Hanging above the mantle in Ron Dart’s living room is a large oil painting of a sea-battered coastal landscape featuring an old lighthouse nestled amongst tall, wispy, and sun-browned grass on an otherwise barren landscape. The symbol of the lighthouse is telling for how the author of thirty-plus books, including The North American High Tory Tradition and Keepers of the Flame: Canadian Red Toryism, has been influenced by the countercultural icon, Hermann Hesse. At first glance Hesse’s influence on Dart may seem a paradox: Dart, a High Tory, influenced by a literary icon of the counterculture often associated with the left. Canadian High Toryism, in its deep respect for the wisdom of tradition and the commonweal, stands in contrast to both a progressive form of liberalism that tends to clear-cut the wisdom of tradition, and a republican form of conservatism that is more concerned with the protection of private property and the free market than it is the common good. But such is Dart’s thesis: a more mature and nuanced read of Hesse reveals an intellectual depth and probing sensitivity into Hesse’s life and writings that has often been overlooked by the counterculture of the 1960s and 70s. The purpose of Hermann Hesse: Phoenix Arising (High Tory Publishing, 2020) is to provide such an interpretation and nuanced read.
The book is divided into nine chapters and includes an introduction and an appendix. The first six chapters walk the reader through the transformation and maturing of Hesse’s own life and writings. He begins with some of Hesse’s earlier works such as Peter Camenzind, Knulp, and Wandering, then moves through to Siddhartha, lingers on Journey to the East, and concludes with Hesse’s magnum opus and Nobel Prize-winning novel, The Glass Bead Game. These six chapters are filled with Dart’s own insights into Hesse’s various works, illuminating the context and the language used in the novels while also offering discerning wisdom into the nature of the human journey in general. There are two common threads that are woven throughout these six chapters.
The first is that Hesse turns away from the ever-wandering-and-free On the Road type (to borrow from Jack Kerouac), a person uprooted from place and people, committed to nothing but the limitless possibilities of the open road. Instead, he moves towards the contemplative and almost monastic type, committed to people and place, while serving others on a variety of levels. Dart tracks the development of this type in the characters Peter in Peter Camenzind, Siddhartha in Siddhartha, Leo in Journey to the East, and Joseph Knecht in The Glass Bead Game, who Dart considers to be the fullest expression of the servant type. The second thread is that Hesse’s apparent turn to the East was not as much about a turning away from Western religion and spirituality toward Eastern religion and spirituality as it was about Hesse’s turn to the East of our soul— the home of light, the source of wisdom and insight. Hesse’s vision is one of unity and concord between spiritual seekers of a variety of traditions, East and West. In this sense Hesse transcends a simple East-West divide in a classical humanism that is on full display in The Glass Bead Game.
The concluding three chapters examine Hesse the man in more detail. The seventh chapter is a comparative essay on Hesse and Thomas Merton that highlights the many affinities that the two men shared. The eighth chapter, titled “Erasmus, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Hesse: Western Civilization, Competing Visions,” is a criticism of the three Germans and a nod toward Erasmus. For anyone who has studied under Dart (as I have), it quickly becomes evident that the clash between Erasmus and Luther and the tension between protest and loyalty is the critical point in Dart’s interpretation of Western history. While Erasmus attempted to hold loyalty to the Church together with protest against its shortcomings, Luther protested to the point of splitting from the Church all together. In Dart’s view, the modern and postmodern are understood as the predictable playing out of the principle of protest contra loyalty. In this chapter, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Hesse are depicted as participating in the spirit of protest that began with Luther and the Protestant Reformation. While there is obvious truth in Dart’s interpretation of history, this particular chapter seems to make Nietzsche and Heidegger the products of his interpretation too quickly. For example, if Nietzsche’s interpretation of history is correct, then Christianity itself was founded on the spirit of revenge and ressentiment against the more noble and aristocratic class. From Nietzsche’s perspective, then, the spirit of protest permeates through to the root and seed of the Christian tradition. Perhaps Dart could have engaged with Nietzsche and Heidegger’s interpretations of history more thoroughly in this chapter.
In my estimation, the final chapter in the book, titled “Burckhardt, Nietzsche, Hesse: Whose Version of Conservatism Contra Modernity?”, is the strongest chapter. Dart establishes that all three German thinkers were critical of the modern liberal ethos and way of being. After establishing this fact, he examines the alternative type of “new being” that each man puts forward. Dart tracks the influence of Burckhardt on Nietzsche, highlighting where the two have affinities and where they diverge, and ultimately giving the nod to Burckhardt over Nietzsche and Hesse over both men. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is put forward as his “new being,” the ubermensch type that stares into the face of the abyss and nothingness and joyfully creates. For Nietzsche, nihilism is our lived reality, but the higher type of being (the ubermensch) is able to overcome a passive form of nihilism that expresses itself in the spirit of revenge against the human condition. An active form of nihilism faces into chaos and joyfully creates new values for a better world. Dart compares Nietzsche’s Zarathustra type with Hesse’s “servant of being” type, developed throughout his works and embodied in the German words Knecht and Dienst. Dart sides with Hesse, and the concluding appendix probes the deeper meaning of the German terms and their outworking in Hesse’s life and literature. In my view, Dart’s interpretation of Hesse and servanthood is one that is much needed in an age and ethos where individual spirituality can quickly be reduced to a mere creative expression of personality and freedom from place, people, and commitment. In its worst form it descends into a shallow and unhealthy narcissism, and all too often mistakes the mole hill we have made of ourselves for the ancient mountain that towers behind us. As someone who read most of Hesse’s novels in my twenties, Dart’s book proved to vastly expand and improve my own interpretation of the various books, while also bringing me to a better understanding of the impact that Hesse has had on Dart’s own life. Just as Siddhartha eventually came to the vocation of a simple ferryman, guiding others from one shore to the next, and Leo quietly served the league of spiritual seekers, so Dart tries to be a lighthouse, a keeper of the flame for his many students, acquaintances, and friends, as we sail across the waters of time together.
Taylor studied philosophy and political philosophy at the University of the Fraser Valley, and is presently working on an M.A. in Theology from Saint Stephen’s University, with a long term goal of pursuing a vocation in mediation and reconciliation work. Taylor is the editor of the high tory reader and recently started a small publishing company. When he isn’t studying, he is likely at home with his two daughters on their hobby farm in Abbotsford, BC.