Johann Georg Hamann is quite
possibly one of the most obscure figures in the history of Western philosophy. A
pity that such obscurity should cloud one of the most incisive figures to
critique the ideals of the Enlightenment. His reappearance in the history of
Western philosophy would prove timely indeed if ‘after the ideals of the
Enlightenment have run their course for more than two hundred years and the
theoretical and moral foundations of secular humanism [appear to] have
collapsed’.[1] The
time would seem right for the ‘Magus’ or ‘Wise man’ of the North to appear once
more as a critic of modernity. Isaiah Berlin argues that Hamann is quite
possibly one of ‘the few wholly original critics of modern times’.[2]
However, John R. Betz argues that Berlin portrays Hamann as an ‘antimodern
obscurantist whom the advance of secular reason has rightly left behind’.[3]
This portrayal is misleading in the light of the latest research on Hamann which
suggests that ‘modern Hamann scholarship has come to see that he was, in some
sense, radically progressive – in fact, as Oswald Bayer has put it, a “radical
Enlightener”’.[4] In
many ways, as a critic of the Enlightenment, Hamann was ahead of his times in
his ability to see the limitations of autonomous human reason. His argument
that human reason is language anticipates the linguistic turn in philosophy in
modern philosophy, while his argument that language is logos or a word
from God shows his high regard for Jesus Christ and Holy Scripture. Despite his
criticism of Immanuel Kant, the two were personal friends and often debated the
latest ideas and trends in philosophy in their correspondence. Hamann’s ideas
would prove influential in the emergence of Romanticism and the postmodern
critique of the Enlightenment. He would exercise considerable influence over
several major post-Enlightenment figures including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(1749–1832), Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), Carl Jacobi (1804–51), Friedrich
Schlegel (1772–1829), Jean Paul (1763–1825), F. W. J. Shelling (1775–1854), G.
W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), and Soren Kierkegaard (1813–55). Betz argues that Hamann’s
critique of Kantian philosophy anticipates postmodernity and makes him ‘in many
ways a Christian precursor of postmodern philosophy’.[5]
Betz borrows O’Flaherty’s definition of the Enlightenment as ‘a consistently
rational approach to the great questions of religion and ethics, of theology
and philosophy’.[6]
His study of the post-secular vision of J. G. Hamann involves dealing with
several sparring partners among the key philosophers of the Enlightenment also
known as Aufklärer or ‘Enlighteners’ – not least Immanuel Kant, J. D.
Michaelis, Gotthold E. Lessing, and Moses Mendelssohn. Kant and Mendelssohn
were both personal friends with Hamann, though they were subject to his
critique of their Enlightenment ideals.
Hamann was
critical of the enlightenment claim that reason was wholly autonomous. Reason,
according to Hamann, is essentially a matter of language – and language is
bound up in history and tradition. He foresaw that the enlightenment idea of
pure reason would eventually give way to a society that is wholly autonomous or
atheistic with no respect for God or humanity. According to Betz,
Hamann foresaw
in the Enlighteners’ political dream a society that would be for all intents
and purposes atheistic – a society for which any revelation, however true, and
any prophetic testimony, however saintly, would be fundamentally irrelevant, extrinsic
to the concerns of government, allowed perhaps at the margins as matter of
subjective, merely personal opinion, but deprived of any objective legitimacy
in matters of state and public policy.[7]
The Bible and the faith of
Christianity would have no place in such a society, except among those quaint
individuals at the margins of society, who little concern the state and
crucially are politically inert. Society is essentially ‘demythologised’ to
borrow Rudolf Bultmann’s phrase in the light of autonomous reason. Tradition
and culture give way to innovation and science. The Bible is seen in such a
society as a natural book subject to the same criticisms as any other work of
literature. The miracles of Moses in the Pentateuch and of Christ in the
Gospels are cleverly devised fables which no longer concern modern society.
Theology is jettisoned into the noumenal world along with faith and
metaphysics, beyond the reach of phenomena, experience, and the critique of human
reason. Faith and reason are radically dichotomized and turned against one
another, though some place is given to God for the sake of public morality. Given
its grounding in autonomous human reason, the enlightenment project was a kind
of self-illumination, whereas for the Christian philosopher argues that true light
is a divine gift of the Holy Spirit. Jesus Christ himself claimed to be the
light of the world (John 8:12) in whom there was no darkness at all (1 John
1:5). Paradoxically, however, Hamann’s style is notoriously difficult to
understand and would seem to obscure or darken what light is present within his
philosophy. This style, however, is a deliberate imitation of the Word of God
itself as a light that ‘shines in the darkness’ (1 John 1:5) and the prophetic
word which ‘shines in a dark place’ (2 Peter 1:19), even as God spoke light into
being and separated the light from the darkness in the beginning (Genesis
1:3–5). In other words, Hamann’s style is deliberate prophetic, obscure, and
sibylline in order to provide the contrast against which true and spiritual
light is seen. This is why Jesus often spoke in parables: ‘Though seeing, they
do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand’ (Matthew 13:13; cf.
