Scheitern, part 2

Thornhill shows the congruity of Jaspers' conception of foundering communicative reason as a decisive ‘hermeneutic of possible transcendence’, with the Weimar socialist theologian Paul Tillich’s theorization of revelation. For Tillich as for Jaspers, revelation involves ‘the shattering of reason’ (in Thornhill’s words); precisely as such however, revelation ‘is not the negation of reason’, because it is ‘the moment where reason experiences its highest degree of transcendent and unconditioned truthfulness’. Both Jaspers and Tillich conceive of revelation as being ‘not solely a fact of faith, but also a philosophical possibility of human reason’, which presents itself wherever reason founders, or ‘encounters the limits of its formal processes’. Thornhill also explains how Jaspers’ theory of the limit, or of a decisive hermeneutic operating in existential limit-situations, parallels Tillich’s conceptualization of kairos, and how both thinkers thus theorize a ‘decisive moment of responsible transcendence’.

Tillich used the concept of kairos to capture what he called ‘fulfilled time’; the moments in human life ‘in which eternity breaks in’ on the usual conditions of human history. In Thornhill’s words, kairos is thus ‘a moment of historical time in which human life reflects upon its possibilities at the limits of its historicality’; in a way recalling Jaspers’ theory of the limit, Thornhill notes, Tillich could therefore assert kairos as a ‘historical consciousness […] whose ethos is unconditioned responsibility for the present moment in time’. Thornhill stresses that – and whilst Heidegger simply ‘interprets the moment of human decision as the awareness of the immutability of the historical forms in which human life is placed’ – Tillich and Jaspers alike understand ‘true kairological decisiveness’ to be an ‘ethical position’. This is because they both sense that genuine ‘transcendent(al) self-knowledge’ articulates itself in ‘acts of active self-choice, self-disclosure and, in the strict sense, historical responsibility towards others’. Both Tillich and Jaspers assert, Thornhill clarifies, that ‘kairos provides the grounds for an innerworldly ‘metaphysic of responsibility’. Quoting Tillich, Thornhill emphasizes this point:      

   

‘It is only in the kairological specificity of historical responsibility, not in the compliance with “universal law”, that human life explains and enacts the possibilities of its transcendence. The decisive moment of responsible transcendence (kairos for Tillich; Grenze [limit] for Jaspers) does not effect here (as for Barth) an absolute crisis of the human realm. Rather, in quasi-Kantian, or even quasi-Weberian manner, both Tillich and Jaspers see the kairos of responsibility as an ethical intrusion into the existing conditions of human life, and as an unconditioned position of accountability towards these conditions.’

It is important to note, finally, that when (what Thornhill calls) Jaspers’ ‘ethical kairology’ enables him to posit an innerworldly metaphysic of responsibility, he is thereby nonetheless thinking towards a true non-secularity; for Jaspers, as Thornhill writes, ‘the truth of history, although interpreted in history, cannot be reconciled with the present conditions of historical life’. Thornhill underlines this point by explicating the shared foundations of Jaspers’ and Karl Barth’s ‘eschatological hermeneutic as the guarantor of the historicality of history’.

Jaspers and Barth, Thornhill sees, ‘share the conviction that revelation cannot be objectified in a particular set of worldly imperatives, and that revelation cannot be cemented in any system of legal or political obligation’. Both assert that, as Thornhill puts it, ‘No order within history itself, […] can arrogate the authority of transcendence to itself. Any attempt of this kind is merely an example of bad secularity, or bad metaphysics.’ Hence both thinkers claim that ‘the disclosure of transcendence occurs at all times at the limit of history, and that it cannot be incorporated into the fixed orders of everyday history’. Moreover both Barth and Jaspers indicate that ‘human life can only interpret itself adequately insofar as it interprets itself and its products under the index of their limits and their possible otherness’. Barth and Jaspers’ shared argument that ‘humanity interprets its own transcendence only as it brings into suspension the forms in which it exists, only as it knows itself external to the forms of its worldliness’, Thornhill stresses, is precisely why Barth (from a christological viewpoint) and Jaspers (from a hermeneutical viewpoint), ‘retain a far stronger attachment to the eschatological basis of Christianity than their opponents amongst liberal and conservative theologians’. Jaspers’ identification of a truthful hermeneutic of transcendence with a self-hermeneutic of individual crisis or failure, means that for him – as for Barth – transcendence is, in Thornhill’s words, ‘merely a decisive possibility at the limit of the temporal’; for both thinkers ‘true interpretation must take place at the limit of objective self-awareness’, and ‘all attempts interpretively to integrate transcendence into a historical synthesis inevitably fall into the trap of false objectification’. Jaspers and Barth’s shared conviction that, as Thornhill writes, ‘the interpretation of revelation is never final’ is therefore what brings both Jaspers and Barth to suggest ‘an either explicitly or implicitly eschatological hermeneutic as the guarantor of the historicality of history’: both thinkers hold ‘the essentially eschatological belief that human history in its present condition cannot provide for final truthfulness, and that the truth of history, although interpreted in history, cannot be reconciled with the present conditions of historical life’.      

