thinker of the German Counterenlightenment. Born in 1730 in Königsberg
in eastern Prussia, Hamann was a contemporary and friendly
acquaintance of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, and in many ways
Hamann's career can be seen in parallel to that of his great friend.
Like Kant, Hamann attended the University of Königsberg, and in his
early life was a devoted partisan of the Enlightenment, the
philosophical and literary movement that emphasized the clearing away
of outdated prejudice and the application of scientific reason to
every area of human life. But during a business trip to London (on
behalf of the firm of the Berens family, who also published Kant's
works), Hamann underwent a sort of conversion that involved giving up
his commitment to the secular Enlightenment in favor of a more
orthodox view of Protestant Christianity. As a consequence, he
embarked on a career of trenchant and often scathing criticism of the
Enlightenment. This change in world-views coincided with his reading
of the British empiricist philosophers George Berkeley and David Hume.
Hamann saw the idealism of the former and the skepticism of the latter
as constituting a reductio ad absurdum of Enlightenment thought:
Scientific reason leads us inevitably either to doubt or to deny the
reality of the world around us. Three of Hamann's intellectual
achievements are of particular significance: His writings Sokratische
Denkwürdigkeiten (Socratic Memorabilia) and Aesthetica in nuce
(Aesthetics in a Nutshell), in which he opposed Enlightenment thought
with an indirect and ironic mode of discourse emphasizing the
importance of aesthetic experience and the role of genius in intuiting
nature; his views on language; and his influential criticisms of
Kant's critical thought, expressed in his "Metakritik über den
Purismum der Vernunft" and in his commentary, in a letter to Johann
Gottfried Herder, on Kant's essay "What is Enlightenment?"
1. Sokratische Denkwürdigkeiten and Aesthetica in nuce
Hamann's rejection of the Enlightenment was greeted with distress by
his friends Kant and Berens. Although they hoped that he could be won
back to the cause of reason, these hopes were dashed with the
publication in 1759 of Sokratische Denkwürdigkeiten, and the following
year of Aesthetica in nuce. Together these two works offer a
world-view that might be described as antirationalist but not
irrationalist.
Hamann's intention in the Sokratische Denkwürdigkeiten is to offer a
defense of religious faith that renders such faith immune against
rational attack while in no way accepting the rationalist's terms of
debate. In order to do this, however, he faces a seemingly insoluble
problem: He must undermine the grounds of the Enlightenment view of
reason and religion without committing himself to other, opposed
positions that are subject to rational criticism and refutation.
Several aspects of how he goes about this were very influential in
German thought in the 18th century. First, the work is written under a
pseudonym, or rather, not under any name at all: The title page says
that the Denkwürdigkeiten were "assembled for the boredom of the
public by a lover of boredom," most likely a reference to the
Enlighteners' desire to educate the public in the name of reason. By
distancing himself from the authorship of what was probably his most
important work, Hamann makes clear that any arguments offered or
positions taken in the book ought to be viewed as moves in a game
rather than as expressions of his rational faculty. Second, Hamann
makes crucial use of irony, specifically Socratic irony, in his attack
on the Enlightenment. "I have," says Hamann at the beginning of the
work, "written about Socrates in a Socratic manner. Analogy was the
soul of his syllogisms, and he gave them irony as their body."
Specifically, Hamann holds up Socrates, the philosophers' secular
saint, in order to draw an unfavorable contrast between him and the
Enlightenment. Despite his wisdom, Socrates explicitly renounced his
claim to know the answers to the questions he asked; rather than
taking and defending determinate positions on the issues he was
interested in, Socrates engaged his listeners in conversation so as to
bring them to realize that they did not know the answers to these
questions any more than Socrates did. Similarly, Hamann intends the
Sokratische Denkwürdigkeiten to show that Berens and Kant are (at
least) as far from genuine knowledge as he is. Finally, like all of
Hamann's works, the style of the Sokratische Denkwürdigkeiten is
intentionally opaque: In contrast to the Enlightenment emphasis on
universal truths that transcend the time and place in which they are
expressed, Hamann fills his text with oblique allusions to a wide
variety of texts in several languages; moves from one point to another
with little indication of how the various passages are supposed to
hang together; and shifts without warning from careful argumentative
analysis to citation of texts to something like oracular declamation.
