Abstract
It is necessary to ask in more detail what Hamann meant by the charge that the philosophy of the Enlightenment “divorced what nature had joined together” and “approached truth to take off her clothes”.
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Hamann was unafraid of radical literary criticism, as the following passage from Thoughts on the Course of My Life indicates. His attack was directed against philosophical canons which would rule out a search for the “Word” in the myth, the story, and the crudities of language
“… The Holy Spirit has given a book to us as His Word, wherein like a fool and a man insane, indeed like an unholy and impure spirit of our prideful reason, He used fairy tales and small, despicable events for the story of heaven and the Divine.” (II, 43).
Hamann was suspicious of contrived and abstract linguistic rules, and trusted much more the “wisdom” implicit in the historical development of a language. He had only scorn for language committees and academies of the time: “The purification of a language deprives it of its wealth, and an overly strict correctness — of its strength and manliness. In a great city such as Paris annually gather without display forty learned men who infallibly know what in their mother-tongue is pure and nice, and what is in the province of junk. Once however in centuries it happens that a gift of Pallas — a man — falls from heaven, empowered to manage the public treasury of a language with wisdom — as a Sully, or to augment it with cleverness — as a Colbert.” (II, 136).
“A philosopher who would like to censure God and improve on Him in the choice of circumstances and ways in which He would have communicated His revelation would act more rationally if he would trust his own judgment less and thereby not run the danger, like that royal astronomer [Alfons von Kastilien], of taking the ptolemaic system or its explanation of the courses of the stars for the true scheme of the heavens.” (I, 10; cf. II, 97).
The rationalists had their own concept of “accommodation”. Cf. Fritz Blanke, Hamann-Studien, p. 84. God used figurative and anthropomorphic language for the ignorant and the simple, until philosophy arrived upon the scene with a better way. But Hamann knows of no access to “pure ideas” behind the sensual symbol. Those who make such claims to a superior position over language are surreptitiously mystics, and are going up to heaven to “fetch back the key to their knowledge”. (II, 203. Aesthetics in a Nutshell).
Three “letters” to a fictitious correspondent, supposedly reporting on the progress of his Greek studies.
Hamann, in a note at the end of his essay, gives his impressions of it as its first reader!
Cf. “The right to assign names to things is a prerogative of human nature …” (To J. G. Lindner, 21 Mar. 1761, ZH II, 71).
There is another chapter to the Herder Auseinandersetzung. Kant wrote Hamann the 6th of April 1774, asking him if he (Kant) had understood Herder’s latest book correctly. (This is the letter where he begs Hamann to answer him in human language!) Hamann’s answer was a letter to Kant of 7 Apr. 1774, which was printed as the first part of Prolegomena of the Christian Zacchaeus, the General Manager [Hamann’s occupation as tax collector!] on the Latest Exegesis of the “Oldest Documents of the Human Race” [Herder: 1774] in Two Answers to Apollonius the Philosopher [Kant!], 1774. Hamann got the title from an early Christian book, Consultationum Zaccaei Christiani et Apollonii Philosophi. (Cf. III, 128; also Nadler, III, 439). Kant replied 8 April 1774 and renewed his request. Hamann’s answer (To Kant, April 1774, ZH III, 87f.) comprises the second half of the Prolegomena of the Christian Zacchaeus, the “second answer”. Kant had asked Hamann about Herder’s discussion of the historicity and validity of Genesis, and had pointed out that Orthodoxy was at the mercy of the scholar, making the assumption that Orthodoxy’s heteronomous authority was the only other alternative as a concept of truth. Hamann makes no such assumption: he has transcended Kant’s “either-or” altogether: “We would be the most miserable of men if the basis of our faith consisted in the shifting sand of the fashions of critical erudition. No, the theory of true religion is not only suitable to every child and woven into his soul, or can be established in it again, but also is just as inaccessible to the most intellectual giants and heaven-stormers as it is inscrutable to the most profound speculators and researchers.” (III, 132; To Kant, Apr. 1774). The entire emphasis of this new theology rests upon a “Something”, and the explanation of the Creator upon a “Something”, which, without being made itself, has made “Something”. In this exalted concept of a “Something” Mr. Robinet finds on the one hand motives for the deepest devotion, and on the other the meritorious grounds for a vocation of metaphysical iconoclasm…. Because this philosophical ban2 now makes unholy all human language, and
Cf. Fragments, 1758 (I, 303-4): “How shall we describe the distinction between natural and revealed religion? If I understand it aright, it is no more than the distinction between the eye of a man who sees a painting without understanding a bit about the painter, or the design or the history which it represents, and the eye of a painter — between the natural hearing, and the musical ear.”
