De Aesthetica in nuce

ad litteram

Senior essay written by Kevin Gallagher under the advisement of Paul North

in completion of the require- ments of the major in

Humanities

April 18 2011

1

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 Hamannrsquos thought and language The title itself ldquoDe

Aesthetica in nuce ad litteramrdquo is in emulation of St Augustinersquos 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 ldquoad litteramrdquo of title is somewhat misleadingmdash

Augustinersquos is not at all a ldquoliteralrdquo commentary but a commentary that often admits that the literal read-

ing 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 impor-

tant is an important one for Hamann as well who in the Aesthetica in nuce approvingly cites Augustine to

this effect1 This is the kind of reading of Hamann I pursue in this essay The ldquoad litteramrdquo of this essayrsquos

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 works2 it will become clear in this essay that they are at least important enough to merit

an oblique reference in the essayrsquos title

The line from Popersquos 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 Augustinersquos hermeneutical methods

Hamann applies to Jonathan Swift a line which Pope intended for Erasmus3 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

ldquoMusarum sacerdosrdquo of Horacersquos odes But the motivation behind the choice of Popersquos line as an epigram

1 See Chapter 1 page 11

2 Eg Neue Apologie des Bultfrac34abens h

3 ldquoAt length Erasmus that great injurrsquod Name (The Glory of the Priesthood and the Shame) Stemmrsquod the

wild Torrent of a barbrsquorous Agerdquo Pope Essay on Criticism In context these lines refer to Erasmusrsquos iconoclastic break with the Scholasticism of the middle ages which Pope considered to have had a stifled good writing Hamann would likely have shared Popersquos assessment of the rational edifice of Scholasticism Only the parenthetical remark from Popersquos verse is applied to Swift (at Nadler 212) as Hamann discusses Swiftrsquos treatise on puns

2

is that Hamann like Horace intends to ldquocharm us into senserdquo 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 intuitive-

ly 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 poetmdashhe will not compel us to be correct by means of

syllogisms or inexorable logic but he will ldquocharm us into senserdquo laying out his ideas making them attrac-

tive 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 ndashthough 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 criti-

cism 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 Eu-

charist The columns of the temple then are adorned both for a bacchanal and for a Eucharist for sancti-

ty 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 ldquofor he spake and it was donerdquo

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 Hamannrsquos fundamental insights namely that creation is

Godrsquos 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 lettersrsquo 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 fashionmdashand 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 Chapter 1 The unnatural use of abstraction 10

The removal of Α and Ω from the first line of the Iliad is a parable about the right use of reason The vowels are the passions and Ha-mann warns against the belief that reason can operate properly with-out the passions

Chapter 2 Vowels 17

In the symbolic economy of the Aesthetica in nuce the difference be-tween 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

Hamannrsquos coincidentia oppositorum is not any kind of dialectical synthesis Creation is speech ndash so is Hamannrsquos use of symbolism justi-fied The hermeneutical paradoxes of the Aesthetica in nuce are ana-logous to the paradoxes of the Christian religion

Chapter 4 To speak is to translate 34

Hamannrsquos 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 revela-tion but present in the things themselves It is from Hamannrsquos typolog-ical style and not from any direct statement that we discover what he has to say

Conclusion 46 Bibliography 49

5

Introduction This essay is not an attempt to understand Hamannrsquos 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 ldquoGreeksrdquo 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 compari-

son 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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos larger corpus this is

due to chance or to a consistency in Hamannrsquos writing and not at all to design Admittedly the themes

brought up on this page that is our subjectmdashwriting the possibility of readingmdashare broad ones and as we

shall see according to the patterns of symbolism which Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 ndashwhich for Hamann are

scarcely separablemdashpresented 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 philo-

sophical criticism as the inauguration of a new artistic era or as an almost meaningless display of be-

nighted and antirational obscurantismmdashbut one cannot avoid the conclusion that Johann Georg Ha-

mannrsquos 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 sub-

jects of the Aesthetica in nuce are much less parochial the nature of reason the power of language the rela-

tion 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 state-

ment of his positionmdashand this perhaps would often not be wrongmdashbut the Aesthetica in nuce a dizzying-

ly 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 enoughmdashinterpreting 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 Hamannrsquos 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 pre-

sume to have accurately or exhaustively interpreted the Aesthetica in nuce but we hope to write a commen-

tary 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 appear-

ance 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 con-

structed this analysis of the Aesthetica in nuce out of a series of separatemdashthough I think not ultimately

contradictorymdashinvestigations 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 wouldnrsquot 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 Hamannrsquos German I have used the old German letters he would have recog-

nized 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 indiffe-

rently 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 lettermdashat 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

Hamannrsquos 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 ma-

naged to salvage any worthwhile thought have at least brought it somewhat closer to the surface

9

Chapter 1 The Unnatural Use of Abstraction

The removal of Α and Ω 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

Verultt es einmal die Iliade zu leen wenn ihr vorher durlt die Abfrac34raction die beiden

Selbfrac34lauter α und ω ausgeilttet habt und agt mir eure Meynung von dem Verfrac34ande und Wohlklange des Diltters

Μῆνιν ειδε Θε Πηληιδε χιλῆος1

In this passage and quotation from Hamannrsquos text traditional images while recognizable for

what they are are combined in a novel way The alpha and omega are symbol of Christ (Rev 18) 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 Hamannrsquos 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 linersquos content

and consider merely what it is as a line Itrsquos the incipit of the Iliad ndash for a student of Greek one of the hex-

ameters that come most readily to mind ndash the opening line of the epic traditionally regarded as the great-

est 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 Priamrsquos neighbors but of the ideals and achievements of classic-

al civilization ndash which though indeed falling as far short of Homerrsquos 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 at-

tempt to understand classical civilization while rejecting Christ Indeed Hamann himself encourages such

a reading of the image when he later cites ldquothe Punic father of the Churchrdquo to the effect that the prophetic

1 Nadler 207

10

books of the Old Testament can only be interpreted correctly when Christ is ldquoread intordquo them ldquoRead the

prophetic books without understanding Christrdquo says Augustine ldquoand what pointlessness and folly will

you find there Understand Christ there and what you read will not only savor but will even intoxicaterdquo1

Hamann takes up and expands this argument providing some context to his surgical removal of vowels

from Homerrsquos line Though as a rhetorician Augustine was acutely aware of their power after his conver-

sion 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 un-

derstood correctly ldquoa dream-like anticipation of Christrdquo2 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 ndash

he is too much of a Lutheran for that But as regards the value of the ancient myths he is rather more ge-

nerous 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 ap-

parent 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 ndash

which is of course not to say that it is not one of the ways Hamann intended it to be read But there must

1 Nadler 212-3 ldquoLege libros propheticos non intellecto CHRISTO agt der punifrac14e Kirltenvater quid tam insipidum amp fatuum inuenies Intellige ibi CHRISTUM non solum sapit quod legis sed etiam inebriatrdquo Hamann gives no citation for this quote a note to the Cambridge translation locates it at Ioh Evang Tract IX3 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 let-

ters than Hamann gives us ndash and even if we lacked the extrinsic familiarity with Homerrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 warriorrsquos

wrath

What then does Hamann mean by this image ldquoSeerdquo he hints to us just after showing us the al-

tered line of Greek ldquothe greater and lesser Masorah of philosophy [Weltweisheit] has overwhelmed the

text of Nature like a Noahrsquos floodrdquo1 As is usual for Hamann this explanation only raises further ques-

tions Nothing here has overwhelmed or flooded anything else and least of all Masorah ndash 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 re-

minded of what was said shortly before Homerrsquos line was introduced

Sie [dh die Mue] wird es wagen den natuumlrlilten Gebrauclt der Sinne von dem unnatuumlrlilten Gebrault der Abfrac34ractionen zu laumlutern wodurlt unere Begriffe von den Dingen eben o ehr verfrac34uumlmmelt werden als der Name des Sltoumlpfers underdruumlckt und gelaumlfrac34ert wird2

The ldquounnatural use of abstractionsrdquo here plays a role parallel to that of the ldquoMasorah of worldly philoso-

phyrdquo mdash 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 ldquoMaso-

1 Nadler 207 Seht die groszlige und kleine Maore der Weltweisheit hat den Text der Natur gleilt einer Suumlndfluth uumlberfrac14wemmt 2 Nadler 207

12

rah of philosophyrdquo then are interpretations that distort and obscure It is this sort of distortion and ob-

scuring that are represented by the removal of the letters alpha and omega from Homerrsquos line we are told

after all that they are removed ldquothrough abstractionrdquo Here Hamann is making a pun on the Latin roots

of the word ldquoabstractionrdquo but it is not merely a pun it is also a hint at one of the hidden connections be-

tween the vowels of the Iliad and Hamannrsquos 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 dam-

aged

And Hamann further suggests that it is because of this failure of interpretation or clarification

that the ldquoGreeksrdquo who abuse abstraction are wrong to think themselves wiser than the ldquochamberlains with

the Gnostic keyrdquo This phrase in itself rather obscure is one of the bridge-phrases in Hamannrsquos text that

point out to us which parts of the tapestry may be connected beneath the surface Chamberlain is Kammer-

herr and between Kammerherr and Kaumlmmerer there is small difference and Kaumlmmerer is the word Luther

used for ldquoeunuchrdquo1 The bridge leads us to another nearby passage of the Aesthetica

Wenn die Leidenfrac14aften Glieder der Unehre ind houmlren ie deswegen auf Waffen der Mannheit zu eyn Verfrac34eht ihr den Bultfrac34aben der Vernunft kluumlger als jener allegorifrac14e Kaumlmmerer der alexandrinifrac14en Kirlte den Bultfrac34aben der Sltrift der ich elbfrac34 zum Verfrac14nittenen maltte um des Himmelreilts willen2

Seen in light of this passage the reference to eunuchs and to Gnosticism is less perplexing While Origen

ndash who I presume to be ldquothat allegorical chamberlain of the Alexandrian churchrdquo mdash is not generally consi-

dered 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

ldquoLeidenfrac14aftenrdquo 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

1 ldquoIn Acts 827 Luther translates as lsquoKaumlmmererrsquo(related to lsquoKammerherrrsquo chamberlain) what the King James Bible translates as lsquoeunuchrsquordquo Haynes 80 note 87 2 Nadler 208

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 ab-

stract 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 ex-

tended Latin quotation from Bacon which is appended as a footnote to the passage quoted above on the

ldquounnatural use of abstractionsrdquo Hamann calls Bacon his ldquoEuthyphrordquo1 the figure who perhaps does not

teach him anymore than Euthyphro taught Socrates but who provides nonetheless the occasion for fruit-

ful 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 repu-

tation as an antirationalist or forerunner of the Sturm und Drang is not here making an argument against

reason as such or against the mindrsquos use of concepts or against thought in general For Bacon is not mak-

ing an argument against philosophy but against bad philosophy ldquoAnd so let men know how far the Idols

of the human mind are from the Ideas of the divine mind hellip 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 ac-

count of the conveniences of liferdquo 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 con-

cepts only so that the truth of things might better shine forth -- indeed for all that he advocates the in-

crease 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 Hamannrsquos critique of the Gnostic chamberlains His prescription is not that we avoid

1 ldquoBacon mein Euthyphronrdquo Nadler 197

14

making use of concepts for things but that we make sure that our concepts have not been verfrac34uumlmmelt and

gelaumlfrac34ert by abuses of reason

The word ldquoabstractionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos 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 foot-

note quotes at considerable length Ovidrsquos retelling of the story ldquoSpem sine corpore amat corpus putat

esse quod umbra est Adstupet ipse sibirdquo1 They who consider the abstractions of their minds to be most

real prefer a (vain) hope or a shadow to the bodymdashthat is the material concrete reality of the natural

world Long after Hamannrsquos 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 sibimdashNarcissus 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 ldquopure reasonrdquo from the mess of passions and contingencies that always surround hu-

man life Hamann prophesies an analogous fate It is this abuse of reason which Hamann means to sug-

gest t the removal of the first and last Greek letters from a line of Homer

And just as Hamann challenges the ldquoGreeksrdquo 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 cor-

rectly or to make any meaningful scientific achievements Just as Hume could not drink a glass of water or

eat an egg without faith2 neither we might paraphrase Hamann could he follow an argument to its con-

1 Metamorphoses III417f quoted at Nadler 210

2 This was a favorite quip of Hamannrsquos and is recorded in several places eg OrsquoFlaherty 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 Hamannrsquos view the supposed opposition of

reason and the passions is a fiction of the Enlighteners his thought has little room for absolute dichoto-

mies and he rejects also this one The passions in fact have an essential role to play even in the exercise

of reason ldquoLeidenfrac14amacr allein giebt Abfrac34ractionen owohl als Hypotheen Haumlnde Fuumlszlige Fluumlgel mdash Bildern und Zei-

chen Geifrac34 Leben und Zungerdquo1 There are perhaps many ways to understand ldquohands feet and wingsrdquo mdash but

between all possible interpretations of these words a basic unity exists They are all parts of the body asso-

ciated with motion and action And so abstractions and hypothesesmdashdry conclusions of the reasonmdashare

made active and mobile by the passions Likewise images and signs are given ldquolife and tonguerdquo 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 un-

mutilated 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 Hamannrsquos style and the symbolic ldquovocabularyrdquo of the Aesthetica in nuce The connection of Ha-

mannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos thought

1 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

Verucht es einmal die Iliade zu leen wenn ihr vorher durch die Abfrac34raction die beyden

Selbfrac34lauter α und ω ausgesichtet habt1 ldquoSelbstlautrdquo and ldquoMitlautrdquo ldquoConsonantrdquo and ldquovowelrdquo2 These are evocative termsmdashnot 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 con-

cepts 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 ldquoletter of the voicerdquo is utterable on its own while a littera consonans

must be ldquosounded withrdquo something else This way of articulating the distinction between independent

vowels and dependent consonants was a commonplace in the eighteenth century3 and would not have

been unfamiliar to Hamann even if the etymology of ldquoSelbstlautrdquo did not suggest it If we translate then

a bit freely we might say ldquothat which is removed from the Iliad by abstraction is that without which

1 Nadler 207

2 German preserves also more Latinate forms ldquoVokalrdquo and ldquoKonsonantrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos thought in the Aesthetica in nuce 3 John Hensons New Latin Grammar for instance published at Nottingham in 1744 explains ldquoA Vowel is a letter

which makes a full and perfect Sound of it Self as a o A Conſonant is a Letter that has no Sound of it Self without a Vowelrdquo And in a Verbesserte and Erleichterte Lateinische Grammatica published at Halle in 1763 (a year after the Cru-sades of the Philologist saw light) we read ldquoDen Anfang in der Lateinifrac14en Spralten maltt man von den Bultfrac34abenhellip Und diee werden eingetheilet in vocales oder elbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautende und consonantes oder mitlautendemitlautendemitlautendemitlautende o niltt ehe koumlnnen ausgeprolten werden als bis ein vocalis dazukoumlmmtrdquo 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 httpbooksgooglecombooksid=T5ECAAAAQAAJ and the second at httpbooksgooglecombooksid=F9oVAAAAYAAJ

17

there can be no speechrdquo which without any further interpretation already at least appears to imply much

more than a matter of rearranged letters

As we have seen the ldquoabstractionrdquo of the letters from the line of the Iliad corresponds in the typo-

logical 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 pas-

sions in order for them to have any power to persuade It is not that reasoned arguments even when ab-

stract are otiose or parasiticalmdashthese 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 ldquovocalizedrdquo

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

Hamannrsquos 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 unpointedmdashlike 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 durlt 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 scripturesmdashwritten by God but one must bring onersquos

own vowels to read it

But is this not going too far While we may not just have misrepresented Hamannrsquos 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 doesnrsquot make sense as

written without those vowels itrsquos still easily interpretable If Hamann had not named it as a line from the

Iliad any educated person on seeing the word microῆνιν 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 miss-

ing places in the line the shape of the dactyls and the grammatical possibilities offered by the Greek lan-

guage 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 En-

lightened 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 objec-

tion of this scientist would be absurd because it would miss the point of Hamannrsquos critiquemdashhe goes

around the backs of the Enlighteners contending that they are moved by passion even in what they be-

lieve to be their exercises of pure reason that the arguments they invoke to defend their conception of rea-

son 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 ldquoTurbatverserdquo1 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 Hamannrsquos altered line from the Iliad) But it refers most specif-

ically 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 Θεά ἄειδε μῆνιν Ἀχιλῆος Πηληϊάδεω In a certain sense there is nothing of Homerrsquos 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 ob-

viously 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 ldquogoddessrdquo and not ldquowrathrdquo In the Turbatverse of nature then the superficial meaning of the speak-

ing 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 niltts als Turbatvere und disiecti membra poetae zu unerm Gebrault uumlbrig Diee zu ammeln ifrac34 des Gelehrten ie auszulegen des Philoophen ie naltzuahmenmdashoder nolt kuumlhnermdash mdashie in Gefrac14ick zu bringen des Poeten befrac14eiden Theil2

1 Nadler 198

2 Nadler 199

20

The hierarchy that is here established with the scholar philosopher and poet presented with responsibili-

ties of increasing creativity should not surprise us as it is exactly in line with what Hamann says else-

where about the high dignity of the poet to whom is compared even God himself1 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 ade-

quate 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 consti-

tuent 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

1 ldquoDer Poet am Anfange der Tagerdquo Nadler 206

21

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

Hamannrsquos coincidentia oppositorum is not any kind of dialectical synthesis Creation is speech ndash so is Hamannrsquos 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 Aesthe-

tica in nuce relate to the argument he makes about the proper use of reason There is significant ldquooverlaprdquo

here the various images and descriptions Hamann uses are parallel making the same argument in differ-

ent ways From what we have already said we can derive a kind of table showing how the various images

used map onto Hamannrsquos argument about the reason and the passions

Passions Reason

Vowels Consonants Words Mere arrangements of letters Poetic Meter Turbatverse God Nature Christianity Classical civilization Alpha and Omega 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 refus-

es 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 to-

gether 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 ldquoit is not clear how far he understood it and he certainly gives it a

1 Though not in the Aesthetica See eg Betz 28 note 17

22

sense of his ownrdquo1 In fact it is not easy to see where the ldquocoincidencerdquo comes in at all Regarding every

text every object as part of his ldquoBiblerdquo 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 themselvesmdashto

the letters of a text (in literary criticism) and the phenomena of nature unreduced to their universal ra-

tional 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 pro-

duced of these elements He beholds in a single vision der rollende Donner der Beredamkeit and der

einylbicltte Blitz2 This strangemdashor strange to us and Hamann would not hesitate to say that our sensibili-

ties need correctionmdashthis strange conjunction of opposites confronts us even on the title page of the Aes-

thetica in nuce Eine Rhapodie in kabbalifrac34ifrac14er Proe A rhapsodymdasha stitching-together of pieces into an ar-

tistic unitymdashthat 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 ldquoApostillerdquo ndash whether Hamann himself some per-

sonified commentator or anyone else ndash remarks that the author of the Aesthetica in nuce ldquohat Satz und

Satz zuammengereltnet wie man die Pfeile auf einem Sltlalttfelde zaumlhltrdquo3 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 Romansrsquo shots though fewer were fired with greater force It is not clear which side better corres-

ponds to Hamannrsquos 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 Therersquos a case to be made for either in-

terpretation But whichever we take the view wersquore given of the Aesthetica in nuce is still of individual

Saumltze piled up one after another as discrete countable units This treatise says the speaker of the Apos-

tille is just a pile of sentences But in an instant our perspective is shifted ldquoLaszligt uns jetzt die Hauptumme

1 Berlin 115

2 Nadler 208

3 Nadler 217 The reference given by Hamann (ldquoProcop De bello persico I 18rdquo) is explained at Haynes 94 note

kkk

23

[hellip] houmlrenldquo1 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 vari-

ous meditations on human life that compose the text of the biblical book2 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

summarymdasha 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 Hamannrsquos 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 readerrsquos confusion It is not Hamannrsquos 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 writings3 it is perhaps not sur-

prising then if the Aesthetica in nuce presents us with hermeneutic difficulties that neither the text itself

nor comparisons with Hamannrsquos other works nor consideration of Hamannrsquos engagement with the issues

of his time are adequate to dispel But the paradox we are considering heremdashthe simultaneous focus on

both columns of the table with which this chapter beganmdashis so fundamental to the thought of the Aesthe-

tica in nuce that unless we can come to terms with it in some way Hamannrsquos 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

1 Ibid

2 Cf Lutherbibel Predig 1213 ldquoLaszligt uns die Hauptumme aller Lehre houmlrenldquo 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 ldquoApostillerdquo likewise to be a undermining of all that goes before it 3 ldquoI no longer understand myself quite differently from then some [writings I understand] better some worse [hellip]

[hellip] 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 stuffrdquo Briefwechsel V p 358 trans in Betz 229

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 ldquodie ilt nolt im bloszligen Bult-frac34a-bi-ren uumlbenmdashmdashund wahrlilt wahrlilt Kinder muumlfrac12en

wir werden wenn wir den Geifrac34 der Wahrheit empfahen ollenldquo1 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 ldquoSpirit of

Truth whom the world cannot receiverdquo (Jn 1417) 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 spiri-

tual pole than to the elemental literal material one But how says Hamannrsquos Nuszlig is this Spirit of Truth

to be received By becoming like children who are just learning to spellmdashand 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 ldquoBultfrac34abirenrdquo syllable by syllable confirms that Hamann is referring to this style of interpreta-

tion Recalling now the table at the start of this chapter in which letters and the ldquospirit of truthrdquo

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 ldquoVerlieren die Elemente des A B C ihre natuumlrlilte

Bedeutung wenn ie in der unendlichen Zuammenetzung willkuumlrlilter Zeilten uns an Ideen erinnern die wo niltt

im Himmel dolt im Gehirn indrdquo2 To this question of course we are meant to answer ldquonordquo But there is

much here that is not unproblematic or at least not simple What for instance is the ldquonatuumlrlilte Bedeu-

tungrdquo of a letter And how if the combination of these signs be arbitrary does it recall for us ideas And

1 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 Hamannrsquos voice at least on Hamannrsquos 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 wersquore 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 Greeksmdashbut 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 coin-

cidence is merely an opportunity to bring the opposites as opposites together But this assumption natu-

ral 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 experiencemdashthis 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 Hamannrsquos writing admits of both a macros-

copic 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 conjunc-

tion 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 them1 considering these various levels of read-

ing 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 simultaneous-

ly 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 interpreta-

tion could be set forth that might allow us to translate Hamannrsquos simultaneously cabalistic and rhapsodic

utterances into academic language or to devise summaries of his arguments in a neatly symbolic lan-

guage 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 oumlffentlilter Gebrault 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 Hamannrsquos thought is useful also here Sltoumlpfung ifrac34 eine Rede an die Kreatur durlt die Kreatur The

Christian overtones of such a formulation are obvious Hamann once offered an encapsulation of his

thought in the word λόγος2 a famously polysemous term every sense of which Hamann intends The in-

timate connection between reason and language is of course the most obvious philosophical implication of

1 For Hamannrsquos defense of this possibility see Chapter 4

2 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 Hamannrsquos philosophy But for Hamann λόγος 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 Hamannrsquos piety placed a great emphasis on the self-emptying of Christ Howev-

er much he might stress Christrsquos humanity and suffering though he remained well within the main-

stream 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 diffi-

culties here But there is a clear parallel between the way a Christian thinks of Christ and how Hamann

thinks ofmdashwell more or less everything Christ is a man who lived for a certain stretch of time in a cer-

tain place and is also the eternal God A word is a string of letters small shapes arbitrarily strung togeth-

er and is also a sign of a concept an immaterial thing existing in the mind Hamann is no dualistmdashit 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

Zufoumlrderfrac34 muumlfrac34e man D George Benon fragen ob die Einheit mit der Mannigfaltigkeit niltt befrac34ehen koumlnne [hellip] Der bultfrac34aumlblilte oder grammatifrac14e der fleifrac14liche oder dialectifrac14e der ka-pernaitifrac14e oder historifrac14e Sinn ind im houmlltfrac34en Grade myfrac34ilt und haumlngen von ollten augen-blicklilten pirituoumlen willkuumlhrlilten Nebenbefrac34immungen und Umfrac34aumlnden ab daszlig man ohne hinauf gen Himmel zu fahren die Schluumlfrac12el ihrer Erkenntnis niltt herabholen kann1

1 Nadler 203 note 23 Hamannrsquos footnote is attached to some lines of Latin verse which conclude the Nutrsquos letter to the Learned Rabbi They come from a poem traditionally and falsely attributed to the Emperor Augustus explain-ing why Vergilrsquos orders to destroy the drafts of the Aeneid were ignored after the poetrsquos death The excerpts are

Ah scelus indignum soluetur litera diues Frangatur potius legum veneranda potestas Liber amp alma Ceres succurrite mdash mdash [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 mdashwhich for Hamann who does not oppose the spirit and the letter in a conventional way is a spiritual richnessmdashis 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

28

It is not that interpretation ought to be literal physical or ldquoCapernaiticrdquo 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 understandingmdashthat is unless one has

attained a certain degree of spiritual insight ndashone will be unable to understand things even in their literal

senses for the spiritual and literal senses are one Hamannrsquos 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 expe-

rience 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 inten-

tion of this line of thought has been least of all to stimulate pious feelings Hamannrsquos goal is not to spiri-

tualize 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 (ldquoDie Sinne aber ind Ceres und Bacltus die Leidenfrac14aftenrdquo [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 simplis-tically 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 Hamannrsquos ability to com-press his meaning into very few and very cryptic words NB The ldquoCapernaiticrdquo sense refers to the sense in which Christ is literally present in the Christian sacrament This unusual word is used derogatively in Lutheran texts (eg the Epitome of the Konkordienformel) to disparage Catholic sacramental teaching Its origins are in Jn 65559 ldquoFor my flesh is meat indeed and my blood is drink in-deed [hellip] These things he said in the synagogue as he taught in Capernaumrdquo 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 Luthe-ran understanding according to which Christ is present in the sacrament in a merely spiritual way is less than per-fectly compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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

Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 im-

plied meanings into the literal tropological allegorical and anagogical senses that Christians have tradi-

tionally 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 ormdashto employ a metaphor

more perhaps more congenial to Hamannmdashdiscerning 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 indul-

gence 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 slo-

gan from the text itselfmdashldquoto speak is to translaterdquomdashand 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 uumlberetzenmdashaus einer Engelpralte in eine Menfrac14enpralte das heifrac34 Gedanken in WortemdashSalten in NamenmdashBilder in Zeilten die poetifrac14 oder kyriologifrac14 hifrac34orifrac14 oder ymbolifrac14 oder hieroglyphifrac14mdashmdashund philoophifrac14 oder ltarakterifrac34ifrac14 eyn koumlnnen1

Here we are given a license to translate Hamannrsquos images into signs of various kinds It is no surprise that

in a footnote attached to this text he derogates the ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs by citing a pas-

sage of Petronius which complains that a new fashion of ldquopuffed-up and formless talkativenessrdquo has cor-

1 Nadler 199

31

rupted speech so that ldquothe standard of eloquence being corrupted has been halted and struck dumbrdquo

and ldquonot even poetry displays a healthy colorrdquo1 By ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs we should un-

derstand something like Leibnizrsquos 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 criti-

cism 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 cor-

respondences out of the text But the other kinds of signsmdashthe poetic or symbolicmdashdo not seem to fall

under the same criticismmdashthese suggest a kind of sign which indeed has meaning but whose interpreta-

tion 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 Hamannrsquos thought allows even for this kind of correspon-

dence 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 Hamannrsquos text but also is deeply compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos text to assert that he intends the literal and symbolic meanings to be taken as

of equal importancemdashfor us to devote our full attention to take up one of the governing metaphors of this

1 N 199 n10 ldquoNuper ventosa isthaec amp enormis loquacitas Athenas ex Asia conmigrauit [hellip] simulque correpta elo-quentiae regula stetit amp obmutuit [hellip] Ac ne carmen quidem sani coloris enituitrdquo

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 discuss-

ing how Hamann refuses to privilege abstract ldquopurely mentalrdquo thought over the particular words in

which that thought finds expression Berlin concludes that ldquofor 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)rdquo1 As an example of one such contradiction Berlin cites the line placed at the head

of this section ldquoto speak is to translaterdquo For Berlin it follows from Hamannrsquos insistence on the unity of

reason and language that no translation no correspondence between words ideas and things can be es-

tablished

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 attend-ing to ideas or to language and through them (because they correspond) to the facts was a method of judging and knowing reality [hellip But the] notion of a correspondence that there is an objective world on one side and on the other man and his instruments ndash lan-guage ideas and so forth ndash attempting to approximate to this objective reality is a false picture There is only a flow of sensations2

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 ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 reproduced3 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 Hamannrsquos treatise but unable to claim any continuity of thought therewith

1 Berlin 81

2 Ibid

3 Though one might question even this Ποταμῷ γὰρ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐμβῆναι δὶς τῷ αὐτῷ and there is no reason to think

any two ldquoflows of sensationrdquo could ever be substantially identical Necessarily every ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos view Berlin is perplexed when confronted with Hamannrsquos open assertion

that translation is possible between ldquohuman speechrdquo and the ldquospeech of angelsrdquo and can only conclude

that Hamann here contradicts himself And for Berlin it is quite to be expected that Hamann should con-

tradict himself he regards Hamannrsquos thought in general as highly creative and intriguing Schwaumlrmerei

of note for its pivotal place in intellectual history but completely insusceptible or unworthy of serious

philosophic attention Berlin appreciates Hamannrsquos criticism of the Enlightenment and his prescient

awareness of the lifeless bloodless conception of manrsquos spiritual life that the Enlighteners would ultimate-

ly produce While Berlin claims to understand Hamannrsquos motives in writing he utterly rejects the content

of his writings which he regards as ldquothe cry of a trapped man hellip who cannot be brought to see that to be

regimented or eliminated is either inevitable or desirablerdquo1 For Berlin Hamann is simply a ldquofanaticrdquo

whose writings consist of ldquopassionate rhetoric and not careful thoughtrdquo and whose opinions are ldquogrotes-

quely one-sided a violent exaggeration of the uniqueness of men and things [and] a passionate hatred of

menrsquos wish to understand the universerdquo2 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 pur-

ism of Hitler3 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 Berlinrsquos judgment that Hamann

1 Berlin 116

2 Berlin 121

3 This accusation is presented in Berlinrsquos book in a series of insinuations we are told for example that Hamannrsquos

ldquohatred and blind irrationalism have fed the stream that has led to social and political irrationalism particularly in German in our own [20

th] centuryrdquo (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 Berlinrsquos 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

34

simply contradicts himself in allowing for the possibility of translation in and out of symbolic ldquolanguag-

esrdquo Hamann has very little patience for ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs which promise patent

meaning and unambiguous interpretation This is perfectly in keeping with his general distaste for effi-

cient 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 ldquopoeticrdquo and ldquosymbolicrdquo signs not to fall under the same fierce criticism as the others

ldquoTo speak is to translaterdquo and ldquocreation is a speech to the creature through the creaturerdquo These

two maxims placed very near to each other in the text1 suggest something of a solution to the problem to

which Berlin directs our attention The conjunction of these lines should remind us that Hamann wheth-

er he directing his attention to literature philology esthetics or any other subject is always also a reli-

gious thinker The archetype of every text is for him the Bible and biblical exegesis is the model and ca-

non 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 Michaelisrsquos ldquodenial of a mystical typological sense

of Scripturerdquo2 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 Mi-

chaelis 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 ldquoTo merdquo says Hamann ldquoevery book is a Biblerdquo3 like the Bible then every

book must be read not merely for its literal sense Berlinrsquos reading of Hamann might be correct if Ha-

1 N 118-119

2 Betz 114

3 Briefwechsel I p 309 trans in Betz 47

35

mann were speaking about the everyday world of words and things understood as a brute fact But Ha-

mann 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 re-

mind us that the interpretation of tongues is also a divine gift1 he admits even that persons may not un-

derstand what they themselves to and say Even a figure such as Voltaire hardly a friend of religious out-

looks testifies for those who have ears to hear to the rightness of Hamannrsquos views

kann man wohl einen glaubwuumlrdigern Zeugen als den unfrac34erblilten Voltaire anfuumlhren wellter bey-nahe die Religion fuumlr den Eckfrac34ein der epifrac14en Dilttkunfrac34 erklaumlrt [hellip] Voltaire aber der Hohe-priefrac34er im Tempel des Gefrac14macks frac14luumlszligt so buumlndig als Kaiphas und denkt frulttbarer als He-rodes2

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 ldquoHo-

hepriefrac34er im Tempelrdquo but also a somewhat Machiavellian politician) justifies the crucifixion of Christ by

arguing that ldquoit is expedient that one man should die for the peoplerdquo3 believing himself to be discussing a

political necessity while as if prophetically describing the Christian doctrine of the atonement And He-

rodrsquos deceitful remark to the Magi ldquothat I might also come and worship himrdquo is taken since Herod was

king of the Jews though a gentile by race to represent the universal destiny of the Christian religion4 This

tradition of interpretation habitual in Biblical exegesis Hamann applies also to analysis of the wordmdashso

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 1210

2 Nadler 204-5

3 John 1150

4 It is telling that Hamann chooses such a contrived and complicated case of biblical parallelism as this one his ar-

gument 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

36

will readily concede that ldquowe see through a glass darklyrdquo1 and that we may not even be able to descry the

true outlines of our own persons in this mirrormdashbut by invoking the language of mirrors2 he locates him-

self within a tradition of thought according to which nature however flawed parts of it may be and how-

ever dulled our ability to discern itmdashis 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 se-

cular 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 ldquoblind heathensrdquo

Blinde Heyden haben die Unilttbarkeit erkannt die der Menfrac14 mit GOTT gemein hat Die verhuumlllte Figur des Leibes das Antlitz des Hauptes und das Aumluszligerfrac34e der Arme ind das ilttbare Sltema in dem wir einher gehn dolt eigentlilt niltts als ein Zeigefinger des verborge-nen Menfrac14en in unsmdash Exemplumque DEI quisque est in imagine parva3

Note that the ldquospiritualrdquo 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 ldquoindex fingersrdquo which direct the inner man to

our attention Hamann let us recall4 does not believe that the target of this ldquoZeigefingerrdquo can always be

1 1 Cor 1312

2 Though Hamann is in some ways a very modern thinker who anticipates 20

th century thought about the kinship of

reason and language he here looks back to the middle ages Cf Alan of Lille ldquoOmnis mundi creatura Quasi liber et pictura Nobis est et speculumrdquo With the sentiment and conceit of this verse Hamann could not agree more 3 N 198 The quotation from the Astronomicon of Manilius (IV895) is mainly noteworthy for its having been writ-

ten by a pagan author while echoing the language of Genesis regarding the ldquoimage of Godrdquo The Cambridge edition of Hamann misenglishes this line rendering it as ldquoEach one is an instance of God in miniaturerdquo This not only loses the connection to the book of Genesis conveyed by the word ldquoimagordquo but puts far too much weight on the word ldquoexemplumrdquo as well An exemplum is not an instance but a type model or analogue ldquoInstancerdquo implies an occur-rence of a rationally determinable kind a ldquotyperdquo or ldquoanaloguerdquo 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

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 circumstancesmdashthis 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 re-

fers to ldquocorrespondencesrdquo of thing and idea and of idea and word these ldquocorrespondencesrdquo are for Berlin

relations between two different things of different types He is quite correct to judge that Hamann consid-

ers 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 meaningmdashhe 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 justifica-

tion 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 ldquoConclusionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos own line that ldquocreation is a speech to the creature

through the creaturerdquo 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 cor-

respond to each other based on no apodictically determinable system knowable a priori but on the gra-

tuitous (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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 com-

pared translation to the art of understanding the image of a tapestry from looking only at the backs of the

threads he remarks ldquoDort [ie in the original contexts of the metaphors borrowed from other authors for

39

Hamannrsquos text] werden ie aber ad illustrationem (zur Verbraumlmung des Rockes) hier ad inuolucrum (zum

Hemde auf bloszligem Leibe) gebrauchtrdquo1 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 deco-

rated 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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos which ac-

cording to the line of interpretation I have explored reveals as much about Hamannrsquos 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 tear-

ing 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 Hamannrsquos motion between images his construction of typological

schemes that resist easy classification and one-for-one interpretation is not antirational raving or obscu-

rantism but rather an alternativemdashand a quite compelling onemdashto 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

1 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 tho-

roughly religious vision of the world If one is willing to do this Hamann is a kind of prophetmdashand the

horned head of Pan on his title-page is also the horned head of Moses1 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 pro-

ducing neat tables of Hamannrsquos 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 Aes-

thetica 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 somethingmdashunless there really is some secret ineffable law of correspondences that un-

ites 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 commen-

tators and writers of senior essays have no right to tread

1 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 agrave la Mosaiumlque (Roth 103 343)

41

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin Isaiah The Magus of the North JG Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism ed Henry

Hardy London John Murray 1993 Betz John After Enlightenment the Post-Secular Vision of JG Hamann Chichester John Wiley amp Sons

2009 Hamann Johann Georg Hamannrsquos Schriften ed Friedrich Roth Berlin G Reimer 1821 (Cited as

ldquoRothrdquo All citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Saumlmtliche Werke ed Josef Nadler Wien Verlag Herder 1950 (Cited as ldquoNad-

lerrdquo Unless otherwise noted all citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Writings on Philosophy and Language trans and ed Kenneth Haynes Cam-

bridge Cambridge UP 2007 (Cited as ldquoHaynesrdquo) Jacobs Carol ldquoHamann Is a Nomadic Writer lsquoAesthetica in nucersquordquo in Skirting the Ethical Stanford Stan-

ford UP 2008 pp 111-130 OrsquoFlaherty James C The Quarrel of Reason with Itself Essays on Hamann Michaelis Lessing Nietzsche Co-

lumbia SC Camden 1988

1

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 Hamannrsquos thought and language The title itself ldquoDe

Aesthetica in nuce ad litteramrdquo is in emulation of St Augustinersquos 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 ldquoad litteramrdquo of title is somewhat misleadingmdash

Augustinersquos is not at all a ldquoliteralrdquo commentary but a commentary that often admits that the literal read-

ing 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 impor-

tant is an important one for Hamann as well who in the Aesthetica in nuce approvingly cites Augustine to

this effect1 This is the kind of reading of Hamann I pursue in this essay The ldquoad litteramrdquo of this essayrsquos

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 works2 it will become clear in this essay that they are at least important enough to merit

an oblique reference in the essayrsquos title

The line from Popersquos 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 Augustinersquos hermeneutical methods

Hamann applies to Jonathan Swift a line which Pope intended for Erasmus3 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

ldquoMusarum sacerdosrdquo of Horacersquos odes But the motivation behind the choice of Popersquos line as an epigram

1 See Chapter 1 page 11

2 Eg Neue Apologie des Bultfrac34abens h

3 ldquoAt length Erasmus that great injurrsquod Name (The Glory of the Priesthood and the Shame) Stemmrsquod the

wild Torrent of a barbrsquorous Agerdquo Pope Essay on Criticism In context these lines refer to Erasmusrsquos iconoclastic break with the Scholasticism of the middle ages which Pope considered to have had a stifled good writing Hamann would likely have shared Popersquos assessment of the rational edifice of Scholasticism Only the parenthetical remark from Popersquos verse is applied to Swift (at Nadler 212) as Hamann discusses Swiftrsquos treatise on puns

2

is that Hamann like Horace intends to ldquocharm us into senserdquo 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 intuitive-

ly 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 poetmdashhe will not compel us to be correct by means of

syllogisms or inexorable logic but he will ldquocharm us into senserdquo laying out his ideas making them attrac-

tive 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 ndashthough 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 criti-

cism 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 Eu-

charist The columns of the temple then are adorned both for a bacchanal and for a Eucharist for sancti-

ty 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 ldquofor he spake and it was donerdquo

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 Hamannrsquos fundamental insights namely that creation is

Godrsquos 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 lettersrsquo 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 fashionmdashand 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 Chapter 1 The unnatural use of abstraction 10

The removal of Α and Ω from the first line of the Iliad is a parable about the right use of reason The vowels are the passions and Ha-mann warns against the belief that reason can operate properly with-out the passions

Chapter 2 Vowels 17

In the symbolic economy of the Aesthetica in nuce the difference be-tween 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

Hamannrsquos coincidentia oppositorum is not any kind of dialectical synthesis Creation is speech ndash so is Hamannrsquos use of symbolism justi-fied The hermeneutical paradoxes of the Aesthetica in nuce are ana-logous to the paradoxes of the Christian religion

Chapter 4 To speak is to translate 34

Hamannrsquos 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 revela-tion but present in the things themselves It is from Hamannrsquos typolog-ical style and not from any direct statement that we discover what he has to say

Conclusion 46 Bibliography 49

5

Introduction This essay is not an attempt to understand Hamannrsquos 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 ldquoGreeksrdquo 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 compari-

son 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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos larger corpus this is

due to chance or to a consistency in Hamannrsquos writing and not at all to design Admittedly the themes

brought up on this page that is our subjectmdashwriting the possibility of readingmdashare broad ones and as we

shall see according to the patterns of symbolism which Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 ndashwhich for Hamann are

scarcely separablemdashpresented 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 philo-

sophical criticism as the inauguration of a new artistic era or as an almost meaningless display of be-

nighted and antirational obscurantismmdashbut one cannot avoid the conclusion that Johann Georg Ha-

mannrsquos 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 sub-

jects of the Aesthetica in nuce are much less parochial the nature of reason the power of language the rela-

tion 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 state-

ment of his positionmdashand this perhaps would often not be wrongmdashbut the Aesthetica in nuce a dizzying-

ly 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 enoughmdashinterpreting 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 Hamannrsquos 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 pre-

sume to have accurately or exhaustively interpreted the Aesthetica in nuce but we hope to write a commen-

tary 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 appear-

ance 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 con-

structed this analysis of the Aesthetica in nuce out of a series of separatemdashthough I think not ultimately

contradictorymdashinvestigations 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 wouldnrsquot 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 Hamannrsquos German I have used the old German letters he would have recog-

nized 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 indiffe-

rently 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 lettermdashat 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

Hamannrsquos 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 ma-

naged to salvage any worthwhile thought have at least brought it somewhat closer to the surface

9

Chapter 1 The Unnatural Use of Abstraction

The removal of Α and Ω 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

Verultt es einmal die Iliade zu leen wenn ihr vorher durlt die Abfrac34raction die beiden

Selbfrac34lauter α und ω ausgeilttet habt und agt mir eure Meynung von dem Verfrac34ande und Wohlklange des Diltters

Μῆνιν ειδε Θε Πηληιδε χιλῆος1

In this passage and quotation from Hamannrsquos text traditional images while recognizable for

what they are are combined in a novel way The alpha and omega are symbol of Christ (Rev 18) 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 Hamannrsquos 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 linersquos content

and consider merely what it is as a line Itrsquos the incipit of the Iliad ndash for a student of Greek one of the hex-

ameters that come most readily to mind ndash the opening line of the epic traditionally regarded as the great-

est 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 Priamrsquos neighbors but of the ideals and achievements of classic-

al civilization ndash which though indeed falling as far short of Homerrsquos 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 at-

tempt to understand classical civilization while rejecting Christ Indeed Hamann himself encourages such

a reading of the image when he later cites ldquothe Punic father of the Churchrdquo to the effect that the prophetic

1 Nadler 207

10

books of the Old Testament can only be interpreted correctly when Christ is ldquoread intordquo them ldquoRead the

prophetic books without understanding Christrdquo says Augustine ldquoand what pointlessness and folly will

you find there Understand Christ there and what you read will not only savor but will even intoxicaterdquo1

Hamann takes up and expands this argument providing some context to his surgical removal of vowels

from Homerrsquos line Though as a rhetorician Augustine was acutely aware of their power after his conver-

sion 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 un-

derstood correctly ldquoa dream-like anticipation of Christrdquo2 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 ndash

he is too much of a Lutheran for that But as regards the value of the ancient myths he is rather more ge-

nerous 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 ap-

parent 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 ndash

which is of course not to say that it is not one of the ways Hamann intended it to be read But there must

1 Nadler 212-3 ldquoLege libros propheticos non intellecto CHRISTO agt der punifrac14e Kirltenvater quid tam insipidum amp fatuum inuenies Intellige ibi CHRISTUM non solum sapit quod legis sed etiam inebriatrdquo Hamann gives no citation for this quote a note to the Cambridge translation locates it at Ioh Evang Tract IX3 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 let-

ters than Hamann gives us ndash and even if we lacked the extrinsic familiarity with Homerrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 warriorrsquos

wrath

What then does Hamann mean by this image ldquoSeerdquo he hints to us just after showing us the al-

tered line of Greek ldquothe greater and lesser Masorah of philosophy [Weltweisheit] has overwhelmed the

text of Nature like a Noahrsquos floodrdquo1 As is usual for Hamann this explanation only raises further ques-

tions Nothing here has overwhelmed or flooded anything else and least of all Masorah ndash 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 re-

minded of what was said shortly before Homerrsquos line was introduced

Sie [dh die Mue] wird es wagen den natuumlrlilten Gebrauclt der Sinne von dem unnatuumlrlilten Gebrault der Abfrac34ractionen zu laumlutern wodurlt unere Begriffe von den Dingen eben o ehr verfrac34uumlmmelt werden als der Name des Sltoumlpfers underdruumlckt und gelaumlfrac34ert wird2

The ldquounnatural use of abstractionsrdquo here plays a role parallel to that of the ldquoMasorah of worldly philoso-

phyrdquo mdash 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 ldquoMaso-

1 Nadler 207 Seht die groszlige und kleine Maore der Weltweisheit hat den Text der Natur gleilt einer Suumlndfluth uumlberfrac14wemmt 2 Nadler 207

12

rah of philosophyrdquo then are interpretations that distort and obscure It is this sort of distortion and ob-

scuring that are represented by the removal of the letters alpha and omega from Homerrsquos line we are told

after all that they are removed ldquothrough abstractionrdquo Here Hamann is making a pun on the Latin roots

of the word ldquoabstractionrdquo but it is not merely a pun it is also a hint at one of the hidden connections be-

tween the vowels of the Iliad and Hamannrsquos 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 dam-

aged

And Hamann further suggests that it is because of this failure of interpretation or clarification

that the ldquoGreeksrdquo who abuse abstraction are wrong to think themselves wiser than the ldquochamberlains with

the Gnostic keyrdquo This phrase in itself rather obscure is one of the bridge-phrases in Hamannrsquos text that

point out to us which parts of the tapestry may be connected beneath the surface Chamberlain is Kammer-

herr and between Kammerherr and Kaumlmmerer there is small difference and Kaumlmmerer is the word Luther

used for ldquoeunuchrdquo1 The bridge leads us to another nearby passage of the Aesthetica

Wenn die Leidenfrac14aften Glieder der Unehre ind houmlren ie deswegen auf Waffen der Mannheit zu eyn Verfrac34eht ihr den Bultfrac34aben der Vernunft kluumlger als jener allegorifrac14e Kaumlmmerer der alexandrinifrac14en Kirlte den Bultfrac34aben der Sltrift der ich elbfrac34 zum Verfrac14nittenen maltte um des Himmelreilts willen2

Seen in light of this passage the reference to eunuchs and to Gnosticism is less perplexing While Origen

ndash who I presume to be ldquothat allegorical chamberlain of the Alexandrian churchrdquo mdash is not generally consi-

dered 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

ldquoLeidenfrac14aftenrdquo 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

1 ldquoIn Acts 827 Luther translates as lsquoKaumlmmererrsquo(related to lsquoKammerherrrsquo chamberlain) what the King James Bible translates as lsquoeunuchrsquordquo Haynes 80 note 87 2 Nadler 208

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 ab-

stract 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 ex-

tended Latin quotation from Bacon which is appended as a footnote to the passage quoted above on the

ldquounnatural use of abstractionsrdquo Hamann calls Bacon his ldquoEuthyphrordquo1 the figure who perhaps does not

teach him anymore than Euthyphro taught Socrates but who provides nonetheless the occasion for fruit-

ful 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 repu-

tation as an antirationalist or forerunner of the Sturm und Drang is not here making an argument against

reason as such or against the mindrsquos use of concepts or against thought in general For Bacon is not mak-

ing an argument against philosophy but against bad philosophy ldquoAnd so let men know how far the Idols

of the human mind are from the Ideas of the divine mind hellip 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 ac-

count of the conveniences of liferdquo 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 con-

cepts only so that the truth of things might better shine forth -- indeed for all that he advocates the in-

crease 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 Hamannrsquos critique of the Gnostic chamberlains His prescription is not that we avoid

1 ldquoBacon mein Euthyphronrdquo Nadler 197

14

making use of concepts for things but that we make sure that our concepts have not been verfrac34uumlmmelt and

gelaumlfrac34ert by abuses of reason

The word ldquoabstractionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos 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 foot-

note quotes at considerable length Ovidrsquos retelling of the story ldquoSpem sine corpore amat corpus putat

esse quod umbra est Adstupet ipse sibirdquo1 They who consider the abstractions of their minds to be most

real prefer a (vain) hope or a shadow to the bodymdashthat is the material concrete reality of the natural

world Long after Hamannrsquos 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 sibimdashNarcissus 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 ldquopure reasonrdquo from the mess of passions and contingencies that always surround hu-

man life Hamann prophesies an analogous fate It is this abuse of reason which Hamann means to sug-

gest t the removal of the first and last Greek letters from a line of Homer

And just as Hamann challenges the ldquoGreeksrdquo 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 cor-

rectly or to make any meaningful scientific achievements Just as Hume could not drink a glass of water or

eat an egg without faith2 neither we might paraphrase Hamann could he follow an argument to its con-

1 Metamorphoses III417f quoted at Nadler 210

2 This was a favorite quip of Hamannrsquos and is recorded in several places eg OrsquoFlaherty 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 Hamannrsquos view the supposed opposition of

reason and the passions is a fiction of the Enlighteners his thought has little room for absolute dichoto-

mies and he rejects also this one The passions in fact have an essential role to play even in the exercise

of reason ldquoLeidenfrac14amacr allein giebt Abfrac34ractionen owohl als Hypotheen Haumlnde Fuumlszlige Fluumlgel mdash Bildern und Zei-

chen Geifrac34 Leben und Zungerdquo1 There are perhaps many ways to understand ldquohands feet and wingsrdquo mdash but

between all possible interpretations of these words a basic unity exists They are all parts of the body asso-

ciated with motion and action And so abstractions and hypothesesmdashdry conclusions of the reasonmdashare

made active and mobile by the passions Likewise images and signs are given ldquolife and tonguerdquo 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 un-

mutilated 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 Hamannrsquos style and the symbolic ldquovocabularyrdquo of the Aesthetica in nuce The connection of Ha-

mannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos thought

1 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

Verucht es einmal die Iliade zu leen wenn ihr vorher durch die Abfrac34raction die beyden

Selbfrac34lauter α und ω ausgesichtet habt1 ldquoSelbstlautrdquo and ldquoMitlautrdquo ldquoConsonantrdquo and ldquovowelrdquo2 These are evocative termsmdashnot 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 con-

cepts 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 ldquoletter of the voicerdquo is utterable on its own while a littera consonans

must be ldquosounded withrdquo something else This way of articulating the distinction between independent

vowels and dependent consonants was a commonplace in the eighteenth century3 and would not have

been unfamiliar to Hamann even if the etymology of ldquoSelbstlautrdquo did not suggest it If we translate then

a bit freely we might say ldquothat which is removed from the Iliad by abstraction is that without which

1 Nadler 207

2 German preserves also more Latinate forms ldquoVokalrdquo and ldquoKonsonantrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos thought in the Aesthetica in nuce 3 John Hensons New Latin Grammar for instance published at Nottingham in 1744 explains ldquoA Vowel is a letter

which makes a full and perfect Sound of it Self as a o A Conſonant is a Letter that has no Sound of it Self without a Vowelrdquo And in a Verbesserte and Erleichterte Lateinische Grammatica published at Halle in 1763 (a year after the Cru-sades of the Philologist saw light) we read ldquoDen Anfang in der Lateinifrac14en Spralten maltt man von den Bultfrac34abenhellip Und diee werden eingetheilet in vocales oder elbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautende und consonantes oder mitlautendemitlautendemitlautendemitlautende o niltt ehe koumlnnen ausgeprolten werden als bis ein vocalis dazukoumlmmtrdquo 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 httpbooksgooglecombooksid=T5ECAAAAQAAJ and the second at httpbooksgooglecombooksid=F9oVAAAAYAAJ

17

there can be no speechrdquo which without any further interpretation already at least appears to imply much

more than a matter of rearranged letters

As we have seen the ldquoabstractionrdquo of the letters from the line of the Iliad corresponds in the typo-

logical 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 pas-

sions in order for them to have any power to persuade It is not that reasoned arguments even when ab-

stract are otiose or parasiticalmdashthese 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 ldquovocalizedrdquo

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

Hamannrsquos 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 unpointedmdashlike 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 durlt 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 scripturesmdashwritten by God but one must bring onersquos

own vowels to read it

But is this not going too far While we may not just have misrepresented Hamannrsquos 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 doesnrsquot make sense as

written without those vowels itrsquos still easily interpretable If Hamann had not named it as a line from the

Iliad any educated person on seeing the word microῆνιν 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 miss-

ing places in the line the shape of the dactyls and the grammatical possibilities offered by the Greek lan-

guage 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 En-

lightened 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 objec-

tion of this scientist would be absurd because it would miss the point of Hamannrsquos critiquemdashhe goes

around the backs of the Enlighteners contending that they are moved by passion even in what they be-

lieve to be their exercises of pure reason that the arguments they invoke to defend their conception of rea-

son 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 ldquoTurbatverserdquo1 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 Hamannrsquos altered line from the Iliad) But it refers most specif-

ically 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 Θεά ἄειδε μῆνιν Ἀχιλῆος Πηληϊάδεω In a certain sense there is nothing of Homerrsquos 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 ob-

viously 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 ldquogoddessrdquo and not ldquowrathrdquo In the Turbatverse of nature then the superficial meaning of the speak-

ing 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 niltts als Turbatvere und disiecti membra poetae zu unerm Gebrault uumlbrig Diee zu ammeln ifrac34 des Gelehrten ie auszulegen des Philoophen ie naltzuahmenmdashoder nolt kuumlhnermdash mdashie in Gefrac14ick zu bringen des Poeten befrac14eiden Theil2

1 Nadler 198

2 Nadler 199

20

The hierarchy that is here established with the scholar philosopher and poet presented with responsibili-

ties of increasing creativity should not surprise us as it is exactly in line with what Hamann says else-

where about the high dignity of the poet to whom is compared even God himself1 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 ade-

quate 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 consti-

tuent 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

1 ldquoDer Poet am Anfange der Tagerdquo Nadler 206

21

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

Hamannrsquos coincidentia oppositorum is not any kind of dialectical synthesis Creation is speech ndash so is Hamannrsquos 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 Aesthe-

tica in nuce relate to the argument he makes about the proper use of reason There is significant ldquooverlaprdquo

here the various images and descriptions Hamann uses are parallel making the same argument in differ-

ent ways From what we have already said we can derive a kind of table showing how the various images

used map onto Hamannrsquos argument about the reason and the passions

Passions Reason

Vowels Consonants Words Mere arrangements of letters Poetic Meter Turbatverse God Nature Christianity Classical civilization Alpha and Omega 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 refus-

es 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 to-

gether 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 ldquoit is not clear how far he understood it and he certainly gives it a

1 Though not in the Aesthetica See eg Betz 28 note 17

22

sense of his ownrdquo1 In fact it is not easy to see where the ldquocoincidencerdquo comes in at all Regarding every

text every object as part of his ldquoBiblerdquo 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 themselvesmdashto

the letters of a text (in literary criticism) and the phenomena of nature unreduced to their universal ra-

tional 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 pro-

duced of these elements He beholds in a single vision der rollende Donner der Beredamkeit and der

einylbicltte Blitz2 This strangemdashor strange to us and Hamann would not hesitate to say that our sensibili-

ties need correctionmdashthis strange conjunction of opposites confronts us even on the title page of the Aes-

thetica in nuce Eine Rhapodie in kabbalifrac34ifrac14er Proe A rhapsodymdasha stitching-together of pieces into an ar-

tistic unitymdashthat 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 ldquoApostillerdquo ndash whether Hamann himself some per-

sonified commentator or anyone else ndash remarks that the author of the Aesthetica in nuce ldquohat Satz und

Satz zuammengereltnet wie man die Pfeile auf einem Sltlalttfelde zaumlhltrdquo3 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 Romansrsquo shots though fewer were fired with greater force It is not clear which side better corres-

ponds to Hamannrsquos 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 Therersquos a case to be made for either in-

terpretation But whichever we take the view wersquore given of the Aesthetica in nuce is still of individual

Saumltze piled up one after another as discrete countable units This treatise says the speaker of the Apos-

tille is just a pile of sentences But in an instant our perspective is shifted ldquoLaszligt uns jetzt die Hauptumme

1 Berlin 115

2 Nadler 208

3 Nadler 217 The reference given by Hamann (ldquoProcop De bello persico I 18rdquo) is explained at Haynes 94 note

kkk

23

[hellip] houmlrenldquo1 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 vari-

ous meditations on human life that compose the text of the biblical book2 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

summarymdasha 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 Hamannrsquos 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 readerrsquos confusion It is not Hamannrsquos 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 writings3 it is perhaps not sur-

prising then if the Aesthetica in nuce presents us with hermeneutic difficulties that neither the text itself

nor comparisons with Hamannrsquos other works nor consideration of Hamannrsquos engagement with the issues

of his time are adequate to dispel But the paradox we are considering heremdashthe simultaneous focus on

both columns of the table with which this chapter beganmdashis so fundamental to the thought of the Aesthe-

tica in nuce that unless we can come to terms with it in some way Hamannrsquos 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

1 Ibid

2 Cf Lutherbibel Predig 1213 ldquoLaszligt uns die Hauptumme aller Lehre houmlrenldquo 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 ldquoApostillerdquo likewise to be a undermining of all that goes before it 3 ldquoI no longer understand myself quite differently from then some [writings I understand] better some worse [hellip]

[hellip] 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 stuffrdquo Briefwechsel V p 358 trans in Betz 229

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 ldquodie ilt nolt im bloszligen Bult-frac34a-bi-ren uumlbenmdashmdashund wahrlilt wahrlilt Kinder muumlfrac12en

wir werden wenn wir den Geifrac34 der Wahrheit empfahen ollenldquo1 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 ldquoSpirit of

Truth whom the world cannot receiverdquo (Jn 1417) 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 spiri-

tual pole than to the elemental literal material one But how says Hamannrsquos Nuszlig is this Spirit of Truth

to be received By becoming like children who are just learning to spellmdashand 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 ldquoBultfrac34abirenrdquo syllable by syllable confirms that Hamann is referring to this style of interpreta-

tion Recalling now the table at the start of this chapter in which letters and the ldquospirit of truthrdquo

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 ldquoVerlieren die Elemente des A B C ihre natuumlrlilte

Bedeutung wenn ie in der unendlichen Zuammenetzung willkuumlrlilter Zeilten uns an Ideen erinnern die wo niltt

im Himmel dolt im Gehirn indrdquo2 To this question of course we are meant to answer ldquonordquo But there is

much here that is not unproblematic or at least not simple What for instance is the ldquonatuumlrlilte Bedeu-

tungrdquo of a letter And how if the combination of these signs be arbitrary does it recall for us ideas And

1 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 Hamannrsquos voice at least on Hamannrsquos 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 wersquore 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 Greeksmdashbut 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 coin-

cidence is merely an opportunity to bring the opposites as opposites together But this assumption natu-

ral 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 experiencemdashthis 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 Hamannrsquos writing admits of both a macros-

copic 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 conjunc-

tion 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 them1 considering these various levels of read-

ing 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 simultaneous-

ly 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 interpreta-

tion could be set forth that might allow us to translate Hamannrsquos simultaneously cabalistic and rhapsodic

utterances into academic language or to devise summaries of his arguments in a neatly symbolic lan-

guage 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 oumlffentlilter Gebrault 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 Hamannrsquos thought is useful also here Sltoumlpfung ifrac34 eine Rede an die Kreatur durlt die Kreatur The

Christian overtones of such a formulation are obvious Hamann once offered an encapsulation of his

thought in the word λόγος2 a famously polysemous term every sense of which Hamann intends The in-

timate connection between reason and language is of course the most obvious philosophical implication of

1 For Hamannrsquos defense of this possibility see Chapter 4

2 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 Hamannrsquos philosophy But for Hamann λόγος 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 Hamannrsquos piety placed a great emphasis on the self-emptying of Christ Howev-

er much he might stress Christrsquos humanity and suffering though he remained well within the main-

stream 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 diffi-

culties here But there is a clear parallel between the way a Christian thinks of Christ and how Hamann

thinks ofmdashwell more or less everything Christ is a man who lived for a certain stretch of time in a cer-

tain place and is also the eternal God A word is a string of letters small shapes arbitrarily strung togeth-

er and is also a sign of a concept an immaterial thing existing in the mind Hamann is no dualistmdashit 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

Zufoumlrderfrac34 muumlfrac34e man D George Benon fragen ob die Einheit mit der Mannigfaltigkeit niltt befrac34ehen koumlnne [hellip] Der bultfrac34aumlblilte oder grammatifrac14e der fleifrac14liche oder dialectifrac14e der ka-pernaitifrac14e oder historifrac14e Sinn ind im houmlltfrac34en Grade myfrac34ilt und haumlngen von ollten augen-blicklilten pirituoumlen willkuumlhrlilten Nebenbefrac34immungen und Umfrac34aumlnden ab daszlig man ohne hinauf gen Himmel zu fahren die Schluumlfrac12el ihrer Erkenntnis niltt herabholen kann1

1 Nadler 203 note 23 Hamannrsquos footnote is attached to some lines of Latin verse which conclude the Nutrsquos letter to the Learned Rabbi They come from a poem traditionally and falsely attributed to the Emperor Augustus explain-ing why Vergilrsquos orders to destroy the drafts of the Aeneid were ignored after the poetrsquos death The excerpts are

Ah scelus indignum soluetur litera diues Frangatur potius legum veneranda potestas Liber amp alma Ceres succurrite mdash mdash [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 mdashwhich for Hamann who does not oppose the spirit and the letter in a conventional way is a spiritual richnessmdashis 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

28

It is not that interpretation ought to be literal physical or ldquoCapernaiticrdquo 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 understandingmdashthat is unless one has

attained a certain degree of spiritual insight ndashone will be unable to understand things even in their literal

senses for the spiritual and literal senses are one Hamannrsquos 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 expe-

rience 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 inten-

tion of this line of thought has been least of all to stimulate pious feelings Hamannrsquos goal is not to spiri-

tualize 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 (ldquoDie Sinne aber ind Ceres und Bacltus die Leidenfrac14aftenrdquo [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 simplis-tically 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 Hamannrsquos ability to com-press his meaning into very few and very cryptic words NB The ldquoCapernaiticrdquo sense refers to the sense in which Christ is literally present in the Christian sacrament This unusual word is used derogatively in Lutheran texts (eg the Epitome of the Konkordienformel) to disparage Catholic sacramental teaching Its origins are in Jn 65559 ldquoFor my flesh is meat indeed and my blood is drink in-deed [hellip] These things he said in the synagogue as he taught in Capernaumrdquo 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 Luthe-ran understanding according to which Christ is present in the sacrament in a merely spiritual way is less than per-fectly compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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

Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 im-

plied meanings into the literal tropological allegorical and anagogical senses that Christians have tradi-

tionally 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 ormdashto employ a metaphor

more perhaps more congenial to Hamannmdashdiscerning 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 indul-

gence 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 slo-

gan from the text itselfmdashldquoto speak is to translaterdquomdashand 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 uumlberetzenmdashaus einer Engelpralte in eine Menfrac14enpralte das heifrac34 Gedanken in WortemdashSalten in NamenmdashBilder in Zeilten die poetifrac14 oder kyriologifrac14 hifrac34orifrac14 oder ymbolifrac14 oder hieroglyphifrac14mdashmdashund philoophifrac14 oder ltarakterifrac34ifrac14 eyn koumlnnen1

Here we are given a license to translate Hamannrsquos images into signs of various kinds It is no surprise that

in a footnote attached to this text he derogates the ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs by citing a pas-

sage of Petronius which complains that a new fashion of ldquopuffed-up and formless talkativenessrdquo has cor-

1 Nadler 199

31

rupted speech so that ldquothe standard of eloquence being corrupted has been halted and struck dumbrdquo

and ldquonot even poetry displays a healthy colorrdquo1 By ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs we should un-

derstand something like Leibnizrsquos 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 criti-

cism 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 cor-

respondences out of the text But the other kinds of signsmdashthe poetic or symbolicmdashdo not seem to fall

under the same criticismmdashthese suggest a kind of sign which indeed has meaning but whose interpreta-

tion 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 Hamannrsquos thought allows even for this kind of correspon-

dence 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 Hamannrsquos text but also is deeply compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos text to assert that he intends the literal and symbolic meanings to be taken as

of equal importancemdashfor us to devote our full attention to take up one of the governing metaphors of this

1 N 199 n10 ldquoNuper ventosa isthaec amp enormis loquacitas Athenas ex Asia conmigrauit [hellip] simulque correpta elo-quentiae regula stetit amp obmutuit [hellip] Ac ne carmen quidem sani coloris enituitrdquo

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 discuss-

ing how Hamann refuses to privilege abstract ldquopurely mentalrdquo thought over the particular words in

which that thought finds expression Berlin concludes that ldquofor 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)rdquo1 As an example of one such contradiction Berlin cites the line placed at the head

of this section ldquoto speak is to translaterdquo For Berlin it follows from Hamannrsquos insistence on the unity of

reason and language that no translation no correspondence between words ideas and things can be es-

tablished

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 attend-ing to ideas or to language and through them (because they correspond) to the facts was a method of judging and knowing reality [hellip But the] notion of a correspondence that there is an objective world on one side and on the other man and his instruments ndash lan-guage ideas and so forth ndash attempting to approximate to this objective reality is a false picture There is only a flow of sensations2

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 ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 reproduced3 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 Hamannrsquos treatise but unable to claim any continuity of thought therewith

1 Berlin 81

2 Ibid

3 Though one might question even this Ποταμῷ γὰρ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐμβῆναι δὶς τῷ αὐτῷ and there is no reason to think

any two ldquoflows of sensationrdquo could ever be substantially identical Necessarily every ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos view Berlin is perplexed when confronted with Hamannrsquos open assertion

that translation is possible between ldquohuman speechrdquo and the ldquospeech of angelsrdquo and can only conclude

that Hamann here contradicts himself And for Berlin it is quite to be expected that Hamann should con-

tradict himself he regards Hamannrsquos thought in general as highly creative and intriguing Schwaumlrmerei

of note for its pivotal place in intellectual history but completely insusceptible or unworthy of serious

philosophic attention Berlin appreciates Hamannrsquos criticism of the Enlightenment and his prescient

awareness of the lifeless bloodless conception of manrsquos spiritual life that the Enlighteners would ultimate-

ly produce While Berlin claims to understand Hamannrsquos motives in writing he utterly rejects the content

of his writings which he regards as ldquothe cry of a trapped man hellip who cannot be brought to see that to be

regimented or eliminated is either inevitable or desirablerdquo1 For Berlin Hamann is simply a ldquofanaticrdquo

whose writings consist of ldquopassionate rhetoric and not careful thoughtrdquo and whose opinions are ldquogrotes-

quely one-sided a violent exaggeration of the uniqueness of men and things [and] a passionate hatred of

menrsquos wish to understand the universerdquo2 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 pur-

ism of Hitler3 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 Berlinrsquos judgment that Hamann

1 Berlin 116

2 Berlin 121

3 This accusation is presented in Berlinrsquos book in a series of insinuations we are told for example that Hamannrsquos

ldquohatred and blind irrationalism have fed the stream that has led to social and political irrationalism particularly in German in our own [20

th] centuryrdquo (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 Berlinrsquos 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

34

simply contradicts himself in allowing for the possibility of translation in and out of symbolic ldquolanguag-

esrdquo Hamann has very little patience for ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs which promise patent

meaning and unambiguous interpretation This is perfectly in keeping with his general distaste for effi-

cient 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 ldquopoeticrdquo and ldquosymbolicrdquo signs not to fall under the same fierce criticism as the others

ldquoTo speak is to translaterdquo and ldquocreation is a speech to the creature through the creaturerdquo These

two maxims placed very near to each other in the text1 suggest something of a solution to the problem to

which Berlin directs our attention The conjunction of these lines should remind us that Hamann wheth-

er he directing his attention to literature philology esthetics or any other subject is always also a reli-

gious thinker The archetype of every text is for him the Bible and biblical exegesis is the model and ca-

non 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 Michaelisrsquos ldquodenial of a mystical typological sense

of Scripturerdquo2 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 Mi-

chaelis 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 ldquoTo merdquo says Hamann ldquoevery book is a Biblerdquo3 like the Bible then every

book must be read not merely for its literal sense Berlinrsquos reading of Hamann might be correct if Ha-

1 N 118-119

2 Betz 114

3 Briefwechsel I p 309 trans in Betz 47

35

mann were speaking about the everyday world of words and things understood as a brute fact But Ha-

mann 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 re-

mind us that the interpretation of tongues is also a divine gift1 he admits even that persons may not un-

derstand what they themselves to and say Even a figure such as Voltaire hardly a friend of religious out-

looks testifies for those who have ears to hear to the rightness of Hamannrsquos views

kann man wohl einen glaubwuumlrdigern Zeugen als den unfrac34erblilten Voltaire anfuumlhren wellter bey-nahe die Religion fuumlr den Eckfrac34ein der epifrac14en Dilttkunfrac34 erklaumlrt [hellip] Voltaire aber der Hohe-priefrac34er im Tempel des Gefrac14macks frac14luumlszligt so buumlndig als Kaiphas und denkt frulttbarer als He-rodes2

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 ldquoHo-

hepriefrac34er im Tempelrdquo but also a somewhat Machiavellian politician) justifies the crucifixion of Christ by

arguing that ldquoit is expedient that one man should die for the peoplerdquo3 believing himself to be discussing a

political necessity while as if prophetically describing the Christian doctrine of the atonement And He-

rodrsquos deceitful remark to the Magi ldquothat I might also come and worship himrdquo is taken since Herod was

king of the Jews though a gentile by race to represent the universal destiny of the Christian religion4 This

tradition of interpretation habitual in Biblical exegesis Hamann applies also to analysis of the wordmdashso

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 1210

2 Nadler 204-5

3 John 1150

4 It is telling that Hamann chooses such a contrived and complicated case of biblical parallelism as this one his ar-

gument 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

36

will readily concede that ldquowe see through a glass darklyrdquo1 and that we may not even be able to descry the

true outlines of our own persons in this mirrormdashbut by invoking the language of mirrors2 he locates him-

self within a tradition of thought according to which nature however flawed parts of it may be and how-

ever dulled our ability to discern itmdashis 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 se-

cular 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 ldquoblind heathensrdquo

Blinde Heyden haben die Unilttbarkeit erkannt die der Menfrac14 mit GOTT gemein hat Die verhuumlllte Figur des Leibes das Antlitz des Hauptes und das Aumluszligerfrac34e der Arme ind das ilttbare Sltema in dem wir einher gehn dolt eigentlilt niltts als ein Zeigefinger des verborge-nen Menfrac14en in unsmdash Exemplumque DEI quisque est in imagine parva3