As a result, it is impossible for the reader to forget that the text
she is reading is the work of a particular individual writing in a
particular time and place, rather than expressing timeless
deliverances of reason.
How then does the text of the Sokratische Denkwürdigkeiten accomplish
the defense of religious faith Hamann desires? The chief contention of
the work is that religious faith is neither based on nor subject to
reason. Here Hamann relies not so much on Socrates but rather on David
Hume, whose skeptical writings had affected him so deeply a few years
before. Hume would doubtless have found little to his liking in
Hamann's rejection of the Enlightenment, but Hamann found much in Hume
to serve his purposes. Specifically, Hamann adapts Hume's important
claim that "belief… [etc.]." Hume intends this as a way of answering
the worst sort of skepticism: If our beliefs are not based on
reasoning, then reasoning cannot threaten them, either. Hamann makes
use of the fact that in German there is one word, 'Glaube,' that
corresponds both to 'belief' and to 'faith' in English. Thus in his
hands Hume's claim is extended to religious faith as well, making it
immune from rational criticism. But this is not to be understood as a
position taken with debates about the philosophical foundations of
religion. Instead, Hamann again makes use of the figure of Socrates.
He compares Socrates to someone refusing to join a game of cards: If
this person didn't know how to play, Hamann observes, we might take
their refusal as an expression of incapacity, much as we would take an
expression of ignorance from an ordinary person as a genuine
indication that he lacks knowledge. But in the case of Socrates, who
was manifestly a deep thinker and great philosopher, professions of
ignorance must be read as refusals to participate in a game in which
the other players "break the rules of the game and steal its joy [das
Glück desselben stehlen]. Socrates' ignorance thus became a "thorn in
the eyes" of the sophists (here again Kant and Berens are clearly
intended) and serve as "testimony" against the "new Athenians" of
Hamann's time, who deified Socrates "in order to be better able to
mock the carpenter's son [Jesus]."
But if Socrates was a great philosopher, as Hamann emphasizes, what
can he be said to know? Hamann's answer to this question is 'genius.'
What in Homer makes up for the ignorance of artistic rules, that
Aristotle thought up after him, and what in Shakespeare makes up for
the ignorance or violation of these rules? Genius (Genie) is the
unambiguous answer. Socrates could thus well have been ignorant; he
had a genius (Genius) on whose knowledge he could rely, and who he
feared as his God.Hamann's use of the notion of genius in the
Sokratische Denkwürdigkeiten serves as a bridge to his second major
work, the Aesthetica in nuce. His target in the Aesthetica is
Enlightenment thought as it applies specifically to art and beauty.
Aesthetics in the Enlightenment alternated between attempts to reduce
art to rules, more specifically rules for the accurate and morally
uplifting imitation of nature, and attempts to explain art as a
response to the subjective human capacity for feeling and sensation.
Hamann emphatically rejects both of these tendencies, along with the
devaluation of the aesthetic he seems them as implying. Far from being
reducible to rational principles, in his view aesthetic experience is
a fundamental and immediate experience of nature, which he
encapsulates (both in the Aesthetica and in Sokratische
Denkwürdigkeiten) under the term 'genius.'
The chief philosophical significance of the Aesthetica in nuce is that
Hamann here deepens his conception of the connection between artistic
genius, nature, and God. Nature, he says, is "a speech through
creation to creation." That is, nature is a text written by God,
which, being creatures ourselves, we are able to understand through
His grace. But this understanding is of course not a rational one,
through concepts and scientific investigation. Rather, in aesthetic
experience we grasp nature in a manner that precedes, and indeed forms
the basis for, rational thought: "Poetry [Poesie] is the native tongue
of the human race, just as gardening is older than agriculture,
painting older than writing, chant older than declamation, similes
older than conclusions, and barter than trade." This view has radical
consequences for the Enlightenment. Whereas the task of philosophical
aesthetics in the early modern period was to incorporate aesthetic
experience into the rational worldview, Hamann now argues that we must
instead do the former, that is, view reason as one aspect of our
aesthetic experience of the world. It is thus pointless to try to
formulate rational standards for beauty. Second, giving art priority
over reason threatens reason's claim to be the proper form for
representing nature, which is crucial to the central role given in the
Enlightenment to natural science. Finally, if reason is subordinated
to art rather than the reverse, then in so far as there is a tension
between artistic and rational views of the world the value placed on
reason in the 18th-century represents not progress but regress.