Such a “philosophical ban” on language, which crops up in some form in every age, is scorned by Hamann as a groundless dogmatism which would prescribe for God what parts of His own creation are accessible to His condescension and what are not. Just as God can condescend to breathe His Spirit into the “dust of the earth” (I, 15) and can bring the riches of nature even out of nothing, so He can bring divine meaning out of earthly language. The influence of the Lutheran understanding of the communicatio idiomatum is clearly evident here in the way that God’s condescension in human language can be said to confer upon it “omnipotence”. “Next to the riches of God in nature, which arise out of nothing, there is no greater creation than that of making human concepts and perceptions fit heavenly and divine mysteries, than i.e. this omnipotent capacity [Allmacht] of human language for the thoughts of the cherubim and seraphim.” (I, 190).
“Such individual proofs of divine goodness and condescension to our needs are fiery coals, and thrust deeper into the soul than the rotten wood of scholastic concepts of Substance Attribute, Mode, and Ens absolute infinitum.” (To Jacobi, 16 Feb. 1785).
From a book against Rousseau by Friedrich Melchior von Grimm: Le petit Prophète de Boehmisch Broda, 1753. Cf. Nadler, VI, 58, 159. (Did Hamann leave out the “h”?! Cf. his note, III, 105). The “minor prophets of Bohemian villages” refers to Damm and his kind who represent a small-town, lightweight philosophy.
For this analysis I am indebted to Fritz Blanke, Hamann-Studien, pp. 49-55.
Hamann-Studien, p. 53.
Jerusalem, oder über religiöse Macht und Judentum (Berlin: bei Friedrich Maurer, 1783). In two parts. [Cited as “J”]. An English translation in two volumes has been done by M. Samuels: London, 1838. The first volume is introduction; the second volume, translation and notes. [Cited as “Samuels’ Translation”].
On title-page of books published in the age, having passed the censor: “with all-gracious freedom”.
Man in the “state of nature” = Frederick the Great and the “Leviathan” state.
J, II, 30–31 (from Samuels’ transi., II, p. 89).
Mendelssohn’s would differ from similar schematizations in his age and ours, of course, in not excluding the arguments of a natural theology as “scientific”.
Cf. J, II, 48; 112-114.
“Why he gave to his writing the name of a devastated city, no literary critic up to now has troubled himself about, and perhaps the author himself did not know.” (III, 319).
Quotation marks indicate Hamann’s use of Mendelssohn’s own phrases. See “Metasche-matism”, Chapter VII.
The only other person of Hamann’s contemporaries who could be said to share this distinction was David Hume; Hamann called Kant the “Prussian Hume.”
The meaning of the title-word is obscure. Possibly Hamann thought it should mean: KONX = watch! and OMPAX = Do no evil! (cf. To Herder, 8 Aug. 1779). Apparently he wished it to represent in some way both the Eleusinian mysteries and eighteenth century Freemasonry. Schoonhoven (Natuur en Genade bij J. G. Hamann,p. 177) interprets it as a watchword for initiates of the Eleusinian rites. Blanke (Hamann-Studien, p. 73, n. 13) takes KONXOMPAX as an attack on four writers
(1) J. A. Starck — Hephaestion, 1775. Apology for the Order of Freemasons, 1778. (2) Christoph Meiners — Philosophical Writings, 1776. (3) G. S. Steinbart — System of Pure Philosophy, or Christianity’s Doctrine of Happiness, 1778. (4) Gotthold Ephraim Lessing — Ernst and Falk. Dialogues for Freemasons, 1778. On the Proof of Spirit and of Power, 1767. Hamann’s satire is directed against the popular view that the Greek mysteries, Freemasonry and Christianity all say the same, namely, what is in agreement with philosophy.
