Hamann and Mendelssohn

I fell for it. Hamann begins a brief discussion of the temporality of truth apparently agreeing with Mendelssohn, “I, too, know of no eternal truths except those who are unceasingly temporal.” Stephen Dunning ( Tongues of Men ) explains the dense irony of the statement. Hamann is responding to Mendelssohn’s threefold classification of truth as eternal (known by unaided reason), historical (through God’s dealings with the patriarchs), and the specific truth embodied in Jewish moral and ceremonial law. Hamann doesn’t agree with this, arguing instead that reason abstracted from time, place, and revelation knows nothing, and therefore that there are no truths in Mendelssohn’s category of “eternal truths.”

But he rebuts Mendelssohn by quoting fragments of two sections of Mendelssohn’s book. Dunning explains, “Mendelssohn’s own ‘I, too’ occurs in a paragraph in which he is stressing . . . that eternal truths are knowable be reason without regard to time or place. In a completely different part of Jerusalem he also declares that man’s ‘eternity’ is nothing more than an ‘infinitely prolonged temporality.’ By conflating the two passages with his allusive ‘I, too,’ Hamann is able to point out their inconsistency with each other and the fact that Mendelssohn, according to his own understanding of ‘eternity,’ ought to agree with Hamann’s claim that all truths are temporal. If man’s ‘eternity’ is really temporal, then all his knowledge is also temporal.”