Hamann and Jaspers

Possibilities of Human Transcendence

In my next posts I want to present a summary of Chris Thornhill’s account, in his Karl Jaspers, of the relation between the thinking of Hamann and that of Jaspers. Thornhill’s analysis identifies ‘deep symmetries’ between the two thinkers. ‘Hamann’s philosophy anticipates both Jaspers’ partial theological critique of Kant, and even certain features of his theory of communication and his transcendental hermeneutics.’

Thornhill observes that scant attention has been paid to ‘Hamann’s prefiguring of the critique of Kant which underpins existential philosophy’; which is unfortunate, because Hamann’s argument that (in Thornhill’s words) ‘the claims of reason cannot be separated from historical and linguistic horizons’ anticipates ‘the reflections on Kant set out by Jaspers, Heidegger and other thinkers in the existential line’. Because Hamann, like Heidegger, indicated that ‘cognition does not occur independently of existing practical relations, and that it is at all times pre-structured by language’, Hamann’s ‘attack on Kant’s epistemological abstraction […] represents a proto-Heideggerian assault on the conception of the thinking subject as an isolated being’. As Thornhill puts it later in his book, ‘Both Heidegger and Jaspers follow Hamann in conceiving of language as a non-formalized mode of cognitive agency, which counteracts the epistemological stasis of Kant’s transcendental reason.’ Unique to his anticipation of Jaspers, however – Thornhill notes – is Hamann’s conception of communication. Whilst ‘certainly foreshadowing both Heidegger and Rosenzweig’, Thornhill writes, ‘Hamann’s reflections on language alter the Kantian concept of the transcendental subject in a manner which equally strongly resembles Jaspers’ linguistic and hermeneutical theory’.

Hamann, Thornhill sees, supplants ‘the isolation of the Kantian subject’ with ‘a relational theology of language, in which human communication always involves a hermeneutical disclosure, or revelation, of the possibility of human transcendence’:

‘Like Jaspers after him, he argues that human reason interprets its own truthful possibilities in linguistic processes which confront reason with vital, practical, sensory and transcendent modes of experience. In language, thus, reason is able to conceive of its transcendence as a linguistic experience of, and a participation in, its own unifying origin, which is divine creation. In these reflections, Hamann prefigures the existential-communicative conception of being developed by Jaspers.’

As Thornhill observes, Jaspers’ theory of language is ‘an important corrective to Heidegger’s practical-linguistic critique of Kant’. Whilst Heidegger argued that language (in Thornhill’s words) ‘defines and constitutes the practically disclosed horizon of the world’, and thus ‘expressly excludes all ideal components from experience’, Jaspers by contrast maintained that language ‘always positions human consciousness in a relation (albeit existentially uncertain) to its primary ideal unity (its transcendence), and it thus permits an ideal/practical disclosure of this unity’. Like Hamann, Jaspers indicates that (as Thornhill writes) ‘language, and the written documents of language, always illuminate a primary unity of practical, sensory and transcendental experience to human life’.

Hamann’s thinking thus anticipated Jaspers’ transcendental hermeneutics by evolving a conception of language in terms of what Thornhill calls a ‘unifying originary hermeneutic’. ‘Indeed, Hamann’s attempt to undermine Kant’s (allegedly) false purification of reason by presenting language as a unifying originary hermeneutic, points most evidently in the direction of Jaspers’ attempt to refigure metaphysics and idealism as hermeneutics.’ Jaspers’ thinking proposes a hermeneutical renewal of metaphysics, or what Thornhill elsewhere [here] describes as a ‘hermeneutical transformation of idealism into a metaphysics of symbolic interpretation’. This is a move anticipated by Hamann, as Thornhill observes when he notes that Hamann suggested that (as Thornhill puts it), ‘In the images (Bilder) of language, […] documents of transcendence are preserved which always await interpretation’. ‘Like Jaspers after him, Hamann re-orders metaphysics as an immanent, yet transcendent process of communication and interpretation.’

As Thornhill sees, Jaspers does not follow Hamann in maintaining ‘an expressly theological argument’ on the transcendentally symbolic content of language. Yet the very fact that Hamann posits such content means that he prefigures the basis of Jaspers’ theory of the ‘ciphers of transcendence’. Jaspers proposed ciphers of transcendence (Chiffren der Transzendenz) as uncertain, yet decisive, symbolic forms – as opposed to reified doctrinal or scientific proof-forms – in which (Thornhill writes) ‘the possibility for transcendent self-realization is reflected to human thinking in fleeting moments of (self-)interpretation’. There is a ‘cipher of God’, but natural life and historical, cultural, mythological and philosophical artefacts also supply ciphers of transcendence. As Thornhill notes, ‘These ciphers, although not giving finally valid form to transcendence, remain as ephemeral presences, on the ground of which the most truthful existence occurs, and in which humanity experientially interprets itself as meta-physical.’ Our interpretation of such ephemeral presences is a necessarily unstable, uncertain hermeneutical process, which is attended by a ‘relative process of communication’ (Thornhill). Precisely the fraughtness of this existential, hermeneutic-communicative forcefield generates its force, its certainty. ‘Philosophical belief’, for Jaspers (Thornhill writes), ‘has its only hold in the ciphers of transcendence: yet the interpretation of these ciphers is only existentially binding because they do not stabilize transcendence as certainty, but merely refer humanity to its own possibilities, and thus invite communication on these’. Moreover, in this way the ‘false [reified] truths of theology, Jaspers thus intimates, become true again in the secular-existential praxis of our communicating about them’.

