themarginalian.org · 12 hours ago

How to Be More Alive: Hermann Hesse on Wonder and the Proper Aim of Education – the Marginalian

Hermann Hesse believed wonder is not merely a pleasant feeling but "the aim and the end" of being fully alive -- yet our education systems, he observed a century ago, teach us "counting and measuring over delight, sobriety over enchantment." Schools of knowledge, he argued, take for granted what they cannot teach: "the capacity for experience, the capacity for being moved, the Goethean sense of wonderment." Whether contemplating a butterfly wing or a patch of moss, Hesse found that wonder allows us to "briefly escape the world of separation and enter the world of unity," connecting us not only to poets and sages but to the living world itself. What makes life livable, he understood, is our willingness to remain wonder-smitten by reality -- a capacity we are born with but must choose to preserve against forces that would school it out of us.