De Aesthetica in nuce ad litteram.

Senior essay written by Kevin Gallagher under the advisement of Paul North in completion of the requirements of the major in Humanities. April 18, 2011

Note on the title page.

The various parts of the title-page of this essay constitute a small attempt to play with the textual and symbolic coincidences that are so important to Hamanns thought and language. The title itself, De Aesthetica in nuce ad litteram, is in emulation of St. Augustines De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim. As the great bishop of Hippo commented on Genesis, so have I attempted to comment on (a small part) of the Aesthetica in nuce. For a modern reader, however, the ad litteram of title is somewhat misleading Augustines is not at all a literal commentary, but a commentary that often admits that the literal reading of the text is false, while searching for the spiritual, allegorical readings according to which it is true. This belief that a text contains multiple meanings, and that the most obvious need not be the most important, is an important one for Hamann as well, who in the Aesthetica in nuce approvingly cites Augustine to this effect.1 This is the kind of reading of Hamann I pursue in this essay. The ad litteram of this essays title also evokes the great importance Hamann places on letters, as elements of words and entities in their own right. While Hamann is not, in the Aesthetica in nuce, as directly concerned with letters as he is in some of his other works,2 it will become clear in this essay that they are at least important enough to merit an oblique reference in the essays title. The line from Popes Essay on Criticism relates to the Aesthetica in nuce in various ways. Hamann himself cites it in the text, in a footnote on his brief discussion of St. Augustines hermeneutical methods. Hamann applies to Jonathan Swift a line which Pope intended for Erasmus;3 so also might we apply to Hamann a line Pope meant for Horace. Horace himself appears prominently in the Aesthetica in nuce, cited both at the end of the text and at the beginning, where Hamann seems to be identifying himself with the Musarum sacerdos of Horaces odes. But the motivation behind the choice of Popes line as an epigram
See Chapter 1., page 11. E.g. Neue Apologie des Bu<abens h. 3 At length, Erasmus, that great, injurd Name, / (The Glory of the Priesthood, and the Shame!) / Stemmd the wild Torrent of a barbrous Age. Pope, Essay on Criticism.. In context, these lines refer to Erasmuss iconoclastic break with the Scholasticism of the middle ages, which Pope considered to have had a stifled good writing. Hamann would likely have shared Popes assessment of the rational edifice of Scholasticism. Only the parenthetical remark from Popes verse is applied to Swift (at Nadler 212), as Hamann discusses Swifts treatise on puns.
2 1

2 is that Hamann, like Horace, intends to charm us into sense. He wants to rescue his readers from the errors of his Enlightenment opponents, by curing them of what he considers rationalist delusion and by defending the importance of the passions against those who prefer a priori abstractions of reason. As I will argue, Hamann is not an antirationalist or an obscurantist; he believes his positions are not only intuitively appealing or esthetically powerful, but also that they are correct. Nonetheless, in the Aesthetica in nuce he avoids making his arguments directly, instead using allusions, riddles, and metaphors to convey his thought. His resistance to rationalism is embodied even in his style, which refuses to be clear and distinct or to yield up obviously-linked premises and conclusions. Though in content the Aesthetica in nuce is the work of a philosopher, in form it is the work of a poethe will not compel us to be correct by means of syllogisms or inexorable logic, but he will charm us into sense, laying out his ideas, making them attractive, and inviting us his readers to assent. The engraving that forms the border of the title page has nothing to do with Hamann; it was cut for the title page of A Concent of Scripture, a work of English Puritanism. Hamann, like the author of that tract, gives the Christian scriptures a prominent place in his work though the similarities may end there, as Hamann is not writing a sectarian tract in the Aesthetica in nuce, or even writing a primarily religious work. But whatever the differences between the two works, the design of the title page suggests themes that are very prominent in Hamann. On each side of the engraving stands a Solomonic column, recalling the basically religious character of the Aesthetica in nuce, which is not a devotional tract or a theological work, but which nevertheless is infused from start to finish with a thoroughly religious temperament. The columns of the Temple mark off the sacred precinct in which Hamann believes all literature and all criticism of literature ought properly to be located. But these holy columns are ensnared in an abundance of grapevines. These grapevines, for our purposes, are a symbol both of Dionysus and of the Christian Eucharist. The columns of the temple, then, are adorned both for a bacchanal and for a Eucharist, for sanctity and for ecstasy, for Christianity and for the worship of older gods. This reflects the mingling of classical and Christian themes which is so prominent in the Aesthetica in nuce.

3 The Hebrew text in the cartouche between the columns reads: for he spake, and it was done, and comes from a passage in the 33rd Psalm describing the creation of the heavens and the earth. In this text, we see a scriptural adumbration of one of Hamanns fundamental insights; namely, that creation is Gods speech. This thought is so central in the Aesthetica in nuce and in this essay that it well deserves the pride of place it occupies on the title page. Finally, the letters alpha and omega are set at the top of the page, in a highly visible position. The question of these letters presence or absence is important to the argument pursued in this essay, and I thought it was appropriate to put them in so prominent a place, lest I lose track of them in what follows. There is more that could be said about the title page, but to explicitly interpret symbolism in this manner is so uncharacteristic of Hamann that it seems inappropriate to begin an essay on his thought in such a fashionand at any rate, his images are much more fruitful objects for analysis than mine.

4
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Note on the title page. 1 Introduction. 5 10

Chapter 1. The unnatural use of abstraction.

The removal of and from the first line of the Iliad is a parable about the right use of reason. The vowels are the passions, and Hamann warns against the belief that reason can operate properly without the passions. Chapter 2. Vowels. In the symbolic economy of the Aesthetica in nuce, the difference between vowels and consonants is mapped on to the difference between reason and the passions, and between the letter and the spirit. The verses of nature may be jumbled, but they are poetry for those who know how to read them. Chapter 3. On one of the difficulties of reading the Aesthetica in nuce. 23 Hamanns coincidentia oppositorum is not any kind of dialectical synthesis. Creation is speech so is Hamanns use of symbolism justified. The hermeneutical paradoxes of the Aesthetica in nuce are analogous to the paradoxes of the Christian religion. Chapter 4. To speak is to translate. Hamanns insistence on the uniqueness of all particulars does not make translation or interpretation impossible, because the created world is always already symbolic. Typology is not derived from special revelation but present in the things themselves. It is from Hamanns typological style, and not from any direct statement, that we discover what he has to say. Conclusion Bibliography 46 49 34 17

Introduction
This essay is not an attempt to understand Hamanns intellectual project, or even to understand the Aesthetica in nuce. It focuses on a single page of that treatise, a page on which Hamann presents the first line of the Iliad, with the vowels alpha and omega removed, and challenges the Greeks to read it. The object of this essay is to write a commentary on that page: to explain its meaning as much as possible. This attempt will often demand that we have recourse to other parts of the Aesthetica in nuce, for comparison or contrast, or to look for clues that might help towards the solution of the riddle Hamann has set before his readers, words that might serve as bridges among the various islands in Hamanns archipelago of thought. But however wide-ranging our reflections on this page may be, they remain bounded by that one page. This is definitely and deliberately not an essay on the treatise as a whole; if some of the theses advanced here are applicable as well to the entire Aesthetica in nuce, or to Hamanns larger corpus, this is due to chance, or to a consistency in Hamanns writing, and not at all to design. Admittedly, the themes brought up on this page that is our subjectwriting, the possibility of readingare broad ones, and as we shall see, according to the patterns of symbolism which Hamanns method entails, they become broader still. Furthermore, much of our reflection on this page of the Aesthetica in nuce will discuss not simply what Hamann means by the words written (which is the subject of chapter I of this essay), but also the meanings implicit in the style Hamann adopts, in the interpretative methods his writing calls for. We will see that Hamanns style is deliberate and extremely thoughtful, and while the surface of the nut may not be without a certain real appeal, the richest and most delicious meats will be found only when it has been cracked. There is, as we shall see, a model of reason, of language, and of rhetoric which for Hamann are scarcely separablepresented in miniature on this page that is our subject. One may regard the Aesthetica in nuce as quasi-mystical wisdom, as a brilliant display of philosophical criticism, as the inauguration of a new artistic era, or as an almost meaningless display of benighted and antirational obscurantismbut one cannot avoid the conclusion that Johann Georg Hamanns Aesthetica in nuce is a truly unusual piece of literature. Ostensibly, it is a reaction to the work of

6 Johann David Michaelis, a Hebraist and rationalist critic of the Bible. But Michaelis is more the pretext for the treatise than its main target; he merits only a few caustic but quite oblique mentions. The main subjects of the Aesthetica in nuce are much less parochial: the nature of reason, the power of language, the relation between God and the world. The text itself is a tissue of allusions and citations, not bound together by any visible framework that might establish a logical order among them, often left unidentified, and when their literary sources or authors can be identified, it often seems that Hamann is using them in a sense the original author may neither have intended nor agree with. Occasionally Hamann will let loose a phrase of compact and aphoristic power, which one might be tempted to take as a straightforward statement of his positionand this, perhaps, would often not be wrongbut the Aesthetica in nuce, a dizzyingly complex assemblage of personifications, symbolisms, and parodies, does not easily allow us to unravel the various threads of meaning wound tightly together in the whole. What is to be made, for example, of the phenomenon of a letter written by a Nut to a Most Learned Rabbi, which constitutes a large part of the middle of the text? What of the citation of a particularly opaque text Book of Judges set as an epigraph to the treatise, and repeatedly echoed throughout it? Recognizing these echoes and correspondences is difficult enoughinterpreting them as philosophical arguments or as elements of a larger text, or even, on the level of pure philology, determining what they are meant to denote, seems to be an interminable task, haunted by the ambiguities and possible meanings with which Hamann endows his text. The levels of (self-)parody, irony, and prosopopeia in Hamanns work make it difficult to tell whether he means to be taken seriously at all. And then, if we consider this obstacle to be surmounted, judge that the text is in fact meaningful, and approach it to figure out what that meaning might be, the problems of interpretation are only just beginning. The Aesthetica in nuce is itself a text about interpretation, about what it means to be meaningful, and so it constantly calls its own interpretation into question. In what follows, we do not presume to have accurately or exhaustively interpreted the Aesthetica in nuce; but we hope to write a commentary that is fully alive to the difficulties and ambiguities of the treatise itself.