Note that the ldquospiritualrdquo 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 ldquoindex fingersrdquo which direct the inner man to

our attention Hamann let us recall4 does not believe that the target of this ldquoZeigefingerrdquo can always be

1 1 Cor 1312

2 Though Hamann is in some ways a very modern thinker who anticipates 20

th century thought about the kinship of

reason and language he here looks back to the middle ages Cf Alan of Lille ldquoOmnis mundi creatura Quasi liber et pictura Nobis est et speculumrdquo With the sentiment and conceit of this verse Hamann could not agree more 3 N 198 The quotation from the Astronomicon of Manilius (IV895) is mainly noteworthy for its having been writ-

ten by a pagan author while echoing the language of Genesis regarding the ldquoimage of Godrdquo The Cambridge edition of Hamann misenglishes this line rendering it as ldquoEach one is an instance of God in miniaturerdquo This not only loses the connection to the book of Genesis conveyed by the word ldquoimagordquo but puts far too much weight on the word ldquoexemplumrdquo as well An exemplum is not an instance but a type model or analogue ldquoInstancerdquo implies an occur-rence of a rationally determinable kind a ldquotyperdquo or ldquoanaloguerdquo 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

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 circumstancesmdashthis 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 re-

fers to ldquocorrespondencesrdquo of thing and idea and of idea and word these ldquocorrespondencesrdquo are for Berlin

relations between two different things of different types He is quite correct to judge that Hamann consid-

ers 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 meaningmdashhe 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 justifica-

tion 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 ldquoConclusionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos own line that ldquocreation is a speech to the creature

through the creaturerdquo 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 cor-

respond to each other based on no apodictically determinable system knowable a priori but on the gra-

tuitous (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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 com-

pared translation to the art of understanding the image of a tapestry from looking only at the backs of the

threads he remarks ldquoDort [ie in the original contexts of the metaphors borrowed from other authors for

39

Hamannrsquos text] werden ie aber ad illustrationem (zur Verbraumlmung des Rockes) hier ad inuolucrum (zum

Hemde auf bloszligem Leibe) gebrauchtrdquo1 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 deco-

rated 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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos which ac-

cording to the line of interpretation I have explored reveals as much about Hamannrsquos 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 tear-

ing 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 Hamannrsquos motion between images his construction of typological

schemes that resist easy classification and one-for-one interpretation is not antirational raving or obscu-

rantism but rather an alternativemdashand a quite compelling onemdashto 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

1 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 tho-

roughly religious vision of the world If one is willing to do this Hamann is a kind of prophetmdashand the

horned head of Pan on his title-page is also the horned head of Moses1 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 pro-

ducing neat tables of Hamannrsquos 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 Aes-

thetica 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 somethingmdashunless there really is some secret ineffable law of correspondences that un-

ites 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 commen-

tators and writers of senior essays have no right to tread

1 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 agrave la Mosaiumlque (Roth 103 343)

41

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin Isaiah The Magus of the North JG Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism ed Henry

Hardy London John Murray 1993 Betz John After Enlightenment the Post-Secular Vision of JG Hamann Chichester John Wiley amp Sons

2009 Hamann Johann Georg Hamannrsquos Schriften ed Friedrich Roth Berlin G Reimer 1821 (Cited as

ldquoRothrdquo All citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Saumlmtliche Werke ed Josef Nadler Wien Verlag Herder 1950 (Cited as ldquoNad-

lerrdquo Unless otherwise noted all citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Writings on Philosophy and Language trans and ed Kenneth Haynes Cam-

bridge Cambridge UP 2007 (Cited as ldquoHaynesrdquo) Jacobs Carol ldquoHamann Is a Nomadic Writer lsquoAesthetica in nucersquordquo in Skirting the Ethical Stanford Stan-

ford UP 2008 pp 111-130 OrsquoFlaherty James C The Quarrel of Reason with Itself Essays on Hamann Michaelis Lessing Nietzsche Co-

lumbia SC Camden 1988

2

is that Hamann like Horace intends to ldquocharm us into senserdquo 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 intuitive-

ly 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 poetmdashhe will not compel us to be correct by means of

syllogisms or inexorable logic but he will ldquocharm us into senserdquo laying out his ideas making them attrac-

tive 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 ndashthough 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 criti-

cism 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 Eu-

charist The columns of the temple then are adorned both for a bacchanal and for a Eucharist for sancti-

ty 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 ldquofor he spake and it was donerdquo

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 Hamannrsquos fundamental insights namely that creation is

Godrsquos 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 lettersrsquo 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 fashionmdashand 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 Chapter 1 The unnatural use of abstraction 10

The removal of Α and Ω from the first line of the Iliad is a parable about the right use of reason The vowels are the passions and Ha-mann warns against the belief that reason can operate properly with-out the passions

Chapter 2 Vowels 17

In the symbolic economy of the Aesthetica in nuce the difference be-tween 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

Hamannrsquos coincidentia oppositorum is not any kind of dialectical synthesis Creation is speech ndash so is Hamannrsquos use of symbolism justi-fied The hermeneutical paradoxes of the Aesthetica in nuce are ana-logous to the paradoxes of the Christian religion

Chapter 4 To speak is to translate 34

Hamannrsquos 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 revela-tion but present in the things themselves It is from Hamannrsquos typolog-ical style and not from any direct statement that we discover what he has to say

Conclusion 46 Bibliography 49

5

Introduction This essay is not an attempt to understand Hamannrsquos 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 ldquoGreeksrdquo 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 compari-

son 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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos larger corpus this is

due to chance or to a consistency in Hamannrsquos writing and not at all to design Admittedly the themes

brought up on this page that is our subjectmdashwriting the possibility of readingmdashare broad ones and as we

shall see according to the patterns of symbolism which Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 ndashwhich for Hamann are

scarcely separablemdashpresented 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 philo-

sophical criticism as the inauguration of a new artistic era or as an almost meaningless display of be-

nighted and antirational obscurantismmdashbut one cannot avoid the conclusion that Johann Georg Ha-

mannrsquos 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 sub-

jects of the Aesthetica in nuce are much less parochial the nature of reason the power of language the rela-

tion 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 state-

ment of his positionmdashand this perhaps would often not be wrongmdashbut the Aesthetica in nuce a dizzying-

ly 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 enoughmdashinterpreting 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 Hamannrsquos 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 pre-

sume to have accurately or exhaustively interpreted the Aesthetica in nuce but we hope to write a commen-

tary 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 appear-

ance 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 con-

structed this analysis of the Aesthetica in nuce out of a series of separatemdashthough I think not ultimately

contradictorymdashinvestigations 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 wouldnrsquot 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 Hamannrsquos German I have used the old German letters he would have recog-

nized 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 indiffe-

rently 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 lettermdashat 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

Hamannrsquos 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 ma-

naged to salvage any worthwhile thought have at least brought it somewhat closer to the surface

9

Chapter 1 The Unnatural Use of Abstraction

The removal of Α and Ω 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

Verultt es einmal die Iliade zu leen wenn ihr vorher durlt die Abfrac34raction die beiden

Selbfrac34lauter α und ω ausgeilttet habt und agt mir eure Meynung von dem Verfrac34ande und Wohlklange des Diltters

Μῆνιν ειδε Θε Πηληιδε χιλῆος1

In this passage and quotation from Hamannrsquos text traditional images while recognizable for

what they are are combined in a novel way The alpha and omega are symbol of Christ (Rev 18) 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 Hamannrsquos 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 linersquos content

and consider merely what it is as a line Itrsquos the incipit of the Iliad ndash for a student of Greek one of the hex-

ameters that come most readily to mind ndash the opening line of the epic traditionally regarded as the great-

est 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 Priamrsquos neighbors but of the ideals and achievements of classic-

al civilization ndash which though indeed falling as far short of Homerrsquos 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 at-

tempt to understand classical civilization while rejecting Christ Indeed Hamann himself encourages such

a reading of the image when he later cites ldquothe Punic father of the Churchrdquo to the effect that the prophetic

1 Nadler 207

10

books of the Old Testament can only be interpreted correctly when Christ is ldquoread intordquo them ldquoRead the

prophetic books without understanding Christrdquo says Augustine ldquoand what pointlessness and folly will

you find there Understand Christ there and what you read will not only savor but will even intoxicaterdquo1

Hamann takes up and expands this argument providing some context to his surgical removal of vowels

from Homerrsquos line Though as a rhetorician Augustine was acutely aware of their power after his conver-

sion 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 un-

derstood correctly ldquoa dream-like anticipation of Christrdquo2 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 ndash

he is too much of a Lutheran for that But as regards the value of the ancient myths he is rather more ge-

nerous 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 ap-

parent 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 ndash

which is of course not to say that it is not one of the ways Hamann intended it to be read But there must

1 Nadler 212-3 ldquoLege libros propheticos non intellecto CHRISTO agt der punifrac14e Kirltenvater quid tam insipidum amp fatuum inuenies Intellige ibi CHRISTUM non solum sapit quod legis sed etiam inebriatrdquo Hamann gives no citation for this quote a note to the Cambridge translation locates it at Ioh Evang Tract IX3 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 let-

ters than Hamann gives us ndash and even if we lacked the extrinsic familiarity with Homerrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 warriorrsquos

wrath

What then does Hamann mean by this image ldquoSeerdquo he hints to us just after showing us the al-

tered line of Greek ldquothe greater and lesser Masorah of philosophy [Weltweisheit] has overwhelmed the

text of Nature like a Noahrsquos floodrdquo1 As is usual for Hamann this explanation only raises further ques-

tions Nothing here has overwhelmed or flooded anything else and least of all Masorah ndash 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 re-

minded of what was said shortly before Homerrsquos line was introduced

Sie [dh die Mue] wird es wagen den natuumlrlilten Gebrauclt der Sinne von dem unnatuumlrlilten Gebrault der Abfrac34ractionen zu laumlutern wodurlt unere Begriffe von den Dingen eben o ehr verfrac34uumlmmelt werden als der Name des Sltoumlpfers underdruumlckt und gelaumlfrac34ert wird2

The ldquounnatural use of abstractionsrdquo here plays a role parallel to that of the ldquoMasorah of worldly philoso-

phyrdquo mdash 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 ldquoMaso-

1 Nadler 207 Seht die groszlige und kleine Maore der Weltweisheit hat den Text der Natur gleilt einer Suumlndfluth uumlberfrac14wemmt 2 Nadler 207

12

rah of philosophyrdquo then are interpretations that distort and obscure It is this sort of distortion and ob-

scuring that are represented by the removal of the letters alpha and omega from Homerrsquos line we are told

after all that they are removed ldquothrough abstractionrdquo Here Hamann is making a pun on the Latin roots

of the word ldquoabstractionrdquo but it is not merely a pun it is also a hint at one of the hidden connections be-

tween the vowels of the Iliad and Hamannrsquos 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 dam-

aged

And Hamann further suggests that it is because of this failure of interpretation or clarification

that the ldquoGreeksrdquo who abuse abstraction are wrong to think themselves wiser than the ldquochamberlains with

the Gnostic keyrdquo This phrase in itself rather obscure is one of the bridge-phrases in Hamannrsquos text that

point out to us which parts of the tapestry may be connected beneath the surface Chamberlain is Kammer-

herr and between Kammerherr and Kaumlmmerer there is small difference and Kaumlmmerer is the word Luther

used for ldquoeunuchrdquo1 The bridge leads us to another nearby passage of the Aesthetica

Wenn die Leidenfrac14aften Glieder der Unehre ind houmlren ie deswegen auf Waffen der Mannheit zu eyn Verfrac34eht ihr den Bultfrac34aben der Vernunft kluumlger als jener allegorifrac14e Kaumlmmerer der alexandrinifrac14en Kirlte den Bultfrac34aben der Sltrift der ich elbfrac34 zum Verfrac14nittenen maltte um des Himmelreilts willen2

Seen in light of this passage the reference to eunuchs and to Gnosticism is less perplexing While Origen

ndash who I presume to be ldquothat allegorical chamberlain of the Alexandrian churchrdquo mdash is not generally consi-

dered 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

ldquoLeidenfrac14aftenrdquo 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

1 ldquoIn Acts 827 Luther translates as lsquoKaumlmmererrsquo(related to lsquoKammerherrrsquo chamberlain) what the King James Bible translates as lsquoeunuchrsquordquo Haynes 80 note 87 2 Nadler 208

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 ab-

stract 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 ex-

tended Latin quotation from Bacon which is appended as a footnote to the passage quoted above on the

ldquounnatural use of abstractionsrdquo Hamann calls Bacon his ldquoEuthyphrordquo1 the figure who perhaps does not

teach him anymore than Euthyphro taught Socrates but who provides nonetheless the occasion for fruit-

ful 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 repu-

tation as an antirationalist or forerunner of the Sturm und Drang is not here making an argument against

reason as such or against the mindrsquos use of concepts or against thought in general For Bacon is not mak-

ing an argument against philosophy but against bad philosophy ldquoAnd so let men know how far the Idols

of the human mind are from the Ideas of the divine mind hellip 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 ac-

count of the conveniences of liferdquo 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 con-

cepts only so that the truth of things might better shine forth -- indeed for all that he advocates the in-

crease 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 Hamannrsquos critique of the Gnostic chamberlains His prescription is not that we avoid

1 ldquoBacon mein Euthyphronrdquo Nadler 197

14

making use of concepts for things but that we make sure that our concepts have not been verfrac34uumlmmelt and

gelaumlfrac34ert by abuses of reason

The word ldquoabstractionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos 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 foot-

note quotes at considerable length Ovidrsquos retelling of the story ldquoSpem sine corpore amat corpus putat

esse quod umbra est Adstupet ipse sibirdquo1 They who consider the abstractions of their minds to be most

real prefer a (vain) hope or a shadow to the bodymdashthat is the material concrete reality of the natural

world Long after Hamannrsquos 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 sibimdashNarcissus 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 ldquopure reasonrdquo from the mess of passions and contingencies that always surround hu-

man life Hamann prophesies an analogous fate It is this abuse of reason which Hamann means to sug-

gest t the removal of the first and last Greek letters from a line of Homer

And just as Hamann challenges the ldquoGreeksrdquo 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 cor-

rectly or to make any meaningful scientific achievements Just as Hume could not drink a glass of water or

eat an egg without faith2 neither we might paraphrase Hamann could he follow an argument to its con-

1 Metamorphoses III417f quoted at Nadler 210

2 This was a favorite quip of Hamannrsquos and is recorded in several places eg OrsquoFlaherty 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 Hamannrsquos view the supposed opposition of

reason and the passions is a fiction of the Enlighteners his thought has little room for absolute dichoto-

mies and he rejects also this one The passions in fact have an essential role to play even in the exercise

of reason ldquoLeidenfrac14amacr allein giebt Abfrac34ractionen owohl als Hypotheen Haumlnde Fuumlszlige Fluumlgel mdash Bildern und Zei-

chen Geifrac34 Leben und Zungerdquo1 There are perhaps many ways to understand ldquohands feet and wingsrdquo mdash but

between all possible interpretations of these words a basic unity exists They are all parts of the body asso-

ciated with motion and action And so abstractions and hypothesesmdashdry conclusions of the reasonmdashare

made active and mobile by the passions Likewise images and signs are given ldquolife and tonguerdquo 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 un-

mutilated 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 Hamannrsquos style and the symbolic ldquovocabularyrdquo of the Aesthetica in nuce The connection of Ha-

mannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos thought

1 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

Verucht es einmal die Iliade zu leen wenn ihr vorher durch die Abfrac34raction die beyden

Selbfrac34lauter α und ω ausgesichtet habt1 ldquoSelbstlautrdquo and ldquoMitlautrdquo ldquoConsonantrdquo and ldquovowelrdquo2 These are evocative termsmdashnot 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 con-

cepts 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 ldquoletter of the voicerdquo is utterable on its own while a littera consonans

must be ldquosounded withrdquo something else This way of articulating the distinction between independent

vowels and dependent consonants was a commonplace in the eighteenth century3 and would not have

been unfamiliar to Hamann even if the etymology of ldquoSelbstlautrdquo did not suggest it If we translate then

a bit freely we might say ldquothat which is removed from the Iliad by abstraction is that without which

1 Nadler 207

2 German preserves also more Latinate forms ldquoVokalrdquo and ldquoKonsonantrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos thought in the Aesthetica in nuce 3 John Hensons New Latin Grammar for instance published at Nottingham in 1744 explains ldquoA Vowel is a letter

which makes a full and perfect Sound of it Self as a o A Conſonant is a Letter that has no Sound of it Self without a Vowelrdquo And in a Verbesserte and Erleichterte Lateinische Grammatica published at Halle in 1763 (a year after the Cru-sades of the Philologist saw light) we read ldquoDen Anfang in der Lateinifrac14en Spralten maltt man von den Bultfrac34abenhellip Und diee werden eingetheilet in vocales oder elbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautende und consonantes oder mitlautendemitlautendemitlautendemitlautende o niltt ehe koumlnnen ausgeprolten werden als bis ein vocalis dazukoumlmmtrdquo 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 httpbooksgooglecombooksid=T5ECAAAAQAAJ and the second at httpbooksgooglecombooksid=F9oVAAAAYAAJ

17

there can be no speechrdquo which without any further interpretation already at least appears to imply much

more than a matter of rearranged letters

As we have seen the ldquoabstractionrdquo of the letters from the line of the Iliad corresponds in the typo-

logical 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 pas-

sions in order for them to have any power to persuade It is not that reasoned arguments even when ab-

stract are otiose or parasiticalmdashthese 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 ldquovocalizedrdquo

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

Hamannrsquos 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 unpointedmdashlike 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 durlt 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 scripturesmdashwritten by God but one must bring onersquos

own vowels to read it

But is this not going too far While we may not just have misrepresented Hamannrsquos 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 doesnrsquot make sense as

written without those vowels itrsquos still easily interpretable If Hamann had not named it as a line from the

Iliad any educated person on seeing the word microῆνιν 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 miss-

ing places in the line the shape of the dactyls and the grammatical possibilities offered by the Greek lan-

guage 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 En-

lightened 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 objec-

tion of this scientist would be absurd because it would miss the point of Hamannrsquos critiquemdashhe goes

around the backs of the Enlighteners contending that they are moved by passion even in what they be-

lieve to be their exercises of pure reason that the arguments they invoke to defend their conception of rea-

son 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 ldquoTurbatverserdquo1 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 Hamannrsquos altered line from the Iliad) But it refers most specif-

ically 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 Θεά ἄειδε μῆνιν Ἀχιλῆος Πηληϊάδεω In a certain sense there is nothing of Homerrsquos 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 ob-

viously 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 ldquogoddessrdquo and not ldquowrathrdquo In the Turbatverse of nature then the superficial meaning of the speak-

ing 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 niltts als Turbatvere und disiecti membra poetae zu unerm Gebrault uumlbrig Diee zu ammeln ifrac34 des Gelehrten ie auszulegen des Philoophen ie naltzuahmenmdashoder nolt kuumlhnermdash mdashie in Gefrac14ick zu bringen des Poeten befrac14eiden Theil2

1 Nadler 198

2 Nadler 199

20

The hierarchy that is here established with the scholar philosopher and poet presented with responsibili-

ties of increasing creativity should not surprise us as it is exactly in line with what Hamann says else-

where about the high dignity of the poet to whom is compared even God himself1 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 ade-

quate 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 consti-

tuent 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

1 ldquoDer Poet am Anfange der Tagerdquo Nadler 206

21

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

Hamannrsquos coincidentia oppositorum is not any kind of dialectical synthesis Creation is speech ndash so is Hamannrsquos 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 Aesthe-

tica in nuce relate to the argument he makes about the proper use of reason There is significant ldquooverlaprdquo

here the various images and descriptions Hamann uses are parallel making the same argument in differ-

ent ways From what we have already said we can derive a kind of table showing how the various images

used map onto Hamannrsquos argument about the reason and the passions

Passions Reason

Vowels Consonants Words Mere arrangements of letters Poetic Meter Turbatverse God Nature Christianity Classical civilization Alpha and Omega 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 refus-

es 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 to-

gether 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 ldquoit is not clear how far he understood it and he certainly gives it a

1 Though not in the Aesthetica See eg Betz 28 note 17

22

sense of his ownrdquo1 In fact it is not easy to see where the ldquocoincidencerdquo comes in at all Regarding every

text every object as part of his ldquoBiblerdquo 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 themselvesmdashto

the letters of a text (in literary criticism) and the phenomena of nature unreduced to their universal ra-

tional 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 pro-

duced of these elements He beholds in a single vision der rollende Donner der Beredamkeit and der

einylbicltte Blitz2 This strangemdashor strange to us and Hamann would not hesitate to say that our sensibili-

ties need correctionmdashthis strange conjunction of opposites confronts us even on the title page of the Aes-

thetica in nuce Eine Rhapodie in kabbalifrac34ifrac14er Proe A rhapsodymdasha stitching-together of pieces into an ar-

tistic unitymdashthat 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 ldquoApostillerdquo ndash whether Hamann himself some per-

sonified commentator or anyone else ndash remarks that the author of the Aesthetica in nuce ldquohat Satz und

Satz zuammengereltnet wie man die Pfeile auf einem Sltlalttfelde zaumlhltrdquo3 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 Romansrsquo shots though fewer were fired with greater force It is not clear which side better corres-

ponds to Hamannrsquos 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 Therersquos a case to be made for either in-

terpretation But whichever we take the view wersquore given of the Aesthetica in nuce is still of individual

Saumltze piled up one after another as discrete countable units This treatise says the speaker of the Apos-

tille is just a pile of sentences But in an instant our perspective is shifted ldquoLaszligt uns jetzt die Hauptumme

1 Berlin 115

2 Nadler 208

3 Nadler 217 The reference given by Hamann (ldquoProcop De bello persico I 18rdquo) is explained at Haynes 94 note

kkk

23

[hellip] houmlrenldquo1 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 vari-

ous meditations on human life that compose the text of the biblical book2 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

summarymdasha 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 Hamannrsquos 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 readerrsquos confusion It is not Hamannrsquos 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 writings3 it is perhaps not sur-

prising then if the Aesthetica in nuce presents us with hermeneutic difficulties that neither the text itself

nor comparisons with Hamannrsquos other works nor consideration of Hamannrsquos engagement with the issues

of his time are adequate to dispel But the paradox we are considering heremdashthe simultaneous focus on

both columns of the table with which this chapter beganmdashis so fundamental to the thought of the Aesthe-

tica in nuce that unless we can come to terms with it in some way Hamannrsquos 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

1 Ibid

2 Cf Lutherbibel Predig 1213 ldquoLaszligt uns die Hauptumme aller Lehre houmlrenldquo 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 ldquoApostillerdquo likewise to be a undermining of all that goes before it 3 ldquoI no longer understand myself quite differently from then some [writings I understand] better some worse [hellip]

[hellip] 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 stuffrdquo Briefwechsel V p 358 trans in Betz 229

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 ldquodie ilt nolt im bloszligen Bult-frac34a-bi-ren uumlbenmdashmdashund wahrlilt wahrlilt Kinder muumlfrac12en

wir werden wenn wir den Geifrac34 der Wahrheit empfahen ollenldquo1 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 ldquoSpirit of

Truth whom the world cannot receiverdquo (Jn 1417) 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 spiri-

tual pole than to the elemental literal material one But how says Hamannrsquos Nuszlig is this Spirit of Truth

to be received By becoming like children who are just learning to spellmdashand 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 ldquoBultfrac34abirenrdquo syllable by syllable confirms that Hamann is referring to this style of interpreta-

tion Recalling now the table at the start of this chapter in which letters and the ldquospirit of truthrdquo

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 ldquoVerlieren die Elemente des A B C ihre natuumlrlilte

Bedeutung wenn ie in der unendlichen Zuammenetzung willkuumlrlilter Zeilten uns an Ideen erinnern die wo niltt

im Himmel dolt im Gehirn indrdquo2 To this question of course we are meant to answer ldquonordquo But there is

much here that is not unproblematic or at least not simple What for instance is the ldquonatuumlrlilte Bedeu-

tungrdquo of a letter And how if the combination of these signs be arbitrary does it recall for us ideas And

1 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 Hamannrsquos voice at least on Hamannrsquos 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 wersquore 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 Greeksmdashbut 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 coin-

cidence is merely an opportunity to bring the opposites as opposites together But this assumption natu-

ral 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 experiencemdashthis 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 Hamannrsquos writing admits of both a macros-

copic 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 conjunc-

tion 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 them1 considering these various levels of read-

ing 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 simultaneous-

ly 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 interpreta-

tion could be set forth that might allow us to translate Hamannrsquos simultaneously cabalistic and rhapsodic

utterances into academic language or to devise summaries of his arguments in a neatly symbolic lan-

guage 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 oumlffentlilter Gebrault 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 Hamannrsquos thought is useful also here Sltoumlpfung ifrac34 eine Rede an die Kreatur durlt die Kreatur The

Christian overtones of such a formulation are obvious Hamann once offered an encapsulation of his

thought in the word λόγος2 a famously polysemous term every sense of which Hamann intends The in-

timate connection between reason and language is of course the most obvious philosophical implication of

1 For Hamannrsquos defense of this possibility see Chapter 4

2 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 Hamannrsquos philosophy But for Hamann λόγος 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 Hamannrsquos piety placed a great emphasis on the self-emptying of Christ Howev-

er much he might stress Christrsquos humanity and suffering though he remained well within the main-

stream 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 diffi-

culties here But there is a clear parallel between the way a Christian thinks of Christ and how Hamann

thinks ofmdashwell more or less everything Christ is a man who lived for a certain stretch of time in a cer-

tain place and is also the eternal God A word is a string of letters small shapes arbitrarily strung togeth-

er and is also a sign of a concept an immaterial thing existing in the mind Hamann is no dualistmdashit 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

Zufoumlrderfrac34 muumlfrac34e man D George Benon fragen ob die Einheit mit der Mannigfaltigkeit niltt befrac34ehen koumlnne [hellip] Der bultfrac34aumlblilte oder grammatifrac14e der fleifrac14liche oder dialectifrac14e der ka-pernaitifrac14e oder historifrac14e Sinn ind im houmlltfrac34en Grade myfrac34ilt und haumlngen von ollten augen-blicklilten pirituoumlen willkuumlhrlilten Nebenbefrac34immungen und Umfrac34aumlnden ab daszlig man ohne hinauf gen Himmel zu fahren die Schluumlfrac12el ihrer Erkenntnis niltt herabholen kann1

1 Nadler 203 note 23 Hamannrsquos footnote is attached to some lines of Latin verse which conclude the Nutrsquos letter to the Learned Rabbi They come from a poem traditionally and falsely attributed to the Emperor Augustus explain-ing why Vergilrsquos orders to destroy the drafts of the Aeneid were ignored after the poetrsquos death The excerpts are

Ah scelus indignum soluetur litera diues Frangatur potius legum veneranda potestas Liber amp alma Ceres succurrite mdash mdash [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 mdashwhich for Hamann who does not oppose the spirit and the letter in a conventional way is a spiritual richnessmdashis 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

28

It is not that interpretation ought to be literal physical or ldquoCapernaiticrdquo 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 understandingmdashthat is unless one has

attained a certain degree of spiritual insight ndashone will be unable to understand things even in their literal

senses for the spiritual and literal senses are one Hamannrsquos 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 expe-

rience 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 inten-

tion of this line of thought has been least of all to stimulate pious feelings Hamannrsquos goal is not to spiri-

tualize 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 (ldquoDie Sinne aber ind Ceres und Bacltus die Leidenfrac14aftenrdquo [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 simplis-tically 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 Hamannrsquos ability to com-press his meaning into very few and very cryptic words NB The ldquoCapernaiticrdquo sense refers to the sense in which Christ is literally present in the Christian sacrament This unusual word is used derogatively in Lutheran texts (eg the Epitome of the Konkordienformel) to disparage Catholic sacramental teaching Its origins are in Jn 65559 ldquoFor my flesh is meat indeed and my blood is drink in-deed [hellip] These things he said in the synagogue as he taught in Capernaumrdquo 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 Luthe-ran understanding according to which Christ is present in the sacrament in a merely spiritual way is less than per-fectly compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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

Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 im-

plied meanings into the literal tropological allegorical and anagogical senses that Christians have tradi-

tionally 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 ormdashto employ a metaphor

more perhaps more congenial to Hamannmdashdiscerning 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 indul-

gence 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 slo-

gan from the text itselfmdashldquoto speak is to translaterdquomdashand 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 uumlberetzenmdashaus einer Engelpralte in eine Menfrac14enpralte das heifrac34 Gedanken in WortemdashSalten in NamenmdashBilder in Zeilten die poetifrac14 oder kyriologifrac14 hifrac34orifrac14 oder ymbolifrac14 oder hieroglyphifrac14mdashmdashund philoophifrac14 oder ltarakterifrac34ifrac14 eyn koumlnnen1

Here we are given a license to translate Hamannrsquos images into signs of various kinds It is no surprise that

in a footnote attached to this text he derogates the ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs by citing a pas-

sage of Petronius which complains that a new fashion of ldquopuffed-up and formless talkativenessrdquo has cor-

1 Nadler 199

31

rupted speech so that ldquothe standard of eloquence being corrupted has been halted and struck dumbrdquo

and ldquonot even poetry displays a healthy colorrdquo1 By ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs we should un-

derstand something like Leibnizrsquos 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 criti-

cism 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 cor-

respondences out of the text But the other kinds of signsmdashthe poetic or symbolicmdashdo not seem to fall

under the same criticismmdashthese suggest a kind of sign which indeed has meaning but whose interpreta-

tion 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 Hamannrsquos thought allows even for this kind of correspon-

dence 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 Hamannrsquos text but also is deeply compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos text to assert that he intends the literal and symbolic meanings to be taken as

of equal importancemdashfor us to devote our full attention to take up one of the governing metaphors of this

1 N 199 n10 ldquoNuper ventosa isthaec amp enormis loquacitas Athenas ex Asia conmigrauit [hellip] simulque correpta elo-quentiae regula stetit amp obmutuit [hellip] Ac ne carmen quidem sani coloris enituitrdquo

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 discuss-

ing how Hamann refuses to privilege abstract ldquopurely mentalrdquo thought over the particular words in

which that thought finds expression Berlin concludes that ldquofor 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)rdquo1 As an example of one such contradiction Berlin cites the line placed at the head

of this section ldquoto speak is to translaterdquo For Berlin it follows from Hamannrsquos insistence on the unity of

reason and language that no translation no correspondence between words ideas and things can be es-

tablished

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 attend-ing to ideas or to language and through them (because they correspond) to the facts was a method of judging and knowing reality [hellip But the] notion of a correspondence that there is an objective world on one side and on the other man and his instruments ndash lan-guage ideas and so forth ndash attempting to approximate to this objective reality is a false picture There is only a flow of sensations2

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 ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 reproduced3 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 Hamannrsquos treatise but unable to claim any continuity of thought therewith

1 Berlin 81

2 Ibid

3 Though one might question even this Ποταμῷ γὰρ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐμβῆναι δὶς τῷ αὐτῷ and there is no reason to think

any two ldquoflows of sensationrdquo could ever be substantially identical Necessarily every ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos view Berlin is perplexed when confronted with Hamannrsquos open assertion

that translation is possible between ldquohuman speechrdquo and the ldquospeech of angelsrdquo and can only conclude

that Hamann here contradicts himself And for Berlin it is quite to be expected that Hamann should con-

tradict himself he regards Hamannrsquos thought in general as highly creative and intriguing Schwaumlrmerei

of note for its pivotal place in intellectual history but completely insusceptible or unworthy of serious

philosophic attention Berlin appreciates Hamannrsquos criticism of the Enlightenment and his prescient

awareness of the lifeless bloodless conception of manrsquos spiritual life that the Enlighteners would ultimate-

ly produce While Berlin claims to understand Hamannrsquos motives in writing he utterly rejects the content

of his writings which he regards as ldquothe cry of a trapped man hellip who cannot be brought to see that to be

regimented or eliminated is either inevitable or desirablerdquo1 For Berlin Hamann is simply a ldquofanaticrdquo

whose writings consist of ldquopassionate rhetoric and not careful thoughtrdquo and whose opinions are ldquogrotes-

quely one-sided a violent exaggeration of the uniqueness of men and things [and] a passionate hatred of

menrsquos wish to understand the universerdquo2 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 pur-

ism of Hitler3 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 Berlinrsquos judgment that Hamann

1 Berlin 116

2 Berlin 121

3 This accusation is presented in Berlinrsquos book in a series of insinuations we are told for example that Hamannrsquos

ldquohatred and blind irrationalism have fed the stream that has led to social and political irrationalism particularly in German in our own [20

th] centuryrdquo (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 Berlinrsquos 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

34

simply contradicts himself in allowing for the possibility of translation in and out of symbolic ldquolanguag-

esrdquo Hamann has very little patience for ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs which promise patent

meaning and unambiguous interpretation This is perfectly in keeping with his general distaste for effi-

cient 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 ldquopoeticrdquo and ldquosymbolicrdquo signs not to fall under the same fierce criticism as the others

ldquoTo speak is to translaterdquo and ldquocreation is a speech to the creature through the creaturerdquo These

two maxims placed very near to each other in the text1 suggest something of a solution to the problem to

which Berlin directs our attention The conjunction of these lines should remind us that Hamann wheth-

er he directing his attention to literature philology esthetics or any other subject is always also a reli-

gious thinker The archetype of every text is for him the Bible and biblical exegesis is the model and ca-

non 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 Michaelisrsquos ldquodenial of a mystical typological sense

of Scripturerdquo2 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 Mi-

chaelis 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 ldquoTo merdquo says Hamann ldquoevery book is a Biblerdquo3 like the Bible then every

book must be read not merely for its literal sense Berlinrsquos reading of Hamann might be correct if Ha-

1 N 118-119

2 Betz 114

3 Briefwechsel I p 309 trans in Betz 47

35

mann were speaking about the everyday world of words and things understood as a brute fact But Ha-

mann 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 re-

mind us that the interpretation of tongues is also a divine gift1 he admits even that persons may not un-

derstand what they themselves to and say Even a figure such as Voltaire hardly a friend of religious out-

looks testifies for those who have ears to hear to the rightness of Hamannrsquos views

kann man wohl einen glaubwuumlrdigern Zeugen als den unfrac34erblilten Voltaire anfuumlhren wellter bey-nahe die Religion fuumlr den Eckfrac34ein der epifrac14en Dilttkunfrac34 erklaumlrt [hellip] Voltaire aber der Hohe-priefrac34er im Tempel des Gefrac14macks frac14luumlszligt so buumlndig als Kaiphas und denkt frulttbarer als He-rodes2

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 ldquoHo-

hepriefrac34er im Tempelrdquo but also a somewhat Machiavellian politician) justifies the crucifixion of Christ by

arguing that ldquoit is expedient that one man should die for the peoplerdquo3 believing himself to be discussing a

political necessity while as if prophetically describing the Christian doctrine of the atonement And He-

rodrsquos deceitful remark to the Magi ldquothat I might also come and worship himrdquo is taken since Herod was

king of the Jews though a gentile by race to represent the universal destiny of the Christian religion4 This

tradition of interpretation habitual in Biblical exegesis Hamann applies also to analysis of the wordmdashso

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 1210

2 Nadler 204-5

3 John 1150

4 It is telling that Hamann chooses such a contrived and complicated case of biblical parallelism as this one his ar-

gument 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

36

will readily concede that ldquowe see through a glass darklyrdquo1 and that we may not even be able to descry the

true outlines of our own persons in this mirrormdashbut by invoking the language of mirrors2 he locates him-

self within a tradition of thought according to which nature however flawed parts of it may be and how-

ever dulled our ability to discern itmdashis 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 se-

cular 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 ldquoblind heathensrdquo

Blinde Heyden haben die Unilttbarkeit erkannt die der Menfrac14 mit GOTT gemein hat Die verhuumlllte Figur des Leibes das Antlitz des Hauptes und das Aumluszligerfrac34e der Arme ind das ilttbare Sltema in dem wir einher gehn dolt eigentlilt niltts als ein Zeigefinger des verborge-nen Menfrac14en in unsmdash Exemplumque DEI quisque est in imagine parva3

Note that the ldquospiritualrdquo 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 ldquoindex fingersrdquo which direct the inner man to

our attention Hamann let us recall4 does not believe that the target of this ldquoZeigefingerrdquo can always be

1 1 Cor 1312

2 Though Hamann is in some ways a very modern thinker who anticipates 20

th century thought about the kinship of

reason and language he here looks back to the middle ages Cf Alan of Lille ldquoOmnis mundi creatura Quasi liber et pictura Nobis est et speculumrdquo With the sentiment and conceit of this verse Hamann could not agree more 3 N 198 The quotation from the Astronomicon of Manilius (IV895) is mainly noteworthy for its having been writ-

ten by a pagan author while echoing the language of Genesis regarding the ldquoimage of Godrdquo The Cambridge edition of Hamann misenglishes this line rendering it as ldquoEach one is an instance of God in miniaturerdquo This not only loses the connection to the book of Genesis conveyed by the word ldquoimagordquo but puts far too much weight on the word ldquoexemplumrdquo as well An exemplum is not an instance but a type model or analogue ldquoInstancerdquo implies an occur-rence of a rationally determinable kind a ldquotyperdquo or ldquoanaloguerdquo 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

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 circumstancesmdashthis 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 re-

fers to ldquocorrespondencesrdquo of thing and idea and of idea and word these ldquocorrespondencesrdquo are for Berlin

relations between two different things of different types He is quite correct to judge that Hamann consid-

ers 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 meaningmdashhe 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 justifica-

tion 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 ldquoConclusionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos own line that ldquocreation is a speech to the creature

through the creaturerdquo 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 cor-

respond to each other based on no apodictically determinable system knowable a priori but on the gra-

tuitous (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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 com-

pared translation to the art of understanding the image of a tapestry from looking only at the backs of the

threads he remarks ldquoDort [ie in the original contexts of the metaphors borrowed from other authors for

39

Hamannrsquos text] werden ie aber ad illustrationem (zur Verbraumlmung des Rockes) hier ad inuolucrum (zum

Hemde auf bloszligem Leibe) gebrauchtrdquo1 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 deco-

rated 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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos which ac-

cording to the line of interpretation I have explored reveals as much about Hamannrsquos 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 tear-

ing 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 Hamannrsquos motion between images his construction of typological

schemes that resist easy classification and one-for-one interpretation is not antirational raving or obscu-

rantism but rather an alternativemdashand a quite compelling onemdashto 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

1 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 tho-

roughly religious vision of the world If one is willing to do this Hamann is a kind of prophetmdashand the

horned head of Pan on his title-page is also the horned head of Moses1 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 pro-

ducing neat tables of Hamannrsquos 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 Aes-

thetica 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 somethingmdashunless there really is some secret ineffable law of correspondences that un-

ites 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 commen-

tators and writers of senior essays have no right to tread

1 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 agrave la Mosaiumlque (Roth 103 343)

41

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin Isaiah The Magus of the North JG Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism ed Henry

Hardy London John Murray 1993 Betz John After Enlightenment the Post-Secular Vision of JG Hamann Chichester John Wiley amp Sons

2009 Hamann Johann Georg Hamannrsquos Schriften ed Friedrich Roth Berlin G Reimer 1821 (Cited as

ldquoRothrdquo All citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Saumlmtliche Werke ed Josef Nadler Wien Verlag Herder 1950 (Cited as ldquoNad-

lerrdquo Unless otherwise noted all citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Writings on Philosophy and Language trans and ed Kenneth Haynes Cam-

bridge Cambridge UP 2007 (Cited as ldquoHaynesrdquo) Jacobs Carol ldquoHamann Is a Nomadic Writer lsquoAesthetica in nucersquordquo in Skirting the Ethical Stanford Stan-

ford UP 2008 pp 111-130 OrsquoFlaherty James C The Quarrel of Reason with Itself Essays on Hamann Michaelis Lessing Nietzsche Co-

lumbia SC Camden 1988

3

The Hebrew text in the cartouche between the columns reads ldquofor he spake and it was donerdquo

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 Hamannrsquos fundamental insights namely that creation is

Godrsquos 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 lettersrsquo 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 fashionmdashand 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 Chapter 1 The unnatural use of abstraction 10

The removal of Α and Ω from the first line of the Iliad is a parable about the right use of reason The vowels are the passions and Ha-mann warns against the belief that reason can operate properly with-out the passions

Chapter 2 Vowels 17

In the symbolic economy of the Aesthetica in nuce the difference be-tween 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

Hamannrsquos coincidentia oppositorum is not any kind of dialectical synthesis Creation is speech ndash so is Hamannrsquos use of symbolism justi-fied The hermeneutical paradoxes of the Aesthetica in nuce are ana-logous to the paradoxes of the Christian religion

Chapter 4 To speak is to translate 34

Hamannrsquos 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 revela-tion but present in the things themselves It is from Hamannrsquos typolog-ical style and not from any direct statement that we discover what he has to say

Conclusion 46 Bibliography 49

5

Introduction This essay is not an attempt to understand Hamannrsquos 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 ldquoGreeksrdquo 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 compari-

son 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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos larger corpus this is

due to chance or to a consistency in Hamannrsquos writing and not at all to design Admittedly the themes

brought up on this page that is our subjectmdashwriting the possibility of readingmdashare broad ones and as we

shall see according to the patterns of symbolism which Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 ndashwhich for Hamann are

scarcely separablemdashpresented 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 philo-

sophical criticism as the inauguration of a new artistic era or as an almost meaningless display of be-

nighted and antirational obscurantismmdashbut one cannot avoid the conclusion that Johann Georg Ha-

mannrsquos 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 sub-

jects of the Aesthetica in nuce are much less parochial the nature of reason the power of language the rela-

tion 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 state-

ment of his positionmdashand this perhaps would often not be wrongmdashbut the Aesthetica in nuce a dizzying-

ly 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 enoughmdashinterpreting 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 Hamannrsquos 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 pre-

sume to have accurately or exhaustively interpreted the Aesthetica in nuce but we hope to write a commen-

tary 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 appear-

ance 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 con-

structed this analysis of the Aesthetica in nuce out of a series of separatemdashthough I think not ultimately

contradictorymdashinvestigations 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 wouldnrsquot 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 Hamannrsquos German I have used the old German letters he would have recog-

nized 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 indiffe-

rently 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 lettermdashat 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

Hamannrsquos 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 ma-

naged to salvage any worthwhile thought have at least brought it somewhat closer to the surface

9

Chapter 1 The Unnatural Use of Abstraction

The removal of Α and Ω 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

Verultt es einmal die Iliade zu leen wenn ihr vorher durlt die Abfrac34raction die beiden

Selbfrac34lauter α und ω ausgeilttet habt und agt mir eure Meynung von dem Verfrac34ande und Wohlklange des Diltters

Μῆνιν ειδε Θε Πηληιδε χιλῆος1

In this passage and quotation from Hamannrsquos text traditional images while recognizable for

what they are are combined in a novel way The alpha and omega are symbol of Christ (Rev 18) 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 Hamannrsquos 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 linersquos content

and consider merely what it is as a line Itrsquos the incipit of the Iliad ndash for a student of Greek one of the hex-

ameters that come most readily to mind ndash the opening line of the epic traditionally regarded as the great-

est 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 Priamrsquos neighbors but of the ideals and achievements of classic-

al civilization ndash which though indeed falling as far short of Homerrsquos 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 at-

tempt to understand classical civilization while rejecting Christ Indeed Hamann himself encourages such

a reading of the image when he later cites ldquothe Punic father of the Churchrdquo to the effect that the prophetic

1 Nadler 207

10

books of the Old Testament can only be interpreted correctly when Christ is ldquoread intordquo them ldquoRead the

prophetic books without understanding Christrdquo says Augustine ldquoand what pointlessness and folly will

you find there Understand Christ there and what you read will not only savor but will even intoxicaterdquo1

Hamann takes up and expands this argument providing some context to his surgical removal of vowels

from Homerrsquos line Though as a rhetorician Augustine was acutely aware of their power after his conver-

sion 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 un-

derstood correctly ldquoa dream-like anticipation of Christrdquo2 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 ndash

he is too much of a Lutheran for that But as regards the value of the ancient myths he is rather more ge-

nerous 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 ap-

parent 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 ndash

which is of course not to say that it is not one of the ways Hamann intended it to be read But there must

1 Nadler 212-3 ldquoLege libros propheticos non intellecto CHRISTO agt der punifrac14e Kirltenvater quid tam insipidum amp fatuum inuenies Intellige ibi CHRISTUM non solum sapit quod legis sed etiam inebriatrdquo Hamann gives no citation for this quote a note to the Cambridge translation locates it at Ioh Evang Tract IX3 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 let-

ters than Hamann gives us ndash and even if we lacked the extrinsic familiarity with Homerrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 warriorrsquos

wrath

What then does Hamann mean by this image ldquoSeerdquo he hints to us just after showing us the al-

tered line of Greek ldquothe greater and lesser Masorah of philosophy [Weltweisheit] has overwhelmed the

text of Nature like a Noahrsquos floodrdquo1 As is usual for Hamann this explanation only raises further ques-

tions Nothing here has overwhelmed or flooded anything else and least of all Masorah ndash 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 re-

minded of what was said shortly before Homerrsquos line was introduced

Sie [dh die Mue] wird es wagen den natuumlrlilten Gebrauclt der Sinne von dem unnatuumlrlilten Gebrault der Abfrac34ractionen zu laumlutern wodurlt unere Begriffe von den Dingen eben o ehr verfrac34uumlmmelt werden als der Name des Sltoumlpfers underdruumlckt und gelaumlfrac34ert wird2

The ldquounnatural use of abstractionsrdquo here plays a role parallel to that of the ldquoMasorah of worldly philoso-

phyrdquo mdash 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 ldquoMaso-

1 Nadler 207 Seht die groszlige und kleine Maore der Weltweisheit hat den Text der Natur gleilt einer Suumlndfluth uumlberfrac14wemmt 2 Nadler 207

12

rah of philosophyrdquo then are interpretations that distort and obscure It is this sort of distortion and ob-

scuring that are represented by the removal of the letters alpha and omega from Homerrsquos line we are told

after all that they are removed ldquothrough abstractionrdquo Here Hamann is making a pun on the Latin roots

of the word ldquoabstractionrdquo but it is not merely a pun it is also a hint at one of the hidden connections be-

tween the vowels of the Iliad and Hamannrsquos 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 dam-

aged

And Hamann further suggests that it is because of this failure of interpretation or clarification

that the ldquoGreeksrdquo who abuse abstraction are wrong to think themselves wiser than the ldquochamberlains with

the Gnostic keyrdquo This phrase in itself rather obscure is one of the bridge-phrases in Hamannrsquos text that

point out to us which parts of the tapestry may be connected beneath the surface Chamberlain is Kammer-

herr and between Kammerherr and Kaumlmmerer there is small difference and Kaumlmmerer is the word Luther

used for ldquoeunuchrdquo1 The bridge leads us to another nearby passage of the Aesthetica

Wenn die Leidenfrac14aften Glieder der Unehre ind houmlren ie deswegen auf Waffen der Mannheit zu eyn Verfrac34eht ihr den Bultfrac34aben der Vernunft kluumlger als jener allegorifrac14e Kaumlmmerer der alexandrinifrac14en Kirlte den Bultfrac34aben der Sltrift der ich elbfrac34 zum Verfrac14nittenen maltte um des Himmelreilts willen2

Seen in light of this passage the reference to eunuchs and to Gnosticism is less perplexing While Origen

ndash who I presume to be ldquothat allegorical chamberlain of the Alexandrian churchrdquo mdash is not generally consi-

dered 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

ldquoLeidenfrac14aftenrdquo 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

1 ldquoIn Acts 827 Luther translates as lsquoKaumlmmererrsquo(related to lsquoKammerherrrsquo chamberlain) what the King James Bible translates as lsquoeunuchrsquordquo Haynes 80 note 87 2 Nadler 208

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 ab-

stract 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 ex-

tended Latin quotation from Bacon which is appended as a footnote to the passage quoted above on the

ldquounnatural use of abstractionsrdquo Hamann calls Bacon his ldquoEuthyphrordquo1 the figure who perhaps does not

teach him anymore than Euthyphro taught Socrates but who provides nonetheless the occasion for fruit-

ful 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 repu-

tation as an antirationalist or forerunner of the Sturm und Drang is not here making an argument against

reason as such or against the mindrsquos use of concepts or against thought in general For Bacon is not mak-

ing an argument against philosophy but against bad philosophy ldquoAnd so let men know how far the Idols

of the human mind are from the Ideas of the divine mind hellip 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 ac-

count of the conveniences of liferdquo 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 con-

cepts only so that the truth of things might better shine forth -- indeed for all that he advocates the in-

crease 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 Hamannrsquos critique of the Gnostic chamberlains His prescription is not that we avoid

1 ldquoBacon mein Euthyphronrdquo Nadler 197

14

making use of concepts for things but that we make sure that our concepts have not been verfrac34uumlmmelt and

gelaumlfrac34ert by abuses of reason

The word ldquoabstractionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos 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 foot-

note quotes at considerable length Ovidrsquos retelling of the story ldquoSpem sine corpore amat corpus putat

esse quod umbra est Adstupet ipse sibirdquo1 They who consider the abstractions of their minds to be most

real prefer a (vain) hope or a shadow to the bodymdashthat is the material concrete reality of the natural

world Long after Hamannrsquos 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 sibimdashNarcissus 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 ldquopure reasonrdquo from the mess of passions and contingencies that always surround hu-

man life Hamann prophesies an analogous fate It is this abuse of reason which Hamann means to sug-

gest t the removal of the first and last Greek letters from a line of Homer

And just as Hamann challenges the ldquoGreeksrdquo 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 cor-

rectly or to make any meaningful scientific achievements Just as Hume could not drink a glass of water or

eat an egg without faith2 neither we might paraphrase Hamann could he follow an argument to its con-

1 Metamorphoses III417f quoted at Nadler 210

2 This was a favorite quip of Hamannrsquos and is recorded in several places eg OrsquoFlaherty 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 Hamannrsquos view the supposed opposition of

reason and the passions is a fiction of the Enlighteners his thought has little room for absolute dichoto-

mies and he rejects also this one The passions in fact have an essential role to play even in the exercise

of reason ldquoLeidenfrac14amacr allein giebt Abfrac34ractionen owohl als Hypotheen Haumlnde Fuumlszlige Fluumlgel mdash Bildern und Zei-

chen Geifrac34 Leben und Zungerdquo1 There are perhaps many ways to understand ldquohands feet and wingsrdquo mdash but

between all possible interpretations of these words a basic unity exists They are all parts of the body asso-

ciated with motion and action And so abstractions and hypothesesmdashdry conclusions of the reasonmdashare

made active and mobile by the passions Likewise images and signs are given ldquolife and tonguerdquo 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 un-

mutilated 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 Hamannrsquos style and the symbolic ldquovocabularyrdquo of the Aesthetica in nuce The connection of Ha-

mannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos thought

1 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

Verucht es einmal die Iliade zu leen wenn ihr vorher durch die Abfrac34raction die beyden

Selbfrac34lauter α und ω ausgesichtet habt1 ldquoSelbstlautrdquo and ldquoMitlautrdquo ldquoConsonantrdquo and ldquovowelrdquo2 These are evocative termsmdashnot 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 con-

cepts 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 ldquoletter of the voicerdquo is utterable on its own while a littera consonans

must be ldquosounded withrdquo something else This way of articulating the distinction between independent

vowels and dependent consonants was a commonplace in the eighteenth century3 and would not have

been unfamiliar to Hamann even if the etymology of ldquoSelbstlautrdquo did not suggest it If we translate then

a bit freely we might say ldquothat which is removed from the Iliad by abstraction is that without which

1 Nadler 207

2 German preserves also more Latinate forms ldquoVokalrdquo and ldquoKonsonantrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos thought in the Aesthetica in nuce 3 John Hensons New Latin Grammar for instance published at Nottingham in 1744 explains ldquoA Vowel is a letter

which makes a full and perfect Sound of it Self as a o A Conſonant is a Letter that has no Sound of it Self without a Vowelrdquo And in a Verbesserte and Erleichterte Lateinische Grammatica published at Halle in 1763 (a year after the Cru-sades of the Philologist saw light) we read ldquoDen Anfang in der Lateinifrac14en Spralten maltt man von den Bultfrac34abenhellip Und diee werden eingetheilet in vocales oder elbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautende und consonantes oder mitlautendemitlautendemitlautendemitlautende o niltt ehe koumlnnen ausgeprolten werden als bis ein vocalis dazukoumlmmtrdquo 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 httpbooksgooglecombooksid=T5ECAAAAQAAJ and the second at httpbooksgooglecombooksid=F9oVAAAAYAAJ

17

there can be no speechrdquo which without any further interpretation already at least appears to imply much

more than a matter of rearranged letters

As we have seen the ldquoabstractionrdquo of the letters from the line of the Iliad corresponds in the typo-

logical 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 pas-

sions in order for them to have any power to persuade It is not that reasoned arguments even when ab-

stract are otiose or parasiticalmdashthese 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 ldquovocalizedrdquo

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

Hamannrsquos 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 unpointedmdashlike 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 durlt 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 scripturesmdashwritten by God but one must bring onersquos

own vowels to read it

But is this not going too far While we may not just have misrepresented Hamannrsquos 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 doesnrsquot make sense as

written without those vowels itrsquos still easily interpretable If Hamann had not named it as a line from the

Iliad any educated person on seeing the word microῆνιν 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 miss-

ing places in the line the shape of the dactyls and the grammatical possibilities offered by the Greek lan-

guage 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 En-

lightened 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 objec-

tion of this scientist would be absurd because it would miss the point of Hamannrsquos critiquemdashhe goes

around the backs of the Enlighteners contending that they are moved by passion even in what they be-

lieve to be their exercises of pure reason that the arguments they invoke to defend their conception of rea-

son 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 ldquoTurbatverserdquo1 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 Hamannrsquos altered line from the Iliad) But it refers most specif-

ically 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 Θεά ἄειδε μῆνιν Ἀχιλῆος Πηληϊάδεω In a certain sense there is nothing of Homerrsquos 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 ob-

viously 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 ldquogoddessrdquo and not ldquowrathrdquo In the Turbatverse of nature then the superficial meaning of the speak-

ing 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 niltts als Turbatvere und disiecti membra poetae zu unerm Gebrault uumlbrig Diee zu ammeln ifrac34 des Gelehrten ie auszulegen des Philoophen ie naltzuahmenmdashoder nolt kuumlhnermdash mdashie in Gefrac14ick zu bringen des Poeten befrac14eiden Theil2

1 Nadler 198

2 Nadler 199

20

The hierarchy that is here established with the scholar philosopher and poet presented with responsibili-

ties of increasing creativity should not surprise us as it is exactly in line with what Hamann says else-

where about the high dignity of the poet to whom is compared even God himself1 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 ade-

quate 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 consti-

tuent 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

1 ldquoDer Poet am Anfange der Tagerdquo Nadler 206

21

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

Hamannrsquos coincidentia oppositorum is not any kind of dialectical synthesis Creation is speech ndash so is Hamannrsquos 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 Aesthe-

tica in nuce relate to the argument he makes about the proper use of reason There is significant ldquooverlaprdquo

here the various images and descriptions Hamann uses are parallel making the same argument in differ-

ent ways From what we have already said we can derive a kind of table showing how the various images

used map onto Hamannrsquos argument about the reason and the passions

Passions Reason

Vowels Consonants Words Mere arrangements of letters Poetic Meter Turbatverse God Nature Christianity Classical civilization Alpha and Omega 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 refus-

es 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 to-

gether 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 ldquoit is not clear how far he understood it and he certainly gives it a

1 Though not in the Aesthetica See eg Betz 28 note 17

22

sense of his ownrdquo1 In fact it is not easy to see where the ldquocoincidencerdquo comes in at all Regarding every

text every object as part of his ldquoBiblerdquo 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 themselvesmdashto

the letters of a text (in literary criticism) and the phenomena of nature unreduced to their universal ra-

tional 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 pro-

duced of these elements He beholds in a single vision der rollende Donner der Beredamkeit and der

einylbicltte Blitz2 This strangemdashor strange to us and Hamann would not hesitate to say that our sensibili-

ties need correctionmdashthis strange conjunction of opposites confronts us even on the title page of the Aes-

thetica in nuce Eine Rhapodie in kabbalifrac34ifrac14er Proe A rhapsodymdasha stitching-together of pieces into an ar-

tistic unitymdashthat 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 ldquoApostillerdquo ndash whether Hamann himself some per-

sonified commentator or anyone else ndash remarks that the author of the Aesthetica in nuce ldquohat Satz und

Satz zuammengereltnet wie man die Pfeile auf einem Sltlalttfelde zaumlhltrdquo3 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 Romansrsquo shots though fewer were fired with greater force It is not clear which side better corres-

ponds to Hamannrsquos 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 Therersquos a case to be made for either in-

terpretation But whichever we take the view wersquore given of the Aesthetica in nuce is still of individual

Saumltze piled up one after another as discrete countable units This treatise says the speaker of the Apos-

tille is just a pile of sentences But in an instant our perspective is shifted ldquoLaszligt uns jetzt die Hauptumme

1 Berlin 115

2 Nadler 208

3 Nadler 217 The reference given by Hamann (ldquoProcop De bello persico I 18rdquo) is explained at Haynes 94 note

kkk

23

[hellip] houmlrenldquo1 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 vari-

ous meditations on human life that compose the text of the biblical book2 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

summarymdasha 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 Hamannrsquos 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 readerrsquos confusion It is not Hamannrsquos 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 writings3 it is perhaps not sur-

prising then if the Aesthetica in nuce presents us with hermeneutic difficulties that neither the text itself

nor comparisons with Hamannrsquos other works nor consideration of Hamannrsquos engagement with the issues

of his time are adequate to dispel But the paradox we are considering heremdashthe simultaneous focus on

both columns of the table with which this chapter beganmdashis so fundamental to the thought of the Aesthe-

tica in nuce that unless we can come to terms with it in some way Hamannrsquos 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

1 Ibid

2 Cf Lutherbibel Predig 1213 ldquoLaszligt uns die Hauptumme aller Lehre houmlrenldquo 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 ldquoApostillerdquo likewise to be a undermining of all that goes before it 3 ldquoI no longer understand myself quite differently from then some [writings I understand] better some worse [hellip]

[hellip] 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 stuffrdquo Briefwechsel V p 358 trans in Betz 229

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 ldquodie ilt nolt im bloszligen Bult-frac34a-bi-ren uumlbenmdashmdashund wahrlilt wahrlilt Kinder muumlfrac12en

wir werden wenn wir den Geifrac34 der Wahrheit empfahen ollenldquo1 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 ldquoSpirit of

Truth whom the world cannot receiverdquo (Jn 1417) 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 spiri-

tual pole than to the elemental literal material one But how says Hamannrsquos Nuszlig is this Spirit of Truth

to be received By becoming like children who are just learning to spellmdashand 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 ldquoBultfrac34abirenrdquo syllable by syllable confirms that Hamann is referring to this style of interpreta-

tion Recalling now the table at the start of this chapter in which letters and the ldquospirit of truthrdquo

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 ldquoVerlieren die Elemente des A B C ihre natuumlrlilte

Bedeutung wenn ie in der unendlichen Zuammenetzung willkuumlrlilter Zeilten uns an Ideen erinnern die wo niltt

im Himmel dolt im Gehirn indrdquo2 To this question of course we are meant to answer ldquonordquo But there is

much here that is not unproblematic or at least not simple What for instance is the ldquonatuumlrlilte Bedeu-

tungrdquo of a letter And how if the combination of these signs be arbitrary does it recall for us ideas And

1 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 Hamannrsquos voice at least on Hamannrsquos 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 wersquore 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 Greeksmdashbut 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 coin-

cidence is merely an opportunity to bring the opposites as opposites together But this assumption natu-

ral 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 experiencemdashthis 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 Hamannrsquos writing admits of both a macros-

copic 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 conjunc-

tion 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 them1 considering these various levels of read-

ing 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 simultaneous-

ly 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 interpreta-

tion could be set forth that might allow us to translate Hamannrsquos simultaneously cabalistic and rhapsodic

utterances into academic language or to devise summaries of his arguments in a neatly symbolic lan-

guage 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 oumlffentlilter Gebrault 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 Hamannrsquos thought is useful also here Sltoumlpfung ifrac34 eine Rede an die Kreatur durlt die Kreatur The

Christian overtones of such a formulation are obvious Hamann once offered an encapsulation of his

thought in the word λόγος2 a famously polysemous term every sense of which Hamann intends The in-

timate connection between reason and language is of course the most obvious philosophical implication of

1 For Hamannrsquos defense of this possibility see Chapter 4

2 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 Hamannrsquos philosophy But for Hamann λόγος 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 Hamannrsquos piety placed a great emphasis on the self-emptying of Christ Howev-

er much he might stress Christrsquos humanity and suffering though he remained well within the main-

stream 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 diffi-

culties here But there is a clear parallel between the way a Christian thinks of Christ and how Hamann

thinks ofmdashwell more or less everything Christ is a man who lived for a certain stretch of time in a cer-

tain place and is also the eternal God A word is a string of letters small shapes arbitrarily strung togeth-

er and is also a sign of a concept an immaterial thing existing in the mind Hamann is no dualistmdashit 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

Zufoumlrderfrac34 muumlfrac34e man D George Benon fragen ob die Einheit mit der Mannigfaltigkeit niltt befrac34ehen koumlnne [hellip] Der bultfrac34aumlblilte oder grammatifrac14e der fleifrac14liche oder dialectifrac14e der ka-pernaitifrac14e oder historifrac14e Sinn ind im houmlltfrac34en Grade myfrac34ilt und haumlngen von ollten augen-blicklilten pirituoumlen willkuumlhrlilten Nebenbefrac34immungen und Umfrac34aumlnden ab daszlig man ohne hinauf gen Himmel zu fahren die Schluumlfrac12el ihrer Erkenntnis niltt herabholen kann1

1 Nadler 203 note 23 Hamannrsquos footnote is attached to some lines of Latin verse which conclude the Nutrsquos letter to the Learned Rabbi They come from a poem traditionally and falsely attributed to the Emperor Augustus explain-ing why Vergilrsquos orders to destroy the drafts of the Aeneid were ignored after the poetrsquos death The excerpts are

Ah scelus indignum soluetur litera diues Frangatur potius legum veneranda potestas Liber amp alma Ceres succurrite mdash mdash [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 mdashwhich for Hamann who does not oppose the spirit and the letter in a conventional way is a spiritual richnessmdashis 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

28

It is not that interpretation ought to be literal physical or ldquoCapernaiticrdquo 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 understandingmdashthat is unless one has

attained a certain degree of spiritual insight ndashone will be unable to understand things even in their literal

senses for the spiritual and literal senses are one Hamannrsquos 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 expe-

rience 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 inten-

tion of this line of thought has been least of all to stimulate pious feelings Hamannrsquos goal is not to spiri-

tualize 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 (ldquoDie Sinne aber ind Ceres und Bacltus die Leidenfrac14aftenrdquo [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 simplis-tically 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 Hamannrsquos ability to com-press his meaning into very few and very cryptic words NB The ldquoCapernaiticrdquo sense refers to the sense in which Christ is literally present in the Christian sacrament This unusual word is used derogatively in Lutheran texts (eg the Epitome of the Konkordienformel) to disparage Catholic sacramental teaching Its origins are in Jn 65559 ldquoFor my flesh is meat indeed and my blood is drink in-deed [hellip] These things he said in the synagogue as he taught in Capernaumrdquo 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 Luthe-ran understanding according to which Christ is present in the sacrament in a merely spiritual way is less than per-fectly compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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

Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 im-

plied meanings into the literal tropological allegorical and anagogical senses that Christians have tradi-

tionally 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 ormdashto employ a metaphor

more perhaps more congenial to Hamannmdashdiscerning 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 indul-

gence 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 slo-

gan from the text itselfmdashldquoto speak is to translaterdquomdashand 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 uumlberetzenmdashaus einer Engelpralte in eine Menfrac14enpralte das heifrac34 Gedanken in WortemdashSalten in NamenmdashBilder in Zeilten die poetifrac14 oder kyriologifrac14 hifrac34orifrac14 oder ymbolifrac14 oder hieroglyphifrac14mdashmdashund philoophifrac14 oder ltarakterifrac34ifrac14 eyn koumlnnen1

Here we are given a license to translate Hamannrsquos images into signs of various kinds It is no surprise that

in a footnote attached to this text he derogates the ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs by citing a pas-

sage of Petronius which complains that a new fashion of ldquopuffed-up and formless talkativenessrdquo has cor-

1 Nadler 199

31

rupted speech so that ldquothe standard of eloquence being corrupted has been halted and struck dumbrdquo

and ldquonot even poetry displays a healthy colorrdquo1 By ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs we should un-

derstand something like Leibnizrsquos 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 criti-

cism 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 cor-

respondences out of the text But the other kinds of signsmdashthe poetic or symbolicmdashdo not seem to fall

under the same criticismmdashthese suggest a kind of sign which indeed has meaning but whose interpreta-

tion 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 Hamannrsquos thought allows even for this kind of correspon-

dence 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 Hamannrsquos text but also is deeply compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos text to assert that he intends the literal and symbolic meanings to be taken as

of equal importancemdashfor us to devote our full attention to take up one of the governing metaphors of this

1 N 199 n10 ldquoNuper ventosa isthaec amp enormis loquacitas Athenas ex Asia conmigrauit [hellip] simulque correpta elo-quentiae regula stetit amp obmutuit [hellip] Ac ne carmen quidem sani coloris enituitrdquo

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 discuss-

ing how Hamann refuses to privilege abstract ldquopurely mentalrdquo thought over the particular words in

which that thought finds expression Berlin concludes that ldquofor 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)rdquo1 As an example of one such contradiction Berlin cites the line placed at the head

of this section ldquoto speak is to translaterdquo For Berlin it follows from Hamannrsquos insistence on the unity of

reason and language that no translation no correspondence between words ideas and things can be es-

tablished

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 attend-ing to ideas or to language and through them (because they correspond) to the facts was a method of judging and knowing reality [hellip But the] notion of a correspondence that there is an objective world on one side and on the other man and his instruments ndash lan-guage ideas and so forth ndash attempting to approximate to this objective reality is a false picture There is only a flow of sensations2

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 ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 reproduced3 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 Hamannrsquos treatise but unable to claim any continuity of thought therewith

1 Berlin 81

2 Ibid

3 Though one might question even this Ποταμῷ γὰρ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐμβῆναι δὶς τῷ αὐτῷ and there is no reason to think

any two ldquoflows of sensationrdquo could ever be substantially identical Necessarily every ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos view Berlin is perplexed when confronted with Hamannrsquos open assertion

that translation is possible between ldquohuman speechrdquo and the ldquospeech of angelsrdquo and can only conclude

that Hamann here contradicts himself And for Berlin it is quite to be expected that Hamann should con-

tradict himself he regards Hamannrsquos thought in general as highly creative and intriguing Schwaumlrmerei

of note for its pivotal place in intellectual history but completely insusceptible or unworthy of serious

philosophic attention Berlin appreciates Hamannrsquos criticism of the Enlightenment and his prescient

awareness of the lifeless bloodless conception of manrsquos spiritual life that the Enlighteners would ultimate-

ly produce While Berlin claims to understand Hamannrsquos motives in writing he utterly rejects the content

of his writings which he regards as ldquothe cry of a trapped man hellip who cannot be brought to see that to be

regimented or eliminated is either inevitable or desirablerdquo1 For Berlin Hamann is simply a ldquofanaticrdquo

whose writings consist of ldquopassionate rhetoric and not careful thoughtrdquo and whose opinions are ldquogrotes-

quely one-sided a violent exaggeration of the uniqueness of men and things [and] a passionate hatred of

menrsquos wish to understand the universerdquo2 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 pur-

ism of Hitler3 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 Berlinrsquos judgment that Hamann

1 Berlin 116

2 Berlin 121

3 This accusation is presented in Berlinrsquos book in a series of insinuations we are told for example that Hamannrsquos

ldquohatred and blind irrationalism have fed the stream that has led to social and political irrationalism particularly in German in our own [20

th] centuryrdquo (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 Berlinrsquos 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

34

simply contradicts himself in allowing for the possibility of translation in and out of symbolic ldquolanguag-

esrdquo Hamann has very little patience for ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs which promise patent

meaning and unambiguous interpretation This is perfectly in keeping with his general distaste for effi-

cient 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 ldquopoeticrdquo and ldquosymbolicrdquo signs not to fall under the same fierce criticism as the others

ldquoTo speak is to translaterdquo and ldquocreation is a speech to the creature through the creaturerdquo These

two maxims placed very near to each other in the text1 suggest something of a solution to the problem to

which Berlin directs our attention The conjunction of these lines should remind us that Hamann wheth-

er he directing his attention to literature philology esthetics or any other subject is always also a reli-

gious thinker The archetype of every text is for him the Bible and biblical exegesis is the model and ca-

non 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 Michaelisrsquos ldquodenial of a mystical typological sense

of Scripturerdquo2 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 Mi-

chaelis 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 ldquoTo merdquo says Hamann ldquoevery book is a Biblerdquo3 like the Bible then every

book must be read not merely for its literal sense Berlinrsquos reading of Hamann might be correct if Ha-

1 N 118-119

2 Betz 114

3 Briefwechsel I p 309 trans in Betz 47

35

mann were speaking about the everyday world of words and things understood as a brute fact But Ha-

mann 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 re-

mind us that the interpretation of tongues is also a divine gift1 he admits even that persons may not un-

derstand what they themselves to and say Even a figure such as Voltaire hardly a friend of religious out-

looks testifies for those who have ears to hear to the rightness of Hamannrsquos views

kann man wohl einen glaubwuumlrdigern Zeugen als den unfrac34erblilten Voltaire anfuumlhren wellter bey-nahe die Religion fuumlr den Eckfrac34ein der epifrac14en Dilttkunfrac34 erklaumlrt [hellip] Voltaire aber der Hohe-priefrac34er im Tempel des Gefrac14macks frac14luumlszligt so buumlndig als Kaiphas und denkt frulttbarer als He-rodes2

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 ldquoHo-

hepriefrac34er im Tempelrdquo but also a somewhat Machiavellian politician) justifies the crucifixion of Christ by

arguing that ldquoit is expedient that one man should die for the peoplerdquo3 believing himself to be discussing a

political necessity while as if prophetically describing the Christian doctrine of the atonement And He-

rodrsquos deceitful remark to the Magi ldquothat I might also come and worship himrdquo is taken since Herod was

king of the Jews though a gentile by race to represent the universal destiny of the Christian religion4 This

tradition of interpretation habitual in Biblical exegesis Hamann applies also to analysis of the wordmdashso

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 1210

2 Nadler 204-5

3 John 1150

4 It is telling that Hamann chooses such a contrived and complicated case of biblical parallelism as this one his ar-

gument 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

36

will readily concede that ldquowe see through a glass darklyrdquo1 and that we may not even be able to descry the

true outlines of our own persons in this mirrormdashbut by invoking the language of mirrors2 he locates him-

self within a tradition of thought according to which nature however flawed parts of it may be and how-

ever dulled our ability to discern itmdashis 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 se-

cular 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 ldquoblind heathensrdquo