Fritz Blanke, Hamann-Studien, p. 81.
Lessing, Lachmann-Muncker Edition, XIII, 5.
Lessing to Goeze (the champion of Orthodoxy and Pastor at Hamburg), ibid., XIII, 102.
Cf. Hamann in his Fragments (I, 299)
“How much man sins in his complaints about the prison of the body, about the boundaries in which the senses confine him, about the imperfectness of the light — and at the same time curses the same by his insatiability in the lusts of the flesh, by his partiality for the prejudices of the senses, and by his haughtiness toward the light which he curtails-”
Reading “Leichname”. Cf. Schoonhoven, Natuur en Genade, p. 181.
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, p. 195.
Above, in section “3” of this chapter.
Lessing, Lachmann-Muncker Edition, XIII, 429.
Ibid., XIII, 416.
Lessing is presupposing a knowledge of God which transcends the historical world in which man lives. As far as his epistemology goes, Lessing stands outside history. Hamann had met a theodicy which made a similar assumption twenty years earlier in Kant’s lectures on “Optimism”, 1759. The problem of theodicy had been accentuated since the Lisbon earthquake (1755), and Kant argues that a knowledge of the “whole” would justify evil. Here is Hamann’s comment: “He appeals to the whole, from which to judge the world. But a knowledge is involved here which is no longer fragmentary. To conclude therefore from the whole to the fragments is the same thing as concluding from the unknown to the known. A philosopher who bids me look upon the whole demands of me something just as difficult as another who bids me look upon the heart out of which he writes. The whole is just as concealed to me as your heart is.” (To J. G. Lindner, 12 Oct. 1759).
It was Hamann who arranged for the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason (cf. Nadler, III, 464).
Apparently Hamann intended his “metacritical” work on Kant to represent what he was trying to do in his entire authorship. In all his work he is the “meta-critic”. Like Socrates he felt a necessity to go back to the occupations of his parents to find the images to describe his philosophy. Hamann’s own father was not only “physician” but town bather. Hamann thought once of giving a proposed collection of his works the title of “Metacritical Little Tubs” which are “to wash the feet … of our enlightened century” (G V, 54; To Jacobi, 22–23 Jan. 1785). In the symbol of the bathtub he finds what he wants to describe his thought: both the critical element (“washing”) and the element of humility (the washing of the feet). In Exposure and Transfiguration: A Flying Letter to Nobody the Notorious, he refers to himself in the third person: “Instead of the mid-wifely birth-stool, he resorted to the bathtub of the metacritique…” (III, 351).
“My poor head against Kant’s is a broken pot, — clay against iron” (To Herder, 8 Dec. 1783). The idea of a critique of Kant’s philosophy tortured him (To Herder, 24 Jan. 1784, R VI, 370).
Cf. Kant, pp. 7-8. (Reference is to the Critique of Pure Reason, First Edition of 1781, unless otherwise noted. Since this pagination is given in the margins of the Akademie-Ausgabe [Vols. IV and III] and in a standard English translation such as Norman Kemp Smith’s [London: MacMillan, 2nd ed. 1933, reprinted, 1953], a simple and practicable method of reference both to the original and to translations is at hand.)
Kant, p. 15; cf. p. 19: “But all thought must directly or indirectly … relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.”
Kant, p. xv.
Cf. Kant, pp. 2, 48.
Cf. Kant, pp. 38-39.
Kant, p. 3.
Kant, p. 49.
Kant, pp. xx, 11–13. These forms and principles comprise “a systematically ordered inventory of all our possessions of pure reason. …What reason produces entirely out of itself cannot be concealed…” (Kant, p. xx).
Kant, p. 22.
Kant, pp. 48, 49.
Kant, p. 20.
Kant, pp. 20-22.
Kant, pp. 106-107.
See the “Canon of Pure Reason,” Kant, pp. 795-831.
