Abstract
It has been apparent that Hamann’s attacks upon the philosophies of the Enlightenment lean heavily upon the “natural” use of the human reason.
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Man’s origin out of “dust” and his constitution of “earth” ought to teach him humility (cf. II, 332), and make him wary of intellectual schemes which obscure this fact. For this reason (as Hamann wrote to Kant) “an historical plan of a science is always better than a logical plan since it contains in itself the origin of things.” (Two Love Letters to a Teacher of Philosophy Who Would Write a Physics Book for Children, II, 373).
Not Hamann’s term!
“Also in the kitchen are the gods and what Descartes says of his cogito [“I think, therefore I am”], of this the activity of my stomach convinces me.” (To Jacobi, 8–9 Apr. 178).
Hamann’s quote is taken directly from the Luther-Bible, Acts 17: 28.
Hippocrates of Cos (ca. 420 B. C), the “physician”. Cf. Nadler, VI, 179.
II Pet. 1: 4 — “teilhaftig werdet der göttlichen Natur” (Luther-Bible).
Cf. Hamann’s reference in KONXOMPAX (III, 224) to “the eternal mystical, magical “Precisely this union with God is the foretaste of heaven and heaven itself; it is the last rung of the ladder which connects earth, the footstool, with the throne of God. This participation in the divine nature was the purpose of the incarnation of God, and both alike are great mysteries, which however are adumbrated in the nature of man and his constitution [i.e. the union of body and soul].” (I, 267-268).
Cf. Hamann’s last major work: Entkleidung und Verklärung, (1786).
Cf. this passage in Thoughts on the Course of My Life: “It is nearer possibility to live without heart and head than without Him. He is the head of our nature and of all our powers and the source of movement which in a Christian can as little stand still as the pulse in a living man. The Christian alone is a living man and an eternal and immortal living man, because he lives in God and with God, moves and is present indeed for God.” (II, 48).
Cf. Hamann to Jacobi, 14 Nov. 1784: “Experience and revelation are of one kind, and indispensable wings or supports of reason, if it is not to remain lame and is not to creep [Jn. 5: 3?].”
Hamann refers of course to the title of his last important work, Exposure and Transfiguration, in which he exposes his own literary ruse and admits the authorship of all the anonymous and pseudonymous works he has published. Cf. also his letter to Jacobi, 4 Nov. 1786, in which he refers to the “exposure of my little authorship and transfiguration of its purpose, which is to renew the misunderstood Christianity and Lutheranism ….” (italics mine). The perception of the unity of reason and scripture means an attack upon spurious conceptions of Christianity as well as spurious concepts of reason.
Cf. Hamann in Golgatha and Scheblimini, III, 309, 310.
Cf. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part XII.
Cf. also the passage in the Knight of the Rose Cross where Hamann speaks ironically: “Indeed, don’t you finally realize, Philosopher! that there is no physical bond between cause and effect, means and ends, but an intellectual and ideal one, namely one of blind faith, as the world’s greatest writer (Hume) of the history of his country [‘History of England’] and of the ‘natural church’ [natural religion] has preached.” (III, 29).
“I am the chief of sinners, says the greatest apostle; not I was, but I am still.” (Hamann to J. G. Lindner, 5 June 1759). “May God be gracious to us all! And forgive us the sins of our good intentions and good works.” (To G. I. Lindner, Nov. 1758?). Therefore: “Christ is the door — and not morality, bourgeois righteousness, industrious community service, and charities.” (To J. G. Lindner, 5 June 1759). “The morality of actions therefore seems rather to be a standard of work-righteousness than that of a life hidden with Christ in God.” (Königsberg Times, 30 Mar. 1764).
Kant has made only one mistake in his project to produce a “pure reason”. Like the man in the fable who befriended the snake, Kant has taken the “ugly bosom-snake of the common vernacular” to his breast, and this seemingly innocuous act is the greatest threat to his system (III, 287).
“Without word, no reason — no world. Here is the source of creation and providence!” (To Jacobi, 2 Nov. 1783).
To Jacobi (22 Jan. 1785): “… Yet it is not being but consciousness of being which is the source of all misery.”
“… All things, even the ens entium, are there for enjoyment, but not for speculation. Through the tree of knowledge are we deprived of the tree of life… All terminology of metaphysics is related to this historical fact [the Old Adam vs. the New] …” (To Jacobi, 14 Nov. 1784). Things (language, reason) are given to man, but not for him to use to transgress the boundaries in trying to reach the divine. As a consequence of doing so, language is under the “curse”, as all else. Hamann is saying that in taking up the cross of the New Adam, not the stance of the Old Adam, language (even an abstraction as ens entium) can be put back into our hands.
“Manichaeism lies in our nature as it does in our misunderstandings of the same — the antidote is the spirit of invisible and unrecognized truth …” (To Jacobi, 16…17 May 1788).