7 A NOTE ON THE COMPOSITION OF THE ESSAY: This essay was composed piecemeal, as a series of more or less unrelated meditations on various aspects of reading a page of the Aesthetica in nuce. They have been edited somewhat, to create the appearance of a substantial essay rather than of a series of inadequate notebook entries, and to eliminate sections that were grossly redundant once the parts were brought together. Nevertheless, there is still in this essay much that is repetitious (though I have tried to minimize cross-references), and there is no single line of thought or unitary question that runs through the whole thing. It is a rhapsodic treatment of a rhapsody, consisting of various pieces stitched together in a kind of hermeneutic crazy-quilt. I readily admit that the seams between the various pieces are neater at some times than at others, and that this approach has brought with it the significant possibility of overlooking questions which the text should have been put to. Despite these shortcomings, I would assert that there is some reason to think that the Aesthetica in nuce calls for this sort of fragmentary analysis (that is, a breaking-up that is itself broken up). If there is any truth to what is argued below, to approach the treatise, or even a page of it, expecting it to resolve itself after a little discussion into a lucid and orderly arrangement of clear and distinct themes is to force upon it a mode of understanding that Hamann rejects. Just as Hamann rarely sets his thought out in a straightforward, obvious manner, but prefers to clothe it in a series of shifting images, so have I constructed this analysis of the Aesthetica in nuce out of a series of separatethough I think not ultimately contradictoryinvestigations. This is not in the least an attempt at mimesis. But Hamann believed that he could not have written the Aesthetica in nuce in a more conventional style without betraying its content, and a style in which the content could not be expressed is a style in which it ought not to be discussed. While I wouldnt finally claim to have read Hamann correctly, I hope that I have at least managed to read Hamann, or at least a page of his Aesthetica in nuce, as he meant to be read. In citing sections of Hamanns German, I have used the old German letters he would have recognized. I would be hard-pressed to say what essential purpose this serves; I would want to say that the words are the same words, whether written in Antiqua or Fraktur. But given the reflections in chapter II

8 of this essay on the importance Hamann places on the individuality of letters, which cannot be indifferently abstracted from the words they compose, I feel justified in preserving his original orthography. For instance, if we abstract from their shapes, and from the grammatical rules that govern their placement, the long and short s are basically the same letterat least we can say that they can be swapped for one another without creating ambiguity. But to argue that because the distinction seems to be superfluous, to serve no clearly necessary purpose, to be arbitrary and unhelpful, it should therefore be abolished, is to ignore Hamanns emphasis on the importance of those aspects of life which cannot be reduced to rational rules. I should not conclude this note on the composition of this essay without mentioning the debt of thanks I owe to my advisor, Prof. Paul North, whose comments on an earlier draft, if they have not managed to salvage any worthwhile thought, have at least brought it somewhat closer to the surface.

Chapter 1. The Unnatural Use of Abstraction

The removal of and from the first line of the Iliad is a parable about the right use of reason. The vowels are the passions, and Hamann warns against the belief that reason can operate properly without the passions. Ver\u<t es einmal die Iliade zu le\en, wenn ihr vorher dur< die Abraction die beiden Selblauter und ausge\i<tet habt, und \agt mir eure Meynung von dem Verande und Wohlklange des Di<ters! 1 In this passage and quotation from Hamanns text, traditional images, while recognizable for what they are, are combined in a novel way. The alpha and omega are symbol of Christ (Rev. 1:8), and perhaps metonymically represent Christianity or the religious in general. The significance of the line from the Iliad, on the other hand, is much less clear. Should it be read word-for-word, as referring to the wrath of Achilles or to the Homeric ethos of heroic pride and military prowess? This possibility ought not to be excluded, as even the small details in Hamanns images are rarely idly put; neither, however, is the general gestalt of his writing accidental, and so we can for the moment put aside the question of the lines content and consider merely what it is as a line. Its the incipit of the Iliad for a student of Greek, one of the hexameters that come most readily to mind the opening line of the epic traditionally regarded as the greatest of all. The Iliad is the touchstone of Greek verse and a masterpiece whose breadth of influence is second to none in the world of classical letters. Hamann, in putting this line here, intends for us to think not only of Achilles and of Homer and of Priams neighbors, but of the ideals and achievements of classical civilization which, though indeed falling as far short of Homers ideals as Christian civilization has of those of Christ, is not unfairly represented by the things it held dearest. The attempt to read the first line of the Iliad without the alpha and omega can be seen as an attempt to understand classical civilization while rejecting Christ. Indeed, Hamann himself encourages such a reading of the image when he later cites the Punic father of the Church to the effect that the prophetic
1

Nadler 207.

10 books of the Old Testament can only be interpreted correctly when Christ is read into them. Read the prophetic books without understanding Christ, says Augustine, and what pointlessness and folly will you find there? Understand Christ there, and what you read will not only savor, but will even intoxicate.1 Hamann takes up and expands this argument, providing some context to his surgical removal of vowels from Homers line. Though as a rhetorician Augustine was acutely aware of their power, after his conversion he regarded the pagan songs and stories as at best the work of lying poets, and at worst the work of demons: a distraction not only from Christianity, but even from secular wisdom. While Augustine argues that the mind enlightened by God can find profound meanings even in the obscurest passages of the psalms and the prophets, and proceeds on such lines in his own readings of such texts, he would have considered it almost blasphemous to attempt something similar with pagan writings. Hamann, on the other hand, is rather more generous to the pagans. For him, the history of classical literature is, when understood correctly, a dream-like anticipation of Christ.2 It is not that Hamann wishes either to denegrate the Scriptures, or to elevate that the worldly wisdom of the pagans to equivalence with Christian faith he is too much of a Lutheran for that. But as regards the value of the ancient myths, he is rather more generous than Augustine. Hamann believes that Christian truth is proclaimed forth, for those who have ears to hear, in everything that is. On this account, one who tries to enjoy or understand the first line of the Iliad in a secular way misses, in a sense, its true value, which may not have been any more apparent to Homer or the Greeks than the meaning (on the Christian interpretation) of the prophecies of Israel is apparent to the Jews. Hamann does in fact think this to be true of classical literature, inasmuch as Hamann believes it to be true of everything. But this seems to be a superficial, rather sermonizing way to read this image which is of course not to say that it is not one of the ways Hamann intended it to be read! But there must

Nadler 212-3. Lege libros propheticos non intellecto CHRISTO, \agt der punie Kir<envater, quid tam insipidum & fatuum inuenies? Intellige ibi CHRISTUM, non solum sapit, quod legis, sed etiam inebriat. Hamann gives no citation for this quote; a note to the Cambridge translation locates it at Ioh. Evang. Tract. IX.3. 2 Betz 206.

11 be something more. Because the line from the Iliad does not really fall silent with two letters removed; anyone even remotely familiar with the traditions of Greek literature could reconstruct it from fewer letters than Hamann gives us and even if we lacked the extrinsic familiarity with Homers words that would allow us to do this, the intrinsic shape of a hexameter would allow us to see clearly the places which needed to be supplemented to fill out the line. Still further, it is far from clear what Christian purpose this line serves, even with the great monogram of the apocalypse returned to it. Even if the Christian mind can make the Homeric epics its own, and even if this might be praiseworthy and the sign of a healthy religious tradition, it is nonetheless not immediately clear what Christian meaning is to be found in the first line of the Iliad. Hamanns Christian muse may not be identical to the Holy Spirit, but she is nonetheless a Christian muse, and has no business running around singing songs in praise of a frustrated warriors wrath. What, then, does Hamann mean by this image? See! he hints to us, just after showing us the altered line of Greek, the greater and lesser Masorah of philosophy [Weltweisheit] has overwhelmed the text of Nature, like a Noahs flood.1 As is usual for Hamann, this explanation only raises further questions. Nothing here has overwhelmed or flooded anything else, and least of all Masorah no commentary or guides for reading were added to the text, which if anything was made more obscure by the excision of letters. But when we are told that this Masorah has covered over the text of Nature, we should be reminded of what was said shortly before Homers line was introduced: Sie [d.h. die Mu\e] wird es wagen, den natrli<en Gebrauc< der Sinne von dem unnatrli<en Gebrau< der Abractionen zu lutern, wodur< un\ere Begriffe von den Dingen eben \o \ehr vermmelt werden, als der Name des S<pfers underdrckt und gelert wird.2 The unnatural use of abstractions here plays a role parallel to that of the Masorah of worldly philosophy preventing the things that are from appearing as they are. For Hamann, after all, whatever his affirmation of this world or delight in materiality, worldly wisdom is never the best wisdom; the Maso1

Nadler 207. Seht! die groe und kleine Ma\ore der Weltweisheit hat den Text der Natur, glei< einer Sndfluth, berwemmt. 2 Nadler 207.