To be continued.

Irregular Language, part 4

Hamannian Origins of Existentialism

‘In the early stages of its evolution, […] existentialism might be described as a theoretical stance which: a) moved philosophical discourse away from Kantian formalism and emphasized the belief that the content of thought must reside in particular experiences and decisions; b) followed Kierkegaard in defining philosophy as a passionate and deeply engaged activity, in which the integrity and the authenticity of the human being are decisively implicated; c) sought to overcome the antinomies (reason/ experience; theory/ praxis; transcendence/ immanence; pure reason/ practical reason) which determine the classical metaphysical tradition by incorporating all aspects (cognitive, practical and sensory) of human life in an encompassing account of rational and experiential existence.’

-Thornhill, ‘Karl Jaspers’ [here]

In After Enlightenment Betz notes that Hamann did not understand ‘passions’ in terms of ‘the various vices or sins (like lust or pride) of a fallen world by which man is enslaved’; instead, he thought of passions in terms of ‘profound feelings, like fear, grief, love, and joy’. Hamann was already developing a Kierkegaardian and existentialist emphasis on suffering interiority unrelated to the dogmatic moral demands of organized Christianity. In a letter to Kant which was described by Josef Nadler as a ‘historical moment’ in the intellectual life of the eighteenth century, Hamann wrote of having exposed Kant ‘to the danger of coming so close to a man [Hamann] invested by the sickness of his passions with a power to think and to feel that a healthy person does not possess’: for Hamann passions related to a proto-existentialist complex fusing pathology, suffering and emotional-cognitive ‘power’.

Hamann also saw that the ‘sickness of his passions’ influenced his linguistic expression, as when he wrote in his Cloverleaf of Hellenistic Letters that ‘Every manner of thought that begins to be somewhat fashionable, every unnoticeable transition in one’s passions, affects the expression of one’s concepts’. Here the rôle played by passions recalls Hamann’s stammerer’s insight that (as Betz puts it) ‘there is no such thing as purely spontaneous language’: prior to communication, language is filtered through an experiential matrix of unnoticeable psychic transitions, reminiscent of the ‘fleeting, spiritual, arbitrary, and incidental determinations and circumstances’ of Aesthetica in nuce. When quoting the following lines from that text and noting that, for Hamann, within ‘the senses and the passions […], and not in a misguided form of pagan asceticism, lies the wellspring of human creativity’, Betz is referring to a level of passionate spiritual life through which language passes on its way to expression:

‘A philosopher like Saul sets up monastic laws (1 Sam. 14: 24) - - Passion alone gives to abstractions and hypotheses hands, feet, wings; - to images and signs, spirit, life, and tongue - - Where can you find more rapid inferences? Whence is the rolling thunder of eloquence engendered, and its companion – monosyllabic lightning.’

Betz helpfully observes that Hamann footnoted these arguments with a reference to these lines in A Midsummer Night’s Dream :

‘Brief as lightning in the collied night,

That (in a spleen) unfolds heav’n and earth

And ere a man has power to say: Behold!

The jaws of darkness do devour it up’

Carl Gustav Carus, 'Mondnacht im Schilf' (c. 1834)



In the next line Shakespeare wrote of ‘quick bright things’; Hamann’s style obviously itself reproduces the ‘collied night’ of passionate spiritual life which he thought enabled such flashes of language. Betz compares Nietzsche’s vital style to Hamann’s: they shared ‘a style that is meant not to inform, but to effect something, to bring about some form of awakening, to help people – for both of them always “the few” – to see something new’. As Betz also notes, Hamann’s style generative of ‘monosyllabic lightning’ – jolting language flashes unfolded by the ‘spleen’ of fleeting spirito-experiential determinations – itself reflected his intrinsically irregular mode of production. The suggestion of producing a complete edition of his writings ‘struck Hamann as vain and fundamentally incongruous with the pseudonymous, occasional, and self-denying nature of everything he wrote’, Betz observes; yet Hamann’s writing was occasional also in that it responded to specific occasions in his life, and so was experiential and proto-existentialist even as it was self-denying. As he wrote to Johann George Scheffner:

‘It has truly been an Herculean labour for me to go through what I wrote between [17]59 and [17]83, since everything refers to the actual situation of my life, to moments, to mistaken, cockeyed, withered impressions that I am no longer able to renew.’  

Hamann’s foregrounding of contingent ‘moments’ also characterized his proto-existentialist conception of reason as something which, in Betz’s words, ‘is never pure, as Kant alleges is possible, but always situated within a given tradition to which it reponds’. Betz provides a quotation from Hamann’s Metacritique of the Purism of Reason, in which he refers to an ‘occasion’ when Hume recognized the influence of Berkeley’s thinking on his own:

‘It seems to me, first of all, that the new scepticism owes the old idealism infinitely more than this fortuitous and particular occasion would give us to understand in passing, and that, without Berkeley, Hume would hardly have become the great philosopher that the Critique [of Pure Reason], from a position of similar indebtedness, alleges him to be.’  

