








































[Expositions 6.1 (2012) 59-67]  Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747-5376 

 

Society, the Self, and Spirituality in Herzog 

ELYSE ZUCKER 

Hostos Community College 

 

 

In Saul Bellow’s epistolary novel, Herzog, the eponymous protagonist is on a quest for spiritual 

fulfillment. The intellectual, writer, and professor Moses E. Herzog commences his journey in a 

demoralized state that was triggered by his wife Madeleine’s rejection of him. Withdrawn, he 

communicates by writing, to both the living and the dead, letters he never sends.  

An articulate, moral, and dynamic man, Herzog seeks to not only heal but to gain a vision that 

will enable him to find cohesion in his life and transcendent meaning. Hungering, by his own 

account, for “good sense, clarity, truth – even an atom of it,” and to identify “the meaning of 

life,” he believes, initially, that finding linguistic constructs that explain human experience or 

putting his thoughts into “high-minded categories” will fulfill these pursuits.
1
 Paradoxically, 

rather than offer him the answers he seeks, these language-based approaches to obtaining 

meaning perpetuate Herzog’s obfuscations: “he was thinking continually but nothing clear 

resulted” (147); he “was […] a man who […] lacked clear ideas” (118). They also leave him 

reflecting upon the limitations of language: “can thought wake you from the dream of existence? 

Not if it becomes a second realm of confusion, another more complicated dream, the dream of 

intellect, the delusion of total explanations” (206). Herzog gradually discovers that a linguistic 

approach for obtaining spiritual fulfillment is an ineffective course, because words alone cannot 

definitively identify for us who we are or what we need: “man has a nature, but what is it? Those 

who have confidently described it, Hobbes, Freud, et cetera, by telling us who we are 

‘intrinsically’, are not our ‘greatest benefactors’” (161). Language, ultimately, cannot capture the 

elusive being of man which is elevated beyond its reach, and so proves reductive and fragmented 

in this pursuit.  

Herzog is well aware that the culture in which he resides is not structured to readily help 

people get in touch with their true selves, noting that “the multiplied power of numbers […] 

made the self negligible” (248) and that “modern character is inconstant, divided, vacillating, 

lacking the stone like certitude of archaic man, also deprived of the firm ideas of the seventeenth 

century, clear, hard theorems” (134). Struggling himself to find a way to be whole, Herzog 

resorts to a number of linguistic strategies for achieving this end; however, these strategies 

paradoxically are fragmented and in turn reflect the fragmentation of his society, which modern 

technology has accelerated.  

For instance, television reveals an endless array of fleeting, often disconnected images, giving 

its viewers little time to contemplate or assimilate what goes whirling by them. Reflective of the 

mercurial workings of television is Herzog’s own style of approaching topics, which is to flit 

from one to another, causing Herzog to “abandon […] theme(s) with characteristic abruptness” 

(161) rather than potentially bring his understanding of them to a level of greater depth or 



Society, the Self, and Spirituality in Herzog  60 

 

breadth by staying with his thoughts long enough to do so. Resonating with the fleeting images 

of television and thoughts in Herzog’s mind are myriads, in panoramic view, of disparate 

products for sale that have quick turnover life, and are linked with purchasable, ephemeral 

lifestyle choices made available to consumers through mass media means. These lifestyles, often 

justified with rhetorical discourse, tend to reduce more rarefied qualities to commodities, 

something Herzog criticizes in a letter he writes to a McSiggins regarding equating goodness 

with a thing, and one people feel is of little consequence: “[…] in Populist Philosophy, goodness 

has become a free commodity like air, or nearly free, like a subway ride. Best of everything for 

everybody – help yourself” (199).
2
 Thus, the choices predominantly available in Herzog’s 

society for offering satisfaction at the core level are essentially empty shells, leading Herzog to 

note that: “people can be free now but the freedom doesn’t have any content. It’s like a howling 

emptiness” (53). 