Blinde Heyden haben die Unilttbarkeit erkannt die der Menfrac14 mit GOTT gemein hat Die verhuumlllte Figur des Leibes das Antlitz des Hauptes und das Aumluszligerfrac34e der Arme ind das ilttbare Sltema in dem wir einher gehn dolt eigentlilt niltts als ein Zeigefinger des verborge-nen Menfrac14en in unsmdash Exemplumque DEI quisque est in imagine parva3

Note that the ldquospiritualrdquo 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 ldquoindex fingersrdquo which direct the inner man to

our attention Hamann let us recall4 does not believe that the target of this ldquoZeigefingerrdquo can always be

1 1 Cor 1312

2 Though Hamann is in some ways a very modern thinker who anticipates 20

th century thought about the kinship of

reason and language he here looks back to the middle ages Cf Alan of Lille ldquoOmnis mundi creatura Quasi liber et pictura Nobis est et speculumrdquo With the sentiment and conceit of this verse Hamann could not agree more 3 N 198 The quotation from the Astronomicon of Manilius (IV895) is mainly noteworthy for its having been writ-

ten by a pagan author while echoing the language of Genesis regarding the ldquoimage of Godrdquo The Cambridge edition of Hamann misenglishes this line rendering it as ldquoEach one is an instance of God in miniaturerdquo This not only loses the connection to the book of Genesis conveyed by the word ldquoimagordquo but puts far too much weight on the word ldquoexemplumrdquo as well An exemplum is not an instance but a type model or analogue ldquoInstancerdquo implies an occur-rence of a rationally determinable kind a ldquotyperdquo or ldquoanaloguerdquo 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

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 circumstancesmdashthis 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 re-

fers to ldquocorrespondencesrdquo of thing and idea and of idea and word these ldquocorrespondencesrdquo are for Berlin

relations between two different things of different types He is quite correct to judge that Hamann consid-

ers 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 meaningmdashhe 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 justifica-

tion 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 ldquoConclusionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos own line that ldquocreation is a speech to the creature

through the creaturerdquo 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 cor-

respond to each other based on no apodictically determinable system knowable a priori but on the gra-

tuitous (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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 com-

pared translation to the art of understanding the image of a tapestry from looking only at the backs of the

threads he remarks ldquoDort [ie in the original contexts of the metaphors borrowed from other authors for

39

Hamannrsquos text] werden ie aber ad illustrationem (zur Verbraumlmung des Rockes) hier ad inuolucrum (zum

Hemde auf bloszligem Leibe) gebrauchtrdquo1 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 deco-

rated 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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos which ac-

cording to the line of interpretation I have explored reveals as much about Hamannrsquos 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 tear-

ing 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 Hamannrsquos motion between images his construction of typological

schemes that resist easy classification and one-for-one interpretation is not antirational raving or obscu-

rantism but rather an alternativemdashand a quite compelling onemdashto 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

1 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 tho-

roughly religious vision of the world If one is willing to do this Hamann is a kind of prophetmdashand the

horned head of Pan on his title-page is also the horned head of Moses1 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 pro-

ducing neat tables of Hamannrsquos 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 Aes-

thetica 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 somethingmdashunless there really is some secret ineffable law of correspondences that un-

ites 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 commen-

tators and writers of senior essays have no right to tread

1 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 agrave la Mosaiumlque (Roth 103 343)

41

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin Isaiah The Magus of the North JG Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism ed Henry

Hardy London John Murray 1993 Betz John After Enlightenment the Post-Secular Vision of JG Hamann Chichester John Wiley amp Sons

2009 Hamann Johann Georg Hamannrsquos Schriften ed Friedrich Roth Berlin G Reimer 1821 (Cited as

ldquoRothrdquo All citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Saumlmtliche Werke ed Josef Nadler Wien Verlag Herder 1950 (Cited as ldquoNad-

lerrdquo Unless otherwise noted all citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Writings on Philosophy and Language trans and ed Kenneth Haynes Cam-

bridge Cambridge UP 2007 (Cited as ldquoHaynesrdquo) Jacobs Carol ldquoHamann Is a Nomadic Writer lsquoAesthetica in nucersquordquo in Skirting the Ethical Stanford Stan-

ford UP 2008 pp 111-130 OrsquoFlaherty James C The Quarrel of Reason with Itself Essays on Hamann Michaelis Lessing Nietzsche Co-

lumbia SC Camden 1988

4

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Note on the title page 1 Introduction 5 Chapter 1 The unnatural use of abstraction 10

The removal of Α and Ω from the first line of the Iliad is a parable about the right use of reason The vowels are the passions and Ha-mann warns against the belief that reason can operate properly with-out the passions

Chapter 2 Vowels 17

In the symbolic economy of the Aesthetica in nuce the difference be-tween 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

Hamannrsquos coincidentia oppositorum is not any kind of dialectical synthesis Creation is speech ndash so is Hamannrsquos use of symbolism justi-fied The hermeneutical paradoxes of the Aesthetica in nuce are ana-logous to the paradoxes of the Christian religion

Chapter 4 To speak is to translate 34

Hamannrsquos 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 revela-tion but present in the things themselves It is from Hamannrsquos typolog-ical style and not from any direct statement that we discover what he has to say

Conclusion 46 Bibliography 49

5

Introduction This essay is not an attempt to understand Hamannrsquos 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 ldquoGreeksrdquo 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 compari-

son 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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos larger corpus this is

due to chance or to a consistency in Hamannrsquos writing and not at all to design Admittedly the themes

brought up on this page that is our subjectmdashwriting the possibility of readingmdashare broad ones and as we

shall see according to the patterns of symbolism which Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 ndashwhich for Hamann are

scarcely separablemdashpresented 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 philo-

sophical criticism as the inauguration of a new artistic era or as an almost meaningless display of be-

nighted and antirational obscurantismmdashbut one cannot avoid the conclusion that Johann Georg Ha-

mannrsquos 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 sub-

jects of the Aesthetica in nuce are much less parochial the nature of reason the power of language the rela-

tion 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 state-

ment of his positionmdashand this perhaps would often not be wrongmdashbut the Aesthetica in nuce a dizzying-

ly 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 enoughmdashinterpreting 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 Hamannrsquos 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 pre-

sume to have accurately or exhaustively interpreted the Aesthetica in nuce but we hope to write a commen-

tary 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 appear-

ance 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 con-

structed this analysis of the Aesthetica in nuce out of a series of separatemdashthough I think not ultimately

contradictorymdashinvestigations 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 wouldnrsquot 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 Hamannrsquos German I have used the old German letters he would have recog-

nized 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 indiffe-

rently 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 lettermdashat 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

Hamannrsquos 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 ma-

naged to salvage any worthwhile thought have at least brought it somewhat closer to the surface

9

Chapter 1 The Unnatural Use of Abstraction

The removal of Α and Ω 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

Verultt es einmal die Iliade zu leen wenn ihr vorher durlt die Abfrac34raction die beiden

Selbfrac34lauter α und ω ausgeilttet habt und agt mir eure Meynung von dem Verfrac34ande und Wohlklange des Diltters

Μῆνιν ειδε Θε Πηληιδε χιλῆος1

In this passage and quotation from Hamannrsquos text traditional images while recognizable for

what they are are combined in a novel way The alpha and omega are symbol of Christ (Rev 18) 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 Hamannrsquos 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 linersquos content

and consider merely what it is as a line Itrsquos the incipit of the Iliad ndash for a student of Greek one of the hex-

ameters that come most readily to mind ndash the opening line of the epic traditionally regarded as the great-

est 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 Priamrsquos neighbors but of the ideals and achievements of classic-

al civilization ndash which though indeed falling as far short of Homerrsquos 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 at-

tempt to understand classical civilization while rejecting Christ Indeed Hamann himself encourages such

a reading of the image when he later cites ldquothe Punic father of the Churchrdquo to the effect that the prophetic

1 Nadler 207

10

books of the Old Testament can only be interpreted correctly when Christ is ldquoread intordquo them ldquoRead the

prophetic books without understanding Christrdquo says Augustine ldquoand what pointlessness and folly will

you find there Understand Christ there and what you read will not only savor but will even intoxicaterdquo1

Hamann takes up and expands this argument providing some context to his surgical removal of vowels

from Homerrsquos line Though as a rhetorician Augustine was acutely aware of their power after his conver-

sion 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 un-

derstood correctly ldquoa dream-like anticipation of Christrdquo2 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 ndash

he is too much of a Lutheran for that But as regards the value of the ancient myths he is rather more ge-

nerous 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 ap-

parent 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 ndash

which is of course not to say that it is not one of the ways Hamann intended it to be read But there must

1 Nadler 212-3 ldquoLege libros propheticos non intellecto CHRISTO agt der punifrac14e Kirltenvater quid tam insipidum amp fatuum inuenies Intellige ibi CHRISTUM non solum sapit quod legis sed etiam inebriatrdquo Hamann gives no citation for this quote a note to the Cambridge translation locates it at Ioh Evang Tract IX3 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 let-

ters than Hamann gives us ndash and even if we lacked the extrinsic familiarity with Homerrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 warriorrsquos

wrath

What then does Hamann mean by this image ldquoSeerdquo he hints to us just after showing us the al-

tered line of Greek ldquothe greater and lesser Masorah of philosophy [Weltweisheit] has overwhelmed the

text of Nature like a Noahrsquos floodrdquo1 As is usual for Hamann this explanation only raises further ques-

tions Nothing here has overwhelmed or flooded anything else and least of all Masorah ndash 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 re-

minded of what was said shortly before Homerrsquos line was introduced

Sie [dh die Mue] wird es wagen den natuumlrlilten Gebrauclt der Sinne von dem unnatuumlrlilten Gebrault der Abfrac34ractionen zu laumlutern wodurlt unere Begriffe von den Dingen eben o ehr verfrac34uumlmmelt werden als der Name des Sltoumlpfers underdruumlckt und gelaumlfrac34ert wird2

The ldquounnatural use of abstractionsrdquo here plays a role parallel to that of the ldquoMasorah of worldly philoso-

phyrdquo mdash 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 ldquoMaso-

1 Nadler 207 Seht die groszlige und kleine Maore der Weltweisheit hat den Text der Natur gleilt einer Suumlndfluth uumlberfrac14wemmt 2 Nadler 207

12

rah of philosophyrdquo then are interpretations that distort and obscure It is this sort of distortion and ob-

scuring that are represented by the removal of the letters alpha and omega from Homerrsquos line we are told

after all that they are removed ldquothrough abstractionrdquo Here Hamann is making a pun on the Latin roots

of the word ldquoabstractionrdquo but it is not merely a pun it is also a hint at one of the hidden connections be-

tween the vowels of the Iliad and Hamannrsquos 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 dam-

aged

And Hamann further suggests that it is because of this failure of interpretation or clarification

that the ldquoGreeksrdquo who abuse abstraction are wrong to think themselves wiser than the ldquochamberlains with

the Gnostic keyrdquo This phrase in itself rather obscure is one of the bridge-phrases in Hamannrsquos text that

point out to us which parts of the tapestry may be connected beneath the surface Chamberlain is Kammer-

herr and between Kammerherr and Kaumlmmerer there is small difference and Kaumlmmerer is the word Luther

used for ldquoeunuchrdquo1 The bridge leads us to another nearby passage of the Aesthetica

Wenn die Leidenfrac14aften Glieder der Unehre ind houmlren ie deswegen auf Waffen der Mannheit zu eyn Verfrac34eht ihr den Bultfrac34aben der Vernunft kluumlger als jener allegorifrac14e Kaumlmmerer der alexandrinifrac14en Kirlte den Bultfrac34aben der Sltrift der ich elbfrac34 zum Verfrac14nittenen maltte um des Himmelreilts willen2

Seen in light of this passage the reference to eunuchs and to Gnosticism is less perplexing While Origen

ndash who I presume to be ldquothat allegorical chamberlain of the Alexandrian churchrdquo mdash is not generally consi-

dered 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

ldquoLeidenfrac14aftenrdquo 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

1 ldquoIn Acts 827 Luther translates as lsquoKaumlmmererrsquo(related to lsquoKammerherrrsquo chamberlain) what the King James Bible translates as lsquoeunuchrsquordquo Haynes 80 note 87 2 Nadler 208

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 ab-

stract 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 ex-

tended Latin quotation from Bacon which is appended as a footnote to the passage quoted above on the

ldquounnatural use of abstractionsrdquo Hamann calls Bacon his ldquoEuthyphrordquo1 the figure who perhaps does not

teach him anymore than Euthyphro taught Socrates but who provides nonetheless the occasion for fruit-

ful 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 repu-

tation as an antirationalist or forerunner of the Sturm und Drang is not here making an argument against

reason as such or against the mindrsquos use of concepts or against thought in general For Bacon is not mak-

ing an argument against philosophy but against bad philosophy ldquoAnd so let men know how far the Idols

of the human mind are from the Ideas of the divine mind hellip 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 ac-

count of the conveniences of liferdquo 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 con-

cepts only so that the truth of things might better shine forth -- indeed for all that he advocates the in-

crease 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 Hamannrsquos critique of the Gnostic chamberlains His prescription is not that we avoid

1 ldquoBacon mein Euthyphronrdquo Nadler 197

14

making use of concepts for things but that we make sure that our concepts have not been verfrac34uumlmmelt and

gelaumlfrac34ert by abuses of reason

The word ldquoabstractionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos 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 foot-

note quotes at considerable length Ovidrsquos retelling of the story ldquoSpem sine corpore amat corpus putat

esse quod umbra est Adstupet ipse sibirdquo1 They who consider the abstractions of their minds to be most

real prefer a (vain) hope or a shadow to the bodymdashthat is the material concrete reality of the natural

world Long after Hamannrsquos 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 sibimdashNarcissus 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 ldquopure reasonrdquo from the mess of passions and contingencies that always surround hu-

man life Hamann prophesies an analogous fate It is this abuse of reason which Hamann means to sug-

gest t the removal of the first and last Greek letters from a line of Homer

And just as Hamann challenges the ldquoGreeksrdquo 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 cor-

rectly or to make any meaningful scientific achievements Just as Hume could not drink a glass of water or

eat an egg without faith2 neither we might paraphrase Hamann could he follow an argument to its con-

1 Metamorphoses III417f quoted at Nadler 210

2 This was a favorite quip of Hamannrsquos and is recorded in several places eg OrsquoFlaherty 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 Hamannrsquos view the supposed opposition of

reason and the passions is a fiction of the Enlighteners his thought has little room for absolute dichoto-

mies and he rejects also this one The passions in fact have an essential role to play even in the exercise

of reason ldquoLeidenfrac14amacr allein giebt Abfrac34ractionen owohl als Hypotheen Haumlnde Fuumlszlige Fluumlgel mdash Bildern und Zei-

chen Geifrac34 Leben und Zungerdquo1 There are perhaps many ways to understand ldquohands feet and wingsrdquo mdash but

between all possible interpretations of these words a basic unity exists They are all parts of the body asso-

ciated with motion and action And so abstractions and hypothesesmdashdry conclusions of the reasonmdashare

made active and mobile by the passions Likewise images and signs are given ldquolife and tonguerdquo 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 un-

mutilated 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 Hamannrsquos style and the symbolic ldquovocabularyrdquo of the Aesthetica in nuce The connection of Ha-

mannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos thought

1 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

Verucht es einmal die Iliade zu leen wenn ihr vorher durch die Abfrac34raction die beyden

Selbfrac34lauter α und ω ausgesichtet habt1 ldquoSelbstlautrdquo and ldquoMitlautrdquo ldquoConsonantrdquo and ldquovowelrdquo2 These are evocative termsmdashnot 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 con-

cepts 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 ldquoletter of the voicerdquo is utterable on its own while a littera consonans

must be ldquosounded withrdquo something else This way of articulating the distinction between independent

vowels and dependent consonants was a commonplace in the eighteenth century3 and would not have

been unfamiliar to Hamann even if the etymology of ldquoSelbstlautrdquo did not suggest it If we translate then

a bit freely we might say ldquothat which is removed from the Iliad by abstraction is that without which

1 Nadler 207

2 German preserves also more Latinate forms ldquoVokalrdquo and ldquoKonsonantrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos thought in the Aesthetica in nuce 3 John Hensons New Latin Grammar for instance published at Nottingham in 1744 explains ldquoA Vowel is a letter

which makes a full and perfect Sound of it Self as a o A Conſonant is a Letter that has no Sound of it Self without a Vowelrdquo And in a Verbesserte and Erleichterte Lateinische Grammatica published at Halle in 1763 (a year after the Cru-sades of the Philologist saw light) we read ldquoDen Anfang in der Lateinifrac14en Spralten maltt man von den Bultfrac34abenhellip Und diee werden eingetheilet in vocales oder elbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautende und consonantes oder mitlautendemitlautendemitlautendemitlautende o niltt ehe koumlnnen ausgeprolten werden als bis ein vocalis dazukoumlmmtrdquo 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 httpbooksgooglecombooksid=T5ECAAAAQAAJ and the second at httpbooksgooglecombooksid=F9oVAAAAYAAJ

17

there can be no speechrdquo which without any further interpretation already at least appears to imply much

more than a matter of rearranged letters

As we have seen the ldquoabstractionrdquo of the letters from the line of the Iliad corresponds in the typo-

logical 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 pas-

sions in order for them to have any power to persuade It is not that reasoned arguments even when ab-

stract are otiose or parasiticalmdashthese 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 ldquovocalizedrdquo

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

Hamannrsquos 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 unpointedmdashlike 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 durlt 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 scripturesmdashwritten by God but one must bring onersquos

own vowels to read it

But is this not going too far While we may not just have misrepresented Hamannrsquos 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 doesnrsquot make sense as

written without those vowels itrsquos still easily interpretable If Hamann had not named it as a line from the

Iliad any educated person on seeing the word microῆνιν 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 miss-

ing places in the line the shape of the dactyls and the grammatical possibilities offered by the Greek lan-

guage 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 En-

lightened 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 objec-

tion of this scientist would be absurd because it would miss the point of Hamannrsquos critiquemdashhe goes

around the backs of the Enlighteners contending that they are moved by passion even in what they be-

lieve to be their exercises of pure reason that the arguments they invoke to defend their conception of rea-

son 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 ldquoTurbatverserdquo1 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 Hamannrsquos altered line from the Iliad) But it refers most specif-

ically 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 Θεά ἄειδε μῆνιν Ἀχιλῆος Πηληϊάδεω In a certain sense there is nothing of Homerrsquos 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 ob-

viously 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 ldquogoddessrdquo and not ldquowrathrdquo In the Turbatverse of nature then the superficial meaning of the speak-

ing 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 niltts als Turbatvere und disiecti membra poetae zu unerm Gebrault uumlbrig Diee zu ammeln ifrac34 des Gelehrten ie auszulegen des Philoophen ie naltzuahmenmdashoder nolt kuumlhnermdash mdashie in Gefrac14ick zu bringen des Poeten befrac14eiden Theil2

1 Nadler 198

2 Nadler 199

20

The hierarchy that is here established with the scholar philosopher and poet presented with responsibili-

ties of increasing creativity should not surprise us as it is exactly in line with what Hamann says else-

where about the high dignity of the poet to whom is compared even God himself1 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 ade-

quate 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 consti-

tuent 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

1 ldquoDer Poet am Anfange der Tagerdquo Nadler 206

21

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

Hamannrsquos coincidentia oppositorum is not any kind of dialectical synthesis Creation is speech ndash so is Hamannrsquos 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 Aesthe-

tica in nuce relate to the argument he makes about the proper use of reason There is significant ldquooverlaprdquo

here the various images and descriptions Hamann uses are parallel making the same argument in differ-

ent ways From what we have already said we can derive a kind of table showing how the various images

used map onto Hamannrsquos argument about the reason and the passions

Passions Reason

Vowels Consonants Words Mere arrangements of letters Poetic Meter Turbatverse God Nature Christianity Classical civilization Alpha and Omega 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 refus-

es 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 to-

gether 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 ldquoit is not clear how far he understood it and he certainly gives it a

1 Though not in the Aesthetica See eg Betz 28 note 17

22

sense of his ownrdquo1 In fact it is not easy to see where the ldquocoincidencerdquo comes in at all Regarding every

text every object as part of his ldquoBiblerdquo 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 themselvesmdashto

the letters of a text (in literary criticism) and the phenomena of nature unreduced to their universal ra-

tional 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 pro-

duced of these elements He beholds in a single vision der rollende Donner der Beredamkeit and der

einylbicltte Blitz2 This strangemdashor strange to us and Hamann would not hesitate to say that our sensibili-

ties need correctionmdashthis strange conjunction of opposites confronts us even on the title page of the Aes-

thetica in nuce Eine Rhapodie in kabbalifrac34ifrac14er Proe A rhapsodymdasha stitching-together of pieces into an ar-

tistic unitymdashthat 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 ldquoApostillerdquo ndash whether Hamann himself some per-

sonified commentator or anyone else ndash remarks that the author of the Aesthetica in nuce ldquohat Satz und

Satz zuammengereltnet wie man die Pfeile auf einem Sltlalttfelde zaumlhltrdquo3 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 Romansrsquo shots though fewer were fired with greater force It is not clear which side better corres-

ponds to Hamannrsquos 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 Therersquos a case to be made for either in-

terpretation But whichever we take the view wersquore given of the Aesthetica in nuce is still of individual

Saumltze piled up one after another as discrete countable units This treatise says the speaker of the Apos-

tille is just a pile of sentences But in an instant our perspective is shifted ldquoLaszligt uns jetzt die Hauptumme

1 Berlin 115

2 Nadler 208

3 Nadler 217 The reference given by Hamann (ldquoProcop De bello persico I 18rdquo) is explained at Haynes 94 note

kkk

23

[hellip] houmlrenldquo1 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 vari-

ous meditations on human life that compose the text of the biblical book2 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

summarymdasha 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 Hamannrsquos 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 readerrsquos confusion It is not Hamannrsquos 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 writings3 it is perhaps not sur-

prising then if the Aesthetica in nuce presents us with hermeneutic difficulties that neither the text itself

nor comparisons with Hamannrsquos other works nor consideration of Hamannrsquos engagement with the issues

of his time are adequate to dispel But the paradox we are considering heremdashthe simultaneous focus on

both columns of the table with which this chapter beganmdashis so fundamental to the thought of the Aesthe-

tica in nuce that unless we can come to terms with it in some way Hamannrsquos 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

1 Ibid

2 Cf Lutherbibel Predig 1213 ldquoLaszligt uns die Hauptumme aller Lehre houmlrenldquo 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 ldquoApostillerdquo likewise to be a undermining of all that goes before it 3 ldquoI no longer understand myself quite differently from then some [writings I understand] better some worse [hellip]

[hellip] 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 stuffrdquo Briefwechsel V p 358 trans in Betz 229

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 ldquodie ilt nolt im bloszligen Bult-frac34a-bi-ren uumlbenmdashmdashund wahrlilt wahrlilt Kinder muumlfrac12en

wir werden wenn wir den Geifrac34 der Wahrheit empfahen ollenldquo1 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 ldquoSpirit of

Truth whom the world cannot receiverdquo (Jn 1417) 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 spiri-

tual pole than to the elemental literal material one But how says Hamannrsquos Nuszlig is this Spirit of Truth

to be received By becoming like children who are just learning to spellmdashand 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 ldquoBultfrac34abirenrdquo syllable by syllable confirms that Hamann is referring to this style of interpreta-

tion Recalling now the table at the start of this chapter in which letters and the ldquospirit of truthrdquo

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 ldquoVerlieren die Elemente des A B C ihre natuumlrlilte

Bedeutung wenn ie in der unendlichen Zuammenetzung willkuumlrlilter Zeilten uns an Ideen erinnern die wo niltt

im Himmel dolt im Gehirn indrdquo2 To this question of course we are meant to answer ldquonordquo But there is

much here that is not unproblematic or at least not simple What for instance is the ldquonatuumlrlilte Bedeu-

tungrdquo of a letter And how if the combination of these signs be arbitrary does it recall for us ideas And

1 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 Hamannrsquos voice at least on Hamannrsquos 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 wersquore 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 Greeksmdashbut 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 coin-

cidence is merely an opportunity to bring the opposites as opposites together But this assumption natu-

ral 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 experiencemdashthis 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 Hamannrsquos writing admits of both a macros-

copic 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 conjunc-

tion 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 them1 considering these various levels of read-

ing 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 simultaneous-

ly 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 interpreta-

tion could be set forth that might allow us to translate Hamannrsquos simultaneously cabalistic and rhapsodic

utterances into academic language or to devise summaries of his arguments in a neatly symbolic lan-

guage 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 oumlffentlilter Gebrault 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 Hamannrsquos thought is useful also here Sltoumlpfung ifrac34 eine Rede an die Kreatur durlt die Kreatur The

Christian overtones of such a formulation are obvious Hamann once offered an encapsulation of his

thought in the word λόγος2 a famously polysemous term every sense of which Hamann intends The in-

timate connection between reason and language is of course the most obvious philosophical implication of

1 For Hamannrsquos defense of this possibility see Chapter 4

2 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 Hamannrsquos philosophy But for Hamann λόγος 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 Hamannrsquos piety placed a great emphasis on the self-emptying of Christ Howev-

er much he might stress Christrsquos humanity and suffering though he remained well within the main-

stream 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 diffi-

culties here But there is a clear parallel between the way a Christian thinks of Christ and how Hamann

thinks ofmdashwell more or less everything Christ is a man who lived for a certain stretch of time in a cer-

tain place and is also the eternal God A word is a string of letters small shapes arbitrarily strung togeth-

er and is also a sign of a concept an immaterial thing existing in the mind Hamann is no dualistmdashit 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

Zufoumlrderfrac34 muumlfrac34e man D George Benon fragen ob die Einheit mit der Mannigfaltigkeit niltt befrac34ehen koumlnne [hellip] Der bultfrac34aumlblilte oder grammatifrac14e der fleifrac14liche oder dialectifrac14e der ka-pernaitifrac14e oder historifrac14e Sinn ind im houmlltfrac34en Grade myfrac34ilt und haumlngen von ollten augen-blicklilten pirituoumlen willkuumlhrlilten Nebenbefrac34immungen und Umfrac34aumlnden ab daszlig man ohne hinauf gen Himmel zu fahren die Schluumlfrac12el ihrer Erkenntnis niltt herabholen kann1

1 Nadler 203 note 23 Hamannrsquos footnote is attached to some lines of Latin verse which conclude the Nutrsquos letter to the Learned Rabbi They come from a poem traditionally and falsely attributed to the Emperor Augustus explain-ing why Vergilrsquos orders to destroy the drafts of the Aeneid were ignored after the poetrsquos death The excerpts are

Ah scelus indignum soluetur litera diues Frangatur potius legum veneranda potestas Liber amp alma Ceres succurrite mdash mdash [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 mdashwhich for Hamann who does not oppose the spirit and the letter in a conventional way is a spiritual richnessmdashis 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

28

It is not that interpretation ought to be literal physical or ldquoCapernaiticrdquo 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 understandingmdashthat is unless one has

attained a certain degree of spiritual insight ndashone will be unable to understand things even in their literal

senses for the spiritual and literal senses are one Hamannrsquos 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 expe-

rience 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 inten-

tion of this line of thought has been least of all to stimulate pious feelings Hamannrsquos goal is not to spiri-

tualize 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 (ldquoDie Sinne aber ind Ceres und Bacltus die Leidenfrac14aftenrdquo [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 simplis-tically 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 Hamannrsquos ability to com-press his meaning into very few and very cryptic words NB The ldquoCapernaiticrdquo sense refers to the sense in which Christ is literally present in the Christian sacrament This unusual word is used derogatively in Lutheran texts (eg the Epitome of the Konkordienformel) to disparage Catholic sacramental teaching Its origins are in Jn 65559 ldquoFor my flesh is meat indeed and my blood is drink in-deed [hellip] These things he said in the synagogue as he taught in Capernaumrdquo 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 Luthe-ran understanding according to which Christ is present in the sacrament in a merely spiritual way is less than per-fectly compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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

Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 im-

plied meanings into the literal tropological allegorical and anagogical senses that Christians have tradi-

tionally 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 ormdashto employ a metaphor

more perhaps more congenial to Hamannmdashdiscerning 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 indul-

gence 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 slo-

gan from the text itselfmdashldquoto speak is to translaterdquomdashand 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 uumlberetzenmdashaus einer Engelpralte in eine Menfrac14enpralte das heifrac34 Gedanken in WortemdashSalten in NamenmdashBilder in Zeilten die poetifrac14 oder kyriologifrac14 hifrac34orifrac14 oder ymbolifrac14 oder hieroglyphifrac14mdashmdashund philoophifrac14 oder ltarakterifrac34ifrac14 eyn koumlnnen1

Here we are given a license to translate Hamannrsquos images into signs of various kinds It is no surprise that

in a footnote attached to this text he derogates the ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs by citing a pas-

sage of Petronius which complains that a new fashion of ldquopuffed-up and formless talkativenessrdquo has cor-

1 Nadler 199

31

rupted speech so that ldquothe standard of eloquence being corrupted has been halted and struck dumbrdquo

and ldquonot even poetry displays a healthy colorrdquo1 By ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs we should un-

derstand something like Leibnizrsquos 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 criti-

cism 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 cor-

respondences out of the text But the other kinds of signsmdashthe poetic or symbolicmdashdo not seem to fall

under the same criticismmdashthese suggest a kind of sign which indeed has meaning but whose interpreta-

tion 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 Hamannrsquos thought allows even for this kind of correspon-

dence 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 Hamannrsquos text but also is deeply compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos text to assert that he intends the literal and symbolic meanings to be taken as

of equal importancemdashfor us to devote our full attention to take up one of the governing metaphors of this

1 N 199 n10 ldquoNuper ventosa isthaec amp enormis loquacitas Athenas ex Asia conmigrauit [hellip] simulque correpta elo-quentiae regula stetit amp obmutuit [hellip] Ac ne carmen quidem sani coloris enituitrdquo

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 discuss-

ing how Hamann refuses to privilege abstract ldquopurely mentalrdquo thought over the particular words in

which that thought finds expression Berlin concludes that ldquofor 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)rdquo1 As an example of one such contradiction Berlin cites the line placed at the head

of this section ldquoto speak is to translaterdquo For Berlin it follows from Hamannrsquos insistence on the unity of

reason and language that no translation no correspondence between words ideas and things can be es-

tablished

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 attend-ing to ideas or to language and through them (because they correspond) to the facts was a method of judging and knowing reality [hellip But the] notion of a correspondence that there is an objective world on one side and on the other man and his instruments ndash lan-guage ideas and so forth ndash attempting to approximate to this objective reality is a false picture There is only a flow of sensations2

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 ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 reproduced3 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 Hamannrsquos treatise but unable to claim any continuity of thought therewith

1 Berlin 81

2 Ibid

3 Though one might question even this Ποταμῷ γὰρ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐμβῆναι δὶς τῷ αὐτῷ and there is no reason to think

any two ldquoflows of sensationrdquo could ever be substantially identical Necessarily every ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos view Berlin is perplexed when confronted with Hamannrsquos open assertion

that translation is possible between ldquohuman speechrdquo and the ldquospeech of angelsrdquo and can only conclude

that Hamann here contradicts himself And for Berlin it is quite to be expected that Hamann should con-

tradict himself he regards Hamannrsquos thought in general as highly creative and intriguing Schwaumlrmerei

of note for its pivotal place in intellectual history but completely insusceptible or unworthy of serious

philosophic attention Berlin appreciates Hamannrsquos criticism of the Enlightenment and his prescient

awareness of the lifeless bloodless conception of manrsquos spiritual life that the Enlighteners would ultimate-

ly produce While Berlin claims to understand Hamannrsquos motives in writing he utterly rejects the content

of his writings which he regards as ldquothe cry of a trapped man hellip who cannot be brought to see that to be

regimented or eliminated is either inevitable or desirablerdquo1 For Berlin Hamann is simply a ldquofanaticrdquo

whose writings consist of ldquopassionate rhetoric and not careful thoughtrdquo and whose opinions are ldquogrotes-

quely one-sided a violent exaggeration of the uniqueness of men and things [and] a passionate hatred of

menrsquos wish to understand the universerdquo2 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 pur-

ism of Hitler3 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 Berlinrsquos judgment that Hamann

1 Berlin 116

2 Berlin 121

3 This accusation is presented in Berlinrsquos book in a series of insinuations we are told for example that Hamannrsquos

ldquohatred and blind irrationalism have fed the stream that has led to social and political irrationalism particularly in German in our own [20

th] centuryrdquo (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 Berlinrsquos 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

34

simply contradicts himself in allowing for the possibility of translation in and out of symbolic ldquolanguag-

esrdquo Hamann has very little patience for ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs which promise patent

meaning and unambiguous interpretation This is perfectly in keeping with his general distaste for effi-

cient 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 ldquopoeticrdquo and ldquosymbolicrdquo signs not to fall under the same fierce criticism as the others

ldquoTo speak is to translaterdquo and ldquocreation is a speech to the creature through the creaturerdquo These

two maxims placed very near to each other in the text1 suggest something of a solution to the problem to

which Berlin directs our attention The conjunction of these lines should remind us that Hamann wheth-

er he directing his attention to literature philology esthetics or any other subject is always also a reli-

gious thinker The archetype of every text is for him the Bible and biblical exegesis is the model and ca-

non 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 Michaelisrsquos ldquodenial of a mystical typological sense

of Scripturerdquo2 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 Mi-

chaelis 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 ldquoTo merdquo says Hamann ldquoevery book is a Biblerdquo3 like the Bible then every

book must be read not merely for its literal sense Berlinrsquos reading of Hamann might be correct if Ha-

1 N 118-119

2 Betz 114

3 Briefwechsel I p 309 trans in Betz 47

35

mann were speaking about the everyday world of words and things understood as a brute fact But Ha-

mann 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 re-

mind us that the interpretation of tongues is also a divine gift1 he admits even that persons may not un-

derstand what they themselves to and say Even a figure such as Voltaire hardly a friend of religious out-

looks testifies for those who have ears to hear to the rightness of Hamannrsquos views

kann man wohl einen glaubwuumlrdigern Zeugen als den unfrac34erblilten Voltaire anfuumlhren wellter bey-nahe die Religion fuumlr den Eckfrac34ein der epifrac14en Dilttkunfrac34 erklaumlrt [hellip] Voltaire aber der Hohe-priefrac34er im Tempel des Gefrac14macks frac14luumlszligt so buumlndig als Kaiphas und denkt frulttbarer als He-rodes2

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 ldquoHo-

hepriefrac34er im Tempelrdquo but also a somewhat Machiavellian politician) justifies the crucifixion of Christ by

arguing that ldquoit is expedient that one man should die for the peoplerdquo3 believing himself to be discussing a

political necessity while as if prophetically describing the Christian doctrine of the atonement And He-

rodrsquos deceitful remark to the Magi ldquothat I might also come and worship himrdquo is taken since Herod was

king of the Jews though a gentile by race to represent the universal destiny of the Christian religion4 This

tradition of interpretation habitual in Biblical exegesis Hamann applies also to analysis of the wordmdashso

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 1210

2 Nadler 204-5

3 John 1150

4 It is telling that Hamann chooses such a contrived and complicated case of biblical parallelism as this one his ar-

gument 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

36

will readily concede that ldquowe see through a glass darklyrdquo1 and that we may not even be able to descry the

true outlines of our own persons in this mirrormdashbut by invoking the language of mirrors2 he locates him-

self within a tradition of thought according to which nature however flawed parts of it may be and how-

ever dulled our ability to discern itmdashis 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 se-

cular 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 ldquoblind heathensrdquo

Blinde Heyden haben die Unilttbarkeit erkannt die der Menfrac14 mit GOTT gemein hat Die verhuumlllte Figur des Leibes das Antlitz des Hauptes und das Aumluszligerfrac34e der Arme ind das ilttbare Sltema in dem wir einher gehn dolt eigentlilt niltts als ein Zeigefinger des verborge-nen Menfrac14en in unsmdash Exemplumque DEI quisque est in imagine parva3

Note that the ldquospiritualrdquo 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 ldquoindex fingersrdquo which direct the inner man to

our attention Hamann let us recall4 does not believe that the target of this ldquoZeigefingerrdquo can always be

1 1 Cor 1312

2 Though Hamann is in some ways a very modern thinker who anticipates 20

th century thought about the kinship of

reason and language he here looks back to the middle ages Cf Alan of Lille ldquoOmnis mundi creatura Quasi liber et pictura Nobis est et speculumrdquo With the sentiment and conceit of this verse Hamann could not agree more 3 N 198 The quotation from the Astronomicon of Manilius (IV895) is mainly noteworthy for its having been writ-

ten by a pagan author while echoing the language of Genesis regarding the ldquoimage of Godrdquo The Cambridge edition of Hamann misenglishes this line rendering it as ldquoEach one is an instance of God in miniaturerdquo This not only loses the connection to the book of Genesis conveyed by the word ldquoimagordquo but puts far too much weight on the word ldquoexemplumrdquo as well An exemplum is not an instance but a type model or analogue ldquoInstancerdquo implies an occur-rence of a rationally determinable kind a ldquotyperdquo or ldquoanaloguerdquo 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

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 circumstancesmdashthis 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 re-

fers to ldquocorrespondencesrdquo of thing and idea and of idea and word these ldquocorrespondencesrdquo are for Berlin

relations between two different things of different types He is quite correct to judge that Hamann consid-

ers 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 meaningmdashhe 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 justifica-

tion 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 ldquoConclusionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos own line that ldquocreation is a speech to the creature

through the creaturerdquo 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 cor-

respond to each other based on no apodictically determinable system knowable a priori but on the gra-

tuitous (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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 com-

pared translation to the art of understanding the image of a tapestry from looking only at the backs of the

threads he remarks ldquoDort [ie in the original contexts of the metaphors borrowed from other authors for

39

Hamannrsquos text] werden ie aber ad illustrationem (zur Verbraumlmung des Rockes) hier ad inuolucrum (zum

Hemde auf bloszligem Leibe) gebrauchtrdquo1 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 deco-

rated 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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos which ac-

cording to the line of interpretation I have explored reveals as much about Hamannrsquos 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 tear-

ing 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 Hamannrsquos motion between images his construction of typological

schemes that resist easy classification and one-for-one interpretation is not antirational raving or obscu-

rantism but rather an alternativemdashand a quite compelling onemdashto 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

1 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 tho-

roughly religious vision of the world If one is willing to do this Hamann is a kind of prophetmdashand the

horned head of Pan on his title-page is also the horned head of Moses1 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 pro-

ducing neat tables of Hamannrsquos 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 Aes-

thetica 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 somethingmdashunless there really is some secret ineffable law of correspondences that un-

ites 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 commen-

tators and writers of senior essays have no right to tread

1 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 agrave la Mosaiumlque (Roth 103 343)

41

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin Isaiah The Magus of the North JG Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism ed Henry

Hardy London John Murray 1993 Betz John After Enlightenment the Post-Secular Vision of JG Hamann Chichester John Wiley amp Sons

2009 Hamann Johann Georg Hamannrsquos Schriften ed Friedrich Roth Berlin G Reimer 1821 (Cited as

ldquoRothrdquo All citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Saumlmtliche Werke ed Josef Nadler Wien Verlag Herder 1950 (Cited as ldquoNad-

lerrdquo Unless otherwise noted all citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Writings on Philosophy and Language trans and ed Kenneth Haynes Cam-

bridge Cambridge UP 2007 (Cited as ldquoHaynesrdquo) Jacobs Carol ldquoHamann Is a Nomadic Writer lsquoAesthetica in nucersquordquo in Skirting the Ethical Stanford Stan-

ford UP 2008 pp 111-130 OrsquoFlaherty James C The Quarrel of Reason with Itself Essays on Hamann Michaelis Lessing Nietzsche Co-

lumbia SC Camden 1988

5

Introduction This essay is not an attempt to understand Hamannrsquos 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 ldquoGreeksrdquo 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 compari-

son 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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos larger corpus this is

due to chance or to a consistency in Hamannrsquos writing and not at all to design Admittedly the themes

brought up on this page that is our subjectmdashwriting the possibility of readingmdashare broad ones and as we

shall see according to the patterns of symbolism which Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 ndashwhich for Hamann are

scarcely separablemdashpresented 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 philo-

sophical criticism as the inauguration of a new artistic era or as an almost meaningless display of be-

nighted and antirational obscurantismmdashbut one cannot avoid the conclusion that Johann Georg Ha-

mannrsquos 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 sub-

jects of the Aesthetica in nuce are much less parochial the nature of reason the power of language the rela-

tion 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 state-

ment of his positionmdashand this perhaps would often not be wrongmdashbut the Aesthetica in nuce a dizzying-

ly 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 enoughmdashinterpreting 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 Hamannrsquos 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 pre-

sume to have accurately or exhaustively interpreted the Aesthetica in nuce but we hope to write a commen-

tary 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 appear-

ance 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 con-

structed this analysis of the Aesthetica in nuce out of a series of separatemdashthough I think not ultimately

contradictorymdashinvestigations 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 wouldnrsquot 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 Hamannrsquos German I have used the old German letters he would have recog-

nized 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 indiffe-

rently 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 lettermdashat 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

Hamannrsquos 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 ma-

naged to salvage any worthwhile thought have at least brought it somewhat closer to the surface

9

Chapter 1 The Unnatural Use of Abstraction

The removal of Α and Ω 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

Verultt es einmal die Iliade zu leen wenn ihr vorher durlt die Abfrac34raction die beiden

Selbfrac34lauter α und ω ausgeilttet habt und agt mir eure Meynung von dem Verfrac34ande und Wohlklange des Diltters

Μῆνιν ειδε Θε Πηληιδε χιλῆος1

In this passage and quotation from Hamannrsquos text traditional images while recognizable for

what they are are combined in a novel way The alpha and omega are symbol of Christ (Rev 18) 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 Hamannrsquos 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 linersquos content

and consider merely what it is as a line Itrsquos the incipit of the Iliad ndash for a student of Greek one of the hex-

ameters that come most readily to mind ndash the opening line of the epic traditionally regarded as the great-

est 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 Priamrsquos neighbors but of the ideals and achievements of classic-

al civilization ndash which though indeed falling as far short of Homerrsquos 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 at-

tempt to understand classical civilization while rejecting Christ Indeed Hamann himself encourages such

a reading of the image when he later cites ldquothe Punic father of the Churchrdquo to the effect that the prophetic

1 Nadler 207

10

books of the Old Testament can only be interpreted correctly when Christ is ldquoread intordquo them ldquoRead the

prophetic books without understanding Christrdquo says Augustine ldquoand what pointlessness and folly will

you find there Understand Christ there and what you read will not only savor but will even intoxicaterdquo1

Hamann takes up and expands this argument providing some context to his surgical removal of vowels

from Homerrsquos line Though as a rhetorician Augustine was acutely aware of their power after his conver-

sion 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 un-

derstood correctly ldquoa dream-like anticipation of Christrdquo2 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 ndash

he is too much of a Lutheran for that But as regards the value of the ancient myths he is rather more ge-

nerous 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 ap-

parent 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 ndash

which is of course not to say that it is not one of the ways Hamann intended it to be read But there must

1 Nadler 212-3 ldquoLege libros propheticos non intellecto CHRISTO agt der punifrac14e Kirltenvater quid tam insipidum amp fatuum inuenies Intellige ibi CHRISTUM non solum sapit quod legis sed etiam inebriatrdquo Hamann gives no citation for this quote a note to the Cambridge translation locates it at Ioh Evang Tract IX3 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 let-

ters than Hamann gives us ndash and even if we lacked the extrinsic familiarity with Homerrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 warriorrsquos

wrath

What then does Hamann mean by this image ldquoSeerdquo he hints to us just after showing us the al-

tered line of Greek ldquothe greater and lesser Masorah of philosophy [Weltweisheit] has overwhelmed the

text of Nature like a Noahrsquos floodrdquo1 As is usual for Hamann this explanation only raises further ques-

tions Nothing here has overwhelmed or flooded anything else and least of all Masorah ndash 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 re-

minded of what was said shortly before Homerrsquos line was introduced

Sie [dh die Mue] wird es wagen den natuumlrlilten Gebrauclt der Sinne von dem unnatuumlrlilten Gebrault der Abfrac34ractionen zu laumlutern wodurlt unere Begriffe von den Dingen eben o ehr verfrac34uumlmmelt werden als der Name des Sltoumlpfers underdruumlckt und gelaumlfrac34ert wird2

The ldquounnatural use of abstractionsrdquo here plays a role parallel to that of the ldquoMasorah of worldly philoso-

phyrdquo mdash 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 ldquoMaso-

1 Nadler 207 Seht die groszlige und kleine Maore der Weltweisheit hat den Text der Natur gleilt einer Suumlndfluth uumlberfrac14wemmt 2 Nadler 207

12

rah of philosophyrdquo then are interpretations that distort and obscure It is this sort of distortion and ob-

scuring that are represented by the removal of the letters alpha and omega from Homerrsquos line we are told

after all that they are removed ldquothrough abstractionrdquo Here Hamann is making a pun on the Latin roots

of the word ldquoabstractionrdquo but it is not merely a pun it is also a hint at one of the hidden connections be-

tween the vowels of the Iliad and Hamannrsquos 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 dam-

aged

And Hamann further suggests that it is because of this failure of interpretation or clarification

that the ldquoGreeksrdquo who abuse abstraction are wrong to think themselves wiser than the ldquochamberlains with

the Gnostic keyrdquo This phrase in itself rather obscure is one of the bridge-phrases in Hamannrsquos text that

point out to us which parts of the tapestry may be connected beneath the surface Chamberlain is Kammer-

herr and between Kammerherr and Kaumlmmerer there is small difference and Kaumlmmerer is the word Luther

used for ldquoeunuchrdquo1 The bridge leads us to another nearby passage of the Aesthetica

Wenn die Leidenfrac14aften Glieder der Unehre ind houmlren ie deswegen auf Waffen der Mannheit zu eyn Verfrac34eht ihr den Bultfrac34aben der Vernunft kluumlger als jener allegorifrac14e Kaumlmmerer der alexandrinifrac14en Kirlte den Bultfrac34aben der Sltrift der ich elbfrac34 zum Verfrac14nittenen maltte um des Himmelreilts willen2

Seen in light of this passage the reference to eunuchs and to Gnosticism is less perplexing While Origen

ndash who I presume to be ldquothat allegorical chamberlain of the Alexandrian churchrdquo mdash is not generally consi-

dered 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

ldquoLeidenfrac14aftenrdquo 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

1 ldquoIn Acts 827 Luther translates as lsquoKaumlmmererrsquo(related to lsquoKammerherrrsquo chamberlain) what the King James Bible translates as lsquoeunuchrsquordquo Haynes 80 note 87 2 Nadler 208

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 ab-

stract 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 ex-

tended Latin quotation from Bacon which is appended as a footnote to the passage quoted above on the

ldquounnatural use of abstractionsrdquo Hamann calls Bacon his ldquoEuthyphrordquo1 the figure who perhaps does not

teach him anymore than Euthyphro taught Socrates but who provides nonetheless the occasion for fruit-

ful 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 repu-

tation as an antirationalist or forerunner of the Sturm und Drang is not here making an argument against

reason as such or against the mindrsquos use of concepts or against thought in general For Bacon is not mak-

ing an argument against philosophy but against bad philosophy ldquoAnd so let men know how far the Idols

of the human mind are from the Ideas of the divine mind hellip 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 ac-

count of the conveniences of liferdquo 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 con-

cepts only so that the truth of things might better shine forth -- indeed for all that he advocates the in-

crease 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 Hamannrsquos critique of the Gnostic chamberlains His prescription is not that we avoid

1 ldquoBacon mein Euthyphronrdquo Nadler 197

14

making use of concepts for things but that we make sure that our concepts have not been verfrac34uumlmmelt and

gelaumlfrac34ert by abuses of reason

The word ldquoabstractionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos 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 foot-

note quotes at considerable length Ovidrsquos retelling of the story ldquoSpem sine corpore amat corpus putat

esse quod umbra est Adstupet ipse sibirdquo1 They who consider the abstractions of their minds to be most

real prefer a (vain) hope or a shadow to the bodymdashthat is the material concrete reality of the natural

world Long after Hamannrsquos 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 sibimdashNarcissus 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 ldquopure reasonrdquo from the mess of passions and contingencies that always surround hu-

man life Hamann prophesies an analogous fate It is this abuse of reason which Hamann means to sug-

gest t the removal of the first and last Greek letters from a line of Homer

And just as Hamann challenges the ldquoGreeksrdquo 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 cor-

rectly or to make any meaningful scientific achievements Just as Hume could not drink a glass of water or

eat an egg without faith2 neither we might paraphrase Hamann could he follow an argument to its con-

1 Metamorphoses III417f quoted at Nadler 210

2 This was a favorite quip of Hamannrsquos and is recorded in several places eg OrsquoFlaherty 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 Hamannrsquos view the supposed opposition of

reason and the passions is a fiction of the Enlighteners his thought has little room for absolute dichoto-

mies and he rejects also this one The passions in fact have an essential role to play even in the exercise

of reason ldquoLeidenfrac14amacr allein giebt Abfrac34ractionen owohl als Hypotheen Haumlnde Fuumlszlige Fluumlgel mdash Bildern und Zei-

chen Geifrac34 Leben und Zungerdquo1 There are perhaps many ways to understand ldquohands feet and wingsrdquo mdash but

between all possible interpretations of these words a basic unity exists They are all parts of the body asso-

ciated with motion and action And so abstractions and hypothesesmdashdry conclusions of the reasonmdashare

made active and mobile by the passions Likewise images and signs are given ldquolife and tonguerdquo 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 un-

mutilated 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 Hamannrsquos style and the symbolic ldquovocabularyrdquo of the Aesthetica in nuce The connection of Ha-

mannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos thought

1 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

Verucht es einmal die Iliade zu leen wenn ihr vorher durch die Abfrac34raction die beyden

Selbfrac34lauter α und ω ausgesichtet habt1 ldquoSelbstlautrdquo and ldquoMitlautrdquo ldquoConsonantrdquo and ldquovowelrdquo2 These are evocative termsmdashnot 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 con-

cepts 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 ldquoletter of the voicerdquo is utterable on its own while a littera consonans

must be ldquosounded withrdquo something else This way of articulating the distinction between independent

vowels and dependent consonants was a commonplace in the eighteenth century3 and would not have

been unfamiliar to Hamann even if the etymology of ldquoSelbstlautrdquo did not suggest it If we translate then

a bit freely we might say ldquothat which is removed from the Iliad by abstraction is that without which

1 Nadler 207

2 German preserves also more Latinate forms ldquoVokalrdquo and ldquoKonsonantrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos thought in the Aesthetica in nuce 3 John Hensons New Latin Grammar for instance published at Nottingham in 1744 explains ldquoA Vowel is a letter

which makes a full and perfect Sound of it Self as a o A Conſonant is a Letter that has no Sound of it Self without a Vowelrdquo And in a Verbesserte and Erleichterte Lateinische Grammatica published at Halle in 1763 (a year after the Cru-sades of the Philologist saw light) we read ldquoDen Anfang in der Lateinifrac14en Spralten maltt man von den Bultfrac34abenhellip Und diee werden eingetheilet in vocales oder elbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautende und consonantes oder mitlautendemitlautendemitlautendemitlautende o niltt ehe koumlnnen ausgeprolten werden als bis ein vocalis dazukoumlmmtrdquo 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 httpbooksgooglecombooksid=T5ECAAAAQAAJ and the second at httpbooksgooglecombooksid=F9oVAAAAYAAJ

17

there can be no speechrdquo which without any further interpretation already at least appears to imply much

more than a matter of rearranged letters

As we have seen the ldquoabstractionrdquo of the letters from the line of the Iliad corresponds in the typo-

logical 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 pas-

sions in order for them to have any power to persuade It is not that reasoned arguments even when ab-

stract are otiose or parasiticalmdashthese 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 ldquovocalizedrdquo

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

Hamannrsquos 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 unpointedmdashlike 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 durlt 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 scripturesmdashwritten by God but one must bring onersquos

own vowels to read it

But is this not going too far While we may not just have misrepresented Hamannrsquos 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 doesnrsquot make sense as

written without those vowels itrsquos still easily interpretable If Hamann had not named it as a line from the

Iliad any educated person on seeing the word microῆνιν 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 miss-

ing places in the line the shape of the dactyls and the grammatical possibilities offered by the Greek lan-

guage 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 En-

lightened 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 objec-

tion of this scientist would be absurd because it would miss the point of Hamannrsquos critiquemdashhe goes

around the backs of the Enlighteners contending that they are moved by passion even in what they be-

lieve to be their exercises of pure reason that the arguments they invoke to defend their conception of rea-

son 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 ldquoTurbatverserdquo1 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 Hamannrsquos altered line from the Iliad) But it refers most specif-

ically 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 Θεά ἄειδε μῆνιν Ἀχιλῆος Πηληϊάδεω In a certain sense there is nothing of Homerrsquos 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 ob-

viously 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 ldquogoddessrdquo and not ldquowrathrdquo In the Turbatverse of nature then the superficial meaning of the speak-

ing 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 niltts als Turbatvere und disiecti membra poetae zu unerm Gebrault uumlbrig Diee zu ammeln ifrac34 des Gelehrten ie auszulegen des Philoophen ie naltzuahmenmdashoder nolt kuumlhnermdash mdashie in Gefrac14ick zu bringen des Poeten befrac14eiden Theil2

1 Nadler 198

2 Nadler 199

20

The hierarchy that is here established with the scholar philosopher and poet presented with responsibili-

ties of increasing creativity should not surprise us as it is exactly in line with what Hamann says else-

where about the high dignity of the poet to whom is compared even God himself1 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 ade-

quate 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 consti-

tuent 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

1 ldquoDer Poet am Anfange der Tagerdquo Nadler 206

21

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

Hamannrsquos coincidentia oppositorum is not any kind of dialectical synthesis Creation is speech ndash so is Hamannrsquos 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 Aesthe-

tica in nuce relate to the argument he makes about the proper use of reason There is significant ldquooverlaprdquo

here the various images and descriptions Hamann uses are parallel making the same argument in differ-

ent ways From what we have already said we can derive a kind of table showing how the various images

used map onto Hamannrsquos argument about the reason and the passions

Passions Reason

Vowels Consonants Words Mere arrangements of letters Poetic Meter Turbatverse God Nature Christianity Classical civilization Alpha and Omega 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 refus-

es 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 to-

gether 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 ldquoit is not clear how far he understood it and he certainly gives it a

1 Though not in the Aesthetica See eg Betz 28 note 17

22

sense of his ownrdquo1 In fact it is not easy to see where the ldquocoincidencerdquo comes in at all Regarding every

text every object as part of his ldquoBiblerdquo 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 themselvesmdashto

the letters of a text (in literary criticism) and the phenomena of nature unreduced to their universal ra-

tional 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 pro-

duced of these elements He beholds in a single vision der rollende Donner der Beredamkeit and der

einylbicltte Blitz2 This strangemdashor strange to us and Hamann would not hesitate to say that our sensibili-

ties need correctionmdashthis strange conjunction of opposites confronts us even on the title page of the Aes-

thetica in nuce Eine Rhapodie in kabbalifrac34ifrac14er Proe A rhapsodymdasha stitching-together of pieces into an ar-

tistic unitymdashthat 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 ldquoApostillerdquo ndash whether Hamann himself some per-

sonified commentator or anyone else ndash remarks that the author of the Aesthetica in nuce ldquohat Satz und

Satz zuammengereltnet wie man die Pfeile auf einem Sltlalttfelde zaumlhltrdquo3 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 Romansrsquo shots though fewer were fired with greater force It is not clear which side better corres-

ponds to Hamannrsquos 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 Therersquos a case to be made for either in-

terpretation But whichever we take the view wersquore given of the Aesthetica in nuce is still of individual

Saumltze piled up one after another as discrete countable units This treatise says the speaker of the Apos-

tille is just a pile of sentences But in an instant our perspective is shifted ldquoLaszligt uns jetzt die Hauptumme

1 Berlin 115

2 Nadler 208

3 Nadler 217 The reference given by Hamann (ldquoProcop De bello persico I 18rdquo) is explained at Haynes 94 note

kkk

23

[hellip] houmlrenldquo1 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 vari-

ous meditations on human life that compose the text of the biblical book2 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

summarymdasha 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 Hamannrsquos 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 readerrsquos confusion It is not Hamannrsquos 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 writings3 it is perhaps not sur-

prising then if the Aesthetica in nuce presents us with hermeneutic difficulties that neither the text itself

nor comparisons with Hamannrsquos other works nor consideration of Hamannrsquos engagement with the issues

of his time are adequate to dispel But the paradox we are considering heremdashthe simultaneous focus on

both columns of the table with which this chapter beganmdashis so fundamental to the thought of the Aesthe-

tica in nuce that unless we can come to terms with it in some way Hamannrsquos 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

1 Ibid

2 Cf Lutherbibel Predig 1213 ldquoLaszligt uns die Hauptumme aller Lehre houmlrenldquo 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 ldquoApostillerdquo likewise to be a undermining of all that goes before it 3 ldquoI no longer understand myself quite differently from then some [writings I understand] better some worse [hellip]

[hellip] 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 stuffrdquo Briefwechsel V p 358 trans in Betz 229

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 ldquodie ilt nolt im bloszligen Bult-frac34a-bi-ren uumlbenmdashmdashund wahrlilt wahrlilt Kinder muumlfrac12en

wir werden wenn wir den Geifrac34 der Wahrheit empfahen ollenldquo1 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 ldquoSpirit of

Truth whom the world cannot receiverdquo (Jn 1417) 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 spiri-

tual pole than to the elemental literal material one But how says Hamannrsquos Nuszlig is this Spirit of Truth

to be received By becoming like children who are just learning to spellmdashand 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 ldquoBultfrac34abirenrdquo syllable by syllable confirms that Hamann is referring to this style of interpreta-

tion Recalling now the table at the start of this chapter in which letters and the ldquospirit of truthrdquo

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 ldquoVerlieren die Elemente des A B C ihre natuumlrlilte

Bedeutung wenn ie in der unendlichen Zuammenetzung willkuumlrlilter Zeilten uns an Ideen erinnern die wo niltt

im Himmel dolt im Gehirn indrdquo2 To this question of course we are meant to answer ldquonordquo But there is

much here that is not unproblematic or at least not simple What for instance is the ldquonatuumlrlilte Bedeu-

tungrdquo of a letter And how if the combination of these signs be arbitrary does it recall for us ideas And

1 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 Hamannrsquos voice at least on Hamannrsquos 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 wersquore 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 Greeksmdashbut 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 coin-

cidence is merely an opportunity to bring the opposites as opposites together But this assumption natu-

ral 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 experiencemdashthis 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 Hamannrsquos writing admits of both a macros-

copic 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 conjunc-

tion 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 them1 considering these various levels of read-

ing 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 simultaneous-

ly 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 interpreta-

tion could be set forth that might allow us to translate Hamannrsquos simultaneously cabalistic and rhapsodic

utterances into academic language or to devise summaries of his arguments in a neatly symbolic lan-

guage 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 oumlffentlilter Gebrault 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 Hamannrsquos thought is useful also here Sltoumlpfung ifrac34 eine Rede an die Kreatur durlt die Kreatur The

Christian overtones of such a formulation are obvious Hamann once offered an encapsulation of his

thought in the word λόγος2 a famously polysemous term every sense of which Hamann intends The in-

timate connection between reason and language is of course the most obvious philosophical implication of

1 For Hamannrsquos defense of this possibility see Chapter 4

2 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 Hamannrsquos philosophy But for Hamann λόγος 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 Hamannrsquos piety placed a great emphasis on the self-emptying of Christ Howev-

er much he might stress Christrsquos humanity and suffering though he remained well within the main-

stream 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 diffi-

culties here But there is a clear parallel between the way a Christian thinks of Christ and how Hamann

thinks ofmdashwell more or less everything Christ is a man who lived for a certain stretch of time in a cer-

tain place and is also the eternal God A word is a string of letters small shapes arbitrarily strung togeth-

er and is also a sign of a concept an immaterial thing existing in the mind Hamann is no dualistmdashit 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

Zufoumlrderfrac34 muumlfrac34e man D George Benon fragen ob die Einheit mit der Mannigfaltigkeit niltt befrac34ehen koumlnne [hellip] Der bultfrac34aumlblilte oder grammatifrac14e der fleifrac14liche oder dialectifrac14e der ka-pernaitifrac14e oder historifrac14e Sinn ind im houmlltfrac34en Grade myfrac34ilt und haumlngen von ollten augen-blicklilten pirituoumlen willkuumlhrlilten Nebenbefrac34immungen und Umfrac34aumlnden ab daszlig man ohne hinauf gen Himmel zu fahren die Schluumlfrac12el ihrer Erkenntnis niltt herabholen kann1

1 Nadler 203 note 23 Hamannrsquos footnote is attached to some lines of Latin verse which conclude the Nutrsquos letter to the Learned Rabbi They come from a poem traditionally and falsely attributed to the Emperor Augustus explain-ing why Vergilrsquos orders to destroy the drafts of the Aeneid were ignored after the poetrsquos death The excerpts are

Ah scelus indignum soluetur litera diues Frangatur potius legum veneranda potestas Liber amp alma Ceres succurrite mdash mdash [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 mdashwhich for Hamann who does not oppose the spirit and the letter in a conventional way is a spiritual richnessmdashis 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

28

It is not that interpretation ought to be literal physical or ldquoCapernaiticrdquo 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 understandingmdashthat is unless one has

attained a certain degree of spiritual insight ndashone will be unable to understand things even in their literal

senses for the spiritual and literal senses are one Hamannrsquos 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 expe-

rience 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 inten-

tion of this line of thought has been least of all to stimulate pious feelings Hamannrsquos goal is not to spiri-

tualize 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 (ldquoDie Sinne aber ind Ceres und Bacltus die Leidenfrac14aftenrdquo [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 simplis-tically 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 Hamannrsquos ability to com-press his meaning into very few and very cryptic words NB The ldquoCapernaiticrdquo sense refers to the sense in which Christ is literally present in the Christian sacrament This unusual word is used derogatively in Lutheran texts (eg the Epitome of the Konkordienformel) to disparage Catholic sacramental teaching Its origins are in Jn 65559 ldquoFor my flesh is meat indeed and my blood is drink in-deed [hellip] These things he said in the synagogue as he taught in Capernaumrdquo 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 Luthe-ran understanding according to which Christ is present in the sacrament in a merely spiritual way is less than per-fectly compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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

Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 im-

plied meanings into the literal tropological allegorical and anagogical senses that Christians have tradi-

tionally 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 ormdashto employ a metaphor

more perhaps more congenial to Hamannmdashdiscerning 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 indul-

gence 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 slo-

gan from the text itselfmdashldquoto speak is to translaterdquomdashand 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 uumlberetzenmdashaus einer Engelpralte in eine Menfrac14enpralte das heifrac34 Gedanken in WortemdashSalten in NamenmdashBilder in Zeilten die poetifrac14 oder kyriologifrac14 hifrac34orifrac14 oder ymbolifrac14 oder hieroglyphifrac14mdashmdashund philoophifrac14 oder ltarakterifrac34ifrac14 eyn koumlnnen1

Here we are given a license to translate Hamannrsquos images into signs of various kinds It is no surprise that

in a footnote attached to this text he derogates the ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs by citing a pas-

sage of Petronius which complains that a new fashion of ldquopuffed-up and formless talkativenessrdquo has cor-

1 Nadler 199

31

rupted speech so that ldquothe standard of eloquence being corrupted has been halted and struck dumbrdquo

and ldquonot even poetry displays a healthy colorrdquo1 By ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs we should un-

derstand something like Leibnizrsquos 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 criti-

cism 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 cor-

respondences out of the text But the other kinds of signsmdashthe poetic or symbolicmdashdo not seem to fall

under the same criticismmdashthese suggest a kind of sign which indeed has meaning but whose interpreta-

tion 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 Hamannrsquos thought allows even for this kind of correspon-

dence 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 Hamannrsquos text but also is deeply compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos text to assert that he intends the literal and symbolic meanings to be taken as

of equal importancemdashfor us to devote our full attention to take up one of the governing metaphors of this

1 N 199 n10 ldquoNuper ventosa isthaec amp enormis loquacitas Athenas ex Asia conmigrauit [hellip] simulque correpta elo-quentiae regula stetit amp obmutuit [hellip] Ac ne carmen quidem sani coloris enituitrdquo

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 discuss-

ing how Hamann refuses to privilege abstract ldquopurely mentalrdquo thought over the particular words in

which that thought finds expression Berlin concludes that ldquofor 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)rdquo1 As an example of one such contradiction Berlin cites the line placed at the head

of this section ldquoto speak is to translaterdquo For Berlin it follows from Hamannrsquos insistence on the unity of

reason and language that no translation no correspondence between words ideas and things can be es-

tablished

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 attend-ing to ideas or to language and through them (because they correspond) to the facts was a method of judging and knowing reality [hellip But the] notion of a correspondence that there is an objective world on one side and on the other man and his instruments ndash lan-guage ideas and so forth ndash attempting to approximate to this objective reality is a false picture There is only a flow of sensations2

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 ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 reproduced3 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 Hamannrsquos treatise but unable to claim any continuity of thought therewith

1 Berlin 81

2 Ibid

3 Though one might question even this Ποταμῷ γὰρ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐμβῆναι δὶς τῷ αὐτῷ and there is no reason to think

any two ldquoflows of sensationrdquo could ever be substantially identical Necessarily every ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos view Berlin is perplexed when confronted with Hamannrsquos open assertion

that translation is possible between ldquohuman speechrdquo and the ldquospeech of angelsrdquo and can only conclude

that Hamann here contradicts himself And for Berlin it is quite to be expected that Hamann should con-

tradict himself he regards Hamannrsquos thought in general as highly creative and intriguing Schwaumlrmerei

of note for its pivotal place in intellectual history but completely insusceptible or unworthy of serious

philosophic attention Berlin appreciates Hamannrsquos criticism of the Enlightenment and his prescient

awareness of the lifeless bloodless conception of manrsquos spiritual life that the Enlighteners would ultimate-

ly produce While Berlin claims to understand Hamannrsquos motives in writing he utterly rejects the content

of his writings which he regards as ldquothe cry of a trapped man hellip who cannot be brought to see that to be

regimented or eliminated is either inevitable or desirablerdquo1 For Berlin Hamann is simply a ldquofanaticrdquo

whose writings consist of ldquopassionate rhetoric and not careful thoughtrdquo and whose opinions are ldquogrotes-

quely one-sided a violent exaggeration of the uniqueness of men and things [and] a passionate hatred of

menrsquos wish to understand the universerdquo2 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 pur-

ism of Hitler3 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 Berlinrsquos judgment that Hamann

1 Berlin 116

2 Berlin 121

3 This accusation is presented in Berlinrsquos book in a series of insinuations we are told for example that Hamannrsquos

ldquohatred and blind irrationalism have fed the stream that has led to social and political irrationalism particularly in German in our own [20

th] centuryrdquo (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 Berlinrsquos 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

34

simply contradicts himself in allowing for the possibility of translation in and out of symbolic ldquolanguag-

esrdquo Hamann has very little patience for ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs which promise patent

meaning and unambiguous interpretation This is perfectly in keeping with his general distaste for effi-

cient 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 ldquopoeticrdquo and ldquosymbolicrdquo signs not to fall under the same fierce criticism as the others

ldquoTo speak is to translaterdquo and ldquocreation is a speech to the creature through the creaturerdquo These

two maxims placed very near to each other in the text1 suggest something of a solution to the problem to

which Berlin directs our attention The conjunction of these lines should remind us that Hamann wheth-

er he directing his attention to literature philology esthetics or any other subject is always also a reli-

gious thinker The archetype of every text is for him the Bible and biblical exegesis is the model and ca-

non 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 Michaelisrsquos ldquodenial of a mystical typological sense

of Scripturerdquo2 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 Mi-

chaelis 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 ldquoTo merdquo says Hamann ldquoevery book is a Biblerdquo3 like the Bible then every

book must be read not merely for its literal sense Berlinrsquos reading of Hamann might be correct if Ha-

1 N 118-119

2 Betz 114

3 Briefwechsel I p 309 trans in Betz 47

35

mann were speaking about the everyday world of words and things understood as a brute fact But Ha-

mann 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 re-

mind us that the interpretation of tongues is also a divine gift1 he admits even that persons may not un-

derstand what they themselves to and say Even a figure such as Voltaire hardly a friend of religious out-

looks testifies for those who have ears to hear to the rightness of Hamannrsquos views

kann man wohl einen glaubwuumlrdigern Zeugen als den unfrac34erblilten Voltaire anfuumlhren wellter bey-nahe die Religion fuumlr den Eckfrac34ein der epifrac14en Dilttkunfrac34 erklaumlrt [hellip] Voltaire aber der Hohe-priefrac34er im Tempel des Gefrac14macks frac14luumlszligt so buumlndig als Kaiphas und denkt frulttbarer als He-rodes2

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 ldquoHo-

hepriefrac34er im Tempelrdquo but also a somewhat Machiavellian politician) justifies the crucifixion of Christ by

arguing that ldquoit is expedient that one man should die for the peoplerdquo3 believing himself to be discussing a

political necessity while as if prophetically describing the Christian doctrine of the atonement And He-

rodrsquos deceitful remark to the Magi ldquothat I might also come and worship himrdquo is taken since Herod was

king of the Jews though a gentile by race to represent the universal destiny of the Christian religion4 This

tradition of interpretation habitual in Biblical exegesis Hamann applies also to analysis of the wordmdashso

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 1210

2 Nadler 204-5

3 John 1150

4 It is telling that Hamann chooses such a contrived and complicated case of biblical parallelism as this one his ar-

gument 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

36

will readily concede that ldquowe see through a glass darklyrdquo1 and that we may not even be able to descry the

true outlines of our own persons in this mirrormdashbut by invoking the language of mirrors2 he locates him-

self within a tradition of thought according to which nature however flawed parts of it may be and how-

ever dulled our ability to discern itmdashis 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 se-

cular 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 ldquoblind heathensrdquo

Blinde Heyden haben die Unilttbarkeit erkannt die der Menfrac14 mit GOTT gemein hat Die verhuumlllte Figur des Leibes das Antlitz des Hauptes und das Aumluszligerfrac34e der Arme ind das ilttbare Sltema in dem wir einher gehn dolt eigentlilt niltts als ein Zeigefinger des verborge-nen Menfrac14en in unsmdash Exemplumque DEI quisque est in imagine parva3

Note that the ldquospiritualrdquo 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 ldquoindex fingersrdquo which direct the inner man to

our attention Hamann let us recall4 does not believe that the target of this ldquoZeigefingerrdquo can always be

1 1 Cor 1312

2 Though Hamann is in some ways a very modern thinker who anticipates 20

th century thought about the kinship of

reason and language he here looks back to the middle ages Cf Alan of Lille ldquoOmnis mundi creatura Quasi liber et pictura Nobis est et speculumrdquo With the sentiment and conceit of this verse Hamann could not agree more 3 N 198 The quotation from the Astronomicon of Manilius (IV895) is mainly noteworthy for its having been writ-

ten by a pagan author while echoing the language of Genesis regarding the ldquoimage of Godrdquo The Cambridge edition of Hamann misenglishes this line rendering it as ldquoEach one is an instance of God in miniaturerdquo This not only loses the connection to the book of Genesis conveyed by the word ldquoimagordquo but puts far too much weight on the word ldquoexemplumrdquo as well An exemplum is not an instance but a type model or analogue ldquoInstancerdquo implies an occur-rence of a rationally determinable kind a ldquotyperdquo or ldquoanaloguerdquo 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

