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Ever since first reading Milbank\u2019s Theology and Society Theory <\/i> , I\u2019ve been intrigued by the work of JG Hamann. A recent brief article by John R. Betz in Modern Theology <\/i> (April 2004) raised my interest again. Betz reviews Oswald Bayer\u2019s recent Vernunft ist Sprache: Hamanns Metakritik Kants <\/i> , and provides the best short summary of Hamann I\u2019ve seen. Some highlights: <\/p>\n
1) The title of Bayer\u2019s book, Reason is Language <\/i> , summarizes one of Hamann\u2019s characteristic ideas. In a letter to Herder, Hamann wrote, \u201cReason is language, logos; this is the marrowbone on which I gnaw, and I will gnaw myself to death on it.\u201d Bayer makes it clear that this equation is theologically grounded, in a couple of ways. First, creation itself is speech: \u201ca speech to the creature through the creature,\u201d so that \u201cevery phenomenon of nature was a word -the sign, symbol, and pledge of a new, mysterious, inexpressible, but all the more intimate union, sharing, and communion of divine energies and ideas. All that the man heard from the beginning, saw with his eyes, looked upon and touched with his hands was a living word; for God was the Word.\u201d Betz describes Hamann\u2019s achievement as \u201ca Christological overcoming of all purely rational metaphysics,\u201d summarized in Hamann\u2019s statement, \u201cWhat in your language is Being, I prefer to call the Word.\u201d <\/p>\n
Second, Hamann\u2019s critique of Kant derives from this Christological and linguistic understanding of reality. Languages are diverse, and this diversity means that there is a plurality of \u201creasons\u201d that cannot be resolved prior to the eschaton. Kant \u201cimmanentizes the eschaton\u201d by assuming a vantage point BEYOND the plurality of reasons and languages. But this is a ruse, for one can write a genealogy of Kant: Berkeley begat Hume begat Kant, and even Kant writes a \u201chistory of pure reason.\u201d <\/p>\n
Kant, moreover, \u201csystematically brackets empirical (and so too linguistic) considerations,\u201d and thus \u201cfalls prey to the \u2018seductions\u2019 of language, i.e., the metaphors that undermine the alleged purity of his discourse from the start\u201d (this is Betz\u2019s summary). <\/p>\n
2) Hamann charges Kant with a form of gnosticism and mysticism. The \u201cCritique of Pure Reason . . . could just as well have been called the mysticum on account of its ideal,\u201d which is, as Betz says, \u201can ideal at which one arrives by the evacuation of everything material.\u201d Kant accused Hamann of being a religious fanatic, but, Betz says, Hamann perceived that Kant was \u201cthe real Schwarmer,\u201d one (Hamann\u2019s words) \u201cwho raves more about space and time than Plato does about the intellectual world.\u201d Over against Kant\u2019s inaccessible and perhaps fictional point of unity, Hamann insists that God surrounds us, and speaks to us constantly through the creation. In Bayer\u2019s summary, \u201cThe reason that God cannot be proven theoretically is, according to Hamann, precisely not that it is impossible for God to be given to intuition and experience, but, entirely to the contrary, that God is always already so present in the concrete reality of creation that \u2018one does not know how to save oneself from his innermost activity.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n
3) Hamann sees Kant\u2019s attempt to cover up the antinomies of pure reason as nothing more than an effort to paper over the fallenness of reason. Bayer summarizes, \u201cFor Hamann this naturalization is the hypocritical transfiguration of a hamartiological condition, the covering of the nakedness of fallen reason, whose ignorance is concealed by philosophy, and whose vice is concealed by law.\u201d Moreover, Babel has intervened: In a letter to Jacobi, Hamann wrote, \u201cFor me it is not so much the question: what is reason? But rather: what is language? And I suspect that this is the ground of all the paralogism and antinomies that one attributes to the former.\u201d <\/p>\n
There\u2019s much more packed into this dense essay review. A fine and provocative introduction to Hamann. <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ever since first reading Milbank\u2019s Theology and Society Theory , I\u2019ve been intrigued by the work of JG Hamann. A recent brief article by John R. Betz in Modern Theology (April 2004) raised my interest again. Betz reviews Oswald Bayer\u2019s recent Vernunft ist Sprache: Hamanns Metakritik Kants , and provides the best short summary of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy"],"yoast_head":"\n