“Good and evil are basically only general notions, which do no more than indicate a relation of ourselves to other objects and of these objects to ourselves. We stand therefore in relation to other things, and upon this connection rests not only our true essence and our own nature but also all the vicissitudes and nuances to which it is susceptible. Nothing throws more extraordinary light on the nature of things than the great truth of our Savior: ‘No one is good but God alone.’ Instead of demanding the origin of evil then, we ought rather to invert the question and be amazed that finite creatures are capable of being good and happy. In this consists the true mystery of the wisdom, omnipotence and love of God. This philosophical curiosity which is amazed and disturbed so much by the question as to the origin of evil can almost be regarded as the obscure conscience of the image of God in our reason … of which the true meaning ought inversely to obtain, because in this inversion resides a cabala, a hidden meaning.” (I, 304, 305).
“In the world you have anxiety, but be comforted — the prince of this world may appear to us as black as he will, yet he is a diaconus of the dear God. …” (To Herder, 15–17 Sept. 1781).
“God takes the pains to form the dust of the earth; the rest of creation appears in this regard to be an opus tumultuarium [Latin: “hastily drawn together”]. The greatest mystery is concluded: God breathes on the work he has formed. This breathing is the end of the entire creation, just as our glorified Savior imparted the fruits of his great redemption in just this form of a mysterious breathing on his disciples. John 20: 22…. The gift of our breath is from God and rests in His hand; the use of it is left with us. Let us never forget that the same nature whose presence we infer from life’s breath belongs to God, and is related immediately to Him; that therefore it can fulfill itself and be satisfied in no other direction but only if it return to its origin and source; that every deviation of the same is contrary to its nature and happiness; that our souls have not their existence merely from His word but an existence from His breath … that we in all our activities have need of His presence just as for our powers of life and action we need breath.” (I, 15-16).
Erwin Metzke, J. G. Hamanns Stellung in der Philosophie des 18 Jahrhunderts, cf. pp. 77, 91.
Cf. Hamann to Jacobi, 22–23 Apr. 1787: “Besides the principio cognoscendi there is no special principium essendi for us. Cogito, ergo sum is in this sense true.”
“From heaven must our philosophy begin, and not from the theatro anatomico and the sectioning of a cadaver” (To Herder, 6 Aug. 1784).
Cf.: “He loved us from eternity in His son and chose us in Him. Nothing but love — in the creation — in the Fall — in the incarnation of God — indeed even to the provision of eternity…. This election in Jesus moved God to create me in Adam, to make me like His only-begotten Son and bring salvation through Him …” (I, 259).
Hamann saw the task of the Christian life as one of accomplishing unity, and expressed this by a curious figure: “Morality is nothing but syntax. Herein consists my method. … To bring into symmetry the feet and the body with the inner man — this has been my work.” (To F. E. Lindner, Whit-Monday, 1783).
Also Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (1702-1782)? His famous idea that “bodiness is the end of all the ways of God” is sometimes put in the mouth of Hamann. For a discussion see C. A. Auberlen, Die Theosophie Friedrich Christoph Oetingers nach ihren Gründzügen (Tübingen, 1847), pp. 129, 155, 446f, 516 (cited by Karlfried Gründer in Johann Georg Hamanns Hauptschriften erklärt, I, 45). Carl Dyrssen (“Hamann und Oetinger”, Zeitwende, 1925, I, p. 395) quotes Oetinger in a somewhat different form, viz.: “Indestructibility of the body is the end of all the works of God.”
So far from regarding the flesh as the seat of man’s sin or the inner soul as a refuge from evil, for Hamann “the body is the clothing of the soul; it covers its nakedness and shame”. Also: “How horrifying perhaps would man be if the body did not hold him in bounds.” (I, 309). Likewise Hamann’s ethic is not ascetic or world-denying; it emphasizes heavily the enjoyment of all of life and contentment with one’s lot. Hamann loved companionship, and food and drink, — frequent gifts of his friends. “Eat your bread with joy, drink your wine with a good spirit, for your work pleases God. Enjoy your life with your wife whom you hold dear. …” [Eccl. 9: 7, 9] (To Lavater, 18 Jan. 1778). Next to books and philosophies, the topics most mentioned in his letters are food and drink. For a discussion of abnormal manifestations, see Salmony I, pp. 124-136.
It might be expected that for Hamann Christianity is not bodiless.
This is the real key to what Hamann is thinking in the “principle of the coincidence of opposites.”
In the Philippic Gloss (1762) Hamann speaks of the Genius Creator, Genius Mediator, and Genius Author (II, 294).
Fritz Thorns, Hauptprobleme der Religionsphilosophie bei Johann Georg Hamann (Erlangen: Gutenberg Druckerei, 1929), p. 28.
Cf. Rudolf Unger, Hamann und die Aufklärung, I, 547f., where it is called an old German obscenity.
Does Hamann also think of an ontological redemptive relation between mankind and Christ which obtains apart from a conscious participation in this relation? Cf. his Biblical Meditations (I, 213): “Every sinner bears the image of the crucified Savior in himself. Behold the Man! said Pilate, as God said: Behold Adam has become as one of us. We all bear not only God’s image but also that of the Redeemer.”
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© 1966 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Alexander, W.M. (1966). Idololatria: Philosophy as a Contrary Faith (Con’t.). In: Johann Georg Hamann Philosophy and Faith. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-9237-8_6
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