the conversation started."

Of course Hesse's Steppenwolf is very mystical, while Pinker and Minsky, e.g., are attempting to be scientific. I wouldn't say that Pinker and Minsky are proving what Hesse and Freud already knew. Not at all. But I do wonder if they (H and F) weren't able to detect a hint of this. Not all knowledge that humans have is scientific knowledge - not all of it needs to be. I think it's possible that H and F may have intuited these ideas prior to scientific explanation (though F probably thought he WAS being scientific).

When I talk about intuition, though, I don't intend anything magical about it. I think this is a kind of unconscious pattern matching. Pattern matching, as one of my AI teachers noted, is something humans are good at. Logic is a fairly new thing. Logic is trivial for computers while pattern matching is, if not intractable, at least truly difficult. Humans and computers do well and poorly at different kinds of things. This is not a surprise.

Pattern matching (a kind of induction) is very important. But induction by itself is not science. As Dewey noted in "How we Think," empiricism and science are distinct things.

That's all I have to say until I get around to reading a few more things. In the meantime, I'll reflect more on this story.

The narrator is a man, the nephew of a woman, in whose house a very curious man, Harry Haller, has taken a room. When the strange man leaves, the narrator finds his papers and presents their contents to us, the reader. The reader then sucked into a fantasy of the strange man in which he manifests numerous personalities, all communicating amongst themselves. Of course, at first we are intended to think that these other people do, in fact, exist. It's only later that we realize that the strange man who calls himself The Steppenwolf is really imagining all of these characters in order that each of them (including the steppenwolf within) might come to terms with each of the others. It's an great story, really, and an easy read. (Mildly interesting that Hesse has the same initials as his main character.) I just read somewhere that Haller has reached a midlife crisis and must choose between a life of action and one of contemplation. I agree about the midlife crisis part, but not about the necessity of making the choice. I think the book is about his coming to terms with and accepting both aspects of his personality. He doesn't have to choose one or the other.

Maybe I'll have some more comments later - if I ever get around to reading that other stuff.

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