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 circumstancesmdashthis 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 re-

fers to ldquocorrespondencesrdquo of thing and idea and of idea and word these ldquocorrespondencesrdquo are for Berlin

relations between two different things of different types He is quite correct to judge that Hamann consid-

ers 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 meaningmdashhe 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 justifica-

tion 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 ldquoConclusionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos own line that ldquocreation is a speech to the creature

through the creaturerdquo 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 cor-

respond to each other based on no apodictically determinable system knowable a priori but on the gra-

tuitous (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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 com-

pared translation to the art of understanding the image of a tapestry from looking only at the backs of the

threads he remarks ldquoDort [ie in the original contexts of the metaphors borrowed from other authors for

39

Hamannrsquos text] werden ie aber ad illustrationem (zur Verbraumlmung des Rockes) hier ad inuolucrum (zum

Hemde auf bloszligem Leibe) gebrauchtrdquo1 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 deco-

rated 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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos which ac-

cording to the line of interpretation I have explored reveals as much about Hamannrsquos 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 tear-

ing 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 Hamannrsquos motion between images his construction of typological

schemes that resist easy classification and one-for-one interpretation is not antirational raving or obscu-

rantism but rather an alternativemdashand a quite compelling onemdashto 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

1 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 tho-

roughly religious vision of the world If one is willing to do this Hamann is a kind of prophetmdashand the

horned head of Pan on his title-page is also the horned head of Moses1 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 pro-

ducing neat tables of Hamannrsquos 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 Aes-

thetica 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 somethingmdashunless there really is some secret ineffable law of correspondences that un-

ites 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 commen-

tators and writers of senior essays have no right to tread

1 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 agrave la Mosaiumlque (Roth 103 343)

41

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin Isaiah The Magus of the North JG Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism ed Henry

Hardy London John Murray 1993 Betz John After Enlightenment the Post-Secular Vision of JG Hamann Chichester John Wiley amp Sons

2009 Hamann Johann Georg Hamannrsquos Schriften ed Friedrich Roth Berlin G Reimer 1821 (Cited as

ldquoRothrdquo All citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Saumlmtliche Werke ed Josef Nadler Wien Verlag Herder 1950 (Cited as ldquoNad-

lerrdquo Unless otherwise noted all citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Writings on Philosophy and Language trans and ed Kenneth Haynes Cam-

bridge Cambridge UP 2007 (Cited as ldquoHaynesrdquo) Jacobs Carol ldquoHamann Is a Nomadic Writer lsquoAesthetica in nucersquordquo in Skirting the Ethical Stanford Stan-

ford UP 2008 pp 111-130 OrsquoFlaherty James C The Quarrel of Reason with Itself Essays on Hamann Michaelis Lessing Nietzsche Co-

lumbia SC Camden 1988

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 sub-

jects of the Aesthetica in nuce are much less parochial the nature of reason the power of language the rela-

tion 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 state-

ment of his positionmdashand this perhaps would often not be wrongmdashbut the Aesthetica in nuce a dizzying-

ly 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 enoughmdashinterpreting 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 Hamannrsquos 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 pre-

sume to have accurately or exhaustively interpreted the Aesthetica in nuce but we hope to write a commen-

tary 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 appear-

ance 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 con-

structed this analysis of the Aesthetica in nuce out of a series of separatemdashthough I think not ultimately

contradictorymdashinvestigations 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 wouldnrsquot 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 Hamannrsquos German I have used the old German letters he would have recog-

nized 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 indiffe-

rently 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 lettermdashat 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

Hamannrsquos 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 ma-

naged to salvage any worthwhile thought have at least brought it somewhat closer to the surface

9

Chapter 1 The Unnatural Use of Abstraction

The removal of Α and Ω 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

Verultt es einmal die Iliade zu leen wenn ihr vorher durlt die Abfrac34raction die beiden

Selbfrac34lauter α und ω ausgeilttet habt und agt mir eure Meynung von dem Verfrac34ande und Wohlklange des Diltters

Μῆνιν ειδε Θε Πηληιδε χιλῆος1

In this passage and quotation from Hamannrsquos text traditional images while recognizable for

what they are are combined in a novel way The alpha and omega are symbol of Christ (Rev 18) 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 Hamannrsquos 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 linersquos content

and consider merely what it is as a line Itrsquos the incipit of the Iliad ndash for a student of Greek one of the hex-

ameters that come most readily to mind ndash the opening line of the epic traditionally regarded as the great-

est 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 Priamrsquos neighbors but of the ideals and achievements of classic-

al civilization ndash which though indeed falling as far short of Homerrsquos 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 at-

tempt to understand classical civilization while rejecting Christ Indeed Hamann himself encourages such

a reading of the image when he later cites ldquothe Punic father of the Churchrdquo to the effect that the prophetic

1 Nadler 207

10

books of the Old Testament can only be interpreted correctly when Christ is ldquoread intordquo them ldquoRead the

prophetic books without understanding Christrdquo says Augustine ldquoand what pointlessness and folly will

you find there Understand Christ there and what you read will not only savor but will even intoxicaterdquo1

Hamann takes up and expands this argument providing some context to his surgical removal of vowels

from Homerrsquos line Though as a rhetorician Augustine was acutely aware of their power after his conver-

sion 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 un-

derstood correctly ldquoa dream-like anticipation of Christrdquo2 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 ndash

he is too much of a Lutheran for that But as regards the value of the ancient myths he is rather more ge-

nerous 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 ap-

parent 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 ndash

which is of course not to say that it is not one of the ways Hamann intended it to be read But there must

1 Nadler 212-3 ldquoLege libros propheticos non intellecto CHRISTO agt der punifrac14e Kirltenvater quid tam insipidum amp fatuum inuenies Intellige ibi CHRISTUM non solum sapit quod legis sed etiam inebriatrdquo Hamann gives no citation for this quote a note to the Cambridge translation locates it at Ioh Evang Tract IX3 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 let-

ters than Hamann gives us ndash and even if we lacked the extrinsic familiarity with Homerrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 warriorrsquos

wrath

What then does Hamann mean by this image ldquoSeerdquo he hints to us just after showing us the al-

tered line of Greek ldquothe greater and lesser Masorah of philosophy [Weltweisheit] has overwhelmed the

text of Nature like a Noahrsquos floodrdquo1 As is usual for Hamann this explanation only raises further ques-

tions Nothing here has overwhelmed or flooded anything else and least of all Masorah ndash 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 re-

minded of what was said shortly before Homerrsquos line was introduced

Sie [dh die Mue] wird es wagen den natuumlrlilten Gebrauclt der Sinne von dem unnatuumlrlilten Gebrault der Abfrac34ractionen zu laumlutern wodurlt unere Begriffe von den Dingen eben o ehr verfrac34uumlmmelt werden als der Name des Sltoumlpfers underdruumlckt und gelaumlfrac34ert wird2

The ldquounnatural use of abstractionsrdquo here plays a role parallel to that of the ldquoMasorah of worldly philoso-

phyrdquo mdash 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 ldquoMaso-

1 Nadler 207 Seht die groszlige und kleine Maore der Weltweisheit hat den Text der Natur gleilt einer Suumlndfluth uumlberfrac14wemmt 2 Nadler 207

12

rah of philosophyrdquo then are interpretations that distort and obscure It is this sort of distortion and ob-

scuring that are represented by the removal of the letters alpha and omega from Homerrsquos line we are told

after all that they are removed ldquothrough abstractionrdquo Here Hamann is making a pun on the Latin roots

of the word ldquoabstractionrdquo but it is not merely a pun it is also a hint at one of the hidden connections be-

tween the vowels of the Iliad and Hamannrsquos 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 dam-

aged

And Hamann further suggests that it is because of this failure of interpretation or clarification

that the ldquoGreeksrdquo who abuse abstraction are wrong to think themselves wiser than the ldquochamberlains with

the Gnostic keyrdquo This phrase in itself rather obscure is one of the bridge-phrases in Hamannrsquos text that

point out to us which parts of the tapestry may be connected beneath the surface Chamberlain is Kammer-

herr and between Kammerherr and Kaumlmmerer there is small difference and Kaumlmmerer is the word Luther

used for ldquoeunuchrdquo1 The bridge leads us to another nearby passage of the Aesthetica

Wenn die Leidenfrac14aften Glieder der Unehre ind houmlren ie deswegen auf Waffen der Mannheit zu eyn Verfrac34eht ihr den Bultfrac34aben der Vernunft kluumlger als jener allegorifrac14e Kaumlmmerer der alexandrinifrac14en Kirlte den Bultfrac34aben der Sltrift der ich elbfrac34 zum Verfrac14nittenen maltte um des Himmelreilts willen2

Seen in light of this passage the reference to eunuchs and to Gnosticism is less perplexing While Origen

ndash who I presume to be ldquothat allegorical chamberlain of the Alexandrian churchrdquo mdash is not generally consi-

dered 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

ldquoLeidenfrac14aftenrdquo 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

1 ldquoIn Acts 827 Luther translates as lsquoKaumlmmererrsquo(related to lsquoKammerherrrsquo chamberlain) what the King James Bible translates as lsquoeunuchrsquordquo Haynes 80 note 87 2 Nadler 208

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 ab-

stract 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 ex-

tended Latin quotation from Bacon which is appended as a footnote to the passage quoted above on the

ldquounnatural use of abstractionsrdquo Hamann calls Bacon his ldquoEuthyphrordquo1 the figure who perhaps does not

teach him anymore than Euthyphro taught Socrates but who provides nonetheless the occasion for fruit-

ful 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 repu-

tation as an antirationalist or forerunner of the Sturm und Drang is not here making an argument against

reason as such or against the mindrsquos use of concepts or against thought in general For Bacon is not mak-

ing an argument against philosophy but against bad philosophy ldquoAnd so let men know how far the Idols

of the human mind are from the Ideas of the divine mind hellip 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 ac-

count of the conveniences of liferdquo 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 con-

cepts only so that the truth of things might better shine forth -- indeed for all that he advocates the in-

crease 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 Hamannrsquos critique of the Gnostic chamberlains His prescription is not that we avoid

1 ldquoBacon mein Euthyphronrdquo Nadler 197

14

making use of concepts for things but that we make sure that our concepts have not been verfrac34uumlmmelt and

gelaumlfrac34ert by abuses of reason

The word ldquoabstractionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos 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 foot-

note quotes at considerable length Ovidrsquos retelling of the story ldquoSpem sine corpore amat corpus putat

esse quod umbra est Adstupet ipse sibirdquo1 They who consider the abstractions of their minds to be most

real prefer a (vain) hope or a shadow to the bodymdashthat is the material concrete reality of the natural

world Long after Hamannrsquos 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 sibimdashNarcissus 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 ldquopure reasonrdquo from the mess of passions and contingencies that always surround hu-

man life Hamann prophesies an analogous fate It is this abuse of reason which Hamann means to sug-

gest t the removal of the first and last Greek letters from a line of Homer

And just as Hamann challenges the ldquoGreeksrdquo 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 cor-

rectly or to make any meaningful scientific achievements Just as Hume could not drink a glass of water or

eat an egg without faith2 neither we might paraphrase Hamann could he follow an argument to its con-

1 Metamorphoses III417f quoted at Nadler 210

2 This was a favorite quip of Hamannrsquos and is recorded in several places eg OrsquoFlaherty 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 Hamannrsquos view the supposed opposition of

reason and the passions is a fiction of the Enlighteners his thought has little room for absolute dichoto-

mies and he rejects also this one The passions in fact have an essential role to play even in the exercise

of reason ldquoLeidenfrac14amacr allein giebt Abfrac34ractionen owohl als Hypotheen Haumlnde Fuumlszlige Fluumlgel mdash Bildern und Zei-

chen Geifrac34 Leben und Zungerdquo1 There are perhaps many ways to understand ldquohands feet and wingsrdquo mdash but

between all possible interpretations of these words a basic unity exists They are all parts of the body asso-

ciated with motion and action And so abstractions and hypothesesmdashdry conclusions of the reasonmdashare

made active and mobile by the passions Likewise images and signs are given ldquolife and tonguerdquo 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 un-

mutilated 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 Hamannrsquos style and the symbolic ldquovocabularyrdquo of the Aesthetica in nuce The connection of Ha-

mannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos thought

1 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

Verucht es einmal die Iliade zu leen wenn ihr vorher durch die Abfrac34raction die beyden

Selbfrac34lauter α und ω ausgesichtet habt1 ldquoSelbstlautrdquo and ldquoMitlautrdquo ldquoConsonantrdquo and ldquovowelrdquo2 These are evocative termsmdashnot 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 con-

cepts 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 ldquoletter of the voicerdquo is utterable on its own while a littera consonans

must be ldquosounded withrdquo something else This way of articulating the distinction between independent

vowels and dependent consonants was a commonplace in the eighteenth century3 and would not have

been unfamiliar to Hamann even if the etymology of ldquoSelbstlautrdquo did not suggest it If we translate then

a bit freely we might say ldquothat which is removed from the Iliad by abstraction is that without which

1 Nadler 207

2 German preserves also more Latinate forms ldquoVokalrdquo and ldquoKonsonantrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos thought in the Aesthetica in nuce 3 John Hensons New Latin Grammar for instance published at Nottingham in 1744 explains ldquoA Vowel is a letter

which makes a full and perfect Sound of it Self as a o A Conſonant is a Letter that has no Sound of it Self without a Vowelrdquo And in a Verbesserte and Erleichterte Lateinische Grammatica published at Halle in 1763 (a year after the Cru-sades of the Philologist saw light) we read ldquoDen Anfang in der Lateinifrac14en Spralten maltt man von den Bultfrac34abenhellip Und diee werden eingetheilet in vocales oder elbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautende und consonantes oder mitlautendemitlautendemitlautendemitlautende o niltt ehe koumlnnen ausgeprolten werden als bis ein vocalis dazukoumlmmtrdquo 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 httpbooksgooglecombooksid=T5ECAAAAQAAJ and the second at httpbooksgooglecombooksid=F9oVAAAAYAAJ

17

there can be no speechrdquo which without any further interpretation already at least appears to imply much

more than a matter of rearranged letters

As we have seen the ldquoabstractionrdquo of the letters from the line of the Iliad corresponds in the typo-

logical 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 pas-

sions in order for them to have any power to persuade It is not that reasoned arguments even when ab-

stract are otiose or parasiticalmdashthese 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 ldquovocalizedrdquo

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

Hamannrsquos 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 unpointedmdashlike 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 durlt 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 scripturesmdashwritten by God but one must bring onersquos

own vowels to read it

But is this not going too far While we may not just have misrepresented Hamannrsquos 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 doesnrsquot make sense as

written without those vowels itrsquos still easily interpretable If Hamann had not named it as a line from the

Iliad any educated person on seeing the word microῆνιν 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 miss-

ing places in the line the shape of the dactyls and the grammatical possibilities offered by the Greek lan-

guage 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 En-

lightened 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 objec-

tion of this scientist would be absurd because it would miss the point of Hamannrsquos critiquemdashhe goes

around the backs of the Enlighteners contending that they are moved by passion even in what they be-

lieve to be their exercises of pure reason that the arguments they invoke to defend their conception of rea-

son 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 ldquoTurbatverserdquo1 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 Hamannrsquos altered line from the Iliad) But it refers most specif-

ically 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 Θεά ἄειδε μῆνιν Ἀχιλῆος Πηληϊάδεω In a certain sense there is nothing of Homerrsquos 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 ob-

viously 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 ldquogoddessrdquo and not ldquowrathrdquo In the Turbatverse of nature then the superficial meaning of the speak-

ing 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 niltts als Turbatvere und disiecti membra poetae zu unerm Gebrault uumlbrig Diee zu ammeln ifrac34 des Gelehrten ie auszulegen des Philoophen ie naltzuahmenmdashoder nolt kuumlhnermdash mdashie in Gefrac14ick zu bringen des Poeten befrac14eiden Theil2

1 Nadler 198

2 Nadler 199

20

The hierarchy that is here established with the scholar philosopher and poet presented with responsibili-

ties of increasing creativity should not surprise us as it is exactly in line with what Hamann says else-

where about the high dignity of the poet to whom is compared even God himself1 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 ade-

quate 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 consti-

tuent 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

1 ldquoDer Poet am Anfange der Tagerdquo Nadler 206

21

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

Hamannrsquos coincidentia oppositorum is not any kind of dialectical synthesis Creation is speech ndash so is Hamannrsquos 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 Aesthe-

tica in nuce relate to the argument he makes about the proper use of reason There is significant ldquooverlaprdquo

here the various images and descriptions Hamann uses are parallel making the same argument in differ-

ent ways From what we have already said we can derive a kind of table showing how the various images

used map onto Hamannrsquos argument about the reason and the passions

Passions Reason

Vowels Consonants Words Mere arrangements of letters Poetic Meter Turbatverse God Nature Christianity Classical civilization Alpha and Omega 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 refus-

es 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 to-

gether 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 ldquoit is not clear how far he understood it and he certainly gives it a

1 Though not in the Aesthetica See eg Betz 28 note 17

22

sense of his ownrdquo1 In fact it is not easy to see where the ldquocoincidencerdquo comes in at all Regarding every

text every object as part of his ldquoBiblerdquo 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 themselvesmdashto

the letters of a text (in literary criticism) and the phenomena of nature unreduced to their universal ra-

tional 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 pro-

duced of these elements He beholds in a single vision der rollende Donner der Beredamkeit and der

einylbicltte Blitz2 This strangemdashor strange to us and Hamann would not hesitate to say that our sensibili-

ties need correctionmdashthis strange conjunction of opposites confronts us even on the title page of the Aes-

thetica in nuce Eine Rhapodie in kabbalifrac34ifrac14er Proe A rhapsodymdasha stitching-together of pieces into an ar-

tistic unitymdashthat 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 ldquoApostillerdquo ndash whether Hamann himself some per-

sonified commentator or anyone else ndash remarks that the author of the Aesthetica in nuce ldquohat Satz und

Satz zuammengereltnet wie man die Pfeile auf einem Sltlalttfelde zaumlhltrdquo3 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 Romansrsquo shots though fewer were fired with greater force It is not clear which side better corres-

ponds to Hamannrsquos 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 Therersquos a case to be made for either in-

terpretation But whichever we take the view wersquore given of the Aesthetica in nuce is still of individual

Saumltze piled up one after another as discrete countable units This treatise says the speaker of the Apos-

tille is just a pile of sentences But in an instant our perspective is shifted ldquoLaszligt uns jetzt die Hauptumme

1 Berlin 115

2 Nadler 208

3 Nadler 217 The reference given by Hamann (ldquoProcop De bello persico I 18rdquo) is explained at Haynes 94 note

kkk

23

[hellip] houmlrenldquo1 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 vari-

ous meditations on human life that compose the text of the biblical book2 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

summarymdasha 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 Hamannrsquos 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 readerrsquos confusion It is not Hamannrsquos 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 writings3 it is perhaps not sur-

prising then if the Aesthetica in nuce presents us with hermeneutic difficulties that neither the text itself

nor comparisons with Hamannrsquos other works nor consideration of Hamannrsquos engagement with the issues

of his time are adequate to dispel But the paradox we are considering heremdashthe simultaneous focus on

both columns of the table with which this chapter beganmdashis so fundamental to the thought of the Aesthe-

tica in nuce that unless we can come to terms with it in some way Hamannrsquos 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

1 Ibid

2 Cf Lutherbibel Predig 1213 ldquoLaszligt uns die Hauptumme aller Lehre houmlrenldquo 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 ldquoApostillerdquo likewise to be a undermining of all that goes before it 3 ldquoI no longer understand myself quite differently from then some [writings I understand] better some worse [hellip]

[hellip] 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 stuffrdquo Briefwechsel V p 358 trans in Betz 229

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 ldquodie ilt nolt im bloszligen Bult-frac34a-bi-ren uumlbenmdashmdashund wahrlilt wahrlilt Kinder muumlfrac12en

wir werden wenn wir den Geifrac34 der Wahrheit empfahen ollenldquo1 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 ldquoSpirit of

Truth whom the world cannot receiverdquo (Jn 1417) 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 spiri-

tual pole than to the elemental literal material one But how says Hamannrsquos Nuszlig is this Spirit of Truth

to be received By becoming like children who are just learning to spellmdashand 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 ldquoBultfrac34abirenrdquo syllable by syllable confirms that Hamann is referring to this style of interpreta-

tion Recalling now the table at the start of this chapter in which letters and the ldquospirit of truthrdquo

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 ldquoVerlieren die Elemente des A B C ihre natuumlrlilte

Bedeutung wenn ie in der unendlichen Zuammenetzung willkuumlrlilter Zeilten uns an Ideen erinnern die wo niltt

im Himmel dolt im Gehirn indrdquo2 To this question of course we are meant to answer ldquonordquo But there is

much here that is not unproblematic or at least not simple What for instance is the ldquonatuumlrlilte Bedeu-

tungrdquo of a letter And how if the combination of these signs be arbitrary does it recall for us ideas And

1 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 Hamannrsquos voice at least on Hamannrsquos 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 wersquore 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 Greeksmdashbut 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 coin-

cidence is merely an opportunity to bring the opposites as opposites together But this assumption natu-

ral 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 experiencemdashthis 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 Hamannrsquos writing admits of both a macros-

copic 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 conjunc-

tion 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 them1 considering these various levels of read-

ing 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 simultaneous-

ly 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 interpreta-

tion could be set forth that might allow us to translate Hamannrsquos simultaneously cabalistic and rhapsodic

utterances into academic language or to devise summaries of his arguments in a neatly symbolic lan-

guage 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 oumlffentlilter Gebrault 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 Hamannrsquos thought is useful also here Sltoumlpfung ifrac34 eine Rede an die Kreatur durlt die Kreatur The

Christian overtones of such a formulation are obvious Hamann once offered an encapsulation of his

thought in the word λόγος2 a famously polysemous term every sense of which Hamann intends The in-

timate connection between reason and language is of course the most obvious philosophical implication of

1 For Hamannrsquos defense of this possibility see Chapter 4

2 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 Hamannrsquos philosophy But for Hamann λόγος 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 Hamannrsquos piety placed a great emphasis on the self-emptying of Christ Howev-

er much he might stress Christrsquos humanity and suffering though he remained well within the main-

stream 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 diffi-

culties here But there is a clear parallel between the way a Christian thinks of Christ and how Hamann

thinks ofmdashwell more or less everything Christ is a man who lived for a certain stretch of time in a cer-

tain place and is also the eternal God A word is a string of letters small shapes arbitrarily strung togeth-

er and is also a sign of a concept an immaterial thing existing in the mind Hamann is no dualistmdashit 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

Zufoumlrderfrac34 muumlfrac34e man D George Benon fragen ob die Einheit mit der Mannigfaltigkeit niltt befrac34ehen koumlnne [hellip] Der bultfrac34aumlblilte oder grammatifrac14e der fleifrac14liche oder dialectifrac14e der ka-pernaitifrac14e oder historifrac14e Sinn ind im houmlltfrac34en Grade myfrac34ilt und haumlngen von ollten augen-blicklilten pirituoumlen willkuumlhrlilten Nebenbefrac34immungen und Umfrac34aumlnden ab daszlig man ohne hinauf gen Himmel zu fahren die Schluumlfrac12el ihrer Erkenntnis niltt herabholen kann1

1 Nadler 203 note 23 Hamannrsquos footnote is attached to some lines of Latin verse which conclude the Nutrsquos letter to the Learned Rabbi They come from a poem traditionally and falsely attributed to the Emperor Augustus explain-ing why Vergilrsquos orders to destroy the drafts of the Aeneid were ignored after the poetrsquos death The excerpts are

Ah scelus indignum soluetur litera diues Frangatur potius legum veneranda potestas Liber amp alma Ceres succurrite mdash mdash [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 mdashwhich for Hamann who does not oppose the spirit and the letter in a conventional way is a spiritual richnessmdashis 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

28

It is not that interpretation ought to be literal physical or ldquoCapernaiticrdquo 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 understandingmdashthat is unless one has

attained a certain degree of spiritual insight ndashone will be unable to understand things even in their literal

senses for the spiritual and literal senses are one Hamannrsquos 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 expe-

rience 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 inten-

tion of this line of thought has been least of all to stimulate pious feelings Hamannrsquos goal is not to spiri-

tualize 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 (ldquoDie Sinne aber ind Ceres und Bacltus die Leidenfrac14aftenrdquo [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 simplis-tically 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 Hamannrsquos ability to com-press his meaning into very few and very cryptic words NB The ldquoCapernaiticrdquo sense refers to the sense in which Christ is literally present in the Christian sacrament This unusual word is used derogatively in Lutheran texts (eg the Epitome of the Konkordienformel) to disparage Catholic sacramental teaching Its origins are in Jn 65559 ldquoFor my flesh is meat indeed and my blood is drink in-deed [hellip] These things he said in the synagogue as he taught in Capernaumrdquo 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 Luthe-ran understanding according to which Christ is present in the sacrament in a merely spiritual way is less than per-fectly compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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

Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 im-

plied meanings into the literal tropological allegorical and anagogical senses that Christians have tradi-

tionally 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 ormdashto employ a metaphor

more perhaps more congenial to Hamannmdashdiscerning 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 indul-

gence 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 slo-

gan from the text itselfmdashldquoto speak is to translaterdquomdashand 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 uumlberetzenmdashaus einer Engelpralte in eine Menfrac14enpralte das heifrac34 Gedanken in WortemdashSalten in NamenmdashBilder in Zeilten die poetifrac14 oder kyriologifrac14 hifrac34orifrac14 oder ymbolifrac14 oder hieroglyphifrac14mdashmdashund philoophifrac14 oder ltarakterifrac34ifrac14 eyn koumlnnen1

Here we are given a license to translate Hamannrsquos images into signs of various kinds It is no surprise that

in a footnote attached to this text he derogates the ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs by citing a pas-

sage of Petronius which complains that a new fashion of ldquopuffed-up and formless talkativenessrdquo has cor-

1 Nadler 199

31

rupted speech so that ldquothe standard of eloquence being corrupted has been halted and struck dumbrdquo

and ldquonot even poetry displays a healthy colorrdquo1 By ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs we should un-

derstand something like Leibnizrsquos 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 criti-

cism 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 cor-

respondences out of the text But the other kinds of signsmdashthe poetic or symbolicmdashdo not seem to fall

under the same criticismmdashthese suggest a kind of sign which indeed has meaning but whose interpreta-

tion 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 Hamannrsquos thought allows even for this kind of correspon-

dence 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 Hamannrsquos text but also is deeply compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos text to assert that he intends the literal and symbolic meanings to be taken as

of equal importancemdashfor us to devote our full attention to take up one of the governing metaphors of this

1 N 199 n10 ldquoNuper ventosa isthaec amp enormis loquacitas Athenas ex Asia conmigrauit [hellip] simulque correpta elo-quentiae regula stetit amp obmutuit [hellip] Ac ne carmen quidem sani coloris enituitrdquo

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 discuss-

ing how Hamann refuses to privilege abstract ldquopurely mentalrdquo thought over the particular words in

which that thought finds expression Berlin concludes that ldquofor 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)rdquo1 As an example of one such contradiction Berlin cites the line placed at the head

of this section ldquoto speak is to translaterdquo For Berlin it follows from Hamannrsquos insistence on the unity of

reason and language that no translation no correspondence between words ideas and things can be es-

tablished

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 attend-ing to ideas or to language and through them (because they correspond) to the facts was a method of judging and knowing reality [hellip But the] notion of a correspondence that there is an objective world on one side and on the other man and his instruments ndash lan-guage ideas and so forth ndash attempting to approximate to this objective reality is a false picture There is only a flow of sensations2

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 ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 reproduced3 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 Hamannrsquos treatise but unable to claim any continuity of thought therewith

1 Berlin 81

2 Ibid

3 Though one might question even this Ποταμῷ γὰρ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐμβῆναι δὶς τῷ αὐτῷ and there is no reason to think

any two ldquoflows of sensationrdquo could ever be substantially identical Necessarily every ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos view Berlin is perplexed when confronted with Hamannrsquos open assertion

that translation is possible between ldquohuman speechrdquo and the ldquospeech of angelsrdquo and can only conclude

that Hamann here contradicts himself And for Berlin it is quite to be expected that Hamann should con-

tradict himself he regards Hamannrsquos thought in general as highly creative and intriguing Schwaumlrmerei

of note for its pivotal place in intellectual history but completely insusceptible or unworthy of serious

philosophic attention Berlin appreciates Hamannrsquos criticism of the Enlightenment and his prescient

awareness of the lifeless bloodless conception of manrsquos spiritual life that the Enlighteners would ultimate-

ly produce While Berlin claims to understand Hamannrsquos motives in writing he utterly rejects the content

of his writings which he regards as ldquothe cry of a trapped man hellip who cannot be brought to see that to be

regimented or eliminated is either inevitable or desirablerdquo1 For Berlin Hamann is simply a ldquofanaticrdquo

whose writings consist of ldquopassionate rhetoric and not careful thoughtrdquo and whose opinions are ldquogrotes-

quely one-sided a violent exaggeration of the uniqueness of men and things [and] a passionate hatred of

menrsquos wish to understand the universerdquo2 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 pur-

ism of Hitler3 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 Berlinrsquos judgment that Hamann

1 Berlin 116

2 Berlin 121

3 This accusation is presented in Berlinrsquos book in a series of insinuations we are told for example that Hamannrsquos

ldquohatred and blind irrationalism have fed the stream that has led to social and political irrationalism particularly in German in our own [20

th] centuryrdquo (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 Berlinrsquos 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

34

simply contradicts himself in allowing for the possibility of translation in and out of symbolic ldquolanguag-

esrdquo Hamann has very little patience for ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs which promise patent

meaning and unambiguous interpretation This is perfectly in keeping with his general distaste for effi-

cient 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 ldquopoeticrdquo and ldquosymbolicrdquo signs not to fall under the same fierce criticism as the others

ldquoTo speak is to translaterdquo and ldquocreation is a speech to the creature through the creaturerdquo These

two maxims placed very near to each other in the text1 suggest something of a solution to the problem to

which Berlin directs our attention The conjunction of these lines should remind us that Hamann wheth-

er he directing his attention to literature philology esthetics or any other subject is always also a reli-

gious thinker The archetype of every text is for him the Bible and biblical exegesis is the model and ca-

non 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 Michaelisrsquos ldquodenial of a mystical typological sense

of Scripturerdquo2 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 Mi-

chaelis 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 ldquoTo merdquo says Hamann ldquoevery book is a Biblerdquo3 like the Bible then every

book must be read not merely for its literal sense Berlinrsquos reading of Hamann might be correct if Ha-

1 N 118-119

2 Betz 114

3 Briefwechsel I p 309 trans in Betz 47

35

mann were speaking about the everyday world of words and things understood as a brute fact But Ha-

mann 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 re-

mind us that the interpretation of tongues is also a divine gift1 he admits even that persons may not un-

derstand what they themselves to and say Even a figure such as Voltaire hardly a friend of religious out-

looks testifies for those who have ears to hear to the rightness of Hamannrsquos views

kann man wohl einen glaubwuumlrdigern Zeugen als den unfrac34erblilten Voltaire anfuumlhren wellter bey-nahe die Religion fuumlr den Eckfrac34ein der epifrac14en Dilttkunfrac34 erklaumlrt [hellip] Voltaire aber der Hohe-priefrac34er im Tempel des Gefrac14macks frac14luumlszligt so buumlndig als Kaiphas und denkt frulttbarer als He-rodes2

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 ldquoHo-

hepriefrac34er im Tempelrdquo but also a somewhat Machiavellian politician) justifies the crucifixion of Christ by

arguing that ldquoit is expedient that one man should die for the peoplerdquo3 believing himself to be discussing a

political necessity while as if prophetically describing the Christian doctrine of the atonement And He-

rodrsquos deceitful remark to the Magi ldquothat I might also come and worship himrdquo is taken since Herod was

king of the Jews though a gentile by race to represent the universal destiny of the Christian religion4 This

tradition of interpretation habitual in Biblical exegesis Hamann applies also to analysis of the wordmdashso

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 1210

2 Nadler 204-5

3 John 1150

4 It is telling that Hamann chooses such a contrived and complicated case of biblical parallelism as this one his ar-

gument 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

36

will readily concede that ldquowe see through a glass darklyrdquo1 and that we may not even be able to descry the

true outlines of our own persons in this mirrormdashbut by invoking the language of mirrors2 he locates him-

self within a tradition of thought according to which nature however flawed parts of it may be and how-

ever dulled our ability to discern itmdashis 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 se-

cular 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 ldquoblind heathensrdquo

Blinde Heyden haben die Unilttbarkeit erkannt die der Menfrac14 mit GOTT gemein hat Die verhuumlllte Figur des Leibes das Antlitz des Hauptes und das Aumluszligerfrac34e der Arme ind das ilttbare Sltema in dem wir einher gehn dolt eigentlilt niltts als ein Zeigefinger des verborge-nen Menfrac14en in unsmdash Exemplumque DEI quisque est in imagine parva3

Note that the ldquospiritualrdquo 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 ldquoindex fingersrdquo which direct the inner man to

our attention Hamann let us recall4 does not believe that the target of this ldquoZeigefingerrdquo can always be

1 1 Cor 1312

2 Though Hamann is in some ways a very modern thinker who anticipates 20

th century thought about the kinship of

reason and language he here looks back to the middle ages Cf Alan of Lille ldquoOmnis mundi creatura Quasi liber et pictura Nobis est et speculumrdquo With the sentiment and conceit of this verse Hamann could not agree more 3 N 198 The quotation from the Astronomicon of Manilius (IV895) is mainly noteworthy for its having been writ-

ten by a pagan author while echoing the language of Genesis regarding the ldquoimage of Godrdquo The Cambridge edition of Hamann misenglishes this line rendering it as ldquoEach one is an instance of God in miniaturerdquo This not only loses the connection to the book of Genesis conveyed by the word ldquoimagordquo but puts far too much weight on the word ldquoexemplumrdquo as well An exemplum is not an instance but a type model or analogue ldquoInstancerdquo implies an occur-rence of a rationally determinable kind a ldquotyperdquo or ldquoanaloguerdquo 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

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 circumstancesmdashthis 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 re-

fers to ldquocorrespondencesrdquo of thing and idea and of idea and word these ldquocorrespondencesrdquo are for Berlin

relations between two different things of different types He is quite correct to judge that Hamann consid-

ers 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 meaningmdashhe 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 justifica-

tion 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 ldquoConclusionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos own line that ldquocreation is a speech to the creature

through the creaturerdquo 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 cor-

respond to each other based on no apodictically determinable system knowable a priori but on the gra-

tuitous (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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 com-

pared translation to the art of understanding the image of a tapestry from looking only at the backs of the

threads he remarks ldquoDort [ie in the original contexts of the metaphors borrowed from other authors for

39

Hamannrsquos text] werden ie aber ad illustrationem (zur Verbraumlmung des Rockes) hier ad inuolucrum (zum

Hemde auf bloszligem Leibe) gebrauchtrdquo1 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 deco-

rated 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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos which ac-

cording to the line of interpretation I have explored reveals as much about Hamannrsquos 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 tear-

ing 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 Hamannrsquos motion between images his construction of typological

schemes that resist easy classification and one-for-one interpretation is not antirational raving or obscu-

rantism but rather an alternativemdashand a quite compelling onemdashto 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

1 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 tho-

roughly religious vision of the world If one is willing to do this Hamann is a kind of prophetmdashand the

horned head of Pan on his title-page is also the horned head of Moses1 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 pro-

ducing neat tables of Hamannrsquos 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 Aes-

thetica 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 somethingmdashunless there really is some secret ineffable law of correspondences that un-

ites 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 commen-

tators and writers of senior essays have no right to tread

1 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 agrave la Mosaiumlque (Roth 103 343)

41

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin Isaiah The Magus of the North JG Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism ed Henry

Hardy London John Murray 1993 Betz John After Enlightenment the Post-Secular Vision of JG Hamann Chichester John Wiley amp Sons

2009 Hamann Johann Georg Hamannrsquos Schriften ed Friedrich Roth Berlin G Reimer 1821 (Cited as

ldquoRothrdquo All citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Saumlmtliche Werke ed Josef Nadler Wien Verlag Herder 1950 (Cited as ldquoNad-

lerrdquo Unless otherwise noted all citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Writings on Philosophy and Language trans and ed Kenneth Haynes Cam-

bridge Cambridge UP 2007 (Cited as ldquoHaynesrdquo) Jacobs Carol ldquoHamann Is a Nomadic Writer lsquoAesthetica in nucersquordquo in Skirting the Ethical Stanford Stan-

ford UP 2008 pp 111-130 OrsquoFlaherty James C The Quarrel of Reason with Itself Essays on Hamann Michaelis Lessing Nietzsche Co-

lumbia SC Camden 1988

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 appear-

ance 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 con-

structed this analysis of the Aesthetica in nuce out of a series of separatemdashthough I think not ultimately

contradictorymdashinvestigations 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 wouldnrsquot 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 Hamannrsquos German I have used the old German letters he would have recog-

nized 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 indiffe-

rently 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 lettermdashat 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

Hamannrsquos 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 ma-

naged to salvage any worthwhile thought have at least brought it somewhat closer to the surface

9

Chapter 1 The Unnatural Use of Abstraction

The removal of Α and Ω 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

Verultt es einmal die Iliade zu leen wenn ihr vorher durlt die Abfrac34raction die beiden

Selbfrac34lauter α und ω ausgeilttet habt und agt mir eure Meynung von dem Verfrac34ande und Wohlklange des Diltters

Μῆνιν ειδε Θε Πηληιδε χιλῆος1

In this passage and quotation from Hamannrsquos text traditional images while recognizable for

what they are are combined in a novel way The alpha and omega are symbol of Christ (Rev 18) 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 Hamannrsquos 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 linersquos content

and consider merely what it is as a line Itrsquos the incipit of the Iliad ndash for a student of Greek one of the hex-

ameters that come most readily to mind ndash the opening line of the epic traditionally regarded as the great-

est 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 Priamrsquos neighbors but of the ideals and achievements of classic-

al civilization ndash which though indeed falling as far short of Homerrsquos 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 at-

tempt to understand classical civilization while rejecting Christ Indeed Hamann himself encourages such

a reading of the image when he later cites ldquothe Punic father of the Churchrdquo to the effect that the prophetic

1 Nadler 207

10

books of the Old Testament can only be interpreted correctly when Christ is ldquoread intordquo them ldquoRead the

prophetic books without understanding Christrdquo says Augustine ldquoand what pointlessness and folly will

you find there Understand Christ there and what you read will not only savor but will even intoxicaterdquo1

Hamann takes up and expands this argument providing some context to his surgical removal of vowels

from Homerrsquos line Though as a rhetorician Augustine was acutely aware of their power after his conver-

sion 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 un-

derstood correctly ldquoa dream-like anticipation of Christrdquo2 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 ndash

he is too much of a Lutheran for that But as regards the value of the ancient myths he is rather more ge-

nerous 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 ap-

parent 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 ndash

which is of course not to say that it is not one of the ways Hamann intended it to be read But there must

1 Nadler 212-3 ldquoLege libros propheticos non intellecto CHRISTO agt der punifrac14e Kirltenvater quid tam insipidum amp fatuum inuenies Intellige ibi CHRISTUM non solum sapit quod legis sed etiam inebriatrdquo Hamann gives no citation for this quote a note to the Cambridge translation locates it at Ioh Evang Tract IX3 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 let-

ters than Hamann gives us ndash and even if we lacked the extrinsic familiarity with Homerrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 warriorrsquos

wrath

What then does Hamann mean by this image ldquoSeerdquo he hints to us just after showing us the al-

tered line of Greek ldquothe greater and lesser Masorah of philosophy [Weltweisheit] has overwhelmed the

text of Nature like a Noahrsquos floodrdquo1 As is usual for Hamann this explanation only raises further ques-

tions Nothing here has overwhelmed or flooded anything else and least of all Masorah ndash 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 re-

minded of what was said shortly before Homerrsquos line was introduced

Sie [dh die Mue] wird es wagen den natuumlrlilten Gebrauclt der Sinne von dem unnatuumlrlilten Gebrault der Abfrac34ractionen zu laumlutern wodurlt unere Begriffe von den Dingen eben o ehr verfrac34uumlmmelt werden als der Name des Sltoumlpfers underdruumlckt und gelaumlfrac34ert wird2

The ldquounnatural use of abstractionsrdquo here plays a role parallel to that of the ldquoMasorah of worldly philoso-

phyrdquo mdash 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 ldquoMaso-

1 Nadler 207 Seht die groszlige und kleine Maore der Weltweisheit hat den Text der Natur gleilt einer Suumlndfluth uumlberfrac14wemmt 2 Nadler 207

12

rah of philosophyrdquo then are interpretations that distort and obscure It is this sort of distortion and ob-

scuring that are represented by the removal of the letters alpha and omega from Homerrsquos line we are told

after all that they are removed ldquothrough abstractionrdquo Here Hamann is making a pun on the Latin roots

of the word ldquoabstractionrdquo but it is not merely a pun it is also a hint at one of the hidden connections be-

tween the vowels of the Iliad and Hamannrsquos 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 dam-

aged

And Hamann further suggests that it is because of this failure of interpretation or clarification

that the ldquoGreeksrdquo who abuse abstraction are wrong to think themselves wiser than the ldquochamberlains with

the Gnostic keyrdquo This phrase in itself rather obscure is one of the bridge-phrases in Hamannrsquos text that

point out to us which parts of the tapestry may be connected beneath the surface Chamberlain is Kammer-

herr and between Kammerherr and Kaumlmmerer there is small difference and Kaumlmmerer is the word Luther

used for ldquoeunuchrdquo1 The bridge leads us to another nearby passage of the Aesthetica

Wenn die Leidenfrac14aften Glieder der Unehre ind houmlren ie deswegen auf Waffen der Mannheit zu eyn Verfrac34eht ihr den Bultfrac34aben der Vernunft kluumlger als jener allegorifrac14e Kaumlmmerer der alexandrinifrac14en Kirlte den Bultfrac34aben der Sltrift der ich elbfrac34 zum Verfrac14nittenen maltte um des Himmelreilts willen2

Seen in light of this passage the reference to eunuchs and to Gnosticism is less perplexing While Origen

ndash who I presume to be ldquothat allegorical chamberlain of the Alexandrian churchrdquo mdash is not generally consi-

dered 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

ldquoLeidenfrac14aftenrdquo 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

1 ldquoIn Acts 827 Luther translates as lsquoKaumlmmererrsquo(related to lsquoKammerherrrsquo chamberlain) what the King James Bible translates as lsquoeunuchrsquordquo Haynes 80 note 87 2 Nadler 208

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 ab-

stract 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 ex-

tended Latin quotation from Bacon which is appended as a footnote to the passage quoted above on the

ldquounnatural use of abstractionsrdquo Hamann calls Bacon his ldquoEuthyphrordquo1 the figure who perhaps does not

teach him anymore than Euthyphro taught Socrates but who provides nonetheless the occasion for fruit-

ful 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 repu-

tation as an antirationalist or forerunner of the Sturm und Drang is not here making an argument against

reason as such or against the mindrsquos use of concepts or against thought in general For Bacon is not mak-

ing an argument against philosophy but against bad philosophy ldquoAnd so let men know how far the Idols

of the human mind are from the Ideas of the divine mind hellip 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 ac-

count of the conveniences of liferdquo 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 con-

cepts only so that the truth of things might better shine forth -- indeed for all that he advocates the in-

crease 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 Hamannrsquos critique of the Gnostic chamberlains His prescription is not that we avoid

1 ldquoBacon mein Euthyphronrdquo Nadler 197

14

making use of concepts for things but that we make sure that our concepts have not been verfrac34uumlmmelt and

gelaumlfrac34ert by abuses of reason

The word ldquoabstractionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos 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 foot-

note quotes at considerable length Ovidrsquos retelling of the story ldquoSpem sine corpore amat corpus putat

esse quod umbra est Adstupet ipse sibirdquo1 They who consider the abstractions of their minds to be most

real prefer a (vain) hope or a shadow to the bodymdashthat is the material concrete reality of the natural

world Long after Hamannrsquos 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 sibimdashNarcissus 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 ldquopure reasonrdquo from the mess of passions and contingencies that always surround hu-

man life Hamann prophesies an analogous fate It is this abuse of reason which Hamann means to sug-

gest t the removal of the first and last Greek letters from a line of Homer

And just as Hamann challenges the ldquoGreeksrdquo 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 cor-

rectly or to make any meaningful scientific achievements Just as Hume could not drink a glass of water or

eat an egg without faith2 neither we might paraphrase Hamann could he follow an argument to its con-

1 Metamorphoses III417f quoted at Nadler 210

2 This was a favorite quip of Hamannrsquos and is recorded in several places eg OrsquoFlaherty 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 Hamannrsquos view the supposed opposition of

reason and the passions is a fiction of the Enlighteners his thought has little room for absolute dichoto-

mies and he rejects also this one The passions in fact have an essential role to play even in the exercise

of reason ldquoLeidenfrac14amacr allein giebt Abfrac34ractionen owohl als Hypotheen Haumlnde Fuumlszlige Fluumlgel mdash Bildern und Zei-

chen Geifrac34 Leben und Zungerdquo1 There are perhaps many ways to understand ldquohands feet and wingsrdquo mdash but

between all possible interpretations of these words a basic unity exists They are all parts of the body asso-

ciated with motion and action And so abstractions and hypothesesmdashdry conclusions of the reasonmdashare

made active and mobile by the passions Likewise images and signs are given ldquolife and tonguerdquo 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 un-

mutilated 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 Hamannrsquos style and the symbolic ldquovocabularyrdquo of the Aesthetica in nuce The connection of Ha-

mannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos thought

1 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

Verucht es einmal die Iliade zu leen wenn ihr vorher durch die Abfrac34raction die beyden

Selbfrac34lauter α und ω ausgesichtet habt1 ldquoSelbstlautrdquo and ldquoMitlautrdquo ldquoConsonantrdquo and ldquovowelrdquo2 These are evocative termsmdashnot 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 con-

cepts 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 ldquoletter of the voicerdquo is utterable on its own while a littera consonans

must be ldquosounded withrdquo something else This way of articulating the distinction between independent

vowels and dependent consonants was a commonplace in the eighteenth century3 and would not have

been unfamiliar to Hamann even if the etymology of ldquoSelbstlautrdquo did not suggest it If we translate then

a bit freely we might say ldquothat which is removed from the Iliad by abstraction is that without which

1 Nadler 207

2 German preserves also more Latinate forms ldquoVokalrdquo and ldquoKonsonantrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos thought in the Aesthetica in nuce 3 John Hensons New Latin Grammar for instance published at Nottingham in 1744 explains ldquoA Vowel is a letter

which makes a full and perfect Sound of it Self as a o A Conſonant is a Letter that has no Sound of it Self without a Vowelrdquo And in a Verbesserte and Erleichterte Lateinische Grammatica published at Halle in 1763 (a year after the Cru-sades of the Philologist saw light) we read ldquoDen Anfang in der Lateinifrac14en Spralten maltt man von den Bultfrac34abenhellip Und diee werden eingetheilet in vocales oder elbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautende und consonantes oder mitlautendemitlautendemitlautendemitlautende o niltt ehe koumlnnen ausgeprolten werden als bis ein vocalis dazukoumlmmtrdquo 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 httpbooksgooglecombooksid=T5ECAAAAQAAJ and the second at httpbooksgooglecombooksid=F9oVAAAAYAAJ

17

there can be no speechrdquo which without any further interpretation already at least appears to imply much

more than a matter of rearranged letters

As we have seen the ldquoabstractionrdquo of the letters from the line of the Iliad corresponds in the typo-

logical 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 pas-

sions in order for them to have any power to persuade It is not that reasoned arguments even when ab-

stract are otiose or parasiticalmdashthese 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 ldquovocalizedrdquo

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

Hamannrsquos 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 unpointedmdashlike 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 durlt 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 scripturesmdashwritten by God but one must bring onersquos

own vowels to read it

But is this not going too far While we may not just have misrepresented Hamannrsquos 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 doesnrsquot make sense as

written without those vowels itrsquos still easily interpretable If Hamann had not named it as a line from the

Iliad any educated person on seeing the word microῆνιν 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 miss-

ing places in the line the shape of the dactyls and the grammatical possibilities offered by the Greek lan-

guage 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 En-

lightened 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 objec-

tion of this scientist would be absurd because it would miss the point of Hamannrsquos critiquemdashhe goes

around the backs of the Enlighteners contending that they are moved by passion even in what they be-

lieve to be their exercises of pure reason that the arguments they invoke to defend their conception of rea-

son 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 ldquoTurbatverserdquo1 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 Hamannrsquos altered line from the Iliad) But it refers most specif-

ically 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 Θεά ἄειδε μῆνιν Ἀχιλῆος Πηληϊάδεω In a certain sense there is nothing of Homerrsquos 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 ob-

viously 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 ldquogoddessrdquo and not ldquowrathrdquo In the Turbatverse of nature then the superficial meaning of the speak-

ing 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 niltts als Turbatvere und disiecti membra poetae zu unerm Gebrault uumlbrig Diee zu ammeln ifrac34 des Gelehrten ie auszulegen des Philoophen ie naltzuahmenmdashoder nolt kuumlhnermdash mdashie in Gefrac14ick zu bringen des Poeten befrac14eiden Theil2

1 Nadler 198

2 Nadler 199

20

The hierarchy that is here established with the scholar philosopher and poet presented with responsibili-

ties of increasing creativity should not surprise us as it is exactly in line with what Hamann says else-

where about the high dignity of the poet to whom is compared even God himself1 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 ade-

quate 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 consti-

tuent 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

1 ldquoDer Poet am Anfange der Tagerdquo Nadler 206

21

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

Hamannrsquos coincidentia oppositorum is not any kind of dialectical synthesis Creation is speech ndash so is Hamannrsquos 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 Aesthe-

tica in nuce relate to the argument he makes about the proper use of reason There is significant ldquooverlaprdquo

here the various images and descriptions Hamann uses are parallel making the same argument in differ-

ent ways From what we have already said we can derive a kind of table showing how the various images

used map onto Hamannrsquos argument about the reason and the passions

Passions Reason

Vowels Consonants Words Mere arrangements of letters Poetic Meter Turbatverse God Nature Christianity Classical civilization Alpha and Omega 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 refus-

es 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 to-

gether 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 ldquoit is not clear how far he understood it and he certainly gives it a

1 Though not in the Aesthetica See eg Betz 28 note 17

22

sense of his ownrdquo1 In fact it is not easy to see where the ldquocoincidencerdquo comes in at all Regarding every

text every object as part of his ldquoBiblerdquo 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 themselvesmdashto

the letters of a text (in literary criticism) and the phenomena of nature unreduced to their universal ra-

tional 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 pro-

duced of these elements He beholds in a single vision der rollende Donner der Beredamkeit and der

einylbicltte Blitz2 This strangemdashor strange to us and Hamann would not hesitate to say that our sensibili-

ties need correctionmdashthis strange conjunction of opposites confronts us even on the title page of the Aes-

thetica in nuce Eine Rhapodie in kabbalifrac34ifrac14er Proe A rhapsodymdasha stitching-together of pieces into an ar-

tistic unitymdashthat 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 ldquoApostillerdquo ndash whether Hamann himself some per-

sonified commentator or anyone else ndash remarks that the author of the Aesthetica in nuce ldquohat Satz und

Satz zuammengereltnet wie man die Pfeile auf einem Sltlalttfelde zaumlhltrdquo3 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 Romansrsquo shots though fewer were fired with greater force It is not clear which side better corres-

ponds to Hamannrsquos 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 Therersquos a case to be made for either in-

terpretation But whichever we take the view wersquore given of the Aesthetica in nuce is still of individual

Saumltze piled up one after another as discrete countable units This treatise says the speaker of the Apos-

tille is just a pile of sentences But in an instant our perspective is shifted ldquoLaszligt uns jetzt die Hauptumme

1 Berlin 115

2 Nadler 208

3 Nadler 217 The reference given by Hamann (ldquoProcop De bello persico I 18rdquo) is explained at Haynes 94 note

kkk

23

[hellip] houmlrenldquo1 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 vari-

ous meditations on human life that compose the text of the biblical book2 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

summarymdasha 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 Hamannrsquos 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 readerrsquos confusion It is not Hamannrsquos 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 writings3 it is perhaps not sur-

prising then if the Aesthetica in nuce presents us with hermeneutic difficulties that neither the text itself

nor comparisons with Hamannrsquos other works nor consideration of Hamannrsquos engagement with the issues

of his time are adequate to dispel But the paradox we are considering heremdashthe simultaneous focus on

both columns of the table with which this chapter beganmdashis so fundamental to the thought of the Aesthe-

tica in nuce that unless we can come to terms with it in some way Hamannrsquos 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

1 Ibid

2 Cf Lutherbibel Predig 1213 ldquoLaszligt uns die Hauptumme aller Lehre houmlrenldquo 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 ldquoApostillerdquo likewise to be a undermining of all that goes before it 3 ldquoI no longer understand myself quite differently from then some [writings I understand] better some worse [hellip]

[hellip] 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 stuffrdquo Briefwechsel V p 358 trans in Betz 229

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 ldquodie ilt nolt im bloszligen Bult-frac34a-bi-ren uumlbenmdashmdashund wahrlilt wahrlilt Kinder muumlfrac12en

wir werden wenn wir den Geifrac34 der Wahrheit empfahen ollenldquo1 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 ldquoSpirit of

Truth whom the world cannot receiverdquo (Jn 1417) 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 spiri-

tual pole than to the elemental literal material one But how says Hamannrsquos Nuszlig is this Spirit of Truth

to be received By becoming like children who are just learning to spellmdashand 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 ldquoBultfrac34abirenrdquo syllable by syllable confirms that Hamann is referring to this style of interpreta-

tion Recalling now the table at the start of this chapter in which letters and the ldquospirit of truthrdquo

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 ldquoVerlieren die Elemente des A B C ihre natuumlrlilte

Bedeutung wenn ie in der unendlichen Zuammenetzung willkuumlrlilter Zeilten uns an Ideen erinnern die wo niltt

im Himmel dolt im Gehirn indrdquo2 To this question of course we are meant to answer ldquonordquo But there is

much here that is not unproblematic or at least not simple What for instance is the ldquonatuumlrlilte Bedeu-

tungrdquo of a letter And how if the combination of these signs be arbitrary does it recall for us ideas And

1 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 Hamannrsquos voice at least on Hamannrsquos 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 wersquore 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 Greeksmdashbut 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 coin-

cidence is merely an opportunity to bring the opposites as opposites together But this assumption natu-

ral 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 experiencemdashthis 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 Hamannrsquos writing admits of both a macros-

copic 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 conjunc-

tion 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 them1 considering these various levels of read-

ing 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 simultaneous-

ly 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 interpreta-

tion could be set forth that might allow us to translate Hamannrsquos simultaneously cabalistic and rhapsodic

utterances into academic language or to devise summaries of his arguments in a neatly symbolic lan-

guage 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 oumlffentlilter Gebrault 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 Hamannrsquos thought is useful also here Sltoumlpfung ifrac34 eine Rede an die Kreatur durlt die Kreatur The

Christian overtones of such a formulation are obvious Hamann once offered an encapsulation of his

thought in the word λόγος2 a famously polysemous term every sense of which Hamann intends The in-

timate connection between reason and language is of course the most obvious philosophical implication of

1 For Hamannrsquos defense of this possibility see Chapter 4

2 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 Hamannrsquos philosophy But for Hamann λόγος 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 Hamannrsquos piety placed a great emphasis on the self-emptying of Christ Howev-

er much he might stress Christrsquos humanity and suffering though he remained well within the main-

stream 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 diffi-

culties here But there is a clear parallel between the way a Christian thinks of Christ and how Hamann

thinks ofmdashwell more or less everything Christ is a man who lived for a certain stretch of time in a cer-

tain place and is also the eternal God A word is a string of letters small shapes arbitrarily strung togeth-

er and is also a sign of a concept an immaterial thing existing in the mind Hamann is no dualistmdashit 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

Zufoumlrderfrac34 muumlfrac34e man D George Benon fragen ob die Einheit mit der Mannigfaltigkeit niltt befrac34ehen koumlnne [hellip] Der bultfrac34aumlblilte oder grammatifrac14e der fleifrac14liche oder dialectifrac14e der ka-pernaitifrac14e oder historifrac14e Sinn ind im houmlltfrac34en Grade myfrac34ilt und haumlngen von ollten augen-blicklilten pirituoumlen willkuumlhrlilten Nebenbefrac34immungen und Umfrac34aumlnden ab daszlig man ohne hinauf gen Himmel zu fahren die Schluumlfrac12el ihrer Erkenntnis niltt herabholen kann1

1 Nadler 203 note 23 Hamannrsquos footnote is attached to some lines of Latin verse which conclude the Nutrsquos letter to the Learned Rabbi They come from a poem traditionally and falsely attributed to the Emperor Augustus explain-ing why Vergilrsquos orders to destroy the drafts of the Aeneid were ignored after the poetrsquos death The excerpts are

Ah scelus indignum soluetur litera diues Frangatur potius legum veneranda potestas Liber amp alma Ceres succurrite mdash mdash [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 mdashwhich for Hamann who does not oppose the spirit and the letter in a conventional way is a spiritual richnessmdashis 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

28

It is not that interpretation ought to be literal physical or ldquoCapernaiticrdquo 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 understandingmdashthat is unless one has

attained a certain degree of spiritual insight ndashone will be unable to understand things even in their literal

senses for the spiritual and literal senses are one Hamannrsquos 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 expe-

rience 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 inten-

tion of this line of thought has been least of all to stimulate pious feelings Hamannrsquos goal is not to spiri-

tualize 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 (ldquoDie Sinne aber ind Ceres und Bacltus die Leidenfrac14aftenrdquo [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 simplis-tically 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 Hamannrsquos ability to com-press his meaning into very few and very cryptic words NB The ldquoCapernaiticrdquo sense refers to the sense in which Christ is literally present in the Christian sacrament This unusual word is used derogatively in Lutheran texts (eg the Epitome of the Konkordienformel) to disparage Catholic sacramental teaching Its origins are in Jn 65559 ldquoFor my flesh is meat indeed and my blood is drink in-deed [hellip] These things he said in the synagogue as he taught in Capernaumrdquo 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 Luthe-ran understanding according to which Christ is present in the sacrament in a merely spiritual way is less than per-fectly compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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

Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 im-

plied meanings into the literal tropological allegorical and anagogical senses that Christians have tradi-

tionally 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 ormdashto employ a metaphor

more perhaps more congenial to Hamannmdashdiscerning 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 indul-

gence 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 slo-

gan from the text itselfmdashldquoto speak is to translaterdquomdashand 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 uumlberetzenmdashaus einer Engelpralte in eine Menfrac14enpralte das heifrac34 Gedanken in WortemdashSalten in NamenmdashBilder in Zeilten die poetifrac14 oder kyriologifrac14 hifrac34orifrac14 oder ymbolifrac14 oder hieroglyphifrac14mdashmdashund philoophifrac14 oder ltarakterifrac34ifrac14 eyn koumlnnen1

Here we are given a license to translate Hamannrsquos images into signs of various kinds It is no surprise that

in a footnote attached to this text he derogates the ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs by citing a pas-

sage of Petronius which complains that a new fashion of ldquopuffed-up and formless talkativenessrdquo has cor-

1 Nadler 199

31

rupted speech so that ldquothe standard of eloquence being corrupted has been halted and struck dumbrdquo

and ldquonot even poetry displays a healthy colorrdquo1 By ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs we should un-

derstand something like Leibnizrsquos 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 criti-

cism 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 cor-

respondences out of the text But the other kinds of signsmdashthe poetic or symbolicmdashdo not seem to fall

under the same criticismmdashthese suggest a kind of sign which indeed has meaning but whose interpreta-

tion 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 Hamannrsquos thought allows even for this kind of correspon-

dence 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 Hamannrsquos text but also is deeply compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos text to assert that he intends the literal and symbolic meanings to be taken as

of equal importancemdashfor us to devote our full attention to take up one of the governing metaphors of this

1 N 199 n10 ldquoNuper ventosa isthaec amp enormis loquacitas Athenas ex Asia conmigrauit [hellip] simulque correpta elo-quentiae regula stetit amp obmutuit [hellip] Ac ne carmen quidem sani coloris enituitrdquo

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 discuss-

ing how Hamann refuses to privilege abstract ldquopurely mentalrdquo thought over the particular words in

which that thought finds expression Berlin concludes that ldquofor 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)rdquo1 As an example of one such contradiction Berlin cites the line placed at the head

of this section ldquoto speak is to translaterdquo For Berlin it follows from Hamannrsquos insistence on the unity of

reason and language that no translation no correspondence between words ideas and things can be es-

tablished

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 attend-ing to ideas or to language and through them (because they correspond) to the facts was a method of judging and knowing reality [hellip But the] notion of a correspondence that there is an objective world on one side and on the other man and his instruments ndash lan-guage ideas and so forth ndash attempting to approximate to this objective reality is a false picture There is only a flow of sensations2

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 ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 reproduced3 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 Hamannrsquos treatise but unable to claim any continuity of thought therewith

1 Berlin 81

2 Ibid

3 Though one might question even this Ποταμῷ γὰρ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐμβῆναι δὶς τῷ αὐτῷ and there is no reason to think

any two ldquoflows of sensationrdquo could ever be substantially identical Necessarily every ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos view Berlin is perplexed when confronted with Hamannrsquos open assertion

that translation is possible between ldquohuman speechrdquo and the ldquospeech of angelsrdquo and can only conclude

that Hamann here contradicts himself And for Berlin it is quite to be expected that Hamann should con-

tradict himself he regards Hamannrsquos thought in general as highly creative and intriguing Schwaumlrmerei

of note for its pivotal place in intellectual history but completely insusceptible or unworthy of serious

philosophic attention Berlin appreciates Hamannrsquos criticism of the Enlightenment and his prescient

awareness of the lifeless bloodless conception of manrsquos spiritual life that the Enlighteners would ultimate-

ly produce While Berlin claims to understand Hamannrsquos motives in writing he utterly rejects the content

of his writings which he regards as ldquothe cry of a trapped man hellip who cannot be brought to see that to be

regimented or eliminated is either inevitable or desirablerdquo1 For Berlin Hamann is simply a ldquofanaticrdquo

whose writings consist of ldquopassionate rhetoric and not careful thoughtrdquo and whose opinions are ldquogrotes-

quely one-sided a violent exaggeration of the uniqueness of men and things [and] a passionate hatred of

menrsquos wish to understand the universerdquo2 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 pur-

ism of Hitler3 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 Berlinrsquos judgment that Hamann

1 Berlin 116

2 Berlin 121

3 This accusation is presented in Berlinrsquos book in a series of insinuations we are told for example that Hamannrsquos

ldquohatred and blind irrationalism have fed the stream that has led to social and political irrationalism particularly in German in our own [20

th] centuryrdquo (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 Berlinrsquos 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

34

simply contradicts himself in allowing for the possibility of translation in and out of symbolic ldquolanguag-

esrdquo Hamann has very little patience for ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs which promise patent

meaning and unambiguous interpretation This is perfectly in keeping with his general distaste for effi-

cient 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 ldquopoeticrdquo and ldquosymbolicrdquo signs not to fall under the same fierce criticism as the others

ldquoTo speak is to translaterdquo and ldquocreation is a speech to the creature through the creaturerdquo These

two maxims placed very near to each other in the text1 suggest something of a solution to the problem to

which Berlin directs our attention The conjunction of these lines should remind us that Hamann wheth-

er he directing his attention to literature philology esthetics or any other subject is always also a reli-

gious thinker The archetype of every text is for him the Bible and biblical exegesis is the model and ca-

non 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 Michaelisrsquos ldquodenial of a mystical typological sense

of Scripturerdquo2 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 Mi-

chaelis 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 ldquoTo merdquo says Hamann ldquoevery book is a Biblerdquo3 like the Bible then every

book must be read not merely for its literal sense Berlinrsquos reading of Hamann might be correct if Ha-

1 N 118-119

2 Betz 114

3 Briefwechsel I p 309 trans in Betz 47

35

mann were speaking about the everyday world of words and things understood as a brute fact But Ha-

mann 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 re-

mind us that the interpretation of tongues is also a divine gift1 he admits even that persons may not un-

derstand what they themselves to and say Even a figure such as Voltaire hardly a friend of religious out-

looks testifies for those who have ears to hear to the rightness of Hamannrsquos views

kann man wohl einen glaubwuumlrdigern Zeugen als den unfrac34erblilten Voltaire anfuumlhren wellter bey-nahe die Religion fuumlr den Eckfrac34ein der epifrac14en Dilttkunfrac34 erklaumlrt [hellip] Voltaire aber der Hohe-priefrac34er im Tempel des Gefrac14macks frac14luumlszligt so buumlndig als Kaiphas und denkt frulttbarer als He-rodes2

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 ldquoHo-

hepriefrac34er im Tempelrdquo but also a somewhat Machiavellian politician) justifies the crucifixion of Christ by

arguing that ldquoit is expedient that one man should die for the peoplerdquo3 believing himself to be discussing a

political necessity while as if prophetically describing the Christian doctrine of the atonement And He-

rodrsquos deceitful remark to the Magi ldquothat I might also come and worship himrdquo is taken since Herod was

king of the Jews though a gentile by race to represent the universal destiny of the Christian religion4 This

tradition of interpretation habitual in Biblical exegesis Hamann applies also to analysis of the wordmdashso

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 1210

2 Nadler 204-5

3 John 1150

4 It is telling that Hamann chooses such a contrived and complicated case of biblical parallelism as this one his ar-

gument 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

36

will readily concede that ldquowe see through a glass darklyrdquo1 and that we may not even be able to descry the

true outlines of our own persons in this mirrormdashbut by invoking the language of mirrors2 he locates him-

self within a tradition of thought according to which nature however flawed parts of it may be and how-

ever dulled our ability to discern itmdashis 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 se-

cular 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 ldquoblind heathensrdquo

Blinde Heyden haben die Unilttbarkeit erkannt die der Menfrac14 mit GOTT gemein hat Die verhuumlllte Figur des Leibes das Antlitz des Hauptes und das Aumluszligerfrac34e der Arme ind das ilttbare Sltema in dem wir einher gehn dolt eigentlilt niltts als ein Zeigefinger des verborge-nen Menfrac14en in unsmdash Exemplumque DEI quisque est in imagine parva3

Note that the ldquospiritualrdquo 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 ldquoindex fingersrdquo which direct the inner man to

our attention Hamann let us recall4 does not believe that the target of this ldquoZeigefingerrdquo can always be

1 1 Cor 1312

2 Though Hamann is in some ways a very modern thinker who anticipates 20

th century thought about the kinship of

reason and language he here looks back to the middle ages Cf Alan of Lille ldquoOmnis mundi creatura Quasi liber et pictura Nobis est et speculumrdquo With the sentiment and conceit of this verse Hamann could not agree more 3 N 198 The quotation from the Astronomicon of Manilius (IV895) is mainly noteworthy for its having been writ-

ten by a pagan author while echoing the language of Genesis regarding the ldquoimage of Godrdquo The Cambridge edition of Hamann misenglishes this line rendering it as ldquoEach one is an instance of God in miniaturerdquo This not only loses the connection to the book of Genesis conveyed by the word ldquoimagordquo but puts far too much weight on the word ldquoexemplumrdquo as well An exemplum is not an instance but a type model or analogue ldquoInstancerdquo implies an occur-rence of a rationally determinable kind a ldquotyperdquo or ldquoanaloguerdquo 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

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 circumstancesmdashthis 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 re-

fers to ldquocorrespondencesrdquo of thing and idea and of idea and word these ldquocorrespondencesrdquo are for Berlin

relations between two different things of different types He is quite correct to judge that Hamann consid-

ers 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 meaningmdashhe 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 justifica-

tion 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 ldquoConclusionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos own line that ldquocreation is a speech to the creature

through the creaturerdquo 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 cor-

respond to each other based on no apodictically determinable system knowable a priori but on the gra-

tuitous (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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 com-

pared translation to the art of understanding the image of a tapestry from looking only at the backs of the

threads he remarks ldquoDort [ie in the original contexts of the metaphors borrowed from other authors for

39

Hamannrsquos text] werden ie aber ad illustrationem (zur Verbraumlmung des Rockes) hier ad inuolucrum (zum

Hemde auf bloszligem Leibe) gebrauchtrdquo1 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 deco-

rated 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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos which ac-

cording to the line of interpretation I have explored reveals as much about Hamannrsquos 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 tear-

ing 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 Hamannrsquos motion between images his construction of typological

schemes that resist easy classification and one-for-one interpretation is not antirational raving or obscu-

rantism but rather an alternativemdashand a quite compelling onemdashto 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

1 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 tho-

roughly religious vision of the world If one is willing to do this Hamann is a kind of prophetmdashand the

horned head of Pan on his title-page is also the horned head of Moses1 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 pro-

ducing neat tables of Hamannrsquos 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 Aes-

thetica 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 somethingmdashunless there really is some secret ineffable law of correspondences that un-

ites 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 commen-

tators and writers of senior essays have no right to tread

1 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 agrave la Mosaiumlque (Roth 103 343)

41

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin Isaiah The Magus of the North JG Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism ed Henry

Hardy London John Murray 1993 Betz John After Enlightenment the Post-Secular Vision of JG Hamann Chichester John Wiley amp Sons

2009 Hamann Johann Georg Hamannrsquos Schriften ed Friedrich Roth Berlin G Reimer 1821 (Cited as

ldquoRothrdquo All citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Saumlmtliche Werke ed Josef Nadler Wien Verlag Herder 1950 (Cited as ldquoNad-

lerrdquo Unless otherwise noted all citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Writings on Philosophy and Language trans and ed Kenneth Haynes Cam-

bridge Cambridge UP 2007 (Cited as ldquoHaynesrdquo) Jacobs Carol ldquoHamann Is a Nomadic Writer lsquoAesthetica in nucersquordquo in Skirting the Ethical Stanford Stan-

ford UP 2008 pp 111-130 OrsquoFlaherty James C The Quarrel of Reason with Itself Essays on Hamann Michaelis Lessing Nietzsche Co-

lumbia SC Camden 1988

8

of this essay on the importance Hamann places on the individuality of letters which cannot be indiffe-

rently 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 lettermdashat 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

Hamannrsquos 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 ma-

naged to salvage any worthwhile thought have at least brought it somewhat closer to the surface

9

Chapter 1 The Unnatural Use of Abstraction

The removal of Α and Ω 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

Verultt es einmal die Iliade zu leen wenn ihr vorher durlt die Abfrac34raction die beiden

Selbfrac34lauter α und ω ausgeilttet habt und agt mir eure Meynung von dem Verfrac34ande und Wohlklange des Diltters