Betz convincingly suggests that Hamann’s very emphasis on the contingent moment in these lines, underlines the importance for him of existential life as a determinant of philosophical activity – even as he downplays the status of Hume’s ‘fortuitous’ recognition. As Betz puts it, Hamann’s ‘“fortuitous,” “particular,” “occasional,” [sic] “in passing,” are all meant to highlight the contrast between his understanding of the life of the intellect (as a function of the historical contingencies of our Sitz im Leben)’, and ‘Kant’s understanding of intellectual activity (as something conducted in the ether of pure, necessary, universal concepts)’. Betz notes that Hamann’s invocation of Francis Bacon, in Aesthetica in nuce, signals Hamann’s ‘stand with the British empiricist tradition against the Cartesianism and Stoicism of the modern Continental tradition, for which nature, the senses and passions, rather than being sources of knowledge and creativity, are always already deceptive and problematic’.

Hamann’s use of the image of Pilate washing his hands of Christ, in the same text, directs us, for Betz, to ‘the Christological basis of Hamann’s critique of the abstract rationalism of the age – the fact that in Christ the divine is at one with the human, the spiritual is at one with the sensible and material’. Betz adds that, ‘as von Balthasar points out, Hamann’s entire aesthetics is centred upon the fleshliness of God in Christ and the wonder that it is precisely through the flesh that the spirit is saved’. This emphasis on the value of existence beyond abstract cognition clearly situates Hamann as a Christian existentialist; as Betz records, the first study of Hamann in English was Walter Lowrie’s Johann Georg Hamann: An Existentialist, which was published by the Princeton Theological Seminary Press in 1950. Noting that Kierkegaard drew on Hamann’s thought, Betz calls Hamann ‘arguably the original source of the “existential turn” in the history of German philosophy’. Betz cites the remarks in Hamann’s Doubts and Ideas that ‘our existence is older than our reason’ , and that ‘the ground of religion lies in our whole existence and outside the sphere of our cognitive powers, all of which taken together constitute the most arbitrary and abstract mode of our existence’.    

Despite his self-alignment with Baconian empiricism, however, Hamann was – in Betz’s words, following Bayer’s analysis – ‘no strict empiricist’. As Hamann wrote to Jacobi,

‘Is knowledge possible apart from rational principles? – just as little as sensus sine intellectu. Composite beings are not capable of simple sensation[s], and still less simple [i.e., immediate, intuitive] knowledge. In human nature, sensibility can as little be separated from reason, as reason can be separated from sensibility.’

Hamann’s sense of the inseparability of the empirical and the rational, of experience and reason, was grounded in what Betz describes as his ‘spiritual understanding of language as involving a mysterious coincidentia oppositorum of the sensible and the intelligible’. Betz quotes from Hegel’s 1828 review of the first edition of his writings: ‘Hamann places himself in the middle of the problem of reason and proposes its solution; and he conceives it in terms of language.’ For Hegel, ‘in Hamann the concrete Idea ferments and turns itself against the divisions of reflection’. Betz continues,

‘In other words, whereas Kant’s philosophy divided the phenomenal from the noumenal, the sensible from the intelligible, and subsequent to “this unnatural and unholy divorce” (in Hamann’s phrase) could offer only a tenuous connection by means of synthetic judgments a priori, Hamann repeatedly points out that the actual living unity of these elements, which reason subsequently sunders, is already given in language.’    

In this connection Betz also quotes from Katie Terezakis’ The Immanent Word :

‘The strength of Hamann’s linguistic “metacritique” of Kant lies in his reckoning with the unreservedly immanent character of language, as the genetically prior, shared root of sensibility and understanding, and thus as the ideal and real boundary of subjective consciousness.’

Terezakis’ underlining of Hamann’s understanding of language as the boundary of subjective consciousness, helps us to understand that we should not overemphasize the subjectivism of Hamann’s oeuvre – a radical subjectivism to which Betz draws attention when he writes of Hamann’s ‘collection of writings that to this day are not only sui generis but doubtless some of the oddest and most fantastic in all of western literature’. For Hamann, as Beiser noted in some observations in The Fate of Reason which are quoted by Betz, subjective creative freedom is in a sense bounded by being itself an imitation of nature:

‘If we were to sum up Aesthetica in nuce, then we would have to single out two doctrines: that art ought to imitate nature and reveal the word of God; and that art ought to express the innermost personality of the artist. What is central to Hamann’s aesthetics, however, is precisely the combination or intersection of these doctrines. It is a seemingly paradoxical fusion of an extreme subjectivism, which insists that the artist express his innermost desires and feelings, and an extreme objectivism, which demands that the artist strictly imitate nature and surrender to its effects upon him.’

As Betz writes, ‘the resolution of this apparent paradox between subjective freedom and objective imitation is to be found in Hamann’s understanding of the human being as the imago Dei’. Because he believed that human poetic freedom is a reflection of God’s creative freedom, for Hamann (in Betz’s words) ‘the maximum of human freedom and creativity, rather than being an instance of pure subjectivism, is simultaneously the maximum of God’s self-revelation’. For Hamann, Betz continues, ‘human poesis’ is ‘always already a participation in the expressive language of creation’.         

