Johann Georg Hamann 1730 – 1788

Johann Georg Hamann was a German philosopher of language and religion, often called the Magus of the North. A Konigsberg contemporary and lifelong interlocutor of Kant, he combined a cryptic, allusive prose with a vehement Lutheran-Pietist critique of Enlightenment rationalism. His Socratic Memorabilia, Aesthetica in Nuce, and Metacritique on the Purism of Reason argued that reason is impossible apart from the senses and from a particular language and tradition, and that the abstraction of pure reason from these conditions is a kind of intellectual idolatry. He shaped Herder, Jacobi, the early German Romantics, and through them, Kierkegaard and much later philosophy of language.

Johann Georg Hamann was born at Königsberg in August 1730 and remained, except for short journeys, a Königsberger all his life. He read theology, law, and philology at the university without taking a degree, worked as a private tutor in Livonia and at Riga, and on a 1758 mission to London for the Berens trading firm underwent a profound religious conversion while reading the Bible alone in his rented room. Back in Königsberg he held minor administrative posts in the customs service, lived in close friendship and dispute with Kant and Herder, and corresponded with Jacobi, Lavater, and a wide European circle.

His writings are characteristically short, dense, ironic, and almost untranslatable; the most important are the Sokratische Denkwürdigkeiten (1759), the Kreuzzüge des Philologen (1762) with its 'Aesthetica in nuce', the open letters of the Hierophantischen Briefe, the late Metakritik über den Purismum der Vernunft (written 1784, published 1800) against Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and a vast correspondence.

Hamann, the 'Magus of the North', argued that reason cannot be separated from language, sense, history, and faith and so cannot purify itself in the way Kant proposed; his defence of the embodied, particular, and revealed against the universalising Enlightenment shaped Herder, Jacobi, Goethe's Sturm und Drang, and through them Romanticism and Kierkegaard. He died on a visit to Princess Gallitzin's circle at Münster in June 1788.