Craig Chalquist
Chalquist.com
2026
[For “mind,” read also: the arts, the imaginal, and the humanities:]
In emergencies, a scholar might be called from his lectern or his desk and made into a soldier. In some circumstances he might volunteer for such service. In a country exhausted by war the scholar must restrict himself in all material things, even to the point of sheer starvation. Surely all this is taken for granted. The higher a person's cultivation, the greater the privileges he has enjoyed, the greater must be his sacrifices in case of need. We hope that every Castalian [representative-practitioner of the arts and humanities] would recognize this as a matter of course, if the time should come.
But although we are prepared to sacrifice our well-being, our comfort, and our lives to the people when danger threatens, that does not mean that we are ready to sacrifice Mind itself, the tradition and morality of our spiritual life, to the demands of the hour, of the people, or of the generals. He would be a coward who withdrew from the challenges, sacrifices, and dangers his people had to endure. But he would be no less a coward and traitor who betrayed the principles of the life of the mind to material interests — who, for example, left the decision on the product of two times two to the rulers. It is treason to sacrifice love of truth, intellectual honesty, loyalty to the laws and methods of the mind, to any other interests, including those of one's country. Whenever propaganda and the conflict of interests threatens to devalue, distort, and do violence to truth as it has already done to individuals, to language, to the arts, and to everything else that is organic and highly cultivated, then it is our duty to resist and save the truth, or rather the striving for truth, since that is the supreme article in our creed....
The Castalian, therefore, should not become a politician. If need be, he must sacrifice his person, but never his fealty to the life of the mind. The mind of man is beneficent and noble only when it obeys truth. As soon as it betrays truth, as soon as it ceases to revere truth, as soon as it sells out, it becomes intensely diabolical. Then it becomes far worse than instinctual bestiality, which always retains something of the innocence of nature.
Hesse’s answer to the dilemma of whether to sell out the arts, mind, and imagination to a cause OR keep these in an ivory tower was represented by Joseph Knecht leaving Castalia and taking what he knew out into the world. The solution is not to collapse the imaginal into the everyday or to separate them, but to allow the connection between the two to surface in creative acts. The imaginal when given its own space will spontaneously and powerfully address the concerns of the time. My term for this is “lamplighting” (Craig Chalquist).