Hamann's early writings inspired thinkers such as Friedrich Heinrich
Jacobi, who appropriated the skeptical arguments of David Hume to
argue that reason is based entirely on faith, and Johann Gottfried
Herder, who offered an account of human thought that emphasized the
continuous historical development of humanity from its original
natural state. More immediately, Hamann's thought had an enormous
impact on the literary movement known as the Sturm und Drang-
literally, "storm and stress." Works of the Sturm und Drang emphasized
nature and human passion. Indeed these two themes were closely linked,
in that passion was seen as closer to nature. More distantly, Hamann's
thought was instrumental in the rise, around the turn of the century,
of the Romantic movement in Germany.
2. Hamann's Views on Language
From his earliest works onward, language was a central theme in all of
Hamann's writings. Here too his opposition to the Enlightenment was
influential not only in his time but also in present-day philosophy
and literary theory. Hamann's account of language can best be
understood by contrast with an admittedly too-simple sketch of the
sort of view he opposed. Much Enlightenment thought on language was
naturalistic, that is, it saw language as a useful tool invented by
human beings. The original humans were thinking, rational beings who
invented symbols, attaching names things in the world around them for
purposes of communication and learning. Thus both reason and the world
precede, and are independent of, language. Hamann rejects this view in
all its particulars.
Important elements of Hamann's account of language are already visible
in the Aesthetica in nuce, in particular in the claim that the world
is "a speech through creation to creation." Here it is clear that
language for Hamann is not something projected onto the world by human
reason, but instead is as it were embedded in the things themselves by
God the creator. At some points in his writings on language, Hamann
maintains the position that language is simultaneously the work of
both God and humans, while at other places he seems to lean more
toward the view that God alone is the source of language. In any case,
he clearly holds the view that neither thought nor reason is possible
independently of language. Indeed, since God's act of creation is in a
sense inherently linguistic, he must hold that language precedes, or
at least is contemporaneous with reason in particular and thought in
general. As we will see, this is an idea that is very important for
his critique of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.
3. "Metacritique" of Kant
In 1781 Hamann's friend but philosophical opponent Immanuel Kant
published his Critique of Pure Reason. Kant's project in the Critique
has two sides. On the one hand, Kant argues that reason is incapable
of attaining knowledge of the existence of, for example, God and the
immortality of the soul; however, these beliefs are also incapable of
being refuted through reason. This much, of course, Hamann could
gladly agree with. But Kant also undertakes to defend both reason and
the claim of natural science to offer a privileged description of the
world. The latter task is accomplished in the Transcendental Deduction
of the Categories, in which Kant argues that our experience requires
us to understand the natural world as being composed of substances
interacting according to necessary causal laws discoverable by natural
science. The former task (which is Hamann's chief target) is
accomplished by reinterpreting reason as the ability to set goals for
human cognition and moral action. This alarmed Hamann because it put
reason in the place of religious faith, along with the tradition and
culture he thought essential to human understanding. In response to
Kant's work, which was the most important event in German philosophy
in the 18th century, Hamann penned a short essay entitled "Metakritik
über den Purismum der Vernunft" ("Metacritique on the Purism of
Reason"). Although the Metacritique was never published in Hamann's
lifetime, he included it in a letter to his friend Johann Gottfried
Herder (who was also a student of Kant's), and Herder passed it on to
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, thus enabling this small but interesting
text to exert what one commentator has called a "subterranean
influence" on German thought after Kant.
