Hamann

Ever since first reading Milbank’s Theology and Society Theory , I’ve 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’s recent Vernunft ist Sprache: Hamanns Metakritik Kants , and provides the best short summary of Hamann I’ve seen. Some highlights:

1) The title of Bayer’s book, Reason is Language , summarizes one of Hamann’s characteristic ideas. In a letter to Herder, Hamann wrote, “Reason is language, logos; this is the marrowbone on which I gnaw, and I will gnaw myself to death on it.” Bayer makes it clear that this equation is theologically grounded, in a couple of ways. First, creation itself is speech: “a speech to the creature through the creature,” so that “every 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.” Betz describes Hamann’s achievement as “a Christological overcoming of all purely rational metaphysics,” summarized in Hamann’s statement, “What in your language is Being, I prefer to call the Word.”

Second, Hamann’s 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 “reasons” that cannot be resolved prior to the eschaton. Kant “immanentizes the eschaton” 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 “history of pure reason.”

Kant, moreover, “systematically brackets empirical (and so too linguistic) considerations,” and thus “falls prey to the ‘seductions’ of language, i.e., the metaphors that undermine the alleged purity of his discourse from the start” (this is Betz’s summary).

2) Hamann charges Kant with a form of gnosticism and mysticism. The “Critique of Pure Reason . . . could just as well have been called the mysticum on account of its ideal,” which is, as Betz says, “an ideal at which one arrives by the evacuation of everything material.” Kant accused Hamann of being a religious fanatic, but, Betz says, Hamann perceived that Kant was “the real Schwarmer,” one (Hamann’s words) “who raves more about space and time than Plato does about the intellectual world.” Over against Kant’s inaccessible and perhaps fictional point of unity, Hamann insists that God surrounds us, and speaks to us constantly through the creation. In Bayer’s summary, “The 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 ‘one does not know how to save oneself from his innermost activity.’”

3) Hamann sees Kant’s attempt to cover up the antinomies of pure reason as nothing more than an effort to paper over the fallenness of reason. Bayer summarizes, “For 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.” Moreover, Babel has intervened: In a letter to Jacobi, Hamann wrote, “For 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.”

There’s much more packed into this dense essay review. A fine and provocative introduction to Hamann.