The Existentialist Poetic of Thoreau's Journal

Henry David Thoreau conceived of his writing of nature in his Journal as an experiential form of writing. As he commented in his entry of 2 July 1852, ‘Nature is reported not by him who goes forth consciously as an observer, but in the fullness of life. To such a one she rushes to make her report.’ The grounding of nature writing within one’s own personal experience is emphasized again by Thoreau on 19 April 1854: ‘I am not interested in mere phenomena, though it were the explosion of a planet, only as it may have lain in the experience of a human being.’ Such sensual experience generates the reader’s sense of the writer’s physical presence, so that we no longer feel imprisoned in our mechanized contemporary environments but instead actively there, out there, with Thoreau. ‘The forcible writer stands bodily behind his words with his experience. He does not make books out of books, but he has been there in person.’ (3 February 1852)

Thoreau drew a direct link between the plenitude and degree of illumination of a reader’s or student’s cognition, and that student’s ability to immerse himself in studies which enable him to become charged by sensual experience.

‘It is essential that a man confine himself to pursuits – a scholar, for instance, to studies – which lie next to and conduce to his life, which do not go against the grain, either of his will or his imagination. The scholar finds in his experience some studies to be most fertile and radiant with light, others dry, barren, and dark. If he is wise, he will not persevere in the last, as a plant in a cellar will strive toward the light. He will confine the observations of his mind as closely as possible to the experience or life of his senses. His thought must live with and be inspired with the life of the body. […] Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.’ (12 March 1853)

Here we find an affinity between the impulses underlying Thoreau’s journalizing and a central aspect of Weimar era German thought to which I have referred often on this blog. For we are reminded here of Jaspers’ early existentialism which, as Chris Thornhill writes in his study Karl Jaspers, sought to ‘deploy Kant as the basis for an existential metaphysic of possible lived unity’. Jaspers’ early existentialism, Thornhill notes elsewhere, sought precisely to overcome Kantian antinomies such as that of reason and experience, by ‘incorporating all aspects (cognitive, practical and sensory) of human life in an encompassing account of rational and experiential existence’. This existentialist project was anticipated by Thoreau’s requirement of the subjectivist researcher, ‘whether he be poet or philosopher or man of science’, that ‘His thought must live with and be inspired with the life of the body’:

‘There is no such thing as pure objective observation. Your observation, to be interesting, i.e. to be significant, must be subjective. The sum of what the writer of whatever class has to report is simply some human experience, whether he be poet or philosopher or man of science. The man of most science is the man most alive, whose life is the greatest event.’ (6 May 1854)  

In his journal entry for 14 July 1852, Thoreau had already related his concern with the ‘most alive’ to the question of a living language. Here he pointed to the emergence of the sort of artificial, manufactured-to-death language which characterizes today’s bureaucratic, public sector discourse and capitalist, private sector discourse alike. ‘A writer who does not speak out of a full experience uses torpid words, wooden or lifeless words, such words as “humanitary,” which have a paralysis in their tails.’ The deathliness of ‘humanitary’ results from its excess: from its self-aggrandizing add-on, the suffix ‘-itary’. Just as here he notes the excessive moment of particularity in ‘humanitary’, on 30 March 1853 Thoreau went on to comment on how a particularizing, analytic perspective on life diminishes our full experience, or our existential sense of ‘possible lived unity’. His references to ‘view’ and ‘the unbounded universe’ make it clear that he thinks of such full experience in terms of our visionary capacity:

‘Ah, those youthful days! are they never to return? when the walker does not too curiously observe particulars, but sees, hears, scents, tastes, and feels only himself, - the phenomena that show themselves in him, - his expanding body, his intellect and heart. No worm or insect, quadruped or bird, confined his view, but the unbounded universe was his. A bird is now become a mote in his eye.’

Crucially, for Thoreau the writing of full experience is genuine poetry, because such a writing conveys the ‘affinity’ or sympathy between the writer and whatever he has experienced – ‘the phenomena that show themselves in him’. In that way it also conveys the sympathy between the particular elements of nature which scientific observation simply separates. ‘What affinity is it brings the goldfinch to the sunflower – both yellow – to pick its seeds? Whatever things I perceive with my entire man, those let me record, and it will be poetry.’ (2 September 1851) Or again, three years later on 24 September 1854: ‘What name of a natural object is most poetic? That which he has given for convenience whose life is most nearly related to it, who has known it longest and best.’ Thoreau’s preoccupation with a unified life’s possibilities of sympathy and relationality, enabled him to describe the action of existential poetic naming which derives from imbibing a natural object’s spirito-existential ‘nutriment’: on 19 September 1854 he had written, ‘I have given myself up to nature; I have lived so many springs and summers and autumns and winters as if I had nothing else to do but live them, and imbibe whatever nutriment they had for me’.  

On 2 January 1859, Thoreau’s exposition of ‘vital and natural’ poetic language brought him to counterpose ‘artificial’, patriarchal, academic regulations of language to the free speech of mothers, brutes and animals:

‘When I hear the hypercritical quarrelling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules of theirs, - Mr. Webster, perhaps, not having spoken according to Mr. Kirkham’s rule, - I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb’s bleat.’

