Why Hamann Is Important Today

Why Hamann Is Important Today February 3, 2022

After Hamann’s conversion, he sent parts of the London Writings, now available in English for the first time, to his father, brother, and two best friends, including Johann Christoph Berens in Riga.  He wanted them to know about the change that he had undergone.

Berens was appalled at this display of fanaticism and religiosity from someone whom he had considered a paragon of Enlightenment rationalism and skepticism.  In the next-to-the-last section of the London Writings, Hamann tells the sad story of how Berens refused to allow his sister Katharina to marry him.

Berens then enlisted the other young men in their circle, including Immanuel Kant, to argue some sense in Hamann, to win him back from what they considered the darkness of superstition into the light of Reason and Reason Alone.  Hamann said, fine.  Reason did not bring to faith, so it is unlikely to take me out of it.  Their efforts failed, but then, turn about is fair play.  Hamann began challenging their world view.  In conversations, letters, then short essays and reviews, then substantial treatises, Hamann developed a critique of the so-called “Age of Reason” that scholars of today are recognizing as definitive, applying also to the further development of Enlightenment rationalism known as Modernism.

Hamann was not opposed to reason, contrary to how he has sometimes been characterized; rather, he wanted to find a basis for reason in something other than itself.  The force of his arguments came against the view that reason alone can resolve all questions with certainty.  Let me explain his conclusions with what I wrote about them in my book Post-Christian, in which I support John Betz‘s view that Hamann gives us a way forward from both the deadends of modernism and the deadends of postmodernism:

Hamann’s objection to the Enlightenment view of Reason is, first of all, that it reduces reality—including tangible, physical things—to mental abstractions.  Actual human beings become abstracted into a collective “humanity.”  What we experience with our senses in the fields, the mountains, and the arts cannot be understood, we are led to believe, unless we can turn them into abstractions.  Even God becomes a philosophical concept rather than the highly specific, highly personal Holy One of Israel.  The Rationalists of the Enlightenment thus use reason, ironically, to distance themselves from existence.

Hamann also notes the Rationalists’ obsession with certainty.  They are not content unless their knowledge is absolutely certain, beyond the shadow of a doubt, and they are convinced that reason can give them this assurance.  We see this most explicitly with Descartes, who systematically doubted everything until he found the one thing upon which he could be absolutely certain; namely, his own existence.  Note the irony:   Reason’s quest for certainty tends to manifest itself in the opposite of certainty; namely, skepticism and doubt.

Then Hamann’s friend Kant came into his own, writing what is considered to be one of the most important texts in the history of philosophy, his Critique of Pure Reason (1781).  Kant argued that the human mind is not a passive receiver of truth.  Rather, the mind takes in a plethora of impressions by the senses and then actively shapes them into ideas and beliefs.  Kant thus lays the foundation for postmodern constructivism.

Hamann dismantled that way of thinking also.   In his Metacritique of the Purism of Reason, not only coined the “meta-” prefix beloved by postmodernists and social media tycoons, he showed that Kant’s analysis was faulty.  Again, I quote myself in Post-Christian:

Kant took reason, including empirical reason, about as far as it could go, to the point of reasoning about reasoning and exploring how the mind makes sense of empirical sense impressions.  But his project comes to the conclusion that all we can know is the “phenomena” as the mind perceives them and that we cannot know anything about the “thing in itself.”  Kant’s achievement of rational certainty makes everything uncertain!

Hamann criticizes Kant for problematizing ordinary experience.  We go through a day interacting with the world, including innumerable physical “things”—breaking an egg for breakfast, working with tools, talking with friends, walking through the garden, enjoying the sunset.  Are you saying, Immanuel, that we are not really experiencing these things?  Yes, when you reason about them so closely, simple perceptions become mind-bogglingly complex, but what good is a philosophy that makes ordinary life, in effect, disappear?

Kant and other Enlightenment figures who insisted on “reason and reason alone” neglect three things that are necessary to the way human thought works:  history, experience, and language, all of which bring culture and tradition into our reasoning.

Hamann showed that, in fact, reason cannot give certainty.  Even reason at its best.  “The system of today, which provides the proof of your presuppositions,” he observed, “will be the fairytale of tomorrow.” One philosopher, ideology, and school of thought succeeds another.  Even scientific empiricism, which Hamann would appreciate for its attention to the physical realm, cannot provide total certainty once the data is processed through an intellectual hypothesis and then a more abstract theory.  One scientific theory gives way to another, as more and more data are discovered.

But this lack of absolute certainty does not mean that science, the various schools of thought, and reason itself cannot give us reliable knowledge and even truth.  All knowledge, according to Hamann, including the knowledge disclosed by reason, depends on faith.

Faith has to do with trust, acceptance, and reliance.  Faith gives a different kind of knowledge than the discursive process of reasoning.  It is more like perception.  Hamann describes faith as being similar to tasting and seeing.

Reason itself rests on assumptions that elude rational proof, but that are taken on faith.  Reasoning requires accepting the validity of logic, the correspondence of thought to the world, the consistent order of the universe, the laws of mathematics, and trusting the contributions of others.

For Hamann, faith ultimately points to faith in Christ, just as language points to the Word of God, to the incarnate Logos.  Thus, for Hamann, reason and language are grounded, though not for unbelievers.

This only scratches the surface of Hamann’s analysis, which contemporary thinkers are finding so exciting.  He would also make provocative contributions to aesthetics–influencing the rise of German romanticism–and to social criticism, writing devastating satires against Frederick the Great, the King of Prussia, the Father of German militarism, and patron of the Enlightenment (arguing that Enlightenment rationalism leads inevitably to tyranny).  Also, to theology, which we will discuss next time.

But what his thought amounted to was simply very sophisticated applications of his Lutheran theology, with its understandings of limitations of reason, the necessity of faith, the centrality of God’s Word, and the spiritual importance of the physical realm in creation, incarnation, and sacraments.

This makes Hamann a valuable model for Christians confronting such issues today.

 

 

Illustration:  Portrait of J. G. Hamann (1920) by Saddhiyama – Scan from Bakkehus og Solbjerg volume 3, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4731924

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