Hamann and the Tradition

3. God, I, and Thou: Hamann and the Personalist Tradition (Gwen Griffith-Dickson)

55 3 God, I, and Thou: Hamann and the Personalist Tradition Gwen Griffith-Dickson Hamann’s picture of the human person is of a creature that is fundamentally related to others—both to other humans and to God—as part of its own being. This “relational” character of our personhood is shown in a conception of knowledge, and anything else Hamann cares to talk about, like textuality or sexuality, to take two of his favorite topics. But above all it is seen in the phenomenon of language. Hamann’s approach to this tangled skein of ideas and motives— ourselves, each other, God, and language—seeps into the water table and is drunk, consciously and unconsciously, throughout the nineteenth century. It breaks the surface in the early twentieth century and has a powerful impact on certain thinkers who will be the focus of this chapter . Thus Hamann sits at the head of a tradition that blossoms in the twentieth century; an approach to the understanding of the human person , the divine, and philosophy of language. Hamann For Hamann, relationships are not external to the human being, but are a dimension of our very being. We are created for—indeed, created by—our relationships. Knowledge This relational approach can be seen in an area that is frequently treated by philosophers as the most private and individualized of all: knowledge; and even in its most inward aspect: self-knowledge. From Hamann’s earliest days, he is working out the intuition that even our self-knowledge depends on another, as can be seen in his early Fragments (Brocken): “In 56 G W E N G R I F F I T H - D I C K S O N order to make easier the knowledge of our self, my own self is visible as in a mirror in every neighbor. As the image of my face is reflected in water, so my self is reflected in every neighbor. That this self may be as dear to me as my own, Providence has sought to unite as many advantages and amenities in human society as possible. God and my neighbor are therefore a part of my self-knowledge, my self-love” (N 1:302). At the other end of his life, in a late letter, he condenses this conviction into a pithier epigram: “Self-knowledge begins with the neighbor, the mirror, and just the same with true self-love; that goes from the mirror to the matter” (ZH 6:281). This theme is worked out through his writings, from his account in the early Socratic Memorabilia (1759) of Socrates, whose self-knowledge marks him out as “the wisest of all,” through to the self-reflections of the Sibyl in her essay on marriage. For Hamann’s Socrates, self-knowledge comes from “being known” by an other. Hamann teases out this insight through an ironic discussion of Socrates’ famed, self-claimed ignorance, deftly illuminated by a Pauline quotation: “If anyone thinks he knows something, he knows nothing as he should know it. But if someone loves God, he will be known by him” (1 Cor. 8). Clearly, then, the ultimate in self-knowledge is being known by the Divine Other—which is a function of the love of God. A similar pattern is found in the Essay of a Sibyl on Marriage (1775) but with a daringly different tone, for the Sibyl’s self-knowledge can only come through sexual experience that is mediated by the lover. She partakes of “this tongue of fire of self-knowledge,” “a catastrophe of my entire way of thinking” through a “sacrificial offering of innocence” (N 3:202) described in an extraordinary reworking of the Genesis creation story of the rib, where the lover’s rib is hardly that, and it is the woman’s “hole of the place” rather than Adam’s side that is filled in with flesh; where the male lover in sex is identified with Christ as “the body’s healer” and the woman herself identified with God the creator, as the place from where the human race “comes forth”: “Amidst the incense of slumber I saw that rib—and cried, full of enthusiastic, possessive appropriation : ‘That is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.’ As an erection unites with its origin, he entered in whence he once came forth, as the body’s healer, and like a faithful creator in good work, he closed up the hole of the place with flesh...