Hamann in two places (III, 278, 286) inaccurately (for his purposes) expresses the dichotomy as one between “sensibility” and “understanding” (Verstand). One of these instances follows: “If’ sensibility and understanding, as the two stems of human knowledge, arise out o f one common — but to us unknown — root, so that through the former, ozbjects are given and through the latter, thought’ (understood and conceived) [Kant, p. 15], why therefore such a violent, unwarranted putting asunder of that which nature has joined together? Will not both stems dry up and perish on account of this dichotomy and fission of their transcendental root?” (III, 278).
Not even mathematics, in so far as it depends upon spatial-temporal intuitions, symbols which make thought possible: “The entire certainty of mathematics depends upon the nature of its language, the necessity in all proofs upon the poetic license to think metaphysical points, lines and surfaces which physically are impossible.” (To Scheffner, 11 Feb. 1785). But should Hamann be in error here, it would not emasculate his main objections to Kant’s conclusions: he still would not grant that mathematical and logical forms could shore up Kant’s epistemology which demands some additional apodictic knowledge. As a matter of fact, this appeal to mathematics would only illustrate one of his objections. (Cf. III, 285; and see below).
“I always hold it to be a fruitless work to patch up subordinate principles and expose their contradiction. One must plainly make up his mind to dig deeper or to climb higher. Whoever has neither heart nor patience for this and cannot renounce his contemporary age, for him it is always better manum de tabula [i.e. ‘Keep your hands off!’].” (Hamann to Jacobi 27 Apr. 1788).
Kant of course does not claim to conceive anything apart from the intuitional forms of space and time. Hamann is aware of this. See below.
How does one know whom God has created? Cf. Hamann’s remarks on “self-knowledge” (Chapter II).
Cf. Kant, p. 123.
Cf. the “transcendental ground of the unity of consciousness” (Kant, p. 106), which is a priori, necessary, etc. — i.e. the eternal, immortal soul! It is proved by philosophy, and out of it comes the sure and certain knowledge of the Divine ethic, future salvation, and the Deity Himself.
“God created. Matter and form. The existence and determination of the same, so that nothing became something, and this something everything which He willed. How can we express this in words when we are not in a position to conceive it in the least.” (I, 14). Flesh stands between man and the mystery of his being. “If our bones are hidden to our view because we are made in concealment, because we were formed below in the earth, how much more are our concepts made in concealment and can be regarded as parts of our understanding.” Socrates does not originate the truth; as a midwife he simply assists in bringing it to the daylight. (Socratic Memorabilia, II, 66).
Cf. e.g. III, 192.
“The entire obvious disorder and destruction of the original rational order through the outward world-circumstances is just an insoluble riddle … of the divine rational origin, and only the Critique and its transcendental strivings to dominate all other natural powers of knowing produces metaphysics of pure reason as the queen in whom is to be found the ultimate basis of all sophisticated ignorance and emptiness of thought …” (To Jacobi, 27 Apr. 1788).
Hamann’s version of the famous Cartesian formula shows an entirely different concept of reason — a, so to speak, “faithful” reason. His differences with Kant on this score transcend any change from the “pre-critical” to the “post-critical” Kant: “I believe; therefore I speak. Convince me you are not able, for I am not one of your auditors, but an accusor and an opponent.” (To Kant, end Dec. 1759).
An unexamined faith (cf. Hamann’s charge of “Indifferentism”! III, 279) always underlies all scepticisms: “Dogmatism and scepticism have for me the most complete identity, as do nature and reason; and as I have already said to you, faire et confondre are likewise homogeneous and related works.” (Hamann to Jacobi, 27 Apr. 1787; G V, 510; cf. also G V, 498).
To Hamann the Critique of Pure Reason is a theological document and he treats it as such: the “pure reason” proposes to judge both religion and law. Thus it is more sacred than either. (Cf. Kant, p. xi; Hamann, III, 277).
Kant had pointed out (Kant, p. 314) that Plato sometimes was not aware of the implications of his thought, and spoke in opposition to his own intention. Hamann, on behalf of Plato, returns the compliment. (See III, 279).