12 rah of philosophy, then, are interpretations that distort and obscure. It is this sort of distortion and obscuring that are represented by the removal of the letters alpha and omega from Homers line; we are told, after all, that they are removed through abstraction. Here Hamann is making a pun on the Latin roots of the word abstraction, but it is not merely a pun; it is also a hint at one of the hidden connections between the vowels of the Iliad and Hamanns thesis about reason. It is with counter-productive Masorah, with a failed attempt at clarification, that the text of nature and the line of Homer have been made damaged. And Hamann further suggests that it is because of this failure of interpretation or clarification that the Greeks who abuse abstraction are wrong to think themselves wiser than the chamberlains with the Gnostic key. This phrase, in itself rather obscure, is one of the bridge-phrases in Hamanns text that point out to us which parts of the tapestry may be connected beneath the surface. Chamberlain is Kammerherr, and between Kammerherr and Kmmerer there is small difference, and Kmmerer is the word Luther used for eunuch.1 The bridge leads us to another nearby passage of the Aesthetica: Wenn die Leidenaften Glieder der Unehre \ind, hren \ie deswegen auf, Waffen der Mannheit zu \eyn? Vereht ihr den Bu<aben der Vernunft klger, als jener allegorie Kmmerer der alexandrinien Kir<e den Bu<aben der S<rift, der \ich \elb zum Vernittenen ma<te, um des Himmelrei<s willen?2 Seen in light of this passage, the reference to eunuchs and to Gnosticism is less perplexing. While Origen who I presume to be that allegorical chamberlain of the Alexandrian church is not generally considered to have been a Gnostic properly speaking, his most famous deed has much in common with the classically Gnostic contempt of the material body. To understand the point being made here, the word Leidenaften must merely be switched out. For even if the organ of generation is, as it was for Origen, a member of dishonor, it is certainly nonetheless a weapon of manhood. Origen has been condemned by Christians not for his desire to acquire control over the passions of his flesh, which end Christianity has universally valued, but because his zeal towards this end led him to commit violence against himself. His
In Acts 8:27, Luther translates as Kmmerer(related to Kammerherr, chamberlain) what the King James Bible translates as eunuch. Haynes 80, note 87. 2 Nadler 208.
1

13 error, on the traditional view, was not that he wanted to acquire spiritual mastery over his body, but that he believed he could achieve such mastery through an essentially bodily act. It was an error not of the end but of the means. Similarly, that the unnatural use of abstractions is problematic does not mean that abstract reasoning need necessarily be evil. Seen in this light, Haman is not advocating that reason be the slave of the passions, but is cautioning us lest we attempt unnaturally to excise the passions from our mind in pursuit of rational purisms. That we might better grasp the comparison of rationalists and castrati, Hamann gives us an extended Latin quotation from Bacon, which is appended as a footnote to the passage quoted above on the unnatural use of abstractions. Hamann calls Bacon his Euthyphro,1 the figure who perhaps does not teach him anymore than Euthyphro taught Socrates, but who provides nonetheless the occasion for fruitful discussion; this being the case, we could read the Aesthetica ignoring this quotation as well as we could understand the Euthyphro reading only the words of Socrates. It tells us that Hamann, whatever his reputation as an antirationalist or forerunner of the Sturm und Drang, is not here making an argument against reason as such, or against the minds use of concepts, or against thought in general. For Bacon is not making an argument against philosophy, but against bad philosophy. And so let men know how far the Idols of the human mind are from the Ideas of the divine mind. And so the things themselves are Truth and Unity, and the works themselves are more to be made inasmuch as they are earnests of truth, than on account of the conveniences of life. Just as Hamann is not the stereotypical antirationalist, this is not Bacon as the stereotypical prophet of scientific method, proclaiming a pragmatism that concerns itself only for the regularity of phenomena. Bacon wants to clear away what he regards as dangerous and fallacious concepts only so that the truth of things might better shine forth -- indeed, for all that he advocates the increase of human power over nature through natural science, he here subordinates that end to the pursuit of truth in itself. Philosophy is not the enemy; bad philosophy is. Abusus non tollit usum. And we may see a similar argument in Hamanns critique of the Gnostic chamberlains. His prescription is not that we avoid
1

Bacon, mein Euthyphron. Nadler 197.

14 making use of concepts for things, but that we make sure that our concepts have not been vermmelt and gelert by abuses of reason. The word abstraction, then, works like a bridge between these two moments in the Aesthetica in nuce, suggesting a thesis about the use and abuse of reason. Perhaps some more light will be shed on this thesis if another of the Hamanns metaphors for it is considered. While discussing those who allow their abstract concepts to get in the way of reality itself, Hamann invokes the myth of Narcissus, and in a footnote quotes at considerable length Ovids retelling of the story. Spem sine corpore amat; corpus putat esse quod umbra est. / Adstupet ipse sibi.1 They who consider the abstractions of their minds to be most real prefer a (vain) hope or a shadow to the bodythat is, the material, concrete reality of the natural world. Long after Hamanns time, perceptive thinkers would challenge the idea of a perfectly individuated rational self, and point out how Enlightenment idealism tended to cut the mind off from that which is truly valuable in life. And here stands Hamann, the godfather of all such antienlightenment critiques, mincing no words, and calling the Enlighteners out for their narcissism. Adstupet ipse sibiNarcissus is justified in admiring himself; he is truly beautiful. And so also is the reason a legitimate and necessary faculty. But in Narcissus, self-admiration is taken to such an extreme that his ability to enjoy any part of the outside world is cut short. For those who, excessively confident in their own mental powers, would attempt to extract pure reason from the mess of passions and contingencies that always surround human life, Hamann prophesies an analogous fate. It is this abuse of reason which Hamann means to suggest t the removal of the first and last Greek letters from a line of Homer. And just as Hamann challenges the Greeks he addresses to make sense of the disemvoweled hexameter, so also does he question the ability of the Enlightened objects of his criticism to reason correctly or to make any meaningful scientific achievements. Just as Hume could not drink a glass of water or eat an egg without faith,2 neither, we might paraphrase Hamann, could he follow an argument to its con-

1 2

Metamorphoses III.417f, quoted at Nadler 210. This was a favorite quip of Hamanns, and is recorded in several places, e.g. OFlaherty 29.

15 clusions without passion. We have seen that it is not fair to call Hamann an antirationalist, when his aim is not to drive reason away but to rectify its use. Accordingly, when he argues that reason cannot get by without the passions, he is not advocating that the passions replace or dominate reason, but rather that their role in our thinking be acknowledged for what it is. In Hamanns view, the supposed opposition of reason and the passions is a fiction of the Enlighteners; his thought has little room for absolute dichotomies, and he rejects also this one. The passions, in fact, have an essential role to play even in the exercise of reason. Leidena allein giebt Abractionen \owohl als Hypothe\en Hnde, Fe, Flgel; Bildern und Zeichen Gei, Leben und Zunge.1 There are perhaps many ways to understand hands, feet and wings but between all possible interpretations of these words a basic unity exists. They are all parts of the body associated with motion and action. And so abstractions and hypothesesdry conclusions of the reasonare made active and mobile by the passions. Likewise, images and signs are given life and tongue by the passions, without which, says Hamann, they would lack all vitality and communicative power. Until the passions have breathed life into them, reasonings and signs are dead and ineffective. But even if we are correct to argue that the removed vowels stand in for the passions and an unmutilated line of verse typifies the right use of reason, we may still ask why Hamann would have chosen such a conceit to convey his thesis about the right use of reason? In what follows, we will more closely examine Hamanns style, and the symbolic vocabulary of the Aesthetica in nuce. The connection of Hamanns philosophical thesis and the parable of the missing alpha and omega is idiosyncratic, perhaps, but not random, and a consideration of possible rationales for it may shed some light on Hamanns thought.

Nadler 209

16

Chapter 2. Vowels.
In the symbolic economy of the Aesthetica in nuce, the difference between vowels and consonants is mapped on to the difference between reason and the passions, and between the letter and the spirit. The verses of nature may be jumbled, but they are poetry for those who know how to read them.

Ver\ucht es einmal die Iliade zu le\en, wenn ihr vorher durch die Abraction die beyden Selblauter und ausgesichtet habt...1 Selbstlaut and Mitlaut. Consonant and vowel.2 These are evocative termsnot that their sense differs at all from that of the corresponding words in English or in any other language, but rather, being composed of readily parsible German roots, they betray an ancient metaphor underlying the concepts of vowels and consonants . Vowels can be uttered on their own; consonants can only be spoken in the presence of a vowel. This observation is also present in the Latin locutions from which our English terms are derived: a littera vocalis, a letter of the voice, is utterable on its own, while a littera consonans must be sounded with something else. This way of articulating the distinction between independent vowels and dependent consonants was a commonplace in the eighteenth century,3 and would not have been unfamiliar to Hamann even if the etymology of Selbstlaut did not suggest it. If we translate, then, a bit freely, we might say, that which is removed from the Iliad by abstraction is that without which

Nadler 207 German preserves also more Latinate forms, Vokal and Konsonant, which are straightforwardly cognate with our English terms. For whatever reason, Hamann, who has no qualms about adorning his German with Latinate words, chooses here to use words that advert somewhat more directly to their meaning, in a way that served for me as a point of departure for an analysis of some of Hamanns thought in the Aesthetica in nuce. 3 John Hensons, New Latin Grammar, for instance, published at Nottingham in 1744, explains A Vowel is a letter, which makes a full and perfect Sound of it Self. as a, o. A Cononant is a Letter, that has no Sound of it Self without a Vowel. And in a Verbesserte and Erleichterte Lateinische Grammatica, published at Halle in 1763 (a year after the Crusades of the Philologist saw light), we read Den Anfang in der Lateinien Spra<en ma<t man von den Bu<aben Und die\e werden eingetheilet in vocales oder \elblautende : und consonantes oder mitlautende , \o ni<t ehe knnen ausge\pro<en werden, als bis ein vocalis dazukmmt. I have cited these two examples for their clear congeniality with the line of thought I am trying to tease out of the text. If more evidence is wanted of this commonplace, Google Books has plenty more examples where these came from. The first text can be found at http://books.google.com/books?id=T5ECAAAAQAAJ, and the second at http://books.google.com/books?id=F9oVAAAAYAAJ.
2

