Hamann’s Hume

Hamann’s Hume December 16, 2014

Johann Georg Hamann, the devout German philosopher of the Enlightenment age, argues that “a kind of ‘faith’ is involved in everyday life when we recognize the real.” In several places, Hamann attributed this insight to Hume. “The reasonings of a Hume,” he wrote, “may be convincing and their refutations clear postulates and doubts; but faith both wins and loses greatly by this most skilful pettifogger and most honourable attorney. Faith is no work of reason, and cannot therefore be subject to any attack of the same; because faith arises as little from reason as tasting and seeing” (“Socratic Memorabilia,” in Dickson, Relational Metacriticism, 391-392).

In a 1781 letter to Herder, Hamann writes, “Hume is always my man, because he at least honors the principle of belief and has taken it up into his system. Our countryman (Kant) keeps chewing the cud of Hume’s fury against causality, without taking this matter of belief into account” (Quoted in Harold Stahmer, Speak That I May See Thee!”, 91). 

Hamann was no Humean empiricist, however. Decades earlier, he had (perhaps) introduced Kant to Hume with in a letter of commendation and criticism: “the Attic philosopher Hume finds faith necessary, if he desires to eat an egg and drink a glass of water. . . . If he finds faith necessary for eating and drinking, why does he deny his own principle, when he judges higher things than sensual eating and drinking?” (quoted in Stahmer, 81).

This is not a reversion to solipsism or fideism. We access the world “directly,” and our experience is not a matter of “mirrored sensations from which we ‘infer’ the real.” The question, as Milbank states it, is not whether the world exists, but “are these primary appearances themselves disclosive of the real, or do they float upon a void to which they offer no clue? If we assume the latter, then the only solid reality in things will be what we can logically grasp as instantiating repeated laws, and the commonsense reality of things will evaporate in the manner already indicated.” If what is really real consists in “the identically repeated according to logically necessitated laws,” then what we experience is only a “fated chain without meaning” that floats on an abyss defined “by the fundamental law of identity: a = a.” In this case, “the abyss is the underlying reality, and yet it is nothing; the only ‘something’ is the phenomenal fated flux, yet as only phenomenal this is also nothing” (Milbank, Radical Orthodoxy). 

Hamann, on the contrary, believed that the surface appearances were indeed “clues” to what is ultimately real, disclosing the Creator to the creature through the creature.


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