Such ideas contributed to Hamann’s early existentialist thinking of language as a dialogical religious phenomenon. As we have seen, in some beautiful lines inThe Knight of the Rose-Cross, Hamann conveyed his view that the original natural creation constituted – just as language constitutes still – a communication between the human and the divine:

‘Every phenomenon of nature was a word – the sign, symbol, and pledge of a new, secret, inexpressible, but at the same time all the more intimate union, communication, and communion of divine energies and ideas. In the beginning everything that the man [Adam] heard, saw with his eyes, looked upon, and touched with his hands was a living word; for God was the Word.’

For Hamann in The Knight of the Rose-Cross, the ‘communicatio of the divine and human idiomatum is a fundamental law and the master key of all our knowledge and the entire visible economy’; for him, therefore, language is not only the boundary of subjective consciousness but also the medium of intersubjectivity. As Betz observes, ‘for Hamann the origin of language is not to be conceived in monological but in dialogical terms (anticipating the thought of Martin Buber and Ferdinand Ebner)’. Hamannian communicative intersubjectivity derives this existentialist or religiously dialogical quality from its relation to his theology of human freedom as response, imitation and surrender – a theology which, Betz notes, anticipates Bayer’s contemporary Lutheran ‘theology of human freedom as Verantwortung’, developed ‘largely along Hamannian lines’ in Bayer’s Freiheit als Antwort [Freedom in Response]. For Hamann, Betz underlines, ‘human freedom is properly understood not as an absolute freedom, i.e., as an autonomous self-positing, but rather as the freedom of a creature to respond, having previously been addressed by another’. Unable to claim the absolute freedom of personal fluency, Hamann theorized a revelational intersubjectivity which twinned language’s creative capacity with human incapacity: for Hamann, without surrender there can be no ‘participation in the expressive language of creation’.      

Next post: Thornhill on Hamann and Jaspers

Precious Artifacts

You can support the publication of Precious Artifacts, the imminent Philip K. Dick pictorial bibliography compiled by Henri Wintz and David Hyde, with a donation here.

Irregular Language, part 3

Reason and Rough Language

In After Enlightenment, Betz notes how Heidegger’s according of a central importance to language within his thinking was influenced by his reception of Hamann. Just as for Hamann language is ‘the mother  of reason and its revelations, its A and W’, for Heidegger language famously came to be the ‘house of being’. In ‘Die Sprache’, Heidegger quoted from a letter of Hamann’s to Herder:

‘If I were as eloquent as Demosthenes, I would have to do no more than repeat a single phrase three times. Reason is language, Lógox. This is the marrowbone on which I gnaw, and will gnaw myself to death on it. For me there remains a darkness over this deep: I am still waiting for an apocalyptic angel with a key to this abyss.’

For the stammerer language is distant and occluded, shrouded in ‘darkness’. For Hamann it is as if the need to understand his dysfluency has become a project which is ‘extreme, and existentially driven’ (to adopt Thornhill’s words on Weber’s sociology), and which involves a risk which verges on the autodestructive, or at least on a petition of an ‘apocalyptic angel’. Heidegger’s reading pointed towards this: ‘This view of language plunges into the depth of an abyss. Does this consist merely in that reason rests upon language, or is even language itself the abyss?’ One could then even argue that if our linguistic capacity is riven, abyssal or aporetic, for Hamann – as Betz puts it in a deconstructionist extension of the stammerer’s view – ‘not only is language the “mother” of reason […] it is also why reason cannot presume to attain any firm conceptual footing or totalizing grasp’. In the course of his analysis Betz ultimately separates Hamann from Derrida, however, and in a way that emphasizes Hamann’s conception of language as a playful and free response to the Logos, the living word. This conception seems to draw on a lighter, more relaxed stammerer’s self-image, when communication is experienced as faltering or errant rather than as falling into an abyss:         

 

‘Either, following Derrida, language is essentially, for all its non-finite supplementarity, a purely immanent construct that reveals nothing outside it; or, following Hamann, language is essentially a prophetic revelation of transcendence, of the divine in and through the human, including all the contingency and indeterminacy, creativity and eccentricity of human language that this implies.’

Central to Betz’s presentation of Hamann’s thought is an emphasis on Hamann’s critique of what Betz calls ‘the injustice of reason’, especially as manifested in attacks on linguistic ‘irrationality’ qua irregularity. Betz sees Hamann’s writing, for example the 1780 Two Mites Concerning the Latest German Literature with its orthographical concerns, to be animated by his response to ‘the contest of the age: a contest between a Christian worldview (which allows for and even celebrates a mysterious depth to human language, to human nature, to the world)’, and ‘a fanatical, puritanical rationalism that would seek to eliminate everything that does not conform to its immanent counsels’, such as ‘the “irrational ” arbitrariness of language’. Hamann’s defence of linguistic ‘excess’ can be read as stemming from his own experience of the extravagances – the repetitions, the delays, the extended silences, the ums, ahs and other fillers – which dysfluency entails.  

