Johann Georg Hamann and the Enlightenment Project

364 Pages·2011·1.064 MB·English

by  Robert Alan Sparling

JOHANN GEORG HAMANN AND
THE ENLIGHTENMENT PROJECT
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ROBERT ALAN SPARLING
Johann Georg Hamann and
the Enlightenment Project
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Toronto Buffalo London
©University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2011
Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
Printed in Canada
ISBN 978-1-4426-4215-7
Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-
based inks.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Sparling, Robert Alan, 1975–
Johann Georg Hamann and the enlightenment project / Robert Alan Sparling.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4426-4215-7
1.Hamann, Johann Georg, 1730–1788. I. Title.
B2993.S63 2011 193 C2010-906222-1
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian
Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to
Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its
publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts
Council.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the
Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing
activities.
Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xix
A Note on Citation xxi
PART ONE: ENLIGHTENMENT AND HAMANN’S
REACTION
1 Introduction: The Enlightenment as a Historical Movement
and Political Project 3
2 Transfiguring the Enlightenment: Hamann and the Problem
of Public Reason 25
PART TWO: THE POLITICS OF METACRITIQUE:
HAMANN CONTRA KANT
3 Critique and Metacritique: Kant and Hamann 57
4 Varieties of Copernican Turn 76
5 The Ideas of God and the Person 85
PART THREE: LANGUAGE AND THE CITY IN MODERN
NATURAL LAW: HAMANN’S CONTROVERSY WITH
MOSES MENDELSSOHN
6 Leviathan and Jerusalem: Rights and ‘the Laws of Wisdom
and Goodness’ 105
vi Contents
7 Faith, Inside and Out: Convictions versus Actions, Eternity versus
History 121
8 L anguage and Society 139
PART FOUR: PRACTICAL REFLECTIONS OF AN
IMPRACTICAL MAN: HAMANN CONTRA FREDERICK II
9 The Language of Enlightenment and the Practice of Despotism:
J.G. Hamann’s Polemics against Frederick the Great 159
PART FIVE: AESTHETICS: HAMANN’S ANTI-ARTISTIC
AESTHETICISM
10 Aesthetic, All Too Aesthetic: Hamann on the Battle between Poetry
and Philosophy 195
11 Conclusion 224
Notes 233
Bibliography 325
Index 337
Preface
The work of Johann Georg Hamann has been at once the steady object
of admiration and neglect. Historians of ideas are well aware of his
significance in late eighteenth-century German thought, and many
philosophers have expressed wonder at the degree to which he appears
to ‘anticipate’ modern developments, notably the linguistic turn in
philosophy, the emphasis on aesthetics, and the insistence on the con-
cerned nature of philosophy that so captivated Nietzsche, Kierkegaard,
later so-called existentialists, and postmodern analysts of power. Yet
for all that Hamann looked forward to the main trends of twentieth-
century thought, he also looked backward to the authority of the divine
word, the Heilsgeschichte of the Old and New testaments, and to a view
of the world as divine language. Thus, Hamann opposed the Enlight-
enment with weapons that appear to us as both pre- and postmodern.
For every aspect of Hamann’s thought that appears tailor-made for our
era there are equally important elements that jar, that disturb, or that
evoke incomprehension.
This is a study of Hamann’s significance for political philosophy. It
attempts both to contextualize his thought and to indicate the enduring
significance of his position. The study is framed around the eighteenth-
century movement known as the Enlightenment and the trans-historical
battles over the Enlightenment Project. Hamann saw himself as an op-
ponent of his age and its ideals; the first chapter of this work will de-
fend and define these widely used and widely contested terms, the
Enlightenment and the Enlightenment Project. Before we begin, however,
it is worthwhile to make several preliminary remarks about the method
and intent of this work.
viii Preface
Hamann is not an easy writer to read, but the difficulties that one
encounters in his texts are distinct from those encountered in many
philosophers said to be difficult. Systematic writers like Hegel or Kant
employ a series of philosophical terms of art that one must master as
one proceeds – slow, attentive reading suffices. In the case of oracular
writers like the late Heidegger, one must make great effort to break
through their purposely opaque vocabulary. Unlike the systematic or
the oracular writers, Hamann’s method is ironic and allusive. He only
employs other people’s terms of art, and his intent is invariably to alter
their meaning. The ‘ironic’ and occasional nature of his works presents
