Johann Georg Hamann Quotes on Knowledge
Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788) — the Magus of the North — gave the German Counter-Enlightenment its principal philosophical voice in the Socratic Memorabilia (1759), Aesthetica in Nuce (1762), and the Metacritique on the Purism of Reason (1784). The constant target is the Kantian and broader Enlightenment program of pure reason — reason abstracted from the embodied, historical, linguistic, and religious conditions under which actual human cognition occurs. Reason, Hamann argues, is always linguistic and so always traditional and historical; the abstraction of pure reason from language produces an empty formalism that can sustain itself only by a continual covert reliance on the very embodied conditions it claims to have left behind. The framework shaped Herder, Jacobi, Kierkegaard, and the broader anti-Enlightenment tradition, and is the principal German philosophical alternative to Kant.
Quotes
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Attributed to Johann Georg Hamann:
“Language is the mother of reason and revelation, their A and Omega.”
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Attributed to Johann Georg Hamann:
“All philosophy that ignores the senses is empty word-magic.”
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“Poetry is the mother tongue of the human race.”
Sämtliche Werken, ed. Josef Nadler (Vienna: Verlag Herder, 1949-1957), vol. II, p. 197. -
“Self knowledge begins with the neighbor, the mirror, and just the same with true self-love; that goes from the mirror to the matter.”
Briefwechsel, ed. Arthur Henkel (1955-1975), vol. VI, p. 281. -
“Few authors understand themselves, and a proper reader must not only understand his author but also be able to see beyond him.”
Briefwechsel, ed. Arthur Henkel (1955-1975), vol. VI, p. 22. -
“Being, belief and reason are pure relations, which cannot be dealt with absolutely, and are not things but pure scholastic concepts, signs for understanding, not for worshipping, aids to awaken our attention, not to fetter it.”
Briefwechsel, ed. Arthur Henkel (1955-1975), vol. VII, p. 165.