Hamann is an esoteric writer. He peppers in obscure references to biblical passages and philosophical tracts on every page, sometimes even multiple times in one rambling sentence. He had to obfuscate cleverly to say what he wanted to say, to be able to bash the contemporary rationalizing trends of Frederick II, and to not get in trouble. Frederick II was, after all, the man who paid his keep. And Hamann would insist—not well. Therefore, he used allegory and subterfuge to hide his true meanings. Hamann toiled in relative obscurity compared to his friend, Johann Herder, and his most frequent sparring partner, Immanuel Kant. Nonetheless, he was known by some, in his time, as the Magus of the North.
Hamann’s writings are hidden with jewels for those inclined to suffer over the lines and dig them out. He wrote much on the origins of culture and, especially, language. “There must be similarities among all human languages based on the uniformity of our nature…. The natural mode of thinking has an influence on language…. The lineaments of a people’s language will therefore correspond with the orientation of its mode of thinking, which is revealed through the nature, form, laws, and customs of its speech as well as through its external culture and through a spectacle of public actions…. From this orientation of the mode of thinking arises the comparative wealth in some areas of the language and the poverty that runs parallel to it in other areas.”
Hamann was a pietist and a traditionalist. He despised the modern trends towards the primacy of reason cleft from culture. “The man to whom history (by virtue of its name) yields science, and philosophy knowledge, and poetry taste not only becomes eloquent himself but almost always the equal of the ancient orators…. Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race, as the garden is older than the ploughed field; painting, than writing; song, than declamation; parables, than logical deduction; barter, than commerce. A deeper sleep was the repose of our most distant ancestors, and their movement was a frenzied dance…. The senses and passions speak and understand nothing but images. All the wealth of human knowledge and happiness consists in images…. Is all your human reason anything other than tradition and inheritance, and is anything much involved in tracing the pedigree of your trite, bald, and twice dead opinions to the roots of the family tree?”
Tradition, for Hamann, was the wellspring of all morality. Free will was also a necessary condition of humanity. “Without the freedom to be evil there is no merit, and without the freedom to be good no responsibility for one’s own guilt, and indeed no knowledge of good and evil. Freedom is the maximum and minimum of all our natural powers as well as both the fundamental drive and the final goal of their entire orientation, evolution, and return…. Everyone is his own legislator but also the first-born and the neighbor of his subjects…. Without fire and hearth, one is no citizen; without land and people, no prince; and the priestly nation of a mere bookbag-religion is, according to the expression of Scripture, a reproach to God and to divine reason.”
Despite being a Christian preacher and bashing Moses Mendelssohn mercilessly, Hamann had immense respect for Jewish tradition and, especially, the Old Testament. “A philosopher and citizen of the world ought to value the most ancient document because it concerns the entire human race and also because Moses illuminates the human race’s true relationships to his people without selfish prejudices…. However favorable the most recent etymology of the word Adel [“nobility”] from an Arabic root may be to the European centaur-knighthood, the Jew nevertheless is still the authentic first nobleman of the entire human race, and the prejudice of their family and ancestral pride is grounded more deeply than all the titles in the ludicrous chancery style of heraldry.”
Finally, Hamann blends reason and faith into a true complete knowledge. “The spirit of observation and the spirit of prophecy are the wings of human genius. All that is present belongs to the domain of the former; all that is absent, the past and the future, belongs to the domain of the latter. Philosophical genius expresses its power through striving, by means of abstraction, to make what is present absent; it disrobes actual objects into naked concepts and merely conceivable attributes, into pure appearances and phenomena. Poetic genius expresses its power through transfiguring, by means of fiction, visions of the absent past and future into present representations. Criticism and politics resist the usurpations of both powers and ensure that they are balanced, through these positive forces and means of observation and prophecy…. Since the sum of the present is infinitely small as against the manifold aggregate of the absent, and since the spirit of prophecy is infinitely superior to the simple spirit of observation, it therefore follows that our faculty of knowledge depends on the many-headed modifications of the inmost, darkest, and deepest instincts of approbation and desire, to which it must be subject.”
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