17 there can be no speech, which, without any further interpretation, already at least appears to imply much more than a matter of rearranged letters. As we have seen, the abstraction of the letters from the line of the Iliad corresponds, in the typological scheme under which Hamann operates in the Aesthetica in nuce, to the rationalist attempt to purge reason of sensuality and passion. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the vowels are the passions. Just as consonants depend on vowels in order to be pronounced, so do rational arguments require the passions in order for them to have any power to persuade. It is not that reasoned arguments, even when abstract, are otiose or parasiticalthese Mitlaute of the mind have as legitimate a place as the consonants do in a word. But without the Selbstlaute of the passions, they are nothing. Only when they are vocalized can arguments become persuasive, or theories about nature become a true portrait of the natural world. Any consideration of the meaning of vowels and consonants in the Aesthetica in nuce cannot ignore Hamanns use of Hebrew. The treatise bears not one but two Hebrew epigrams, from the Books of Judges and Job. Here we will not attempt to make an exegesis of these texts, which are in an ambiguous relation to each other and to the treatise as a whole. Prescinding from the question of their individual or collective meaning of these citations, we can consider them merely as examples of the Hebrew language. Hamann includes them unpointedlike the first line of the Iliad, they have vowels missing. But to those with more than the most rudimentary knowledge of Hebrew, an unpointed text is by and large legible; ambiguities that cannot be resolved by considerations of context are the exception and not the rule. When one reads a vowelless Hebrew text, one does not read a text without vowels. If the letters of the text cease to be bare letters, and become elements of words, it is because the reader, by an act of interpretation, knows where and of what quality the vowels ought to be. But this is not, merely a question of textual interpretation; rather, for Hamann it is a hermeneutic principle applicable to all experience. For Hamann, reality does not interpret itself, as if by a comparison of bare sense-data the truths of nature could be reached. If one wants truly to understand nature, one must see it as eine Rede an die Kreatur dur< die Kreatur. Just as one reading a Hebrew text reads nothing but the letters, but adds to them vocalizations that allow them to become

18 words, poems, prophecies, and divine commands, so also one who correctly understands nature truly sees the things of nature, but sees them always as aspects of the creation of an essentially communicative God. Nature, we might say, is like the Hebrew text of the scriptureswritten by God, but one must bring ones own vowels to read it. But is this not going too far? While we may not just have misrepresented Hamanns thoughts about nature, Hebrew, and God, there is reason to wonder whether any of this can actually be found in the first line of the Iliad. A Hebrew text without vowels is silent, but a line of Greek verse, with only two of the seven Greek vowels removed, is easy enough to read. And while it certainly doesnt make sense as written without those vowels, its still easily interpretable. If Hamann had not named it as a line from the Iliad, any educated person, on seeing the word , would instantly recognize the verse and its source. Replacing the missing letters is not a challenge. And even if one were not sure of how to fill out the missing places in the line, the shape of the dactyls and the grammatical possibilities offered by the Greek language would quickly narrow down the range of potential readings. If Hamann means to represent with this line the puzzle of reason confronted with nature, he has not set up a very challenging puzzle. It is true that most readers of Hamann will be able easily to read out the poetic line as if all the letters were present, and it is also surely true that Hamann expected so much. But to object that Hamann has sent us down a misleading path, when the line is actually quite easy to read, is to miss the point as much as would an Enlightened natural scientist who, maintaining that reason itself was more than adequate to move his mind, objected that Hamann was wrong to assert that reason depends upon the passions for its force. The objection of this scientist would be absurd because it would miss the point of Hamanns critiquehe goes around the backs of the Enlighteners, contending that they are moved by passion even in what they believe to be their exercises of pure reason, that the arguments they invoke to defend their conception of reason in fact are supported by the passions. And for an analogous reason, we would be wrong to object that we could readily recognize and complete the slightly-effaced line of Homer; if we can, it is only because we already know how it is supposed to run. Only if we already know what the first line of the Iliad is, or

19 how a hexameter ought to be shaped, or what kinds of combinations of letters count as Greek words, is the problem of this line trivial. Only if we already know the spirit that can animate those letters, are they able to speak to us. Hamann is reasoning along these lines when he compares creation to a Turbatverse.1 This is a jumbled verse, a line of poetry in which the words have been put into disarray (and we are correct if, in thinking of this word, we are reminded of Hamanns altered line from the Iliad). But it refers most specifically to jumbled verses used as a school exercise to teach children the laws of classical prosody: given a line from Homer or Vergil with the words out of order, a student would be required to arrange them in such a way that, preserving the sense, creates a correct metrical pattern. Given the quite free word order of Latin and Greek, a misarranged line of poetry need not be, as it would in English, a grammatical anomaly or an incomprehensible arrangement of words. A Turbatverse, even if left in its jumbled state or incorrectly put into meter, is still a meaningful sentence, containing all the semantic content of its perfected, versified form: , . In a certain sense, there is nothing of Homers line which is missing here; a student who cared only for grammar would mark no functional distinction between this and the word order Homer chose or was inspired to choose. But for a student of poetry, the lines are obviously unlike each other, different in poetic power and therefore, in an important sense, in their meaning as an element of a poem telling the story of Troy. The Iliad would be a different poem, if its opening word were goddess and not wrath. In the Turbatverse of nature, then, the superficial meaning of the speaking God may be preserved, but the poetry, the spirit of the utterance, its power not only to inform but to inspire its audience, is mangled or completely missing. Wir haben an der Natur ni<ts als Turbatver\e und disiecti membra poetae zu un\erm Gebrau< brig. Die\e zu \ammeln i des Gelehrten; \ie auszulegen, des Philo\ophen; \ie na<zuahmenoder no< khner \ie in Geick zu bringen des Poeten beeiden Theil.2

1 2

Nadler 198. Nadler 199

20 The hierarchy that is here established, with the scholar, philosopher and poet presented with responsibilities of increasing creativity, should not surprise us, as it is exactly in line with what Hamann says elsewhere about the high dignity of the poet, to whom is compared even God himself.1 But it should be noted that Hamann does not, here, consider the role of the poet as essentially creative. The poet is not, on this view, an inventor of forms, but a disposer or orderer of forms that are already given in the created world. Meanings are already there, and require only to be drawn out. A Hebrew word is actually a word, even if only someone learned in the language can give it voice. A Turbatverse has correct and incorrect answers (though there can be more than one correct answer), even if the senses of individual words are not adequate to determine the ultimate esthetic effect of the whole poetic line. The opening line of the Iliad is a meaningful sentence, but also a powerful piece of poetry, not explainable as merely the sum of its constituent words. And this is so even if it is clear only to those who know how to read the alpha and the omega back into it.

Der Poet am Anfange der Tage. Nadler 206.

21

Chapter 3. On one of the difficulties in reading the Aesthetica in nuce

Hamanns coincidentia oppositorum is not any kind of dialectical synthesis. Creation is speech so is Hamanns use of symbolism justified. The hermeneutical paradoxes of the Aesthetica in nuce are analogous to the paradoxes of the Christian religion. In the preceding, we have discussed several ways in which the images Hamann uses in the Aesthetica in nuce relate to the argument he makes about the proper use of reason. There is significant overlap here; the various images and descriptions Hamann uses are parallel, making the same argument in different ways. From what we have already said, we can derive a kind of table, showing how the various images used map onto Hamanns argument about the reason and the passions: Passions Vowels Words Poetic Meter God Christianity Alpha and Omega Reason Consonants Mere arrangements of letters. Turbatverse Nature Classical civilization. The line from the Iliad with the alpha and omega missing.

It would be facile and quite incorrect to say simply that Hamann likes those things in the first column, and dislikes those in the second. Even if many of these distinctions seem like dichotomies, Hamann refuses to choose between them. He deals with both at once, simultaneously pointing out the particularity of the elements of his language and thought, and the text woven together from those elements. He means for each word to be present as a word, each letter as a letter, each object as itself, even as he joins them all together. His demand is that we hear the rhapsody as a stitched-together unity while maintaining an acute awareness of each of the patches that make it up. In several places in his corpus, Hamann makes reference to the coincidentia oppositorum, a principle which he described as central to his philosophical and critical work. 1 But what does he mean by this term? Isaiah Berlin comments that it is not clear how far he understood it, and he certainly gives it a
1

Though not in the Aesthetica. See e.g. Betz 28, note 17.