‘What he was against was the injustice of reason, i.e., reason “overstepping its limits”: whether this take the form of “rational” incursions into the sacred matrix of language in order to “clean it up” (as in the orthographical elimination of the terminal h) or impose upon it some kind of “rational” standard; or a Stoic denial of any positive rôle to the passions (as though human beings would have been better without them); or, in the matter of religion, “rational” eliminations of the supposedly “mythological,” “superfluous,” “irrational,” or at least “incredible” doctrines and contents of the faith […]. In short, as Hamann saw it, reason’s attempt to “fix the indeterminate and to cut out any excess,” as carried out here with regard to language, was symptomatic of the violence it commits whenever it transgresses its limits.’

As Betz notes, in his New Apology of the Letter h Hamann argued for the preservation of the silent terminal ‘h’ (for instance in words like Rath or Muth), in order to defend ‘the contingent and arbitrary aspects of language or religion’. A similar stammerer’s defence of linguistic arbitrariness lies behind his critique in Aesthetica in nuce of the reliance on rational philological methods in Michaelis’ scriptural criticism; for Hamann, Betz writes, ‘historical criticism alone can never hope to determine the meaning of the biblical text' - 'which depends, as Hamann puts it, “upon such fleeting, spiritual, arbitrary, and incidental determinations and circumstances that one cannot draw down the key to their understanding without ascending to heaven”’. The arbitrariness of the Bible’s linguistic determinations suggest to Hamann the way in which the Bible is animated by a spiritual impurity or transcendental disturbance. In Hamann’s view philological absolutism would void the Bible of what Betz calls ‘a mysterious image of the Spirit of the invisible God’, just as, for Hamann, ‘the silent letter h, which is an offense to reason, is symbolic not only of life and soul and the invisible creative human spirit, but ultimately of the creative breath of God’ too. Citing the Aesthetica in nuce, Betz writes that ‘the Spirit offends “good taste” and what counts as “good style”’.

‘As he put it as early as 1758, whoever “is called to be a preacher in the desert must clothe himself in camel’s hair and live from locusts and wild honey.” And, true to form, this is exactly what Hamann did: living on the meagre income of a civil servant, he imitated the rough exterior of John the Baptist through what is by all accounts a course [sic], rebarbative style (stylus atrox), in order to deflect attention away from himself to Christ.’

Attending to the vehemence of Hamann’s writing, Betz describes his ‘typically passionate, energetic, and declamatory style’. Betz argues that ‘Hamann’s style is more than anything a self-conscious imitation of the sublime, oracular style both he and [Robert] Lowth attributed to the sacred poetry of the Hebrews’. Betz notes that Lowth was a point of reference for Hamann in Aesthetica in nuce, and goes on to quote the following lines from Lowth’s Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, in connection with Hamann’s rough language. Here once again we find an emphasis on those qualities of disturbance, interruption and intermittency which define dysfluency and spiritual life alike; on the mysterious ‘fleeting, spiritual, arbitrary, and incidental determinations and circumstances’:

‘Thus if the actual origin of poetry be inquired after, it must of necessity be referred to religion; and since it appears to be an art derived from nature alone, peculiar to no age or nation, and only at an advanced period of society conformed to rule and method, it must be wholly attributed to the more violent affections of the heart, the nature of which is to express themselves in an animated and lofty tone, with a vehemence of expression far removed from vulgar use. It is also no less observable, that these affections break and interrupt the enunciation by their impetuosity; they burst forth in sentences pointed, earnest, rapid, and tremulous […] Is it not probable, that the first effort of rude and unpolished verse would display itself in the praise of the Creator, and flow almost involuntarily from the enraptured mind?’ 

To be continued.

English Existentialism

Iain Sinclair, in his review last week of Robert Fraser's Night Thoughts: The Surreal Life of the Poet David Gascoyne [here], reminds us of Gascoyne's status as a 'Christian existentialist'. So maybe I got all this from absorbing The Sun at Midnight c. 1997. Maybe not. But I had been thinking of Herbert Read as representing the only English existentialist, so this is fascinating. Of course then there's Colin Wilson. Iris Murdoch.

Irregular Language, part 2

The Living Word

In After Enlightenment, Betz notes how, in Hamann’s case, the dictum that one cannot understand the work apart from the man ‘applies to an almost unparalleled degree’. Hamann’s rational project of humbling proud autonomous reason, for example, reflected his own uncanny combination of ‘idiocy and profundity’. Betz quotes Friedrich Leopold of Stolberg’s comment that, ‘At one moment he has the appearance of one who cannot count to three; the next moment he overflows with genius and fire.’ Hamann himself wrote of aiming at a ‘stoic wisdom that interchangeably unites the imbecillitatem Hominis and the securitatem Dei ’. As Betz notes, the title of the fragment Apologie meines Cretinen refers to Hamann’s younger brother, who suffered from mental illness, and for whom Hamann and his partner Regina Schumacher cared until his premature death.

In The Fate of Reason, Beiser drew attention to the crucial importance for the development of Hamann’s thinking of his experiences as a young man in London, where he had been dispatched in 1757 by his friend the Riga trader Christoph Berens on some form of pointless business mission:

‘To locate the source of Hamann’s philosophy, we have to go back to his early years in London in 1758. What the young Hamann saw during a mystical experience contains the germ of his later philosophy, not to mention the basis for his critique of Kant and the Aufklärung.’