To Herder, 9–10 Dec. 1781: “I ran into Kant again. … He was very cordial in spite of the fact that I had disconcerted him a little the preceding time when I sanctioned his Critique but rejected the mysticism in it.”
Hamann pointed to the “striking analogy” between Christian mysticism and heathen “telesiurgy” (i.e. salvation by “forcing the End”: in Gnosticism, bringing the return of the LOGOS. Cf. Nadler, VI, 376. An example is bringing about union with the divine through sexual relations). Cf. III, 223-224.
A reason which trusts only in the infallible eventually becomes immobile, like the man who cannot prove “friendship” or “trustworthiness”. To be sure the man is right — infallibly right — but if he acts consistently, eventually he destroys himself. To avoid all untrust-worthiness he cannot get out of bed in the morning, and he moves on inexorably to the time when he cannot sleep and cannot even safely breathe. Cf. Hamann on Hume: ZH I, 379 (To Kant, 27 July 1759).
The passage is reproduced here for convenience: Ist es nun möglich, fragt der Idealismus von der einen Seite, aus der blossen Anschauung eines Worts den Begriff desselben zu finden? Ist es möglich aus der Materie des Worts Vernunft, seinen 7 Buchstaben oder 2 Sylben — ist es möglich, aus der Form, welche die Ordnung dieser Buchstaben und Sylben bestimmt; irgend etwas von dem Begriffe des Worts Vernunft herauszubringen? Hier antwortet die Kritik mit ihren beyden Wagschaalen gleich…. Ist es ferner möglich, frägt der Idealismus von der andern Seite, aus dem Verstande die empirische Anschauung eines Worts zu finden? Ist es möglich aus dem Begriffe der Vernunft die Materie ihres Namens, d.i. die 7 Buchstaben oder 2 Sylben im deutschen oder irgend einer andern Sprache zu finden? Hier deutet die eine Waagschale der Kritik ein entscheidendes Nein! Sollte es aber nicht möglich seyn, aus dem Begriff die Form seiner empyrischen Anschauung im Wort herzuleiten, vermöge welcher Form die eine von 2 Sylben a priori und die andere a posteriori steht oder dass die 7 Buchstaben, in bestimmter Verhältnis geordnet, angeschaut werden? Hier schnarcht der Homer der reinen Vernunft ein so lautes Ja!….
I.e. an iron-bound logic of language which can operate apart from any question of content.
The “basic error”.
Hamann sees a firm connection between idealism and scepticism. Hume’s radical empiricism rests upon the “older idealism”, as Kant’s idealism upon Hume (specifically, the assumption of a hopeless dichotomy between subject and object, between reason — whether as “sense impressions” or a priori concepts — and reality). “It seems to me first and foremost that the new scepticism owes infinitely more to the older idealism than is apparent in passing… and that without Berkeley Hume would hardly have become the ‘great philosopher’ that the Critique in uniform gratitude takes him to be.” (III, 283). Hamann’s emphasis on the importance of history and “tradition” in philosophy is well-known: “So much is certain, that without Berkeley no Hume would have happened, as without the latter no Kant. In the final analysis all depends upon tradition, as all abstraction upon sense impression.” (To Herder, 20–22 Apr. 1782).
Cf. Hamann to Jacobi, 4–5 Feb. 1786: Philosophy ought not to “carry on empty shadow-boxing with ideas and speculations against data and facts, with theoretical deceptions against historical truths, with plausible probabilities against witnesses and documents”. Hamann was not entirely naive concerning the problem of historical probability. Cf. Hamann to Jacobi, 14 Nov. 1784: “Sense and history are the foundations and ground; — be the former ever so deceptive and the latter ever so simple, I still prefer them to all castles in the air.” (G V, 16).
Cf. Hamann to Jacobi, 22–28 Oct. 1785: “In my eyes Spinoza’s superstitious belief in mathematical form is of itself a delusion, and a very unphilosophical jugglery.”
2nd Edition (Zweite Auflage), p. 648. Kant reintroduced the idea of a necessary Being, only through the back door — no longer as Object but now as Subject. Cf. the “transcendental apperception” (Kant, pp. 106-107).