certain difficulties that can be overcome only by attending to their con-
texts (both literary and historical). The other aspect of his writing that
renders it difficult is its density. Any given sentence from a Hamannian
piece usually implies several arguments by way of numerous allusions
(usually humorously rendered) to the Bible, to the text(s) he is attacking,
and, more often than not, to some other work that would appear to be
related only tangentially to the matter at hand. He juxtaposes radically
different thoughts in wild non sequiturs, and the argument is to be
found in the space between. He overlays the vocabulary of one text
onto the grammatical construction of another and leaves the reader to
piece together the meaning. We will discuss at some length the signifi-
cance of these stylistic oddities in chapter 2; for the moment, I wish
merely to indicate the difficulties in proceeding. Given the occasional
and allusive nature of Hamann’s writing, no discussion of his work can
avoid extensive textual exegesis, but such exegesis always runs the
danger of overwhelming the analysis of the works. Thus, while making
ample use of the now-sizeable exegetical literature on the subject, I will
attempt to refrain from a tendentious Entstehungsgeschichte so as not to
lose our way in the labyrinth of references.
I have written this work in the awareness of Hamann’s relative ob-
scurity, and I have thus never assumed familiarity with his oeuvre.
However, I have not attempted to write an introduction to Hamann’s
thought. In the German academy, this job has already been accom-
plished by such writers as Sven-Aage Jørgensen and Oswald Bayer.1
For la Francophonie, the job was amply done by Jean Blum’s interpretive
biography.2 The English-speaking academy is surprisingly well served,
containing several brief, readable accounts of Hamann’s life and work.3
Isaiah Berlin’s The Magus of the North, with which I find fault, is none-
theless a brisk and lively treatment. More substantive but equally read-
able introductory works have been penned by James O’Flaherty and
Preface ix
W.M. Alexander. Gwen Griffith-Dickson offers a thorough exegesis of
many of Hamann’s more important works, placing helpful emphasis
on the ‘relational’ nature of Hamannian epistemology. Ronald Gregor
Smith offers a readable and competent treatment (although he tends
towards excessive manipulation of the texts in order to clothe Hamann
in the garb of existentialism). All of them undertake the task of introdu-
cing ‘the Magus of the North’ to the anglophone world. It would be
somewhat superfluous to add to these. My purpose is to illuminate
Hamann’s location within the history of political thought and to indi-
cate his importance for political philosophy today.
This application might at first glimpse surprise the reader. The bulk
of extant Hamann scholarship exists in three fields of study: theology,
comparative literature, and philosophy. Theological writers have sought
in Hamann a particularly modern way of remaining Christian in the
wake of metaphysics’ demise. To these writers, Hamann presents a
helpful mode of recuperating God’s address to humanity and of salva-
ging meaning in a post-metaphysical world. Hamann’s insistence on
human limitations is a source of fideistic glee to such interpreters.4 In
the field of comparative literature, Hamann holds an important place in
the development of the Sturm und Drang. Writers have examined the
influence and meaning of his curious style and located it within the
traditions of the baroque and the Renaissance – here Hamann both fore-
shadows the romantic stylistic extravagancies and recalls the humanis-
tic insistence on rhetoric’s philosophical importance.5 Finally, there has
been significant attention paid to Hamann’s philosophical claims, and
particularly to his reception of Hume and reaction to Kant.6 Here,
Hamann is located as one of Kant’s earliest critics and as an important
mediating voice between Hume and Kant. Writers from all of these
disciplines have noted the degree to which Hamann’s inquiries were
very much in the spirit of practical philosophy, and all of Hamann’s
interpreters have been struck by the fervour of his political outbursts,
but there has been no systematic study of his thought from the perspec-
tive of political philosophy.
The subject that occupied Hamann throughout his life was com-
munication – the communication between people and the communica-
tion between God and humanity. As a young man, Hamann was a
bibliophile with a great enthusiasm for the latest literature. But in his
twenties he had a spiritual crisis and an encounter with the divine, not
on a road to Damascus, but in an equally unlikely place for God to ap-
pear, London. Undertaking a commercial/diplomatic mission (whose