22 sense of his own.1 In fact, it is not easy to see where the coincidence comes in at all. Regarding every text, every object, as part of his Bible, he believes firmly that the significance of things is not confined to themselves; yet this sensibility goes hand-in-hand with a relentless attention to the things themselvesto the letters of a text (in literary criticism) and the phenomena of nature unreduced to their universal, rational principles (in the natural sciences). Hamann foregrounds for us both the elements of a written word, a poem, an object, or any other part of our experience in the world, and the irreducible unities produced of these elements. He beholds, in a single vision, der rollende Donner der Bered\amkeit and der ein\ylbic<te Blitz.2 This strangeor strange to us, and Hamann would not hesitate to say that our sensibilities need correctionthis strange conjunction of opposites confronts us even on the title page of the Aesthetica in nuce. Eine Rhap\odie in kabbaliier Pro\e. A rhapsodya stitching-together of pieces into an artistic unitythat is also a Cabalistic exercise, looking past the meaning of the text to discern the meanings revealed by the letters. We get perhaps as clear an expression of this double view as we might expect to in the last few sentences of the treatise: the author of the Apostille whether Hamann himself, some personified commentator, or anyone else remarks that the author of the Aesthetica in nuce hat Satz und Satz zu\ammengere<net, wie man die Pfeile auf einem S<la<tfelde zhlt.3 The reference is to an ancient battle in which the Persians fired more arrows than the Romans, by whom they were nonetheless defeated, since the Romans shots, though fewer, were fired with greater force. It is not clear which side better corresponds to Hamanns style: has Hamann written a great number of superfluous words, that fall ineffectively on the ground, or has he expressed a few ideas with great effect? Theres a case to be made for either interpretation. But whichever we take, the view were given of the Aesthetica in nuce is still of individual Stze, piled up one after another as discrete, countable units. This treatise, says the speaker of the Apostille, is just a pile of sentences. But in an instant, our perspective is shifted: Lat uns jetzt die Haupt\umme

Berlin 115. Nadler 208. 3 Nadler 217. The reference given by Hamann (Procop. De bello persico. I. 18.) is explained at Haynes 94, note kkk.
2

23 [] hren.1 The reference is to the conclusion of the Book of Ecclesiastes, in which Qoheleth pronounces his conclusive judgment on all that has been said before, giving a unitary moral to be taken from the various meditations on human life that compose the text of the biblical book.2 This line discloses a view on which the Aesthetica in nuce is a consistent unity, with an internal order that allows for the possibility of summarya far cry from a pile of arrows scattered on a battlefield. Which of these perspectives, which of these methods of reading, does Hamann (or the nut, or the Apostillist) ultimately endorse? To this question he gives no answer. Hamanns method of writing is meticulously thought out, and is without a doubt the source of much of the power and originality of his thought. But he rarely speaks directly about his method or style, and when he does, it is usually in a deprecating manner, or in the style of a joke, or (as we have just seen in the case of the arrows on the battlefield) in words so cryptic as to resolve none of a readers confusion. It is not Hamanns way to make obvious the keys to the puzzles he has left behind him. Indeed, towards the end of his career Hamann expressed, whether out of false humility or genuine perplexity, his own inability to understand his earlier writings:3 it is perhaps not surprising, then if the Aesthetica in nuce presents us with hermeneutic difficulties that neither the text itself, nor comparisons with Hamanns other works, nor consideration of Hamanns engagement with the issues of his time are adequate to dispel. But the paradox we are considering herethe simultaneous focus on both columns of the table with which this chapter beganis so fundamental to the thought of the Aesthetica in nuce, that unless we can come to terms with it in some way, Hamanns treatise remains opaque and silent. In this coincidence of opposites, the opposita are continually juxtaposed, but never set into any kind of overarching order or comprehensive scheme. If they are thesis and antithesis, they survive as such,
Ibid. Cf. Lutherbibel Predig. 12:13 Lat uns die Haupt\umme aller Lehre hren. Much modern criticism dismisses the final verses of Ecclesiastes as added by a later author, who was attempting to dull the cynical edge of the original text. This raises the intriguing possibility that Hamann might have meant the Apostille, likewise, to be a undermining of all that goes before it. 3 I no longer understand myself, quite differently from then; some [writings I understand] better, some worse. [] [] My name and reputation are of no account; as a matter of conscience, however, I can expect neither a publisher nor the public to read such unintelligible stuff. Briefwechsel V, p. 358, trans. in Betz 229.
2 1

24 without succumbing to any synthetic temptation. Hamann does not provide any third perspective, which might contain these two, and allow for a unitary reading of his text. If anything, he seems to suggest that these two apparently opposed ways of reading are part of a single act of understanding. He speaks, for example, of little children, die \i< no< im bloen Bu<-a-bi-ren benund wahrli<, wahrli<, Kinder men wir werden, wenn wir den Gei der Wahrheit empfahen \ollen.1 The Spirit of Truth is on the one hand the Holy Spirit of Christian doctrine, the power that gives to prophets knowledge of what they have not seen, and without which any attempts to understand the Scriptures are doomed to bear no fruit. The Spirit of Truth, whom the world cannot receive (Jn 14:17), corresponds to a otherworldly intuition, which, if not groundless, is nonetheless not grounded by everyday, anthropine reason or experience. On the scheme of interpretative perspectives we have seen in the Aesthetica in nuce, this is clearly closer to the holistic, spiritual pole than to the elemental, literal, material one. But how, says Hamanns Nu, is this Spirit of Truth to be received? By becoming like children who are just learning to spelland as if the reference to spelling did not make clear that the literal mode of interpretation is being invoked, the painstaking spelling out of the word Bu<abiren, syllable by syllable, confirms that Hamann is referring to this style of interpretation. Recalling, now, the table at the start of this chapter, in which letters and the spirit of truth represent opposite sides, the strange meaning of this exhortation to become like children is clear: we are told that it is in attention to individual letters and particular elements that we are to attain to abstracter, more holistic or deeper understanding of the world. Verlieren die Elemente des A B C ihre natrli<e Bedeutung, wenn \ie in der unendlichen Zu\ammen\etzung willkrli<er Zei<en uns an Ideen erinnern, die, wo ni<t im Himmel, do< im Gehirn \ind?2 To this question, of course, we are meant to answer no. But there is much here that is not unproblematic, or at least not simple. What, for instance, is the natrli<e Bedeutung of a letter? And how, if the combination of these signs be arbitrary, does it recall for us ideas? And

Nadler 202. It is the nut here who speaks; and while the nut is not necessarily the crusading philologist, who in turn is not necessarily Hamann himself, it seems far to say that the nut is speaking, if not in Hamanns voice, at least on Hamanns behalf. 2 Nadler 203

25 given that it does so, why, in our consideration of the spiritual or mental ideas invoked, should we take concern for the arbitrary elements? But we are told that it is in practicing our spelling that we shall receive the Spirit of Truth. There is no answer given thereby, to any of these questions, nor any resolution of the larger paradox we are considering here. The paradox, rather, is relentlessly brought to the fore, and given to us undiluted. If reading the Aesthetica in nuce entails learning how to navigate this play of elements and wholes, letter and spirit, consonants and vowels, were not given any clues as to how we might begin to do this. We might imagine Hamann dismissing our hermeneutical troubles by saying something about folly to the Jews and scandal to the Greeksbut there may indeed be reason to agree with the Jews and Greeks. It is a natural inclination, when faced with a work that calls for such a reading style, to describe it as schizophrenic or contradictory; that is, to emphasize the divergence of senses in the text, the plurality of possible interpretations, and the tension created by the disparate ways of thinking Hamann encourages. If we are told to focus on the letters of the scripture, and also on its inner, spiritual meaning, and if we are prohibited from regarding either focus of our attention as primary, or from resolving one into the other, it is natural to assume that a kind of doublethink is called for, that in this coincidentia oppositorum, the coincidence is merely an opportunity to bring the opposites, as opposites, together. But this assumption, natural though it may be, does not seem to be what Hamann expects of his readers. It is not merely that he posits two levels of meaning to texts and to experiencethis can be none neatly and sanitarily, keeping different ledgers for each part of our reading. It is that he slides freely and effortlessly between them, without any regard for the different kinds of analysis we might assume that they require. To understand the Spirit of Truth, pay attention to spelling. To see the dangers following on the abuse of abstractions, consider a line of verse with some of the vowels removed. If Hamanns writing admits of both a macroscopic and microscopic reading, he demands that we keep both in our mind at once. He does not urge us to schizophrenia; he does not consider a single thing with two minds, but allows for the unforced conjunction of two ideas in a single mind. The emphasis is on the coincidentia, not the opposita.

26 Signs, sense-objects, words, concepts, symbols, and scriptural types are understood, and can only be understood, in different ways. There is no theory of everything, no general principle of univocity, no rule of reason or symbolic algorithm, that could allow these to be converted one into the others. But once Hamann allows for the possibility of translation between them,1 considering these various levels of reading as different languages in which the same discourse can be conducted, he is able to transition freely from one category to another. The letters removed from the first line of the Iliad are single letters, and also graphic translations of heard vowels, which in turn can represent the spirit as opposed to the flesh of consonants, which is in turn the vitality of human discourse as opposed to the purisms of reason, and the beauty of particular objects unresolved into their first principles. All these, for Hamann, are simultaneously present at all times, in all things; and unless we can learn to see similarly, we cannot read what he has written. But how is this to be done? This is necessarily not a matter in which clear canons of interpretation could be set forth, that might allow us to translate Hamanns simultaneously cabalistic and rhapsodic utterances into academic language, or to devise summaries of his arguments in a neatly symbolic language. If there were clear, exoteric rules for the interpretation of Hamann, he would have failed in his purpose, which is at least in part to demonstrate that ffentli<er Gebrau< der Vernunft is neither possible nor desirable. But without presuming to set up rules for this double reading which is not however divided, we can consider some of the reasons why Hamann might consider this to be an ideal method (if method it can be called). The maxim that proves useful in so many other cases, as a key to unlocking the mysteries of Hamanns thought, is useful also here: S<pfung i eine Rede an die Kreatur dur< die Kreatur. The Christian overtones of such a formulation are obvious. Hamann once offered an encapsulation of his thought in the word ,2 a famously polysemous term every sense of which Hamann intends. The intimate connection between reason and language is of course the most obvious philosophical implication of
1 2

For Hamanns defense of this possibility, see Chapter 4. In Betz, 329. From a letter to Herder.

