Hamann

   Biography

• 1730-1788 (58)
• Born and studied (although without completing) university in Königsberg.
• Took a job with a friend (Berens), but failed at some mission, which after living a high life was left impoverished, alone and lonely. In this state, in a rented attic, depressed, he read the Bible and had a conversion. He returned to Berens, was forgiven but forbidden to marry Berens’ sister (due to their Enlightenment horror at Hamann’s newfound religion).
• He lived for the rest of his life at his father’s house. He didn’t marry but was faithful to a woman with whom he had four loved children.
• Kant helped him get a job upon his return to Konigsberg, as a low-level civil servant.
• Appreciation of his writing often requires an understanding of the style and terminology of his target, and the great breadth of his allusions and citations. Often considered impenetrable, (even commented on in a way by Hegel!)
• Used pseudonyms.
• Often disregarded as an irrationalist (esp. by commentators in English).

Sokratische Denkwürdigkeiten (Socratic Memorabilia)

• Uses Hume’s scepticism to undermine reason, and thus immunize faith from any arguments based on reason.
• The alternative to reason is Socrates, who exemplifies “genius”, viz. the ability to produce without knowledge of rules, e.g. Homer who has not studied Aristotle.

Aesthetica in Nuce (Aesthetics in a Nutshell)

• Art is not reducible to rational principles and is instead a fundamental and immediate grasp of nature called “genius”.
• Nature is a text that we read in a manner that precedes reason.
• “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.”
• Reason is an aspect of the aesthetic experience (and not vice versa). This allows for the following:
  • Can’t use reason to explain aesthetics.
  • Reason can’t be the basis for understanding nature.
  • The rise of reason against aesthetics implies that the Enlightenment represents a regression.
• Influence on literary movement “Sturm und Drang” (Storm and Stress), that emphasize nature and human passion.

Language

• Cf. Enlightenment understanding that language is a tool developed by humans for the purpose of communication and learning, implying that it is preceded by the world and reason.
• Language is embedded in the world, by God, i.e. the world is natively linguistic.
• Thus language precedes or is contemporaneous with the world, reason and thought.

“Metacritique” of Kant

• Nb. He considered his work to generally use a metacritical or preconceptual approach, i.e. one that engages the foundations of his target.
• Hamann wrote Metakritik über den Purismum der Vernunft (Metacritique on the Purism of Reason), which was given the Herder and then Jacobi.
  • “Not only the entire ability to think rests on language… but language is also the crux of the misunderstanding of reason with itself.”
  • Kant assumes that he can invent a universal language of philosophy, whereas words’ meanings are dependent on time and place.
  • Berkeley and Hume hold that abstract ideas do not exist in themselves (but rather, only in the mind), and only particular sensibles do.
  • Thus Kant cannot justify his own enterprise.
• Hamann responded to Kant’s essay on “What is Enlightenment?” in an essay to Christian Jacob Kraus.
  • Attacks presumption that reason is superior (e.g. above culture, tradition, religion).
  • Failure to be enlightened is (not due to a self-incurred incapacity but) due to those who succumb to the demands of people like Kant.
  • Kant’s “Enlightenment” is a sort of aristocracy, that replaces one dominant group with another.

The Union of Opposites

• This is a principle he developed and valued highly.
• Contradictions and oppositions fill our experience, and it is dogmatism that is only free of them. Knowledge proceeds by the dialogue between opposition (cf. synthesis, per se, of Hegel).
• “Yes, daily at home I have the experience that one must always contradict oneself from two viewpoints, [which] never can agree, and that it is impossible to change these viewpoints into the other without doing the greatest violence to them. Our knowledge is piecemeal — no dogmatist is in a position to feel this great truth, if he is to play his role and play it well; and through a vicious circle of pure reason skepsis itself becomes dogma.” (Nb. re Kant).