Μῆνιν ειδε Θε Πηληιδε χιλῆος1

In this passage and quotation from Hamannrsquos text traditional images while recognizable for

what they are are combined in a novel way The alpha and omega are symbol of Christ (Rev 18) 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 Hamannrsquos 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 linersquos content

and consider merely what it is as a line Itrsquos the incipit of the Iliad ndash for a student of Greek one of the hex-

ameters that come most readily to mind ndash the opening line of the epic traditionally regarded as the great-

est 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 Priamrsquos neighbors but of the ideals and achievements of classic-

al civilization ndash which though indeed falling as far short of Homerrsquos 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 at-

tempt to understand classical civilization while rejecting Christ Indeed Hamann himself encourages such

a reading of the image when he later cites ldquothe Punic father of the Churchrdquo to the effect that the prophetic

1 Nadler 207

10

books of the Old Testament can only be interpreted correctly when Christ is ldquoread intordquo them ldquoRead the

prophetic books without understanding Christrdquo says Augustine ldquoand what pointlessness and folly will

you find there Understand Christ there and what you read will not only savor but will even intoxicaterdquo1

Hamann takes up and expands this argument providing some context to his surgical removal of vowels

from Homerrsquos line Though as a rhetorician Augustine was acutely aware of their power after his conver-

sion 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 un-

derstood correctly ldquoa dream-like anticipation of Christrdquo2 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 ndash

he is too much of a Lutheran for that But as regards the value of the ancient myths he is rather more ge-

nerous 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 ap-

parent 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 ndash

which is of course not to say that it is not one of the ways Hamann intended it to be read But there must

1 Nadler 212-3 ldquoLege libros propheticos non intellecto CHRISTO agt der punifrac14e Kirltenvater quid tam insipidum amp fatuum inuenies Intellige ibi CHRISTUM non solum sapit quod legis sed etiam inebriatrdquo Hamann gives no citation for this quote a note to the Cambridge translation locates it at Ioh Evang Tract IX3 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 let-

ters than Hamann gives us ndash and even if we lacked the extrinsic familiarity with Homerrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 warriorrsquos

wrath

What then does Hamann mean by this image ldquoSeerdquo he hints to us just after showing us the al-

tered line of Greek ldquothe greater and lesser Masorah of philosophy [Weltweisheit] has overwhelmed the

text of Nature like a Noahrsquos floodrdquo1 As is usual for Hamann this explanation only raises further ques-

tions Nothing here has overwhelmed or flooded anything else and least of all Masorah ndash 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 re-

minded of what was said shortly before Homerrsquos line was introduced

Sie [dh die Mue] wird es wagen den natuumlrlilten Gebrauclt der Sinne von dem unnatuumlrlilten Gebrault der Abfrac34ractionen zu laumlutern wodurlt unere Begriffe von den Dingen eben o ehr verfrac34uumlmmelt werden als der Name des Sltoumlpfers underdruumlckt und gelaumlfrac34ert wird2

The ldquounnatural use of abstractionsrdquo here plays a role parallel to that of the ldquoMasorah of worldly philoso-

phyrdquo mdash 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 ldquoMaso-

1 Nadler 207 Seht die groszlige und kleine Maore der Weltweisheit hat den Text der Natur gleilt einer Suumlndfluth uumlberfrac14wemmt 2 Nadler 207

12

rah of philosophyrdquo then are interpretations that distort and obscure It is this sort of distortion and ob-

scuring that are represented by the removal of the letters alpha and omega from Homerrsquos line we are told

after all that they are removed ldquothrough abstractionrdquo Here Hamann is making a pun on the Latin roots

of the word ldquoabstractionrdquo but it is not merely a pun it is also a hint at one of the hidden connections be-

tween the vowels of the Iliad and Hamannrsquos 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 dam-

aged

And Hamann further suggests that it is because of this failure of interpretation or clarification

that the ldquoGreeksrdquo who abuse abstraction are wrong to think themselves wiser than the ldquochamberlains with

the Gnostic keyrdquo This phrase in itself rather obscure is one of the bridge-phrases in Hamannrsquos text that

point out to us which parts of the tapestry may be connected beneath the surface Chamberlain is Kammer-

herr and between Kammerherr and Kaumlmmerer there is small difference and Kaumlmmerer is the word Luther

used for ldquoeunuchrdquo1 The bridge leads us to another nearby passage of the Aesthetica

Wenn die Leidenfrac14aften Glieder der Unehre ind houmlren ie deswegen auf Waffen der Mannheit zu eyn Verfrac34eht ihr den Bultfrac34aben der Vernunft kluumlger als jener allegorifrac14e Kaumlmmerer der alexandrinifrac14en Kirlte den Bultfrac34aben der Sltrift der ich elbfrac34 zum Verfrac14nittenen maltte um des Himmelreilts willen2

Seen in light of this passage the reference to eunuchs and to Gnosticism is less perplexing While Origen

ndash who I presume to be ldquothat allegorical chamberlain of the Alexandrian churchrdquo mdash is not generally consi-

dered 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

ldquoLeidenfrac14aftenrdquo 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

1 ldquoIn Acts 827 Luther translates as lsquoKaumlmmererrsquo(related to lsquoKammerherrrsquo chamberlain) what the King James Bible translates as lsquoeunuchrsquordquo Haynes 80 note 87 2 Nadler 208

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 ab-

stract 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 ex-

tended Latin quotation from Bacon which is appended as a footnote to the passage quoted above on the

ldquounnatural use of abstractionsrdquo Hamann calls Bacon his ldquoEuthyphrordquo1 the figure who perhaps does not

teach him anymore than Euthyphro taught Socrates but who provides nonetheless the occasion for fruit-

ful 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 repu-

tation as an antirationalist or forerunner of the Sturm und Drang is not here making an argument against

reason as such or against the mindrsquos use of concepts or against thought in general For Bacon is not mak-

ing an argument against philosophy but against bad philosophy ldquoAnd so let men know how far the Idols

of the human mind are from the Ideas of the divine mind hellip 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 ac-

count of the conveniences of liferdquo 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 con-

cepts only so that the truth of things might better shine forth -- indeed for all that he advocates the in-

crease 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 Hamannrsquos critique of the Gnostic chamberlains His prescription is not that we avoid

1 ldquoBacon mein Euthyphronrdquo Nadler 197

14

making use of concepts for things but that we make sure that our concepts have not been verfrac34uumlmmelt and

gelaumlfrac34ert by abuses of reason

The word ldquoabstractionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos 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 foot-

note quotes at considerable length Ovidrsquos retelling of the story ldquoSpem sine corpore amat corpus putat

esse quod umbra est Adstupet ipse sibirdquo1 They who consider the abstractions of their minds to be most

real prefer a (vain) hope or a shadow to the bodymdashthat is the material concrete reality of the natural

world Long after Hamannrsquos 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 sibimdashNarcissus 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 ldquopure reasonrdquo from the mess of passions and contingencies that always surround hu-

man life Hamann prophesies an analogous fate It is this abuse of reason which Hamann means to sug-

gest t the removal of the first and last Greek letters from a line of Homer

And just as Hamann challenges the ldquoGreeksrdquo 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 cor-

rectly or to make any meaningful scientific achievements Just as Hume could not drink a glass of water or

eat an egg without faith2 neither we might paraphrase Hamann could he follow an argument to its con-

1 Metamorphoses III417f quoted at Nadler 210

2 This was a favorite quip of Hamannrsquos and is recorded in several places eg OrsquoFlaherty 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 Hamannrsquos view the supposed opposition of

reason and the passions is a fiction of the Enlighteners his thought has little room for absolute dichoto-

mies and he rejects also this one The passions in fact have an essential role to play even in the exercise

of reason ldquoLeidenfrac14amacr allein giebt Abfrac34ractionen owohl als Hypotheen Haumlnde Fuumlszlige Fluumlgel mdash Bildern und Zei-

chen Geifrac34 Leben und Zungerdquo1 There are perhaps many ways to understand ldquohands feet and wingsrdquo mdash but

between all possible interpretations of these words a basic unity exists They are all parts of the body asso-

ciated with motion and action And so abstractions and hypothesesmdashdry conclusions of the reasonmdashare

made active and mobile by the passions Likewise images and signs are given ldquolife and tonguerdquo 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 un-

mutilated 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 Hamannrsquos style and the symbolic ldquovocabularyrdquo of the Aesthetica in nuce The connection of Ha-

mannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos thought

1 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

Verucht es einmal die Iliade zu leen wenn ihr vorher durch die Abfrac34raction die beyden

Selbfrac34lauter α und ω ausgesichtet habt1 ldquoSelbstlautrdquo and ldquoMitlautrdquo ldquoConsonantrdquo and ldquovowelrdquo2 These are evocative termsmdashnot 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 con-

cepts 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 ldquoletter of the voicerdquo is utterable on its own while a littera consonans

must be ldquosounded withrdquo something else This way of articulating the distinction between independent

vowels and dependent consonants was a commonplace in the eighteenth century3 and would not have

been unfamiliar to Hamann even if the etymology of ldquoSelbstlautrdquo did not suggest it If we translate then

a bit freely we might say ldquothat which is removed from the Iliad by abstraction is that without which

1 Nadler 207

2 German preserves also more Latinate forms ldquoVokalrdquo and ldquoKonsonantrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos thought in the Aesthetica in nuce 3 John Hensons New Latin Grammar for instance published at Nottingham in 1744 explains ldquoA Vowel is a letter

which makes a full and perfect Sound of it Self as a o A Conſonant is a Letter that has no Sound of it Self without a Vowelrdquo And in a Verbesserte and Erleichterte Lateinische Grammatica published at Halle in 1763 (a year after the Cru-sades of the Philologist saw light) we read ldquoDen Anfang in der Lateinifrac14en Spralten maltt man von den Bultfrac34abenhellip Und diee werden eingetheilet in vocales oder elbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautende und consonantes oder mitlautendemitlautendemitlautendemitlautende o niltt ehe koumlnnen ausgeprolten werden als bis ein vocalis dazukoumlmmtrdquo 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 httpbooksgooglecombooksid=T5ECAAAAQAAJ and the second at httpbooksgooglecombooksid=F9oVAAAAYAAJ

17

there can be no speechrdquo which without any further interpretation already at least appears to imply much

more than a matter of rearranged letters

As we have seen the ldquoabstractionrdquo of the letters from the line of the Iliad corresponds in the typo-

logical 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 pas-

sions in order for them to have any power to persuade It is not that reasoned arguments even when ab-

stract are otiose or parasiticalmdashthese 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 ldquovocalizedrdquo

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

Hamannrsquos 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 unpointedmdashlike 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 durlt 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 scripturesmdashwritten by God but one must bring onersquos

own vowels to read it

But is this not going too far While we may not just have misrepresented Hamannrsquos 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 doesnrsquot make sense as

written without those vowels itrsquos still easily interpretable If Hamann had not named it as a line from the

Iliad any educated person on seeing the word microῆνιν 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 miss-

ing places in the line the shape of the dactyls and the grammatical possibilities offered by the Greek lan-

guage 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 En-

lightened 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 objec-

tion of this scientist would be absurd because it would miss the point of Hamannrsquos critiquemdashhe goes

around the backs of the Enlighteners contending that they are moved by passion even in what they be-

lieve to be their exercises of pure reason that the arguments they invoke to defend their conception of rea-

son 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 ldquoTurbatverserdquo1 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 Hamannrsquos altered line from the Iliad) But it refers most specif-

ically 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 Θεά ἄειδε μῆνιν Ἀχιλῆος Πηληϊάδεω In a certain sense there is nothing of Homerrsquos 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 ob-

viously 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 ldquogoddessrdquo and not ldquowrathrdquo In the Turbatverse of nature then the superficial meaning of the speak-

ing 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 niltts als Turbatvere und disiecti membra poetae zu unerm Gebrault uumlbrig Diee zu ammeln ifrac34 des Gelehrten ie auszulegen des Philoophen ie naltzuahmenmdashoder nolt kuumlhnermdash mdashie in Gefrac14ick zu bringen des Poeten befrac14eiden Theil2

1 Nadler 198

2 Nadler 199

20

The hierarchy that is here established with the scholar philosopher and poet presented with responsibili-

ties of increasing creativity should not surprise us as it is exactly in line with what Hamann says else-

where about the high dignity of the poet to whom is compared even God himself1 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 ade-

quate 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 consti-

tuent 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

1 ldquoDer Poet am Anfange der Tagerdquo Nadler 206

21

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

Hamannrsquos coincidentia oppositorum is not any kind of dialectical synthesis Creation is speech ndash so is Hamannrsquos 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 Aesthe-

tica in nuce relate to the argument he makes about the proper use of reason There is significant ldquooverlaprdquo

here the various images and descriptions Hamann uses are parallel making the same argument in differ-

ent ways From what we have already said we can derive a kind of table showing how the various images

used map onto Hamannrsquos argument about the reason and the passions

Passions Reason

Vowels Consonants Words Mere arrangements of letters Poetic Meter Turbatverse God Nature Christianity Classical civilization Alpha and Omega 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 refus-

es 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 to-

gether 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 ldquoit is not clear how far he understood it and he certainly gives it a

1 Though not in the Aesthetica See eg Betz 28 note 17

22

sense of his ownrdquo1 In fact it is not easy to see where the ldquocoincidencerdquo comes in at all Regarding every

text every object as part of his ldquoBiblerdquo 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 themselvesmdashto

the letters of a text (in literary criticism) and the phenomena of nature unreduced to their universal ra-

tional 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 pro-

duced of these elements He beholds in a single vision der rollende Donner der Beredamkeit and der

einylbicltte Blitz2 This strangemdashor strange to us and Hamann would not hesitate to say that our sensibili-

ties need correctionmdashthis strange conjunction of opposites confronts us even on the title page of the Aes-

thetica in nuce Eine Rhapodie in kabbalifrac34ifrac14er Proe A rhapsodymdasha stitching-together of pieces into an ar-

tistic unitymdashthat 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 ldquoApostillerdquo ndash whether Hamann himself some per-

sonified commentator or anyone else ndash remarks that the author of the Aesthetica in nuce ldquohat Satz und

Satz zuammengereltnet wie man die Pfeile auf einem Sltlalttfelde zaumlhltrdquo3 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 Romansrsquo shots though fewer were fired with greater force It is not clear which side better corres-

ponds to Hamannrsquos 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 Therersquos a case to be made for either in-

terpretation But whichever we take the view wersquore given of the Aesthetica in nuce is still of individual

Saumltze piled up one after another as discrete countable units This treatise says the speaker of the Apos-

tille is just a pile of sentences But in an instant our perspective is shifted ldquoLaszligt uns jetzt die Hauptumme

1 Berlin 115

2 Nadler 208

3 Nadler 217 The reference given by Hamann (ldquoProcop De bello persico I 18rdquo) is explained at Haynes 94 note

kkk

23

[hellip] houmlrenldquo1 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 vari-

ous meditations on human life that compose the text of the biblical book2 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

summarymdasha 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 Hamannrsquos 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 readerrsquos confusion It is not Hamannrsquos 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 writings3 it is perhaps not sur-

prising then if the Aesthetica in nuce presents us with hermeneutic difficulties that neither the text itself

nor comparisons with Hamannrsquos other works nor consideration of Hamannrsquos engagement with the issues

of his time are adequate to dispel But the paradox we are considering heremdashthe simultaneous focus on

both columns of the table with which this chapter beganmdashis so fundamental to the thought of the Aesthe-

tica in nuce that unless we can come to terms with it in some way Hamannrsquos 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

1 Ibid

2 Cf Lutherbibel Predig 1213 ldquoLaszligt uns die Hauptumme aller Lehre houmlrenldquo 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 ldquoApostillerdquo likewise to be a undermining of all that goes before it 3 ldquoI no longer understand myself quite differently from then some [writings I understand] better some worse [hellip]

[hellip] 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 stuffrdquo Briefwechsel V p 358 trans in Betz 229

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 ldquodie ilt nolt im bloszligen Bult-frac34a-bi-ren uumlbenmdashmdashund wahrlilt wahrlilt Kinder muumlfrac12en

wir werden wenn wir den Geifrac34 der Wahrheit empfahen ollenldquo1 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 ldquoSpirit of

Truth whom the world cannot receiverdquo (Jn 1417) 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 spiri-

tual pole than to the elemental literal material one But how says Hamannrsquos Nuszlig is this Spirit of Truth

to be received By becoming like children who are just learning to spellmdashand 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 ldquoBultfrac34abirenrdquo syllable by syllable confirms that Hamann is referring to this style of interpreta-

tion Recalling now the table at the start of this chapter in which letters and the ldquospirit of truthrdquo

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 ldquoVerlieren die Elemente des A B C ihre natuumlrlilte

Bedeutung wenn ie in der unendlichen Zuammenetzung willkuumlrlilter Zeilten uns an Ideen erinnern die wo niltt

im Himmel dolt im Gehirn indrdquo2 To this question of course we are meant to answer ldquonordquo But there is

much here that is not unproblematic or at least not simple What for instance is the ldquonatuumlrlilte Bedeu-

tungrdquo of a letter And how if the combination of these signs be arbitrary does it recall for us ideas And

1 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 Hamannrsquos voice at least on Hamannrsquos 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 wersquore 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 Greeksmdashbut 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 coin-

cidence is merely an opportunity to bring the opposites as opposites together But this assumption natu-

ral 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 experiencemdashthis 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 Hamannrsquos writing admits of both a macros-

copic 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 conjunc-

tion 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 them1 considering these various levels of read-

ing 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 simultaneous-

ly 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 interpreta-

tion could be set forth that might allow us to translate Hamannrsquos simultaneously cabalistic and rhapsodic

utterances into academic language or to devise summaries of his arguments in a neatly symbolic lan-

guage 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 oumlffentlilter Gebrault 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 Hamannrsquos thought is useful also here Sltoumlpfung ifrac34 eine Rede an die Kreatur durlt die Kreatur The

Christian overtones of such a formulation are obvious Hamann once offered an encapsulation of his

thought in the word λόγος2 a famously polysemous term every sense of which Hamann intends The in-

timate connection between reason and language is of course the most obvious philosophical implication of

1 For Hamannrsquos defense of this possibility see Chapter 4

2 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 Hamannrsquos philosophy But for Hamann λόγος 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 Hamannrsquos piety placed a great emphasis on the self-emptying of Christ Howev-

er much he might stress Christrsquos humanity and suffering though he remained well within the main-

stream 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 diffi-

culties here But there is a clear parallel between the way a Christian thinks of Christ and how Hamann

thinks ofmdashwell more or less everything Christ is a man who lived for a certain stretch of time in a cer-

tain place and is also the eternal God A word is a string of letters small shapes arbitrarily strung togeth-

er and is also a sign of a concept an immaterial thing existing in the mind Hamann is no dualistmdashit 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

Zufoumlrderfrac34 muumlfrac34e man D George Benon fragen ob die Einheit mit der Mannigfaltigkeit niltt befrac34ehen koumlnne [hellip] Der bultfrac34aumlblilte oder grammatifrac14e der fleifrac14liche oder dialectifrac14e der ka-pernaitifrac14e oder historifrac14e Sinn ind im houmlltfrac34en Grade myfrac34ilt und haumlngen von ollten augen-blicklilten pirituoumlen willkuumlhrlilten Nebenbefrac34immungen und Umfrac34aumlnden ab daszlig man ohne hinauf gen Himmel zu fahren die Schluumlfrac12el ihrer Erkenntnis niltt herabholen kann1

1 Nadler 203 note 23 Hamannrsquos footnote is attached to some lines of Latin verse which conclude the Nutrsquos letter to the Learned Rabbi They come from a poem traditionally and falsely attributed to the Emperor Augustus explain-ing why Vergilrsquos orders to destroy the drafts of the Aeneid were ignored after the poetrsquos death The excerpts are

Ah scelus indignum soluetur litera diues Frangatur potius legum veneranda potestas Liber amp alma Ceres succurrite mdash mdash [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 mdashwhich for Hamann who does not oppose the spirit and the letter in a conventional way is a spiritual richnessmdashis 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

28

It is not that interpretation ought to be literal physical or ldquoCapernaiticrdquo 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 understandingmdashthat is unless one has

attained a certain degree of spiritual insight ndashone will be unable to understand things even in their literal

senses for the spiritual and literal senses are one Hamannrsquos 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 expe-

rience 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 inten-

tion of this line of thought has been least of all to stimulate pious feelings Hamannrsquos goal is not to spiri-

tualize 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 (ldquoDie Sinne aber ind Ceres und Bacltus die Leidenfrac14aftenrdquo [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 simplis-tically 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 Hamannrsquos ability to com-press his meaning into very few and very cryptic words NB The ldquoCapernaiticrdquo sense refers to the sense in which Christ is literally present in the Christian sacrament This unusual word is used derogatively in Lutheran texts (eg the Epitome of the Konkordienformel) to disparage Catholic sacramental teaching Its origins are in Jn 65559 ldquoFor my flesh is meat indeed and my blood is drink in-deed [hellip] These things he said in the synagogue as he taught in Capernaumrdquo 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 Luthe-ran understanding according to which Christ is present in the sacrament in a merely spiritual way is less than per-fectly compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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

Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 im-

plied meanings into the literal tropological allegorical and anagogical senses that Christians have tradi-

tionally 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 ormdashto employ a metaphor

more perhaps more congenial to Hamannmdashdiscerning 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 indul-

gence 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 slo-

gan from the text itselfmdashldquoto speak is to translaterdquomdashand 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 uumlberetzenmdashaus einer Engelpralte in eine Menfrac14enpralte das heifrac34 Gedanken in WortemdashSalten in NamenmdashBilder in Zeilten die poetifrac14 oder kyriologifrac14 hifrac34orifrac14 oder ymbolifrac14 oder hieroglyphifrac14mdashmdashund philoophifrac14 oder ltarakterifrac34ifrac14 eyn koumlnnen1

Here we are given a license to translate Hamannrsquos images into signs of various kinds It is no surprise that

in a footnote attached to this text he derogates the ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs by citing a pas-

sage of Petronius which complains that a new fashion of ldquopuffed-up and formless talkativenessrdquo has cor-

1 Nadler 199

31

rupted speech so that ldquothe standard of eloquence being corrupted has been halted and struck dumbrdquo

and ldquonot even poetry displays a healthy colorrdquo1 By ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs we should un-

derstand something like Leibnizrsquos 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 criti-

cism 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 cor-

respondences out of the text But the other kinds of signsmdashthe poetic or symbolicmdashdo not seem to fall

under the same criticismmdashthese suggest a kind of sign which indeed has meaning but whose interpreta-

tion 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 Hamannrsquos thought allows even for this kind of correspon-

dence 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 Hamannrsquos text but also is deeply compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos text to assert that he intends the literal and symbolic meanings to be taken as

of equal importancemdashfor us to devote our full attention to take up one of the governing metaphors of this

1 N 199 n10 ldquoNuper ventosa isthaec amp enormis loquacitas Athenas ex Asia conmigrauit [hellip] simulque correpta elo-quentiae regula stetit amp obmutuit [hellip] Ac ne carmen quidem sani coloris enituitrdquo

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 discuss-

ing how Hamann refuses to privilege abstract ldquopurely mentalrdquo thought over the particular words in

which that thought finds expression Berlin concludes that ldquofor 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)rdquo1 As an example of one such contradiction Berlin cites the line placed at the head

of this section ldquoto speak is to translaterdquo For Berlin it follows from Hamannrsquos insistence on the unity of

reason and language that no translation no correspondence between words ideas and things can be es-

tablished

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 attend-ing to ideas or to language and through them (because they correspond) to the facts was a method of judging and knowing reality [hellip But the] notion of a correspondence that there is an objective world on one side and on the other man and his instruments ndash lan-guage ideas and so forth ndash attempting to approximate to this objective reality is a false picture There is only a flow of sensations2

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 ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 reproduced3 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 Hamannrsquos treatise but unable to claim any continuity of thought therewith

1 Berlin 81

2 Ibid

3 Though one might question even this Ποταμῷ γὰρ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐμβῆναι δὶς τῷ αὐτῷ and there is no reason to think

any two ldquoflows of sensationrdquo could ever be substantially identical Necessarily every ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos view Berlin is perplexed when confronted with Hamannrsquos open assertion

that translation is possible between ldquohuman speechrdquo and the ldquospeech of angelsrdquo and can only conclude

that Hamann here contradicts himself And for Berlin it is quite to be expected that Hamann should con-

tradict himself he regards Hamannrsquos thought in general as highly creative and intriguing Schwaumlrmerei

of note for its pivotal place in intellectual history but completely insusceptible or unworthy of serious

philosophic attention Berlin appreciates Hamannrsquos criticism of the Enlightenment and his prescient

awareness of the lifeless bloodless conception of manrsquos spiritual life that the Enlighteners would ultimate-

ly produce While Berlin claims to understand Hamannrsquos motives in writing he utterly rejects the content

of his writings which he regards as ldquothe cry of a trapped man hellip who cannot be brought to see that to be

regimented or eliminated is either inevitable or desirablerdquo1 For Berlin Hamann is simply a ldquofanaticrdquo

whose writings consist of ldquopassionate rhetoric and not careful thoughtrdquo and whose opinions are ldquogrotes-

quely one-sided a violent exaggeration of the uniqueness of men and things [and] a passionate hatred of

menrsquos wish to understand the universerdquo2 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 pur-

ism of Hitler3 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 Berlinrsquos judgment that Hamann

1 Berlin 116

2 Berlin 121

3 This accusation is presented in Berlinrsquos book in a series of insinuations we are told for example that Hamannrsquos

ldquohatred and blind irrationalism have fed the stream that has led to social and political irrationalism particularly in German in our own [20

th] centuryrdquo (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 Berlinrsquos 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

34

simply contradicts himself in allowing for the possibility of translation in and out of symbolic ldquolanguag-

esrdquo Hamann has very little patience for ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs which promise patent

meaning and unambiguous interpretation This is perfectly in keeping with his general distaste for effi-

cient 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 ldquopoeticrdquo and ldquosymbolicrdquo signs not to fall under the same fierce criticism as the others

ldquoTo speak is to translaterdquo and ldquocreation is a speech to the creature through the creaturerdquo These

two maxims placed very near to each other in the text1 suggest something of a solution to the problem to

which Berlin directs our attention The conjunction of these lines should remind us that Hamann wheth-

er he directing his attention to literature philology esthetics or any other subject is always also a reli-

gious thinker The archetype of every text is for him the Bible and biblical exegesis is the model and ca-

non 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 Michaelisrsquos ldquodenial of a mystical typological sense

of Scripturerdquo2 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 Mi-

chaelis 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 ldquoTo merdquo says Hamann ldquoevery book is a Biblerdquo3 like the Bible then every

book must be read not merely for its literal sense Berlinrsquos reading of Hamann might be correct if Ha-

1 N 118-119

2 Betz 114

3 Briefwechsel I p 309 trans in Betz 47

35

mann were speaking about the everyday world of words and things understood as a brute fact But Ha-

mann 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 re-

mind us that the interpretation of tongues is also a divine gift1 he admits even that persons may not un-

derstand what they themselves to and say Even a figure such as Voltaire hardly a friend of religious out-

looks testifies for those who have ears to hear to the rightness of Hamannrsquos views

kann man wohl einen glaubwuumlrdigern Zeugen als den unfrac34erblilten Voltaire anfuumlhren wellter bey-nahe die Religion fuumlr den Eckfrac34ein der epifrac14en Dilttkunfrac34 erklaumlrt [hellip] Voltaire aber der Hohe-priefrac34er im Tempel des Gefrac14macks frac14luumlszligt so buumlndig als Kaiphas und denkt frulttbarer als He-rodes2

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 ldquoHo-

hepriefrac34er im Tempelrdquo but also a somewhat Machiavellian politician) justifies the crucifixion of Christ by

arguing that ldquoit is expedient that one man should die for the peoplerdquo3 believing himself to be discussing a

political necessity while as if prophetically describing the Christian doctrine of the atonement And He-

rodrsquos deceitful remark to the Magi ldquothat I might also come and worship himrdquo is taken since Herod was

king of the Jews though a gentile by race to represent the universal destiny of the Christian religion4 This

tradition of interpretation habitual in Biblical exegesis Hamann applies also to analysis of the wordmdashso

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 1210

2 Nadler 204-5

3 John 1150

4 It is telling that Hamann chooses such a contrived and complicated case of biblical parallelism as this one his ar-

gument 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

36

will readily concede that ldquowe see through a glass darklyrdquo1 and that we may not even be able to descry the

true outlines of our own persons in this mirrormdashbut by invoking the language of mirrors2 he locates him-

self within a tradition of thought according to which nature however flawed parts of it may be and how-

ever dulled our ability to discern itmdashis 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 se-

cular 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 ldquoblind heathensrdquo

Blinde Heyden haben die Unilttbarkeit erkannt die der Menfrac14 mit GOTT gemein hat Die verhuumlllte Figur des Leibes das Antlitz des Hauptes und das Aumluszligerfrac34e der Arme ind das ilttbare Sltema in dem wir einher gehn dolt eigentlilt niltts als ein Zeigefinger des verborge-nen Menfrac14en in unsmdash Exemplumque DEI quisque est in imagine parva3

Note that the ldquospiritualrdquo 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 ldquoindex fingersrdquo which direct the inner man to

our attention Hamann let us recall4 does not believe that the target of this ldquoZeigefingerrdquo can always be

1 1 Cor 1312

2 Though Hamann is in some ways a very modern thinker who anticipates 20

th century thought about the kinship of

reason and language he here looks back to the middle ages Cf Alan of Lille ldquoOmnis mundi creatura Quasi liber et pictura Nobis est et speculumrdquo With the sentiment and conceit of this verse Hamann could not agree more 3 N 198 The quotation from the Astronomicon of Manilius (IV895) is mainly noteworthy for its having been writ-

ten by a pagan author while echoing the language of Genesis regarding the ldquoimage of Godrdquo The Cambridge edition of Hamann misenglishes this line rendering it as ldquoEach one is an instance of God in miniaturerdquo This not only loses the connection to the book of Genesis conveyed by the word ldquoimagordquo but puts far too much weight on the word ldquoexemplumrdquo as well An exemplum is not an instance but a type model or analogue ldquoInstancerdquo implies an occur-rence of a rationally determinable kind a ldquotyperdquo or ldquoanaloguerdquo 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

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 circumstancesmdashthis 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 re-

fers to ldquocorrespondencesrdquo of thing and idea and of idea and word these ldquocorrespondencesrdquo are for Berlin

relations between two different things of different types He is quite correct to judge that Hamann consid-

ers 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 meaningmdashhe 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 justifica-

tion 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 ldquoConclusionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos own line that ldquocreation is a speech to the creature

through the creaturerdquo 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 cor-

respond to each other based on no apodictically determinable system knowable a priori but on the gra-

tuitous (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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 com-

pared translation to the art of understanding the image of a tapestry from looking only at the backs of the

threads he remarks ldquoDort [ie in the original contexts of the metaphors borrowed from other authors for

39

Hamannrsquos text] werden ie aber ad illustrationem (zur Verbraumlmung des Rockes) hier ad inuolucrum (zum

Hemde auf bloszligem Leibe) gebrauchtrdquo1 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 deco-

rated 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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos which ac-

cording to the line of interpretation I have explored reveals as much about Hamannrsquos 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 tear-

ing 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 Hamannrsquos motion between images his construction of typological

schemes that resist easy classification and one-for-one interpretation is not antirational raving or obscu-

rantism but rather an alternativemdashand a quite compelling onemdashto 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

1 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 tho-

roughly religious vision of the world If one is willing to do this Hamann is a kind of prophetmdashand the

horned head of Pan on his title-page is also the horned head of Moses1 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 pro-

ducing neat tables of Hamannrsquos 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 Aes-

thetica 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 somethingmdashunless there really is some secret ineffable law of correspondences that un-

ites 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 commen-

tators and writers of senior essays have no right to tread

1 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 agrave la Mosaiumlque (Roth 103 343)

41

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin Isaiah The Magus of the North JG Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism ed Henry

Hardy London John Murray 1993 Betz John After Enlightenment the Post-Secular Vision of JG Hamann Chichester John Wiley amp Sons

2009 Hamann Johann Georg Hamannrsquos Schriften ed Friedrich Roth Berlin G Reimer 1821 (Cited as

ldquoRothrdquo All citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Saumlmtliche Werke ed Josef Nadler Wien Verlag Herder 1950 (Cited as ldquoNad-

lerrdquo Unless otherwise noted all citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Writings on Philosophy and Language trans and ed Kenneth Haynes Cam-

bridge Cambridge UP 2007 (Cited as ldquoHaynesrdquo) Jacobs Carol ldquoHamann Is a Nomadic Writer lsquoAesthetica in nucersquordquo in Skirting the Ethical Stanford Stan-

ford UP 2008 pp 111-130 OrsquoFlaherty James C The Quarrel of Reason with Itself Essays on Hamann Michaelis Lessing Nietzsche Co-

lumbia SC Camden 1988

9

Chapter 1 The Unnatural Use of Abstraction

The removal of Α and Ω 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

Verultt es einmal die Iliade zu leen wenn ihr vorher durlt die Abfrac34raction die beiden

Selbfrac34lauter α und ω ausgeilttet habt und agt mir eure Meynung von dem Verfrac34ande und Wohlklange des Diltters

Μῆνιν ειδε Θε Πηληιδε χιλῆος1

In this passage and quotation from Hamannrsquos text traditional images while recognizable for

what they are are combined in a novel way The alpha and omega are symbol of Christ (Rev 18) 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 Hamannrsquos 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 linersquos content

and consider merely what it is as a line Itrsquos the incipit of the Iliad ndash for a student of Greek one of the hex-

ameters that come most readily to mind ndash the opening line of the epic traditionally regarded as the great-

est 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 Priamrsquos neighbors but of the ideals and achievements of classic-

al civilization ndash which though indeed falling as far short of Homerrsquos 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 at-

tempt to understand classical civilization while rejecting Christ Indeed Hamann himself encourages such

a reading of the image when he later cites ldquothe Punic father of the Churchrdquo to the effect that the prophetic

1 Nadler 207

10

books of the Old Testament can only be interpreted correctly when Christ is ldquoread intordquo them ldquoRead the

prophetic books without understanding Christrdquo says Augustine ldquoand what pointlessness and folly will

you find there Understand Christ there and what you read will not only savor but will even intoxicaterdquo1

Hamann takes up and expands this argument providing some context to his surgical removal of vowels

from Homerrsquos line Though as a rhetorician Augustine was acutely aware of their power after his conver-

sion 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 un-

derstood correctly ldquoa dream-like anticipation of Christrdquo2 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 ndash

he is too much of a Lutheran for that But as regards the value of the ancient myths he is rather more ge-

nerous 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 ap-

parent 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 ndash

which is of course not to say that it is not one of the ways Hamann intended it to be read But there must

1 Nadler 212-3 ldquoLege libros propheticos non intellecto CHRISTO agt der punifrac14e Kirltenvater quid tam insipidum amp fatuum inuenies Intellige ibi CHRISTUM non solum sapit quod legis sed etiam inebriatrdquo Hamann gives no citation for this quote a note to the Cambridge translation locates it at Ioh Evang Tract IX3 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 let-

ters than Hamann gives us ndash and even if we lacked the extrinsic familiarity with Homerrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 warriorrsquos

wrath

What then does Hamann mean by this image ldquoSeerdquo he hints to us just after showing us the al-

tered line of Greek ldquothe greater and lesser Masorah of philosophy [Weltweisheit] has overwhelmed the

text of Nature like a Noahrsquos floodrdquo1 As is usual for Hamann this explanation only raises further ques-

tions Nothing here has overwhelmed or flooded anything else and least of all Masorah ndash 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 re-

minded of what was said shortly before Homerrsquos line was introduced

Sie [dh die Mue] wird es wagen den natuumlrlilten Gebrauclt der Sinne von dem unnatuumlrlilten Gebrault der Abfrac34ractionen zu laumlutern wodurlt unere Begriffe von den Dingen eben o ehr verfrac34uumlmmelt werden als der Name des Sltoumlpfers underdruumlckt und gelaumlfrac34ert wird2

The ldquounnatural use of abstractionsrdquo here plays a role parallel to that of the ldquoMasorah of worldly philoso-

phyrdquo mdash 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 ldquoMaso-

1 Nadler 207 Seht die groszlige und kleine Maore der Weltweisheit hat den Text der Natur gleilt einer Suumlndfluth uumlberfrac14wemmt 2 Nadler 207

12

rah of philosophyrdquo then are interpretations that distort and obscure It is this sort of distortion and ob-

scuring that are represented by the removal of the letters alpha and omega from Homerrsquos line we are told

after all that they are removed ldquothrough abstractionrdquo Here Hamann is making a pun on the Latin roots

of the word ldquoabstractionrdquo but it is not merely a pun it is also a hint at one of the hidden connections be-

tween the vowels of the Iliad and Hamannrsquos 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 dam-

aged

And Hamann further suggests that it is because of this failure of interpretation or clarification

that the ldquoGreeksrdquo who abuse abstraction are wrong to think themselves wiser than the ldquochamberlains with

the Gnostic keyrdquo This phrase in itself rather obscure is one of the bridge-phrases in Hamannrsquos text that

point out to us which parts of the tapestry may be connected beneath the surface Chamberlain is Kammer-

herr and between Kammerherr and Kaumlmmerer there is small difference and Kaumlmmerer is the word Luther

used for ldquoeunuchrdquo1 The bridge leads us to another nearby passage of the Aesthetica

Wenn die Leidenfrac14aften Glieder der Unehre ind houmlren ie deswegen auf Waffen der Mannheit zu eyn Verfrac34eht ihr den Bultfrac34aben der Vernunft kluumlger als jener allegorifrac14e Kaumlmmerer der alexandrinifrac14en Kirlte den Bultfrac34aben der Sltrift der ich elbfrac34 zum Verfrac14nittenen maltte um des Himmelreilts willen2

Seen in light of this passage the reference to eunuchs and to Gnosticism is less perplexing While Origen

ndash who I presume to be ldquothat allegorical chamberlain of the Alexandrian churchrdquo mdash is not generally consi-

dered 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

ldquoLeidenfrac14aftenrdquo 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

1 ldquoIn Acts 827 Luther translates as lsquoKaumlmmererrsquo(related to lsquoKammerherrrsquo chamberlain) what the King James Bible translates as lsquoeunuchrsquordquo Haynes 80 note 87 2 Nadler 208

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 ab-

stract 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 ex-

tended Latin quotation from Bacon which is appended as a footnote to the passage quoted above on the

ldquounnatural use of abstractionsrdquo Hamann calls Bacon his ldquoEuthyphrordquo1 the figure who perhaps does not

teach him anymore than Euthyphro taught Socrates but who provides nonetheless the occasion for fruit-

ful 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 repu-

tation as an antirationalist or forerunner of the Sturm und Drang is not here making an argument against

reason as such or against the mindrsquos use of concepts or against thought in general For Bacon is not mak-

ing an argument against philosophy but against bad philosophy ldquoAnd so let men know how far the Idols

of the human mind are from the Ideas of the divine mind hellip 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 ac-

count of the conveniences of liferdquo 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 con-

cepts only so that the truth of things might better shine forth -- indeed for all that he advocates the in-

crease 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 Hamannrsquos critique of the Gnostic chamberlains His prescription is not that we avoid

1 ldquoBacon mein Euthyphronrdquo Nadler 197

14

making use of concepts for things but that we make sure that our concepts have not been verfrac34uumlmmelt and

gelaumlfrac34ert by abuses of reason

The word ldquoabstractionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos 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 foot-

note quotes at considerable length Ovidrsquos retelling of the story ldquoSpem sine corpore amat corpus putat

esse quod umbra est Adstupet ipse sibirdquo1 They who consider the abstractions of their minds to be most

real prefer a (vain) hope or a shadow to the bodymdashthat is the material concrete reality of the natural

world Long after Hamannrsquos 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 sibimdashNarcissus 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 ldquopure reasonrdquo from the mess of passions and contingencies that always surround hu-

man life Hamann prophesies an analogous fate It is this abuse of reason which Hamann means to sug-

gest t the removal of the first and last Greek letters from a line of Homer

And just as Hamann challenges the ldquoGreeksrdquo 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 cor-

rectly or to make any meaningful scientific achievements Just as Hume could not drink a glass of water or

eat an egg without faith2 neither we might paraphrase Hamann could he follow an argument to its con-

1 Metamorphoses III417f quoted at Nadler 210

2 This was a favorite quip of Hamannrsquos and is recorded in several places eg OrsquoFlaherty 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 Hamannrsquos view the supposed opposition of

reason and the passions is a fiction of the Enlighteners his thought has little room for absolute dichoto-

mies and he rejects also this one The passions in fact have an essential role to play even in the exercise

of reason ldquoLeidenfrac14amacr allein giebt Abfrac34ractionen owohl als Hypotheen Haumlnde Fuumlszlige Fluumlgel mdash Bildern und Zei-

chen Geifrac34 Leben und Zungerdquo1 There are perhaps many ways to understand ldquohands feet and wingsrdquo mdash but

between all possible interpretations of these words a basic unity exists They are all parts of the body asso-

ciated with motion and action And so abstractions and hypothesesmdashdry conclusions of the reasonmdashare

made active and mobile by the passions Likewise images and signs are given ldquolife and tonguerdquo 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 un-

mutilated 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 Hamannrsquos style and the symbolic ldquovocabularyrdquo of the Aesthetica in nuce The connection of Ha-

mannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos thought

1 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

Verucht es einmal die Iliade zu leen wenn ihr vorher durch die Abfrac34raction die beyden

Selbfrac34lauter α und ω ausgesichtet habt1 ldquoSelbstlautrdquo and ldquoMitlautrdquo ldquoConsonantrdquo and ldquovowelrdquo2 These are evocative termsmdashnot 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 con-

cepts 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 ldquoletter of the voicerdquo is utterable on its own while a littera consonans

must be ldquosounded withrdquo something else This way of articulating the distinction between independent

vowels and dependent consonants was a commonplace in the eighteenth century3 and would not have

been unfamiliar to Hamann even if the etymology of ldquoSelbstlautrdquo did not suggest it If we translate then

a bit freely we might say ldquothat which is removed from the Iliad by abstraction is that without which

1 Nadler 207

2 German preserves also more Latinate forms ldquoVokalrdquo and ldquoKonsonantrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos thought in the Aesthetica in nuce 3 John Hensons New Latin Grammar for instance published at Nottingham in 1744 explains ldquoA Vowel is a letter

which makes a full and perfect Sound of it Self as a o A Conſonant is a Letter that has no Sound of it Self without a Vowelrdquo And in a Verbesserte and Erleichterte Lateinische Grammatica published at Halle in 1763 (a year after the Cru-sades of the Philologist saw light) we read ldquoDen Anfang in der Lateinifrac14en Spralten maltt man von den Bultfrac34abenhellip Und diee werden eingetheilet in vocales oder elbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautende und consonantes oder mitlautendemitlautendemitlautendemitlautende o niltt ehe koumlnnen ausgeprolten werden als bis ein vocalis dazukoumlmmtrdquo 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 httpbooksgooglecombooksid=T5ECAAAAQAAJ and the second at httpbooksgooglecombooksid=F9oVAAAAYAAJ

17

there can be no speechrdquo which without any further interpretation already at least appears to imply much

more than a matter of rearranged letters

As we have seen the ldquoabstractionrdquo of the letters from the line of the Iliad corresponds in the typo-

logical 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 pas-

sions in order for them to have any power to persuade It is not that reasoned arguments even when ab-

stract are otiose or parasiticalmdashthese 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 ldquovocalizedrdquo

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

Hamannrsquos 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 unpointedmdashlike 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 durlt 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 scripturesmdashwritten by God but one must bring onersquos

own vowels to read it

But is this not going too far While we may not just have misrepresented Hamannrsquos 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 doesnrsquot make sense as

written without those vowels itrsquos still easily interpretable If Hamann had not named it as a line from the

Iliad any educated person on seeing the word microῆνιν 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 miss-

ing places in the line the shape of the dactyls and the grammatical possibilities offered by the Greek lan-

guage 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 En-

lightened 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 objec-

tion of this scientist would be absurd because it would miss the point of Hamannrsquos critiquemdashhe goes

around the backs of the Enlighteners contending that they are moved by passion even in what they be-

lieve to be their exercises of pure reason that the arguments they invoke to defend their conception of rea-

son 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 ldquoTurbatverserdquo1 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 Hamannrsquos altered line from the Iliad) But it refers most specif-

ically 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 Θεά ἄειδε μῆνιν Ἀχιλῆος Πηληϊάδεω In a certain sense there is nothing of Homerrsquos 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 ob-

viously 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 ldquogoddessrdquo and not ldquowrathrdquo In the Turbatverse of nature then the superficial meaning of the speak-

ing 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 niltts als Turbatvere und disiecti membra poetae zu unerm Gebrault uumlbrig Diee zu ammeln ifrac34 des Gelehrten ie auszulegen des Philoophen ie naltzuahmenmdashoder nolt kuumlhnermdash mdashie in Gefrac14ick zu bringen des Poeten befrac14eiden Theil2

1 Nadler 198

2 Nadler 199

20

The hierarchy that is here established with the scholar philosopher and poet presented with responsibili-

ties of increasing creativity should not surprise us as it is exactly in line with what Hamann says else-

where about the high dignity of the poet to whom is compared even God himself1 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 ade-

quate 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 consti-

tuent 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

1 ldquoDer Poet am Anfange der Tagerdquo Nadler 206

21

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

Hamannrsquos coincidentia oppositorum is not any kind of dialectical synthesis Creation is speech ndash so is Hamannrsquos 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 Aesthe-

tica in nuce relate to the argument he makes about the proper use of reason There is significant ldquooverlaprdquo

here the various images and descriptions Hamann uses are parallel making the same argument in differ-

ent ways From what we have already said we can derive a kind of table showing how the various images

used map onto Hamannrsquos argument about the reason and the passions

Passions Reason

Vowels Consonants Words Mere arrangements of letters Poetic Meter Turbatverse God Nature Christianity Classical civilization Alpha and Omega 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 refus-

es 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 to-

gether 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 ldquoit is not clear how far he understood it and he certainly gives it a

1 Though not in the Aesthetica See eg Betz 28 note 17

22

sense of his ownrdquo1 In fact it is not easy to see where the ldquocoincidencerdquo comes in at all Regarding every

text every object as part of his ldquoBiblerdquo 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 themselvesmdashto

the letters of a text (in literary criticism) and the phenomena of nature unreduced to their universal ra-

tional 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 pro-

duced of these elements He beholds in a single vision der rollende Donner der Beredamkeit and der

einylbicltte Blitz2 This strangemdashor strange to us and Hamann would not hesitate to say that our sensibili-

ties need correctionmdashthis strange conjunction of opposites confronts us even on the title page of the Aes-

thetica in nuce Eine Rhapodie in kabbalifrac34ifrac14er Proe A rhapsodymdasha stitching-together of pieces into an ar-

tistic unitymdashthat 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 ldquoApostillerdquo ndash whether Hamann himself some per-

sonified commentator or anyone else ndash remarks that the author of the Aesthetica in nuce ldquohat Satz und

Satz zuammengereltnet wie man die Pfeile auf einem Sltlalttfelde zaumlhltrdquo3 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 Romansrsquo shots though fewer were fired with greater force It is not clear which side better corres-

ponds to Hamannrsquos 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 Therersquos a case to be made for either in-

terpretation But whichever we take the view wersquore given of the Aesthetica in nuce is still of individual

Saumltze piled up one after another as discrete countable units This treatise says the speaker of the Apos-

tille is just a pile of sentences But in an instant our perspective is shifted ldquoLaszligt uns jetzt die Hauptumme

1 Berlin 115

2 Nadler 208

3 Nadler 217 The reference given by Hamann (ldquoProcop De bello persico I 18rdquo) is explained at Haynes 94 note

kkk

23

[hellip] houmlrenldquo1 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 vari-

ous meditations on human life that compose the text of the biblical book2 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

summarymdasha 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 Hamannrsquos 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 readerrsquos confusion It is not Hamannrsquos 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 writings3 it is perhaps not sur-

prising then if the Aesthetica in nuce presents us with hermeneutic difficulties that neither the text itself

nor comparisons with Hamannrsquos other works nor consideration of Hamannrsquos engagement with the issues

of his time are adequate to dispel But the paradox we are considering heremdashthe simultaneous focus on

both columns of the table with which this chapter beganmdashis so fundamental to the thought of the Aesthe-

tica in nuce that unless we can come to terms with it in some way Hamannrsquos 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

1 Ibid

2 Cf Lutherbibel Predig 1213 ldquoLaszligt uns die Hauptumme aller Lehre houmlrenldquo 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 ldquoApostillerdquo likewise to be a undermining of all that goes before it 3 ldquoI no longer understand myself quite differently from then some [writings I understand] better some worse [hellip]

[hellip] 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 stuffrdquo Briefwechsel V p 358 trans in Betz 229

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 ldquodie ilt nolt im bloszligen Bult-frac34a-bi-ren uumlbenmdashmdashund wahrlilt wahrlilt Kinder muumlfrac12en

wir werden wenn wir den Geifrac34 der Wahrheit empfahen ollenldquo1 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 ldquoSpirit of

Truth whom the world cannot receiverdquo (Jn 1417) 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 spiri-

tual pole than to the elemental literal material one But how says Hamannrsquos Nuszlig is this Spirit of Truth

to be received By becoming like children who are just learning to spellmdashand 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 ldquoBultfrac34abirenrdquo syllable by syllable confirms that Hamann is referring to this style of interpreta-

tion Recalling now the table at the start of this chapter in which letters and the ldquospirit of truthrdquo

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 ldquoVerlieren die Elemente des A B C ihre natuumlrlilte

Bedeutung wenn ie in der unendlichen Zuammenetzung willkuumlrlilter Zeilten uns an Ideen erinnern die wo niltt

im Himmel dolt im Gehirn indrdquo2 To this question of course we are meant to answer ldquonordquo But there is

much here that is not unproblematic or at least not simple What for instance is the ldquonatuumlrlilte Bedeu-

tungrdquo of a letter And how if the combination of these signs be arbitrary does it recall for us ideas And

1 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 Hamannrsquos voice at least on Hamannrsquos 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 wersquore 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 Greeksmdashbut 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 coin-

cidence is merely an opportunity to bring the opposites as opposites together But this assumption natu-

ral 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 experiencemdashthis 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 Hamannrsquos writing admits of both a macros-

copic 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 conjunc-

tion 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 them1 considering these various levels of read-

ing 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 simultaneous-

ly 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 interpreta-

tion could be set forth that might allow us to translate Hamannrsquos simultaneously cabalistic and rhapsodic

utterances into academic language or to devise summaries of his arguments in a neatly symbolic lan-

guage 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 oumlffentlilter Gebrault 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 Hamannrsquos thought is useful also here Sltoumlpfung ifrac34 eine Rede an die Kreatur durlt die Kreatur The

Christian overtones of such a formulation are obvious Hamann once offered an encapsulation of his

thought in the word λόγος2 a famously polysemous term every sense of which Hamann intends The in-

timate connection between reason and language is of course the most obvious philosophical implication of

1 For Hamannrsquos defense of this possibility see Chapter 4

2 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 Hamannrsquos philosophy But for Hamann λόγος 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 Hamannrsquos piety placed a great emphasis on the self-emptying of Christ Howev-

er much he might stress Christrsquos humanity and suffering though he remained well within the main-

stream 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 diffi-

culties here But there is a clear parallel between the way a Christian thinks of Christ and how Hamann

thinks ofmdashwell more or less everything Christ is a man who lived for a certain stretch of time in a cer-

tain place and is also the eternal God A word is a string of letters small shapes arbitrarily strung togeth-

er and is also a sign of a concept an immaterial thing existing in the mind Hamann is no dualistmdashit 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

Zufoumlrderfrac34 muumlfrac34e man D George Benon fragen ob die Einheit mit der Mannigfaltigkeit niltt befrac34ehen koumlnne [hellip] Der bultfrac34aumlblilte oder grammatifrac14e der fleifrac14liche oder dialectifrac14e der ka-pernaitifrac14e oder historifrac14e Sinn ind im houmlltfrac34en Grade myfrac34ilt und haumlngen von ollten augen-blicklilten pirituoumlen willkuumlhrlilten Nebenbefrac34immungen und Umfrac34aumlnden ab daszlig man ohne hinauf gen Himmel zu fahren die Schluumlfrac12el ihrer Erkenntnis niltt herabholen kann1

1 Nadler 203 note 23 Hamannrsquos footnote is attached to some lines of Latin verse which conclude the Nutrsquos letter to the Learned Rabbi They come from a poem traditionally and falsely attributed to the Emperor Augustus explain-ing why Vergilrsquos orders to destroy the drafts of the Aeneid were ignored after the poetrsquos death The excerpts are

Ah scelus indignum soluetur litera diues Frangatur potius legum veneranda potestas Liber amp alma Ceres succurrite mdash mdash [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 mdashwhich for Hamann who does not oppose the spirit and the letter in a conventional way is a spiritual richnessmdashis 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

28

It is not that interpretation ought to be literal physical or ldquoCapernaiticrdquo 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 understandingmdashthat is unless one has

attained a certain degree of spiritual insight ndashone will be unable to understand things even in their literal

senses for the spiritual and literal senses are one Hamannrsquos 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 expe-

rience 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 inten-

tion of this line of thought has been least of all to stimulate pious feelings Hamannrsquos goal is not to spiri-

tualize 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 (ldquoDie Sinne aber ind Ceres und Bacltus die Leidenfrac14aftenrdquo [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 simplis-tically 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 Hamannrsquos ability to com-press his meaning into very few and very cryptic words NB The ldquoCapernaiticrdquo sense refers to the sense in which Christ is literally present in the Christian sacrament This unusual word is used derogatively in Lutheran texts (eg the Epitome of the Konkordienformel) to disparage Catholic sacramental teaching Its origins are in Jn 65559 ldquoFor my flesh is meat indeed and my blood is drink in-deed [hellip] These things he said in the synagogue as he taught in Capernaumrdquo 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 Luthe-ran understanding according to which Christ is present in the sacrament in a merely spiritual way is less than per-fectly compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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

Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 im-

plied meanings into the literal tropological allegorical and anagogical senses that Christians have tradi-

tionally 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 ormdashto employ a metaphor

more perhaps more congenial to Hamannmdashdiscerning 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 indul-

gence 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 slo-

gan from the text itselfmdashldquoto speak is to translaterdquomdashand 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 uumlberetzenmdashaus einer Engelpralte in eine Menfrac14enpralte das heifrac34 Gedanken in WortemdashSalten in NamenmdashBilder in Zeilten die poetifrac14 oder kyriologifrac14 hifrac34orifrac14 oder ymbolifrac14 oder hieroglyphifrac14mdashmdashund philoophifrac14 oder ltarakterifrac34ifrac14 eyn koumlnnen1

Here we are given a license to translate Hamannrsquos images into signs of various kinds It is no surprise that

in a footnote attached to this text he derogates the ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs by citing a pas-

sage of Petronius which complains that a new fashion of ldquopuffed-up and formless talkativenessrdquo has cor-

1 Nadler 199

31

rupted speech so that ldquothe standard of eloquence being corrupted has been halted and struck dumbrdquo

and ldquonot even poetry displays a healthy colorrdquo1 By ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs we should un-

derstand something like Leibnizrsquos 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 criti-

cism 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 cor-

respondences out of the text But the other kinds of signsmdashthe poetic or symbolicmdashdo not seem to fall

under the same criticismmdashthese suggest a kind of sign which indeed has meaning but whose interpreta-

tion 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 Hamannrsquos thought allows even for this kind of correspon-

dence 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 Hamannrsquos text but also is deeply compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos text to assert that he intends the literal and symbolic meanings to be taken as

of equal importancemdashfor us to devote our full attention to take up one of the governing metaphors of this

1 N 199 n10 ldquoNuper ventosa isthaec amp enormis loquacitas Athenas ex Asia conmigrauit [hellip] simulque correpta elo-quentiae regula stetit amp obmutuit [hellip] Ac ne carmen quidem sani coloris enituitrdquo

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 discuss-

ing how Hamann refuses to privilege abstract ldquopurely mentalrdquo thought over the particular words in

which that thought finds expression Berlin concludes that ldquofor 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)rdquo1 As an example of one such contradiction Berlin cites the line placed at the head

of this section ldquoto speak is to translaterdquo For Berlin it follows from Hamannrsquos insistence on the unity of

reason and language that no translation no correspondence between words ideas and things can be es-

tablished

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 attend-ing to ideas or to language and through them (because they correspond) to the facts was a method of judging and knowing reality [hellip But the] notion of a correspondence that there is an objective world on one side and on the other man and his instruments ndash lan-guage ideas and so forth ndash attempting to approximate to this objective reality is a false picture There is only a flow of sensations2

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 ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 reproduced3 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 Hamannrsquos treatise but unable to claim any continuity of thought therewith

1 Berlin 81

2 Ibid

3 Though one might question even this Ποταμῷ γὰρ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐμβῆναι δὶς τῷ αὐτῷ and there is no reason to think

any two ldquoflows of sensationrdquo could ever be substantially identical Necessarily every ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos view Berlin is perplexed when confronted with Hamannrsquos open assertion

that translation is possible between ldquohuman speechrdquo and the ldquospeech of angelsrdquo and can only conclude

that Hamann here contradicts himself And for Berlin it is quite to be expected that Hamann should con-

tradict himself he regards Hamannrsquos thought in general as highly creative and intriguing Schwaumlrmerei

of note for its pivotal place in intellectual history but completely insusceptible or unworthy of serious

philosophic attention Berlin appreciates Hamannrsquos criticism of the Enlightenment and his prescient

awareness of the lifeless bloodless conception of manrsquos spiritual life that the Enlighteners would ultimate-

ly produce While Berlin claims to understand Hamannrsquos motives in writing he utterly rejects the content

of his writings which he regards as ldquothe cry of a trapped man hellip who cannot be brought to see that to be

regimented or eliminated is either inevitable or desirablerdquo1 For Berlin Hamann is simply a ldquofanaticrdquo

whose writings consist of ldquopassionate rhetoric and not careful thoughtrdquo and whose opinions are ldquogrotes-

quely one-sided a violent exaggeration of the uniqueness of men and things [and] a passionate hatred of

menrsquos wish to understand the universerdquo2 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 pur-

ism of Hitler3 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 Berlinrsquos judgment that Hamann

1 Berlin 116

2 Berlin 121

3 This accusation is presented in Berlinrsquos book in a series of insinuations we are told for example that Hamannrsquos

ldquohatred and blind irrationalism have fed the stream that has led to social and political irrationalism particularly in German in our own [20

th] centuryrdquo (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 Berlinrsquos 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

34

simply contradicts himself in allowing for the possibility of translation in and out of symbolic ldquolanguag-

esrdquo Hamann has very little patience for ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs which promise patent

meaning and unambiguous interpretation This is perfectly in keeping with his general distaste for effi-

cient 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 ldquopoeticrdquo and ldquosymbolicrdquo signs not to fall under the same fierce criticism as the others

ldquoTo speak is to translaterdquo and ldquocreation is a speech to the creature through the creaturerdquo These

two maxims placed very near to each other in the text1 suggest something of a solution to the problem to

which Berlin directs our attention The conjunction of these lines should remind us that Hamann wheth-

er he directing his attention to literature philology esthetics or any other subject is always also a reli-

gious thinker The archetype of every text is for him the Bible and biblical exegesis is the model and ca-

non 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 Michaelisrsquos ldquodenial of a mystical typological sense

of Scripturerdquo2 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 Mi-

chaelis 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 ldquoTo merdquo says Hamann ldquoevery book is a Biblerdquo3 like the Bible then every

book must be read not merely for its literal sense Berlinrsquos reading of Hamann might be correct if Ha-

1 N 118-119

2 Betz 114

3 Briefwechsel I p 309 trans in Betz 47

35

mann were speaking about the everyday world of words and things understood as a brute fact But Ha-

mann 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 re-

mind us that the interpretation of tongues is also a divine gift1 he admits even that persons may not un-

derstand what they themselves to and say Even a figure such as Voltaire hardly a friend of religious out-

looks testifies for those who have ears to hear to the rightness of Hamannrsquos views

kann man wohl einen glaubwuumlrdigern Zeugen als den unfrac34erblilten Voltaire anfuumlhren wellter bey-nahe die Religion fuumlr den Eckfrac34ein der epifrac14en Dilttkunfrac34 erklaumlrt [hellip] Voltaire aber der Hohe-priefrac34er im Tempel des Gefrac14macks frac14luumlszligt so buumlndig als Kaiphas und denkt frulttbarer als He-rodes2

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 ldquoHo-

hepriefrac34er im Tempelrdquo but also a somewhat Machiavellian politician) justifies the crucifixion of Christ by

arguing that ldquoit is expedient that one man should die for the peoplerdquo3 believing himself to be discussing a

political necessity while as if prophetically describing the Christian doctrine of the atonement And He-

rodrsquos deceitful remark to the Magi ldquothat I might also come and worship himrdquo is taken since Herod was

king of the Jews though a gentile by race to represent the universal destiny of the Christian religion4 This

tradition of interpretation habitual in Biblical exegesis Hamann applies also to analysis of the wordmdashso

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 1210

2 Nadler 204-5

3 John 1150

4 It is telling that Hamann chooses such a contrived and complicated case of biblical parallelism as this one his ar-

gument 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

36

will readily concede that ldquowe see through a glass darklyrdquo1 and that we may not even be able to descry the

true outlines of our own persons in this mirrormdashbut by invoking the language of mirrors2 he locates him-

self within a tradition of thought according to which nature however flawed parts of it may be and how-

ever dulled our ability to discern itmdashis 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 se-

cular 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 ldquoblind heathensrdquo

Blinde Heyden haben die Unilttbarkeit erkannt die der Menfrac14 mit GOTT gemein hat Die verhuumlllte Figur des Leibes das Antlitz des Hauptes und das Aumluszligerfrac34e der Arme ind das ilttbare Sltema in dem wir einher gehn dolt eigentlilt niltts als ein Zeigefinger des verborge-nen Menfrac14en in unsmdash Exemplumque DEI quisque est in imagine parva3

Note that the ldquospiritualrdquo 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 ldquoindex fingersrdquo which direct the inner man to

our attention Hamann let us recall4 does not believe that the target of this ldquoZeigefingerrdquo can always be

1 1 Cor 1312

2 Though Hamann is in some ways a very modern thinker who anticipates 20

th century thought about the kinship of

reason and language he here looks back to the middle ages Cf Alan of Lille ldquoOmnis mundi creatura Quasi liber et pictura Nobis est et speculumrdquo With the sentiment and conceit of this verse Hamann could not agree more 3 N 198 The quotation from the Astronomicon of Manilius (IV895) is mainly noteworthy for its having been writ-

ten by a pagan author while echoing the language of Genesis regarding the ldquoimage of Godrdquo The Cambridge edition of Hamann misenglishes this line rendering it as ldquoEach one is an instance of God in miniaturerdquo This not only loses the connection to the book of Genesis conveyed by the word ldquoimagordquo but puts far too much weight on the word ldquoexemplumrdquo as well An exemplum is not an instance but a type model or analogue ldquoInstancerdquo implies an occur-rence of a rationally determinable kind a ldquotyperdquo or ldquoanaloguerdquo 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

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 circumstancesmdashthis 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 re-

fers to ldquocorrespondencesrdquo of thing and idea and of idea and word these ldquocorrespondencesrdquo are for Berlin

relations between two different things of different types He is quite correct to judge that Hamann consid-

ers 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 meaningmdashhe 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 justifica-

tion 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 ldquoConclusionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos own line that ldquocreation is a speech to the creature

through the creaturerdquo 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 cor-

respond to each other based on no apodictically determinable system knowable a priori but on the gra-

tuitous (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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 com-

pared translation to the art of understanding the image of a tapestry from looking only at the backs of the

threads he remarks ldquoDort [ie in the original contexts of the metaphors borrowed from other authors for

39

Hamannrsquos text] werden ie aber ad illustrationem (zur Verbraumlmung des Rockes) hier ad inuolucrum (zum

Hemde auf bloszligem Leibe) gebrauchtrdquo1 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 deco-

rated 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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos which ac-

cording to the line of interpretation I have explored reveals as much about Hamannrsquos 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 tear-

ing 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 Hamannrsquos motion between images his construction of typological

schemes that resist easy classification and one-for-one interpretation is not antirational raving or obscu-

rantism but rather an alternativemdashand a quite compelling onemdashto 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

1 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 tho-

roughly religious vision of the world If one is willing to do this Hamann is a kind of prophetmdashand the

horned head of Pan on his title-page is also the horned head of Moses1 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 pro-

ducing neat tables of Hamannrsquos 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 Aes-

thetica 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 somethingmdashunless there really is some secret ineffable law of correspondences that un-

ites 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 commen-

tators and writers of senior essays have no right to tread

1 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 agrave la Mosaiumlque (Roth 103 343)

41

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin Isaiah The Magus of the North JG Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism ed Henry

Hardy London John Murray 1993 Betz John After Enlightenment the Post-Secular Vision of JG Hamann Chichester John Wiley amp Sons

2009 Hamann Johann Georg Hamannrsquos Schriften ed Friedrich Roth Berlin G Reimer 1821 (Cited as

ldquoRothrdquo All citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Saumlmtliche Werke ed Josef Nadler Wien Verlag Herder 1950 (Cited as ldquoNad-

lerrdquo Unless otherwise noted all citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Writings on Philosophy and Language trans and ed Kenneth Haynes Cam-

bridge Cambridge UP 2007 (Cited as ldquoHaynesrdquo) Jacobs Carol ldquoHamann Is a Nomadic Writer lsquoAesthetica in nucersquordquo in Skirting the Ethical Stanford Stan-

ford UP 2008 pp 111-130 OrsquoFlaherty James C The Quarrel of Reason with Itself Essays on Hamann Michaelis Lessing Nietzsche Co-

lumbia SC Camden 1988

10

books of the Old Testament can only be interpreted correctly when Christ is ldquoread intordquo them ldquoRead the

prophetic books without understanding Christrdquo says Augustine ldquoand what pointlessness and folly will

you find there Understand Christ there and what you read will not only savor but will even intoxicaterdquo1

Hamann takes up and expands this argument providing some context to his surgical removal of vowels

from Homerrsquos line Though as a rhetorician Augustine was acutely aware of their power after his conver-

sion 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 un-

derstood correctly ldquoa dream-like anticipation of Christrdquo2 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 ndash

he is too much of a Lutheran for that But as regards the value of the ancient myths he is rather more ge-

nerous 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 ap-

parent 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 ndash

which is of course not to say that it is not one of the ways Hamann intended it to be read But there must

1 Nadler 212-3 ldquoLege libros propheticos non intellecto CHRISTO agt der punifrac14e Kirltenvater quid tam insipidum amp fatuum inuenies Intellige ibi CHRISTUM non solum sapit quod legis sed etiam inebriatrdquo Hamann gives no citation for this quote a note to the Cambridge translation locates it at Ioh Evang Tract IX3 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 let-

ters than Hamann gives us ndash and even if we lacked the extrinsic familiarity with Homerrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 warriorrsquos

wrath

What then does Hamann mean by this image ldquoSeerdquo he hints to us just after showing us the al-

tered line of Greek ldquothe greater and lesser Masorah of philosophy [Weltweisheit] has overwhelmed the

text of Nature like a Noahrsquos floodrdquo1 As is usual for Hamann this explanation only raises further ques-

tions Nothing here has overwhelmed or flooded anything else and least of all Masorah ndash 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 re-

minded of what was said shortly before Homerrsquos line was introduced

Sie [dh die Mue] wird es wagen den natuumlrlilten Gebrauclt der Sinne von dem unnatuumlrlilten Gebrault der Abfrac34ractionen zu laumlutern wodurlt unere Begriffe von den Dingen eben o ehr verfrac34uumlmmelt werden als der Name des Sltoumlpfers underdruumlckt und gelaumlfrac34ert wird2

The ldquounnatural use of abstractionsrdquo here plays a role parallel to that of the ldquoMasorah of worldly philoso-

phyrdquo mdash 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 ldquoMaso-

1 Nadler 207 Seht die groszlige und kleine Maore der Weltweisheit hat den Text der Natur gleilt einer Suumlndfluth uumlberfrac14wemmt 2 Nadler 207

12

rah of philosophyrdquo then are interpretations that distort and obscure It is this sort of distortion and ob-

scuring that are represented by the removal of the letters alpha and omega from Homerrsquos line we are told

after all that they are removed ldquothrough abstractionrdquo Here Hamann is making a pun on the Latin roots

of the word ldquoabstractionrdquo but it is not merely a pun it is also a hint at one of the hidden connections be-

tween the vowels of the Iliad and Hamannrsquos 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 dam-

aged

And Hamann further suggests that it is because of this failure of interpretation or clarification

that the ldquoGreeksrdquo who abuse abstraction are wrong to think themselves wiser than the ldquochamberlains with

the Gnostic keyrdquo This phrase in itself rather obscure is one of the bridge-phrases in Hamannrsquos text that

point out to us which parts of the tapestry may be connected beneath the surface Chamberlain is Kammer-

herr and between Kammerherr and Kaumlmmerer there is small difference and Kaumlmmerer is the word Luther

used for ldquoeunuchrdquo1 The bridge leads us to another nearby passage of the Aesthetica

Wenn die Leidenfrac14aften Glieder der Unehre ind houmlren ie deswegen auf Waffen der Mannheit zu eyn Verfrac34eht ihr den Bultfrac34aben der Vernunft kluumlger als jener allegorifrac14e Kaumlmmerer der alexandrinifrac14en Kirlte den Bultfrac34aben der Sltrift der ich elbfrac34 zum Verfrac14nittenen maltte um des Himmelreilts willen2

Seen in light of this passage the reference to eunuchs and to Gnosticism is less perplexing While Origen

ndash who I presume to be ldquothat allegorical chamberlain of the Alexandrian churchrdquo mdash is not generally consi-

dered 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

ldquoLeidenfrac14aftenrdquo 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

1 ldquoIn Acts 827 Luther translates as lsquoKaumlmmererrsquo(related to lsquoKammerherrrsquo chamberlain) what the King James Bible translates as lsquoeunuchrsquordquo Haynes 80 note 87 2 Nadler 208

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 ab-

stract 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 ex-

tended Latin quotation from Bacon which is appended as a footnote to the passage quoted above on the

ldquounnatural use of abstractionsrdquo Hamann calls Bacon his ldquoEuthyphrordquo1 the figure who perhaps does not

teach him anymore than Euthyphro taught Socrates but who provides nonetheless the occasion for fruit-

ful 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 repu-

tation as an antirationalist or forerunner of the Sturm und Drang is not here making an argument against

reason as such or against the mindrsquos use of concepts or against thought in general For Bacon is not mak-

ing an argument against philosophy but against bad philosophy ldquoAnd so let men know how far the Idols

of the human mind are from the Ideas of the divine mind hellip 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 ac-

count of the conveniences of liferdquo 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 con-

cepts only so that the truth of things might better shine forth -- indeed for all that he advocates the in-

crease 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 Hamannrsquos critique of the Gnostic chamberlains His prescription is not that we avoid