As such, the atomistic linguistic constructs Herzog contemplates reflect his own fractured self 

as well as the mid-twentieth-century culture of which he is partially a product. This is a culture 

that pervasively reduces phenomena and people to their most material and literal aspects, thereby 

creating obstacles to spiritual fulfillment.
3
 Thus, as Herzog notes, “[his] generation thinks – and 

this is its thought of thoughts – that nothing faithful, vulnerable, fragile can be durable or have 

any true power” (353). 

Herzog himself uses fragmentation as a defense against examining his own feelings by 

dispersing those feelings into generalizations rather than both looking at the impact they have on 

his life and how he contributes to situations that trigger them. For example, in a letter to General 

Eisenhower in which Herzog critiques the former United States President about his professional 

handling of the topic of “spiritual values” (200), he digresses with the thought that “[i]ntelligent 

people without influence feel a certain self-contempt” (200). This point holds particular 

relevance for Herzog, whose own sense of powerlessness has been brought about by Madeleine’s 

rejection of him. For all his intelligence, he could not influence her to stay with him, and he 

unwittingly turns the resulting rage against himself. Yet rather than think in greater complexity 

about how the statement of his digression relates to his own life, Herzog characteristically 

dissociates himself from the generalization he makes.  

Herzog is taking refuge in a big, historical perspective, something that he, ironically, warns in 

a letter to one Dr. Bhave – relative to dealing with the wealth distribution in India – not to hide 

behind: “You must start with injustices that are obvious to everybody, not with big historical 

perspectives” (38). Herzog externalizes the topic, makes statements such as “what this country 

needs is a good five-cent synthesis” (255) but does not examine his own need to synthesize 

information. Finally, referring to himself as “Moses” or “him” as if he were someone other than 

the narrator of his thoughts is another way that keeps Herzog fractured, removed from the 

immediacy of what he is experiencing. 

Herzog’s society both creates and validates those who embody its reductive, utilitarian ways, 

such as those whom Herzog refers to as “Reality Instructors” (157): people who “[…] want to 

teach you – to punish you with – the lessons of the Real” (157). Often skilled professionals, such 



61  Zucker 

 

 
 

as Simkin, or the syllogistic and jaded lawyer, Sandor Himmelstein, they try with their “strange, 

minimal ideas of truth” (281) to frighten Herzog into facing what they perceive to be the 

essential elements of his existence by laying bare the most literal, degenerative level of his 

predicaments. For instance, knowing Herzog is in a vulnerable state after separating from 

Madeleine, Sandor further eradicates Herzog’s fragile sense of self by telling him he is old and 

gray and Madeleine is in her prime and might have someone on the side. Sandor is thus reducing 

the relationship Herzog has with Madeleine to its basest level: the level at which people’s worth 

depends on where they are situated in their biological life cycles. Aware that he subjects himself 

to these punitive realists, Herzog makes excuses for Sandor’s unnecessarily brutal approach, 

giving Sandor the benefit of the doubt that his intention is not to deliver more damage: "He must 

have been convinced he was cutting the dead weight of deception from Herzog’s soul" (107).  

Herzog’s access, however, to that very soul – an access the indoctrinated Reality Instructors 

lack to their own – is what differentiates Herzog from them. Being a “specialist in spiritual self-

awareness” (12), Herzog’s desire to live a life of elevated consciousness is one, in fact, inspired 

by his soul: the loving and humane locus of his true being, the source that will enable his 

recovery, and the place in which he encounters God. Herzog’s soul renders its owner one who 

experiences “much heavy love” (148) and for whom “grief [does] not pass quickly” (148). 

Although porous, so necessary for receptivity, “the soul requires intensity” (379) as it must be 

strong enough to handle the barrage of thoughts and feelings it registers without becoming 

overburdened by them to the point of closing up. Yet even if weighed down, the soul, putting its 

recipients in touch with the pain that can accompany consciousness, offers the experience of 

pleasurable feelings as well, such as the feeling of emancipation. It is an opulent container that 

keeps us human by keeping us feeling and experiencing who we are. It is what revitalizes people, 

keeping them aware, connected, sensitive, and sane. Yet it must constantly assert itself in a 

struggle against the dehumanizing forces of contemporary life that threaten to annihilate it. 

Paradoxically, the soul must seek nourishment from that same contemporary culture, as it is 

embodied by inhabitants of that milieu.  