Hamann's thesis in the Metacritique is that "language is the center of
reason's misunderstanding with itself." More specifically, Hamann
thinks that Kant's critical philosophy, while maintaining that
everything in the world must submit to rational questioning and
appraisal, nevertheless overlooks the crucial fact that all use of
reason, including Kant's reason, depends on language: Kant imagines,
he says, that he can simply "invent" a "universal philosophical
language," whereas here and elsewhere Hamann maintains that words have
meaning only in relation to the time and place where they are
appropriate. Hamann is clearly on to something important here, because
the force of Kant's conclusions in the Critique of Pure Reason
requires that we accept his quite substantial body of terminology,
such as the distinctions between a priori and a posteriori, and
between analytic and synthetic propositions. But, one might ask, why
can't one simply invent terms of art and stipulate their meanings?
This is probably, in fact, what Kant saw himself as doing. Hamann
answers this question indirectly, by appealing to the empiricists
Berkeley and Hume. Both Berkeley and Hume reject the existence of
so-called "abstract ideas," arguing that there is no philosophical
justification for referring to anything in the world other than
particular sensible things, whereas abstract ideas are things that can
exist only in the privacy of human minds. Since Kant himself accepts
the quasi-empiricist view that our knowledge is limited to possible
experience, Hamann's point is that Kant cannot justify his own
philosophical enterprise unless he can offer a justification for the
very language in which the enterprise is couched- a demand that seems
impossible for Kant to fulfill.
Quite late in his life, Hamann participated in another intellectual
dispute involving Kant, this one centering on the question, "What is
enlightenment." Although Kant was not the first to contribute to this
debate, his was the most prominent and influential statement on the
question. In his essay, also entitled "What is Enlightenment?," Kant
defines enlightenment as "the departure of human beings from their
self-incurred incapacity." Its slogan, he says, is sapere aude!– Dare
to think! Ignorance on this view is a sort of moral failing in human
beings who have neglected to exercise their rational faculties to the
fullest extent possible. Hamann responded to Kant's essay not in
print, but rather in a letter to a former student of Kant's, Christian
Jacob Kraus. Again, his target is the Enlightenment's belief that
reason rather than culture, tradition, or religious faith, is the
proper guide for human life. His response to Kant turns on an
important change in Kant's language: For Kant's word "incapacity"
[Unmündigkeit] he substitutes the word "domination" [Vormundschaft].
Failure to be fully enlightened results, Hamann suggests, not from a
failure to think for oneself, but rather from the fact that people are
told what to think by people-like Kant– who see themselves as more
rational and thus closer to the truth than ordinary mortals. Hamann
thus rejects Kant's view that the incapacity he bemoans is
"self-incurred." Instead, the "enlightened" state replaces one
dominant group (say, the aristocracy) with another ("Enlighteners"
such as Kant). Here Hamann anticipates, at least in broad strokes, the
late 20th-century suspicion that liberal democracy cannot live up to
its own pretensions to universal tolerance, because viewing oneself as
a citizen in a liberal democracy requires many of us to subordinate
some of our most passionately held beliefs to the demands of
citizenship.
Johann Georg Hamann died in 1788.
4. Bibliography
Works in German
:
Johann Georg Hamann, Samtliche Werke, ed. by Josef Nadler (Vienna:
Verlag Herder, 1951).
—–, Schriften zur Sprache, ed. by Josef Simon (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp
Verlag, 1967).
—–, Sokratische Denkwurdigkeiten/Aesthetica in nuce, ed. by Sven-Aage
Jorgenson (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam Verlag, 1968).
—– and others, Was ist Aufklarung?, ed. by Ehrhard Bahr (Stuttgart:
Philipp Reclam Verlag, 1974).
Works in English
:
—–, Hamann's Socratic Memorabilia. A Translation and Commentary,
trans. and ed. by James C. O'Flaherty (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
Press, 1967).
What is Enlightenment? 18th Century Answers, 20th Century Questions
, ed. by James B. Schmidt (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996).
Works in English that discuss Hamann
:
Beiser, Frederick C., The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant
to Fichte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).
Berlin, Isaiah, The Magus of the North: J. G. Hamann and the Origins
of Modern Irrationalism (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1993).
Dickson, Gwen G., Johann Georg Hamann's Relational Metacriticism
(Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1995).
Kühn, Manfred, Kant: A Biography (New York : Cambridge University Press, 2001).
O' Flaherty, James C., The Quarrel of Reason with Itself: Essays on
Hamann, Nietzsche, Lessing, & Michaelis (Rochester, NY: Camden House,
1991).
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