In Beiser’s words, the circumstances surrounding Hamann’s conversion to Christianity are ‘dramatic and moving, the stuff of a novel or play’. Humiliated and shaken by a derisive reception at the Russian Embassy in London, Hamann fell into despair, and felt lost and alone in a foreign land. Seeking to relieve his misery, he squandered all his money on a dissolute life. Then, ‘I went about depressed, staggering to and fro, without a soul with whom to share my burden, who could give me advice or help.’ Finally in the winter of 1758 he rented a room in Marlborough Street, seeking to seclude himself with his books. As Betz writes, ‘It was here, with no money, a £300 debt, and failing health that he began an intensive reading of the Bible.’ In Beiser’s account,

‘He read it in the most personal manner, as if it were God’s message to him alone. He saw the history of the Jewish people as a parable about his own sufferings. All that happened to him in London, all his trials and tribulations, seemed to be prefigured in the Bible.’

On the evening of March 31, 1758, reading the fifth book of Moses, Hamann began to – in Beiser’s words – ‘feel the spirit of God working through him’.

‘After hearing the voice of God inside himself, and after reading the Bible in his personal and allegorical way, Hamann came to believe that God was always communicating with him, if he would only listen. Indeed, he became convinced that everything that happened to him contained a secret message from God, and that it was an allegory like everything else in the Bible. This conviction then led Hamann to a grand and extraordinary metaphysical conclusion: that the creation is the secret language of God, the symbols by which he communicates his message to man. All nature and history therefore consist in hieroglyphs, divine ciphers, secret symbols, and puzzles. […] In Hamann’s metaphorical terms, “God is a writer, and his creation is his language.”’

Hamann understood language, Betz notes, as ‘the point of intersection between things divine and human’. In The Knight of the Rose-Cross, as Betz observes, Hamann presents language as being ‘at once fully human (“as natural as child’s play”) and fully divine (as having its ultimate source in the Creator)’. Hamann:

‘Every phenomenon of nature was a word – the sign, symbol, and pledge of a new, secret, inexpressible, but at the same time all the more intimate union, communication, and communion of divine energies and ideas. In the beginning everything that the man [Adam] heard, saw with his eyes, looked upon, and touched with his hands was a living word; for God was the Word. With this Word in his mouth and in his heart, the origin of language was as natural, so near and easy, as child’s play […].’

What Betz calls Hamann’s ‘view of original and redeemed language as a kind of innocent, “playful” response to the Logos’, seems to me to reimagine the garden of Eden as a stammerer’s fantasy of the fluent condition; for the stammerer spoken language is often far from ‘near and easy’, but for Hamann’s Adam, divinity has supplied communicative ease, naturalness and the self-confidence (or self-forgetfulness) required to be linguistically playful – just as Christian hermeneutics supported Hamann during his London breakdown. Deeply personal issues arising from his experiences of dysfluency and mental illness do seem to me to provide the existential context for Hamann’s conviction that, as Betz puts it, ‘language is essentially a dialogical religious phenomenon’, involving a suffering human and redemptive alterity. The concept of a 'living word’ is surely, at least on some level or in part, Hamann’s response to his own stammerer’s experience of communication as something which – at wholly unpredictable intervals – becomes blocked or frozen. Similarly, Hamann evolved a concept and practice of a living hermeneutic as a response to the depressive ‘cover’ clamping down on his mental health in London; the origin of the scriptural commentary he produced in London, the Biblical Meditations, was the urge to read ‘with more hunger’ so as to develop a mode of spontaneous exegesis from that renewed vitality:



‘Because I wanted to make a new beginning, it seemed as if I began to perceive a cover over my reason and my heart, which had kept the book closed to me the first time. I thus set out to read it with more attention, in a more orderly fashion, and with more hunger; and to write down my thoughts as they would occur.’

Betz matches Hamann’s concept of a living word to his concept of a living hermeneutic, when discussing Hamann’s perspective on the biblical critic J. D. Michaelis in Aesthetica in nuce. Writing of the way in  which, ‘as the letter to the Hebrews puts it, the language of Scripture is “living and active” (4: 12)’, Betz notes that for Hamann, ‘it is precisely this that Michaelis cannot see: lacking the inspired gift of interpretation (cf. 1 Cor. 12: 10), he cannot see the prophetic Spirit of God tabernacling within the contingent and seemingly arbitrary elements of human language’. Betz also records that by the time of his return to Germany from London, Hamann’s urge to practice his hermeneutic gift had grown into a vocation. ‘My vocation is neither to be a businessman, nor a civil servant, nor a man of the world […] Reading the Bible and praying are the work of a Christian’. Yet as Betz sees, already in 1746, as a student matriculating at the University of Königsberg, Hamann affiliated his dysfluency to his disinclination to practice professional Bible study: theology. ‘A more immediate reason he cites for not taking up theology, however, was a speech impediment, in addition to his poor memory, the corruption of the clergy, his high estimation of this vocation, and his sense of hypocrisy’.

For Hamann, ‘Humility of heart is the one required disposition and most indispensable preparation for the reading of the Bible.’ Betz fascinatingly shows how Hamann’s self-denying stammering, which disqualified him from becoming a theologian, and his conception of Scripture as something ‘living and active’ (Heb. 4: 12), alike enabled him to develop a practice of hermeneutic humility.  

