Hamann and the Tradition

2. “There Is an Idol in the Temple of Learning”: Hamann and the History of Philosophy (Kenneth Haynes)

33 2 “There Is an Idol in the Temple of Learning”: Hamann and the History of Philosophy Kenneth Haynes “Poor Hamann,” Kierkegaard (or “Johannes Climacus”) apostrophizes in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846): I will not conceal the fact that I admire Hamann, although I readily admit that, if he is supposed to have worked coherently, the elasticity of his thoughts lacks evenness and his preternatural resilience lacks self-control. But the originality of genius is there in his brief statements, and the pithiness of form corresponds completely to the desultory hurling forth of a thought. With heart and soul, down to his last drop of blood, he is concentrated in a single word, a highly gifted genius’s passionate protest against a system of existence. But the system is hospitable . Poor Hamann, you have been reduced to a subsection [reduceret paa en §] by Michelet. Whether your grave has ever been marked, I do not know; whether it is now trampled upon, I do not know; but I do know that by hook or by crook you have been stuck into the subsection uniform [§-Uniformen] and thrust into the ranks. Immediately after his comments on Hamann, Kierkegaard continues with a similar apostrophe to Jacobi: I do not deny that Jacobi has often inspired me, although I am well aware that his dialectical skill is not in proportion to his noble enthusiasm , but he is the eloquent protest of a noble, unadulterated, lovable, highly gifted mind against the systematic crimping of existence, a triumphant consciousness of and an inspired battling for the significance of existence as something longer and deeper than the few years during which one forgets oneself in studying the system. Poor Jacobi! 34 K E N N E T H H A Y N E S Whether anyone visits your grave, I do not know; but I do know that the subsection-plow [§ens Plov] plows under all your eloquence, all your inwardness, while a few paltry words are being registered about your importance in the system.1 Kierkegaard’s irony in these passages makes his point clear: Hamann and Jacobi can be admired safely in certain limited ways—their hearts are in the right place, they write in striking styles—but they offer no substantial resistance to the System. In this respect, they are both to be contrasted with Lessing, of whom Kierkegaard writes: “no one was equal to putting an end to Lessing and having him world-historically butchered, salted, and packed in a paragraph” (or “killed and world-historically butchered and salted in a §”).2 Though Hamann’s brief, pithy, and passionate sentences inspire admiration, they nonetheless fail to offer significant resistance to, or an alternative to, the system of philosophy as it had developed since his time. Kierkegaard’s claims, and his mockery of Karl Ludwig Michelet, presuppose an understanding of Hamann that emerged in the middle third of the nineteenth century, when the parallel between Hamann and Jacobi became commonplace. In this understanding, despite the official parallelism, Jacobi is the one who is effectively responsible for the philosophical work of the larger context. This is the case with Kierkegaard , whose attention in this part of the work is far more occupied by Jacobi’s philosophical battles than by Hamann’s, in the recapitulation of Lessing’s alleged Spinozism, in the discussion of the leap of faith, and implicitly in references to the system, which begins with the immediate, but does so through reflection, and then gets into trouble: these are Jacobi’s concerns, and those of German idealism, rather than Hamann’s. In this regard, Kierkegaard’s account is typical of mid-century histories of modern philosophy, in which Hamann is usually considered in relation to Jacobi, and specifically to Jacobi’s concerns with the problem of immediate knowledge and faith, of “faith-philosophy.” It is clear, above all from his Journals, that Kierkegaard read Hamann closely and responsively. Hamann’s sense of Christian paradox, his irony and humor, his breaches of decorum, were key factors in Kierkegaard ’s own trajectory.3 Nonetheless, while he was keenly aware, in some contexts, of the differences between Hamann and Jacobi, in the version of the history of philosophy that was important for Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Hamann lost his distinctiveness4 and became, in the more general, philosophic-historical account, a kind of Jacobi, neither of them of much use in the struggle against Hegel. The greater prominence of Jacobi in the historiography of philos- [3.142.35...