Isaiah 6:9–10). Isaiah Berlin, perhaps commenting on Hamann’s opaque style,
considers him to be an advocate of irrationalism, but this assessment is surely
wide of the mark. Oswald Bayer has actually demonstrated that Hamann was even
more rational than his contemporaries as a kind of ‘radical Aufklärer’
who subjected reason to a deeper critique than Kant. According to Betz, we must
distinguish between secular reason and reason enlightened by faith:
To be sure,
precisely because Hamann foresaw that secular reason, left to its own devices,
would end in nihilism, he wished to accelerate its demise; but he did so in
order to bring reason to the point of a more radical understanding of its
limits, so that reason could be born again, as it were, through the humble
admission of the light of faith and a corresponding life-giving sense of
reason’s ordination to revelation.[8]
None of this makes Hamann guilty of irrationalism. It actually places him in a long tradition of ‘faith seeking understanding’ (fides quaerens intellectum) and brings to mind Anselm of Canterbury’s phrase from the Proslogion: ‘I believe that I may understand’ (credo ut intelligam). It may be helpful to conclude with some insights from the veteran philosopher Fredrick Copleston: ‘Johann Georg Hamman … would reject the rationalist turn of the Enlightenment and adopt a strict Pietism which would clearly demarcated faith from the abstractions of reason. He was strongly opposed to Kant’s critical philosophy for its excessive abstractness as he clearly articulated in his posthumously published Metacritique on the Purism of Pure Reason [1784]’.[9] His life work was to critique Kant and the Enlightenment and remind the world of the light of Jesus Christ in the Holy Scriptures. ‘And the light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not’ (John 1:5).
Bibliography
Alexander, W. M., Johann Georg
Hamann: Philosophy and Faith (The Hague, 1966).
Anderson, Lisa Marie (trans.), Hegel
on Hamann (Evanston, Ill., 2008).
Bayer, Oswald, A Contemporary in
Dissent: Johann Georg Hamann as a Radical Enlightener (Grand Rapids, MI,
2012).
Beck, Lewis White, Early German
Philosophy: Kant and His Predecessors (Cambridge, MA, 1969).
Beiser, Frederick C., The Fate
of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, MA, 1987).
Berlin, Isaiah, The Magus of the
North: J. G. Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism (London, 1993).
Berlin, Isaiah, Three Critics of
the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder (Princeton, NJ, 2013).
Betz, John R., After
Enlightenment: The Post-Secular Vision of J. G. Hamann (Malden, MA; Oxford,
2012).
Dickson, Gwen Griffith, Johann
Georg Hamann’s Relational Metacriticism (Berlin, 1995).
Dunning, Stephen H., The Tongues
of Men: Hegel and Hamann on Religious Language and History (Missoula, MT,
1979).
German, Terence J., Hamann on
Language and Religion (Oxford, 1981).
Griffith-Dickson, G., Johann
Georg Hamann | Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (2022). Online
and available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hamann/.
[Accessed 22/12/2024]
Kenneth Haynes, Hamann: Writings
on Philosophy and Language (Cambridge, 2007).
Kinnaman, Ted, Hamann, Johann
Georg | Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (n.d.). Online and available
at: https://iep.utm.edu/hamann/
[Accessed 22/12/2024]
O’Flaherty, James C., Johann
Georg Hamann (Boston, MA, 1979).
O’Flaherty, James C., Socratic
Memorabilia: A Translation and Commentary (Baltimore, MD, 1967).
O’Flaherty, James C., The
Quarrel of Reason with Itself: Essays on Hamann, Michaelis, Lessing, Nietzche (Columbia,
SC, 1988).
O’Flaherty, James C., Unity and
Language: A Study in the Philosophy of Hamann (Chapel Hill, NC, 1952).
Popkin, Richard H., ‘Vico, Hamann,
and Herder’, in The Columbia History of Western Philosophy (New York,
1999), pp. 502–508.
Sparling, Robert Alan, Johann
Georg Hamann and the Enlightenment Project (Toronto, 2017).
[1]
John R. Betz, After Enlightenment: The Post-Secular Vision of J. G. Hamann
(Malden MA and Oxford, 2012), p. 3.
[2]
Isaiah Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder
(Princeton, NJ, 2000), p. 257.
[3] Betz,
After Enlightenment, p. 2.
[4]
Betz, After Enlightenment, p. 2.
[5]
Betz, After Enlightenment, p. 3.
[6] Betz,
After Enlightenment, p. 3.
[7] Betz,
After Enlightenment, p. 5.
[8] Betz,
After Enlightenment, p. 16.
[9] Anthony
Carroll, A History of Philosophy: The Condensed Copleston (London,
2025), p. 199.
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