27 the conjunction of meanings in that Greek word, and that intimate connection is indeed an important part of Hamanns philosophy. But for Hamann, is always also the Word that was in the beginning: his philology is his Christianity. If Hamann says, then, that creation is a kind of speech, this is not without Christological overtones. Hamanns piety placed a great emphasis on the self-emptying of Christ. However much he might stress Christs humanity and suffering, though, he remained well within the mainstream of Christianity in regarding Christ as the eternal and all-powerful God. In the single person of Christ, as the traditional formulations run, there are two natures, both human and divine, present in all their fullness, but without alteration or admixture. Making sense of this, of course, is a very difficult task; there is little point in rehearsing the difficulties here. But there is a clear parallel between the way a Christian thinks of Christ, and how Hamann thinks ofwell, more or less everything. Christ is a man, who lived for a certain stretch of time in a certain place, and is also the eternal God. A word is a string of letters, small shapes arbitrarily strung together, and is also a sign of a concept, an immaterial thing existing in the mind. Hamann is no dualistit is closer to the truth to call him a dyophysite. The various interpretations of which a text admits do not for Hamann constitute a real plurality; as in the person of Christ, there is a kind of mystical union by which they are one. Zufrder me man D. George Ben\on fragen: ob die Einheit mit der Mannigfaltigkeit ni<t beehen knne? [] Der bu<bli<e oder grammatie, der eiliche oder dialectie, der kapernaitie oder historie Sinn \ind im h<en Grade myi<, und hngen von \ol<en augenblickli<en, \piritu\en, willkhrli<en Nebenbeimmungen und Umnden ab, da man ohne hinauf gen Himmel zu fahren, die Schlel ihrer Erkenntnis ni<t herabholen kann.1
Nadler 203, note 23. Hamanns footnote is attached to some lines of Latin verse which conclude the Nuts letter to the Learned Rabbi. They come from a poem, traditionally and falsely attributed to the Emperor Augustus, explaining why Vergils orders to destroy the drafts of the Aeneid were ignored after the poets death. The excerpts are: Ah, scelus indignum! soluetur litera diues? Frangatur potius legum veneranda potestas. Liber & alma Ceres succurrite! [Ah, shameful crime! Shall the rich letter be allowed to perish? Rather let the venerable power of the laws be broken. Liber and kind Ceres, come to our aid!] The first two lines are clear: the richness of the letters which for Hamann, who does not oppose the spirit and the letter in a conventional way, is a spiritual richnessis to take precedence over the Law. It is a standard Pauline or Lutheran trope: the spirit transcending the Law; but with a Hamannic twist. And this defeat of the Law by the spirit
1

28

It is not that interpretation ought to be literal, physical, or Capernaitic, and also, additionally, mystical, spiritual or symbolic. What is contended here is that these meanings are themselves mystical, and in the highest degree. Unless one has obtained from heaven the keys of understandingthat is, unless one has attained a certain degree of spiritual insight one will be unable to understand things even in their literal senses; for the spiritual and literal senses are one. Hamanns thoroughly Christian sensibility demands a specifically Christian hermeneutics; a mind enabled by faith to believe in the hypostatic union might, by the same faith, be able to understand how spiritual disclosures await even in the material details of experience. Hamann, then, has what is for him the highest authorization to confront us with the paradox of interpretation. He sees the spirit living through the letter just as God can be present in the flesh of Christ. The letters which he removes from the first line of the Iliad, and the passions which the enlighteners hope to purge from their reasonings, are not mere accidents or addenda, as if words could be considered apart from their letters, or arguments apart from the passions that move their speakers and hearers. These raw elements of the created world of our experience are, Hamann tells us, the species under which comes to us an embodied communication from God, even as his Word is given flesh in Christ. All this is very pious; for someone of pious sensibilities, it may even be profound. But the intention of this line of thought has been least of all to stimulate pious feelings. Hamanns goal is not to spiritualize experience, or to add to our everyday speech and action a sense of divinity. His argument, rather, is
is to happen by the aid of Liber, who is Bacchus, and Ceres; that is, by the passions and the senses (Die Sinne aber \ind Ceres, und Bac<us die Leidenaften. [Nadler 201]). To these verses, to this praise of the literal, is attached as a footnote an attack on George Benson, who had argued against a plurality of senses of Scripture. Here Benson, who had in his way presumed to defend the literal sense, is mocked, for defending the unity of the scriptures too simplistically, as if unity of sense meant that there could only be one sense. Unity of sense, for Hamann, is always unity of senses. The footnote cited here and the verses to which it is attached are a fine example of Hamanns ability to compress his meaning into very few and very cryptic words. N.B. The Capernaitic sense refers to the sense in which Christ is literally present in the Christian sacrament. This unusual word is used, derogatively, in Lutheran texts (e.g. the Epitome of the Konkordienformel) to disparage Catholic sacramental teaching. Its origins are in Jn 6:55,59: For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. [] These things he said in the synagogue, as he taught in Capernaum. It is curious that a word referring to the text of the Gospels should become, for a Lutheran, a term of disapprobation; also curious is that the devoutly Lutheran Hamann should use this term apparently without any sense of disapprobation. Indeed, though, the Lutheran understanding, according to which Christ is present in the sacrament in a merely spiritual way, is less than perfectly compatible with Hamanns emphasis on material presence.

29 that our experience is always already spiritual, in all its details and particularities. And so the difficulty, then, of maintaining this double sensibility while reading Hamann, has been in no way relieved, even if something of Hamanns possible motivation for asking it of us has been brought into light. Essentially, Hamann is asking of us a kind of interpretative faith analogous to religious faith. He has no intention of proving, as if by a syllogism, that contingent historical actions disclose divine truth, or that letters have a cabalistic power not wholly accounted for by the words they compose. But it is in this way that he thinks, and if we hope to understand what Hamann meant to say, we must begin with an attempt to read him as he believed all texts ought to be read.

30

Chapter 4. To speak is to translate.

Hamanns insistence on the uniqueness of all particulars does not make translation or interpretation impossible, because the created world is always already symbolic. Typology is not derived from special revelation but present in the things themselves. It is from Hamanns typological style, and not from any direct statement, that we discover what he has to say. On the reading we have been attempting to carry out here, the logic, if one may call it that, of the Aesthetica in nuce is based on a series of correspondences, as seen in the table presented in the last chapter. Hamann asks us to read his text as a medieval commentator would have read Scripture, teasing apart the multiple senses of each line in order to understand the full meaning of what was written. In this reading of the line from the Iliad which we are challenged to read, we may not be able to neatly categorize its implied meanings into the literal, tropological, allegorical, and anagogical senses that Christians have traditionally seen in their sacred texts, but our project has nonetheless been similar, freely allowing the images Hamann places on the surface of the text to hint at what may lie beneath them, orto employ a metaphor more perhaps more congenial to Hamanndiscerning, from the loose threads on the back-side of the cloth, what the tapestry is meant to convey. This manner of interpretation does not seem to be an indulgence in eisegetic fantasy or a willfully creative overinterpretation of the text; the Aesthetica in nuce seems to demand such a reading, even if it does not spell out exactly how it might proceed. We might take a slogan from the text itselfto speak is to translateand understand our task, as readers, to read fluently or at least to decipher the peculiar language Hamann sends our way. The context from which this slogan comes gives us even more reason to think we have taken the right interpretative approach: Reden ist ber\etzenaus einer Engel\pra<e in eine Menen\pra<e, das hei, Gedanken in Worte,Sa<en in Namen,Bilder in Zei<en; die poeti oder kyriologi, hiori, oder \ymboli oder hieroglyphiund philo\ophi oder <arakterii \eyn knnen.1 Here we are given a license to translate Hamanns images into signs of various kinds. It is no surprise that, in a footnote attached to this text, he derogates the philosophic or characteristic signs by citing a passage of Petronius which complains that a new fashion of puffed-up and formless talkativeness has cor1

Nadler 199.

31 rupted speech, so that the standard of eloquence, being corrupted, has been halted and struck dumb, and not even poetry displays a healthy color.1 By philosophic or characteristic signs, we should understand something like Leibnizs fantasy of a universal character, according to which every possible idea ought to have an unambiguous and immediately interpretable symbolic expression. Such a rationalizing ambition, which hopes to reduce all language and symbolism to an all-encompassing system, in effect making semiotics nothing but a branch of logic, is for Hamann both impossible and ill-advised; his criticism, that such a system would put an end to the artistic use of language and symbols, is entirely of a piece with his general criticisms of the lifeless, passionless reason of the Enlighteners. However we are to read the signs of the Aesthetica in nuce, it is certainly not a matter of reading clear and distinct one-to-one correspondences out of the text. But the other kinds of signsthe poetic or symbolicdo not seem to fall under the same criticismthese suggest a kind of sign which indeed has meaning, but whose interpretation requires not an act of the reason, but artistic intuition, or familiarity with the tradition in which the symbol has definite content. It can be questioned, though, whether Hamanns thought allows even for this kind of correspondence. Hamann, as we have seen, is an avowed enemy of all abstractions that are artificially interpolated between ourselves and the objects of our perception. A fierce enemy of all idealisms (transcendental or otherwise), he sets out to defend our direct contact with the objects of our perception. In chapter 3, where we touched on the simultaneity of the different levels of meaning in the Aesthetica in nuce, we mentioned, in (rather obfuscatory) Christological language, that such a style of reading not only seems to be called for by Hamanns text, but also is deeply compatible with Hamanns religious and philosophical views. But here we might ask: is such a style of reading even possible? It seems to be a convenient solution to some of the problems of Hamanns text to assert that he intends the literal and symbolic meanings to be taken as of equal importancefor us to devote our full attention, to take up one of the governing metaphors of this

N 199, n10. Nuper ventosa isthaec & enormis loquacitas Athenas ex Asia conmigrauit [] simulque correpta eloquentiae regula stetit & obmutuit. [] Ac ne carmen quidem sani coloris enituit.