1 ldquoBacon mein Euthyphronrdquo Nadler 197

14

making use of concepts for things but that we make sure that our concepts have not been verfrac34uumlmmelt and

gelaumlfrac34ert by abuses of reason

The word ldquoabstractionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos 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 foot-

note quotes at considerable length Ovidrsquos retelling of the story ldquoSpem sine corpore amat corpus putat

esse quod umbra est Adstupet ipse sibirdquo1 They who consider the abstractions of their minds to be most

real prefer a (vain) hope or a shadow to the bodymdashthat is the material concrete reality of the natural

world Long after Hamannrsquos 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 sibimdashNarcissus 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 ldquopure reasonrdquo from the mess of passions and contingencies that always surround hu-

man life Hamann prophesies an analogous fate It is this abuse of reason which Hamann means to sug-

gest t the removal of the first and last Greek letters from a line of Homer

And just as Hamann challenges the ldquoGreeksrdquo 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 cor-

rectly or to make any meaningful scientific achievements Just as Hume could not drink a glass of water or

eat an egg without faith2 neither we might paraphrase Hamann could he follow an argument to its con-

1 Metamorphoses III417f quoted at Nadler 210

2 This was a favorite quip of Hamannrsquos and is recorded in several places eg OrsquoFlaherty 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 Hamannrsquos view the supposed opposition of

reason and the passions is a fiction of the Enlighteners his thought has little room for absolute dichoto-

mies and he rejects also this one The passions in fact have an essential role to play even in the exercise

of reason ldquoLeidenfrac14amacr allein giebt Abfrac34ractionen owohl als Hypotheen Haumlnde Fuumlszlige Fluumlgel mdash Bildern und Zei-

chen Geifrac34 Leben und Zungerdquo1 There are perhaps many ways to understand ldquohands feet and wingsrdquo mdash but

between all possible interpretations of these words a basic unity exists They are all parts of the body asso-

ciated with motion and action And so abstractions and hypothesesmdashdry conclusions of the reasonmdashare

made active and mobile by the passions Likewise images and signs are given ldquolife and tonguerdquo 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 un-

mutilated 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 Hamannrsquos style and the symbolic ldquovocabularyrdquo of the Aesthetica in nuce The connection of Ha-

mannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos thought

1 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

Verucht es einmal die Iliade zu leen wenn ihr vorher durch die Abfrac34raction die beyden

Selbfrac34lauter α und ω ausgesichtet habt1 ldquoSelbstlautrdquo and ldquoMitlautrdquo ldquoConsonantrdquo and ldquovowelrdquo2 These are evocative termsmdashnot 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 con-

cepts 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 ldquoletter of the voicerdquo is utterable on its own while a littera consonans

must be ldquosounded withrdquo something else This way of articulating the distinction between independent

vowels and dependent consonants was a commonplace in the eighteenth century3 and would not have

been unfamiliar to Hamann even if the etymology of ldquoSelbstlautrdquo did not suggest it If we translate then

a bit freely we might say ldquothat which is removed from the Iliad by abstraction is that without which

1 Nadler 207

2 German preserves also more Latinate forms ldquoVokalrdquo and ldquoKonsonantrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos thought in the Aesthetica in nuce 3 John Hensons New Latin Grammar for instance published at Nottingham in 1744 explains ldquoA Vowel is a letter

which makes a full and perfect Sound of it Self as a o A Conſonant is a Letter that has no Sound of it Self without a Vowelrdquo And in a Verbesserte and Erleichterte Lateinische Grammatica published at Halle in 1763 (a year after the Cru-sades of the Philologist saw light) we read ldquoDen Anfang in der Lateinifrac14en Spralten maltt man von den Bultfrac34abenhellip Und diee werden eingetheilet in vocales oder elbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautende und consonantes oder mitlautendemitlautendemitlautendemitlautende o niltt ehe koumlnnen ausgeprolten werden als bis ein vocalis dazukoumlmmtrdquo 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 httpbooksgooglecombooksid=T5ECAAAAQAAJ and the second at httpbooksgooglecombooksid=F9oVAAAAYAAJ

17

there can be no speechrdquo which without any further interpretation already at least appears to imply much

more than a matter of rearranged letters

As we have seen the ldquoabstractionrdquo of the letters from the line of the Iliad corresponds in the typo-

logical 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 pas-

sions in order for them to have any power to persuade It is not that reasoned arguments even when ab-

stract are otiose or parasiticalmdashthese 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 ldquovocalizedrdquo

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

Hamannrsquos 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 unpointedmdashlike 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 durlt 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 scripturesmdashwritten by God but one must bring onersquos

own vowels to read it

But is this not going too far While we may not just have misrepresented Hamannrsquos 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 doesnrsquot make sense as

written without those vowels itrsquos still easily interpretable If Hamann had not named it as a line from the

Iliad any educated person on seeing the word microῆνιν 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 miss-

ing places in the line the shape of the dactyls and the grammatical possibilities offered by the Greek lan-

guage 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 En-

lightened 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 objec-

tion of this scientist would be absurd because it would miss the point of Hamannrsquos critiquemdashhe goes

around the backs of the Enlighteners contending that they are moved by passion even in what they be-

lieve to be their exercises of pure reason that the arguments they invoke to defend their conception of rea-

son 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 ldquoTurbatverserdquo1 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 Hamannrsquos altered line from the Iliad) But it refers most specif-

ically 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 Θεά ἄειδε μῆνιν Ἀχιλῆος Πηληϊάδεω In a certain sense there is nothing of Homerrsquos 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 ob-

viously 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 ldquogoddessrdquo and not ldquowrathrdquo In the Turbatverse of nature then the superficial meaning of the speak-

ing 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 niltts als Turbatvere und disiecti membra poetae zu unerm Gebrault uumlbrig Diee zu ammeln ifrac34 des Gelehrten ie auszulegen des Philoophen ie naltzuahmenmdashoder nolt kuumlhnermdash mdashie in Gefrac14ick zu bringen des Poeten befrac14eiden Theil2

1 Nadler 198

2 Nadler 199

20

The hierarchy that is here established with the scholar philosopher and poet presented with responsibili-

ties of increasing creativity should not surprise us as it is exactly in line with what Hamann says else-

where about the high dignity of the poet to whom is compared even God himself1 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 ade-

quate 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 consti-

tuent 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

1 ldquoDer Poet am Anfange der Tagerdquo Nadler 206

21

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

Hamannrsquos coincidentia oppositorum is not any kind of dialectical synthesis Creation is speech ndash so is Hamannrsquos 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 Aesthe-

tica in nuce relate to the argument he makes about the proper use of reason There is significant ldquooverlaprdquo

here the various images and descriptions Hamann uses are parallel making the same argument in differ-

ent ways From what we have already said we can derive a kind of table showing how the various images

used map onto Hamannrsquos argument about the reason and the passions

Passions Reason

Vowels Consonants Words Mere arrangements of letters Poetic Meter Turbatverse God Nature Christianity Classical civilization Alpha and Omega 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 refus-

es 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 to-

gether 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 ldquoit is not clear how far he understood it and he certainly gives it a

1 Though not in the Aesthetica See eg Betz 28 note 17

22

sense of his ownrdquo1 In fact it is not easy to see where the ldquocoincidencerdquo comes in at all Regarding every

text every object as part of his ldquoBiblerdquo 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 themselvesmdashto

the letters of a text (in literary criticism) and the phenomena of nature unreduced to their universal ra-

tional 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 pro-

duced of these elements He beholds in a single vision der rollende Donner der Beredamkeit and der

einylbicltte Blitz2 This strangemdashor strange to us and Hamann would not hesitate to say that our sensibili-

ties need correctionmdashthis strange conjunction of opposites confronts us even on the title page of the Aes-

thetica in nuce Eine Rhapodie in kabbalifrac34ifrac14er Proe A rhapsodymdasha stitching-together of pieces into an ar-

tistic unitymdashthat 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 ldquoApostillerdquo ndash whether Hamann himself some per-

sonified commentator or anyone else ndash remarks that the author of the Aesthetica in nuce ldquohat Satz und

Satz zuammengereltnet wie man die Pfeile auf einem Sltlalttfelde zaumlhltrdquo3 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 Romansrsquo shots though fewer were fired with greater force It is not clear which side better corres-

ponds to Hamannrsquos 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 Therersquos a case to be made for either in-

terpretation But whichever we take the view wersquore given of the Aesthetica in nuce is still of individual

Saumltze piled up one after another as discrete countable units This treatise says the speaker of the Apos-

tille is just a pile of sentences But in an instant our perspective is shifted ldquoLaszligt uns jetzt die Hauptumme

1 Berlin 115

2 Nadler 208

3 Nadler 217 The reference given by Hamann (ldquoProcop De bello persico I 18rdquo) is explained at Haynes 94 note

kkk

23

[hellip] houmlrenldquo1 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 vari-

ous meditations on human life that compose the text of the biblical book2 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

summarymdasha 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 Hamannrsquos 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 readerrsquos confusion It is not Hamannrsquos 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 writings3 it is perhaps not sur-

prising then if the Aesthetica in nuce presents us with hermeneutic difficulties that neither the text itself

nor comparisons with Hamannrsquos other works nor consideration of Hamannrsquos engagement with the issues

of his time are adequate to dispel But the paradox we are considering heremdashthe simultaneous focus on

both columns of the table with which this chapter beganmdashis so fundamental to the thought of the Aesthe-

tica in nuce that unless we can come to terms with it in some way Hamannrsquos 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

1 Ibid

2 Cf Lutherbibel Predig 1213 ldquoLaszligt uns die Hauptumme aller Lehre houmlrenldquo 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 ldquoApostillerdquo likewise to be a undermining of all that goes before it 3 ldquoI no longer understand myself quite differently from then some [writings I understand] better some worse [hellip]

[hellip] 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 stuffrdquo Briefwechsel V p 358 trans in Betz 229

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 ldquodie ilt nolt im bloszligen Bult-frac34a-bi-ren uumlbenmdashmdashund wahrlilt wahrlilt Kinder muumlfrac12en

wir werden wenn wir den Geifrac34 der Wahrheit empfahen ollenldquo1 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 ldquoSpirit of

Truth whom the world cannot receiverdquo (Jn 1417) 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 spiri-

tual pole than to the elemental literal material one But how says Hamannrsquos Nuszlig is this Spirit of Truth

to be received By becoming like children who are just learning to spellmdashand 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 ldquoBultfrac34abirenrdquo syllable by syllable confirms that Hamann is referring to this style of interpreta-

tion Recalling now the table at the start of this chapter in which letters and the ldquospirit of truthrdquo

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 ldquoVerlieren die Elemente des A B C ihre natuumlrlilte

Bedeutung wenn ie in der unendlichen Zuammenetzung willkuumlrlilter Zeilten uns an Ideen erinnern die wo niltt

im Himmel dolt im Gehirn indrdquo2 To this question of course we are meant to answer ldquonordquo But there is

much here that is not unproblematic or at least not simple What for instance is the ldquonatuumlrlilte Bedeu-

tungrdquo of a letter And how if the combination of these signs be arbitrary does it recall for us ideas And

1 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 Hamannrsquos voice at least on Hamannrsquos 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 wersquore 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 Greeksmdashbut 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 coin-

cidence is merely an opportunity to bring the opposites as opposites together But this assumption natu-

ral 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 experiencemdashthis 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 Hamannrsquos writing admits of both a macros-

copic 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 conjunc-

tion 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 them1 considering these various levels of read-

ing 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 simultaneous-

ly 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 interpreta-

tion could be set forth that might allow us to translate Hamannrsquos simultaneously cabalistic and rhapsodic

utterances into academic language or to devise summaries of his arguments in a neatly symbolic lan-

guage 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 oumlffentlilter Gebrault 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 Hamannrsquos thought is useful also here Sltoumlpfung ifrac34 eine Rede an die Kreatur durlt die Kreatur The

Christian overtones of such a formulation are obvious Hamann once offered an encapsulation of his

thought in the word λόγος2 a famously polysemous term every sense of which Hamann intends The in-

timate connection between reason and language is of course the most obvious philosophical implication of

1 For Hamannrsquos defense of this possibility see Chapter 4

2 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 Hamannrsquos philosophy But for Hamann λόγος 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 Hamannrsquos piety placed a great emphasis on the self-emptying of Christ Howev-

er much he might stress Christrsquos humanity and suffering though he remained well within the main-

stream 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 diffi-

culties here But there is a clear parallel between the way a Christian thinks of Christ and how Hamann

thinks ofmdashwell more or less everything Christ is a man who lived for a certain stretch of time in a cer-

tain place and is also the eternal God A word is a string of letters small shapes arbitrarily strung togeth-

er and is also a sign of a concept an immaterial thing existing in the mind Hamann is no dualistmdashit 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

Zufoumlrderfrac34 muumlfrac34e man D George Benon fragen ob die Einheit mit der Mannigfaltigkeit niltt befrac34ehen koumlnne [hellip] Der bultfrac34aumlblilte oder grammatifrac14e der fleifrac14liche oder dialectifrac14e der ka-pernaitifrac14e oder historifrac14e Sinn ind im houmlltfrac34en Grade myfrac34ilt und haumlngen von ollten augen-blicklilten pirituoumlen willkuumlhrlilten Nebenbefrac34immungen und Umfrac34aumlnden ab daszlig man ohne hinauf gen Himmel zu fahren die Schluumlfrac12el ihrer Erkenntnis niltt herabholen kann1

1 Nadler 203 note 23 Hamannrsquos footnote is attached to some lines of Latin verse which conclude the Nutrsquos letter to the Learned Rabbi They come from a poem traditionally and falsely attributed to the Emperor Augustus explain-ing why Vergilrsquos orders to destroy the drafts of the Aeneid were ignored after the poetrsquos death The excerpts are

Ah scelus indignum soluetur litera diues Frangatur potius legum veneranda potestas Liber amp alma Ceres succurrite mdash mdash [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 mdashwhich for Hamann who does not oppose the spirit and the letter in a conventional way is a spiritual richnessmdashis 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

28

It is not that interpretation ought to be literal physical or ldquoCapernaiticrdquo 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 understandingmdashthat is unless one has

attained a certain degree of spiritual insight ndashone will be unable to understand things even in their literal

senses for the spiritual and literal senses are one Hamannrsquos 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 expe-

rience 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 inten-

tion of this line of thought has been least of all to stimulate pious feelings Hamannrsquos goal is not to spiri-

tualize 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 (ldquoDie Sinne aber ind Ceres und Bacltus die Leidenfrac14aftenrdquo [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 simplis-tically 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 Hamannrsquos ability to com-press his meaning into very few and very cryptic words NB The ldquoCapernaiticrdquo sense refers to the sense in which Christ is literally present in the Christian sacrament This unusual word is used derogatively in Lutheran texts (eg the Epitome of the Konkordienformel) to disparage Catholic sacramental teaching Its origins are in Jn 65559 ldquoFor my flesh is meat indeed and my blood is drink in-deed [hellip] These things he said in the synagogue as he taught in Capernaumrdquo 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 Luthe-ran understanding according to which Christ is present in the sacrament in a merely spiritual way is less than per-fectly compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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

Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 im-

plied meanings into the literal tropological allegorical and anagogical senses that Christians have tradi-

tionally 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 ormdashto employ a metaphor

more perhaps more congenial to Hamannmdashdiscerning 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 indul-

gence 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 slo-

gan from the text itselfmdashldquoto speak is to translaterdquomdashand 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 uumlberetzenmdashaus einer Engelpralte in eine Menfrac14enpralte das heifrac34 Gedanken in WortemdashSalten in NamenmdashBilder in Zeilten die poetifrac14 oder kyriologifrac14 hifrac34orifrac14 oder ymbolifrac14 oder hieroglyphifrac14mdashmdashund philoophifrac14 oder ltarakterifrac34ifrac14 eyn koumlnnen1

Here we are given a license to translate Hamannrsquos images into signs of various kinds It is no surprise that

in a footnote attached to this text he derogates the ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs by citing a pas-

sage of Petronius which complains that a new fashion of ldquopuffed-up and formless talkativenessrdquo has cor-

1 Nadler 199

31

rupted speech so that ldquothe standard of eloquence being corrupted has been halted and struck dumbrdquo

and ldquonot even poetry displays a healthy colorrdquo1 By ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs we should un-

derstand something like Leibnizrsquos 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 criti-

cism 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 cor-

respondences out of the text But the other kinds of signsmdashthe poetic or symbolicmdashdo not seem to fall

under the same criticismmdashthese suggest a kind of sign which indeed has meaning but whose interpreta-

tion 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 Hamannrsquos thought allows even for this kind of correspon-

dence 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 Hamannrsquos text but also is deeply compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos text to assert that he intends the literal and symbolic meanings to be taken as

of equal importancemdashfor us to devote our full attention to take up one of the governing metaphors of this

1 N 199 n10 ldquoNuper ventosa isthaec amp enormis loquacitas Athenas ex Asia conmigrauit [hellip] simulque correpta elo-quentiae regula stetit amp obmutuit [hellip] Ac ne carmen quidem sani coloris enituitrdquo

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 discuss-

ing how Hamann refuses to privilege abstract ldquopurely mentalrdquo thought over the particular words in

which that thought finds expression Berlin concludes that ldquofor 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)rdquo1 As an example of one such contradiction Berlin cites the line placed at the head

of this section ldquoto speak is to translaterdquo For Berlin it follows from Hamannrsquos insistence on the unity of

reason and language that no translation no correspondence between words ideas and things can be es-

tablished

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 attend-ing to ideas or to language and through them (because they correspond) to the facts was a method of judging and knowing reality [hellip But the] notion of a correspondence that there is an objective world on one side and on the other man and his instruments ndash lan-guage ideas and so forth ndash attempting to approximate to this objective reality is a false picture There is only a flow of sensations2

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 ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 reproduced3 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 Hamannrsquos treatise but unable to claim any continuity of thought therewith

1 Berlin 81

2 Ibid

3 Though one might question even this Ποταμῷ γὰρ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐμβῆναι δὶς τῷ αὐτῷ and there is no reason to think

any two ldquoflows of sensationrdquo could ever be substantially identical Necessarily every ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos view Berlin is perplexed when confronted with Hamannrsquos open assertion

that translation is possible between ldquohuman speechrdquo and the ldquospeech of angelsrdquo and can only conclude

that Hamann here contradicts himself And for Berlin it is quite to be expected that Hamann should con-

tradict himself he regards Hamannrsquos thought in general as highly creative and intriguing Schwaumlrmerei

of note for its pivotal place in intellectual history but completely insusceptible or unworthy of serious

philosophic attention Berlin appreciates Hamannrsquos criticism of the Enlightenment and his prescient

awareness of the lifeless bloodless conception of manrsquos spiritual life that the Enlighteners would ultimate-

ly produce While Berlin claims to understand Hamannrsquos motives in writing he utterly rejects the content

of his writings which he regards as ldquothe cry of a trapped man hellip who cannot be brought to see that to be

regimented or eliminated is either inevitable or desirablerdquo1 For Berlin Hamann is simply a ldquofanaticrdquo

whose writings consist of ldquopassionate rhetoric and not careful thoughtrdquo and whose opinions are ldquogrotes-

quely one-sided a violent exaggeration of the uniqueness of men and things [and] a passionate hatred of

menrsquos wish to understand the universerdquo2 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 pur-

ism of Hitler3 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 Berlinrsquos judgment that Hamann

1 Berlin 116

2 Berlin 121

3 This accusation is presented in Berlinrsquos book in a series of insinuations we are told for example that Hamannrsquos

ldquohatred and blind irrationalism have fed the stream that has led to social and political irrationalism particularly in German in our own [20

th] centuryrdquo (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 Berlinrsquos 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

34

simply contradicts himself in allowing for the possibility of translation in and out of symbolic ldquolanguag-

esrdquo Hamann has very little patience for ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs which promise patent

meaning and unambiguous interpretation This is perfectly in keeping with his general distaste for effi-

cient 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 ldquopoeticrdquo and ldquosymbolicrdquo signs not to fall under the same fierce criticism as the others

ldquoTo speak is to translaterdquo and ldquocreation is a speech to the creature through the creaturerdquo These

two maxims placed very near to each other in the text1 suggest something of a solution to the problem to

which Berlin directs our attention The conjunction of these lines should remind us that Hamann wheth-

er he directing his attention to literature philology esthetics or any other subject is always also a reli-

gious thinker The archetype of every text is for him the Bible and biblical exegesis is the model and ca-

non 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 Michaelisrsquos ldquodenial of a mystical typological sense

of Scripturerdquo2 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 Mi-

chaelis 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 ldquoTo merdquo says Hamann ldquoevery book is a Biblerdquo3 like the Bible then every

book must be read not merely for its literal sense Berlinrsquos reading of Hamann might be correct if Ha-

1 N 118-119

2 Betz 114

3 Briefwechsel I p 309 trans in Betz 47

35

mann were speaking about the everyday world of words and things understood as a brute fact But Ha-

mann 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 re-

mind us that the interpretation of tongues is also a divine gift1 he admits even that persons may not un-

derstand what they themselves to and say Even a figure such as Voltaire hardly a friend of religious out-

looks testifies for those who have ears to hear to the rightness of Hamannrsquos views

kann man wohl einen glaubwuumlrdigern Zeugen als den unfrac34erblilten Voltaire anfuumlhren wellter bey-nahe die Religion fuumlr den Eckfrac34ein der epifrac14en Dilttkunfrac34 erklaumlrt [hellip] Voltaire aber der Hohe-priefrac34er im Tempel des Gefrac14macks frac14luumlszligt so buumlndig als Kaiphas und denkt frulttbarer als He-rodes2

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 ldquoHo-

hepriefrac34er im Tempelrdquo but also a somewhat Machiavellian politician) justifies the crucifixion of Christ by

arguing that ldquoit is expedient that one man should die for the peoplerdquo3 believing himself to be discussing a

political necessity while as if prophetically describing the Christian doctrine of the atonement And He-

rodrsquos deceitful remark to the Magi ldquothat I might also come and worship himrdquo is taken since Herod was

king of the Jews though a gentile by race to represent the universal destiny of the Christian religion4 This

tradition of interpretation habitual in Biblical exegesis Hamann applies also to analysis of the wordmdashso

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 1210

2 Nadler 204-5

3 John 1150

4 It is telling that Hamann chooses such a contrived and complicated case of biblical parallelism as this one his ar-

gument 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

36

will readily concede that ldquowe see through a glass darklyrdquo1 and that we may not even be able to descry the

true outlines of our own persons in this mirrormdashbut by invoking the language of mirrors2 he locates him-

self within a tradition of thought according to which nature however flawed parts of it may be and how-

ever dulled our ability to discern itmdashis 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 se-

cular 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 ldquoblind heathensrdquo

Blinde Heyden haben die Unilttbarkeit erkannt die der Menfrac14 mit GOTT gemein hat Die verhuumlllte Figur des Leibes das Antlitz des Hauptes und das Aumluszligerfrac34e der Arme ind das ilttbare Sltema in dem wir einher gehn dolt eigentlilt niltts als ein Zeigefinger des verborge-nen Menfrac14en in unsmdash Exemplumque DEI quisque est in imagine parva3

Note that the ldquospiritualrdquo 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 ldquoindex fingersrdquo which direct the inner man to

our attention Hamann let us recall4 does not believe that the target of this ldquoZeigefingerrdquo can always be

1 1 Cor 1312

2 Though Hamann is in some ways a very modern thinker who anticipates 20

th century thought about the kinship of

reason and language he here looks back to the middle ages Cf Alan of Lille ldquoOmnis mundi creatura Quasi liber et pictura Nobis est et speculumrdquo With the sentiment and conceit of this verse Hamann could not agree more 3 N 198 The quotation from the Astronomicon of Manilius (IV895) is mainly noteworthy for its having been writ-

ten by a pagan author while echoing the language of Genesis regarding the ldquoimage of Godrdquo The Cambridge edition of Hamann misenglishes this line rendering it as ldquoEach one is an instance of God in miniaturerdquo This not only loses the connection to the book of Genesis conveyed by the word ldquoimagordquo but puts far too much weight on the word ldquoexemplumrdquo as well An exemplum is not an instance but a type model or analogue ldquoInstancerdquo implies an occur-rence of a rationally determinable kind a ldquotyperdquo or ldquoanaloguerdquo 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

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 circumstancesmdashthis 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 re-

fers to ldquocorrespondencesrdquo of thing and idea and of idea and word these ldquocorrespondencesrdquo are for Berlin

relations between two different things of different types He is quite correct to judge that Hamann consid-

ers 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 meaningmdashhe 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 justifica-

tion 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 ldquoConclusionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos own line that ldquocreation is a speech to the creature

through the creaturerdquo 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 cor-

respond to each other based on no apodictically determinable system knowable a priori but on the gra-

tuitous (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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 com-

pared translation to the art of understanding the image of a tapestry from looking only at the backs of the

threads he remarks ldquoDort [ie in the original contexts of the metaphors borrowed from other authors for

39

Hamannrsquos text] werden ie aber ad illustrationem (zur Verbraumlmung des Rockes) hier ad inuolucrum (zum

Hemde auf bloszligem Leibe) gebrauchtrdquo1 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 deco-

rated 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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos which ac-

cording to the line of interpretation I have explored reveals as much about Hamannrsquos 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 tear-

ing 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 Hamannrsquos motion between images his construction of typological

schemes that resist easy classification and one-for-one interpretation is not antirational raving or obscu-

rantism but rather an alternativemdashand a quite compelling onemdashto 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

1 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 tho-

roughly religious vision of the world If one is willing to do this Hamann is a kind of prophetmdashand the

horned head of Pan on his title-page is also the horned head of Moses1 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 pro-

ducing neat tables of Hamannrsquos 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 Aes-

thetica 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 somethingmdashunless there really is some secret ineffable law of correspondences that un-

ites 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 commen-

tators and writers of senior essays have no right to tread

1 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 agrave la Mosaiumlque (Roth 103 343)

41

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin Isaiah The Magus of the North JG Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism ed Henry

Hardy London John Murray 1993 Betz John After Enlightenment the Post-Secular Vision of JG Hamann Chichester John Wiley amp Sons

2009 Hamann Johann Georg Hamannrsquos Schriften ed Friedrich Roth Berlin G Reimer 1821 (Cited as

ldquoRothrdquo All citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Saumlmtliche Werke ed Josef Nadler Wien Verlag Herder 1950 (Cited as ldquoNad-

lerrdquo Unless otherwise noted all citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Writings on Philosophy and Language trans and ed Kenneth Haynes Cam-

bridge Cambridge UP 2007 (Cited as ldquoHaynesrdquo) Jacobs Carol ldquoHamann Is a Nomadic Writer lsquoAesthetica in nucersquordquo in Skirting the Ethical Stanford Stan-

ford UP 2008 pp 111-130 OrsquoFlaherty James C The Quarrel of Reason with Itself Essays on Hamann Michaelis Lessing Nietzsche Co-

lumbia SC Camden 1988

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 let-

ters than Hamann gives us ndash and even if we lacked the extrinsic familiarity with Homerrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 warriorrsquos

wrath

What then does Hamann mean by this image ldquoSeerdquo he hints to us just after showing us the al-

tered line of Greek ldquothe greater and lesser Masorah of philosophy [Weltweisheit] has overwhelmed the

text of Nature like a Noahrsquos floodrdquo1 As is usual for Hamann this explanation only raises further ques-

tions Nothing here has overwhelmed or flooded anything else and least of all Masorah ndash 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 re-

minded of what was said shortly before Homerrsquos line was introduced

Sie [dh die Mue] wird es wagen den natuumlrlilten Gebrauclt der Sinne von dem unnatuumlrlilten Gebrault der Abfrac34ractionen zu laumlutern wodurlt unere Begriffe von den Dingen eben o ehr verfrac34uumlmmelt werden als der Name des Sltoumlpfers underdruumlckt und gelaumlfrac34ert wird2

The ldquounnatural use of abstractionsrdquo here plays a role parallel to that of the ldquoMasorah of worldly philoso-

phyrdquo mdash 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 ldquoMaso-

1 Nadler 207 Seht die groszlige und kleine Maore der Weltweisheit hat den Text der Natur gleilt einer Suumlndfluth uumlberfrac14wemmt 2 Nadler 207

12

rah of philosophyrdquo then are interpretations that distort and obscure It is this sort of distortion and ob-

scuring that are represented by the removal of the letters alpha and omega from Homerrsquos line we are told

after all that they are removed ldquothrough abstractionrdquo Here Hamann is making a pun on the Latin roots

of the word ldquoabstractionrdquo but it is not merely a pun it is also a hint at one of the hidden connections be-

tween the vowels of the Iliad and Hamannrsquos 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 dam-

aged

And Hamann further suggests that it is because of this failure of interpretation or clarification

that the ldquoGreeksrdquo who abuse abstraction are wrong to think themselves wiser than the ldquochamberlains with

the Gnostic keyrdquo This phrase in itself rather obscure is one of the bridge-phrases in Hamannrsquos text that

point out to us which parts of the tapestry may be connected beneath the surface Chamberlain is Kammer-

herr and between Kammerherr and Kaumlmmerer there is small difference and Kaumlmmerer is the word Luther

used for ldquoeunuchrdquo1 The bridge leads us to another nearby passage of the Aesthetica

Wenn die Leidenfrac14aften Glieder der Unehre ind houmlren ie deswegen auf Waffen der Mannheit zu eyn Verfrac34eht ihr den Bultfrac34aben der Vernunft kluumlger als jener allegorifrac14e Kaumlmmerer der alexandrinifrac14en Kirlte den Bultfrac34aben der Sltrift der ich elbfrac34 zum Verfrac14nittenen maltte um des Himmelreilts willen2

Seen in light of this passage the reference to eunuchs and to Gnosticism is less perplexing While Origen

ndash who I presume to be ldquothat allegorical chamberlain of the Alexandrian churchrdquo mdash is not generally consi-

dered 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

ldquoLeidenfrac14aftenrdquo 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

1 ldquoIn Acts 827 Luther translates as lsquoKaumlmmererrsquo(related to lsquoKammerherrrsquo chamberlain) what the King James Bible translates as lsquoeunuchrsquordquo Haynes 80 note 87 2 Nadler 208

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 ab-

stract 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 ex-

tended Latin quotation from Bacon which is appended as a footnote to the passage quoted above on the

ldquounnatural use of abstractionsrdquo Hamann calls Bacon his ldquoEuthyphrordquo1 the figure who perhaps does not

teach him anymore than Euthyphro taught Socrates but who provides nonetheless the occasion for fruit-

ful 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 repu-

tation as an antirationalist or forerunner of the Sturm und Drang is not here making an argument against

reason as such or against the mindrsquos use of concepts or against thought in general For Bacon is not mak-

ing an argument against philosophy but against bad philosophy ldquoAnd so let men know how far the Idols

of the human mind are from the Ideas of the divine mind hellip 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 ac-

count of the conveniences of liferdquo 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 con-

cepts only so that the truth of things might better shine forth -- indeed for all that he advocates the in-

crease 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 Hamannrsquos critique of the Gnostic chamberlains His prescription is not that we avoid

1 ldquoBacon mein Euthyphronrdquo Nadler 197

14

making use of concepts for things but that we make sure that our concepts have not been verfrac34uumlmmelt and

gelaumlfrac34ert by abuses of reason

The word ldquoabstractionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos 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 foot-

note quotes at considerable length Ovidrsquos retelling of the story ldquoSpem sine corpore amat corpus putat

esse quod umbra est Adstupet ipse sibirdquo1 They who consider the abstractions of their minds to be most

real prefer a (vain) hope or a shadow to the bodymdashthat is the material concrete reality of the natural

world Long after Hamannrsquos 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 sibimdashNarcissus 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 ldquopure reasonrdquo from the mess of passions and contingencies that always surround hu-

man life Hamann prophesies an analogous fate It is this abuse of reason which Hamann means to sug-

gest t the removal of the first and last Greek letters from a line of Homer

And just as Hamann challenges the ldquoGreeksrdquo 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 cor-

rectly or to make any meaningful scientific achievements Just as Hume could not drink a glass of water or

eat an egg without faith2 neither we might paraphrase Hamann could he follow an argument to its con-

1 Metamorphoses III417f quoted at Nadler 210

2 This was a favorite quip of Hamannrsquos and is recorded in several places eg OrsquoFlaherty 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 Hamannrsquos view the supposed opposition of

reason and the passions is a fiction of the Enlighteners his thought has little room for absolute dichoto-

mies and he rejects also this one The passions in fact have an essential role to play even in the exercise

of reason ldquoLeidenfrac14amacr allein giebt Abfrac34ractionen owohl als Hypotheen Haumlnde Fuumlszlige Fluumlgel mdash Bildern und Zei-

chen Geifrac34 Leben und Zungerdquo1 There are perhaps many ways to understand ldquohands feet and wingsrdquo mdash but

between all possible interpretations of these words a basic unity exists They are all parts of the body asso-

ciated with motion and action And so abstractions and hypothesesmdashdry conclusions of the reasonmdashare

made active and mobile by the passions Likewise images and signs are given ldquolife and tonguerdquo 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 un-

mutilated 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 Hamannrsquos style and the symbolic ldquovocabularyrdquo of the Aesthetica in nuce The connection of Ha-

mannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos thought

1 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

Verucht es einmal die Iliade zu leen wenn ihr vorher durch die Abfrac34raction die beyden

Selbfrac34lauter α und ω ausgesichtet habt1 ldquoSelbstlautrdquo and ldquoMitlautrdquo ldquoConsonantrdquo and ldquovowelrdquo2 These are evocative termsmdashnot 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 con-

cepts 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 ldquoletter of the voicerdquo is utterable on its own while a littera consonans

must be ldquosounded withrdquo something else This way of articulating the distinction between independent

vowels and dependent consonants was a commonplace in the eighteenth century3 and would not have

been unfamiliar to Hamann even if the etymology of ldquoSelbstlautrdquo did not suggest it If we translate then

a bit freely we might say ldquothat which is removed from the Iliad by abstraction is that without which

1 Nadler 207

2 German preserves also more Latinate forms ldquoVokalrdquo and ldquoKonsonantrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos thought in the Aesthetica in nuce 3 John Hensons New Latin Grammar for instance published at Nottingham in 1744 explains ldquoA Vowel is a letter

which makes a full and perfect Sound of it Self as a o A Conſonant is a Letter that has no Sound of it Self without a Vowelrdquo And in a Verbesserte and Erleichterte Lateinische Grammatica published at Halle in 1763 (a year after the Cru-sades of the Philologist saw light) we read ldquoDen Anfang in der Lateinifrac14en Spralten maltt man von den Bultfrac34abenhellip Und diee werden eingetheilet in vocales oder elbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautende und consonantes oder mitlautendemitlautendemitlautendemitlautende o niltt ehe koumlnnen ausgeprolten werden als bis ein vocalis dazukoumlmmtrdquo 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 httpbooksgooglecombooksid=T5ECAAAAQAAJ and the second at httpbooksgooglecombooksid=F9oVAAAAYAAJ

17

there can be no speechrdquo which without any further interpretation already at least appears to imply much

more than a matter of rearranged letters

As we have seen the ldquoabstractionrdquo of the letters from the line of the Iliad corresponds in the typo-

logical 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 pas-

sions in order for them to have any power to persuade It is not that reasoned arguments even when ab-

stract are otiose or parasiticalmdashthese 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 ldquovocalizedrdquo

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

Hamannrsquos 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 unpointedmdashlike 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 durlt 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 scripturesmdashwritten by God but one must bring onersquos

own vowels to read it

But is this not going too far While we may not just have misrepresented Hamannrsquos 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 doesnrsquot make sense as

written without those vowels itrsquos still easily interpretable If Hamann had not named it as a line from the

Iliad any educated person on seeing the word microῆνιν 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 miss-

ing places in the line the shape of the dactyls and the grammatical possibilities offered by the Greek lan-

guage 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 En-

lightened 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 objec-

tion of this scientist would be absurd because it would miss the point of Hamannrsquos critiquemdashhe goes

around the backs of the Enlighteners contending that they are moved by passion even in what they be-

lieve to be their exercises of pure reason that the arguments they invoke to defend their conception of rea-

son 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 ldquoTurbatverserdquo1 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 Hamannrsquos altered line from the Iliad) But it refers most specif-

ically 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 Θεά ἄειδε μῆνιν Ἀχιλῆος Πηληϊάδεω In a certain sense there is nothing of Homerrsquos 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 ob-

viously 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 ldquogoddessrdquo and not ldquowrathrdquo In the Turbatverse of nature then the superficial meaning of the speak-

ing 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 niltts als Turbatvere und disiecti membra poetae zu unerm Gebrault uumlbrig Diee zu ammeln ifrac34 des Gelehrten ie auszulegen des Philoophen ie naltzuahmenmdashoder nolt kuumlhnermdash mdashie in Gefrac14ick zu bringen des Poeten befrac14eiden Theil2

1 Nadler 198

2 Nadler 199

20

The hierarchy that is here established with the scholar philosopher and poet presented with responsibili-

ties of increasing creativity should not surprise us as it is exactly in line with what Hamann says else-

where about the high dignity of the poet to whom is compared even God himself1 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 ade-

quate 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 consti-

tuent 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

1 ldquoDer Poet am Anfange der Tagerdquo Nadler 206

21

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

Hamannrsquos coincidentia oppositorum is not any kind of dialectical synthesis Creation is speech ndash so is Hamannrsquos 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 Aesthe-

tica in nuce relate to the argument he makes about the proper use of reason There is significant ldquooverlaprdquo

here the various images and descriptions Hamann uses are parallel making the same argument in differ-

ent ways From what we have already said we can derive a kind of table showing how the various images

used map onto Hamannrsquos argument about the reason and the passions

Passions Reason

Vowels Consonants Words Mere arrangements of letters Poetic Meter Turbatverse God Nature Christianity Classical civilization Alpha and Omega 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 refus-

es 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 to-

gether 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 ldquoit is not clear how far he understood it and he certainly gives it a

1 Though not in the Aesthetica See eg Betz 28 note 17

22

sense of his ownrdquo1 In fact it is not easy to see where the ldquocoincidencerdquo comes in at all Regarding every

text every object as part of his ldquoBiblerdquo 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 themselvesmdashto

the letters of a text (in literary criticism) and the phenomena of nature unreduced to their universal ra-

tional 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 pro-

duced of these elements He beholds in a single vision der rollende Donner der Beredamkeit and der

einylbicltte Blitz2 This strangemdashor strange to us and Hamann would not hesitate to say that our sensibili-

ties need correctionmdashthis strange conjunction of opposites confronts us even on the title page of the Aes-

thetica in nuce Eine Rhapodie in kabbalifrac34ifrac14er Proe A rhapsodymdasha stitching-together of pieces into an ar-

tistic unitymdashthat 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 ldquoApostillerdquo ndash whether Hamann himself some per-

sonified commentator or anyone else ndash remarks that the author of the Aesthetica in nuce ldquohat Satz und

Satz zuammengereltnet wie man die Pfeile auf einem Sltlalttfelde zaumlhltrdquo3 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 Romansrsquo shots though fewer were fired with greater force It is not clear which side better corres-

ponds to Hamannrsquos 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 Therersquos a case to be made for either in-

terpretation But whichever we take the view wersquore given of the Aesthetica in nuce is still of individual

Saumltze piled up one after another as discrete countable units This treatise says the speaker of the Apos-

tille is just a pile of sentences But in an instant our perspective is shifted ldquoLaszligt uns jetzt die Hauptumme

1 Berlin 115

2 Nadler 208

3 Nadler 217 The reference given by Hamann (ldquoProcop De bello persico I 18rdquo) is explained at Haynes 94 note

kkk

23

[hellip] houmlrenldquo1 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 vari-

ous meditations on human life that compose the text of the biblical book2 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

summarymdasha 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 Hamannrsquos 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 readerrsquos confusion It is not Hamannrsquos 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 writings3 it is perhaps not sur-

prising then if the Aesthetica in nuce presents us with hermeneutic difficulties that neither the text itself

nor comparisons with Hamannrsquos other works nor consideration of Hamannrsquos engagement with the issues

of his time are adequate to dispel But the paradox we are considering heremdashthe simultaneous focus on

both columns of the table with which this chapter beganmdashis so fundamental to the thought of the Aesthe-

tica in nuce that unless we can come to terms with it in some way Hamannrsquos 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

1 Ibid

2 Cf Lutherbibel Predig 1213 ldquoLaszligt uns die Hauptumme aller Lehre houmlrenldquo 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 ldquoApostillerdquo likewise to be a undermining of all that goes before it 3 ldquoI no longer understand myself quite differently from then some [writings I understand] better some worse [hellip]

[hellip] 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 stuffrdquo Briefwechsel V p 358 trans in Betz 229

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 ldquodie ilt nolt im bloszligen Bult-frac34a-bi-ren uumlbenmdashmdashund wahrlilt wahrlilt Kinder muumlfrac12en

wir werden wenn wir den Geifrac34 der Wahrheit empfahen ollenldquo1 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 ldquoSpirit of

Truth whom the world cannot receiverdquo (Jn 1417) 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 spiri-

tual pole than to the elemental literal material one But how says Hamannrsquos Nuszlig is this Spirit of Truth

to be received By becoming like children who are just learning to spellmdashand 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 ldquoBultfrac34abirenrdquo syllable by syllable confirms that Hamann is referring to this style of interpreta-

tion Recalling now the table at the start of this chapter in which letters and the ldquospirit of truthrdquo

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 ldquoVerlieren die Elemente des A B C ihre natuumlrlilte

Bedeutung wenn ie in der unendlichen Zuammenetzung willkuumlrlilter Zeilten uns an Ideen erinnern die wo niltt

im Himmel dolt im Gehirn indrdquo2 To this question of course we are meant to answer ldquonordquo But there is

much here that is not unproblematic or at least not simple What for instance is the ldquonatuumlrlilte Bedeu-

tungrdquo of a letter And how if the combination of these signs be arbitrary does it recall for us ideas And

1 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 Hamannrsquos voice at least on Hamannrsquos 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 wersquore 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 Greeksmdashbut 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 coin-

cidence is merely an opportunity to bring the opposites as opposites together But this assumption natu-

ral 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 experiencemdashthis 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 Hamannrsquos writing admits of both a macros-

copic 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 conjunc-

tion 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 them1 considering these various levels of read-

ing 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 simultaneous-

ly 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 interpreta-

tion could be set forth that might allow us to translate Hamannrsquos simultaneously cabalistic and rhapsodic

utterances into academic language or to devise summaries of his arguments in a neatly symbolic lan-

guage 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 oumlffentlilter Gebrault 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 Hamannrsquos thought is useful also here Sltoumlpfung ifrac34 eine Rede an die Kreatur durlt die Kreatur The

Christian overtones of such a formulation are obvious Hamann once offered an encapsulation of his

thought in the word λόγος2 a famously polysemous term every sense of which Hamann intends The in-

timate connection between reason and language is of course the most obvious philosophical implication of

1 For Hamannrsquos defense of this possibility see Chapter 4

2 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 Hamannrsquos philosophy But for Hamann λόγος 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 Hamannrsquos piety placed a great emphasis on the self-emptying of Christ Howev-

er much he might stress Christrsquos humanity and suffering though he remained well within the main-

stream 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 diffi-

culties here But there is a clear parallel between the way a Christian thinks of Christ and how Hamann

thinks ofmdashwell more or less everything Christ is a man who lived for a certain stretch of time in a cer-

tain place and is also the eternal God A word is a string of letters small shapes arbitrarily strung togeth-

er and is also a sign of a concept an immaterial thing existing in the mind Hamann is no dualistmdashit 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

Zufoumlrderfrac34 muumlfrac34e man D George Benon fragen ob die Einheit mit der Mannigfaltigkeit niltt befrac34ehen koumlnne [hellip] Der bultfrac34aumlblilte oder grammatifrac14e der fleifrac14liche oder dialectifrac14e der ka-pernaitifrac14e oder historifrac14e Sinn ind im houmlltfrac34en Grade myfrac34ilt und haumlngen von ollten augen-blicklilten pirituoumlen willkuumlhrlilten Nebenbefrac34immungen und Umfrac34aumlnden ab daszlig man ohne hinauf gen Himmel zu fahren die Schluumlfrac12el ihrer Erkenntnis niltt herabholen kann1

1 Nadler 203 note 23 Hamannrsquos footnote is attached to some lines of Latin verse which conclude the Nutrsquos letter to the Learned Rabbi They come from a poem traditionally and falsely attributed to the Emperor Augustus explain-ing why Vergilrsquos orders to destroy the drafts of the Aeneid were ignored after the poetrsquos death The excerpts are

Ah scelus indignum soluetur litera diues Frangatur potius legum veneranda potestas Liber amp alma Ceres succurrite mdash mdash [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 mdashwhich for Hamann who does not oppose the spirit and the letter in a conventional way is a spiritual richnessmdashis 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

28

It is not that interpretation ought to be literal physical or ldquoCapernaiticrdquo 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 understandingmdashthat is unless one has

attained a certain degree of spiritual insight ndashone will be unable to understand things even in their literal

senses for the spiritual and literal senses are one Hamannrsquos 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 expe-

rience 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 inten-

tion of this line of thought has been least of all to stimulate pious feelings Hamannrsquos goal is not to spiri-

tualize 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 (ldquoDie Sinne aber ind Ceres und Bacltus die Leidenfrac14aftenrdquo [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 simplis-tically 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 Hamannrsquos ability to com-press his meaning into very few and very cryptic words NB The ldquoCapernaiticrdquo sense refers to the sense in which Christ is literally present in the Christian sacrament This unusual word is used derogatively in Lutheran texts (eg the Epitome of the Konkordienformel) to disparage Catholic sacramental teaching Its origins are in Jn 65559 ldquoFor my flesh is meat indeed and my blood is drink in-deed [hellip] These things he said in the synagogue as he taught in Capernaumrdquo 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 Luthe-ran understanding according to which Christ is present in the sacrament in a merely spiritual way is less than per-fectly compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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

Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 im-

plied meanings into the literal tropological allegorical and anagogical senses that Christians have tradi-

tionally 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 ormdashto employ a metaphor

more perhaps more congenial to Hamannmdashdiscerning 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 indul-

gence 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 slo-

gan from the text itselfmdashldquoto speak is to translaterdquomdashand 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 uumlberetzenmdashaus einer Engelpralte in eine Menfrac14enpralte das heifrac34 Gedanken in WortemdashSalten in NamenmdashBilder in Zeilten die poetifrac14 oder kyriologifrac14 hifrac34orifrac14 oder ymbolifrac14 oder hieroglyphifrac14mdashmdashund philoophifrac14 oder ltarakterifrac34ifrac14 eyn koumlnnen1

Here we are given a license to translate Hamannrsquos images into signs of various kinds It is no surprise that

in a footnote attached to this text he derogates the ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs by citing a pas-

sage of Petronius which complains that a new fashion of ldquopuffed-up and formless talkativenessrdquo has cor-

1 Nadler 199

31

rupted speech so that ldquothe standard of eloquence being corrupted has been halted and struck dumbrdquo

and ldquonot even poetry displays a healthy colorrdquo1 By ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs we should un-

derstand something like Leibnizrsquos 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 criti-

cism 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 cor-

respondences out of the text But the other kinds of signsmdashthe poetic or symbolicmdashdo not seem to fall

under the same criticismmdashthese suggest a kind of sign which indeed has meaning but whose interpreta-

tion 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 Hamannrsquos thought allows even for this kind of correspon-

dence 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 Hamannrsquos text but also is deeply compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos text to assert that he intends the literal and symbolic meanings to be taken as

of equal importancemdashfor us to devote our full attention to take up one of the governing metaphors of this

1 N 199 n10 ldquoNuper ventosa isthaec amp enormis loquacitas Athenas ex Asia conmigrauit [hellip] simulque correpta elo-quentiae regula stetit amp obmutuit [hellip] Ac ne carmen quidem sani coloris enituitrdquo

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 discuss-

ing how Hamann refuses to privilege abstract ldquopurely mentalrdquo thought over the particular words in

which that thought finds expression Berlin concludes that ldquofor 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)rdquo1 As an example of one such contradiction Berlin cites the line placed at the head

of this section ldquoto speak is to translaterdquo For Berlin it follows from Hamannrsquos insistence on the unity of

reason and language that no translation no correspondence between words ideas and things can be es-

tablished

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 attend-ing to ideas or to language and through them (because they correspond) to the facts was a method of judging and knowing reality [hellip But the] notion of a correspondence that there is an objective world on one side and on the other man and his instruments ndash lan-guage ideas and so forth ndash attempting to approximate to this objective reality is a false picture There is only a flow of sensations2

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 ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 reproduced3 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 Hamannrsquos treatise but unable to claim any continuity of thought therewith

1 Berlin 81

2 Ibid

3 Though one might question even this Ποταμῷ γὰρ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐμβῆναι δὶς τῷ αὐτῷ and there is no reason to think

any two ldquoflows of sensationrdquo could ever be substantially identical Necessarily every ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos view Berlin is perplexed when confronted with Hamannrsquos open assertion

that translation is possible between ldquohuman speechrdquo and the ldquospeech of angelsrdquo and can only conclude

that Hamann here contradicts himself And for Berlin it is quite to be expected that Hamann should con-

tradict himself he regards Hamannrsquos thought in general as highly creative and intriguing Schwaumlrmerei

of note for its pivotal place in intellectual history but completely insusceptible or unworthy of serious

philosophic attention Berlin appreciates Hamannrsquos criticism of the Enlightenment and his prescient

awareness of the lifeless bloodless conception of manrsquos spiritual life that the Enlighteners would ultimate-

ly produce While Berlin claims to understand Hamannrsquos motives in writing he utterly rejects the content

of his writings which he regards as ldquothe cry of a trapped man hellip who cannot be brought to see that to be

regimented or eliminated is either inevitable or desirablerdquo1 For Berlin Hamann is simply a ldquofanaticrdquo

whose writings consist of ldquopassionate rhetoric and not careful thoughtrdquo and whose opinions are ldquogrotes-

quely one-sided a violent exaggeration of the uniqueness of men and things [and] a passionate hatred of

menrsquos wish to understand the universerdquo2 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 pur-

ism of Hitler3 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 Berlinrsquos judgment that Hamann

1 Berlin 116

2 Berlin 121

3 This accusation is presented in Berlinrsquos book in a series of insinuations we are told for example that Hamannrsquos

ldquohatred and blind irrationalism have fed the stream that has led to social and political irrationalism particularly in German in our own [20

th] centuryrdquo (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 Berlinrsquos 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

34

simply contradicts himself in allowing for the possibility of translation in and out of symbolic ldquolanguag-

esrdquo Hamann has very little patience for ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs which promise patent

meaning and unambiguous interpretation This is perfectly in keeping with his general distaste for effi-

cient 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 ldquopoeticrdquo and ldquosymbolicrdquo signs not to fall under the same fierce criticism as the others

ldquoTo speak is to translaterdquo and ldquocreation is a speech to the creature through the creaturerdquo These

two maxims placed very near to each other in the text1 suggest something of a solution to the problem to

which Berlin directs our attention The conjunction of these lines should remind us that Hamann wheth-

er he directing his attention to literature philology esthetics or any other subject is always also a reli-

gious thinker The archetype of every text is for him the Bible and biblical exegesis is the model and ca-

non 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 Michaelisrsquos ldquodenial of a mystical typological sense

of Scripturerdquo2 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 Mi-

chaelis 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 ldquoTo merdquo says Hamann ldquoevery book is a Biblerdquo3 like the Bible then every

book must be read not merely for its literal sense Berlinrsquos reading of Hamann might be correct if Ha-

1 N 118-119

2 Betz 114

3 Briefwechsel I p 309 trans in Betz 47

35

mann were speaking about the everyday world of words and things understood as a brute fact But Ha-

mann 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 re-

mind us that the interpretation of tongues is also a divine gift1 he admits even that persons may not un-

derstand what they themselves to and say Even a figure such as Voltaire hardly a friend of religious out-

looks testifies for those who have ears to hear to the rightness of Hamannrsquos views

kann man wohl einen glaubwuumlrdigern Zeugen als den unfrac34erblilten Voltaire anfuumlhren wellter bey-nahe die Religion fuumlr den Eckfrac34ein der epifrac14en Dilttkunfrac34 erklaumlrt [hellip] Voltaire aber der Hohe-priefrac34er im Tempel des Gefrac14macks frac14luumlszligt so buumlndig als Kaiphas und denkt frulttbarer als He-rodes2

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 ldquoHo-

hepriefrac34er im Tempelrdquo but also a somewhat Machiavellian politician) justifies the crucifixion of Christ by

arguing that ldquoit is expedient that one man should die for the peoplerdquo3 believing himself to be discussing a

political necessity while as if prophetically describing the Christian doctrine of the atonement And He-

rodrsquos deceitful remark to the Magi ldquothat I might also come and worship himrdquo is taken since Herod was

king of the Jews though a gentile by race to represent the universal destiny of the Christian religion4 This

tradition of interpretation habitual in Biblical exegesis Hamann applies also to analysis of the wordmdashso

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 1210

2 Nadler 204-5

3 John 1150

4 It is telling that Hamann chooses such a contrived and complicated case of biblical parallelism as this one his ar-

gument 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

36

will readily concede that ldquowe see through a glass darklyrdquo1 and that we may not even be able to descry the

true outlines of our own persons in this mirrormdashbut by invoking the language of mirrors2 he locates him-

self within a tradition of thought according to which nature however flawed parts of it may be and how-

ever dulled our ability to discern itmdashis 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 se-

cular 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 ldquoblind heathensrdquo

Blinde Heyden haben die Unilttbarkeit erkannt die der Menfrac14 mit GOTT gemein hat Die verhuumlllte Figur des Leibes das Antlitz des Hauptes und das Aumluszligerfrac34e der Arme ind das ilttbare Sltema in dem wir einher gehn dolt eigentlilt niltts als ein Zeigefinger des verborge-nen Menfrac14en in unsmdash Exemplumque DEI quisque est in imagine parva3

Note that the ldquospiritualrdquo 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 ldquoindex fingersrdquo which direct the inner man to

our attention Hamann let us recall4 does not believe that the target of this ldquoZeigefingerrdquo can always be

1 1 Cor 1312

2 Though Hamann is in some ways a very modern thinker who anticipates 20

th century thought about the kinship of

reason and language he here looks back to the middle ages Cf Alan of Lille ldquoOmnis mundi creatura Quasi liber et pictura Nobis est et speculumrdquo With the sentiment and conceit of this verse Hamann could not agree more 3 N 198 The quotation from the Astronomicon of Manilius (IV895) is mainly noteworthy for its having been writ-

ten by a pagan author while echoing the language of Genesis regarding the ldquoimage of Godrdquo The Cambridge edition of Hamann misenglishes this line rendering it as ldquoEach one is an instance of God in miniaturerdquo This not only loses the connection to the book of Genesis conveyed by the word ldquoimagordquo but puts far too much weight on the word ldquoexemplumrdquo as well An exemplum is not an instance but a type model or analogue ldquoInstancerdquo implies an occur-rence of a rationally determinable kind a ldquotyperdquo or ldquoanaloguerdquo 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

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 circumstancesmdashthis 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 re-

fers to ldquocorrespondencesrdquo of thing and idea and of idea and word these ldquocorrespondencesrdquo are for Berlin

relations between two different things of different types He is quite correct to judge that Hamann consid-

ers 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 meaningmdashhe 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 justifica-

tion 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 ldquoConclusionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos own line that ldquocreation is a speech to the creature

through the creaturerdquo 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 cor-

respond to each other based on no apodictically determinable system knowable a priori but on the gra-

tuitous (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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 com-

pared translation to the art of understanding the image of a tapestry from looking only at the backs of the

threads he remarks ldquoDort [ie in the original contexts of the metaphors borrowed from other authors for

39

Hamannrsquos text] werden ie aber ad illustrationem (zur Verbraumlmung des Rockes) hier ad inuolucrum (zum

Hemde auf bloszligem Leibe) gebrauchtrdquo1 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 deco-

rated 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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos which ac-

cording to the line of interpretation I have explored reveals as much about Hamannrsquos 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 tear-

ing 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 Hamannrsquos motion between images his construction of typological

schemes that resist easy classification and one-for-one interpretation is not antirational raving or obscu-

rantism but rather an alternativemdashand a quite compelling onemdashto 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

1 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 tho-

roughly religious vision of the world If one is willing to do this Hamann is a kind of prophetmdashand the

horned head of Pan on his title-page is also the horned head of Moses1 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 pro-

ducing neat tables of Hamannrsquos 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 Aes-

thetica 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 somethingmdashunless there really is some secret ineffable law of correspondences that un-

ites 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 commen-

tators and writers of senior essays have no right to tread

1 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 agrave la Mosaiumlque (Roth 103 343)

41

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin Isaiah The Magus of the North JG Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism ed Henry

Hardy London John Murray 1993 Betz John After Enlightenment the Post-Secular Vision of JG Hamann Chichester John Wiley amp Sons

2009 Hamann Johann Georg Hamannrsquos Schriften ed Friedrich Roth Berlin G Reimer 1821 (Cited as

ldquoRothrdquo All citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Saumlmtliche Werke ed Josef Nadler Wien Verlag Herder 1950 (Cited as ldquoNad-

lerrdquo Unless otherwise noted all citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Writings on Philosophy and Language trans and ed Kenneth Haynes Cam-

bridge Cambridge UP 2007 (Cited as ldquoHaynesrdquo) Jacobs Carol ldquoHamann Is a Nomadic Writer lsquoAesthetica in nucersquordquo in Skirting the Ethical Stanford Stan-

ford UP 2008 pp 111-130 OrsquoFlaherty James C The Quarrel of Reason with Itself Essays on Hamann Michaelis Lessing Nietzsche Co-

lumbia SC Camden 1988

12

rah of philosophyrdquo then are interpretations that distort and obscure It is this sort of distortion and ob-

scuring that are represented by the removal of the letters alpha and omega from Homerrsquos line we are told

after all that they are removed ldquothrough abstractionrdquo Here Hamann is making a pun on the Latin roots

of the word ldquoabstractionrdquo but it is not merely a pun it is also a hint at one of the hidden connections be-

tween the vowels of the Iliad and Hamannrsquos 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 dam-

aged

And Hamann further suggests that it is because of this failure of interpretation or clarification

that the ldquoGreeksrdquo who abuse abstraction are wrong to think themselves wiser than the ldquochamberlains with

the Gnostic keyrdquo This phrase in itself rather obscure is one of the bridge-phrases in Hamannrsquos text that

point out to us which parts of the tapestry may be connected beneath the surface Chamberlain is Kammer-

herr and between Kammerherr and Kaumlmmerer there is small difference and Kaumlmmerer is the word Luther

used for ldquoeunuchrdquo1 The bridge leads us to another nearby passage of the Aesthetica

Wenn die Leidenfrac14aften Glieder der Unehre ind houmlren ie deswegen auf Waffen der Mannheit zu eyn Verfrac34eht ihr den Bultfrac34aben der Vernunft kluumlger als jener allegorifrac14e Kaumlmmerer der alexandrinifrac14en Kirlte den Bultfrac34aben der Sltrift der ich elbfrac34 zum Verfrac14nittenen maltte um des Himmelreilts willen2

Seen in light of this passage the reference to eunuchs and to Gnosticism is less perplexing While Origen

ndash who I presume to be ldquothat allegorical chamberlain of the Alexandrian churchrdquo mdash is not generally consi-

dered 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

ldquoLeidenfrac14aftenrdquo 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

1 ldquoIn Acts 827 Luther translates as lsquoKaumlmmererrsquo(related to lsquoKammerherrrsquo chamberlain) what the King James Bible translates as lsquoeunuchrsquordquo Haynes 80 note 87 2 Nadler 208

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 ab-

stract 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 ex-

tended Latin quotation from Bacon which is appended as a footnote to the passage quoted above on the

ldquounnatural use of abstractionsrdquo Hamann calls Bacon his ldquoEuthyphrordquo1 the figure who perhaps does not

teach him anymore than Euthyphro taught Socrates but who provides nonetheless the occasion for fruit-

ful 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 repu-

tation as an antirationalist or forerunner of the Sturm und Drang is not here making an argument against

reason as such or against the mindrsquos use of concepts or against thought in general For Bacon is not mak-

ing an argument against philosophy but against bad philosophy ldquoAnd so let men know how far the Idols

of the human mind are from the Ideas of the divine mind hellip 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 ac-

count of the conveniences of liferdquo 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 con-

cepts only so that the truth of things might better shine forth -- indeed for all that he advocates the in-

crease 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 Hamannrsquos critique of the Gnostic chamberlains His prescription is not that we avoid

1 ldquoBacon mein Euthyphronrdquo Nadler 197

14

making use of concepts for things but that we make sure that our concepts have not been verfrac34uumlmmelt and

gelaumlfrac34ert by abuses of reason

The word ldquoabstractionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos 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 foot-

note quotes at considerable length Ovidrsquos retelling of the story ldquoSpem sine corpore amat corpus putat

esse quod umbra est Adstupet ipse sibirdquo1 They who consider the abstractions of their minds to be most

real prefer a (vain) hope or a shadow to the bodymdashthat is the material concrete reality of the natural

world Long after Hamannrsquos 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 sibimdashNarcissus 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 ldquopure reasonrdquo from the mess of passions and contingencies that always surround hu-

man life Hamann prophesies an analogous fate It is this abuse of reason which Hamann means to sug-

gest t the removal of the first and last Greek letters from a line of Homer

And just as Hamann challenges the ldquoGreeksrdquo 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 cor-

rectly or to make any meaningful scientific achievements Just as Hume could not drink a glass of water or

eat an egg without faith2 neither we might paraphrase Hamann could he follow an argument to its con-

1 Metamorphoses III417f quoted at Nadler 210

2 This was a favorite quip of Hamannrsquos and is recorded in several places eg OrsquoFlaherty 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 Hamannrsquos view the supposed opposition of

reason and the passions is a fiction of the Enlighteners his thought has little room for absolute dichoto-

mies and he rejects also this one The passions in fact have an essential role to play even in the exercise

of reason ldquoLeidenfrac14amacr allein giebt Abfrac34ractionen owohl als Hypotheen Haumlnde Fuumlszlige Fluumlgel mdash Bildern und Zei-

chen Geifrac34 Leben und Zungerdquo1 There are perhaps many ways to understand ldquohands feet and wingsrdquo mdash but

between all possible interpretations of these words a basic unity exists They are all parts of the body asso-

ciated with motion and action And so abstractions and hypothesesmdashdry conclusions of the reasonmdashare

made active and mobile by the passions Likewise images and signs are given ldquolife and tonguerdquo 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 un-

mutilated 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 Hamannrsquos style and the symbolic ldquovocabularyrdquo of the Aesthetica in nuce The connection of Ha-

mannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos thought

1 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

Verucht es einmal die Iliade zu leen wenn ihr vorher durch die Abfrac34raction die beyden

Selbfrac34lauter α und ω ausgesichtet habt1 ldquoSelbstlautrdquo and ldquoMitlautrdquo ldquoConsonantrdquo and ldquovowelrdquo2 These are evocative termsmdashnot 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 con-

cepts 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 ldquoletter of the voicerdquo is utterable on its own while a littera consonans

must be ldquosounded withrdquo something else This way of articulating the distinction between independent

vowels and dependent consonants was a commonplace in the eighteenth century3 and would not have

been unfamiliar to Hamann even if the etymology of ldquoSelbstlautrdquo did not suggest it If we translate then

a bit freely we might say ldquothat which is removed from the Iliad by abstraction is that without which

1 Nadler 207

2 German preserves also more Latinate forms ldquoVokalrdquo and ldquoKonsonantrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos thought in the Aesthetica in nuce 3 John Hensons New Latin Grammar for instance published at Nottingham in 1744 explains ldquoA Vowel is a letter

which makes a full and perfect Sound of it Self as a o A Conſonant is a Letter that has no Sound of it Self without a Vowelrdquo And in a Verbesserte and Erleichterte Lateinische Grammatica published at Halle in 1763 (a year after the Cru-sades of the Philologist saw light) we read ldquoDen Anfang in der Lateinifrac14en Spralten maltt man von den Bultfrac34abenhellip Und diee werden eingetheilet in vocales oder elbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautende und consonantes oder mitlautendemitlautendemitlautendemitlautende o niltt ehe koumlnnen ausgeprolten werden als bis ein vocalis dazukoumlmmtrdquo 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 httpbooksgooglecombooksid=T5ECAAAAQAAJ and the second at httpbooksgooglecombooksid=F9oVAAAAYAAJ

17

there can be no speechrdquo which without any further interpretation already at least appears to imply much

more than a matter of rearranged letters

As we have seen the ldquoabstractionrdquo of the letters from the line of the Iliad corresponds in the typo-

logical 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 pas-

sions in order for them to have any power to persuade It is not that reasoned arguments even when ab-

stract are otiose or parasiticalmdashthese 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 ldquovocalizedrdquo

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

Hamannrsquos 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 unpointedmdashlike 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 durlt 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 scripturesmdashwritten by God but one must bring onersquos

own vowels to read it

But is this not going too far While we may not just have misrepresented Hamannrsquos 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 doesnrsquot make sense as

written without those vowels itrsquos still easily interpretable If Hamann had not named it as a line from the

Iliad any educated person on seeing the word microῆνιν 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 miss-

ing places in the line the shape of the dactyls and the grammatical possibilities offered by the Greek lan-

guage 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 En-

lightened 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 objec-

tion of this scientist would be absurd because it would miss the point of Hamannrsquos critiquemdashhe goes

around the backs of the Enlighteners contending that they are moved by passion even in what they be-

lieve to be their exercises of pure reason that the arguments they invoke to defend their conception of rea-

son 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 ldquoTurbatverserdquo1 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 Hamannrsquos altered line from the Iliad) But it refers most specif-

ically 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 Θεά ἄειδε μῆνιν Ἀχιλῆος Πηληϊάδεω In a certain sense there is nothing of Homerrsquos 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 ob-

viously 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 ldquogoddessrdquo and not ldquowrathrdquo In the Turbatverse of nature then the superficial meaning of the speak-

ing 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 niltts als Turbatvere und disiecti membra poetae zu unerm Gebrault uumlbrig Diee zu ammeln ifrac34 des Gelehrten ie auszulegen des Philoophen ie naltzuahmenmdashoder nolt kuumlhnermdash mdashie in Gefrac14ick zu bringen des Poeten befrac14eiden Theil2

1 Nadler 198

2 Nadler 199

20

The hierarchy that is here established with the scholar philosopher and poet presented with responsibili-

ties of increasing creativity should not surprise us as it is exactly in line with what Hamann says else-

where about the high dignity of the poet to whom is compared even God himself1 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 ade-

quate 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 consti-

tuent 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

1 ldquoDer Poet am Anfange der Tagerdquo Nadler 206

21

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

Hamannrsquos coincidentia oppositorum is not any kind of dialectical synthesis Creation is speech ndash so is Hamannrsquos 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 Aesthe-

tica in nuce relate to the argument he makes about the proper use of reason There is significant ldquooverlaprdquo

here the various images and descriptions Hamann uses are parallel making the same argument in differ-

ent ways From what we have already said we can derive a kind of table showing how the various images

used map onto Hamannrsquos argument about the reason and the passions

Passions Reason

Vowels Consonants Words Mere arrangements of letters Poetic Meter Turbatverse God Nature Christianity Classical civilization Alpha and Omega 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 refus-

es 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 to-

gether 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 ldquoit is not clear how far he understood it and he certainly gives it a

1 Though not in the Aesthetica See eg Betz 28 note 17

22

sense of his ownrdquo1 In fact it is not easy to see where the ldquocoincidencerdquo comes in at all Regarding every

text every object as part of his ldquoBiblerdquo 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 themselvesmdashto

the letters of a text (in literary criticism) and the phenomena of nature unreduced to their universal ra-

tional 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 pro-

duced of these elements He beholds in a single vision der rollende Donner der Beredamkeit and der

einylbicltte Blitz2 This strangemdashor strange to us and Hamann would not hesitate to say that our sensibili-

ties need correctionmdashthis strange conjunction of opposites confronts us even on the title page of the Aes-

thetica in nuce Eine Rhapodie in kabbalifrac34ifrac14er Proe A rhapsodymdasha stitching-together of pieces into an ar-

tistic unitymdashthat 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 ldquoApostillerdquo ndash whether Hamann himself some per-

sonified commentator or anyone else ndash remarks that the author of the Aesthetica in nuce ldquohat Satz und

Satz zuammengereltnet wie man die Pfeile auf einem Sltlalttfelde zaumlhltrdquo3 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 Romansrsquo shots though fewer were fired with greater force It is not clear which side better corres-

ponds to Hamannrsquos 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 Therersquos a case to be made for either in-

terpretation But whichever we take the view wersquore given of the Aesthetica in nuce is still of individual

Saumltze piled up one after another as discrete countable units This treatise says the speaker of the Apos-

tille is just a pile of sentences But in an instant our perspective is shifted ldquoLaszligt uns jetzt die Hauptumme

1 Berlin 115

2 Nadler 208

3 Nadler 217 The reference given by Hamann (ldquoProcop De bello persico I 18rdquo) is explained at Haynes 94 note

kkk

23

[hellip] houmlrenldquo1 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 vari-

ous meditations on human life that compose the text of the biblical book2 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

summarymdasha 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 Hamannrsquos 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 readerrsquos confusion It is not Hamannrsquos 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 writings3 it is perhaps not sur-

prising then if the Aesthetica in nuce presents us with hermeneutic difficulties that neither the text itself

nor comparisons with Hamannrsquos other works nor consideration of Hamannrsquos engagement with the issues

of his time are adequate to dispel But the paradox we are considering heremdashthe simultaneous focus on

both columns of the table with which this chapter beganmdashis so fundamental to the thought of the Aesthe-

tica in nuce that unless we can come to terms with it in some way Hamannrsquos 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

1 Ibid

2 Cf Lutherbibel Predig 1213 ldquoLaszligt uns die Hauptumme aller Lehre houmlrenldquo 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 ldquoApostillerdquo likewise to be a undermining of all that goes before it 3 ldquoI no longer understand myself quite differently from then some [writings I understand] better some worse [hellip]

[hellip] 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 stuffrdquo Briefwechsel V p 358 trans in Betz 229

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 ldquodie ilt nolt im bloszligen Bult-frac34a-bi-ren uumlbenmdashmdashund wahrlilt wahrlilt Kinder muumlfrac12en

wir werden wenn wir den Geifrac34 der Wahrheit empfahen ollenldquo1 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 ldquoSpirit of

Truth whom the world cannot receiverdquo (Jn 1417) 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 spiri-

tual pole than to the elemental literal material one But how says Hamannrsquos Nuszlig is this Spirit of Truth

to be received By becoming like children who are just learning to spellmdashand 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 ldquoBultfrac34abirenrdquo syllable by syllable confirms that Hamann is referring to this style of interpreta-

tion Recalling now the table at the start of this chapter in which letters and the ldquospirit of truthrdquo

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 ldquoVerlieren die Elemente des A B C ihre natuumlrlilte

Bedeutung wenn ie in der unendlichen Zuammenetzung willkuumlrlilter Zeilten uns an Ideen erinnern die wo niltt

im Himmel dolt im Gehirn indrdquo2 To this question of course we are meant to answer ldquonordquo But there is

much here that is not unproblematic or at least not simple What for instance is the ldquonatuumlrlilte Bedeu-

tungrdquo of a letter And how if the combination of these signs be arbitrary does it recall for us ideas And

