In 1920 Hermann Hesse published a collection of essays titled Blick ins Chaos (Glimpse of Chaos). I’ve been studying The Idiot recently, and below are few excerpts from Hesse’s essay on that work.

For those of you who are new to the Plan Resonate blog, this post is part of an ongoing series that looks at chaos from a management perspective.

Here’s Hesse (PDF):

“The “idiot,” I have said, is at times close to that boundary line where every idea and its opposite are recognized as true. That is, he has an intuition that no idea, no law, no character or order exists that is true and right except as seen from one pole – and for every pole there is an opposite pole. Settling upon a pole, adopting a position from which the world is viewed and arranged, this is the first principle of every order, every culture, every society and morality. Whoever feels, if only for an instant, that spirit and nature, good and evil are interchangeable is the most dangerous enemy of all forms of order. For that is where the opposite order is, and there chaos begins.”

“A way of thought that leads back to the unconscious, to chaos, destroys all forms of human organization. In conversation someone says to the “idiot” that he only speaks the truth, nothing more, and that this is deplorable. So it is. Everything is true, “Yes” can be said to anything. To bring order into the world, to attain goals, to make possible law, society, organization, culture, morality, “No” must be added to the “Yes,” the world must be separated into opposites, into good and evil. However arbitrary the first establishment of each “No,” each prohibition, may be, it becomes sacrosanct the instant it becomes law, produces results, becomes the foundation for a point of view and system of order.”

Hesse does not advocate chaos. His conceptualization polarizes chaos and organization to the extent that chaos is unlawful, immoral, and deplorable. This is one view, and it appears to draw heavily from the Laotse quote I presented earlier.

Absolute aversion to “classic” chaos doesn’t seem like a healthy management strategy. Management after all is a human endeavor. Work demands that we become comfortable with a certain amount of chaos while still holding our goals for higher states of organization. Sitting with the chaos is necessary. And then to really understand it we’d need a clearer description of what the U.S. business class refers to as chaos.

Ed. note: this small piece of research continues and it tends to get increasingly philosophical as it goes.

Hesse’s extreme definition of chaos is inconsistent with Tom Peter’s. It’s a point of language. Hesse’s version doesn’t allow room for the types of sophisticated management structures and processes that Tom described. Tom popularized the use of the term in management and like all things popularized the pop biz chaos took on a new and different meaning.

Here’s another excerpt from Hesse:

“What is remarkable and strange, important and fateful, is not that somewhere in Russia in the 1850’s and 60’s an epileptic of genius had these fantasies and created these figures. The important thing is that these books for three decades have become increasingly important and prophetic works to the young people of Europe. The strange thing is that we look at the faces of these hysterics, and idiots of Dostoevsky quite differently than we do at the faces of other criminals or fools in other famous novels, that we understand and love them so uncannily that we must feel in ourselves something related and akin to these people.”

“This is not due to accident and even less to the external and literary elements in Dostoevsky’s work. However disconcerting any of his traits may be – you have only to think how he anticipates a highly developed psychology of the unconscious – we do not admire his work as the expression of profound insight and skill or as the artistic representation of a world essentially known and familiar to us; rather we experience it as prophecy, as the mirroring in advance of the dissolution and chaos that we have seen openly going on in Europe for the last several years. Not that this world of fictional characters represents a picture of an ideal future – no one would consider it that. No, we do not see in Myshkin and all the other characters examples to be copied; instead we perceive inevitability that says, ‘Through this we must pass, this is our destiny!’”

Hesse suggests that we seek to pass through chaos; it is a necessary condition of our environment.

I experience Dostoevsky differently. I’m concerned less with the definition of chaos – we’re just not writing about the same term. The driving difference for me is that we’re hardly in a sociopolitical or political economic state that resembles Europe in the very early 20th century. The U.S. business class can afford to popularize chaos because the cultural pendulum has swung so far in the other direction. We experience a type of chaos that is so heavily systematized and produced. We have the “liberty” to use chaos as a convenient logical device to nitpick through artifacts of the web of our work and lives.

What is chaos to the readers of this blog; what is chaos to Tom Peters circa 1987; what is chaos to the Idyllwild Presbyterian Community Church Womens Group; it’s become a word that functions exclusively in relative terms. The absolute meaning has been discontinued, is strictly available via aftermarket distributors, and occasionally on ebay. With no good reference to absolute chaos we find ourselves splitting hairs. It’s possible that in a highly predictable world we use the term chaos to refer to things which are actually not random.

We recontextualize our experiences and give new meaning to old symbols. No problem there. Chaos is a catchy word too. It’s got that fashionable socialistish yuppie thing going on.

What is weird though, and I think you’ll agree, is trying to figure out the extent to which we’ve mysticized a game of video poker.

One of Tolstoy’s basic premises in War & Peace is that we commonly misjudge the degree of predetermination in our lives. I’m struggling with how to reflect on that book, and I’ll definitely save it for later… stay tuned.
[tags]chaos, The Idiot, Dostoevsky, Hermann Hesse[/tags]