32 analysis, to whole words and single letters alike. But is this not simply a contradiction? Isaiah Berlin, a fairly unsympathetic but at any rate highly perspicuous reader of Hamann, argues that it is. After discussing how Hamann refuses to privilege abstract, purely mental thought over the particular words in which that thought finds expression, Berlin concludes that for Hamann, thought and language are one (even though he sometimes contradicts himself and speaks as if there could be some kind of translation from one to the other).1 As an example of one such contradiction, Berlin cites the line placed at the head of this section: to speak is to translate. For Berlin, it follows from Hamanns insistence on the unity of reason and language that no translation, no correspondence between words, ideas, and things can be established. If it had been the case that there was a metaphysical structure of things which could somehow be directly perceived, of if there were a guarantee that our ideas, or even our linguistic usage, in some mysterious way corresponded to such an objective structure, it might be supposed that philosophy, either by direct metaphysical intuition, or by attending to ideas or to language, and through them (because they correspond) to the facts, was a method of judging and knowing reality. [ But the] notion of a correspondence, that there is an objective world on one side, and, on the other, man and his instruments language, ideas, and so forth attempting to approximate to this objective reality, is a false picture. There is only a flow of sensations.2 This is a full-frontal challenge to the kind of reading we have been pursuing in this essay; it is, for that matter, also an attack on the very idea of the meaningfulness of the Aesthetica in nuce. If Hamann really intends his words to be nothing more than a flow of sensations, self-identical but corresponding to nothing else, the reading of those words could be nothing but raw, unconceptual esthetic experience. The text could perhaps be reproduced,3 but commentary or exposition would be absolutely impossible; any purported commentaries or expositions would in fact be wholly independent esthetic objects, invoking, perhaps, certain images from Hamanns treatise, but unable to claim any continuity of thought therewith.
1 2 3

Berlin 81 Ibid.

Though one might question even this. , and there is no reason to think any two flows of sensation could ever be substantially identical. Necessarily, every flow of sensations occurs to a different person or at a different time, and when we have removed from our consideration any kind of substantial or essential way of thinking that would allow us to abstract a unity from these differences, we would be engaging in a kind of thought that, according to Berlin, Hamann resolutely opposed.

33 Believing this to be Hamanns view, Berlin is perplexed when confronted with Hamanns open assertion that translation is possible between human speech and the speech of angels, and can only conclude that Hamann here contradicts himself. And for Berlin it is quite to be expected that Hamann should contradict himself; he regards Hamanns thought, in general, as highly creative and intriguing Schwrmerei, of note for its pivotal place in intellectual history, but completely insusceptible or unworthy of serious philosophic attention. Berlin appreciates Hamanns criticism of the Enlightenment, and his prescient awareness of the lifeless, bloodless conception of mans spiritual life that the Enlighteners would ultimately produce. While Berlin claims to understand Hamanns motives in writing, he utterly rejects the content of his writings, which he regards as the cry of a trapped man who cannot be brought to see that to be regimented or eliminated is either inevitable or desirable.1 For Berlin, Hamann is simply a fanatic, whose writings consist of passionate rhetoric and not careful thought, and whose opinions are grotesquely one-sided: a violent exaggeration of the uniqueness of men and things [and] a passionate hatred of mens wish to understand the universe.2 These criticisms are accompanied by hints that Hamann, in reacting against the rational purism of the Enlightenment, was making straight the way for the racial purism of Hitler.3 Given that Berlin viewed Hamann in such a way, it is not surprising that he concludes that a core element in the intellectual architecture of the Aesthetica in nuce is a simple contradiction; Berlin is interested in Hamann as an episode in German intellectual history, not as a thinker whose ideas have any perennial worth. But on the assumption that Hamann is not simply raving, and that the attempt to understand the Aesthetica in nuce need not be fruitless or frustrating, we might question Berlins judgment that Hamann

Berlin 116 Berlin 121 3 This accusation is presented in Berlins book in a series of insinuations; we are told for example that Hamanns hatred and blind irrationalism have fed the stream that has led to social and political irrationalism, particularly in th German, in our own [20 ] century (121), as knowing reference is made to the prophecy of Heine that the world would do well to fear the quiet philosophers of Germany. Berlin never purports to have unearthed any actually Nazi ideas in Hamann, and it is not my purpose to defend Hamann from that charge here, as has been conclusively done elsewhere. But Berlins apparent opinion in this matter is not entirely irrelevant to his dismissal of Hamann as an irresponsible thinker with nothing of substance to add to the history of ideas.
2

34 simply contradicts himself in allowing for the possibility of translation in and out of symbolic languages. Hamann has very little patience for philosophic or characteristic signs which promise patent meaning and unambiguous interpretation. This is perfectly in keeping with his general distaste for efficient, well-oiled rational systems. But in the text cited above, where various kinds of signs are discussed, it is worth noting that the footnote containing his criticism is attached only to the last, which in turn is, in the text, separated from the others by two em-dashes. And there is indeed reason to think that Hamann means for the poetic and symbolic signs not to fall under the same fierce criticism as the others. To speak is to translate, and creation is a speech to the creature through the creature. These two maxims, placed very near to each other in the text,1 suggest something of a solution to the problem to which Berlin directs our attention. The conjunction of these lines should remind us that Hamann, whether he directing his attention to literature, philology, esthetics, or any other subject, is always also a religious thinker. The archetype of every text is for him the Bible, and biblical exegesis is the model and canon of all interpretation. It is for this reason no accident that the most obvious object of criticism in the Aesthetica in nuce is the biblical critic Michaelis. Against Michaeliss denial of a mystical, typological sense of Scripture,2 Hamann defends these. The Scriptures for Hamann are a collection of historical and poetic texts which is not merely a collection of historical and poetic texts, but also a book that contains the most essential truth about the entire created world, and about each believer. In taking to the lists against Michaelis, Hamann defends the ancient way of reading scripture; but if he were nothing but an exegetical reactionary, differing from Michaelis merely on a point of Biblical interpretation, there would be much less to discover in the Aesthetica in nuce than there is. For Hamann, though, the Bible is not the only object to which correct biblical criticism ought to be applied. The Bible is the Word of God, but creation is also, for Hamann, a kind of speech. To me, says Hamann, every book is a Bible;3 like the Bible, then, every book must be read not merely for its literal sense. Berlins reading of Hamann might be correct, if Ha1

N 118-119 Betz 114. 3 Briefwechsel I p. 309, trans. in Betz 47

2

35 mann were speaking about the everyday world of words and things understood as a brute fact. But Hamann, on the contrary, sees everything that is as a gift and communication from God; creation is speech, and the intention of the Author allows for the possibility of translation, even if it does not guarantee that the translation will be in every case successful. In the Aesthetica in nuce, after all, there is no expression of confidence that the meanings of the world around us can be at all easily interpreted. If creation is speech given from God, Hamann would remind us that the interpretation of tongues is also a divine gift;1 he admits even that persons may not understand what they themselves to and say. Even a figure such as Voltaire, hardly a friend of religious outlooks, testifies, for those who have ears to hear, to the rightness of Hamanns views: kann man wohl einen glaubwrdigern Zeugen als den unerbli<en Voltaire anfhren, wel<er beynahe die Religion fr den Eckein der epien Di<tkun erklrt? [] Voltaire aber, der Hoheprieer im Tempel des Gemacks lt so bndig als Kaiphas, und denkt fru<tbarer als Herodes.2 As Hamann explains in a note, Caiaphas and Herod are archetypical examples, in the Christian tradition, of figures who uttered words far more meaningful than they themselves understood. Caiaphas (the Hoheprieer im Tempel but also a somewhat Machiavellian politician) justifies the crucifixion of Christ by arguing that it is expedient that one man should die for the people,3 believing himself to be discussing a political necessity while, as if prophetically, describing the Christian doctrine of the atonement. And Herods deceitful remark to the Magi that I might also come and worship him, is taken, since Herod was king of the Jews though a gentile by race, to represent the universal destiny of the Christian religion.4 This tradition of interpretation, habitual in Biblical exegesis, Hamann applies also to analysis of the wordso that the truth of the dependency of art on religion (a truth that, if vowels are taken for the spirit, is also expressed in his line from the Iliad) is confessed even out of the mouth of the heretic Voltaire. Hamann
1

1 Cor 12:10. Nadler 204-5. 3 John 11:50 4 It is telling that Hamann chooses such a contrived and complicated case of biblical parallelism as this one; his argument is not that the inner, spiritual meaning of nature and of human speech can obviously interpreted, but that those who are able to do it will find a way.
2