Thoreau’s suspicion of academic language use – of ‘literacy’ – rests on his sense that, just as natural life itself symbolizes human experience, so too, conversely, human symbolic expression is grounded in natural phenomena: ‘Talk about learning our letters and being literate! Why, the roots of letters are things. Natural objects and phenomena are the original symbols or types which express our thoughts and feelings’ (16 October 1859). It is because their language conveys the sourcing of letters in natural things that ‘We cannot spare the very lively and lifelike descriptions of some of the old naturalists’, as he writes on 17 February 1860 (for example). ‘They sympathize with the creatures which they describe.’ But for Thoreau, importantly, a vital and natural – poetic – language conveys not just nature’s facticity, but its spirit too. On the following day, his journal entry expounded his animist phenomenology and noted the inadequacy of traditional scientific description to that phenomenology:

‘Surely the most important part of an animal is its anima, its vital spirit, on which is based its character and all the peculiarities by which it most concerns us. […]

   Science in many departments of natural history does not pretend to go beyond the shell; i.e., it does not get to animated nature at all. A history of animated nature must itself be animated.’

On 15 February, Thoreau wrote of ‘the physical fact which in all language is the symbol of the spiritual’; his sense of natural phenomena as being symbols of natural anima, explains his intention – stated nine years earlier on 9 November 1851 – that lively and lifelike, poetic expression is to convey ‘animated’ phenomena on their own terms, without reducing them to mere brute facticity, as would the ‘common sense’ view of nature. For only such a form of expression can convey the sympathy between the writer’s anima and nature, or the way in which the writer has experienced and imbibed natural anima. ‘My facts shall be falsehoods to the common sense. I would so state facts that they shall be significant, shall be myths or mythologic. Facts which the mind perceived, thoughts which the body thought.’  

Thoreau opposes vital poetic language and the experience of nature which it conveys, or what he calls ‘the true growth and experience, the living speech’ (16 October 1859), to the paralyzed vitality and ‘dry technical terms’ which he associates with academic science’s specialist accounts of nature:

‘I look over the report of the doings of a scientific association and am surprised that there is so little life to be reported; I am put off with a parcel of dry technical terms. Anything living is easily and naturally expressed in popular language. I cannot help suspecting that the life of these learned professors has been almost as inhuman and wooden as a rain-gauge or self-registering magnetic machine. They communicate no fact which rises to the temperature of blood-heat. It doesn’t all amount to one rhyme.’ (6 May 1854)

On 5 September 1851 we find Thoreau praising James John Garth Wilkinson’s The Human Body and Its Connection with Man, Illustrated by the Principal Organs for its analogical method. By drawing quotidian physical analogies (such as when he describes the papillary cutis as ‘“an encampment of small conical tents coextensive with the surface of the body”’), Wilkinson, Thoreau feels, finds in popular, nonspecialist language a means of communicating unified, existential reason’s sympathetic experience of the body: this is true cognition or ‘perception of truth’.

‘The faith he puts in old and current expressions as having sprung from an instinct wiser than science, and safely to be trusted if they can be interpreted. The man of science discovers no world for the mind of man with all its faculties to inhabit. Wilkinson finds a home for the imagination, and it is no longer outcast and homeless. All perception of truth is the detection of an analogy; we reason from our hands to our head.’

Nine years later, on 13 October 1860, Thoreau’s existentialism leads him to argue that, because of their success in conveying ‘the highest quality of the plant, - its relation to man’, ‘it is commonly the old naturalists who first received American plants that describe them best’. Here Thoreau again advocates (the ‘free and lawless’ writing which can relay) singular, existential cognition over professional scientific knowledge:

‘After all, the truest description, and that by which another living man can most readily recognize a flower, is the unmeasured and eloquent one which the sight of it inspires. No scientific description will supply the want of this, though you should count and measure and analyze every atom that seems to compose it.’

Thoreau’s rejection of the language of academic science and advocacy of an existential poetic, relates to his rejection of professional, scholarly literacy in favour of popular, democratic literacy. ‘Anything living is easily and naturally expressed in popular language.’ On 6 December 1859:

‘Literary gentlemen, editors, and critics think that they know how to write because they have studied grammar and rhetoric; but the art of composition is as simple as the discharge of a bullet from a rifle, and its masterpieces imply an infinitely greater force behind it. This unlettered man’s [Irving’s] speaking and writing is standard English. Some words and phrases deemed vulgarisms and Americanisms before, he has made standard American.’

