The Associations in One Human Mind: ChatGPT, Two German Novelists, and Synthesizing

The associations of the human mind never cease to amaze me.

With the advent of ChatGPT, I’ve been reflecting on what computational systems can accomplish; what might be left for (or consigned to) our increasingly beleaguered species; and how we might reconfigure our educational systems—locally, nationally, globally…perhaps universally!

Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, the title of a novel leapt to mind—Magister Ludi, also known as The Glass Bead Game. Published in Europe during WWII, the book was written by Hermann Hesse, a German novelist who would shortly thereafter win the Nobel Prize. I remembered it as a somber reflection about an esoteric game, played by highly intellectual and ascetic men…, but recalled few details. I had read it when I was about 20; shortly thereafter, I cavalierly dismissed Hesse from the ranks of serious authors (a writer primarily for budding adolescent intellectuals, as I snobbishly deemed him). But somehow, sixty years later, Magister Ludi cropped up as germane to my current musings. And indeed, now on the cusp of 80, as I turned the pages, the novel actually came back to me. I anticipated the climax—the unexpected decision by Joseph Knecht, (the protagonist and “Master of the Game”) to leave the order and return to teaching and mentoring of ordinary folks.

Why had my unconscious prompted me to revisit this long-forgotten novel?

That became evident once I became reacquainted with The Glass Bead Game. This seemingly playful but actually deadly serious endeavor involved the highest level of thinking and integration—across major areas of knowledge: mathematics, philology, astronomy, music, and other art forms. In a pursuit analogous to chess, but far more complicated: a small group of highly educated and highly curated (by their elders) men competed with one another annually to identify the player most accomplished at navigating the current iteration of the game. As a distinct outsider, I was reminded of the Jesuits: a group of serious, reflective men join an order devoted to learning and prayer. In these efforts, they are supported by the broader Catholic community. Or, indeed the options available to a select group of young Jewish males, who study and debate Talmud over a lifetime; again, in this important though arcane pursuit, they are buoyed by the rest of the community.

After being chosen as the master of the order, and gaining admiration for his deft stewardship, Master Knecht makes the shocking decision to leave the order. (Predictably, the “board” denies his unusual request, but he abandons the order nonetheless). The stated reason: He feels that the members of the order are playing a self-indulgent game; they are bequeathing the more serious challenges of the quotidian world to the heads, hands, and hearts of women and men who are less able, less sanctified, (today we might quip “less gamified”). It becomes their lot to deal with “the real world.”

In re-reading the work, along with a few summaries and critiques of it, I was struck by how often the word “synthesis” comes up. The intended meaning seems quite clear. As one engages with the bead game, one is challenged to make new connections, fresh associations, unexpected moves that intertwine the superficially disparate strands of knowledge into convincing and powerful works, indeed worlds. One might speak as well of pathbreaking works of art, work of science, pillars of knowledge, the heights of interdisciplinarity….no paucity of “buzz-phrases.”

For many human beings, whether we lived in ancient Greece, Renaissance Italy, the Enlightenment of the 18th century, or the universities and research centers of our time, the act, the art of synthesis has been esteemed, valorized, and sought after—though as I have contended in these blogs, it is still not well understood.

Yet Joseph Knecht’s realization is haunting. At the close of the novel, he posits that the world will no longer support the activity to which he and peers have devoted their energies—it’s seen, indeed, as a game, rather than a valorized activity, set of activities, or way of life that actually and demonstrably serves the wider world. And he indicates that this societal conclusion may well be justified.

Our time faces a different, but analogous challenge. We now witness tools, products, endeavors—ChatGPT can stand for the lot—that seem capable of synthesizing as well as, or better than, almost all human beings—and, indeed, such an application may someday surpass even the Einsteins or Leonardos of our planet, or the bead players of Hermann Hesse’s imagination.

As I was re-reading The Glass Bead Game, another association leapt to mind. At roughly the same time that I had initially read that book, I had also read The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg) by Thomas Mann—widely considered to be the most important book by arguably the most important German writer of the 20th century (and a Nobel-Prize winner well before his age-mate Hesse). Without doubt, Hesse had read The Magic Mountain (and we also know now that Mann had read many versions of The Glass Bead Game and had in fact (successfully) nominated Hesse for the Nobel Prize.

I believe that, in addition to his other literary (and perhaps extra-literary) goals, Hesse had Mann’s masterwork in mind—indeed it may even have dominated his radar screen! Composed in the early decades of the 20th century, The Magic Mountain chronicles a contemplated short visit by a young engineer to a Swiss clinic for victims of tuberculosis. This supposed respite transmogrifies into a seven-year residency—one only terminated by the outbreak of World War I. Though this lengthy novel touches on a wide range of themes involving a diverse set of patients from many backgrounds, its major focus is clear—and it dominates much of the book. Visitor-turned-long-term-resident, Hans Castorp, monitors a seemingly endless and highly intellectual dialogue: the antagonists are Settembrini, a classic humanist who espouses Enlightenment values—and Naphta, a Jew-turned-Jesuit who disdains any embracing of modern values, in favor of a pervasive cynicism that ends in suicide.

But while fascinated by this intellectual dueling, Hans Castorp comes to a more cynical realization and conclusion. In fact, the earthly world (whether well or ill) belongs to Peeperkorn—a wealthy, comfortable, and confident, businessman who enthralls the residents and has become the lover of Clavdia, a young Russian woman whom Castorp has long craved. As happens in The Glass Bead Game, the intellect is overpowered by more mundane concerns, needs, and aspirations.

