Goethe's "Sorcerer's Apprentice" – power over wisdom | Hacker News Reader

Goethe's "Sorcerer's Apprentice" – power over wisdom

wilderutopia.com

99 pointsandsoitis36 comments

It's a good poem. I learned the original off by heart two months ago to recite it to my sleep-averse child as part of their bedtime routine. It definitely benefits from recitation, which really unearths the lovely wavelike rythms.

(edit: this translation does a good job of matching the syllable count, almost perfectly. It does mean it strains a bit in places. But compromises always have to be made!)

Oh god this poem. It's like generational trauma in German speaking countries. At some point during junior high every student is tasked with learning to recite it by heart. Of course it's not too hard, but there are a million things a thirteen year old kid would rather do.

My high school's version of this was the Middle English version of Canterbury Tale's prologue. We'd then have to recite the first stanza or two in front of the class, one at a time.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43926/the-canterbury-...

For me as a Slav, Goethe's verses are one of the few German texts that actually sound elegant, soft, somehow rich in texture...

I speak and read German, but most German texts feel "cold and abrasive" to me. It is a language with very hard edges, so to say.

This is about the root of humanity’s problem: the inability to avoid misusing knowledge and technology. All our inventions are but improved means to an unimproved end (Thoreau)

Dukas should get a mention alongside Disney. Paul Dukes wrote the symphonic poem L’Apprenti Sorcier (1897) based on Goethe’s poem, which was later animated by Disney for the film Fantasia.

I started my PhD thesis with the poem. Because I love the tech angle.

It is actually surprising to me how common this theme is throughout human history.

The story of Icarus and Daedalus, for example, has a very similar theme. Technology gives humans power over the world, but at the same time they risk being destroyed by it, if they lack the wisdom to correctly control it. Even people from antiquity were aware of this conflict.

The rate of technological change is accelerating because technology begets technology. Meanwhile, the rate of growth in wisdom is linear at best (and occasionally stagnant or in retreat). Frankly, it doesn’t bode all that well.

Mankind seems to forget every lesson after two generations.

Holocaust survivors are still with us, but the kind of nationalism that put them through that ordeal is on the rise again and is gaining popularity with teenagers.

Technology could help, but right now it seems to be working the other way.

> Technology could help, but right now it seems to be working the other way.

If history does teach us anything, the moral ambiguity of technological progress is surely one of the lessons of the 20th century. I think it might be one of those lessons we're forgetting again after a couple generations!

Technology isn't morally ambiguous, it is a moral non-player. It would be obviously absurd to call rocks "immoral" because people can be bashed over the head with them. Ultimately there is no 'gun that only shoots bad people' type judgement possible from technology.

Instructions for building a box anyone could pit together for $20 in common materials with a button that would end the world would be a fairly unambiguously evil artifact.

H-bombs as a much more expensive version that is arguable thanks to the somewhat lasting peace they can be argued to have brought through MAD, but if it had turned out world enders were something anyone could easily throw together it would be a very different world, or non-world.

It may be because there are rarely such simplistic rule-based lessons. To your example, nationalism could be a great emancipatory force in one century and an instrument of great suffering in another. If there is some takeaway, then it must be more subtle than "nationalism=evil".

You’ll notice that I qualified it with “the kind of nationalism that…”

I don’t have a problem with the kind of nationalism that gave European minority languages pride in their own culture and literature in the 19th century, for example.

I do have a problem with the kind of nationalism exemplified by lots of 20th century European leaders from Kaiser Wilhelm II to Milosevic.

The latter kind is sadly on the rise again. And the former isn’t endemic to nationalism. Everyone can have pride in their identity, it doesn’t need a state apparatus.

>Everyone can have pride in their identity, it doesn’t need a state apparatus.

Well, you'd want to think so. But I wonder if all identities politics doesn't, in the end, trend towards fascism.

You don't have to wonder. Just observe what is going on in so-called liberal democracies of the world while identity politics is implemented by governments: censorship, redefinition of words, inventing new moral issues to shutdown inconvenient facts and such.

Wisdom doesn’t need to grow, it is eternal. It needs to be learned and accessed.

Key to understanding is to work to understand rather than redefine these concepts in the light of the same modernity that gave us domineering technological prowess at all costs.

Yeah, feels like we've largely lost touch with the Wisdom of a reciprocal existence within this ecosystem, the "Garden of Eden" through a Christian lens, or the way the Haudenosaunee Confederacy lived pre-Columbus.

Indeed. And Pre celts and celts before the Romans. And others. Sorrily muddied through waves of cultural and religious persecution.

Pretty universal story that one:

One domineering bully culture claiming to be the one true light in the world intent on snuffing out all others. Like reciprocal trauma on a wide scale. Mirrored in this ongoing revenge of the nerds scenario we have now. A poorly perceived high school experience, with limited historical or cultural context, driving massive political and cultural changes across the planet. Artie Ziff on meth and LSD.

> Wisdom doesn’t need to grow

This seems to imply that we've gained all the wisdom there is to gain. Do you believe that's true?

No, they’re saying that wisdom is something “out there” and our job is to learn it and access it. This implies different people have different levels of access to “the eternal wisdom”, and by extension, one can learn more wisdom.

Top down & middle-out disruption of information flow impedes acceleration of wisdom.

