The Hippie Counterculture Movement of the 1960s told the man in the jacket to read Siddhartha in order to move away from the randomly written real-life flash fictions of the Postwar Period. It was mainly because of the fact that Siddhartha is a substantial investigation into the very core of human condition. It is about all you want it to be about.
The novel tells us the story of one’s dissolution of self and communication with what is known as reality. It is not surprising to see that the same concern has also been reflected in the productions of the Western Thought throughout the centuries. Indeed, the self is one of the common topics of interests shared by the Eastern and Western minds. Jacques Lacan, for instance, was one of the Western minds whose ideas are formed by the concepts similar to that of the Eastern comprehension of self, other
and reality. What Lacan claims is thoroughly reflected in the story of Siddhartha: Once one enters into what is called the
Symbolic Order, that is the world of the language and restrictions, s/he can never
attain the felling of unity and completeness of the pre-verbal world again,
except for momentary abstractions of connection with the Real.
In Lacanian Psychoanalysis, the Mirror Stage is described as a preverbal state in infancy that initiates what he calls the Imaginary
Order, the world of images and perception rather than labelling and imagination. It is also the world of fullness and completeness. “He refers to the child’s acquisition of language as its initiation
into the Symbolic Order, for language
is first and foremost a symbolic system of signification, that is, a symbolic
system of meaning-making.” In the beginning of the book, Siddhartha is in the Symbolic Order. He is presented to the reader as a young man who gains knowledge from his father
and some other wise men, and tries to experience the feeling of completeness, that is to say, The Atman. He is struggling in the world of
the “father” and thus rules and limitations, and tries to get rid of the feeling of absence of his “mother” with the acquisition of knowledge. That is the way Siddhartha
unconsciously follows in order to compensate the feeling of lack of unity
with the mother and tackle with the father. However, Siddhartha will never
have this feeling of unity and oneness with the mother since he has started
to perceive himself and thus the world by the act of othering the mother. According
to Jacques Lacan, one can never fulfill the feeling of lack and loss with
external possessions. In the same way, although his parents and friend Govinda
love and support him, Siddhartha unconsciously knows that they can
never help him find a way to go back to the pre-verbal world of fulfillment,
unity and completeness. It is not about love(lessness), it is about pre(ab)sence.
Siddhartha’s desire and search for a path to
enlightenment can be associated with his
unconscious hunger of a way to go back to the pre-verbal world and
fully connect with the mother. Living under the operations of the material world and the
constructed mechanisms of the norm-maker society, either Western or Eastern,
Siddhartha is taught to believe that knowledge can help him settle the
inner conflicts he has. For example, though his father wants him to do the
opposite, Siddhartha decides to follow the Samanas because he is unconsciously inclined to the idea that it is only through the acquisition of knowledge that he can feel complete. When such a moment presents itself, a reflection of Doctor Faustus' image finds itself in the mirror of our modern society. However, this new life does not
produce the desired feeling as Jacques Lacan predicts. The feeling of unity
and completeness with the mother is unattainable after one has entered the
world of language.
On the other hand, Siddhartha is in
a competition with the father because he unconsciously regards him as the one
who takes the mother away from him. The father, as a figure, represents the
world of rules and limitedness for Siddhartha, and therefore, Siddhartha has
internalized the idea that the mother belongs to the father and the father does
not want him to reach the mother again, which will result in driving him to a
way that is not leading to the unity with the mother.
As the book progresses, Siddhartha changes his attitude
towards life and decides to free himself from the teachings of the Eastern mind. He decides to stop mediating and looking for
spiritual completeness. Instead, he starts pursuing the pleasures of the
material world. In Lacanian terms, Siddhartha decides to change his objet petit a, yet this will never help
him settle the desire to go back to the pre-verbal world of fulfillment and
unity. At this point, Herman Hesse can be regarded as an optimistic thinker
because he explicitly shows the reader his belief that one can find fulfillment in life by choosing
the correct path. Hesse’s aim is to show us that Siddhartha is choosing the
wrong path when he decides to follow the pleasures of the bodily and material
world. On the other hand, Lacan is rather pessimistic as he claimed that one can never attain the fulfillment of the pre-verbal world
after entering the world of signification and symbols; it doesn’t matter which
path one might choose.
The book is, nevertheless, a quest for the feeling of unity and completeness. In the entirety of the story, Siddhartha
searches for the right path to find fulfillment in life; he tries meditation,
spiritual voyages, wealth of the material world, pleasures of the bodily desires,
love, friendship and adventurousness. Yet, he never attains the feeling of
fulfillment and unity. In the end, he reaches to a sort of inner bliss, and that
is a clear evidence to claim that Herman Hesse greatly differs from Jacques Lacan in terms of his faith in reaching the feeling of completeness in the castle of language. Nevertheless, it is also true that the
point Siddhartha reaches in the end of the story is rather derived from his pulling
himself out of the act of thinking, and therefore language. Therefore, the main difference between the philosophies of the two lies in their beliefs in whether or not it is possible to go beyond the text.
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