In Herman Hesse's ‘The Glass Bead Game’, we follow Joseph Knecht, the protagonist, on a quest to reconcile all forms of artistic expression into a unified understanding. On his journey, he encounters the Music Master, who has devoted his life to finding the correspondence between mathematical order and beauty in music. As he unveils to Joseph the state of his research, he shares his terrible torment. In his introspection, he has experienced moments of profound clarity where he glimpsed the ‘pure essence of mathematical harmony in music’. Yet the moment his pen approaches the parchment, he finds his vision cannot be translated into notes without losing its essential duality. Every note feels like a betrayal of the perfect harmonies he touched within, turning into merely technical relationships on the page. Materializing his vision feels like a betrayal of the raw, chaotic vitality he feels within.

Here lies what Hesse characterizes as ‘the eternal struggle of the creative process’. When the artist attempts to give form to his inner vision in order to fix it in place, he finds that it is inevitably alienated, compressed into the finite constraints of form and language. While imagination holds no boundaries, the painting must fit on the canvas, the symphony must unfold on time, the novel must proceed through sequential pages. The inadequacy of words, pigments, and sounds to express the vastness of the inner landscape creates a gap between inward expression and outward representation. From the lover who attempts to express the fullness of feeling to the scientist who seeks to capture natural phenomena into mathematical expressions, all participate in the eternal dance between preservation and destruction.

Yet perhaps the perpetual failure of the artist to attain authentic representation points not to art’s limitation but to its true purpose. In ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, Martin Heidegger suggests that the function of art is not one of representation but of disclosure: the artwork should not represent the inner experience of the artist, but instead create conditions where such experience can unfold within the viewer. While the precise architecture of Mozart’s compositions may be only an approximation of the transcendent state he felt while writing them, they create an environment that allows for direct encounter with the sublime. The failure of perfect representation becomes the source for infinite other visions to unfold. Authenticity lies not in the faithful reproduction of the artist’s experience but in the genuine emergence of new experiences within each encounter.