Hamann, Kant, Enlightenment

Hamann, Kant, Enlightenment December 23, 2015

According to Hamann, the guilt of the dependent is not in “laziness or cowardice,” as Kant seems to imply. “No, in the blindness of his guardian who pretends to see, and precisely for this reason must assume responsibility for the guilt of all.” Again, “How can one mock the laziness of such dependents when their enlightened and self-thinking guardian . . . does not even see them as machines, but merely as shadows of his own greatness, whom he in no way needs to fear, since they are his ministering spirits, the only ones that he believes to exist.” 

Hamann considers Kant vain, and sees this vanity as the one disqualification for Kant as a guide.

This leads into a larger condemnation of the Enlightenment as such: “the Enlightenment of our century is merely a northern light, which reveals no cosmopolitan chiliasm but that which can be prophesied in a sleeping cap and behind the stove. . . . It is a cold, unfruitful moonlight . . . – and the whole answer to the posed question is a blind illumination for every dependent, who strolls under the midday [sun].”

Hamann puts the point rather dramatically: Kant sees enlightenment fulfilled in “personal autonomy,” while Hamann sees it in “the mature recognition of one’s dependence.” In place of Kant’s definition of Enlightenment, Hamann says, “My transfiguration of the Kantian explanation amounts to this: the true enlightenment consists in a departure of the dependent human being from an exceedingly self-incurred guardianship. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”

Hamann also recognizes that Kant’s definition of enlightenment is metaphor-dependent, drawing as it does on Lessing’s “dependency-guardianship” contrast. Hamann doesn’t believe that this distinction can be made an absolute one. Enlightenment is described in “aesthetic terms,” Bayer says, and thus “even Kant’s allegedly pure reason is in no way ‘pure,’ but stands in need of sensible images.” Hamann wants to bring Kant down to earth, to the level of normal language, where reason is always embedded in the play of particular language and tropes.

Were Kant to recognize the role of language, he would not be able to elevate reason to the level of supreme judge. And Hamann is also concerned with Kant’s quite literal guilt in promoting the “enlightened” despotism of the regime of Frederick the Great.

Hamann’s purpose in addressing Kant is ultimately evangelical. As John Betz says, “Kant needs to be converted to Christianity: from servility to the god of the age to the freedom of the children of God; from the notion of an imminent, secular eschatology, a ‘cosmopolitan chiliasm’ heralded by his own philosophy, to the patient waiting of Christian existence ‘between the times’; and, thus, to that true enlightenment which consists not in the titanic loneliness of personal autonomy but in the intimate freedom, the ‘mature dependence’ of a child of God, who – beyond every opposition established by an ideological hierarchy – is free to be both guardian and dependent at once.” 

Hamann also discerns that the center of Kant’s view of enlightenment turns on the belief that public and private can be strictly separated. Hamann doesn’t believe this possible, and he believes any approach to this ideal would be despotic. Public and private cannot be separated, and it’s a “political obligation . . . to unify both natures, that of a dependent and that of a guardian” in one.


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