Translated by Norman Kemp Smith.
2nd Edition (Zweite Auflage), pp. 353-354.
“Sense is related to reason supposedly as the stomach to the vessels which secrete the fine juices of the blood without the circulation and inflow of which the stomach cannot fulfill its function. Nothing therefore is in our understanding without first having been in our senses, just as nothing is in our entire body which did not first pass through our own stomachs or through those of our parents” (III, 39).
What is quoted with a straight face as part of Hamann’s own attack is frequently Ha-mann’s quote from Kant! For example, Hamann does not accuse Kant of not perceiving that “sensibility and understanding as two stems of human knowledge arise out of one common root,” as Heinrich Steege thinks (Johann Georg Hamann, Ein Prediger in der Wüste [Giessen and Basel: Brunnen-Verlag, 1954], p. 59). These are Kant’s own words! (See Kant, p. 15.) Nor is Hamann maintaining that Kant cannot distinguish between sensibility and understanding. Analysis and synthesis are inescapable, but they must correspond to reality, that is, they must follow what Hamann calls “nature”. Cf. Hamann to Jacobi, 27 April 1787: “Analysis and synthesis must be done according to entirely similar laws: analysis must not destroy, only separate; synthesis must not confuse, but put together again; both according to the criteria and laws of nature and its generation, the copying and composition of which our knowledge must take for its model.” (G V, 510).
Cf. Hamann to Herder, 9 Nov. 1785: “Your theme of language, tradition and experience is my dearest idea, my egg over which I brood — my one and all. …”
The word “separate” (absondern, scheiden, etc. — Kant, p. 22; Hamann, III, 278) of course is ambiguous. In the context of the issue here, it does not refer to the capacity of language to distinguish, but to the capacity of the mind to form a thought emptied of experience.
Cf. Kant, Second Edition (Zweite Auflage), pp. 19-20, 127-128.
Kant, pp. 78-79.
Cf. G V, 7 (To Jacobi, 2 Nov. 1783); also R VII, 216 (To Scheffner, 11 Feb. 1785): “as Young says”. The reference is to Edward Young (1683–1765), The Complaint: or Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality (1742), “Night” II, line 469, which reads: “Speech, thought’s canal! Speech, thought’s criterion too!” However, it is probable that Hamann uses the term organon in a sense deliberately ambiguous, meaning by it not only “organ” or “canal”, but also a philosophical principle or method for acquiring knowledge. In the background is Kant’s usage (cf. Kant, p. 11, for example).
How is it known what is reality ? (For a full discussion see the theological presuppositions, Chapter VI.) At the conclusion of the Metacritique Hamann refers to the manifestation of reality in which the ambiguity and dichotomy, which philosophy separates into idealism and empiricism, is lifted, but only under the conditions of the ambiguity of experience! “Perhaps however a similar [problem of] idealism is the entire wall of partition between Judaism and heathenism. The Jew has the word and the sign; the heathen their reason and its wisdom — the solution was a metabasis eis allo genos in which the Highest [of the GENOS, i.e. Christ or the LOGOS — “reason”] was transplanted into the small Golgatha.” (III, 289). This is one of Hamann’s most far-fetched plays on words. The “highest” GENOS is the Christ, the highest of his race (GENOS) and the MONOGENOS — the “only” Son of Jn. 3: 16. The “highest” is also the Reason which enters the world only in the ambiguous form of language, a “crucifixion”.
2nd Edition (Zweite Auflage), p. 884.
Hamann’s attack on Kant is largely directed against the First Critique. Kant’s Second Critique was finished the middle of 1787 and the printing concluded in the final days of 1787 (Salmony, I, p. 255, n. 7, top of page). Hamann “looked into” it a month before his death, but his powers were not “equal” to it. (Cf. To Jacobi, 16 May 1788, G V, 656.)
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© 1966 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Alexander, W.M. (1966). Idololatria: Philosophy as a Contrary Faith (Con’t.). In: Johann Georg Hamann Philosophy and Faith. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-9237-8_5
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