Johann Georg Hamann - Biography

Johann Georg Hamann (b. 1730-88) was born into a middle class family, in Konigsberg, Prussia, where he spent the majority of his life, working as a minor official in the Prussian bureaucracy. Hamann was a fierce and important critic of the German Enlightenment, especially regarding reason’s breach into the realm of faith, and reason’s hypostasis, that is the illegitimate abstraction of reason from its historical and social context, and the consequent reification of it. Despite spending much of his life as Immanuel Kant’s neighbor and friend, they we nonetheless sharp critics of one another. Hamann was the founder of Sturm und Drang, a literary movement celebrating revolt and personal freedom, in the late 18th century.

Hamann’s thought can be divided into four main categories, his critique of reason, philosophy of language, politics and aesthetics. The starting point of Hamann’s critique of reason is, admittedly, his mystical experience and consequent conversion, or rather, rebirth through faith in Christ. Prior to this mystical experience, Hamann aligned himself with the Enlightenment. For Hamann, God was omnipresent, and dwelling inside each and every one of us, the realization of this, and practice in accordance with this realization was, for Hamann, the ultimate solution to humanities problems.

All of nature, he argued, was a series or amalgamation of symbols, puzzles and hieroglyphs, which could be interpreted only through scripture. This explicit rejection of taking the Bible literally, placed Hamann into the Pietist tradition. His religious nature, however, was not a call for irrationality, but simply a demand that reason be restricted to its domain, i.e. the empirical earthly realm, and leave the supernatural heavenly realm to faith. Faith was beyond the jurisdiction of reason, as it consisted in living experience. Reason, he thought, is limited to the testing or assessment of the truth-value of propositions.

Part of Hamann’s defense of religion, or religious belief, was founded on Humean skepticism. Hamann’s interpretation of David Hume was that reason is incapable of demonstrating the existence of anything at all, and as such ought not meddle in questions over God’s existence. Moreover, Hume’s conclusion that ultimately we need faith, or less radically, that we rely on habit, in ordinary life, led Hamann to proclaim that since we need faith for ordinary life, then why should be allowed faith in religion as well. Aside from this use of the Humean position, Hamann is credited with introducing Hume’s ideas to Germany, especially to his famous neighbor, Kant. With the publication of Crusades of the Philologist (1762), Philological Whimsy’s and Doubt (1772) and, most importantly, Metacritique of the Purism of Reason (1781) Hamann expands his criticism of the Enlightenment, or reason in general, from its ungrounded entry into the religious sphere, to its abstraction from its social and historical context, and the consequent reification of reason and the false belief in its self-sufficiency as an autonomous and ahistorical faculty. Hamann repeatedly stresses that reason is embedded in custom, tradition, sense perception, and especially language, that is, the socio-cultural and historical dimension of reason. The publication of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) was deplored by Hamann, not only on account of Immanuel Kant’s abstraction, but also his dualism, that is, of Immanuel Kant postulation of a noumenal realm as existing wholly apart form the phenomenal realm, again, especially language. Moreover, Hamann also criticized all of Immanuel Kant’s dualisms, including noumena/phenomena, conception/intuition, understanding/sensibility and etc., these were, he claimed, simply arbitrary and artificial demarcations and abstractions. Hamann also considered the task of the philosophy of mind to be the unification of all the mind’s powers , including reason, will and etc. They were, he claimed, all from a single source.

The crusade against reason, however, should not be seen as one against the validity or use of reason itself, but against its breach into religion, that is, its illegitimate extension, and its reification and abstraction from its embodiment in social and historical practices. This sharp distinction of faith and reason placed Hamann in the protestant, while his tirade against its abstraction made his one of the father of the historicism, which was to come.

Hamann’s philosophy of language stressed the importance of language to thought, in fact, he argued that language was the very medium by which thought and ideas existed. On this account, Hamann opposed both the empiricist and rationalist tradition in claiming that there are no clear and distinct ideas apart from or outside of language. Thought was nothing more then the use of symbols, that is, words. Signs and words were not merely the medium of the existence of reason, but also the very criterion of truth. This line of thought led Hamann very close to relativism, especially when he claimed that the correct use of language, and thereby thought, was determined by convention, tradition, in short, the historico-cultural situation. On the 18th century debate over the origin of language, that is, whether it was of divine or human origin, Hamann took a predictable stance, given his critique of reason and philosophy of language, namely, that it was of both human and divine origin; simply put, because of God’s omnipresence He is the ultimate source of everything human, hence, all human activity is finally sourced in God.

Hamann’s political thoughts are, as expected, criticisms of the Enlightenment’s political doctrines. The first target of his criticism is what he considered a rampant individualism. He claimed that the notion of a self-sufficient individual is mistaken, as is the claim of natural needs. Freedom and needs, like reason itself, are properties possessed by individuals in virtue of their participation in society. Hamann also took aim at the natural law doctrine, espoused by thinkers such as Mendelssohn. Such doctrines, he argued, mistakenly presume that that men are rational outside of society, and that there are universal and eternal norms, morals and etc. Golgotha und Scheblimini (1784) is the work in which the majority of Hamann’s political thoughts are contained. Although Hamann is often conceived of as a political conservative and reactionary, this work clearly indicates that he was very much a proponent of liberal principles. His criticism of Friedrich II, was not the basis of his liberal values, rather, it was a general critique of the authoritarianism and paternalism of the Prussian state.

In Aesthetica in nuce, a part of Crusades of the Philologist (1762), Hamann comes to the defense of artistic creativity, and even more so, to the defense of the metaphysical significance of art. Hamann’s aim in this work was to liberate the artist from the restrictions of norms and traditions, and even open the door for artists to use art as a form of personal expression, to the extent that they reveal their own personalities in their works. There is a seeming contradiction between this call for the liberation of artists, and his simultaneous directive that art ought to imitate the secret language of God. This contradiction, however, disappears soon as it is recalled that God, for Hamann was omnipresent, and therefore also within all men; artists, therefore, in expressing themselves would with the same strokes be expressing the words of God. Hamann’s other aim in this text is analogous to Dostoyevsky’s famous proclamation that ‘beauty will save the world’. The metaphysical significance of art, that Hamann sought to reestablish, hinges on a similar classical equation of truth and beauty. Moreover, art, he argued, was a purer medium for the expression of truth, than is philosophy; because it reproduces the knowledge of life and reality we get through immediate experience, and do so in through the non-discursive medium of the image. As a whole there is undoubtedly a mystical vision and synthesis in Hamann’s thoughts and directive on art, as there is in the entirety of his philosophy.