1 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 Hamannrsquos voice at least on Hamannrsquos 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 wersquore 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 Greeksmdashbut 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 coin-

cidence is merely an opportunity to bring the opposites as opposites together But this assumption natu-

ral 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 experiencemdashthis 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 Hamannrsquos writing admits of both a macros-

copic 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 conjunc-

tion 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 them1 considering these various levels of read-

ing 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 simultaneous-

ly 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 interpreta-

tion could be set forth that might allow us to translate Hamannrsquos simultaneously cabalistic and rhapsodic

utterances into academic language or to devise summaries of his arguments in a neatly symbolic lan-

guage 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 oumlffentlilter Gebrault 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 Hamannrsquos thought is useful also here Sltoumlpfung ifrac34 eine Rede an die Kreatur durlt die Kreatur The

Christian overtones of such a formulation are obvious Hamann once offered an encapsulation of his

thought in the word λόγος2 a famously polysemous term every sense of which Hamann intends The in-

timate connection between reason and language is of course the most obvious philosophical implication of

1 For Hamannrsquos defense of this possibility see Chapter 4

2 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 Hamannrsquos philosophy But for Hamann λόγος 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 Hamannrsquos piety placed a great emphasis on the self-emptying of Christ Howev-

er much he might stress Christrsquos humanity and suffering though he remained well within the main-

stream 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 diffi-

culties here But there is a clear parallel between the way a Christian thinks of Christ and how Hamann

thinks ofmdashwell more or less everything Christ is a man who lived for a certain stretch of time in a cer-

tain place and is also the eternal God A word is a string of letters small shapes arbitrarily strung togeth-

er and is also a sign of a concept an immaterial thing existing in the mind Hamann is no dualistmdashit 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

Zufoumlrderfrac34 muumlfrac34e man D George Benon fragen ob die Einheit mit der Mannigfaltigkeit niltt befrac34ehen koumlnne [hellip] Der bultfrac34aumlblilte oder grammatifrac14e der fleifrac14liche oder dialectifrac14e der ka-pernaitifrac14e oder historifrac14e Sinn ind im houmlltfrac34en Grade myfrac34ilt und haumlngen von ollten augen-blicklilten pirituoumlen willkuumlhrlilten Nebenbefrac34immungen und Umfrac34aumlnden ab daszlig man ohne hinauf gen Himmel zu fahren die Schluumlfrac12el ihrer Erkenntnis niltt herabholen kann1

1 Nadler 203 note 23 Hamannrsquos footnote is attached to some lines of Latin verse which conclude the Nutrsquos letter to the Learned Rabbi They come from a poem traditionally and falsely attributed to the Emperor Augustus explain-ing why Vergilrsquos orders to destroy the drafts of the Aeneid were ignored after the poetrsquos death The excerpts are

Ah scelus indignum soluetur litera diues Frangatur potius legum veneranda potestas Liber amp alma Ceres succurrite mdash mdash [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 mdashwhich for Hamann who does not oppose the spirit and the letter in a conventional way is a spiritual richnessmdashis 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

28

It is not that interpretation ought to be literal physical or ldquoCapernaiticrdquo 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 understandingmdashthat is unless one has

attained a certain degree of spiritual insight ndashone will be unable to understand things even in their literal

senses for the spiritual and literal senses are one Hamannrsquos 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 expe-

rience 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 inten-

tion of this line of thought has been least of all to stimulate pious feelings Hamannrsquos goal is not to spiri-

tualize 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 (ldquoDie Sinne aber ind Ceres und Bacltus die Leidenfrac14aftenrdquo [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 simplis-tically 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 Hamannrsquos ability to com-press his meaning into very few and very cryptic words NB The ldquoCapernaiticrdquo sense refers to the sense in which Christ is literally present in the Christian sacrament This unusual word is used derogatively in Lutheran texts (eg the Epitome of the Konkordienformel) to disparage Catholic sacramental teaching Its origins are in Jn 65559 ldquoFor my flesh is meat indeed and my blood is drink in-deed [hellip] These things he said in the synagogue as he taught in Capernaumrdquo 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 Luthe-ran understanding according to which Christ is present in the sacrament in a merely spiritual way is less than per-fectly compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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

Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 im-

plied meanings into the literal tropological allegorical and anagogical senses that Christians have tradi-

tionally 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 ormdashto employ a metaphor

more perhaps more congenial to Hamannmdashdiscerning 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 indul-

gence 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 slo-

gan from the text itselfmdashldquoto speak is to translaterdquomdashand 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 uumlberetzenmdashaus einer Engelpralte in eine Menfrac14enpralte das heifrac34 Gedanken in WortemdashSalten in NamenmdashBilder in Zeilten die poetifrac14 oder kyriologifrac14 hifrac34orifrac14 oder ymbolifrac14 oder hieroglyphifrac14mdashmdashund philoophifrac14 oder ltarakterifrac34ifrac14 eyn koumlnnen1

Here we are given a license to translate Hamannrsquos images into signs of various kinds It is no surprise that

in a footnote attached to this text he derogates the ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs by citing a pas-

sage of Petronius which complains that a new fashion of ldquopuffed-up and formless talkativenessrdquo has cor-

1 Nadler 199

31

rupted speech so that ldquothe standard of eloquence being corrupted has been halted and struck dumbrdquo

and ldquonot even poetry displays a healthy colorrdquo1 By ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs we should un-

derstand something like Leibnizrsquos 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 criti-

cism 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 cor-

respondences out of the text But the other kinds of signsmdashthe poetic or symbolicmdashdo not seem to fall

under the same criticismmdashthese suggest a kind of sign which indeed has meaning but whose interpreta-

tion 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 Hamannrsquos thought allows even for this kind of correspon-

dence 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 Hamannrsquos text but also is deeply compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos text to assert that he intends the literal and symbolic meanings to be taken as

of equal importancemdashfor us to devote our full attention to take up one of the governing metaphors of this

1 N 199 n10 ldquoNuper ventosa isthaec amp enormis loquacitas Athenas ex Asia conmigrauit [hellip] simulque correpta elo-quentiae regula stetit amp obmutuit [hellip] Ac ne carmen quidem sani coloris enituitrdquo

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 discuss-

ing how Hamann refuses to privilege abstract ldquopurely mentalrdquo thought over the particular words in

which that thought finds expression Berlin concludes that ldquofor 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)rdquo1 As an example of one such contradiction Berlin cites the line placed at the head

of this section ldquoto speak is to translaterdquo For Berlin it follows from Hamannrsquos insistence on the unity of

reason and language that no translation no correspondence between words ideas and things can be es-

tablished

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 attend-ing to ideas or to language and through them (because they correspond) to the facts was a method of judging and knowing reality [hellip But the] notion of a correspondence that there is an objective world on one side and on the other man and his instruments ndash lan-guage ideas and so forth ndash attempting to approximate to this objective reality is a false picture There is only a flow of sensations2

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 ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 reproduced3 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 Hamannrsquos treatise but unable to claim any continuity of thought therewith

1 Berlin 81

2 Ibid

3 Though one might question even this Ποταμῷ γὰρ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐμβῆναι δὶς τῷ αὐτῷ and there is no reason to think

any two ldquoflows of sensationrdquo could ever be substantially identical Necessarily every ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos view Berlin is perplexed when confronted with Hamannrsquos open assertion

that translation is possible between ldquohuman speechrdquo and the ldquospeech of angelsrdquo and can only conclude

that Hamann here contradicts himself And for Berlin it is quite to be expected that Hamann should con-

tradict himself he regards Hamannrsquos thought in general as highly creative and intriguing Schwaumlrmerei

of note for its pivotal place in intellectual history but completely insusceptible or unworthy of serious

philosophic attention Berlin appreciates Hamannrsquos criticism of the Enlightenment and his prescient

awareness of the lifeless bloodless conception of manrsquos spiritual life that the Enlighteners would ultimate-

ly produce While Berlin claims to understand Hamannrsquos motives in writing he utterly rejects the content

of his writings which he regards as ldquothe cry of a trapped man hellip who cannot be brought to see that to be

regimented or eliminated is either inevitable or desirablerdquo1 For Berlin Hamann is simply a ldquofanaticrdquo

whose writings consist of ldquopassionate rhetoric and not careful thoughtrdquo and whose opinions are ldquogrotes-

quely one-sided a violent exaggeration of the uniqueness of men and things [and] a passionate hatred of

menrsquos wish to understand the universerdquo2 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 pur-

ism of Hitler3 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 Berlinrsquos judgment that Hamann

1 Berlin 116

2 Berlin 121

3 This accusation is presented in Berlinrsquos book in a series of insinuations we are told for example that Hamannrsquos

ldquohatred and blind irrationalism have fed the stream that has led to social and political irrationalism particularly in German in our own [20

th] centuryrdquo (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 Berlinrsquos 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

34

simply contradicts himself in allowing for the possibility of translation in and out of symbolic ldquolanguag-

esrdquo Hamann has very little patience for ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs which promise patent

meaning and unambiguous interpretation This is perfectly in keeping with his general distaste for effi-

cient 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 ldquopoeticrdquo and ldquosymbolicrdquo signs not to fall under the same fierce criticism as the others

ldquoTo speak is to translaterdquo and ldquocreation is a speech to the creature through the creaturerdquo These

two maxims placed very near to each other in the text1 suggest something of a solution to the problem to

which Berlin directs our attention The conjunction of these lines should remind us that Hamann wheth-

er he directing his attention to literature philology esthetics or any other subject is always also a reli-

gious thinker The archetype of every text is for him the Bible and biblical exegesis is the model and ca-

non 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 Michaelisrsquos ldquodenial of a mystical typological sense

of Scripturerdquo2 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 Mi-

chaelis 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 ldquoTo merdquo says Hamann ldquoevery book is a Biblerdquo3 like the Bible then every

book must be read not merely for its literal sense Berlinrsquos reading of Hamann might be correct if Ha-

1 N 118-119

2 Betz 114

3 Briefwechsel I p 309 trans in Betz 47

35

mann were speaking about the everyday world of words and things understood as a brute fact But Ha-

mann 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 re-

mind us that the interpretation of tongues is also a divine gift1 he admits even that persons may not un-

derstand what they themselves to and say Even a figure such as Voltaire hardly a friend of religious out-

looks testifies for those who have ears to hear to the rightness of Hamannrsquos views

kann man wohl einen glaubwuumlrdigern Zeugen als den unfrac34erblilten Voltaire anfuumlhren wellter bey-nahe die Religion fuumlr den Eckfrac34ein der epifrac14en Dilttkunfrac34 erklaumlrt [hellip] Voltaire aber der Hohe-priefrac34er im Tempel des Gefrac14macks frac14luumlszligt so buumlndig als Kaiphas und denkt frulttbarer als He-rodes2

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 ldquoHo-

hepriefrac34er im Tempelrdquo but also a somewhat Machiavellian politician) justifies the crucifixion of Christ by

arguing that ldquoit is expedient that one man should die for the peoplerdquo3 believing himself to be discussing a

political necessity while as if prophetically describing the Christian doctrine of the atonement And He-

rodrsquos deceitful remark to the Magi ldquothat I might also come and worship himrdquo is taken since Herod was

king of the Jews though a gentile by race to represent the universal destiny of the Christian religion4 This

tradition of interpretation habitual in Biblical exegesis Hamann applies also to analysis of the wordmdashso

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 1210

2 Nadler 204-5

3 John 1150

4 It is telling that Hamann chooses such a contrived and complicated case of biblical parallelism as this one his ar-

gument 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

36

will readily concede that ldquowe see through a glass darklyrdquo1 and that we may not even be able to descry the

true outlines of our own persons in this mirrormdashbut by invoking the language of mirrors2 he locates him-

self within a tradition of thought according to which nature however flawed parts of it may be and how-

ever dulled our ability to discern itmdashis 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 se-

cular 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 ldquoblind heathensrdquo

Blinde Heyden haben die Unilttbarkeit erkannt die der Menfrac14 mit GOTT gemein hat Die verhuumlllte Figur des Leibes das Antlitz des Hauptes und das Aumluszligerfrac34e der Arme ind das ilttbare Sltema in dem wir einher gehn dolt eigentlilt niltts als ein Zeigefinger des verborge-nen Menfrac14en in unsmdash Exemplumque DEI quisque est in imagine parva3

Note that the ldquospiritualrdquo 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 ldquoindex fingersrdquo which direct the inner man to

our attention Hamann let us recall4 does not believe that the target of this ldquoZeigefingerrdquo can always be

1 1 Cor 1312

2 Though Hamann is in some ways a very modern thinker who anticipates 20

th century thought about the kinship of

reason and language he here looks back to the middle ages Cf Alan of Lille ldquoOmnis mundi creatura Quasi liber et pictura Nobis est et speculumrdquo With the sentiment and conceit of this verse Hamann could not agree more 3 N 198 The quotation from the Astronomicon of Manilius (IV895) is mainly noteworthy for its having been writ-

ten by a pagan author while echoing the language of Genesis regarding the ldquoimage of Godrdquo The Cambridge edition of Hamann misenglishes this line rendering it as ldquoEach one is an instance of God in miniaturerdquo This not only loses the connection to the book of Genesis conveyed by the word ldquoimagordquo but puts far too much weight on the word ldquoexemplumrdquo as well An exemplum is not an instance but a type model or analogue ldquoInstancerdquo implies an occur-rence of a rationally determinable kind a ldquotyperdquo or ldquoanaloguerdquo 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

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 circumstancesmdashthis 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 re-

fers to ldquocorrespondencesrdquo of thing and idea and of idea and word these ldquocorrespondencesrdquo are for Berlin

relations between two different things of different types He is quite correct to judge that Hamann consid-

ers 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 meaningmdashhe 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 justifica-

tion 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 ldquoConclusionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos own line that ldquocreation is a speech to the creature

through the creaturerdquo 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 cor-

respond to each other based on no apodictically determinable system knowable a priori but on the gra-

tuitous (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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 com-

pared translation to the art of understanding the image of a tapestry from looking only at the backs of the

threads he remarks ldquoDort [ie in the original contexts of the metaphors borrowed from other authors for

39

Hamannrsquos text] werden ie aber ad illustrationem (zur Verbraumlmung des Rockes) hier ad inuolucrum (zum

Hemde auf bloszligem Leibe) gebrauchtrdquo1 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 deco-

rated 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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos which ac-

cording to the line of interpretation I have explored reveals as much about Hamannrsquos 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 tear-

ing 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 Hamannrsquos motion between images his construction of typological

schemes that resist easy classification and one-for-one interpretation is not antirational raving or obscu-

rantism but rather an alternativemdashand a quite compelling onemdashto 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

1 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 tho-

roughly religious vision of the world If one is willing to do this Hamann is a kind of prophetmdashand the

horned head of Pan on his title-page is also the horned head of Moses1 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 pro-

ducing neat tables of Hamannrsquos 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 Aes-

thetica 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 somethingmdashunless there really is some secret ineffable law of correspondences that un-

ites 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 commen-

tators and writers of senior essays have no right to tread

1 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 agrave la Mosaiumlque (Roth 103 343)

41

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin Isaiah The Magus of the North JG Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism ed Henry

Hardy London John Murray 1993 Betz John After Enlightenment the Post-Secular Vision of JG Hamann Chichester John Wiley amp Sons

2009 Hamann Johann Georg Hamannrsquos Schriften ed Friedrich Roth Berlin G Reimer 1821 (Cited as

ldquoRothrdquo All citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Saumlmtliche Werke ed Josef Nadler Wien Verlag Herder 1950 (Cited as ldquoNad-

lerrdquo Unless otherwise noted all citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Writings on Philosophy and Language trans and ed Kenneth Haynes Cam-

bridge Cambridge UP 2007 (Cited as ldquoHaynesrdquo) Jacobs Carol ldquoHamann Is a Nomadic Writer lsquoAesthetica in nucersquordquo in Skirting the Ethical Stanford Stan-

ford UP 2008 pp 111-130 OrsquoFlaherty James C The Quarrel of Reason with Itself Essays on Hamann Michaelis Lessing Nietzsche Co-

lumbia SC Camden 1988

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 ab-

stract 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 ex-

tended Latin quotation from Bacon which is appended as a footnote to the passage quoted above on the

ldquounnatural use of abstractionsrdquo Hamann calls Bacon his ldquoEuthyphrordquo1 the figure who perhaps does not

teach him anymore than Euthyphro taught Socrates but who provides nonetheless the occasion for fruit-

ful 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 repu-

tation as an antirationalist or forerunner of the Sturm und Drang is not here making an argument against

reason as such or against the mindrsquos use of concepts or against thought in general For Bacon is not mak-

ing an argument against philosophy but against bad philosophy ldquoAnd so let men know how far the Idols

of the human mind are from the Ideas of the divine mind hellip 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 ac-

count of the conveniences of liferdquo 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 con-

cepts only so that the truth of things might better shine forth -- indeed for all that he advocates the in-

crease 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 Hamannrsquos critique of the Gnostic chamberlains His prescription is not that we avoid

1 ldquoBacon mein Euthyphronrdquo Nadler 197

14

making use of concepts for things but that we make sure that our concepts have not been verfrac34uumlmmelt and

gelaumlfrac34ert by abuses of reason

The word ldquoabstractionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos 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 foot-

note quotes at considerable length Ovidrsquos retelling of the story ldquoSpem sine corpore amat corpus putat

esse quod umbra est Adstupet ipse sibirdquo1 They who consider the abstractions of their minds to be most

real prefer a (vain) hope or a shadow to the bodymdashthat is the material concrete reality of the natural

world Long after Hamannrsquos 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 sibimdashNarcissus 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 ldquopure reasonrdquo from the mess of passions and contingencies that always surround hu-

man life Hamann prophesies an analogous fate It is this abuse of reason which Hamann means to sug-

gest t the removal of the first and last Greek letters from a line of Homer

And just as Hamann challenges the ldquoGreeksrdquo 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 cor-

rectly or to make any meaningful scientific achievements Just as Hume could not drink a glass of water or

eat an egg without faith2 neither we might paraphrase Hamann could he follow an argument to its con-

1 Metamorphoses III417f quoted at Nadler 210

2 This was a favorite quip of Hamannrsquos and is recorded in several places eg OrsquoFlaherty 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 Hamannrsquos view the supposed opposition of

reason and the passions is a fiction of the Enlighteners his thought has little room for absolute dichoto-

mies and he rejects also this one The passions in fact have an essential role to play even in the exercise

of reason ldquoLeidenfrac14amacr allein giebt Abfrac34ractionen owohl als Hypotheen Haumlnde Fuumlszlige Fluumlgel mdash Bildern und Zei-

chen Geifrac34 Leben und Zungerdquo1 There are perhaps many ways to understand ldquohands feet and wingsrdquo mdash but

between all possible interpretations of these words a basic unity exists They are all parts of the body asso-

ciated with motion and action And so abstractions and hypothesesmdashdry conclusions of the reasonmdashare

made active and mobile by the passions Likewise images and signs are given ldquolife and tonguerdquo 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 un-

mutilated 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 Hamannrsquos style and the symbolic ldquovocabularyrdquo of the Aesthetica in nuce The connection of Ha-

mannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos thought

1 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

Verucht es einmal die Iliade zu leen wenn ihr vorher durch die Abfrac34raction die beyden

Selbfrac34lauter α und ω ausgesichtet habt1 ldquoSelbstlautrdquo and ldquoMitlautrdquo ldquoConsonantrdquo and ldquovowelrdquo2 These are evocative termsmdashnot 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 con-

cepts 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 ldquoletter of the voicerdquo is utterable on its own while a littera consonans

must be ldquosounded withrdquo something else This way of articulating the distinction between independent

vowels and dependent consonants was a commonplace in the eighteenth century3 and would not have

been unfamiliar to Hamann even if the etymology of ldquoSelbstlautrdquo did not suggest it If we translate then

a bit freely we might say ldquothat which is removed from the Iliad by abstraction is that without which

1 Nadler 207

2 German preserves also more Latinate forms ldquoVokalrdquo and ldquoKonsonantrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos thought in the Aesthetica in nuce 3 John Hensons New Latin Grammar for instance published at Nottingham in 1744 explains ldquoA Vowel is a letter

which makes a full and perfect Sound of it Self as a o A Conſonant is a Letter that has no Sound of it Self without a Vowelrdquo And in a Verbesserte and Erleichterte Lateinische Grammatica published at Halle in 1763 (a year after the Cru-sades of the Philologist saw light) we read ldquoDen Anfang in der Lateinifrac14en Spralten maltt man von den Bultfrac34abenhellip Und diee werden eingetheilet in vocales oder elbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautende und consonantes oder mitlautendemitlautendemitlautendemitlautende o niltt ehe koumlnnen ausgeprolten werden als bis ein vocalis dazukoumlmmtrdquo 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 httpbooksgooglecombooksid=T5ECAAAAQAAJ and the second at httpbooksgooglecombooksid=F9oVAAAAYAAJ

17

there can be no speechrdquo which without any further interpretation already at least appears to imply much

more than a matter of rearranged letters

As we have seen the ldquoabstractionrdquo of the letters from the line of the Iliad corresponds in the typo-

logical 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 pas-

sions in order for them to have any power to persuade It is not that reasoned arguments even when ab-

stract are otiose or parasiticalmdashthese 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 ldquovocalizedrdquo

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

Hamannrsquos 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 unpointedmdashlike 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 durlt 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 scripturesmdashwritten by God but one must bring onersquos

own vowels to read it

But is this not going too far While we may not just have misrepresented Hamannrsquos 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 doesnrsquot make sense as

written without those vowels itrsquos still easily interpretable If Hamann had not named it as a line from the

Iliad any educated person on seeing the word microῆνιν 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 miss-

ing places in the line the shape of the dactyls and the grammatical possibilities offered by the Greek lan-

guage 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 En-

lightened 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 objec-

tion of this scientist would be absurd because it would miss the point of Hamannrsquos critiquemdashhe goes

around the backs of the Enlighteners contending that they are moved by passion even in what they be-

lieve to be their exercises of pure reason that the arguments they invoke to defend their conception of rea-

son 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 ldquoTurbatverserdquo1 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 Hamannrsquos altered line from the Iliad) But it refers most specif-

ically 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 Θεά ἄειδε μῆνιν Ἀχιλῆος Πηληϊάδεω In a certain sense there is nothing of Homerrsquos 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 ob-

viously 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 ldquogoddessrdquo and not ldquowrathrdquo In the Turbatverse of nature then the superficial meaning of the speak-

ing 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 niltts als Turbatvere und disiecti membra poetae zu unerm Gebrault uumlbrig Diee zu ammeln ifrac34 des Gelehrten ie auszulegen des Philoophen ie naltzuahmenmdashoder nolt kuumlhnermdash mdashie in Gefrac14ick zu bringen des Poeten befrac14eiden Theil2

1 Nadler 198

2 Nadler 199

20

The hierarchy that is here established with the scholar philosopher and poet presented with responsibili-

ties of increasing creativity should not surprise us as it is exactly in line with what Hamann says else-

where about the high dignity of the poet to whom is compared even God himself1 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 ade-

quate 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 consti-

tuent 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

1 ldquoDer Poet am Anfange der Tagerdquo Nadler 206

21

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

Hamannrsquos coincidentia oppositorum is not any kind of dialectical synthesis Creation is speech ndash so is Hamannrsquos 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 Aesthe-

tica in nuce relate to the argument he makes about the proper use of reason There is significant ldquooverlaprdquo

here the various images and descriptions Hamann uses are parallel making the same argument in differ-

ent ways From what we have already said we can derive a kind of table showing how the various images

used map onto Hamannrsquos argument about the reason and the passions

Passions Reason

Vowels Consonants Words Mere arrangements of letters Poetic Meter Turbatverse God Nature Christianity Classical civilization Alpha and Omega 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 refus-

es 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 to-

gether 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 ldquoit is not clear how far he understood it and he certainly gives it a

1 Though not in the Aesthetica See eg Betz 28 note 17

22

sense of his ownrdquo1 In fact it is not easy to see where the ldquocoincidencerdquo comes in at all Regarding every

text every object as part of his ldquoBiblerdquo 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 themselvesmdashto

the letters of a text (in literary criticism) and the phenomena of nature unreduced to their universal ra-

tional 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 pro-

duced of these elements He beholds in a single vision der rollende Donner der Beredamkeit and der

einylbicltte Blitz2 This strangemdashor strange to us and Hamann would not hesitate to say that our sensibili-

ties need correctionmdashthis strange conjunction of opposites confronts us even on the title page of the Aes-

thetica in nuce Eine Rhapodie in kabbalifrac34ifrac14er Proe A rhapsodymdasha stitching-together of pieces into an ar-

tistic unitymdashthat 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 ldquoApostillerdquo ndash whether Hamann himself some per-

sonified commentator or anyone else ndash remarks that the author of the Aesthetica in nuce ldquohat Satz und

Satz zuammengereltnet wie man die Pfeile auf einem Sltlalttfelde zaumlhltrdquo3 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 Romansrsquo shots though fewer were fired with greater force It is not clear which side better corres-

ponds to Hamannrsquos 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 Therersquos a case to be made for either in-

terpretation But whichever we take the view wersquore given of the Aesthetica in nuce is still of individual

Saumltze piled up one after another as discrete countable units This treatise says the speaker of the Apos-

tille is just a pile of sentences But in an instant our perspective is shifted ldquoLaszligt uns jetzt die Hauptumme

1 Berlin 115

2 Nadler 208

3 Nadler 217 The reference given by Hamann (ldquoProcop De bello persico I 18rdquo) is explained at Haynes 94 note

kkk

23

[hellip] houmlrenldquo1 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 vari-

ous meditations on human life that compose the text of the biblical book2 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

summarymdasha 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 Hamannrsquos 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 readerrsquos confusion It is not Hamannrsquos 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 writings3 it is perhaps not sur-

prising then if the Aesthetica in nuce presents us with hermeneutic difficulties that neither the text itself

nor comparisons with Hamannrsquos other works nor consideration of Hamannrsquos engagement with the issues

of his time are adequate to dispel But the paradox we are considering heremdashthe simultaneous focus on

both columns of the table with which this chapter beganmdashis so fundamental to the thought of the Aesthe-

tica in nuce that unless we can come to terms with it in some way Hamannrsquos 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

1 Ibid

2 Cf Lutherbibel Predig 1213 ldquoLaszligt uns die Hauptumme aller Lehre houmlrenldquo 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 ldquoApostillerdquo likewise to be a undermining of all that goes before it 3 ldquoI no longer understand myself quite differently from then some [writings I understand] better some worse [hellip]

[hellip] 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 stuffrdquo Briefwechsel V p 358 trans in Betz 229

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 ldquodie ilt nolt im bloszligen Bult-frac34a-bi-ren uumlbenmdashmdashund wahrlilt wahrlilt Kinder muumlfrac12en

wir werden wenn wir den Geifrac34 der Wahrheit empfahen ollenldquo1 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 ldquoSpirit of

Truth whom the world cannot receiverdquo (Jn 1417) 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 spiri-

tual pole than to the elemental literal material one But how says Hamannrsquos Nuszlig is this Spirit of Truth

to be received By becoming like children who are just learning to spellmdashand 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 ldquoBultfrac34abirenrdquo syllable by syllable confirms that Hamann is referring to this style of interpreta-

tion Recalling now the table at the start of this chapter in which letters and the ldquospirit of truthrdquo

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 ldquoVerlieren die Elemente des A B C ihre natuumlrlilte

Bedeutung wenn ie in der unendlichen Zuammenetzung willkuumlrlilter Zeilten uns an Ideen erinnern die wo niltt

im Himmel dolt im Gehirn indrdquo2 To this question of course we are meant to answer ldquonordquo But there is

much here that is not unproblematic or at least not simple What for instance is the ldquonatuumlrlilte Bedeu-

tungrdquo of a letter And how if the combination of these signs be arbitrary does it recall for us ideas And

1 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 Hamannrsquos voice at least on Hamannrsquos 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 wersquore 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 Greeksmdashbut 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 coin-

cidence is merely an opportunity to bring the opposites as opposites together But this assumption natu-

ral 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 experiencemdashthis 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 Hamannrsquos writing admits of both a macros-

copic 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 conjunc-

tion 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 them1 considering these various levels of read-

ing 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 simultaneous-

ly 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 interpreta-

tion could be set forth that might allow us to translate Hamannrsquos simultaneously cabalistic and rhapsodic

utterances into academic language or to devise summaries of his arguments in a neatly symbolic lan-

guage 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 oumlffentlilter Gebrault 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 Hamannrsquos thought is useful also here Sltoumlpfung ifrac34 eine Rede an die Kreatur durlt die Kreatur The

Christian overtones of such a formulation are obvious Hamann once offered an encapsulation of his

thought in the word λόγος2 a famously polysemous term every sense of which Hamann intends The in-

timate connection between reason and language is of course the most obvious philosophical implication of

1 For Hamannrsquos defense of this possibility see Chapter 4

2 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 Hamannrsquos philosophy But for Hamann λόγος 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 Hamannrsquos piety placed a great emphasis on the self-emptying of Christ Howev-

er much he might stress Christrsquos humanity and suffering though he remained well within the main-

stream 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 diffi-

culties here But there is a clear parallel between the way a Christian thinks of Christ and how Hamann

thinks ofmdashwell more or less everything Christ is a man who lived for a certain stretch of time in a cer-

tain place and is also the eternal God A word is a string of letters small shapes arbitrarily strung togeth-

er and is also a sign of a concept an immaterial thing existing in the mind Hamann is no dualistmdashit 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

Zufoumlrderfrac34 muumlfrac34e man D George Benon fragen ob die Einheit mit der Mannigfaltigkeit niltt befrac34ehen koumlnne [hellip] Der bultfrac34aumlblilte oder grammatifrac14e der fleifrac14liche oder dialectifrac14e der ka-pernaitifrac14e oder historifrac14e Sinn ind im houmlltfrac34en Grade myfrac34ilt und haumlngen von ollten augen-blicklilten pirituoumlen willkuumlhrlilten Nebenbefrac34immungen und Umfrac34aumlnden ab daszlig man ohne hinauf gen Himmel zu fahren die Schluumlfrac12el ihrer Erkenntnis niltt herabholen kann1

1 Nadler 203 note 23 Hamannrsquos footnote is attached to some lines of Latin verse which conclude the Nutrsquos letter to the Learned Rabbi They come from a poem traditionally and falsely attributed to the Emperor Augustus explain-ing why Vergilrsquos orders to destroy the drafts of the Aeneid were ignored after the poetrsquos death The excerpts are

Ah scelus indignum soluetur litera diues Frangatur potius legum veneranda potestas Liber amp alma Ceres succurrite mdash mdash [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 mdashwhich for Hamann who does not oppose the spirit and the letter in a conventional way is a spiritual richnessmdashis 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

28

It is not that interpretation ought to be literal physical or ldquoCapernaiticrdquo 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 understandingmdashthat is unless one has

attained a certain degree of spiritual insight ndashone will be unable to understand things even in their literal

senses for the spiritual and literal senses are one Hamannrsquos 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 expe-

rience 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 inten-

tion of this line of thought has been least of all to stimulate pious feelings Hamannrsquos goal is not to spiri-

tualize 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 (ldquoDie Sinne aber ind Ceres und Bacltus die Leidenfrac14aftenrdquo [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 simplis-tically 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 Hamannrsquos ability to com-press his meaning into very few and very cryptic words NB The ldquoCapernaiticrdquo sense refers to the sense in which Christ is literally present in the Christian sacrament This unusual word is used derogatively in Lutheran texts (eg the Epitome of the Konkordienformel) to disparage Catholic sacramental teaching Its origins are in Jn 65559 ldquoFor my flesh is meat indeed and my blood is drink in-deed [hellip] These things he said in the synagogue as he taught in Capernaumrdquo 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 Luthe-ran understanding according to which Christ is present in the sacrament in a merely spiritual way is less than per-fectly compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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

Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 im-

plied meanings into the literal tropological allegorical and anagogical senses that Christians have tradi-

tionally 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 ormdashto employ a metaphor

more perhaps more congenial to Hamannmdashdiscerning 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 indul-

gence 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 slo-

gan from the text itselfmdashldquoto speak is to translaterdquomdashand 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 uumlberetzenmdashaus einer Engelpralte in eine Menfrac14enpralte das heifrac34 Gedanken in WortemdashSalten in NamenmdashBilder in Zeilten die poetifrac14 oder kyriologifrac14 hifrac34orifrac14 oder ymbolifrac14 oder hieroglyphifrac14mdashmdashund philoophifrac14 oder ltarakterifrac34ifrac14 eyn koumlnnen1

Here we are given a license to translate Hamannrsquos images into signs of various kinds It is no surprise that

in a footnote attached to this text he derogates the ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs by citing a pas-

sage of Petronius which complains that a new fashion of ldquopuffed-up and formless talkativenessrdquo has cor-

1 Nadler 199

31

rupted speech so that ldquothe standard of eloquence being corrupted has been halted and struck dumbrdquo

and ldquonot even poetry displays a healthy colorrdquo1 By ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs we should un-

derstand something like Leibnizrsquos 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 criti-

cism 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 cor-

respondences out of the text But the other kinds of signsmdashthe poetic or symbolicmdashdo not seem to fall

under the same criticismmdashthese suggest a kind of sign which indeed has meaning but whose interpreta-

tion 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 Hamannrsquos thought allows even for this kind of correspon-

dence 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 Hamannrsquos text but also is deeply compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos text to assert that he intends the literal and symbolic meanings to be taken as

of equal importancemdashfor us to devote our full attention to take up one of the governing metaphors of this

1 N 199 n10 ldquoNuper ventosa isthaec amp enormis loquacitas Athenas ex Asia conmigrauit [hellip] simulque correpta elo-quentiae regula stetit amp obmutuit [hellip] Ac ne carmen quidem sani coloris enituitrdquo

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 discuss-

ing how Hamann refuses to privilege abstract ldquopurely mentalrdquo thought over the particular words in

which that thought finds expression Berlin concludes that ldquofor 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)rdquo1 As an example of one such contradiction Berlin cites the line placed at the head

of this section ldquoto speak is to translaterdquo For Berlin it follows from Hamannrsquos insistence on the unity of

reason and language that no translation no correspondence between words ideas and things can be es-

tablished

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 attend-ing to ideas or to language and through them (because they correspond) to the facts was a method of judging and knowing reality [hellip But the] notion of a correspondence that there is an objective world on one side and on the other man and his instruments ndash lan-guage ideas and so forth ndash attempting to approximate to this objective reality is a false picture There is only a flow of sensations2

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 ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 reproduced3 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 Hamannrsquos treatise but unable to claim any continuity of thought therewith

1 Berlin 81

2 Ibid

3 Though one might question even this Ποταμῷ γὰρ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐμβῆναι δὶς τῷ αὐτῷ and there is no reason to think

any two ldquoflows of sensationrdquo could ever be substantially identical Necessarily every ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos view Berlin is perplexed when confronted with Hamannrsquos open assertion

that translation is possible between ldquohuman speechrdquo and the ldquospeech of angelsrdquo and can only conclude

that Hamann here contradicts himself And for Berlin it is quite to be expected that Hamann should con-

tradict himself he regards Hamannrsquos thought in general as highly creative and intriguing Schwaumlrmerei

of note for its pivotal place in intellectual history but completely insusceptible or unworthy of serious

philosophic attention Berlin appreciates Hamannrsquos criticism of the Enlightenment and his prescient

awareness of the lifeless bloodless conception of manrsquos spiritual life that the Enlighteners would ultimate-

ly produce While Berlin claims to understand Hamannrsquos motives in writing he utterly rejects the content

of his writings which he regards as ldquothe cry of a trapped man hellip who cannot be brought to see that to be

regimented or eliminated is either inevitable or desirablerdquo1 For Berlin Hamann is simply a ldquofanaticrdquo

whose writings consist of ldquopassionate rhetoric and not careful thoughtrdquo and whose opinions are ldquogrotes-

quely one-sided a violent exaggeration of the uniqueness of men and things [and] a passionate hatred of

menrsquos wish to understand the universerdquo2 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 pur-

ism of Hitler3 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 Berlinrsquos judgment that Hamann

1 Berlin 116

2 Berlin 121

3 This accusation is presented in Berlinrsquos book in a series of insinuations we are told for example that Hamannrsquos

ldquohatred and blind irrationalism have fed the stream that has led to social and political irrationalism particularly in German in our own [20

th] centuryrdquo (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 Berlinrsquos 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

34

simply contradicts himself in allowing for the possibility of translation in and out of symbolic ldquolanguag-

esrdquo Hamann has very little patience for ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs which promise patent

meaning and unambiguous interpretation This is perfectly in keeping with his general distaste for effi-

cient 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 ldquopoeticrdquo and ldquosymbolicrdquo signs not to fall under the same fierce criticism as the others

ldquoTo speak is to translaterdquo and ldquocreation is a speech to the creature through the creaturerdquo These

two maxims placed very near to each other in the text1 suggest something of a solution to the problem to

which Berlin directs our attention The conjunction of these lines should remind us that Hamann wheth-

er he directing his attention to literature philology esthetics or any other subject is always also a reli-

gious thinker The archetype of every text is for him the Bible and biblical exegesis is the model and ca-

non 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 Michaelisrsquos ldquodenial of a mystical typological sense

of Scripturerdquo2 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 Mi-

chaelis 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 ldquoTo merdquo says Hamann ldquoevery book is a Biblerdquo3 like the Bible then every

book must be read not merely for its literal sense Berlinrsquos reading of Hamann might be correct if Ha-

1 N 118-119

2 Betz 114

3 Briefwechsel I p 309 trans in Betz 47

35

mann were speaking about the everyday world of words and things understood as a brute fact But Ha-

mann 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 re-

mind us that the interpretation of tongues is also a divine gift1 he admits even that persons may not un-

derstand what they themselves to and say Even a figure such as Voltaire hardly a friend of religious out-

looks testifies for those who have ears to hear to the rightness of Hamannrsquos views

kann man wohl einen glaubwuumlrdigern Zeugen als den unfrac34erblilten Voltaire anfuumlhren wellter bey-nahe die Religion fuumlr den Eckfrac34ein der epifrac14en Dilttkunfrac34 erklaumlrt [hellip] Voltaire aber der Hohe-priefrac34er im Tempel des Gefrac14macks frac14luumlszligt so buumlndig als Kaiphas und denkt frulttbarer als He-rodes2

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 ldquoHo-

hepriefrac34er im Tempelrdquo but also a somewhat Machiavellian politician) justifies the crucifixion of Christ by

arguing that ldquoit is expedient that one man should die for the peoplerdquo3 believing himself to be discussing a

political necessity while as if prophetically describing the Christian doctrine of the atonement And He-

rodrsquos deceitful remark to the Magi ldquothat I might also come and worship himrdquo is taken since Herod was

king of the Jews though a gentile by race to represent the universal destiny of the Christian religion4 This

tradition of interpretation habitual in Biblical exegesis Hamann applies also to analysis of the wordmdashso

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 1210

2 Nadler 204-5

3 John 1150

4 It is telling that Hamann chooses such a contrived and complicated case of biblical parallelism as this one his ar-

gument 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

36

will readily concede that ldquowe see through a glass darklyrdquo1 and that we may not even be able to descry the

true outlines of our own persons in this mirrormdashbut by invoking the language of mirrors2 he locates him-

self within a tradition of thought according to which nature however flawed parts of it may be and how-

ever dulled our ability to discern itmdashis 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 se-

cular 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 ldquoblind heathensrdquo

Blinde Heyden haben die Unilttbarkeit erkannt die der Menfrac14 mit GOTT gemein hat Die verhuumlllte Figur des Leibes das Antlitz des Hauptes und das Aumluszligerfrac34e der Arme ind das ilttbare Sltema in dem wir einher gehn dolt eigentlilt niltts als ein Zeigefinger des verborge-nen Menfrac14en in unsmdash Exemplumque DEI quisque est in imagine parva3

Note that the ldquospiritualrdquo 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 ldquoindex fingersrdquo which direct the inner man to

our attention Hamann let us recall4 does not believe that the target of this ldquoZeigefingerrdquo can always be

1 1 Cor 1312

2 Though Hamann is in some ways a very modern thinker who anticipates 20

th century thought about the kinship of

reason and language he here looks back to the middle ages Cf Alan of Lille ldquoOmnis mundi creatura Quasi liber et pictura Nobis est et speculumrdquo With the sentiment and conceit of this verse Hamann could not agree more 3 N 198 The quotation from the Astronomicon of Manilius (IV895) is mainly noteworthy for its having been writ-

ten by a pagan author while echoing the language of Genesis regarding the ldquoimage of Godrdquo The Cambridge edition of Hamann misenglishes this line rendering it as ldquoEach one is an instance of God in miniaturerdquo This not only loses the connection to the book of Genesis conveyed by the word ldquoimagordquo but puts far too much weight on the word ldquoexemplumrdquo as well An exemplum is not an instance but a type model or analogue ldquoInstancerdquo implies an occur-rence of a rationally determinable kind a ldquotyperdquo or ldquoanaloguerdquo 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

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 circumstancesmdashthis 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 re-

fers to ldquocorrespondencesrdquo of thing and idea and of idea and word these ldquocorrespondencesrdquo are for Berlin

relations between two different things of different types He is quite correct to judge that Hamann consid-

ers 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 meaningmdashhe 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 justifica-

tion 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 ldquoConclusionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos own line that ldquocreation is a speech to the creature

through the creaturerdquo 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 cor-

respond to each other based on no apodictically determinable system knowable a priori but on the gra-

tuitous (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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 com-

pared translation to the art of understanding the image of a tapestry from looking only at the backs of the

threads he remarks ldquoDort [ie in the original contexts of the metaphors borrowed from other authors for

39

Hamannrsquos text] werden ie aber ad illustrationem (zur Verbraumlmung des Rockes) hier ad inuolucrum (zum

Hemde auf bloszligem Leibe) gebrauchtrdquo1 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 deco-

rated 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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos which ac-

cording to the line of interpretation I have explored reveals as much about Hamannrsquos 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 tear-

ing 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 Hamannrsquos motion between images his construction of typological

schemes that resist easy classification and one-for-one interpretation is not antirational raving or obscu-

rantism but rather an alternativemdashand a quite compelling onemdashto 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

1 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 tho-

roughly religious vision of the world If one is willing to do this Hamann is a kind of prophetmdashand the

horned head of Pan on his title-page is also the horned head of Moses1 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 pro-

ducing neat tables of Hamannrsquos 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 Aes-

thetica 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 somethingmdashunless there really is some secret ineffable law of correspondences that un-

ites 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 commen-

tators and writers of senior essays have no right to tread

1 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 agrave la Mosaiumlque (Roth 103 343)

41

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin Isaiah The Magus of the North JG Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism ed Henry

Hardy London John Murray 1993 Betz John After Enlightenment the Post-Secular Vision of JG Hamann Chichester John Wiley amp Sons

2009 Hamann Johann Georg Hamannrsquos Schriften ed Friedrich Roth Berlin G Reimer 1821 (Cited as

ldquoRothrdquo All citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Saumlmtliche Werke ed Josef Nadler Wien Verlag Herder 1950 (Cited as ldquoNad-

lerrdquo Unless otherwise noted all citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Writings on Philosophy and Language trans and ed Kenneth Haynes Cam-

bridge Cambridge UP 2007 (Cited as ldquoHaynesrdquo) Jacobs Carol ldquoHamann Is a Nomadic Writer lsquoAesthetica in nucersquordquo in Skirting the Ethical Stanford Stan-

ford UP 2008 pp 111-130 OrsquoFlaherty James C The Quarrel of Reason with Itself Essays on Hamann Michaelis Lessing Nietzsche Co-

lumbia SC Camden 1988

14

making use of concepts for things but that we make sure that our concepts have not been verfrac34uumlmmelt and

gelaumlfrac34ert by abuses of reason

The word ldquoabstractionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos 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 foot-

note quotes at considerable length Ovidrsquos retelling of the story ldquoSpem sine corpore amat corpus putat

esse quod umbra est Adstupet ipse sibirdquo1 They who consider the abstractions of their minds to be most

real prefer a (vain) hope or a shadow to the bodymdashthat is the material concrete reality of the natural

world Long after Hamannrsquos 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 sibimdashNarcissus 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 ldquopure reasonrdquo from the mess of passions and contingencies that always surround hu-

man life Hamann prophesies an analogous fate It is this abuse of reason which Hamann means to sug-

gest t the removal of the first and last Greek letters from a line of Homer

And just as Hamann challenges the ldquoGreeksrdquo 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 cor-

rectly or to make any meaningful scientific achievements Just as Hume could not drink a glass of water or

eat an egg without faith2 neither we might paraphrase Hamann could he follow an argument to its con-

1 Metamorphoses III417f quoted at Nadler 210

2 This was a favorite quip of Hamannrsquos and is recorded in several places eg OrsquoFlaherty 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 Hamannrsquos view the supposed opposition of

reason and the passions is a fiction of the Enlighteners his thought has little room for absolute dichoto-

mies and he rejects also this one The passions in fact have an essential role to play even in the exercise

of reason ldquoLeidenfrac14amacr allein giebt Abfrac34ractionen owohl als Hypotheen Haumlnde Fuumlszlige Fluumlgel mdash Bildern und Zei-

chen Geifrac34 Leben und Zungerdquo1 There are perhaps many ways to understand ldquohands feet and wingsrdquo mdash but

between all possible interpretations of these words a basic unity exists They are all parts of the body asso-

ciated with motion and action And so abstractions and hypothesesmdashdry conclusions of the reasonmdashare

made active and mobile by the passions Likewise images and signs are given ldquolife and tonguerdquo 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 un-

mutilated 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 Hamannrsquos style and the symbolic ldquovocabularyrdquo of the Aesthetica in nuce The connection of Ha-

mannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos thought

1 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

Verucht es einmal die Iliade zu leen wenn ihr vorher durch die Abfrac34raction die beyden

Selbfrac34lauter α und ω ausgesichtet habt1 ldquoSelbstlautrdquo and ldquoMitlautrdquo ldquoConsonantrdquo and ldquovowelrdquo2 These are evocative termsmdashnot 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 con-

cepts 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 ldquoletter of the voicerdquo is utterable on its own while a littera consonans

must be ldquosounded withrdquo something else This way of articulating the distinction between independent

vowels and dependent consonants was a commonplace in the eighteenth century3 and would not have

been unfamiliar to Hamann even if the etymology of ldquoSelbstlautrdquo did not suggest it If we translate then

a bit freely we might say ldquothat which is removed from the Iliad by abstraction is that without which

1 Nadler 207

2 German preserves also more Latinate forms ldquoVokalrdquo and ldquoKonsonantrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos thought in the Aesthetica in nuce 3 John Hensons New Latin Grammar for instance published at Nottingham in 1744 explains ldquoA Vowel is a letter

which makes a full and perfect Sound of it Self as a o A Conſonant is a Letter that has no Sound of it Self without a Vowelrdquo And in a Verbesserte and Erleichterte Lateinische Grammatica published at Halle in 1763 (a year after the Cru-sades of the Philologist saw light) we read ldquoDen Anfang in der Lateinifrac14en Spralten maltt man von den Bultfrac34abenhellip Und diee werden eingetheilet in vocales oder elbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautende und consonantes oder mitlautendemitlautendemitlautendemitlautende o niltt ehe koumlnnen ausgeprolten werden als bis ein vocalis dazukoumlmmtrdquo 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 httpbooksgooglecombooksid=T5ECAAAAQAAJ and the second at httpbooksgooglecombooksid=F9oVAAAAYAAJ

17

there can be no speechrdquo which without any further interpretation already at least appears to imply much

more than a matter of rearranged letters

As we have seen the ldquoabstractionrdquo of the letters from the line of the Iliad corresponds in the typo-

logical 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 pas-

sions in order for them to have any power to persuade It is not that reasoned arguments even when ab-

stract are otiose or parasiticalmdashthese 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 ldquovocalizedrdquo

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

Hamannrsquos 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 unpointedmdashlike 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 durlt 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 scripturesmdashwritten by God but one must bring onersquos

own vowels to read it

But is this not going too far While we may not just have misrepresented Hamannrsquos 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 doesnrsquot make sense as

written without those vowels itrsquos still easily interpretable If Hamann had not named it as a line from the

Iliad any educated person on seeing the word microῆνιν 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 miss-

ing places in the line the shape of the dactyls and the grammatical possibilities offered by the Greek lan-

guage 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 En-

lightened 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 objec-

tion of this scientist would be absurd because it would miss the point of Hamannrsquos critiquemdashhe goes

around the backs of the Enlighteners contending that they are moved by passion even in what they be-

lieve to be their exercises of pure reason that the arguments they invoke to defend their conception of rea-

son 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 ldquoTurbatverserdquo1 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 Hamannrsquos altered line from the Iliad) But it refers most specif-

ically 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 Θεά ἄειδε μῆνιν Ἀχιλῆος Πηληϊάδεω In a certain sense there is nothing of Homerrsquos 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 ob-

viously 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 ldquogoddessrdquo and not ldquowrathrdquo In the Turbatverse of nature then the superficial meaning of the speak-

ing 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 niltts als Turbatvere und disiecti membra poetae zu unerm Gebrault uumlbrig Diee zu ammeln ifrac34 des Gelehrten ie auszulegen des Philoophen ie naltzuahmenmdashoder nolt kuumlhnermdash mdashie in Gefrac14ick zu bringen des Poeten befrac14eiden Theil2

1 Nadler 198

2 Nadler 199

20

The hierarchy that is here established with the scholar philosopher and poet presented with responsibili-

ties of increasing creativity should not surprise us as it is exactly in line with what Hamann says else-

where about the high dignity of the poet to whom is compared even God himself1 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 ade-

quate 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 consti-

tuent 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

1 ldquoDer Poet am Anfange der Tagerdquo Nadler 206

21

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

Hamannrsquos coincidentia oppositorum is not any kind of dialectical synthesis Creation is speech ndash so is Hamannrsquos 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 Aesthe-

tica in nuce relate to the argument he makes about the proper use of reason There is significant ldquooverlaprdquo

here the various images and descriptions Hamann uses are parallel making the same argument in differ-

ent ways From what we have already said we can derive a kind of table showing how the various images

used map onto Hamannrsquos argument about the reason and the passions

Passions Reason

Vowels Consonants Words Mere arrangements of letters Poetic Meter Turbatverse God Nature Christianity Classical civilization Alpha and Omega 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 refus-

es 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 to-

gether 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 ldquoit is not clear how far he understood it and he certainly gives it a

1 Though not in the Aesthetica See eg Betz 28 note 17

22

sense of his ownrdquo1 In fact it is not easy to see where the ldquocoincidencerdquo comes in at all Regarding every

text every object as part of his ldquoBiblerdquo 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 themselvesmdashto

the letters of a text (in literary criticism) and the phenomena of nature unreduced to their universal ra-

tional 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 pro-

duced of these elements He beholds in a single vision der rollende Donner der Beredamkeit and der

einylbicltte Blitz2 This strangemdashor strange to us and Hamann would not hesitate to say that our sensibili-

ties need correctionmdashthis strange conjunction of opposites confronts us even on the title page of the Aes-

thetica in nuce Eine Rhapodie in kabbalifrac34ifrac14er Proe A rhapsodymdasha stitching-together of pieces into an ar-

tistic unitymdashthat 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 ldquoApostillerdquo ndash whether Hamann himself some per-

sonified commentator or anyone else ndash remarks that the author of the Aesthetica in nuce ldquohat Satz und

Satz zuammengereltnet wie man die Pfeile auf einem Sltlalttfelde zaumlhltrdquo3 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 Romansrsquo shots though fewer were fired with greater force It is not clear which side better corres-

ponds to Hamannrsquos 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 Therersquos a case to be made for either in-

terpretation But whichever we take the view wersquore given of the Aesthetica in nuce is still of individual

Saumltze piled up one after another as discrete countable units This treatise says the speaker of the Apos-

tille is just a pile of sentences But in an instant our perspective is shifted ldquoLaszligt uns jetzt die Hauptumme

1 Berlin 115

2 Nadler 208

3 Nadler 217 The reference given by Hamann (ldquoProcop De bello persico I 18rdquo) is explained at Haynes 94 note

kkk

23

[hellip] houmlrenldquo1 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 vari-

ous meditations on human life that compose the text of the biblical book2 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

summarymdasha 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 Hamannrsquos 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 readerrsquos confusion It is not Hamannrsquos 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 writings3 it is perhaps not sur-

prising then if the Aesthetica in nuce presents us with hermeneutic difficulties that neither the text itself

nor comparisons with Hamannrsquos other works nor consideration of Hamannrsquos engagement with the issues

of his time are adequate to dispel But the paradox we are considering heremdashthe simultaneous focus on

both columns of the table with which this chapter beganmdashis so fundamental to the thought of the Aesthe-

tica in nuce that unless we can come to terms with it in some way Hamannrsquos 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

1 Ibid

2 Cf Lutherbibel Predig 1213 ldquoLaszligt uns die Hauptumme aller Lehre houmlrenldquo 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 ldquoApostillerdquo likewise to be a undermining of all that goes before it 3 ldquoI no longer understand myself quite differently from then some [writings I understand] better some worse [hellip]

[hellip] 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 stuffrdquo Briefwechsel V p 358 trans in Betz 229

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 ldquodie ilt nolt im bloszligen Bult-frac34a-bi-ren uumlbenmdashmdashund wahrlilt wahrlilt Kinder muumlfrac12en

wir werden wenn wir den Geifrac34 der Wahrheit empfahen ollenldquo1 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 ldquoSpirit of

Truth whom the world cannot receiverdquo (Jn 1417) 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 spiri-

tual pole than to the elemental literal material one But how says Hamannrsquos Nuszlig is this Spirit of Truth

to be received By becoming like children who are just learning to spellmdashand 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 ldquoBultfrac34abirenrdquo syllable by syllable confirms that Hamann is referring to this style of interpreta-

tion Recalling now the table at the start of this chapter in which letters and the ldquospirit of truthrdquo

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 ldquoVerlieren die Elemente des A B C ihre natuumlrlilte

Bedeutung wenn ie in der unendlichen Zuammenetzung willkuumlrlilter Zeilten uns an Ideen erinnern die wo niltt

im Himmel dolt im Gehirn indrdquo2 To this question of course we are meant to answer ldquonordquo But there is

much here that is not unproblematic or at least not simple What for instance is the ldquonatuumlrlilte Bedeu-

tungrdquo of a letter And how if the combination of these signs be arbitrary does it recall for us ideas And

1 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 Hamannrsquos voice at least on Hamannrsquos 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 wersquore 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 Greeksmdashbut 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 coin-

cidence is merely an opportunity to bring the opposites as opposites together But this assumption natu-

ral 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 experiencemdashthis 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 Hamannrsquos writing admits of both a macros-

copic 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 conjunc-

tion 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 them1 considering these various levels of read-

ing 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 simultaneous-

ly 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 interpreta-

tion could be set forth that might allow us to translate Hamannrsquos simultaneously cabalistic and rhapsodic

utterances into academic language or to devise summaries of his arguments in a neatly symbolic lan-

guage 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 oumlffentlilter Gebrault 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 Hamannrsquos thought is useful also here Sltoumlpfung ifrac34 eine Rede an die Kreatur durlt die Kreatur The

Christian overtones of such a formulation are obvious Hamann once offered an encapsulation of his

thought in the word λόγος2 a famously polysemous term every sense of which Hamann intends The in-

timate connection between reason and language is of course the most obvious philosophical implication of

1 For Hamannrsquos defense of this possibility see Chapter 4

2 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 Hamannrsquos philosophy But for Hamann λόγος 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 Hamannrsquos piety placed a great emphasis on the self-emptying of Christ Howev-

er much he might stress Christrsquos humanity and suffering though he remained well within the main-

stream 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 diffi-

culties here But there is a clear parallel between the way a Christian thinks of Christ and how Hamann

thinks ofmdashwell more or less everything Christ is a man who lived for a certain stretch of time in a cer-

tain place and is also the eternal God A word is a string of letters small shapes arbitrarily strung togeth-

er and is also a sign of a concept an immaterial thing existing in the mind Hamann is no dualistmdashit 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

Zufoumlrderfrac34 muumlfrac34e man D George Benon fragen ob die Einheit mit der Mannigfaltigkeit niltt befrac34ehen koumlnne [hellip] Der bultfrac34aumlblilte oder grammatifrac14e der fleifrac14liche oder dialectifrac14e der ka-pernaitifrac14e oder historifrac14e Sinn ind im houmlltfrac34en Grade myfrac34ilt und haumlngen von ollten augen-blicklilten pirituoumlen willkuumlhrlilten Nebenbefrac34immungen und Umfrac34aumlnden ab daszlig man ohne hinauf gen Himmel zu fahren die Schluumlfrac12el ihrer Erkenntnis niltt herabholen kann1

1 Nadler 203 note 23 Hamannrsquos footnote is attached to some lines of Latin verse which conclude the Nutrsquos letter to the Learned Rabbi They come from a poem traditionally and falsely attributed to the Emperor Augustus explain-ing why Vergilrsquos orders to destroy the drafts of the Aeneid were ignored after the poetrsquos death The excerpts are

Ah scelus indignum soluetur litera diues Frangatur potius legum veneranda potestas Liber amp alma Ceres succurrite mdash mdash [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 mdashwhich for Hamann who does not oppose the spirit and the letter in a conventional way is a spiritual richnessmdashis 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

28

It is not that interpretation ought to be literal physical or ldquoCapernaiticrdquo 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 understandingmdashthat is unless one has

attained a certain degree of spiritual insight ndashone will be unable to understand things even in their literal

senses for the spiritual and literal senses are one Hamannrsquos 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 expe-

rience 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 inten-

tion of this line of thought has been least of all to stimulate pious feelings Hamannrsquos goal is not to spiri-

tualize 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 (ldquoDie Sinne aber ind Ceres und Bacltus die Leidenfrac14aftenrdquo [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 simplis-tically 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 Hamannrsquos ability to com-press his meaning into very few and very cryptic words NB The ldquoCapernaiticrdquo sense refers to the sense in which Christ is literally present in the Christian sacrament This unusual word is used derogatively in Lutheran texts (eg the Epitome of the Konkordienformel) to disparage Catholic sacramental teaching Its origins are in Jn 65559 ldquoFor my flesh is meat indeed and my blood is drink in-deed [hellip] These things he said in the synagogue as he taught in Capernaumrdquo 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 Luthe-ran understanding according to which Christ is present in the sacrament in a merely spiritual way is less than per-fectly compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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

Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 im-

plied meanings into the literal tropological allegorical and anagogical senses that Christians have tradi-

tionally 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 ormdashto employ a metaphor

more perhaps more congenial to Hamannmdashdiscerning 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 indul-

gence 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 slo-

gan from the text itselfmdashldquoto speak is to translaterdquomdashand 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 uumlberetzenmdashaus einer Engelpralte in eine Menfrac14enpralte das heifrac34 Gedanken in WortemdashSalten in NamenmdashBilder in Zeilten die poetifrac14 oder kyriologifrac14 hifrac34orifrac14 oder ymbolifrac14 oder hieroglyphifrac14mdashmdashund philoophifrac14 oder ltarakterifrac34ifrac14 eyn koumlnnen1

Here we are given a license to translate Hamannrsquos images into signs of various kinds It is no surprise that

in a footnote attached to this text he derogates the ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs by citing a pas-

sage of Petronius which complains that a new fashion of ldquopuffed-up and formless talkativenessrdquo has cor-

1 Nadler 199

31

rupted speech so that ldquothe standard of eloquence being corrupted has been halted and struck dumbrdquo

and ldquonot even poetry displays a healthy colorrdquo1 By ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs we should un-

derstand something like Leibnizrsquos 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 criti-

cism 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 cor-

respondences out of the text But the other kinds of signsmdashthe poetic or symbolicmdashdo not seem to fall

under the same criticismmdashthese suggest a kind of sign which indeed has meaning but whose interpreta-

tion 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 Hamannrsquos thought allows even for this kind of correspon-

dence 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 Hamannrsquos text but also is deeply compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos text to assert that he intends the literal and symbolic meanings to be taken as

of equal importancemdashfor us to devote our full attention to take up one of the governing metaphors of this

1 N 199 n10 ldquoNuper ventosa isthaec amp enormis loquacitas Athenas ex Asia conmigrauit [hellip] simulque correpta elo-quentiae regula stetit amp obmutuit [hellip] Ac ne carmen quidem sani coloris enituitrdquo

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 discuss-

ing how Hamann refuses to privilege abstract ldquopurely mentalrdquo thought over the particular words in

which that thought finds expression Berlin concludes that ldquofor 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)rdquo1 As an example of one such contradiction Berlin cites the line placed at the head

of this section ldquoto speak is to translaterdquo For Berlin it follows from Hamannrsquos insistence on the unity of

reason and language that no translation no correspondence between words ideas and things can be es-

tablished

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 attend-ing to ideas or to language and through them (because they correspond) to the facts was a method of judging and knowing reality [hellip But the] notion of a correspondence that there is an objective world on one side and on the other man and his instruments ndash lan-guage ideas and so forth ndash attempting to approximate to this objective reality is a false picture There is only a flow of sensations2

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 ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 reproduced3 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 Hamannrsquos treatise but unable to claim any continuity of thought therewith

1 Berlin 81

2 Ibid

3 Though one might question even this Ποταμῷ γὰρ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐμβῆναι δὶς τῷ αὐτῷ and there is no reason to think

any two ldquoflows of sensationrdquo could ever be substantially identical Necessarily every ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos view Berlin is perplexed when confronted with Hamannrsquos open assertion

that translation is possible between ldquohuman speechrdquo and the ldquospeech of angelsrdquo and can only conclude

that Hamann here contradicts himself And for Berlin it is quite to be expected that Hamann should con-

tradict himself he regards Hamannrsquos thought in general as highly creative and intriguing Schwaumlrmerei

of note for its pivotal place in intellectual history but completely insusceptible or unworthy of serious

philosophic attention Berlin appreciates Hamannrsquos criticism of the Enlightenment and his prescient

awareness of the lifeless bloodless conception of manrsquos spiritual life that the Enlighteners would ultimate-

ly produce While Berlin claims to understand Hamannrsquos motives in writing he utterly rejects the content

of his writings which he regards as ldquothe cry of a trapped man hellip who cannot be brought to see that to be

regimented or eliminated is either inevitable or desirablerdquo1 For Berlin Hamann is simply a ldquofanaticrdquo

whose writings consist of ldquopassionate rhetoric and not careful thoughtrdquo and whose opinions are ldquogrotes-

quely one-sided a violent exaggeration of the uniqueness of men and things [and] a passionate hatred of

menrsquos wish to understand the universerdquo2 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 pur-

ism of Hitler3 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 Berlinrsquos judgment that Hamann

1 Berlin 116

2 Berlin 121

3 This accusation is presented in Berlinrsquos book in a series of insinuations we are told for example that Hamannrsquos

ldquohatred and blind irrationalism have fed the stream that has led to social and political irrationalism particularly in German in our own [20

th] centuryrdquo (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 Berlinrsquos 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

34

simply contradicts himself in allowing for the possibility of translation in and out of symbolic ldquolanguag-

esrdquo Hamann has very little patience for ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs which promise patent

meaning and unambiguous interpretation This is perfectly in keeping with his general distaste for effi-

cient 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 ldquopoeticrdquo and ldquosymbolicrdquo signs not to fall under the same fierce criticism as the others

ldquoTo speak is to translaterdquo and ldquocreation is a speech to the creature through the creaturerdquo These

two maxims placed very near to each other in the text1 suggest something of a solution to the problem to

which Berlin directs our attention The conjunction of these lines should remind us that Hamann wheth-

er he directing his attention to literature philology esthetics or any other subject is always also a reli-

gious thinker The archetype of every text is for him the Bible and biblical exegesis is the model and ca-

non 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 Michaelisrsquos ldquodenial of a mystical typological sense

of Scripturerdquo2 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 Mi-

chaelis 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 ldquoTo merdquo says Hamann ldquoevery book is a Biblerdquo3 like the Bible then every

book must be read not merely for its literal sense Berlinrsquos reading of Hamann might be correct if Ha-

1 N 118-119

2 Betz 114

3 Briefwechsel I p 309 trans in Betz 47

35

mann were speaking about the everyday world of words and things understood as a brute fact But Ha-

mann 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 re-

mind us that the interpretation of tongues is also a divine gift1 he admits even that persons may not un-

derstand what they themselves to and say Even a figure such as Voltaire hardly a friend of religious out-

looks testifies for those who have ears to hear to the rightness of Hamannrsquos views

kann man wohl einen glaubwuumlrdigern Zeugen als den unfrac34erblilten Voltaire anfuumlhren wellter bey-nahe die Religion fuumlr den Eckfrac34ein der epifrac14en Dilttkunfrac34 erklaumlrt [hellip] Voltaire aber der Hohe-priefrac34er im Tempel des Gefrac14macks frac14luumlszligt so buumlndig als Kaiphas und denkt frulttbarer als He-rodes2

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 ldquoHo-

hepriefrac34er im Tempelrdquo but also a somewhat Machiavellian politician) justifies the crucifixion of Christ by

arguing that ldquoit is expedient that one man should die for the peoplerdquo3 believing himself to be discussing a

political necessity while as if prophetically describing the Christian doctrine of the atonement And He-

rodrsquos deceitful remark to the Magi ldquothat I might also come and worship himrdquo is taken since Herod was

king of the Jews though a gentile by race to represent the universal destiny of the Christian religion4 This

tradition of interpretation habitual in Biblical exegesis Hamann applies also to analysis of the wordmdashso

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 1210

2 Nadler 204-5

3 John 1150

4 It is telling that Hamann chooses such a contrived and complicated case of biblical parallelism as this one his ar-

gument 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

36

will readily concede that ldquowe see through a glass darklyrdquo1 and that we may not even be able to descry the

true outlines of our own persons in this mirrormdashbut by invoking the language of mirrors2 he locates him-

self within a tradition of thought according to which nature however flawed parts of it may be and how-

ever dulled our ability to discern itmdashis 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 se-

cular 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 ldquoblind heathensrdquo

Blinde Heyden haben die Unilttbarkeit erkannt die der Menfrac14 mit GOTT gemein hat Die verhuumlllte Figur des Leibes das Antlitz des Hauptes und das Aumluszligerfrac34e der Arme ind das ilttbare Sltema in dem wir einher gehn dolt eigentlilt niltts als ein Zeigefinger des verborge-nen Menfrac14en in unsmdash Exemplumque DEI quisque est in imagine parva3

Note that the ldquospiritualrdquo 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 ldquoindex fingersrdquo which direct the inner man to

our attention Hamann let us recall4 does not believe that the target of this ldquoZeigefingerrdquo can always be

1 1 Cor 1312

2 Though Hamann is in some ways a very modern thinker who anticipates 20

th century thought about the kinship of

reason and language he here looks back to the middle ages Cf Alan of Lille ldquoOmnis mundi creatura Quasi liber et pictura Nobis est et speculumrdquo With the sentiment and conceit of this verse Hamann could not agree more 3 N 198 The quotation from the Astronomicon of Manilius (IV895) is mainly noteworthy for its having been writ-

ten by a pagan author while echoing the language of Genesis regarding the ldquoimage of Godrdquo The Cambridge edition of Hamann misenglishes this line rendering it as ldquoEach one is an instance of God in miniaturerdquo This not only loses the connection to the book of Genesis conveyed by the word ldquoimagordquo but puts far too much weight on the word ldquoexemplumrdquo as well An exemplum is not an instance but a type model or analogue ldquoInstancerdquo implies an occur-rence of a rationally determinable kind a ldquotyperdquo or ldquoanaloguerdquo 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

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 circumstancesmdashthis 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 re-

fers to ldquocorrespondencesrdquo of thing and idea and of idea and word these ldquocorrespondencesrdquo are for Berlin

relations between two different things of different types He is quite correct to judge that Hamann consid-

ers 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 meaningmdashhe 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 justifica-

tion 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 ldquoConclusionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos own line that ldquocreation is a speech to the creature

through the creaturerdquo 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 cor-

respond to each other based on no apodictically determinable system knowable a priori but on the gra-

tuitous (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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 com-

pared translation to the art of understanding the image of a tapestry from looking only at the backs of the

threads he remarks ldquoDort [ie in the original contexts of the metaphors borrowed from other authors for

39

Hamannrsquos text] werden ie aber ad illustrationem (zur Verbraumlmung des Rockes) hier ad inuolucrum (zum

Hemde auf bloszligem Leibe) gebrauchtrdquo1 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 deco-

rated 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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos which ac-

cording to the line of interpretation I have explored reveals as much about Hamannrsquos 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 tear-

ing 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 Hamannrsquos motion between images his construction of typological

schemes that resist easy classification and one-for-one interpretation is not antirational raving or obscu-

rantism but rather an alternativemdashand a quite compelling onemdashto 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

1 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 tho-

roughly religious vision of the world If one is willing to do this Hamann is a kind of prophetmdashand the

horned head of Pan on his title-page is also the horned head of Moses1 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 pro-

ducing neat tables of Hamannrsquos 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 Aes-

thetica 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 somethingmdashunless there really is some secret ineffable law of correspondences that un-

ites 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 commen-

tators and writers of senior essays have no right to tread

1 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 agrave la Mosaiumlque (Roth 103 343)

41

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin Isaiah The Magus of the North JG Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism ed Henry

Hardy London John Murray 1993 Betz John After Enlightenment the Post-Secular Vision of JG Hamann Chichester John Wiley amp Sons

2009 Hamann Johann Georg Hamannrsquos Schriften ed Friedrich Roth Berlin G Reimer 1821 (Cited as

ldquoRothrdquo All citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Saumlmtliche Werke ed Josef Nadler Wien Verlag Herder 1950 (Cited as ldquoNad-

lerrdquo Unless otherwise noted all citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Writings on Philosophy and Language trans and ed Kenneth Haynes Cam-

bridge Cambridge UP 2007 (Cited as ldquoHaynesrdquo) Jacobs Carol ldquoHamann Is a Nomadic Writer lsquoAesthetica in nucersquordquo in Skirting the Ethical Stanford Stan-

ford UP 2008 pp 111-130 OrsquoFlaherty James C The Quarrel of Reason with Itself Essays on Hamann Michaelis Lessing Nietzsche Co-

lumbia SC Camden 1988

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 Hamannrsquos view the supposed opposition of

reason and the passions is a fiction of the Enlighteners his thought has little room for absolute dichoto-

mies and he rejects also this one The passions in fact have an essential role to play even in the exercise

of reason ldquoLeidenfrac14amacr allein giebt Abfrac34ractionen owohl als Hypotheen Haumlnde Fuumlszlige Fluumlgel mdash Bildern und Zei-

chen Geifrac34 Leben und Zungerdquo1 There are perhaps many ways to understand ldquohands feet and wingsrdquo mdash but

between all possible interpretations of these words a basic unity exists They are all parts of the body asso-

ciated with motion and action And so abstractions and hypothesesmdashdry conclusions of the reasonmdashare

made active and mobile by the passions Likewise images and signs are given ldquolife and tonguerdquo 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 un-

mutilated 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 Hamannrsquos style and the symbolic ldquovocabularyrdquo of the Aesthetica in nuce The connection of Ha-

mannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos thought

1 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

Verucht es einmal die Iliade zu leen wenn ihr vorher durch die Abfrac34raction die beyden

Selbfrac34lauter α und ω ausgesichtet habt1 ldquoSelbstlautrdquo and ldquoMitlautrdquo ldquoConsonantrdquo and ldquovowelrdquo2 These are evocative termsmdashnot 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 con-

cepts 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 ldquoletter of the voicerdquo is utterable on its own while a littera consonans

must be ldquosounded withrdquo something else This way of articulating the distinction between independent

vowels and dependent consonants was a commonplace in the eighteenth century3 and would not have

been unfamiliar to Hamann even if the etymology of ldquoSelbstlautrdquo did not suggest it If we translate then

a bit freely we might say ldquothat which is removed from the Iliad by abstraction is that without which