Walden Pond in 1908

We are reminded of the earlier remark that ‘the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection’. It is as if, for Thoreau, an academic aesthetic architecture of ‘grammar and rhetoric’ is to be supplanted by a demotic aesthetic physics of verbal force and compaction. Already on 12 November 1851, he was thinking in terms of ‘interjection’ and discharge: ‘Those sentences are good and well discharged which are like so many little resiliencies from the spring floor of our life, - a distinct fruit and kernel itself, springing from terra firma.’ The ‘continent concentrated thoughts’ of which Thoreau wrote on 30 August 1856 recall these well-defined resiliencies. In order to adequately reflect the complexity of nature, Thoreau maintains on 27 October 1858, language really should be compounded – ‘ground together’ – rather like in German:

‘Who will undertake to describe in words the difference in tint between two neighbouring leaves on the same tree? or of two thousand? – for by so many the eye is addressed in a glance, In describing the richly spotted leaves, for instance, how often we find ourselves using ineffectually words which merely indicate faintly our good intentions, giving them in our despair a terminal twist toward our mark, - such as reddish, yellowish, purplish, etc. We cannot make a hue of words, for they are not to be compounded like colours, and hence we are obliged to use such ineffectual expressions as reddish brown, etc. They need to be ground together.’

A principle of compounding or compaction can also be found underlying Thoreau’s broader conception of writing as the creation of ‘a theme’, and subsequent identification of ‘one pertinent and just’ thematic ‘observation’. Thoreau’s idea of writing here would reverse today’s academic writing practice, which typically starts from a pre-set, often predatorily pre-identified theme, before exploitatively selecting the material (and only that material) which will enable one to sustain one’s forced argument. The dominative logic of subsumption, against which Theodor Adorno directed much of his thinking, continues to determine so much of what passes for intellectual life now. A commodity is to be delivered, or you will be made unemployed, your selfhood erased and then accused of mental illness, etc. On 3 February 1859 Thoreau noted:

‘The writer has much to do even to create a theme for himself. Most that is first written on any subject is a mere groping after it, mere rubble-stone and foundation. It is only when many observations of different periods have been brought together that he begins to grasp his subject and can make one pertinent and just observation.’

In his entry for 13 October 1860, Thoreau suggested that visionary affirmation of natural phenomena, by contrast with professional scientific description of nature, involves an existential, sensually delighting form of language which has its own inevitable momentum: like the interjections and discharges of which he writes elsewhere, these ‘unconsidered’ or ‘unconscious’ statements – acts of definition – are not impeded by the sort of career-sustaining guards and scruples which complicate academic language.

‘[…] unconsidered expressions of our delight which any natural object draws from us are something complete and final in themselves, since all nature is to be regarded as it concerns man; and who knows how near to absolute truth such unconscious affirmations may come? Which are the truest, the sublime conceptions of Hebrew poets and seers, or the guarded statements of modern geologists, which we must modify or unlearn so fast?’

On 1 April 1860, Thoreau’s understanding of how the action of inevitably releasing verbal statements of visionary definition accords with a principle of natural law – a ‘sympathy with the universal mind’ – is so transcendentally shocking as to negate for him the import of communication itself.

‘The fruit a thinker bears is sentences, - statements or opinions. He seeks to affirm something as true. I am surprised that my affirmations or utterances come to me ready-made, - not forethought, - so that I occasionally awake in the night simply to let fall ripe a statement which I had never consciously considered before, and as surprising and novel and agreeable to me as anything can be. As if we only thought by sympathy with the universal mind, which thought while we were asleep. There is such a necessity to make a definite statement that our minds at length do it without our consciousness, just as we carry our food to our mouths. This occurred to me last night, but I was so surprised by the fact which I have just endeavoured to report that I have entirely forgotten what the particular observation was.’

(All Thoreau quotations here are taken from: Henry David Thoreau, The Journal, 1837-1861, ed. by Damion Searls (New York: New York Review Books, 2009))          

Habermas on Cassirer in the 1920s (2)

In Habermas’ presentation in ‘The Liberating Power of Symbols’, the conflict in the 1920s between Cassirer and Heidegger is related to the former’s concern with a humanist, normative (Kantian) constitutionalism. This concern of Cassirer’s is reflected in his upholding of (German-)Jewish ‘ethical ideals’ and civility, in the face of the emergence of fascist political myth.

Fundamental to Habermas’ account of Cassirer is his emphasis on Cassirer’s understanding that it is (in Habermas’ words) ‘the dynamic of symbolization which drives the process of civilization forward’. ‘In the symbolic constitution of human existence and in the symbolic mediation of our life activity the path towards a humane conduct of life is already anticipated.’ This stress on Cassirer’s insights into the entwinement of symbolization and civilization or humanization, underwrites Habermas’ presentation of the Cassirer-Heidegger opposition as an opposition between German-Jewish civility and Heidegger’s (mythic) thinking of (mythically) autonomized, fated praxis – ‘between the decent, cultured spirit of a cosmopolitan humanism, and that fatal rhetoric set on throwing man back onto the “hardness of his fate”’. This proto-Nazi hardness refers to a praxis without fundamental or transcendental norms, such as the norms which, in Cassirer’s thinking, derived from the (post-)Kantian transcendental analysis of language; Habermas suggests that it was Cassirer’s unwillingness to run with and generalize Humboldt’s revolutionary use of Kant’s notion of the transcendental, or ‘transform the heuristic priority which the transcendental analysis of language and of the linguistically constituted lifeworld does in fact enjoy in his researches into a systematic priority’ of his theory of symbolization, which lay behind the limitation of the 1929 Davos disputation to a superficially culturo-philosophical rather than fully philosophical-political debate.