Aware of this reality, the spiritual awakening that Herzog undergoes – an awakening he 

inadvertently finds while in the process of trying to locate himself with words – leads him to 

desire to return to his culture renewed and ready to embrace the humanity which resides there. 

This desire represents the loftiest expression of Herzog’s soul, the godly desire to “love thy 

neighbor”: “Luckily for me, I did not have the means to get too far away from our common life. 

[…] I mean to share with other human beings as far as possible and not destroy my remaining 

years in the same way” (392). This calling is what accounts for Herzog’s telling his friend, Luke, 

while well along the way of his spiritual journey: “I really believe that brotherhood is what 

makes a man human” (333). 

In contrast to Herzog, his brother, Shura, an exemplar of one who has achieved the American 

ideal of becoming financially successful and powerful in society, is severed from the emotional 

depths and connections to the past that concern his mystical brother. As an illustration of this 



Society, the Self, and Spirituality in Herzog  62 

 

point, Shura tells Herzog, when the latter wept at their father’s funeral, “Don’t carry on like a 

goddamn immigrant” (342), a comment that prompts Herzog to reflect:  

 

I embarrassed him with his golfing friends, the corporation president. […] Here he was 

the good American. I still carry European pollution, am infected by the Old World with 

feelings of Love – Filial Emotion. Old stuporous dreams. (342) 

 

Herzog’s soulful feelings are rooted in the immigrant culture that pervaded his home life, 

feelings he does not perceive as defunct: “To [the environment of his youth] Moses’ heart was 

attached with great power” (174).  

The nuclear family in which Herzog grew up showed respect for the past and the power of the 

soul. His mother, for instance, did not reductively package up why she could never come to 

terms with her sister-in-law, Zipporah. As Herzog notes, “the antagonism [between them], as 

Mama felt it, was mystical – a matter of souls” (182): a thought conveying that souls, unlike 

corporation presidents, are not products of contemporary culture but given us by a power greater 

than our own, and therefore not malleable.  

Herzog’s respect for the mystical realm is akin to his mother’s, as made apparent from his 

belief that man, by his very nature, is too mysterious and complex to become exhausted by 

empirical procedures that aim to excavate him: “a man is somehow more than his 

‘characteristics’, all the emotions, strivings, tastes, and constructions which it pleases him to call 

‘My Life’” (325). His mystical and emotional propensities have been influenced as well by the 

religious upbringing he has had: an upbringing in the orthodox Jewish tradition, one numerously 

reiterating to Herzog and his siblings his family’s personally and collectively painful history, one 

that is ancient: 

 

[…] we had a great schooling in grief. I still know these cries of the soul. They lie in the 

breast, and in the throat. The mouth wants to open wide and let them out. But all these 

are antiquities – yes, Jewish antiquities originating in the Bible, in a Biblical sense of 

personal history and destiny. (184) 

 

If Herzog’s spiritual orientation has been instilled in him by his religious upbringing, and 

dovetails with his soulfully effusive and sensitive nature, it is enhanced as well by his intellectual 

consciousness, which propels him to both examine what various thinkers and philosophers have 

to say about the nature of mankind, and discover, in the process, how both they and he himself 

can hold unrealistic expectations of language. 

Exploring, polemically, texts of various philosophical thinkers, Herzog crystallizes and 

articulates his belief that as human beings, which are mystical beings, there is much that is 

indecipherable about our natures. In fact, discerning our deepest being would not even imbue us 

with what we need in order to find fulfillment. What would accomplish that feat would be 

celebrating our spiritual selves by lovingly embracing humanity in the context of daily life: an 



63  Zucker 

 

 
 

act that transforms what is mundane into that which is meaningful. This belief is one Herzog 

finds validated by the works of, among other thinkers, Michel de Montaigne and Blaise Pascal, 

which relay that “[t]he strength of a man’s virtue or spiritual capacity [is] measured by his 

ordinary life” (133).  

