Abstract

This article explores a rarely acknowledged and all too often specifically denied possibility: the relevance of Hegel’s philosophy to the interpretation of the literary work of Hermann Hesse. Contemporary Hesse scholars critical of this position, such as Edmund Gnefkow, Martin Pfeifer, and Mark Boulby, tend to view Hegel primarily as a rigorously rationalist philosopher of history. Thus they perpetuate a myth which has long been abandoned by the mainstream of Hegelian scholarship and should have been permanently laid to rest by Iwan Iljin in Die Philosophie Hegels als kontemplative Gotteslehre when he presented convincing evidence for considering Hegel as an “intuitively-rational clairvoyant”.