‘For it is no longer a question of how can I (viewed as a complete, self-present, pre-textual identity) understand the text, but rather a question of how the text understands and constitutes me. Indeed, as Bayer puts it, “Scripture interprets me and not I scripture.” Accordingly, priority shifts from the modern subject, which constitutes itself (e.g., through Descartes’s radical doubt or Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception), to the text, which represents the subject to itself in a new light, metaschematically constituting (or reconstituting) its identity by means of the figures and parables in the story that is told.’

The humility underpinning Hamann’s self-reconstituting hermeneutics itself reflects the humility of the Bible’s author, who – Hamann believed – condescended to elevate human history into parables of sacred history. Betz:

‘Thus Hamann speaks in striking terms, in addition to [of] the humility of the Son, of the humility of the Holy Spirit, “who, in the face of our proud little mare of reason, produced a book as his Word, in which, like a foolish and crazy [spirit], what is more, like an unholy and unclean spirit, he made small, contemptuous events into the history of heaven and of God (1 Cor. 1: 25).”’

In summary, Hamann understands hermeneutics not as a form of philosophical reason which constitutes reality, but as an act of spiritual petition to the Scripture which, in his Christian view, constitutes reality. ‘As he puts it in the “Fragments,” “Nature and history are […] the two great commentarii on the divine Word; and the latter, on the other hand, the only key that unlocks our knowledge of both.”’ Hamann also thinks of faith as the key to understanding nature and history – in the Socratic Memorabilia he writes, ‘Without faith we cannot even understand creation and nature’ – and so in this way faith is equivalent to Scripture; but of course for Hamann faith is itself also necessary for accessing the truths of Scripture: ‘the Holy Spirit is promised to all who petition the heavenly Father’.

To be continued.

Irregular Language: Betz's Hamann

Vulnerability and the Vocation of Obscurity

In his After Enlightenment: The Post-Secular Vision of J. G. Hamann, John R. Betz follows Frederick Beiser and John Milbank in presenting Hamann, correctly I feel, as a figure whose ‘influence on the history of philosophy, while obscurely mediated, was, in fact, profound’. Betz’s landmark English-language study thus concretizes the recent rehabilitation of Hamann as a thinker who cannot be reduced to the sort of marginal irrationalist that Isaiah Berlin made of him in The Magus of the North. Hamann himself foresaw the obscure diffusion of his influence in his 1786 text ‘Divestment and Transfiguration: A Flying Letter to Nobody, the Well-Known’, when he noted the Christ-revering intent of his work. ‘The little stream of my authorship, despised like the waters of Shiloah that flow gently, was poured out for the sake of this king, whose name, like his reputation, is great and unknown.’ The obscure yet profound, at once ‘great and unknown’ influence of Hamann’s writing, is in keeping with his rôle as – in Betz’s words – ‘the first and arguably profoundest modern Christian thinker of language’.

The stream of Hamann’s writing flows indirectly; or, its banks are notoriously hard to bridge. Betz cites Ernst Jünger’s remark that Hamann thought ‘in archipelagos with submarine connections’, following on from his own comment on Heraclitus: ‘A confluence of ideas and sensations in that living elegy of a philosopher made his maxims into a group of small islands, lacking the bridges and ferries of method that would have established a community among them.’ Hamann’s texts constitute a practice of indirect communication, and require the reader to build the bridges, make the connections, herself. As Betz notes, a text like the Socratic Memorabilia has a ‘highly stylized public, dramatic, gnomic, allusive, oblique, ironic, pseudonymous, prophetic form’, which is grounded in Hamann’s ‘conviction that faith “cannot be communicated like merchandise”’. Hamann’s is an ‘elusive’, proto-modernist textuality, showing ‘endless associative links’ and a ‘defiance of any single significance’.     

Such strategies reveal a lack of trust in – or an ironizing of – his own communicative capacity. You could say that Hamann’s lack of trust derived from his stammering behaviour; whilst the ironization derived from his Christianity. The flight from direct communication is a form of self-denial, and Hamann’s authorship is (as Betz argues) ‘quite possibly the most rigorously Christian of modern times – both in its content and in its self-denying form ’. In some important phrases in Golgotha and Scheblimini, Hamann wrote of ‘the symbolic connection between the earthly crown of thorns and the heavenly crown of stars, and the relationship mediated in the form of the Cross between the opposing natures of the deepest abasement and the loftiest exaltation’. Betz summarizes how these phrases are an assertion of the Christian coincidence of worldly vulnerability and otherworldly, spiritual empowerment:

‘[T]his passage provides a clue to the whole of Hamann’s mimetic “cruciform” authorship: whereas the outward humility, folly, and (to rationalists) sheer incomprehensibility of his self-denying style mirrors the humility, apparent folly, and incomprehensibility (to Jews and Greeks) of Christ’s self-sacrifice on the Cross (Golgotha), the inner sublimity of his inspired, prophetic message shares in the power and the glory of the Spirit of the resurrection (Scheblimini). In short, we come to understand that the only thing that can make sense of Hamann’s writings is Christ – in the double aspect of majesty and abasement, of a glory hidden from the “wise and learned” beneath a rejected outward form.’  