Ordinary existence, Herzog observes, is something that the philosopher Martin Heidegger 

perceives as a denigration of the loftier state within which man once dwelled. It is a perception 

that Herzog, who himself had been elitist, adding to his malaise, now takes issue with: 

 

Very tired of the modern form of historicism which sees in this civilization the defeat of 

the best hopes of Western religion and thought, what Heidegger calls the second Fall of 

Man into the quotidian or ordinary. No philosopher knows what the ordinary is, has not 

fallen into it deeply enough. (133) 

 

According to Herzog, Heidegger uses language defensively, to barricade the in-depth 

experiencing of contemporary human existence by labeling that existence a fallen one. 

Heidegger’s reference to man as being in his “second Fall […] into the quotidian or ordinary” 

(133) is a categorization that has the effect of truncating any further exploration of it, just as 

Herzog’s linguistic categorizations have the effect of curtailing his own growth. Thus, for 

example, to avoid exploring the feeling of “potato love” (327) he is feeling towards Luke, he 

thinks: “To advert to his temperament, call things by their proper name, restored his control” 

(327). 

Challenging Heidegger’s phenomenological semantics, Herzog does not interpret man’s 

“Fall” (133) to mean that we have become morally lowered by living in a manner that is 

commonplace. To Herzog, having "fallen into [the ordinary]" (133) translates into a type of 

lapsing – forfeiting a dominant, authoritative position for one in which we can know daily life 

beyond its stereotypes. This is a realm in which new growth can be accrued, and something “no 

philosopher” (133), protected and separated by the language constructs inherent to his or her 

occupation, has “fallen into […] deeply enough” (133) to experience and thus understand from a 

holistic perspective. 

Rather than finalizing ordinary life, Herzog’s approach to it opens it up as uncharted terrain. 

His portrayal of his own relatives, “the would-be forgotten” (167), as well as the descriptions he 

relays of the milieu of his childhood, reveal his ability to perceive what is extraordinary in that 

which is ordinary. For instance, Napoleon Street, the block where Herzog lived during his youth, 

was decadent and squalid: “rotten, toy-like, crazy and filthy” (174). There, however, he had 

found “a wider range of human feelings than he had ever again been able to find” (174). It is the 

unseen, inner workings of one’s existence rather than the strata of one’s life which supply that 

life with essential meaning. Herzog thinks, in retrospection, “What was wrong with Napoleon 

Street? […] All he ever wanted was there” (174). Although his family was comprised of so-

called ordinary people, Herzog’s poignant descriptions of them reveal the value that they held for 

him, a value born of love: “Moses loved them all, notwithstanding” (401).  



Society, the Self, and Spirituality in Herzog  64 

 

In addition to Heidegger’s devaluing of human life, Herzog reads the philosopher as reducing 

the phenomenon of death to something that can be objectively confronted. This reduction 

becomes revealed in a scene in which Luke tells Herzog of some exercises he read about 

designed to help one face his or her death. Herzog proceeds to criticize the notion implicit to 

Heidegger’s premise that God’s mysteries – life and death – can be caught, as if static, for our 

comprehension: “A man may say ‘From now on I’m going to speak the truth.’ But the truth hears 

him and runs away and hides before he’s even done speaking” (331). Heidegger’s glorification 

of death is merely a projection of man’s own dark vision: it is “our own murdering imagination 

[that] turns out to be the great power, our human imagination which starts by accusing God of 

murder” (354).  

Herzog’s burgeoning spiritual vision is one in which he critiques theorists and thinkers whose 

writings convey reductive and fragmented notions that, in varying ways, mirror those 

characterizing contemporary culture, often making its inhabitants hostile or, if backfiring as they 

did with Herzog, seized by malaise. This vision has been initiated by both Herzog’s proliferating 

access to his soul, and the opportunity his textual readings create for him to articulate how and 

why he wants to live in ways that are enlarging and enlightening. Herzog then, having 

internalized what he needed, moves to closing the texts and opening himself to the world around 

him, which in his self-absorption he had previously blocked out: “As he stretched out, he took a 

long breath, and then he lay, looking at the mesh of the screen, pulled loose by vines, and 

listening to the steady scratching of Mrs. Tuttle’s broom” (415–416). At the culmination of 

Herzog, ready to reunite as a renewed man with the world, “Herzog felt a deep, dizzy eagerness 

to begin” (392). 