‘The question of the evaluation of symbolic forms remained open, and the normative foundations remained entirely unclear. This may be the systematic reason why the controversy in Davos did not touch on the real crux of the dispute. The conflict between Cassirer and Heidegger, which extended into the political domain, was not played out. The opposition between the decent, cultured spirit of a cosmopolitan humanism, and that fatal rhetoric set on throwing man back onto the “hardness of his fate”, was reflected only in a contrast of gestures and mentalities.’

A foregrounding of the transcendental conception of language derived from Humboldt’s innovations, or of the linguistic ‘normative foundations’ of (the construction of) symbolic forms would, Habermas suggests, have enabled Cassirer to develop the civilizing impetus or content within his theory of symbolization; ‘the emancipatory power of symbolic shaping’.

‘With this step Cassirer could have overcome his epistemologically constricted vision, and resolved the conflict between the perspectivism of equiprimordial worlds [symbols acting as concepts], on the one hand, and the emancipatory power of symbolic shaping [symbols acting as images], on the other, which dogs his philosophy of symbolic forms.’

Habermas observes that Heidegger himself, by the stage of Davos, had not yet achieved a non-nominalist pragmatics of language in his own thinking: ‘it is worth noting that Cassirer, on the basis of his reception of Humboldt, had already long since achieved the turn towards a pragmatics of language which still lay in the future for Heidegger’. Yet ironically, it was Heidegger at Davos who pointed to Cassirer’s lack of an emphasis on the transcendental aspect or normative foundations of his philosophy of symbolic forms – precisely the emphasis which could have stood up to Heidegger’s praxis without norms. For Heidegger a ‘terminus a quo’ – what Habermas calls the ‘fundamental dimension’ – remains unprobed by Cassirer:

‘One could say that for Cassirer the terminus ad quem is the whole of a philosophy of culture in the sense of an elucidation of the wholeness of the forms of the shaping consciousness. For Cassirer the terminus a quo is utterly problematical […] Cassirer’s point is to emphasize the various forms of the shaping in order, with a view to these shapings, subsequently to point out a certain dimension of the shaping powers themselves.’

As Habermas underlines later in The Liberating Power of Symbols, it would be left to Apel subsequently to turn a transcendental view of language against Heidegger’s upholding of autonomized linguistic praxis: Apel insists, Habermas saw, on ‘a transcendental-hermeneutic conception of language, which was directed against the autonomization of the world-disclosing function of language in Heidegger’s history of Being’. For Apel, as Habermas reiterates, ‘Innerworldly “praxis” is only “mediated” by the disclosing “poiesis” of linguistic world-constitution.’ 

Yet as Habermas also shows, it is Cassirer’s political pronouncements of the 1920s which evince the normative aspect of his philosophy, and illustrate his repeated appeal to ‘Kant’s theory of law’. ‘When Cassirer took a stand on matters of public concern he made no attempt to conceal his fundamental normative convictions.’ Habermas quotes from Cassirer’s 1928 Constitution Day speech, to demonstrate how it (as Habermas puts it) ‘sketched with bold strokes the origins of human rights and democracy in the tradition of rational law’: ‘the idea of a republican constitution is in no sense a stranger, let alone an alien intruder, in the overall context of the history of German thought and culture’. Instead, Cassirer maintained, Weimar republicanism ‘grew out of this very ground, and was nourished by its most authentic forces, the forces of Idealist philosophy’.

Jankel Adler. 'Woman with Hat'. 1940

Habermas observes how Cassirer’s support of the normative political process of Weimar constitutionalism was followed by an analysis of the collapse of this constitutionalism, which occurred along with the fatal threat to ‘normatively significant cultural processes’ (Habermas’ words) such as civilizing symbolization. In one of his last essays, the 1944 ‘Judaism and the Modern Political Myths’, Cassirer upheld German-Jewish humanist, normative ‘ethical ideals’ against the bad foundationalism represented by what Habermas calls the ‘fake primordiality of political myths’.

‘We [modern Jews] had to represent all those ethical ideals that had been brought into being by Judaism and found their way into general human culture, into the life of all civilized nations. […] If Judaism has contributed to breaking the power of the modern political myths, it has done its duty, having once more fulfilled its historical and religious mission.’    

Cassirer saw how Nazi political myth enlisted the support of technological products of the scientific enlightenment, perceiving the political practice of the Nazis to be – as Habermas writes – ‘an ominous fusion of myth and technology: fascist mobilization succeeds by employing modern techniques of mass communication in the service of the revival of mythical forms of thought’. Moreover, Cassirer, as Habermas interestingly suggests, could therefore argue for the value of the monotheistic myth of Judaism precisely because Judaism historically fed into a humanizing (German-Jewish) religious enlightenment, rather than into a dehumanizing scientific enlightenment:

‘It is worth noting that Cassirer trusts religious far more than scientific enlightenment as a counter-force to the violence of political myths – he relies on the confinement of myth within its own proper sphere, which was long ago achieved by monotheism.’    