Ponzis and lesser people* at work.

*those who can't score without harmful sabotage

Sparring, cumulative competition, is a thing that drives the evolution of all parties and has the potential to rebalance the scales over and over again, but consumer culture and portfolio capitalism failed to capitalize on that and monetized the opposite instead: envy and sabotage.

Some people were too afraid of natural human convection and ruined the game. It still works, of course, but

> it doesn't bode all that well.

funny this is here, two Sundays ago I was sitting looking out the window just letting my mind wander when I thought "genesis isn't being interpreted correctly". I went for to church for a couple of years as a kid but I can't say I know much of religion, I put the thought aside and carried on my day. Later I thought again "I wonder why I was thinking about Genesis being incorrectly discussed, what does genesis even say?". Again I put the thought aside but a few hours later found myself researching genesis... and then the bible, vedicism, laozi, thoth, gnosis, and then and then and then...all the extra hours till a couple of days ago I spent researching and reading. Along the way I ended up producing 3 documents, this was the first of the 3: https://s.h4x.club/JruQOrjy (it's a bit weird, and not really sure why it came out)

According to my friends who i've shared the above with because I felt like I was going a little...nuts...I'm "at that period of my life where these type of things are going to happen" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Do you get scared when you find yourself believing? Because I was never spiritual like this either until somewhat later in life.

There’s a real element of “holy shit I believe in God”. I never thought I would.

It is very new for me to accept that we were probably always here, and probably always be, in various forms.

Well a) I don't know where it came from and b) it was quite a lot of work, I really did hours and hours and hours of reading and research very quickly. So scared isn't quite right, also because I guess I don't know what I "believe" yet as there are so many layers. I've spent a lot of the time in the last few days focusing on 15 or so events throughout history, unbound to time or geography, beating any form of truly spiritual path out of us and at every single step it seems to be deeply analytical thought relegating spiritual exploration not even to a couple of classes a week in high school but to "fun stories and myths" - I'm sure I've discussed this intellectually somehow over the years but only very recently did it become a part of me. The second document I wrote was basically focusing on compounding societal, natural and spiritual crisis all coalescing at some point in the fairly near future. The 3rd thing I produced is this kinda intense, long, very technical outline of everything I'd learned in the form of a "podcast from AI" heh: https://s.h4x.club/X6uGEpRG

I’m going through something like this too with zero religious background. Lately I’m of the belief that if you take a look at your life, you’ll see that most of it wasn’t really a coincidence. Tough thing to share but it’s my overall underlying feeling.

Not me:

https://medium.com/machine-cognition/objective-reality-doesn...

In the first pdf I linked the part I keep coming back to is

"Our relentless quest for knowledge drives us ever outward, probing the endless void of space and the puzzling emptiness of quantum realms, finding nothing but more questions, more mysteries, more void. Digging into dead rocks in space, landing on Mars, with each step further from Earth - our garden, where we need to be - the light of that original truth grows dimmer. We risk becoming cosmic wanderers who have forgotten why we began searching in the first place, so far from home that the very memory of simple being has faded to ash."

When you think about the universe, ever expanding, infinitely complex, probably devoid of observable life yet ever in observance, it really is built like an amazing game of "once we introduce 'the arrogance of why VS the awestruck wonder' bet you there is 0% chance they can collectively merge with nature at large no matter how much we warn them" - I wonder how much we are missing out on.

The poem "Blight" by Ralph Waldo Emerson comes to mind, too: https://emersoncentral.com/texts/poems/blight/

"And night and day, ocean and continent, Fire, plant, and mineral say, Not in us, And haughtily return us stare for stare. For we invade them impiously for gain, We devastate them unreligiously, And coldly ask their pottage, not their love, Therefore they shove us from them, yield to us Only what to our griping toil is due; But the sweet affluence of love and song, The rich results of the divine consents Of man and earth, of world beloved and lover, The nectar and ambrosia are withheld;"

Quite interesting. After being raised fundamentalist / evangelical and quite strongly so, in my late 40s I had a "holy shit, I NO LONGER believe in God" moment.. That was quite a thing, and I never thought I would think that way.. It was quite some time to get there, and not one specific thing that triggered it, just a general acceptance of the randomness and meaninglessness of life..

Opposite. I had a militant level of anti god, and believed that it was all random. Something was given to me where I don’t accept it anymore.

Do you believe in the universe? There could be a balancing act here lol. But each their own, we both understand each others side at least (which should be the case, we’ve lived as opposites and then opposites again, more or less living the same spiritual life in some sense).

I don’t know, you sure you don’t believe in it?

You ever wonder why there’s always one democrat for one republican? How is everything so 50/50 and balanced?

:shrugs:

It's "The Game of Black and White" per The Book by Alan Watts. It goes all the way down to raw mass--the proportion of matter and anti-matter should have been exactly 50/50. But for some reason there was just a little more of the one...

Absolutely getting this book, thank you. My mind has been wandering around these ideas lately.

I really loved your essay! It reminds me of the discuss in Genesis of Call Me Ishmael. Thanks for sharing...and I'd love to know if you post the other 2.

Oof, another syncretic hermeticism, and with the usual pinch of antisemitism!

Bro, read you some "Foucault's Pendulum" and touch grass.

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