The protagonist of Hesse’s novel, Harry Haller, even though still heavily influenced by the humanist tradition, can no longer be viewed as a clearly defined individual personifying the Cartesian dichotomy of body and mind. It dislodges idealist concepts of wholeness and self-perfection and replaces them with a multi-perspectival view of a continuously changing human consciousness, an open-ended process toward an ever-elusive self-awareness. The novel’s brazen critique of traditional bourgeois values does not simply reject humanism and its philosophy of individual autonomy. It is post-humanist in a temporal sense because it engages with the nineteenth-century humanist legacy from a twentieth-century perspective. Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf (1927) can be regarded as a post-humanist novel for several reasons.
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