Hamann’s elusive textual practices, guided by what Betz calls a ‘Christian irony and humour’, thus invoke a humility reminiscent of the statement St Paul made about himself, when quoting his critics, that ‘“His letters are weighty and strong, but his bodily presence is weak, and his speech of no account”’ (2 Cor. 10: 10). Betz notes that, more generally, the recognition of humility is ‘the fundamental intuition of Hamann’s thought’. He quotes Hamann’s comment that,

‘It belongs to the unity of divine revelation that the Spirit of GOd [sic] should have lowered himself and emptied himself of his majesty just as the Son of God did in assuming the form of a servant, and just as the whole of creation is a work of the greatest humility.’

The creation of the Bible by the Holy Spirit is another act of condescension, whereby the Holy Spirit (as Hans Urs von Balthasar wrote) ‘conceals himself, as Hamann strikingly puts it, “under all kinds of rags and tatters,” “under the rubbish” of the letter of Scripture.’ As Hamann writes in his Biblical Meditations :

‘How much did God the Holy Spirit humble himself when he became a historian of the most particular, contemptible, and insignificant events on earth in order to reveal to man in his own language, in his own history, in his own ways the plans, the mysteries, and the ways of the Godhead?’

To assert with Luther that, as Betz puts it, ‘there is no exaltation of the creature apart from Christ’s humility, which is the key to the economy of salvation and the logic of every ascent’, is also to maintain a Lutheran emphasis on human humility qua passivity and a dependence on – or readiness to accept – what ‘God accomplishes in and through human beings’, or ‘what only God can give: ontologically, the grace that heals our nature from sin; noetically, the faith that enlightens the darkness of ignorance’. To depend on ‘the grace of God’s prior condescension, in the absence of which Christianity is easily distorted into a kind of Promethean asceticism’ – a work ethic, muscular Christianity – is to resist ‘what we might claim for ourselves as something owed, whether through inheritance or through virtuous works’. Betz enables us to see how Hamann associates divine condescension and human humility alike with suffering and hence with true cognition. When ‘in Christianity God suffers on account of his loving proximity to human beings’, Betz notes, ‘for Hamann, Christ is the model of all true learning in that he “learned […] through what he suffered” (Heb. 5: 8)’.

‘In other words, for fallen human beings, just as authentic reasoning begins with the suffering of reason’s “insufficiency” and a corresponding recognition of one’s need for the light of faith and the guidance of revelation, true moral learning begins with the suffering of one’s moral weakness and a corresponding recognition of one’s need for grace.’

As Hamann notes, recognition of dependence on divine condescension renders proud, self-sufficient rational aspiration irrelevant: ‘The condescension of God to the earth; no tower of reason whose spire reaches to heaven’. Indeed, as Betz observes, for Hamann ‘the purpose of reason is precisely to deconstruct all proud knowledge falsely so called, the kind of knowledge which is really doxa but nevertheless opposes itself to faith, so that true knowledge can begin’. Importantly, this rational project of undermining proud rationalism looks forward to Jaspers’ existentialist critique of neo-Kantian epistemological reification. It also looks back, to Augustinian and then Lutheran resistance to late medieval conceptions of philosophical rationality, as Betz suggests when he traces the ‘modern doctrine of reason’ back beyond Renaissance humanism to late medieval distinctions between philosophy and theology, which ‘ceded to philosophy (and to reason) far greater capacities than the Augustinian and, later, Lutheran traditions allowed, each of which remained more profoundly impressed by the degree to which reason is affected by the fallenness of the will’. (It would be interesting to consider the unstable, post-juridical rationalities – shaken by paranoia or drug use – of Philip K. Dick, and perhaps of Robert Walser, in this context). The political dimension of Hamann’s critique of proud reason is also worth noting here; his distance from Moses Mendelssohn’s modern conception of rights as being ‘as it were, pre-possessed by reason and claimed by independents in the manner of private property, [whereas] for Hamann, they are something received in faith from the Creator by dependents as a covenantal gift’ (Betz).

Betz stresses Hamann’s underlying intention to develop, and not curtail, rationality. Quoting Hamann’s remark that ‘the true genius knows only his dependence and weakness, or the limits of his gifts’, Betz observes that Hamann’s Christian mode of cognition ‘glories ironically in weaknesses and limitations (2 Cor. 12: 9), whereby the intellect is made receptive of divine light and wisdom. Herein, and not in any proud rationalism, lies the true path to enlightenment.’ Hence, Betz writes, Hamann’s ‘occasionally vitriolic rhetoric is never directed at reason per se, which he considers a gift of God, but only at its idolatrous misuse and transgressing of its proper limits’. He cites Hamann’s comment that ‘Faith  has need of reason just as much as reason needs faith’. Referring to the arguments of his doctoral supervisor, the prominent Lutheran theologian Oswald Bayer, Betz suggests that ‘one could even say that Hamann was more rational than his contemporaries, a kind of “radical Aufklärer,” in that, like Kant, but going beyond him, he subjected reason to metacritical  scrutiny’:

‘Specifically, Hamann calls attention to what the Aufklärer  virtually ignored, namely, the historical contingencies of tradition and the “impurities” of language and metaphor pervading all putatively “pure” thought. […] As a humbling of autonomous reason and all proud systems of thought (in the sense of 2 Cor. 10: 5), it is meant not to leave reason in a state of despair, but to prepare it for faith, thereby saving reason from theoretical suicide and providing it with its ultimate object, an object that can only be given.’       

To be continued.