What Herzog comes to embrace is that loving one’s brethren and celebrating life amongst 

them is an expression of God’s will for mankind and where we will be able to find fulfillment: 

“The silence sustained him, and the brilliant weather, the feeling that he was easily contained by 

everything about him Within the hollowness of God” (396). This plan is one that promotes 

wholeness and transcendence: an antidote to contemporary life which can rather than encourage 

us to love and expand, become hostile and reduced. It is a premise that will allow Herzog to both 

heal himself and help heal the world to which he will return.  

As Herzog believes that human beings can best flourish by learning through affirmative 

channels, he is critical, too, of Kierkegaard’s propagation of suffering as a way to achieve an 

understanding of truth: “Kierkegaard meant that truth has lost its force with us and horrible pain 

and evil must teach it to us again” (385). Kierkegaard glorifies suffering much as Heidegger 

glorifies dread, which likewise has dangerous repercussions: “the advocacy and praise of 

suffering take us in the wrong direction and those of us who remain loyal to civilization must not 

go for it” (386). Being an expert in using language constructs to create a feigned reality, Herzog 

recognizes the seductive nature of Kierkegaard’s language. In his discussion of Kierkegaard he 

notes that nihilistic philosophers use words as a sophisticated way to make destruction sound 

exciting enough to embrace: “We love apocalypses too much, and crisis ethics and florid 

extremism with its thrilling language” (386–387).  



65  Zucker 

 

 
 

Yet, as Herzog makes clear, philosophers such as Heidegger are not the only thinkers who use 

language for manipulative purposes. He also takes issue with “the Wastelanders” (97) in how 

they manipulate words: they use the choicest ones to try to recreate people into becoming more 

valuable beings. Living merely in the lexical realm, they believe that “the deterioration of 

language and its debasement was tantamount to dehumanization [in the industrialized class of 

Europe], which led straight to cultural fascism” (97).  

Finally, Herzog condemns Nietzsche’s vision of aesthetic nihilism. Although he sympathizes 

with Nietzsche for wanting mankind to “live with the void” (389) by acknowledging its 

existence, Herzog recognizes that no one can survive in a vacuum. These “immoralists” (389) 

that face up to life’s meaninglessness are themselves dependent on the very cultural comforts 

that they vehemently attack: “They ride the bus. They are only the most bus-sick travelers” 

(389). Nietzsche’s guidelines for living truthfully are, ironically, as problematic as the spurious 

living of which he is critical.  

Herzog inadvertently is talking about the limitations of language. Given that language 

functions subjectively, any statement can be revealed to be true or false and any notion can rest 

on its laurels of a self-contained logic. But neither point of view, or of other views, necessarily 

means that an ultimate truth has been obtained. What gives one a sense that a truth has been 

uncovered, Herzog realizes, often comes, ironically, from that which is ineffable: “Go through 

what is comprehensible and you conclude that only the incomprehensible gives any light” (325).  

That which is life-affirming, Herzog learns, comes from the piece of God within us, and being 

of God is larger than our capacity to fully comprehend and translate into language. To attempt to 

understand man in a complete vein would be to whittle him down to less than what he is. 

Nihilism, as presented in Herzog, is testimony to the dangers of ceaseless categorizing: 

something Herzog himself engaged in doing, exacerbating his spiritual vacuity. 

Herzog does not interpret his belief in man’s munificence to be “a false hope that makes a 

man feel the illusion of worth” (254). To him, “good is no phony” (254). This goodness is an 

outgrowth of the self (and the self, inversely, flourishes under the auspices of ‘goodness’ born of 

love) and has atavistic roots. This point becomes apparent when Moses reflects one day upon his 

image in the mirror. He thinks, “The primitive self-attachment of the human creature, that sweet 

instinct for the self, [is] so deep, so old it may have a cellular origin” (197).  

