Johann Georg Hamann Quotes on Truth
Johann Georg Hamann’s Socratic Memorabilia (1759), Aesthetica in Nuce (1762), and the late Metacritique on the Purism of Reason (1784) gave the German Counter-Enlightenment its most distinctive treatment of philosophical truth. The central thesis is that genuine truth is always concrete, embodied, linguistic, and historical — the Enlightenment’s pure reason is a fiction whose covert reliance on the very embodied conditions it claims to transcend is exposed by the careful philological-philosophical analysis Hamann directed against Kant and the broader Enlightenment program. The framework, drawing on Lutheran biblical theology, the late ancient Christian critics of pagan philosophy, and the broader European literary tradition, shaped subsequent German thought through Herder, Jacobi, Kierkegaard, and the broader anti-Enlightenment philosophical tradition that runs through the present.
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:
“Reason is impossible without faith in language.”
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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. -
Attributed to Johann Georg Hamann:
“Christianity is folly to the wise but wisdom to the simple.”
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“The philosophers have always given truth a bill of divorce, by separating what nature has joined together and vice versa.”
Sämtliche Werken, ed. Josef Nadler (1949-1957), vol. III, p. 40. -
“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. -
“A thirsty ambition for truth and virtue, and a frenzy to conquer all lies and vices which are not recognized as such nor desire to be; herein consists the heroic spirit of the philosopher.”
Socratic Memorabilia , J. Flaherty, trans. (Baltimore: 1967), p. 147.