Hegel on Hamann

The Notion of Friendship in Hegel and Hamann

In her book Johann Georg Hamann’s Relational Metacriticism, Gwen Griffith Dickson suggests that “the key to understanding Hamann’s approach to” “language, knowledge, and anthropology” “can be found in the idea of the relationship,” both “the first and foundational . . . human-divine relationship that . . . grounds all being, knowledge and language” and “the relations of one human being to another” which are in fact “no less crucial.”1 In this introductory essay, I would like to focus on a specific kind of relationship which played an absolutely central role in Hamann’s life and, as Hegel stresses, in the genesis and development of his authorship: friendship. Hegel’s review devotes a surprising amount of attention to Hamann ’s personal life. Within Hegel’s consideration of Hamann’s biography and personality, the bond of friendship is even more essential than are familial ties. Hegel’s treatment of Hamann’s friendships—and of the very notion of friendship, a vitalizing “life-pulse” (HH, 45) for Hamann— becomes a recurring theme and is in some passages quite thoroughgoing. Thus, it seems fitting to consider the role that friendship plays not only in Hegel’s review and Hamann’s life, but also in the thought of both men, and in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Germany. Hamann has been described as having a “singular capacity for friendship”2 and a “convivial character” that made him “the epicenter of a circle of friends.”3 He has even been called “a genius of friendship,” full of “an insatiable desire for . . . communication.”4 Hegel himself notes the general importance of friendship “in the affairs of the scholars and literati” (HH, 25) of Hamann’s time.5 But his sustained attention to Hamann’s friendships has still another impetus; it is in large part attributable to the fact that Hamann’s friendships cannot be separated from his life as a thinker and writer. For one thing, many of Hamann’s writings were dedicated to and in fact written for his friends, some of them even qualifying as what in German is called Gelegenheitsdichtung, something written for a quite specific occasion. His Essay of a Sibyl on Marriage (1775), to cite just one example among many, was a gift for his friend, the Riga bookThe Notion of Friendship in Hegel and Hamann xxi seller and publisher Johann Friedrich Hartknoch, upon his marriage to Albertine Toussaint. Publication, too, was bound up with Hamann’s friendships; most of his works “were published as a courtesy.”6 Hegel indicates that Hamann’s friends also helped him at times to overcome his inherently unproductive, even lazy, wasteful nature. Almost any employment Hamann ever held or hoped to hold, he came to through the urging or the assistance of a friend, be it the statesman Karl Friedrich von Moser or even Hamann’s fellow Königsberger, Immanuel Kant.7 And when this employment turned out to be less than lucrative, Hamann depended on subsidies from friends like Johann Gottfried Herder (without whose financial assistance he would have had to sell his library) or Franz von Buchholtz.8 Hamann’s letters contain a veritable collection of often aphoristic views about friendship. He writes in 1758 that “one single friend outweighs all the treasures of India” (R 1:297; ZH 1:249). He calls friends “a gift from God” (R 1:379; ZH 1:324) and friendship “a fruit of the spirit which is also called Friend and Comforter” (R 1:391; ZH 1:338). This is just one of the many declarations in which Hamann demonstrates the connection between his Christianity and his human friendships.9 He writes to his close friend Johann Gotthelf Lindner: “He whom we do not see, even if he is with us, in us and among us, He who fills the room, who separates us two from another, wants our hearts to hear his greeting: ‘Peace be with you!’ wants to send us about his business and his Father’s, and wants to help us lead our whole lives with the dignity and truth of his messenger whom he has sent” (R 1:391; ZH 1:338). Continuing in the biblical reference which pervades all his work, Hamann writes later of “the daily bread of friendship” (R 1:500; ZH 1:436), and calls it later still the “salt and seasoning for our daily bread . . . by which alone man does not live” (R 7:142; ZH 5:167). This conceptual link between Hamann’s friendships and...