Habermas on Cassirer in the 1920s

I want to underline three particular aspects of Ernst Cassirer’s intellectual life in the 1920s which Habermas draws attention to in the opening lecture in his The Liberating Power of Symbols, in order to reiterate Habermas’ emphasis on the importance of Cassirer’s work of the 1920s – an emphasis which, I feel, remains somewhat understated in the lecture ‘The Liberating Power of Symbols’ itself. These three aspects are: (i) his involvement with the Warburg Library circle, (ii) his novel reception of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s philosophy of language and, (iii) Cassirer’s relation to Heidegger alongside his concern with a humanist, Kantian constitutionalism.

Whilst stressing the independence of Cassirer’s philosophical development, Habermas nonetheless observes how ‘the interest which [Aby] Warburg and Cassirer shared in the symbolic medium of the human mind’s forms of expression was the basis of their intellectual affinity’. Habermas notes that, in 1921, Cassirer was ‘one of the first’ to give a lecture at the Warburg Library based at the University of Hamburg. Habermas then adds that the following description (by T. von Stockhausen) of the present layout of the Warburg Library, ‘which, since 1958, has been housed in Woburn Square in London in an arrangement modelled on the Hamburg original, reads as though inspired by Cassirer’s philosophy of the development of symbolic forms’:

‘The library was to lead from the visual image, as the first stage in man’s awareness, to language and hence to religion, science and philosophy, all of them products of man’s search for orientation, which influence his patterns of behaviour and his actions, the subject matter of history.’ 

As Habermas writes, the library’s very design thus reflects the way in which, for Cassirer, ‘The world of symbolic forms extends from pictorial representation, via verbal expression, to forms of orienting knowledge, which in turn pave the way for practice’. We can see that a progress through the Warburg Library, Image-Word-Orientation-Action, also follows (broadly) the subtitles of the three successive volumes of Cassirer’s The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms – Language, then Mythical Thought, then The Phenomenology of Knowledge. A representative report on the recent threat to the Warburg Library emanating from the new management culture of the University of London can be read here. 

Yet Warburg’s thinking influenced Cassirer’s theory of the process of symbolization in the first place, as Habermas shows when he points to Warburg’s concern with what Habermas calls the ‘force of artistic creation, purged of its demons’ – a concern described in E. H. Gombrich’s intellectual biography of Warburg: ‘More than ever therefore, the Renaissance appears in the Mnemosyne as a precious moment of precarious religious equilibrium in which the sources of heathen passions were tapped but still under control.’ Warburg’s atlas project, Habermas notes, was to be introduced with the following emphasis of Warburg's on the emergence of culture out of a work of distantiation: ‘The conscious creation of distance between oneself and the external world may be called the fundamental act of civilization. Where this gap conditions artistic creativity, this awareness of distance can achieve a lasting social function.’ As Habermas sees, Warburg’s insights are reflected in Cassirer’s ideas that (as Habermas puts it) ‘the fact that sensory contact with the world is reworked into something meaningful through the use of symbols is the defining feature of human existence’, and that ‘the objectifying force of symbolic mediation breaks the animal immediacy of a nature which impacts on the organism from within and without’. Habermas quotes this account of the process of symbolization in Cassirer’s Geist und Leben :

‘Language and art, myth and theoretical knowledge all contribute to […] this process of mental distanciation: they are the major stages on the path which leads from the space of what can be grasped and effected, in which the animal lives and within which it remains confined, to the space of sensory experience and thought, to the horizon of mind.’  

Of course Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms also emerged out of what Habermas calls his ‘innovative reception of Humboldt’s philosophy of language’ – a reception recorded in the 1920s in Cassirer’s 1923 essay ‘The Kantian Element in Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Philosophy of Language’. Before considering Humboldt’s rôle in Cassirer’s thought, however, it is helpful to understand how his contact with the Warburg Library circle influenced his theorization of the symbolic function of expression. As Habermas notes, the most obvious result of the stimulus which Cassirer received in the 1920s, ‘if not from Warburg himself, then from the scholarly discussions of religion in the circle gathered around him in his library’, can be found in Cassirer’s ‘important reflections on mythical images and linguistic symbols’. Cassirer’s 1925 treatise on ‘Language and Myth’, which – as Habermas observes – appeared in the series of studies published by the Warburg Library, drew on Hermann Usener's classic (1896) work on the formation of religious concepts, Götternamen.

