Johann Georg Hamann and the Enlightenment Project (review)

In Johann Georg Hamann and the Enlightenment Project, Robert Alan Sparling provides a lucid overview of Hamann’s writings, with an eye to their implications for contemporary discourse about the place (if any) that religious convictions should hold in the public sphere. For readers unfamiliar with Hamann, Sparling provides the historical background necessary for grasping the parallels between the impasses of our own polarized age and the intellectual situation in which Hamann found himself. A friend of thinkers as prominent and diverse as Kant, Herder, Mendelssohn, and Jacobi, Hamann was especially well situated to challenge the Enlightenment’s project of grounding human happiness upon logical principles that compel any impartial person’s assent. Insofar as we reenact that era’s presuppositions, Sparling argues, we inherit the same inconsistencies Hamann noticed within them. Most pointedly, the contemporary solution to the social problems raised by the coexistence of incompatible religious worldviews—i.e., the formation of a secular state founded upon principles self-evident to natural reason—suffers from subtle deficiencies, all of which stem from misplaced pride in the power of abstraction to reach objective truths by transcending partiality. The idea that each individual can (and ought to) operate upon models of rationality independent of inherited context creates irreparable bifurcations between mind and body, between right and duty, and perhaps most politically distressing, between freedom and well-being.

To understand the force of Hamann’s critique of the Enlightenment, one must grasp his extraordinary understanding of language, and how it differs from the similar concerns with conditionality it indirectly inspired. We are familiar, for example, with Derrida’s potent argument that all reasoning is always done in some language, each with its own peculiarities and history. We are less familiar with the conviction, quintessential for Hamann, that language itself—as logos—is divine, and not just any divinity, but the Logos of the Johannine prologue, whose message constitutes the basis from which to properly see reality in all its concreteness. Whereas postmodernism often takes the insurmountable particularity of language to be the pudenda origo of all truth-claims—and then retreats into a facile relativism that calls itself “tolerance”— Hamann holds that because all reality is God’s generative speech, the fuzziness of language does not block us from reality, but is actually our entryway to it. While he stresses the indispensability of experiential and historical context, Hamann is hardly an advocate of myopic traditionalism, given how he bucks dogmatic orthodoxy for the way its stolidity hampers the intrinsic playfulness of language. At every turn, Hamann refuses to fit into the tidy categories of foundationalism or relativism, shocking us into reconsidering their legitimacy. Whereas recent scholars such as John Betz interpret Hamann along confessional lines, Sparling’s special contribution is the compelling portrait he paints of Hamann as a gadfly for our polis, just as Socrates was for Athens.

After arguing that public reason is the central concept of the Enlightenment, Sparling reconstructs Hamann’s attack on the same: if we believe that reasoning can go on apart from the situatedness of people doing it, we suffer from the illusion there is something “reason” says, and some generic “public” (who is simultaneously none of us and all of us) for whom books are written and policies are made. For example, in a chapter on Frederick the Great (Hamann’s arch-nemesis), we see how readily projects to institute public flourishing (according to “enlightened absolutism”) oppress actual, individual citizens. Likewise, Mendelssohn’s division between private belief and public action—by which he hopes to ennoble a Hobbesian theory of the state to allow for religious pluralism—yields a society of egoists whose “tolerance” is just indifference to one another’s well-being. Sparling’s last chapter confirms that Hamann resists the secularization that makes Plato, Nietzsche, and Heidegger less challenging to modern taste.

Sparling’s argument falters a bit in the central chapters, articulating Hamann’s “metacritique” of Kant: if...