Sándor Szathmári on the monomania of prophets
Sándor Szathmári on the limitations of sages
But I found Szathmári's take on this so compelling, I finally wrote a comparable post on my Reason & Society blog:
Sándor Szathmári on the monomania of prophets
There I added a detail without explaining further: the boldfaced passage reminded me of an aspect of Hermann Hesse's Siddartha that irritated me when I read it as a teenager. Siddartha meets the Buddha, and objects that the Buddha is just babysitting his followers who have not experienced what the Buddha is preaching, the Buddha makes excuses for this, and Siddartha accepts this while moving on. So Hesse has it both ways. Hence Szathmári's commentary stood out for me. I repeat the key passage below. The translation is awkward, so I should re-translate it myself from the Esperanto:
"To be a bikru is also in fact a monomania; the erroneous belief that with the Behins there is a connection between the heard word and the brain. A bikru is a Behin whose only Behinity is that he doesn't realize among whom he lives; for it could not be imagined, could it, that somebody who was aware of the Behinic disease would still want to explain reality to them."
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