Bifurcation of the fetishizing gaze.
Ilse Bing. 'Self-Portrait in Mirrors'. 1931

Cassirer’s idea that, as Habermas writes, ‘Symbolic form is […] originally generated by a stylizing force, which condenses the dramatic impact of experiences’, made use of Usener’s theory of ‘momentary gods’ to (as Habermas puts it) ‘account for symbolic condensation as a response to the exciting ambivalence of meaning-laden experiences’. It is as if the symbolic transformation of sense experience into meaning is triggered by the very focussing intensity of the nature-traumatized human. ‘Such compressed, highly significant experiences, which are the focus of an isolating attention, can congeal into a mythical image, can be semanticized and thereby spellbound, given fixity by a divine name which makes it possible to recall and control them.’ Habermas quotes Cassirer: ‘only when this splitting off succeeds, when intuition is compressed into a single point and apparently reduced to it, does a mythical or linguistic structure result, only then can the word or the momentary god emerge’.   

Again, in Language and Myth, Cassirer maintains that language and myth are ‘two diverse shoots from the same parent stem, the same impulse of symbolic formulation’, in that language and myth apparently emerge simultaneously from ‘the same basic act of mental processing, of the concentration and intensification of simple sensory intuition’. In a way which perhaps is comparable with Gillian Rose’s underlining (in The Melancholy Science) of the importance for Adorno’s thinking of a Marxist-modernist aesthetic of brüchigkeit or brittleness, Habermas stresses Cassirer’s concomitant emphasis on ‘the broken character of our symbolic relation to the world, a relation which is mediated by words and tools’, and on ‘the indirectness of a self-relation which forces human beings to make a detour via symbolically generated objectifications in order to return to themselves’. For Cassirer, Habermas writes, acts of symbolization are distinguished by the fact that they ‘break open environments shaped by the peculiarities of a particular species’; they do this by ‘transforming fluctuating sense impressions into semantic meanings and fixing them in such a way that the human mind can reproduce the impressions in memory and preserve them’.

Rose cited Adorno’s ‘The Essay as Form’ on how the essay ‘thinks in breaks (in Brüchen) because reality is brittle (brüchig [split, class-divided, antagonistic]) and finds its unity through the breaks, not by smoothing them over’. It can be argued therefore, that in a sense for Adorno as for Cassirer, unified (symbolic, essayistic) expression is consequent upon experiential brokenness. Yet Cassirer’s basic notion of symbolization, as Habermas notes, also posits a symbolic function of conceptualization distinct from that of expression : this separate function of conceptualization too would have to be factored into any convincing comparison of Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms with Adorno’s aesthetics of the riven essay form. Habermas outlines the distinction between expression and conceptualization so as to emphasize how Cassirer’s insights drawn from his involvement with the Warburg Library circle’s study of religion, in fact simply supplemented the thinking that he had launched in his earlier reception of Humboldt’s philosophy of language:

‘Expression transforms forceful sense impressions into meaningful elements, individual mythical images, which are able to stabilize affective responses; concepts articulate a view of the world as a whole. In his analysis of the expressive function, which is unmistakeably [sic] inspired by myth, Cassirer was stimulated by the discussions in Warburg’s circle. But, as regards the linguistic function of world-disclosure, Cassirer had already learned much from Humboldt prior to his arrival in Hamburg. The insights drawn from the study of religion helped to deepen a conception which ultimately derived from Cassirer’s genuine insights in the domain of the philosophy of language.’    

Habermas writes that Cassirer’s ‘original achievement’, his ‘semiotic transformation of Kantian transcendental philosophy’, rested on his being ‘the first to perceive the paradigmatic significance of Humboldt’s philosophy of language’. Cassirer ‘thus prepared the way for my generation, the post-war generation, to take up the “linguitic [sic] turn” in analytical philosophy and integrate it with the native tradition of hermeneutic philosophy’ (Habermas’ speech on Apel, reprinted later in The Liberating Power of Symbols, indeed lists Humboldt among the ‘marginal figures in the philosophy of language’ recovered within Apel’s early work). We can begin to understand the rôle played by Humboldt within Cassirer’s thinking of the symbolic function of conceptualization – his thinking of the way in which symbols, when acting as concepts rather than as mythical images, ‘articulate a view of the world as a whole’ – if we refer to Habermas’ account of Cassirer’s understanding of the symbolizing process as ‘an interplay of contrary tendencies’. ‘The world of symbolic meanings arises on the one hand from the production of a plenitude of meaningful images, and on the other from the logical disclosure of categorially articulated domains of experience.’ Cassirer, we can see from Habermas’ explanation, took from Humboldt’s thinking the principle of linguistic world-disclosure, against traditional nomination theory of language, but he continued to stress the Kantian aspect of this innovative principle of Humboldt’s:

‘He [Cassirer] retains an epistemological standpoint in the sense that he interprets linguistic world-disclosure on the model of the transcendental constitution of objects of possible experience. He assimilates Humboldt’s linguistic articulation of the world to Kant’s constitution of a domain of objects of possible experience. He reduces both to the common denominator of the categorial articulation of a symbolically generated world.’