Thornhill thus pays considerable attention to the way in which Jaspers, like Barth, argues that ‘the interpretation of transcendence cannot be historically fixed as a reflex within any continuum of culture, politics or doctrine’. Yet, crucially, Thornhill also suggests that the type of non-secularity established within Barth’s thinking, is distinct from the true non-secularity established within Jaspers’. The truth of the non-secularity thought by Jaspers, Thornhill’s argument hints, hinges on his proposal of a self-hermeneutic of individual failure. Jaspers, Thornhill sees, charges Barth and the dialectical theologians with interpreting revelation as ‘the unique source of authority against human history’; precisely in their opposition to secular legitimacy, they ‘succeed only in recreating revelation at the limit of human history as a new source of objective authority’. Thornhill writes that when Barth in this way insisted on the objective authority of revelation, and so ultimately aligned himself with the Lutheran theologian Emanuel Hirsch and Barth’s other reactionary adversaries, he became ‘complicit in the process which secularizes and materializes religious contents’.

Crucially, Thornhill stresses that, viewed from Jaspers’ perspective, Barth’s thinking of radical anti-secularity necessarily creates an ‘objectivizing system of belief’, precisely because it fails to recognize ‘the human relativity of all truly transcendental interpretation’. Thornhill maintains that when the Lutherans, viewed from Jaspers’ position, ‘crudely press revelation into service for the authority of the nation state’, and Barth poses revelation at the limit of history as a new source of objective authority, this is because – so Jaspers’ thinking intimates – they all obscure ‘the absolute relativity of revelation’. ‘In this respect, both eliminate the genuine transcendence of revelation, which is its uncertainty, and both falsely concretize transcendence as authority – as law.’ Thornhill’s work suggests that, in opposition to this juridical tendency of Weimar theology, Jaspers’ identification of a truthful interpretation of transcendence with a self-hermeneutic of individual crisis or failure, recreates the relativity of truly transcendental hermeneutics, and so establishes a true non-secularity – one which ‘relies on an interpretive component of humanity, secularity and liberality ’.  

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

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.

The Invisible Community Militant

Luther on vulnerability. From Thornhill, German Political Philosophy.

'Luther's response to Müntzer's ideas was vehemently to condemn the insurrections of the peasants and to support the princes in the violent suppression of the peasant armies. To support this, he denounced all people seeking to "enact God's scriptures on earth", and he denied that the Bible could be employed to justify any act of political resistance. If the "worldly regiment" is overthrown, he explained, this leads not to a political order founded in "God's word" but rather to "eternal destruction". It is only heathens, not Christians, he argued, who "struggle against authority", for only heathens attach such importance to worldly rule. Christians, in contrast, fight only through the cross and through suffering. Their "victory" lies not "in governing or in power ", but in "vanquishment and powerlessness".' 

This strikes me as a fundamental, if stark, description of our potential for existentialist, post-Marxist militancy: for the sort of revolt against objectivity suggested by Jaspers' thinking. Though of course in his book on Jaspers, Thornhill complexifies his relation to Luther considerably.

In my thinking I am not seeking to eternalize or to normalize despair. I am simply trying to attach some value to the misery I encounter weekly at Mind. Homelessness, indefinite hospitalization (again because of this city's housing crisis), self-hospitalization in flight from the work capability assessment process. Because the suffering of the vulnerable - the social invisibles -  is the prophecy, the future narrative, of a society that is all too visibly going down the pan. And all the Mind service users are involved with religion, ranging from King Street Buddhism to the most insular True Orthodoxy out of Guildford. Classified as a volunteer, I like to think of myself as one rung up on the rationalist ladder. I suppose I am evolving a fusion of secular Buddhism, as taught by the City Lit speech therapy department, and a Lutheran (mystery-inflected) rationalism allied to Jaspers' idea of philosophical faith.

To complexify John Lydon, 'there is no future' - for the very idea of worldly power - 'in England's dreaming'. When I first read Iain Sinclair's Radon Daughters around 1995, it came across as dark fantasy, a dream-transmission from a planet of unrealizable horror. Now, pick up the newspaper, it's there enacted. The collapse of what is called objective.

Up soon: the stammering magus, J. G. Hamann