Yet to revere the self by sacrificing it as a way of saving it from the world’s corruption is to 

exaggerate its importance – taking it out of the cosmic context in which it resides – and 

overestimate its function: a perspective as destructive as that of negating the self. This idea 

becomes apparent in light of the behavior of the narcissistic Nachman, Herzog’s childhood 

crony, and his wife, Laura. Nachman glorifies the self to the point at which he perceives the 

world as being its absolute enemy rather than a participant in a symbiotic relationship with it. As 

a consequence of this polarized view, “gaunt” (163) Nachman and his “thin” (165) wife choose 

to live in abject poverty, wanting, as does Kafka’s hunger artist, no sustenance from the fruits of 

the world’s labor, and trying instead to derive their nourishment from reading “Van Gogh’s 

letters aloud to each other – Rilke’s poems” (163). The more realistic perception Herzog holds of 



Society, the Self, and Spirituality in Herzog  66 

 

man in relation to his soul accounts for his telling Nachman, whose aesthetic vision, ironically, 

will prevent him from living a rich, prismatic life: “it isn’t as bad as you make out […] Most 

people are unpoetical, and you consider this a betrayal” (166). Herzog’s perspective will enable 

him to bring redeeming qualities to his environment and work within rather than above it.  

Although America is filled with narcissists and nihilists whose orientations are confirmed by 

the tenets of formidable thinkers, there are also thinkers and theorists that Herzog approves of 

who celebrate the spiritual vision of embracing humanity and its individuals. One such thinker is 

the American transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, from whose work Herzog quotes when 

the class orator of his high school: “The main enterprise of the world, for splendor . . . is the 

upbuilding of a man. The private life of one man shall be a more illustrious monarchy . . . than 

any kingdom in history” (198). As with Emerson, the Russian writer Vasily Rozanov exalts the 

life of the individual, as borne out by what Herzog writes to him in response to his notions about 

the value of individual lives: “A stupendous truth you say, heard from none of the prophets, is 

that private life is above everything. More universal than religion. Truth is higher than the sun. 

The soul is passion” (391). Still another thinker whose views affirm the beauty of mankind is 

Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Although Herzog calls him a “degenerate” (161), he adds, “But I do not 

see what we can answer when he says ‘Je sens mon cœur et je connais les hommes’” (161).
4
  

No longer seeking pithy meaning in linguistic constructs and categories, Herzog has found 

meaning in the spiritual realm of existence. Finding meaning, Herzog realizes, comes from 

finding his place in God’s plan, which inherently supplies that meaning: 

 

A man doesn’t need happiness for himself […] provided there is something great, 

something into which his being, and all beings, can go. He does not need meaning as 

long as such intensity has scope. Because then it is self-evident; it is meaning. (353) 

 

Meaning exists; it needn’t be created with words. Herzog learns it cannot be directly spoken: it 

can only be spoken about. He understands that expecting language to capture and convey 

definitive truth is an endeavor that cannot come to fruition. The evidence of this realization is 

demonstrated in a story Herzog tells his daughter that satirizes the absurd attempt to know in 

absolute terms the difference between things: “There’s this association that people belong to. 

They’re the most of every type. There’s the hairiest bald man, and the baldest hairy man” (360). 

What Herzog belongs to now is the association between humanity and his self and the spiritual 

vision which gave both back to him.  

 

 

Notes 

 

1. Bellow 1976, 39, 229, 76. All subsequent in-text citations will be from this reference. 

2. Adorno 2001, 100. Adorno refers to this type of condition as culture industry which is 

to turn everything “into public relations, the manufacturing of ‘good will.’” 



67  Zucker 

 

 
 

3. The type of culture is representative of the culture industry, where capitalist mass 

production commodifies and replicates people’s identities so that their less 

perceptible aspects are neglected (see Adorno 2001; also Horkheimer and Adorno 

1972). 

4. “I feel my heart and I know mankind.” 

 

 

Works Cited 

 

Adorno, Theodor W. 2001. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. London: 

Routledge Classics. 

Bellow, Saul. 1976. Herzog. New York: Avon Books. 

Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. 1972. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John 

Cumming. New York: The Seabury Press. 

Zucker, Elyse. Language and the Self: a Psychoanalytic Reading of Saul Bellow’s Herzog 

and James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain. Doctoral dissertation. New York 

University. Michigan: UMI Dissertation Services, 2006.  

 