Habermas stresses how, by relying on ‘the common denominator of the categorial articulation of a symbolically generated world’, Cassirer’s reception of Humboldt’s philosophy of language in fact ‘underestimated the scope of these innovations’, or the scope of Humboldt’s own semiotic transformation of Kantian transcendental philosophy. For Cassirer reduced Humboldt’s thought here to a Kantian theory of objectification, as he sustained his own cherished theory of linguistic conceptualization and then made symbols of his conceptual objects:

‘Relying on an analogy with categorial synthesis, which first endows the manifold of sense impressions with the unity of the objective experience of things, he also understands the function of linguistic form in terms of “objectification”. In so doing, he exploits the ambivalence of the expression “objectification”; for we also use this term to describe the process of externalization which characterizes the sensuous, symbolic embodiment of an intellectual content: “What Kant describes as the activity of judgement is only made possible in the concrete life of the mind by the mediating intervention of language, as Humboldt makes clear. Objectification in thought must pass via objectification in the sounds of language.” This interpretation is the direct descendant of the theory of concepts which Cassirer had already developed by 1910.’

Yet crucially, as Habermas also underlines, Cassirer did see that Humboldt’s use of Kant in fact in a way took him beyond Kantian epistemology. Humboldt, Habermas summarizes, ‘takes from Kant the notion of the transcendental production of a categorially structured world of objects of possible experience, in order to explain the meaning-conferring function of language’. In this way Humboldt ‘describes the productivity of language as a world-projecting spontaneity’. In Geist und Leben, Cassirer conveys this idea of what Habermas calls language’s ‘conceptual articulation of a world of possible states of affairs’: ‘Languages are […] not in fact means of representing a truth which is already known, but rather means of discovering what was previously unknown.’ Habermas underscores the revolutionary implications of Humboldt’s positing of language’s projective capacity and meaning-conferring function in this way:

‘The spontaneous process of world constitution is thus transferred from the transcendental subject to a natural language employed by empirical subjects; the constitution of a domain of objects is similarly transformed into the grammatical pre-structuring of a linguistically articulated world. […] Whatever the members of a linguistic community may encounter in the world is accessible only via the linguistic forms of a possible shared understanding concerning such experiences.’ 

For Cassirer, Habermas writes, this meant that ‘Symbolic form overcomes the opposition of subject and object’. For by ‘transforming the world-constituting activity of the knowing subject into the world-disclosing function of the trans-subjective form of language’, Humboldt’s use of Kant’s notion of the transcendental exploded ‘the architectonic of the philosophy of consciousness as a whole’. Habermas quotes from Geist und Leben: ‘Thus the basic opposition which dominates the entire systematics of Kant’s thought seems inadequate […] when it comes to defining the specificity of the domain of language as a product of the mind.’

To be continued.   

Either/Or (Part I)

Here are some of my reading notes on the first part of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or.

‘that eternity which lies not outside time but in the midst of it’ [51. Compare, regarding actualizing the eternal in the temporal (Bergman), the reference on 37 to ‘an idea that joined the finite and the infinite’. Cf. also 54, for instance the remark that ‘Only where the idea is brought to rest and transparency in a definite form can there be any question of a classic work’ (compare 103: ‘the stillness of the moment’). These references to rest and stillness are themselves worth comparing with Kierkegaard’s (hereafter SK’s) notion of ‘suspension’: ‘The art of recollecting and forgetting will also prevent a person from foundering in any particular relationship in life – and assures him complete suspension.’ (295) This effect of an ‘artistically [vs. ethically] achieved identity’ of forgetting and recollecting seems to me to correspond to the Buddhist meditative condition of detachment or acceptance; for me mindfulness can be what SK, on the same page, calls ‘the Archimedean point with which one lifts the whole world’. Suspension - also because it is an aesthetic position - is of course a relativistic state: one ‘does not hoist full sail for any decision’ (293).] 

‘When was it that the hetairias became common in Greece except at the time when the state was in the process of disintegration? And does not our age have a striking likeness to that age, which not even Aristophanes could make more ludicrous than it actually was? Has not the bond that in the political sense held the states together, invisibly and spiritually, dissolved; has not the power in religion that insisted upon the invisible been weakened and destroyed […]’ [141. These statements, like the similar ones in Irony, seem to evoke the conditions of Weimar era Germany – as well as the conditions of our time.]

‘Our age has lost all the substantial categories of family, state, kindred; it must turn the single individual over to himself completely in such a way that, strictly speaking, he becomes his own creator.’ [149. Cf. the ‘subjectivity reflected in itself’ on 143, and the quotation from Hegel’s Philosophy of Right regarding ‘the right of subjective freedom’ on 626 n. 13.]

 

‘since we […] acknowledge as characteristic of all human endeavour in its truth that it is fragmentary, that it is precisely this which distinguishes it from nature’s infinite coherence, that an individual’s wealth consists specifically in his capacity for fragmentary prodigality […]’ [151. Cf. the advocacy of concise communication – ‘simple statements’, ‘time-and-talk-saving pithy aphorisms’, ‘economizing’ – on 465. Cf. too the recommended ‘venture in fragmentary endeavour’ in line with ‘the disjointed and desultory character of unfinished papers’, and a vocation of obscurity, on 152 (& 137).]    