Without question, both authors seem fascinated by the world of ideas—abstract patterns, in the case of Hesse, political and cultural issues in the case of Mann. And most of their readers presumably are drawn into those debates because they—because we—also live in, and rejoice in, the world of ideas.  

Thomas Mann 1929 (source: Wikipedia)

But in the end these master novelists (and Nobelists) reach a conclusion that can be described as anti-intellectual. The real world belongs not primarily to the exchange of ideas, but rather to the more earthly pursuits of love, passion, health, commerce, possessions, struggle, conflict, war—and ultimately death. Their joint conclusion was confirmed in Europe in the early decades of the 20th century; a century later, it continues to be a leitmotif.

I had thought that Mann and Hesse had little contact. They seemed to be such different people–Mann an engaged intellectual involved in a raft of circles and political and cultural issues and one who moved back and forth among European capitals and the two coasts of the United States; Hesse, an isolate almost a hermit, who moved early in life from Germany to Switzerland, and rarely travelled any distance.

But in fact, I lately discovered that there’s a whole book of their correspondence! Any effort to connect—or disjoin—these two masterful German writers needs to take their letters in account.

Here’s my read:

The letters span virtually a fifty-year period—the men encountered one another in Germany in 1910 shortly after their first books came out. But for the next few decades, they are quite stilted in their correspondence—polite, formal, guarded, no first names, hardly anything personal—they could be diplomats from adjoining countries exchanging routine notes with few common concerns or issues.

But as the decades pass, so do the quantity and the quality of their correspondence. In 1933, Germany is taken over by the Nazis, and as an outspoken critic of the regime, Mann becomes an early target who flees the country, seemingly forever. Hesse watches from afar and finds it difficult to understand Mann’s active criticisms of the Nazi regime and its policies—they won’t do any good and they may well place him in peril.

Hermann Hesse (source: Wikipedia)

But the two men now come to realize, and to write more publicly, about their gradually discovered kinship. With horror they behold the rapid destruction of German art, literature, philosophy, scholarship—what we might call the German spirit, as epitomized in the writings of Immanuel Kant and the Humboldt brothers, the great musical composers of the 18th and 19th century, and—most prominently—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany’s prototypical intellectual spirit.

While neither has the hubris to claim the mantle of Goethe, it’s clear that Hesse and Mann see themselves as the guardian of what is excellent, noble, and admirable, in the German tradition. Hesse does not write explicitly about The Magic Mountain—as noted, widely regarded as Mann’s masterwork and the one for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize. But Mann writes frequently, enthusiastically, and with great admiration for Magister Ludi—consider this passage:

“At an age when others grow tired, you have outdone yourself and crowned your career with a work of the spirit—absolutely coherent, a self-contained perfectly rounded masterpiece in which with your own hand you draw up an impressive “sum of your experience”…Undoubtedly the book is in many respects a glass bead game played most magnificently…such a hovering, of course, is akin to irony; it makes the gravely thoughtful whole into an artful cunning jest and is the source of the comedy inherent in this parody of biography and solemn scholarship…one of my feelings in reading the book was consternation—at the resemblance and kinship between us.”  (p. 92)

Their mutual esteem is evident in this passage, Mann does not hold back on the compliments:

“He is not only a brilliant writer and a witty, highly intelligent human being… he is a grateful son and heir of the German bourgeois culture... the culture that produced not only Goethe and Humboldt, Schiller and Hölderlin, Keller, Storm, and Fontane, but also Nietzsche and Marx. I believe that we may justly number him among those masters whose “suffering and greatness” he, their younger brother, knows and interprets… how intimately he knows the “suffering” of the masters, how much he has in him of the heroism and also of the demonism of those who are possessed by their work and sacrifice themselves to it” (p. 174)

Mann considered comparisons with Hesse as both expected and understandable:

“It is only natural that we should occasionally be mentioned in the same breadth… It has always been the most German among Germans who have been the most dissatisfied with the German spirit…the greatest of all is The Glass Bead Game, ...In reading it I felt strongly that the element of parody…helped enormously to make possible the relation of this late work of dangerously advanced spiritualization and preserve its game like culture… a supreme work, his great novel of education.” (p. 112-113).

Hesse commented on their increasingly warm relationship over the decades:

“Before this friendship, one of the most gratifying and harmonious of my late life… a good many things…had to happen…both of us had to travel a difficult and often dark path from the seeming security of our national ties through loneliness and ostracism to the clean and rather cold air of a world citizenships…which nevertheless unites us far more firmly and reliably than anything we may have had in common at the time of our moral and political innocence.” (p. 149)

Back to today and tomorrow. Perhaps we humans will still be able to synthesize, perhaps we will still want to synthesize… even if various algorithms perform as well as we can. I hope so! I did not travel to Germany until late adolescence. But my entire family were German—German Jews—and had been for centuries. There is little doubt I picked up a good deal of their values, their views, what we can call their Weltanschauung (world view) and that may be yet another reason that I found myself revisiting these works in the last years of my life.

But, taking a leaf from these two literary giants, we should also valorize the kinds of human and humane sentiments that represent our species at its best—and strive to conserve them in the generations to come. And that may need to begin as early as the first days of school, indeed the first days of life.

I thank Shinri Furuzawa and Ellen Winner for their helpful suggestions on earlier drafts of this blog.

Reference

Hesse, H., & Mann, T. (2005). The Hesse / Mann letters: The correspondence of Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann, 1910-1955. Jorge Pinto Books.