36 will readily concede that we see through a glass darkly,1 and that we may not even be able to descry the true outlines of our own persons in this mirrorbut by invoking the language of mirrors2 he locates himself within a tradition of thought according to which nature, however flawed parts of it may be and however dulled our ability to discern itis a communication from God. It would be one thing if Hamann proposed this communication as a matter for properly religious analysis, as a mystery included in Christian revelation but unrelated to the conclusions available to secular reason. While Hamann never negates the importance of religious faith for the understanding even of secular matters, he does not however contend that awareness of the true nature of the world as created, as a speech to the creature through the creature, can be known only to the privileged few to whom the Gospel has been preached, but is available even to blind heathens: Blinde Heyden haben die Un\i<tbarkeit erkannt, die der Men mit GOTT gemein hat. Die verhllte Figur des Leibes, das Antlitz des Hauptes, und das uere der Arme \ind das \i<tbare S<ema, in dem wir einher gehn; do< eigentli< ni<ts als ein Zeigefinger des verborgenen Menen in uns; Exemplumque DEI quisque est in imagine parva.3 Note that the spiritual, invisible qualities of humanity, the godlike nature of man described in Genesis, is, according to Hamann, are not only knowable even to those without particularly Christian knowledge, but are known precisely through the physical, visible parts of the manifest human body. These physical parts, far from distracting from the spiritual reality, are the index fingers which direct the inner man to our attention. Hamann, let us recall,4 does not believe that the target of this Zeigefinger can always be

1 Cor 13:12. th Though Hamann is in some ways a very modern thinker who anticipates 20 century thought about the kinship of reason and language, he here looks back to the middle ages. Cf. Alan of Lille Omnis mundi creatura / Quasi liber et pictura / Nobis est, et speculum. With the sentiment and conceit of this verse Hamann could not agree more. 3 N 198. The quotation, from the Astronomicon of Manilius (IV.895), is mainly noteworthy for its having been written by a pagan author, while echoing the language of Genesis regarding the image of God. The Cambridge edition of Hamann misenglishes this line, rendering it as Each one is an instance of God in miniature. This not only loses the connection to the book of Genesis conveyed by the word imago, but puts far too much weight on the word exemplum as well. An exemplum is not an instance, but a type, model, or analogue. Instance implies an occurrence of a rationally determinable kind; a type or analogue implies something which makes present the idea of another thing without being purged of its own particularity. It is this latter kind of relationship Hamann argues is present throughout the created world, and which is mirrored in the structure of his text. 4 See chapter 2, pp. 21
2

37 readily descried; his argument is not that the translation is effortless. But if it is not effortless, neither is it arbitrary; for Hamann, the ability of the material world to speak to us of spiritual things, which is also the ability of letters to unite into words, and the ability of the text of the Scriptures (and every book is a Bible!) to speak to our individual circumstancesthis ability is grounded in the meanings that are already present in objects which are, as created objects, a communication from God. Isaiah Berlin misses the point, then, when he contends that translation between these various levels of understanding is impossible. Berlin refers to correspondences of thing and idea, and of idea and word; these correspondences are, for Berlin, relations between two different things of different types. He is quite correct to judge that Hamann considers such correspondences impossible. What Hamann posits is not that there is an essential connection between the things we perceive, the words we utter, and their inner, spiritual meaninghe does not claim that there is a systematic logic bridging the gap between letters and words. In a universe that is always pregnant with meaning, things already are signs. There is nothing arbitrary, nothing requiring justification, for Hamann, about the semiotic richness of the universe. That is simply its nature, as a free gift of a communicative God. The world, and everything in it, is a sign.

38

Conclusion
If this section is entitled Conclusion, it is something of a misnomer. This essay has variously approached the page of the Aesthetica in nuce on which two letters are removed from the first line of the Iliad, and attempted to consider in several ways what Hamann might mean by it. In the course of this analysis, however, it has been clear that whatever the message of this page is, it is not easily reduced to logical points or to simple slogans. We might try to encapsulate it in various ways; in fact, the closest this essay has come to success in this is with Hamanns own line that creation is a speech to the creature through the creature. The several sections of this essay have sketched out a vision according to which reason does not presume haughtily to raise itself up, by abstraction, over the things perceived, which things nonetheless, without dissolving into any sort of system or losing their self-identical particularity, can serve as signs of other things. Things are what they are even while, as creation, they are speech. And if creation is God speech, so also is human speech a translation between signs, words, and ideas, which correspond to each other based on no apodictically determinable system knowable a priori, but on the gratuitous (one might even say arbitrary) ordering of things as they are given to us. But while to summarize like this might not be wrong, it sells the Aesthetica in nuce short. Hamanns genius is not to give us some theses on cognition or language with which we might agree or disagree, or which we might file away in some large volume on intellectual history. He wants to introduce us to a new way of reading and thinking, but he does this by writing a treatise which obliges us, if we would understand it, to accustom ourselves to such a way of reading. The images in the Aesthetica in nuce, to which we have devoted so much attention in this essay, are not mere decorations or illustrations of the arguments; they themselves are the arguments, and so it is that in meditating on Hamanns use of images we have been able to unearth aspects of his views on the relation of religion, language, and reason which were not obvious in the text. After Hamann has compared translation to the art of understanding the image of a tapestry from looking only at the backs of the threads, he remarks Dort [i.e. in the original contexts of the metaphors borrowed from other authors for

39 Hamanns text] werden \ie aber ad illustrationem (zur Verbrmung des Rockes); hier ad inuolucrum (zum Hemde auf bloem Leibe) gebraucht.1 One might be inclined to think that decoration of a garment and the clothing of a body are both matters of external ornamentation, irrelevant to the substance of what is decorated or clothed. But we can read this footnote in another way, if we understand clothing to be something which is not extraneous to a person, but is rather an integral part of the way a person is presented to the world. This is one of the things which account for the great difficulty of reading Hamann, since he much prefers using images ad involucrum to dressing his points in clear and transparent language (he has too much respect for them to send them out so scantily clad). But it also accounts for the tremendous richness that can be found even in a tiny excerpt from Hamanns text. Images that open into other images, without losing their identity by deferring their meaning to the object signified, make for an extremely dense text. The ambit of this reflection, however rambling it may be, has been a single line of Hamanns, which, according to the line of interpretation I have explored, reveals as much about Hamanns thought by its form as it does by its content. Hamann hopes, in the Aesthetica in nuce, both to describe and to practice a kind of thought completely foreign to the Enlightened minds of his age. Whether he ultimately succeeds in tearing down the idols of rational purism in this text is not primarily our question. But I hope I have made clear, or at least suggested, that Hamanns motion between images, his construction of typological schemes that resist easy classification and one-for-one interpretation, is not antirational raving or obscurantism, but rather an alternativeand a quite compelling oneto the dominant intellectual practices of his time. He warns us of the futility of all attempts to anticipate experience with a rational system, to hope to encompass the whole of a phenomenon by means of abstractions, and helps us to see a richer world, a world not composed primarily of raw elements or of truths of reason, but a world that resists all manner of abstraction and reduction, a world in which parts are not dissolved into their wholes, nor wholes into their parts, and in which each thing opens up a vista of symbolism and typology.

N 199, note 11.

40 This is, in the end, neither rationalism nor antirationalism, at least if we mean by those opposites what we normally do. This kind of reading that is so strange, so different from the intellectual schemes that govern so much of our thought, that he does not hope to be able to explain it to us directly. His style, rather, is an invitation, extended to all who would understand him, to see things as he does, to allow our abstractions to become destabilized by his willfully confusing text, and to enter with him into his thoroughly religious vision of the world. If one is willing to do this, Hamann is a kind of prophetand the horned head of Pan on his title-page is also the horned head of Moses.1 And if one is not willing (and who is?), Hamann is a curiosity, an interesting efflorescence of powerful prose-writing that provides a kind of side show to the master narrative of the German Enlightenment. In either case, there is little point in producing neat tables of Hamanns views or brief conclusions of his thought; if we conclude anything from Hamann, it should be that such a task would be a waste of time. Our theorizings about a page of the Aesthetica in nuce lead ultimately to the conclusion there can be no commentary, no Masorah, on the text that is equal to it. The Aesthetica in nuce can only be understood in being read; what is written here, however lucidly or obscurely, is a different text in a different style. It is incommensurable with the Aesthetica in nuce, and whatever worth it itself may contain, it can tell us nothing about that text. And so it is, unless Hamann is onto somethingunless there really is some secret, ineffable law of correspondences that unites disparate symbols and meanings, endowing even the humblest of things with a potentially infinite range of meanings. But should we pursue this thought further, we would do violence to it. Or from another perspective: we should have waded out into depths of mystical intuition where we cannot hope to keep our footing. There is the realm of Moses and of leering Pan, and perhaps also of Hamann: a realm of play and of coruscation and reflection but a sacred precinct into which the tribes of calculators, commentators and writers of senior essays have no right to tread.

Hamann himself made use of this coincidence, using the same image for Pan on the title page of the Crusades of the Philologist, and for Moses on the title-page of his Essais la Mosaque. (Roth 103, 343).

41

BIBLIOGRAPHY Berlin, Isaiah. The Magus of the North: J.G. Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism. ed. Henry Hardy. London: John Murray, 1993. Betz, John. After Enlightenment: the Post-Secular Vision of J.G. Hamann. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2009. Hamann, Johann Georg. Hamanns Schriften. ed. Friedrich Roth. Berlin: G. Reimer, 1821. (Cited as Roth. All citations are from volume 2.) Hamann, Johann Georg. Smtliche Werke. ed. Josef Nadler. Wien: Verlag Herder, 1950. (Cited as Nadler. Unless otherwise noted, all citations are from volume 2.) Hamann, Johann Georg. Writings on Philosophy and Language. trans. and ed. Kenneth Haynes. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. (Cited as Haynes.) Jacobs, Carol. Hamann Is a Nomadic Writer: Aesthetica in nuce. in Skirting the Ethical. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008. pp. 111-130. OFlaherty, James C. The Quarrel of Reason with Itself: Essays on Hamann, Michaelis, Lessing, Nietzsche. Columbia, SC: Camden, 1988.