[quotation above from 151 regarding ‘fragmentary prodigality’ continues with:] ‘what is the producing individual’s enjoyment is the receiving individual’s also, not the laborious and careful accomplishment or the tedious interpretation of this accomplishment but the production and the pleasure of the glinting transiency, which for the producer holds much more than the consummated accomplishment, since it is a glimpse of the idea and holds a bonus for the recipient, since its fulguration [Fulguration] stimulates his own productivity […]’ [152. 629 n. 36 glosses ‘Fulguration’ as a loan word in Danish, meaning ‘a sudden flashing (for example, the flashing of molten gold or silver)’. Compare, therefore, 129: ‘Then in the most distant heavens, far off on the horizon, one sees a flash; it speeds away swiftly along the earth, is gone in an instant. […] it seems as if the darkness itself has lost its composure and is starting to move. […] There is an anxiety in that flash; it is as if in that deep darkness it were born in anxiety – just so is Don Giovanni’s life. There is an anxiety in him, but this anxiety is his energy. […] Don Giovanni’s life is not despair; it is, however, the full force of the sensuous, which is born in anxiety; and Don Giovanni himself is this anxiety, but this anxiety is precisely the demonic zest for life.’ In this relation, compare too SK’s constellation of aesthetic-intellectual love, risk and a Nietzsche-like terror of natural contingency (contingent even in its ‘infinite coherence’). ‘With what kind of love do we embrace nature? Is there not a secretive anxiety and horror in it, because its beautiful harmony works its way out of lawlessness and wild confusion, its security out of perfidy? But precisely this anxiety captivates the most. So also with love, if it is to be interesting. Behind it ought to brood the deep, anxious night from which springs the flower of love. Thus the nymphaea alba [white water lily] rests with its calyx on the surface of the water, while thought is anxious about plunging down into the deep darkness where it has its root.’ (424; cf. 294) On 102 Don Giovanni is posited as ‘absolutely musical’ because, unreflective and nonverbal, he ‘does not have that kind of [intellectual] continuance at all but hurries on in an eternal vanishing, just like the music’.]

‘love is always present tense’ [226]

‘the repelling force always required in the negative, which is actually the principle of motion. It is not merely repelling but infinitely repulsive, and whoever has the basic principle behind him must necessarily have infinite momentum for making discoveries.’ [285. Cf. Hegel’s infinite absolute negativity adopted in Irony, and Hegel’s definition of negativity as ‘the turning point of the movement of the Notion […] the innermost source of all activity’ quoted in 641 n. 3. Cf. with this principle of motion the ‘movement of thought […] in the service of reflection’ discussed on 188, where, for the will (mediation, and the ethical) to begin, or to free itself from serving reflection, it ‘must be altogether impartial, must begin in the power of its own willing; only then can there be any question of a beginning’. The logic of this replacement of the principle of (aesthetic-)intellectual motion by the free exercise of the will (the decision, ethics), seems to me to be analogous to the meditative logic wherein mindfulness emerges from (within, ‘in the power of’) the body’s own wisdom: the breath. Cf. also, however, SK’s opposition of spirit-motion to the perpetual motion imposed by the capitalist work ethic. He writes of the ‘businesslike zeal with which they work at the office’ on 289: ‘There is an indefatigable activity that shuts a person out of the world of spirit and places him in a class with the animals, which instinctively must always be in motion.’ (Cf. SK on ‘busy bustlers’ on 25, and critiquing working for a living on 31).]    

‘There is so much talk about man’s being a social animal, but basically he is a beast of prey, something that can be ascertained not only by looking at his teeth. Therefore, all this chatter about sociality and community is partly inherited hypocrisy and partly studied perfidy.’ [288. Cf. the quotation from Aristotle’s Politics in 642-43 n.12: ‘man is by nature a political [social] animal. […] the natural outcast is forthwith a lover of war; he may be compared to an isolated piece at draughts’. Cf. 22, and also Hobbes?]

‘Every erotic relationship must always be lived through in such a way that it is easy for one to produce an image that conveys all the beauty of it.’ [390. Cf. 418: ‘For love, everything is a symbol […]’; ‘Erotic love is much too substantial to be satisfied with chatter, the erotic situations much too significant to be filled with chatter. They are silent, still, definitely outlined, and yet eloquent, like the music of Memnon’s statue. Eros gesticulates, does not speak; or if he does, it is an enigmatic intimation, symbolic music.’]     

‘To have an understanding of the moment is not such an easy matter, and the one who misunderstands it is doomed to boredom for life. The moment is everything, and in the moment woman is everything; the consequences I do not understand.’ [433. Cf. the seducer’s statements with the references to the moment on 90 and (as 658 n. 209 points out) The Concept of Anxiety, 82-91.]

As in my previous post on The Concept of Irony, the page numbering here refers to the relevant volume of the Princeton edition of Kierkegaard’s Writings. 

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