1 Nadler 207

2 German preserves also more Latinate forms ldquoVokalrdquo and ldquoKonsonantrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos thought in the Aesthetica in nuce 3 John Hensons New Latin Grammar for instance published at Nottingham in 1744 explains ldquoA Vowel is a letter

which makes a full and perfect Sound of it Self as a o A Conſonant is a Letter that has no Sound of it Self without a Vowelrdquo And in a Verbesserte and Erleichterte Lateinische Grammatica published at Halle in 1763 (a year after the Cru-sades of the Philologist saw light) we read ldquoDen Anfang in der Lateinifrac14en Spralten maltt man von den Bultfrac34abenhellip Und diee werden eingetheilet in vocales oder elbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautende und consonantes oder mitlautendemitlautendemitlautendemitlautende o niltt ehe koumlnnen ausgeprolten werden als bis ein vocalis dazukoumlmmtrdquo 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 httpbooksgooglecombooksid=T5ECAAAAQAAJ and the second at httpbooksgooglecombooksid=F9oVAAAAYAAJ

17

there can be no speechrdquo which without any further interpretation already at least appears to imply much

more than a matter of rearranged letters

As we have seen the ldquoabstractionrdquo of the letters from the line of the Iliad corresponds in the typo-

logical 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 pas-

sions in order for them to have any power to persuade It is not that reasoned arguments even when ab-

stract are otiose or parasiticalmdashthese 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 ldquovocalizedrdquo

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

Hamannrsquos 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 unpointedmdashlike 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 durlt 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 scripturesmdashwritten by God but one must bring onersquos

own vowels to read it

But is this not going too far While we may not just have misrepresented Hamannrsquos 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 doesnrsquot make sense as

written without those vowels itrsquos still easily interpretable If Hamann had not named it as a line from the

Iliad any educated person on seeing the word microῆνιν 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 miss-

ing places in the line the shape of the dactyls and the grammatical possibilities offered by the Greek lan-

guage 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 En-

lightened 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 objec-

tion of this scientist would be absurd because it would miss the point of Hamannrsquos critiquemdashhe goes

around the backs of the Enlighteners contending that they are moved by passion even in what they be-

lieve to be their exercises of pure reason that the arguments they invoke to defend their conception of rea-

son 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 ldquoTurbatverserdquo1 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 Hamannrsquos altered line from the Iliad) But it refers most specif-

ically 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 Θεά ἄειδε μῆνιν Ἀχιλῆος Πηληϊάδεω In a certain sense there is nothing of Homerrsquos 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 ob-

viously 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 ldquogoddessrdquo and not ldquowrathrdquo In the Turbatverse of nature then the superficial meaning of the speak-

ing 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 niltts als Turbatvere und disiecti membra poetae zu unerm Gebrault uumlbrig Diee zu ammeln ifrac34 des Gelehrten ie auszulegen des Philoophen ie naltzuahmenmdashoder nolt kuumlhnermdash mdashie in Gefrac14ick zu bringen des Poeten befrac14eiden Theil2

1 Nadler 198

2 Nadler 199

20

The hierarchy that is here established with the scholar philosopher and poet presented with responsibili-

ties of increasing creativity should not surprise us as it is exactly in line with what Hamann says else-

where about the high dignity of the poet to whom is compared even God himself1 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 ade-

quate 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 consti-

tuent 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

1 ldquoDer Poet am Anfange der Tagerdquo Nadler 206

21

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

Hamannrsquos coincidentia oppositorum is not any kind of dialectical synthesis Creation is speech ndash so is Hamannrsquos 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 Aesthe-

tica in nuce relate to the argument he makes about the proper use of reason There is significant ldquooverlaprdquo

here the various images and descriptions Hamann uses are parallel making the same argument in differ-

ent ways From what we have already said we can derive a kind of table showing how the various images

used map onto Hamannrsquos argument about the reason and the passions

Passions Reason

Vowels Consonants Words Mere arrangements of letters Poetic Meter Turbatverse God Nature Christianity Classical civilization Alpha and Omega 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 refus-

es 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 to-

gether 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 ldquoit is not clear how far he understood it and he certainly gives it a

1 Though not in the Aesthetica See eg Betz 28 note 17

22

sense of his ownrdquo1 In fact it is not easy to see where the ldquocoincidencerdquo comes in at all Regarding every

text every object as part of his ldquoBiblerdquo 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 themselvesmdashto

the letters of a text (in literary criticism) and the phenomena of nature unreduced to their universal ra-

tional 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 pro-

duced of these elements He beholds in a single vision der rollende Donner der Beredamkeit and der

einylbicltte Blitz2 This strangemdashor strange to us and Hamann would not hesitate to say that our sensibili-

ties need correctionmdashthis strange conjunction of opposites confronts us even on the title page of the Aes-

thetica in nuce Eine Rhapodie in kabbalifrac34ifrac14er Proe A rhapsodymdasha stitching-together of pieces into an ar-

tistic unitymdashthat 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 ldquoApostillerdquo ndash whether Hamann himself some per-

sonified commentator or anyone else ndash remarks that the author of the Aesthetica in nuce ldquohat Satz und

Satz zuammengereltnet wie man die Pfeile auf einem Sltlalttfelde zaumlhltrdquo3 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 Romansrsquo shots though fewer were fired with greater force It is not clear which side better corres-

ponds to Hamannrsquos 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 Therersquos a case to be made for either in-

terpretation But whichever we take the view wersquore given of the Aesthetica in nuce is still of individual

Saumltze piled up one after another as discrete countable units This treatise says the speaker of the Apos-

tille is just a pile of sentences But in an instant our perspective is shifted ldquoLaszligt uns jetzt die Hauptumme

1 Berlin 115

2 Nadler 208

3 Nadler 217 The reference given by Hamann (ldquoProcop De bello persico I 18rdquo) is explained at Haynes 94 note

kkk

23

[hellip] houmlrenldquo1 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 vari-

ous meditations on human life that compose the text of the biblical book2 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

summarymdasha 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 Hamannrsquos 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 readerrsquos confusion It is not Hamannrsquos 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 writings3 it is perhaps not sur-

prising then if the Aesthetica in nuce presents us with hermeneutic difficulties that neither the text itself

nor comparisons with Hamannrsquos other works nor consideration of Hamannrsquos engagement with the issues

of his time are adequate to dispel But the paradox we are considering heremdashthe simultaneous focus on

both columns of the table with which this chapter beganmdashis so fundamental to the thought of the Aesthe-

tica in nuce that unless we can come to terms with it in some way Hamannrsquos 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

1 Ibid

2 Cf Lutherbibel Predig 1213 ldquoLaszligt uns die Hauptumme aller Lehre houmlrenldquo 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 ldquoApostillerdquo likewise to be a undermining of all that goes before it 3 ldquoI no longer understand myself quite differently from then some [writings I understand] better some worse [hellip]

[hellip] 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 stuffrdquo Briefwechsel V p 358 trans in Betz 229

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 ldquodie ilt nolt im bloszligen Bult-frac34a-bi-ren uumlbenmdashmdashund wahrlilt wahrlilt Kinder muumlfrac12en

wir werden wenn wir den Geifrac34 der Wahrheit empfahen ollenldquo1 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 ldquoSpirit of

Truth whom the world cannot receiverdquo (Jn 1417) 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 spiri-

tual pole than to the elemental literal material one But how says Hamannrsquos Nuszlig is this Spirit of Truth

to be received By becoming like children who are just learning to spellmdashand 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 ldquoBultfrac34abirenrdquo syllable by syllable confirms that Hamann is referring to this style of interpreta-

tion Recalling now the table at the start of this chapter in which letters and the ldquospirit of truthrdquo

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 ldquoVerlieren die Elemente des A B C ihre natuumlrlilte

Bedeutung wenn ie in der unendlichen Zuammenetzung willkuumlrlilter Zeilten uns an Ideen erinnern die wo niltt

im Himmel dolt im Gehirn indrdquo2 To this question of course we are meant to answer ldquonordquo But there is

much here that is not unproblematic or at least not simple What for instance is the ldquonatuumlrlilte Bedeu-

tungrdquo of a letter And how if the combination of these signs be arbitrary does it recall for us ideas And

1 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 Hamannrsquos voice at least on Hamannrsquos 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 wersquore 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 Greeksmdashbut 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 coin-

cidence is merely an opportunity to bring the opposites as opposites together But this assumption natu-

ral 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 experiencemdashthis 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 Hamannrsquos writing admits of both a macros-

copic 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 conjunc-

tion 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 them1 considering these various levels of read-

ing 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 simultaneous-

ly 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 interpreta-

tion could be set forth that might allow us to translate Hamannrsquos simultaneously cabalistic and rhapsodic

utterances into academic language or to devise summaries of his arguments in a neatly symbolic lan-

guage 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 oumlffentlilter Gebrault 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 Hamannrsquos thought is useful also here Sltoumlpfung ifrac34 eine Rede an die Kreatur durlt die Kreatur The

Christian overtones of such a formulation are obvious Hamann once offered an encapsulation of his

thought in the word λόγος2 a famously polysemous term every sense of which Hamann intends The in-

timate connection between reason and language is of course the most obvious philosophical implication of

1 For Hamannrsquos defense of this possibility see Chapter 4

2 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 Hamannrsquos philosophy But for Hamann λόγος 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 Hamannrsquos piety placed a great emphasis on the self-emptying of Christ Howev-

er much he might stress Christrsquos humanity and suffering though he remained well within the main-

stream 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 diffi-

culties here But there is a clear parallel between the way a Christian thinks of Christ and how Hamann

thinks ofmdashwell more or less everything Christ is a man who lived for a certain stretch of time in a cer-

tain place and is also the eternal God A word is a string of letters small shapes arbitrarily strung togeth-

er and is also a sign of a concept an immaterial thing existing in the mind Hamann is no dualistmdashit 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

Zufoumlrderfrac34 muumlfrac34e man D George Benon fragen ob die Einheit mit der Mannigfaltigkeit niltt befrac34ehen koumlnne [hellip] Der bultfrac34aumlblilte oder grammatifrac14e der fleifrac14liche oder dialectifrac14e der ka-pernaitifrac14e oder historifrac14e Sinn ind im houmlltfrac34en Grade myfrac34ilt und haumlngen von ollten augen-blicklilten pirituoumlen willkuumlhrlilten Nebenbefrac34immungen und Umfrac34aumlnden ab daszlig man ohne hinauf gen Himmel zu fahren die Schluumlfrac12el ihrer Erkenntnis niltt herabholen kann1

1 Nadler 203 note 23 Hamannrsquos footnote is attached to some lines of Latin verse which conclude the Nutrsquos letter to the Learned Rabbi They come from a poem traditionally and falsely attributed to the Emperor Augustus explain-ing why Vergilrsquos orders to destroy the drafts of the Aeneid were ignored after the poetrsquos death The excerpts are

Ah scelus indignum soluetur litera diues Frangatur potius legum veneranda potestas Liber amp alma Ceres succurrite mdash mdash [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 mdashwhich for Hamann who does not oppose the spirit and the letter in a conventional way is a spiritual richnessmdashis 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

28

It is not that interpretation ought to be literal physical or ldquoCapernaiticrdquo 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 understandingmdashthat is unless one has

attained a certain degree of spiritual insight ndashone will be unable to understand things even in their literal

senses for the spiritual and literal senses are one Hamannrsquos 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 expe-

rience 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 inten-

tion of this line of thought has been least of all to stimulate pious feelings Hamannrsquos goal is not to spiri-

tualize 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 (ldquoDie Sinne aber ind Ceres und Bacltus die Leidenfrac14aftenrdquo [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 simplis-tically 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 Hamannrsquos ability to com-press his meaning into very few and very cryptic words NB The ldquoCapernaiticrdquo sense refers to the sense in which Christ is literally present in the Christian sacrament This unusual word is used derogatively in Lutheran texts (eg the Epitome of the Konkordienformel) to disparage Catholic sacramental teaching Its origins are in Jn 65559 ldquoFor my flesh is meat indeed and my blood is drink in-deed [hellip] These things he said in the synagogue as he taught in Capernaumrdquo 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 Luthe-ran understanding according to which Christ is present in the sacrament in a merely spiritual way is less than per-fectly compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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

Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 im-

plied meanings into the literal tropological allegorical and anagogical senses that Christians have tradi-

tionally 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 ormdashto employ a metaphor

more perhaps more congenial to Hamannmdashdiscerning 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 indul-

gence 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 slo-

gan from the text itselfmdashldquoto speak is to translaterdquomdashand 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 uumlberetzenmdashaus einer Engelpralte in eine Menfrac14enpralte das heifrac34 Gedanken in WortemdashSalten in NamenmdashBilder in Zeilten die poetifrac14 oder kyriologifrac14 hifrac34orifrac14 oder ymbolifrac14 oder hieroglyphifrac14mdashmdashund philoophifrac14 oder ltarakterifrac34ifrac14 eyn koumlnnen1

Here we are given a license to translate Hamannrsquos images into signs of various kinds It is no surprise that

in a footnote attached to this text he derogates the ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs by citing a pas-

sage of Petronius which complains that a new fashion of ldquopuffed-up and formless talkativenessrdquo has cor-

1 Nadler 199

31

rupted speech so that ldquothe standard of eloquence being corrupted has been halted and struck dumbrdquo

and ldquonot even poetry displays a healthy colorrdquo1 By ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs we should un-

derstand something like Leibnizrsquos 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 criti-

cism 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 cor-

respondences out of the text But the other kinds of signsmdashthe poetic or symbolicmdashdo not seem to fall

under the same criticismmdashthese suggest a kind of sign which indeed has meaning but whose interpreta-

tion 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 Hamannrsquos thought allows even for this kind of correspon-

dence 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 Hamannrsquos text but also is deeply compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos text to assert that he intends the literal and symbolic meanings to be taken as

of equal importancemdashfor us to devote our full attention to take up one of the governing metaphors of this

1 N 199 n10 ldquoNuper ventosa isthaec amp enormis loquacitas Athenas ex Asia conmigrauit [hellip] simulque correpta elo-quentiae regula stetit amp obmutuit [hellip] Ac ne carmen quidem sani coloris enituitrdquo

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 discuss-

ing how Hamann refuses to privilege abstract ldquopurely mentalrdquo thought over the particular words in

which that thought finds expression Berlin concludes that ldquofor 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)rdquo1 As an example of one such contradiction Berlin cites the line placed at the head

of this section ldquoto speak is to translaterdquo For Berlin it follows from Hamannrsquos insistence on the unity of

reason and language that no translation no correspondence between words ideas and things can be es-

tablished

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 attend-ing to ideas or to language and through them (because they correspond) to the facts was a method of judging and knowing reality [hellip But the] notion of a correspondence that there is an objective world on one side and on the other man and his instruments ndash lan-guage ideas and so forth ndash attempting to approximate to this objective reality is a false picture There is only a flow of sensations2

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 ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 reproduced3 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 Hamannrsquos treatise but unable to claim any continuity of thought therewith

1 Berlin 81

2 Ibid

3 Though one might question even this Ποταμῷ γὰρ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐμβῆναι δὶς τῷ αὐτῷ and there is no reason to think

any two ldquoflows of sensationrdquo could ever be substantially identical Necessarily every ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos view Berlin is perplexed when confronted with Hamannrsquos open assertion

that translation is possible between ldquohuman speechrdquo and the ldquospeech of angelsrdquo and can only conclude

that Hamann here contradicts himself And for Berlin it is quite to be expected that Hamann should con-

tradict himself he regards Hamannrsquos thought in general as highly creative and intriguing Schwaumlrmerei

of note for its pivotal place in intellectual history but completely insusceptible or unworthy of serious

philosophic attention Berlin appreciates Hamannrsquos criticism of the Enlightenment and his prescient

awareness of the lifeless bloodless conception of manrsquos spiritual life that the Enlighteners would ultimate-

ly produce While Berlin claims to understand Hamannrsquos motives in writing he utterly rejects the content

of his writings which he regards as ldquothe cry of a trapped man hellip who cannot be brought to see that to be

regimented or eliminated is either inevitable or desirablerdquo1 For Berlin Hamann is simply a ldquofanaticrdquo

whose writings consist of ldquopassionate rhetoric and not careful thoughtrdquo and whose opinions are ldquogrotes-

quely one-sided a violent exaggeration of the uniqueness of men and things [and] a passionate hatred of

menrsquos wish to understand the universerdquo2 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 pur-

ism of Hitler3 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 Berlinrsquos judgment that Hamann

1 Berlin 116

2 Berlin 121

3 This accusation is presented in Berlinrsquos book in a series of insinuations we are told for example that Hamannrsquos

ldquohatred and blind irrationalism have fed the stream that has led to social and political irrationalism particularly in German in our own [20

th] centuryrdquo (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 Berlinrsquos 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

34

simply contradicts himself in allowing for the possibility of translation in and out of symbolic ldquolanguag-

esrdquo Hamann has very little patience for ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs which promise patent

meaning and unambiguous interpretation This is perfectly in keeping with his general distaste for effi-

cient 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 ldquopoeticrdquo and ldquosymbolicrdquo signs not to fall under the same fierce criticism as the others

ldquoTo speak is to translaterdquo and ldquocreation is a speech to the creature through the creaturerdquo These

two maxims placed very near to each other in the text1 suggest something of a solution to the problem to

which Berlin directs our attention The conjunction of these lines should remind us that Hamann wheth-

er he directing his attention to literature philology esthetics or any other subject is always also a reli-

gious thinker The archetype of every text is for him the Bible and biblical exegesis is the model and ca-

non 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 Michaelisrsquos ldquodenial of a mystical typological sense

of Scripturerdquo2 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 Mi-

chaelis 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 ldquoTo merdquo says Hamann ldquoevery book is a Biblerdquo3 like the Bible then every

book must be read not merely for its literal sense Berlinrsquos reading of Hamann might be correct if Ha-

1 N 118-119

2 Betz 114

3 Briefwechsel I p 309 trans in Betz 47

35

mann were speaking about the everyday world of words and things understood as a brute fact But Ha-

mann 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 re-

mind us that the interpretation of tongues is also a divine gift1 he admits even that persons may not un-

derstand what they themselves to and say Even a figure such as Voltaire hardly a friend of religious out-

looks testifies for those who have ears to hear to the rightness of Hamannrsquos views

kann man wohl einen glaubwuumlrdigern Zeugen als den unfrac34erblilten Voltaire anfuumlhren wellter bey-nahe die Religion fuumlr den Eckfrac34ein der epifrac14en Dilttkunfrac34 erklaumlrt [hellip] Voltaire aber der Hohe-priefrac34er im Tempel des Gefrac14macks frac14luumlszligt so buumlndig als Kaiphas und denkt frulttbarer als He-rodes2

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 ldquoHo-

hepriefrac34er im Tempelrdquo but also a somewhat Machiavellian politician) justifies the crucifixion of Christ by

arguing that ldquoit is expedient that one man should die for the peoplerdquo3 believing himself to be discussing a

political necessity while as if prophetically describing the Christian doctrine of the atonement And He-

rodrsquos deceitful remark to the Magi ldquothat I might also come and worship himrdquo is taken since Herod was

king of the Jews though a gentile by race to represent the universal destiny of the Christian religion4 This

tradition of interpretation habitual in Biblical exegesis Hamann applies also to analysis of the wordmdashso

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 1210

2 Nadler 204-5

3 John 1150

4 It is telling that Hamann chooses such a contrived and complicated case of biblical parallelism as this one his ar-

gument 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

36

will readily concede that ldquowe see through a glass darklyrdquo1 and that we may not even be able to descry the

true outlines of our own persons in this mirrormdashbut by invoking the language of mirrors2 he locates him-

self within a tradition of thought according to which nature however flawed parts of it may be and how-

ever dulled our ability to discern itmdashis 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 se-

cular 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 ldquoblind heathensrdquo

Blinde Heyden haben die Unilttbarkeit erkannt die der Menfrac14 mit GOTT gemein hat Die verhuumlllte Figur des Leibes das Antlitz des Hauptes und das Aumluszligerfrac34e der Arme ind das ilttbare Sltema in dem wir einher gehn dolt eigentlilt niltts als ein Zeigefinger des verborge-nen Menfrac14en in unsmdash Exemplumque DEI quisque est in imagine parva3

Note that the ldquospiritualrdquo 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 ldquoindex fingersrdquo which direct the inner man to

our attention Hamann let us recall4 does not believe that the target of this ldquoZeigefingerrdquo can always be

1 1 Cor 1312

2 Though Hamann is in some ways a very modern thinker who anticipates 20

th century thought about the kinship of

reason and language he here looks back to the middle ages Cf Alan of Lille ldquoOmnis mundi creatura Quasi liber et pictura Nobis est et speculumrdquo With the sentiment and conceit of this verse Hamann could not agree more 3 N 198 The quotation from the Astronomicon of Manilius (IV895) is mainly noteworthy for its having been writ-

ten by a pagan author while echoing the language of Genesis regarding the ldquoimage of Godrdquo The Cambridge edition of Hamann misenglishes this line rendering it as ldquoEach one is an instance of God in miniaturerdquo This not only loses the connection to the book of Genesis conveyed by the word ldquoimagordquo but puts far too much weight on the word ldquoexemplumrdquo as well An exemplum is not an instance but a type model or analogue ldquoInstancerdquo implies an occur-rence of a rationally determinable kind a ldquotyperdquo or ldquoanaloguerdquo 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

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 circumstancesmdashthis 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 re-

fers to ldquocorrespondencesrdquo of thing and idea and of idea and word these ldquocorrespondencesrdquo are for Berlin

relations between two different things of different types He is quite correct to judge that Hamann consid-

ers 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 meaningmdashhe 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 justifica-

tion 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 ldquoConclusionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos own line that ldquocreation is a speech to the creature

through the creaturerdquo 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 cor-

respond to each other based on no apodictically determinable system knowable a priori but on the gra-

tuitous (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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 com-

pared translation to the art of understanding the image of a tapestry from looking only at the backs of the

threads he remarks ldquoDort [ie in the original contexts of the metaphors borrowed from other authors for

39

Hamannrsquos text] werden ie aber ad illustrationem (zur Verbraumlmung des Rockes) hier ad inuolucrum (zum

Hemde auf bloszligem Leibe) gebrauchtrdquo1 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 deco-

rated 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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos which ac-

cording to the line of interpretation I have explored reveals as much about Hamannrsquos 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 tear-

ing 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 Hamannrsquos motion between images his construction of typological

schemes that resist easy classification and one-for-one interpretation is not antirational raving or obscu-

rantism but rather an alternativemdashand a quite compelling onemdashto 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

1 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 tho-

roughly religious vision of the world If one is willing to do this Hamann is a kind of prophetmdashand the

horned head of Pan on his title-page is also the horned head of Moses1 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 pro-

ducing neat tables of Hamannrsquos 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 Aes-

thetica 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 somethingmdashunless there really is some secret ineffable law of correspondences that un-

ites 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 commen-

tators and writers of senior essays have no right to tread

1 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 agrave la Mosaiumlque (Roth 103 343)

41

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin Isaiah The Magus of the North JG Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism ed Henry

Hardy London John Murray 1993 Betz John After Enlightenment the Post-Secular Vision of JG Hamann Chichester John Wiley amp Sons

2009 Hamann Johann Georg Hamannrsquos Schriften ed Friedrich Roth Berlin G Reimer 1821 (Cited as

ldquoRothrdquo All citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Saumlmtliche Werke ed Josef Nadler Wien Verlag Herder 1950 (Cited as ldquoNad-

lerrdquo Unless otherwise noted all citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Writings on Philosophy and Language trans and ed Kenneth Haynes Cam-

bridge Cambridge UP 2007 (Cited as ldquoHaynesrdquo) Jacobs Carol ldquoHamann Is a Nomadic Writer lsquoAesthetica in nucersquordquo in Skirting the Ethical Stanford Stan-

ford UP 2008 pp 111-130 OrsquoFlaherty James C The Quarrel of Reason with Itself Essays on Hamann Michaelis Lessing Nietzsche Co-

lumbia SC Camden 1988

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

Verucht es einmal die Iliade zu leen wenn ihr vorher durch die Abfrac34raction die beyden

Selbfrac34lauter α und ω ausgesichtet habt1 ldquoSelbstlautrdquo and ldquoMitlautrdquo ldquoConsonantrdquo and ldquovowelrdquo2 These are evocative termsmdashnot 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 con-

cepts 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 ldquoletter of the voicerdquo is utterable on its own while a littera consonans

must be ldquosounded withrdquo something else This way of articulating the distinction between independent

vowels and dependent consonants was a commonplace in the eighteenth century3 and would not have

been unfamiliar to Hamann even if the etymology of ldquoSelbstlautrdquo did not suggest it If we translate then

a bit freely we might say ldquothat which is removed from the Iliad by abstraction is that without which

1 Nadler 207

2 German preserves also more Latinate forms ldquoVokalrdquo and ldquoKonsonantrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos thought in the Aesthetica in nuce 3 John Hensons New Latin Grammar for instance published at Nottingham in 1744 explains ldquoA Vowel is a letter

which makes a full and perfect Sound of it Self as a o A Conſonant is a Letter that has no Sound of it Self without a Vowelrdquo And in a Verbesserte and Erleichterte Lateinische Grammatica published at Halle in 1763 (a year after the Cru-sades of the Philologist saw light) we read ldquoDen Anfang in der Lateinifrac14en Spralten maltt man von den Bultfrac34abenhellip Und diee werden eingetheilet in vocales oder elbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautendeelbfrac34lautende und consonantes oder mitlautendemitlautendemitlautendemitlautende o niltt ehe koumlnnen ausgeprolten werden als bis ein vocalis dazukoumlmmtrdquo 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 httpbooksgooglecombooksid=T5ECAAAAQAAJ and the second at httpbooksgooglecombooksid=F9oVAAAAYAAJ

17

there can be no speechrdquo which without any further interpretation already at least appears to imply much

more than a matter of rearranged letters

As we have seen the ldquoabstractionrdquo of the letters from the line of the Iliad corresponds in the typo-

logical 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 pas-

sions in order for them to have any power to persuade It is not that reasoned arguments even when ab-

stract are otiose or parasiticalmdashthese 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 ldquovocalizedrdquo

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

Hamannrsquos 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 unpointedmdashlike 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 durlt 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 scripturesmdashwritten by God but one must bring onersquos

own vowels to read it

But is this not going too far While we may not just have misrepresented Hamannrsquos 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 doesnrsquot make sense as

written without those vowels itrsquos still easily interpretable If Hamann had not named it as a line from the

Iliad any educated person on seeing the word microῆνιν 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 miss-

ing places in the line the shape of the dactyls and the grammatical possibilities offered by the Greek lan-

guage 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 En-

lightened 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 objec-

tion of this scientist would be absurd because it would miss the point of Hamannrsquos critiquemdashhe goes

around the backs of the Enlighteners contending that they are moved by passion even in what they be-

lieve to be their exercises of pure reason that the arguments they invoke to defend their conception of rea-

son 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 ldquoTurbatverserdquo1 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 Hamannrsquos altered line from the Iliad) But it refers most specif-

ically 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 Θεά ἄειδε μῆνιν Ἀχιλῆος Πηληϊάδεω In a certain sense there is nothing of Homerrsquos 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 ob-

viously 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 ldquogoddessrdquo and not ldquowrathrdquo In the Turbatverse of nature then the superficial meaning of the speak-

ing 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 niltts als Turbatvere und disiecti membra poetae zu unerm Gebrault uumlbrig Diee zu ammeln ifrac34 des Gelehrten ie auszulegen des Philoophen ie naltzuahmenmdashoder nolt kuumlhnermdash mdashie in Gefrac14ick zu bringen des Poeten befrac14eiden Theil2

1 Nadler 198

2 Nadler 199

20

The hierarchy that is here established with the scholar philosopher and poet presented with responsibili-

ties of increasing creativity should not surprise us as it is exactly in line with what Hamann says else-

where about the high dignity of the poet to whom is compared even God himself1 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 ade-

quate 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 consti-

tuent 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

1 ldquoDer Poet am Anfange der Tagerdquo Nadler 206

21

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

Hamannrsquos coincidentia oppositorum is not any kind of dialectical synthesis Creation is speech ndash so is Hamannrsquos 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 Aesthe-

tica in nuce relate to the argument he makes about the proper use of reason There is significant ldquooverlaprdquo

here the various images and descriptions Hamann uses are parallel making the same argument in differ-

ent ways From what we have already said we can derive a kind of table showing how the various images

used map onto Hamannrsquos argument about the reason and the passions

Passions Reason

Vowels Consonants Words Mere arrangements of letters Poetic Meter Turbatverse God Nature Christianity Classical civilization Alpha and Omega 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 refus-

es 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 to-

gether 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 ldquoit is not clear how far he understood it and he certainly gives it a

1 Though not in the Aesthetica See eg Betz 28 note 17

22

sense of his ownrdquo1 In fact it is not easy to see where the ldquocoincidencerdquo comes in at all Regarding every

text every object as part of his ldquoBiblerdquo 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 themselvesmdashto

the letters of a text (in literary criticism) and the phenomena of nature unreduced to their universal ra-

tional 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 pro-

duced of these elements He beholds in a single vision der rollende Donner der Beredamkeit and der

einylbicltte Blitz2 This strangemdashor strange to us and Hamann would not hesitate to say that our sensibili-

ties need correctionmdashthis strange conjunction of opposites confronts us even on the title page of the Aes-

thetica in nuce Eine Rhapodie in kabbalifrac34ifrac14er Proe A rhapsodymdasha stitching-together of pieces into an ar-

tistic unitymdashthat 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 ldquoApostillerdquo ndash whether Hamann himself some per-

sonified commentator or anyone else ndash remarks that the author of the Aesthetica in nuce ldquohat Satz und

Satz zuammengereltnet wie man die Pfeile auf einem Sltlalttfelde zaumlhltrdquo3 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 Romansrsquo shots though fewer were fired with greater force It is not clear which side better corres-

ponds to Hamannrsquos 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 Therersquos a case to be made for either in-

terpretation But whichever we take the view wersquore given of the Aesthetica in nuce is still of individual

Saumltze piled up one after another as discrete countable units This treatise says the speaker of the Apos-

tille is just a pile of sentences But in an instant our perspective is shifted ldquoLaszligt uns jetzt die Hauptumme

1 Berlin 115

2 Nadler 208

3 Nadler 217 The reference given by Hamann (ldquoProcop De bello persico I 18rdquo) is explained at Haynes 94 note

kkk

23

[hellip] houmlrenldquo1 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 vari-

ous meditations on human life that compose the text of the biblical book2 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

summarymdasha 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 Hamannrsquos 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 readerrsquos confusion It is not Hamannrsquos 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 writings3 it is perhaps not sur-

prising then if the Aesthetica in nuce presents us with hermeneutic difficulties that neither the text itself

nor comparisons with Hamannrsquos other works nor consideration of Hamannrsquos engagement with the issues

of his time are adequate to dispel But the paradox we are considering heremdashthe simultaneous focus on

both columns of the table with which this chapter beganmdashis so fundamental to the thought of the Aesthe-

tica in nuce that unless we can come to terms with it in some way Hamannrsquos 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

1 Ibid

2 Cf Lutherbibel Predig 1213 ldquoLaszligt uns die Hauptumme aller Lehre houmlrenldquo 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 ldquoApostillerdquo likewise to be a undermining of all that goes before it 3 ldquoI no longer understand myself quite differently from then some [writings I understand] better some worse [hellip]

[hellip] 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 stuffrdquo Briefwechsel V p 358 trans in Betz 229

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 ldquodie ilt nolt im bloszligen Bult-frac34a-bi-ren uumlbenmdashmdashund wahrlilt wahrlilt Kinder muumlfrac12en

wir werden wenn wir den Geifrac34 der Wahrheit empfahen ollenldquo1 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 ldquoSpirit of

Truth whom the world cannot receiverdquo (Jn 1417) 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 spiri-

tual pole than to the elemental literal material one But how says Hamannrsquos Nuszlig is this Spirit of Truth

to be received By becoming like children who are just learning to spellmdashand 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 ldquoBultfrac34abirenrdquo syllable by syllable confirms that Hamann is referring to this style of interpreta-

tion Recalling now the table at the start of this chapter in which letters and the ldquospirit of truthrdquo

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 ldquoVerlieren die Elemente des A B C ihre natuumlrlilte

Bedeutung wenn ie in der unendlichen Zuammenetzung willkuumlrlilter Zeilten uns an Ideen erinnern die wo niltt

im Himmel dolt im Gehirn indrdquo2 To this question of course we are meant to answer ldquonordquo But there is

much here that is not unproblematic or at least not simple What for instance is the ldquonatuumlrlilte Bedeu-

tungrdquo of a letter And how if the combination of these signs be arbitrary does it recall for us ideas And

1 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 Hamannrsquos voice at least on Hamannrsquos 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 wersquore 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 Greeksmdashbut 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 coin-

cidence is merely an opportunity to bring the opposites as opposites together But this assumption natu-

ral 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 experiencemdashthis 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 Hamannrsquos writing admits of both a macros-

copic 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 conjunc-

tion 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 them1 considering these various levels of read-

ing 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 simultaneous-

ly 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 interpreta-

tion could be set forth that might allow us to translate Hamannrsquos simultaneously cabalistic and rhapsodic

utterances into academic language or to devise summaries of his arguments in a neatly symbolic lan-

guage 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 oumlffentlilter Gebrault 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 Hamannrsquos thought is useful also here Sltoumlpfung ifrac34 eine Rede an die Kreatur durlt die Kreatur The

Christian overtones of such a formulation are obvious Hamann once offered an encapsulation of his

thought in the word λόγος2 a famously polysemous term every sense of which Hamann intends The in-

timate connection between reason and language is of course the most obvious philosophical implication of

1 For Hamannrsquos defense of this possibility see Chapter 4

2 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 Hamannrsquos philosophy But for Hamann λόγος 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 Hamannrsquos piety placed a great emphasis on the self-emptying of Christ Howev-

er much he might stress Christrsquos humanity and suffering though he remained well within the main-

stream 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 diffi-

culties here But there is a clear parallel between the way a Christian thinks of Christ and how Hamann

thinks ofmdashwell more or less everything Christ is a man who lived for a certain stretch of time in a cer-

tain place and is also the eternal God A word is a string of letters small shapes arbitrarily strung togeth-

er and is also a sign of a concept an immaterial thing existing in the mind Hamann is no dualistmdashit 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

Zufoumlrderfrac34 muumlfrac34e man D George Benon fragen ob die Einheit mit der Mannigfaltigkeit niltt befrac34ehen koumlnne [hellip] Der bultfrac34aumlblilte oder grammatifrac14e der fleifrac14liche oder dialectifrac14e der ka-pernaitifrac14e oder historifrac14e Sinn ind im houmlltfrac34en Grade myfrac34ilt und haumlngen von ollten augen-blicklilten pirituoumlen willkuumlhrlilten Nebenbefrac34immungen und Umfrac34aumlnden ab daszlig man ohne hinauf gen Himmel zu fahren die Schluumlfrac12el ihrer Erkenntnis niltt herabholen kann1

1 Nadler 203 note 23 Hamannrsquos footnote is attached to some lines of Latin verse which conclude the Nutrsquos letter to the Learned Rabbi They come from a poem traditionally and falsely attributed to the Emperor Augustus explain-ing why Vergilrsquos orders to destroy the drafts of the Aeneid were ignored after the poetrsquos death The excerpts are

Ah scelus indignum soluetur litera diues Frangatur potius legum veneranda potestas Liber amp alma Ceres succurrite mdash mdash [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 mdashwhich for Hamann who does not oppose the spirit and the letter in a conventional way is a spiritual richnessmdashis 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

28

It is not that interpretation ought to be literal physical or ldquoCapernaiticrdquo 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 understandingmdashthat is unless one has

attained a certain degree of spiritual insight ndashone will be unable to understand things even in their literal

senses for the spiritual and literal senses are one Hamannrsquos 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 expe-

rience 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 inten-

tion of this line of thought has been least of all to stimulate pious feelings Hamannrsquos goal is not to spiri-

tualize 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 (ldquoDie Sinne aber ind Ceres und Bacltus die Leidenfrac14aftenrdquo [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 simplis-tically 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 Hamannrsquos ability to com-press his meaning into very few and very cryptic words NB The ldquoCapernaiticrdquo sense refers to the sense in which Christ is literally present in the Christian sacrament This unusual word is used derogatively in Lutheran texts (eg the Epitome of the Konkordienformel) to disparage Catholic sacramental teaching Its origins are in Jn 65559 ldquoFor my flesh is meat indeed and my blood is drink in-deed [hellip] These things he said in the synagogue as he taught in Capernaumrdquo 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 Luthe-ran understanding according to which Christ is present in the sacrament in a merely spiritual way is less than per-fectly compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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

Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 im-

plied meanings into the literal tropological allegorical and anagogical senses that Christians have tradi-

tionally 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 ormdashto employ a metaphor

more perhaps more congenial to Hamannmdashdiscerning 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 indul-

gence 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 slo-

gan from the text itselfmdashldquoto speak is to translaterdquomdashand 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 uumlberetzenmdashaus einer Engelpralte in eine Menfrac14enpralte das heifrac34 Gedanken in WortemdashSalten in NamenmdashBilder in Zeilten die poetifrac14 oder kyriologifrac14 hifrac34orifrac14 oder ymbolifrac14 oder hieroglyphifrac14mdashmdashund philoophifrac14 oder ltarakterifrac34ifrac14 eyn koumlnnen1

Here we are given a license to translate Hamannrsquos images into signs of various kinds It is no surprise that

in a footnote attached to this text he derogates the ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs by citing a pas-

sage of Petronius which complains that a new fashion of ldquopuffed-up and formless talkativenessrdquo has cor-

1 Nadler 199

31

rupted speech so that ldquothe standard of eloquence being corrupted has been halted and struck dumbrdquo

and ldquonot even poetry displays a healthy colorrdquo1 By ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs we should un-

derstand something like Leibnizrsquos 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 criti-

cism 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 cor-

respondences out of the text But the other kinds of signsmdashthe poetic or symbolicmdashdo not seem to fall

under the same criticismmdashthese suggest a kind of sign which indeed has meaning but whose interpreta-

tion 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 Hamannrsquos thought allows even for this kind of correspon-

dence 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 Hamannrsquos text but also is deeply compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos text to assert that he intends the literal and symbolic meanings to be taken as

of equal importancemdashfor us to devote our full attention to take up one of the governing metaphors of this

1 N 199 n10 ldquoNuper ventosa isthaec amp enormis loquacitas Athenas ex Asia conmigrauit [hellip] simulque correpta elo-quentiae regula stetit amp obmutuit [hellip] Ac ne carmen quidem sani coloris enituitrdquo

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 discuss-

ing how Hamann refuses to privilege abstract ldquopurely mentalrdquo thought over the particular words in

which that thought finds expression Berlin concludes that ldquofor 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)rdquo1 As an example of one such contradiction Berlin cites the line placed at the head

of this section ldquoto speak is to translaterdquo For Berlin it follows from Hamannrsquos insistence on the unity of

reason and language that no translation no correspondence between words ideas and things can be es-

tablished

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 attend-ing to ideas or to language and through them (because they correspond) to the facts was a method of judging and knowing reality [hellip But the] notion of a correspondence that there is an objective world on one side and on the other man and his instruments ndash lan-guage ideas and so forth ndash attempting to approximate to this objective reality is a false picture There is only a flow of sensations2

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 ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 reproduced3 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 Hamannrsquos treatise but unable to claim any continuity of thought therewith

1 Berlin 81

2 Ibid

3 Though one might question even this Ποταμῷ γὰρ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐμβῆναι δὶς τῷ αὐτῷ and there is no reason to think

any two ldquoflows of sensationrdquo could ever be substantially identical Necessarily every ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos view Berlin is perplexed when confronted with Hamannrsquos open assertion

that translation is possible between ldquohuman speechrdquo and the ldquospeech of angelsrdquo and can only conclude

that Hamann here contradicts himself And for Berlin it is quite to be expected that Hamann should con-

tradict himself he regards Hamannrsquos thought in general as highly creative and intriguing Schwaumlrmerei

of note for its pivotal place in intellectual history but completely insusceptible or unworthy of serious

philosophic attention Berlin appreciates Hamannrsquos criticism of the Enlightenment and his prescient

awareness of the lifeless bloodless conception of manrsquos spiritual life that the Enlighteners would ultimate-

ly produce While Berlin claims to understand Hamannrsquos motives in writing he utterly rejects the content

of his writings which he regards as ldquothe cry of a trapped man hellip who cannot be brought to see that to be

regimented or eliminated is either inevitable or desirablerdquo1 For Berlin Hamann is simply a ldquofanaticrdquo

whose writings consist of ldquopassionate rhetoric and not careful thoughtrdquo and whose opinions are ldquogrotes-

quely one-sided a violent exaggeration of the uniqueness of men and things [and] a passionate hatred of

menrsquos wish to understand the universerdquo2 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 pur-

ism of Hitler3 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 Berlinrsquos judgment that Hamann

1 Berlin 116

2 Berlin 121

3 This accusation is presented in Berlinrsquos book in a series of insinuations we are told for example that Hamannrsquos

ldquohatred and blind irrationalism have fed the stream that has led to social and political irrationalism particularly in German in our own [20

th] centuryrdquo (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 Berlinrsquos 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

34

simply contradicts himself in allowing for the possibility of translation in and out of symbolic ldquolanguag-

esrdquo Hamann has very little patience for ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs which promise patent

meaning and unambiguous interpretation This is perfectly in keeping with his general distaste for effi-

cient 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 ldquopoeticrdquo and ldquosymbolicrdquo signs not to fall under the same fierce criticism as the others

ldquoTo speak is to translaterdquo and ldquocreation is a speech to the creature through the creaturerdquo These

two maxims placed very near to each other in the text1 suggest something of a solution to the problem to

which Berlin directs our attention The conjunction of these lines should remind us that Hamann wheth-

er he directing his attention to literature philology esthetics or any other subject is always also a reli-

gious thinker The archetype of every text is for him the Bible and biblical exegesis is the model and ca-

non 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 Michaelisrsquos ldquodenial of a mystical typological sense

of Scripturerdquo2 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 Mi-

chaelis 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 ldquoTo merdquo says Hamann ldquoevery book is a Biblerdquo3 like the Bible then every

book must be read not merely for its literal sense Berlinrsquos reading of Hamann might be correct if Ha-

1 N 118-119

2 Betz 114

3 Briefwechsel I p 309 trans in Betz 47

35

mann were speaking about the everyday world of words and things understood as a brute fact But Ha-

mann 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 re-

mind us that the interpretation of tongues is also a divine gift1 he admits even that persons may not un-

derstand what they themselves to and say Even a figure such as Voltaire hardly a friend of religious out-

looks testifies for those who have ears to hear to the rightness of Hamannrsquos views

kann man wohl einen glaubwuumlrdigern Zeugen als den unfrac34erblilten Voltaire anfuumlhren wellter bey-nahe die Religion fuumlr den Eckfrac34ein der epifrac14en Dilttkunfrac34 erklaumlrt [hellip] Voltaire aber der Hohe-priefrac34er im Tempel des Gefrac14macks frac14luumlszligt so buumlndig als Kaiphas und denkt frulttbarer als He-rodes2

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 ldquoHo-

hepriefrac34er im Tempelrdquo but also a somewhat Machiavellian politician) justifies the crucifixion of Christ by

arguing that ldquoit is expedient that one man should die for the peoplerdquo3 believing himself to be discussing a

political necessity while as if prophetically describing the Christian doctrine of the atonement And He-

rodrsquos deceitful remark to the Magi ldquothat I might also come and worship himrdquo is taken since Herod was

king of the Jews though a gentile by race to represent the universal destiny of the Christian religion4 This

tradition of interpretation habitual in Biblical exegesis Hamann applies also to analysis of the wordmdashso

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 1210

2 Nadler 204-5

3 John 1150

4 It is telling that Hamann chooses such a contrived and complicated case of biblical parallelism as this one his ar-

gument 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

36

will readily concede that ldquowe see through a glass darklyrdquo1 and that we may not even be able to descry the

true outlines of our own persons in this mirrormdashbut by invoking the language of mirrors2 he locates him-

self within a tradition of thought according to which nature however flawed parts of it may be and how-

ever dulled our ability to discern itmdashis 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 se-

cular 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 ldquoblind heathensrdquo

Blinde Heyden haben die Unilttbarkeit erkannt die der Menfrac14 mit GOTT gemein hat Die verhuumlllte Figur des Leibes das Antlitz des Hauptes und das Aumluszligerfrac34e der Arme ind das ilttbare Sltema in dem wir einher gehn dolt eigentlilt niltts als ein Zeigefinger des verborge-nen Menfrac14en in unsmdash Exemplumque DEI quisque est in imagine parva3

Note that the ldquospiritualrdquo 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 ldquoindex fingersrdquo which direct the inner man to

our attention Hamann let us recall4 does not believe that the target of this ldquoZeigefingerrdquo can always be

1 1 Cor 1312

2 Though Hamann is in some ways a very modern thinker who anticipates 20

th century thought about the kinship of

reason and language he here looks back to the middle ages Cf Alan of Lille ldquoOmnis mundi creatura Quasi liber et pictura Nobis est et speculumrdquo With the sentiment and conceit of this verse Hamann could not agree more 3 N 198 The quotation from the Astronomicon of Manilius (IV895) is mainly noteworthy for its having been writ-

ten by a pagan author while echoing the language of Genesis regarding the ldquoimage of Godrdquo The Cambridge edition of Hamann misenglishes this line rendering it as ldquoEach one is an instance of God in miniaturerdquo This not only loses the connection to the book of Genesis conveyed by the word ldquoimagordquo but puts far too much weight on the word ldquoexemplumrdquo as well An exemplum is not an instance but a type model or analogue ldquoInstancerdquo implies an occur-rence of a rationally determinable kind a ldquotyperdquo or ldquoanaloguerdquo 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

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 circumstancesmdashthis 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 re-

fers to ldquocorrespondencesrdquo of thing and idea and of idea and word these ldquocorrespondencesrdquo are for Berlin

relations between two different things of different types He is quite correct to judge that Hamann consid-

ers 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 meaningmdashhe 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 justifica-

tion 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 ldquoConclusionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos own line that ldquocreation is a speech to the creature

through the creaturerdquo 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 cor-

respond to each other based on no apodictically determinable system knowable a priori but on the gra-

tuitous (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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 com-

pared translation to the art of understanding the image of a tapestry from looking only at the backs of the

threads he remarks ldquoDort [ie in the original contexts of the metaphors borrowed from other authors for

39

Hamannrsquos text] werden ie aber ad illustrationem (zur Verbraumlmung des Rockes) hier ad inuolucrum (zum

Hemde auf bloszligem Leibe) gebrauchtrdquo1 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 deco-

rated 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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos which ac-

cording to the line of interpretation I have explored reveals as much about Hamannrsquos 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 tear-

ing 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 Hamannrsquos motion between images his construction of typological

schemes that resist easy classification and one-for-one interpretation is not antirational raving or obscu-

rantism but rather an alternativemdashand a quite compelling onemdashto 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

1 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 tho-

roughly religious vision of the world If one is willing to do this Hamann is a kind of prophetmdashand the

horned head of Pan on his title-page is also the horned head of Moses1 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 pro-

ducing neat tables of Hamannrsquos 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 Aes-

thetica 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 somethingmdashunless there really is some secret ineffable law of correspondences that un-

ites 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 commen-

tators and writers of senior essays have no right to tread

1 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 agrave la Mosaiumlque (Roth 103 343)

41

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin Isaiah The Magus of the North JG Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism ed Henry

Hardy London John Murray 1993 Betz John After Enlightenment the Post-Secular Vision of JG Hamann Chichester John Wiley amp Sons

2009 Hamann Johann Georg Hamannrsquos Schriften ed Friedrich Roth Berlin G Reimer 1821 (Cited as

ldquoRothrdquo All citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Saumlmtliche Werke ed Josef Nadler Wien Verlag Herder 1950 (Cited as ldquoNad-

lerrdquo Unless otherwise noted all citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Writings on Philosophy and Language trans and ed Kenneth Haynes Cam-

bridge Cambridge UP 2007 (Cited as ldquoHaynesrdquo) Jacobs Carol ldquoHamann Is a Nomadic Writer lsquoAesthetica in nucersquordquo in Skirting the Ethical Stanford Stan-

ford UP 2008 pp 111-130 OrsquoFlaherty James C The Quarrel of Reason with Itself Essays on Hamann Michaelis Lessing Nietzsche Co-

lumbia SC Camden 1988

17

there can be no speechrdquo which without any further interpretation already at least appears to imply much

more than a matter of rearranged letters

As we have seen the ldquoabstractionrdquo of the letters from the line of the Iliad corresponds in the typo-

logical 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 pas-

sions in order for them to have any power to persuade It is not that reasoned arguments even when ab-

stract are otiose or parasiticalmdashthese 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 ldquovocalizedrdquo

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

Hamannrsquos 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 unpointedmdashlike 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 durlt 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 scripturesmdashwritten by God but one must bring onersquos

own vowels to read it

But is this not going too far While we may not just have misrepresented Hamannrsquos 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 doesnrsquot make sense as

written without those vowels itrsquos still easily interpretable If Hamann had not named it as a line from the

Iliad any educated person on seeing the word microῆνιν 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 miss-

ing places in the line the shape of the dactyls and the grammatical possibilities offered by the Greek lan-

guage 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 En-

lightened 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 objec-

tion of this scientist would be absurd because it would miss the point of Hamannrsquos critiquemdashhe goes

around the backs of the Enlighteners contending that they are moved by passion even in what they be-

lieve to be their exercises of pure reason that the arguments they invoke to defend their conception of rea-

son 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 ldquoTurbatverserdquo1 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 Hamannrsquos altered line from the Iliad) But it refers most specif-

ically 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 Θεά ἄειδε μῆνιν Ἀχιλῆος Πηληϊάδεω In a certain sense there is nothing of Homerrsquos 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 ob-

viously 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 ldquogoddessrdquo and not ldquowrathrdquo In the Turbatverse of nature then the superficial meaning of the speak-

ing 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 niltts als Turbatvere und disiecti membra poetae zu unerm Gebrault uumlbrig Diee zu ammeln ifrac34 des Gelehrten ie auszulegen des Philoophen ie naltzuahmenmdashoder nolt kuumlhnermdash mdashie in Gefrac14ick zu bringen des Poeten befrac14eiden Theil2

1 Nadler 198

2 Nadler 199

20

The hierarchy that is here established with the scholar philosopher and poet presented with responsibili-

ties of increasing creativity should not surprise us as it is exactly in line with what Hamann says else-

where about the high dignity of the poet to whom is compared even God himself1 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 ade-

quate 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 consti-

tuent 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

1 ldquoDer Poet am Anfange der Tagerdquo Nadler 206

21

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

Hamannrsquos coincidentia oppositorum is not any kind of dialectical synthesis Creation is speech ndash so is Hamannrsquos 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 Aesthe-

tica in nuce relate to the argument he makes about the proper use of reason There is significant ldquooverlaprdquo

here the various images and descriptions Hamann uses are parallel making the same argument in differ-

ent ways From what we have already said we can derive a kind of table showing how the various images

used map onto Hamannrsquos argument about the reason and the passions

Passions Reason

Vowels Consonants Words Mere arrangements of letters Poetic Meter Turbatverse God Nature Christianity Classical civilization Alpha and Omega 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 refus-

es 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 to-

gether 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 ldquoit is not clear how far he understood it and he certainly gives it a

1 Though not in the Aesthetica See eg Betz 28 note 17

22

sense of his ownrdquo1 In fact it is not easy to see where the ldquocoincidencerdquo comes in at all Regarding every

text every object as part of his ldquoBiblerdquo 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 themselvesmdashto

the letters of a text (in literary criticism) and the phenomena of nature unreduced to their universal ra-

tional 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 pro-

duced of these elements He beholds in a single vision der rollende Donner der Beredamkeit and der

einylbicltte Blitz2 This strangemdashor strange to us and Hamann would not hesitate to say that our sensibili-

ties need correctionmdashthis strange conjunction of opposites confronts us even on the title page of the Aes-

thetica in nuce Eine Rhapodie in kabbalifrac34ifrac14er Proe A rhapsodymdasha stitching-together of pieces into an ar-

tistic unitymdashthat 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 ldquoApostillerdquo ndash whether Hamann himself some per-

sonified commentator or anyone else ndash remarks that the author of the Aesthetica in nuce ldquohat Satz und

Satz zuammengereltnet wie man die Pfeile auf einem Sltlalttfelde zaumlhltrdquo3 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 Romansrsquo shots though fewer were fired with greater force It is not clear which side better corres-

ponds to Hamannrsquos 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 Therersquos a case to be made for either in-

terpretation But whichever we take the view wersquore given of the Aesthetica in nuce is still of individual

Saumltze piled up one after another as discrete countable units This treatise says the speaker of the Apos-

tille is just a pile of sentences But in an instant our perspective is shifted ldquoLaszligt uns jetzt die Hauptumme

1 Berlin 115

2 Nadler 208

3 Nadler 217 The reference given by Hamann (ldquoProcop De bello persico I 18rdquo) is explained at Haynes 94 note

kkk

23

[hellip] houmlrenldquo1 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 vari-

ous meditations on human life that compose the text of the biblical book2 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

summarymdasha 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 Hamannrsquos 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 readerrsquos confusion It is not Hamannrsquos 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 writings3 it is perhaps not sur-

prising then if the Aesthetica in nuce presents us with hermeneutic difficulties that neither the text itself

nor comparisons with Hamannrsquos other works nor consideration of Hamannrsquos engagement with the issues

of his time are adequate to dispel But the paradox we are considering heremdashthe simultaneous focus on

both columns of the table with which this chapter beganmdashis so fundamental to the thought of the Aesthe-

tica in nuce that unless we can come to terms with it in some way Hamannrsquos 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

1 Ibid

2 Cf Lutherbibel Predig 1213 ldquoLaszligt uns die Hauptumme aller Lehre houmlrenldquo 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 ldquoApostillerdquo likewise to be a undermining of all that goes before it 3 ldquoI no longer understand myself quite differently from then some [writings I understand] better some worse [hellip]

[hellip] 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 stuffrdquo Briefwechsel V p 358 trans in Betz 229

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 ldquodie ilt nolt im bloszligen Bult-frac34a-bi-ren uumlbenmdashmdashund wahrlilt wahrlilt Kinder muumlfrac12en

wir werden wenn wir den Geifrac34 der Wahrheit empfahen ollenldquo1 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 ldquoSpirit of

Truth whom the world cannot receiverdquo (Jn 1417) 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 spiri-

tual pole than to the elemental literal material one But how says Hamannrsquos Nuszlig is this Spirit of Truth

to be received By becoming like children who are just learning to spellmdashand 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 ldquoBultfrac34abirenrdquo syllable by syllable confirms that Hamann is referring to this style of interpreta-

tion Recalling now the table at the start of this chapter in which letters and the ldquospirit of truthrdquo

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 ldquoVerlieren die Elemente des A B C ihre natuumlrlilte

Bedeutung wenn ie in der unendlichen Zuammenetzung willkuumlrlilter Zeilten uns an Ideen erinnern die wo niltt

im Himmel dolt im Gehirn indrdquo2 To this question of course we are meant to answer ldquonordquo But there is

much here that is not unproblematic or at least not simple What for instance is the ldquonatuumlrlilte Bedeu-

tungrdquo of a letter And how if the combination of these signs be arbitrary does it recall for us ideas And

1 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 Hamannrsquos voice at least on Hamannrsquos 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 wersquore 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 Greeksmdashbut 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 coin-

cidence is merely an opportunity to bring the opposites as opposites together But this assumption natu-

ral 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 experiencemdashthis 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 Hamannrsquos writing admits of both a macros-

copic 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 conjunc-

tion 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 them1 considering these various levels of read-

ing 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 simultaneous-

ly 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 interpreta-

tion could be set forth that might allow us to translate Hamannrsquos simultaneously cabalistic and rhapsodic

utterances into academic language or to devise summaries of his arguments in a neatly symbolic lan-

guage 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 oumlffentlilter Gebrault 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 Hamannrsquos thought is useful also here Sltoumlpfung ifrac34 eine Rede an die Kreatur durlt die Kreatur The

Christian overtones of such a formulation are obvious Hamann once offered an encapsulation of his

thought in the word λόγος2 a famously polysemous term every sense of which Hamann intends The in-

timate connection between reason and language is of course the most obvious philosophical implication of

1 For Hamannrsquos defense of this possibility see Chapter 4

2 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 Hamannrsquos philosophy But for Hamann λόγος 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 Hamannrsquos piety placed a great emphasis on the self-emptying of Christ Howev-

er much he might stress Christrsquos humanity and suffering though he remained well within the main-

stream 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 diffi-

culties here But there is a clear parallel between the way a Christian thinks of Christ and how Hamann

thinks ofmdashwell more or less everything Christ is a man who lived for a certain stretch of time in a cer-

tain place and is also the eternal God A word is a string of letters small shapes arbitrarily strung togeth-

er and is also a sign of a concept an immaterial thing existing in the mind Hamann is no dualistmdashit 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

Zufoumlrderfrac34 muumlfrac34e man D George Benon fragen ob die Einheit mit der Mannigfaltigkeit niltt befrac34ehen koumlnne [hellip] Der bultfrac34aumlblilte oder grammatifrac14e der fleifrac14liche oder dialectifrac14e der ka-pernaitifrac14e oder historifrac14e Sinn ind im houmlltfrac34en Grade myfrac34ilt und haumlngen von ollten augen-blicklilten pirituoumlen willkuumlhrlilten Nebenbefrac34immungen und Umfrac34aumlnden ab daszlig man ohne hinauf gen Himmel zu fahren die Schluumlfrac12el ihrer Erkenntnis niltt herabholen kann1

1 Nadler 203 note 23 Hamannrsquos footnote is attached to some lines of Latin verse which conclude the Nutrsquos letter to the Learned Rabbi They come from a poem traditionally and falsely attributed to the Emperor Augustus explain-ing why Vergilrsquos orders to destroy the drafts of the Aeneid were ignored after the poetrsquos death The excerpts are

Ah scelus indignum soluetur litera diues Frangatur potius legum veneranda potestas Liber amp alma Ceres succurrite mdash mdash [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 mdashwhich for Hamann who does not oppose the spirit and the letter in a conventional way is a spiritual richnessmdashis 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

28

It is not that interpretation ought to be literal physical or ldquoCapernaiticrdquo 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 understandingmdashthat is unless one has

attained a certain degree of spiritual insight ndashone will be unable to understand things even in their literal

senses for the spiritual and literal senses are one Hamannrsquos 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 expe-

rience 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 inten-

tion of this line of thought has been least of all to stimulate pious feelings Hamannrsquos goal is not to spiri-

tualize 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 (ldquoDie Sinne aber ind Ceres und Bacltus die Leidenfrac14aftenrdquo [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 simplis-tically 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 Hamannrsquos ability to com-press his meaning into very few and very cryptic words NB The ldquoCapernaiticrdquo sense refers to the sense in which Christ is literally present in the Christian sacrament This unusual word is used derogatively in Lutheran texts (eg the Epitome of the Konkordienformel) to disparage Catholic sacramental teaching Its origins are in Jn 65559 ldquoFor my flesh is meat indeed and my blood is drink in-deed [hellip] These things he said in the synagogue as he taught in Capernaumrdquo 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 Luthe-ran understanding according to which Christ is present in the sacrament in a merely spiritual way is less than per-fectly compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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

Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 im-

plied meanings into the literal tropological allegorical and anagogical senses that Christians have tradi-

tionally 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 ormdashto employ a metaphor

more perhaps more congenial to Hamannmdashdiscerning 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 indul-

gence 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 slo-

gan from the text itselfmdashldquoto speak is to translaterdquomdashand 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 uumlberetzenmdashaus einer Engelpralte in eine Menfrac14enpralte das heifrac34 Gedanken in WortemdashSalten in NamenmdashBilder in Zeilten die poetifrac14 oder kyriologifrac14 hifrac34orifrac14 oder ymbolifrac14 oder hieroglyphifrac14mdashmdashund philoophifrac14 oder ltarakterifrac34ifrac14 eyn koumlnnen1

Here we are given a license to translate Hamannrsquos images into signs of various kinds It is no surprise that

in a footnote attached to this text he derogates the ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs by citing a pas-

sage of Petronius which complains that a new fashion of ldquopuffed-up and formless talkativenessrdquo has cor-

1 Nadler 199

31

rupted speech so that ldquothe standard of eloquence being corrupted has been halted and struck dumbrdquo

and ldquonot even poetry displays a healthy colorrdquo1 By ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs we should un-

derstand something like Leibnizrsquos 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 criti-

cism 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 cor-

respondences out of the text But the other kinds of signsmdashthe poetic or symbolicmdashdo not seem to fall

under the same criticismmdashthese suggest a kind of sign which indeed has meaning but whose interpreta-

tion 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 Hamannrsquos thought allows even for this kind of correspon-

dence 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 Hamannrsquos text but also is deeply compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos text to assert that he intends the literal and symbolic meanings to be taken as

of equal importancemdashfor us to devote our full attention to take up one of the governing metaphors of this

1 N 199 n10 ldquoNuper ventosa isthaec amp enormis loquacitas Athenas ex Asia conmigrauit [hellip] simulque correpta elo-quentiae regula stetit amp obmutuit [hellip] Ac ne carmen quidem sani coloris enituitrdquo

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 discuss-

ing how Hamann refuses to privilege abstract ldquopurely mentalrdquo thought over the particular words in

which that thought finds expression Berlin concludes that ldquofor 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)rdquo1 As an example of one such contradiction Berlin cites the line placed at the head

of this section ldquoto speak is to translaterdquo For Berlin it follows from Hamannrsquos insistence on the unity of

reason and language that no translation no correspondence between words ideas and things can be es-

tablished

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 attend-ing to ideas or to language and through them (because they correspond) to the facts was a method of judging and knowing reality [hellip But the] notion of a correspondence that there is an objective world on one side and on the other man and his instruments ndash lan-guage ideas and so forth ndash attempting to approximate to this objective reality is a false picture There is only a flow of sensations2

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 ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 reproduced3 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 Hamannrsquos treatise but unable to claim any continuity of thought therewith

1 Berlin 81

2 Ibid

3 Though one might question even this Ποταμῷ γὰρ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐμβῆναι δὶς τῷ αὐτῷ and there is no reason to think

any two ldquoflows of sensationrdquo could ever be substantially identical Necessarily every ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos view Berlin is perplexed when confronted with Hamannrsquos open assertion

that translation is possible between ldquohuman speechrdquo and the ldquospeech of angelsrdquo and can only conclude

that Hamann here contradicts himself And for Berlin it is quite to be expected that Hamann should con-

tradict himself he regards Hamannrsquos thought in general as highly creative and intriguing Schwaumlrmerei

of note for its pivotal place in intellectual history but completely insusceptible or unworthy of serious

philosophic attention Berlin appreciates Hamannrsquos criticism of the Enlightenment and his prescient

awareness of the lifeless bloodless conception of manrsquos spiritual life that the Enlighteners would ultimate-

ly produce While Berlin claims to understand Hamannrsquos motives in writing he utterly rejects the content

of his writings which he regards as ldquothe cry of a trapped man hellip who cannot be brought to see that to be

regimented or eliminated is either inevitable or desirablerdquo1 For Berlin Hamann is simply a ldquofanaticrdquo

whose writings consist of ldquopassionate rhetoric and not careful thoughtrdquo and whose opinions are ldquogrotes-

quely one-sided a violent exaggeration of the uniqueness of men and things [and] a passionate hatred of

menrsquos wish to understand the universerdquo2 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 pur-

ism of Hitler3 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 Berlinrsquos judgment that Hamann

1 Berlin 116

2 Berlin 121

3 This accusation is presented in Berlinrsquos book in a series of insinuations we are told for example that Hamannrsquos

ldquohatred and blind irrationalism have fed the stream that has led to social and political irrationalism particularly in German in our own [20

th] centuryrdquo (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 Berlinrsquos 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

34

simply contradicts himself in allowing for the possibility of translation in and out of symbolic ldquolanguag-

esrdquo Hamann has very little patience for ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs which promise patent

meaning and unambiguous interpretation This is perfectly in keeping with his general distaste for effi-

cient 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 ldquopoeticrdquo and ldquosymbolicrdquo signs not to fall under the same fierce criticism as the others

ldquoTo speak is to translaterdquo and ldquocreation is a speech to the creature through the creaturerdquo These

two maxims placed very near to each other in the text1 suggest something of a solution to the problem to

which Berlin directs our attention The conjunction of these lines should remind us that Hamann wheth-

er he directing his attention to literature philology esthetics or any other subject is always also a reli-

gious thinker The archetype of every text is for him the Bible and biblical exegesis is the model and ca-

non 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 Michaelisrsquos ldquodenial of a mystical typological sense

of Scripturerdquo2 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 Mi-

chaelis 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 ldquoTo merdquo says Hamann ldquoevery book is a Biblerdquo3 like the Bible then every

book must be read not merely for its literal sense Berlinrsquos reading of Hamann might be correct if Ha-

1 N 118-119

2 Betz 114

3 Briefwechsel I p 309 trans in Betz 47

35

mann were speaking about the everyday world of words and things understood as a brute fact But Ha-

mann 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 re-

mind us that the interpretation of tongues is also a divine gift1 he admits even that persons may not un-

derstand what they themselves to and say Even a figure such as Voltaire hardly a friend of religious out-

looks testifies for those who have ears to hear to the rightness of Hamannrsquos views

kann man wohl einen glaubwuumlrdigern Zeugen als den unfrac34erblilten Voltaire anfuumlhren wellter bey-nahe die Religion fuumlr den Eckfrac34ein der epifrac14en Dilttkunfrac34 erklaumlrt [hellip] Voltaire aber der Hohe-priefrac34er im Tempel des Gefrac14macks frac14luumlszligt so buumlndig als Kaiphas und denkt frulttbarer als He-rodes2

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 ldquoHo-

hepriefrac34er im Tempelrdquo but also a somewhat Machiavellian politician) justifies the crucifixion of Christ by

arguing that ldquoit is expedient that one man should die for the peoplerdquo3 believing himself to be discussing a

political necessity while as if prophetically describing the Christian doctrine of the atonement And He-

rodrsquos deceitful remark to the Magi ldquothat I might also come and worship himrdquo is taken since Herod was

king of the Jews though a gentile by race to represent the universal destiny of the Christian religion4 This

tradition of interpretation habitual in Biblical exegesis Hamann applies also to analysis of the wordmdashso

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 1210

2 Nadler 204-5

3 John 1150

4 It is telling that Hamann chooses such a contrived and complicated case of biblical parallelism as this one his ar-

gument 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

36

will readily concede that ldquowe see through a glass darklyrdquo1 and that we may not even be able to descry the

true outlines of our own persons in this mirrormdashbut by invoking the language of mirrors2 he locates him-

self within a tradition of thought according to which nature however flawed parts of it may be and how-

ever dulled our ability to discern itmdashis 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 se-

cular 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 ldquoblind heathensrdquo

Blinde Heyden haben die Unilttbarkeit erkannt die der Menfrac14 mit GOTT gemein hat Die verhuumlllte Figur des Leibes das Antlitz des Hauptes und das Aumluszligerfrac34e der Arme ind das ilttbare Sltema in dem wir einher gehn dolt eigentlilt niltts als ein Zeigefinger des verborge-nen Menfrac14en in unsmdash Exemplumque DEI quisque est in imagine parva3

Note that the ldquospiritualrdquo 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 ldquoindex fingersrdquo which direct the inner man to

our attention Hamann let us recall4 does not believe that the target of this ldquoZeigefingerrdquo can always be

1 1 Cor 1312

2 Though Hamann is in some ways a very modern thinker who anticipates 20

th century thought about the kinship of

reason and language he here looks back to the middle ages Cf Alan of Lille ldquoOmnis mundi creatura Quasi liber et pictura Nobis est et speculumrdquo With the sentiment and conceit of this verse Hamann could not agree more 3 N 198 The quotation from the Astronomicon of Manilius (IV895) is mainly noteworthy for its having been writ-

ten by a pagan author while echoing the language of Genesis regarding the ldquoimage of Godrdquo The Cambridge edition of Hamann misenglishes this line rendering it as ldquoEach one is an instance of God in miniaturerdquo This not only loses the connection to the book of Genesis conveyed by the word ldquoimagordquo but puts far too much weight on the word ldquoexemplumrdquo as well An exemplum is not an instance but a type model or analogue ldquoInstancerdquo implies an occur-rence of a rationally determinable kind a ldquotyperdquo or ldquoanaloguerdquo 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

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 circumstancesmdashthis 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 re-

fers to ldquocorrespondencesrdquo of thing and idea and of idea and word these ldquocorrespondencesrdquo are for Berlin

relations between two different things of different types He is quite correct to judge that Hamann consid-

ers 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 meaningmdashhe 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 justifica-

tion 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 ldquoConclusionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos own line that ldquocreation is a speech to the creature

through the creaturerdquo 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 cor-

respond to each other based on no apodictically determinable system knowable a priori but on the gra-

tuitous (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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 com-

pared translation to the art of understanding the image of a tapestry from looking only at the backs of the

threads he remarks ldquoDort [ie in the original contexts of the metaphors borrowed from other authors for

39

Hamannrsquos text] werden ie aber ad illustrationem (zur Verbraumlmung des Rockes) hier ad inuolucrum (zum

Hemde auf bloszligem Leibe) gebrauchtrdquo1 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 deco-

rated 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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos which ac-

cording to the line of interpretation I have explored reveals as much about Hamannrsquos 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 tear-

ing 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 Hamannrsquos motion between images his construction of typological

schemes that resist easy classification and one-for-one interpretation is not antirational raving or obscu-

rantism but rather an alternativemdashand a quite compelling onemdashto 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

1 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 tho-

roughly religious vision of the world If one is willing to do this Hamann is a kind of prophetmdashand the

horned head of Pan on his title-page is also the horned head of Moses1 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 pro-

ducing neat tables of Hamannrsquos 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 Aes-

thetica 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 somethingmdashunless there really is some secret ineffable law of correspondences that un-

ites 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 commen-

tators and writers of senior essays have no right to tread

1 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 agrave la Mosaiumlque (Roth 103 343)

41

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin Isaiah The Magus of the North JG Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism ed Henry

Hardy London John Murray 1993 Betz John After Enlightenment the Post-Secular Vision of JG Hamann Chichester John Wiley amp Sons

2009 Hamann Johann Georg Hamannrsquos Schriften ed Friedrich Roth Berlin G Reimer 1821 (Cited as

ldquoRothrdquo All citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Saumlmtliche Werke ed Josef Nadler Wien Verlag Herder 1950 (Cited as ldquoNad-

lerrdquo Unless otherwise noted all citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Writings on Philosophy and Language trans and ed Kenneth Haynes Cam-

bridge Cambridge UP 2007 (Cited as ldquoHaynesrdquo) Jacobs Carol ldquoHamann Is a Nomadic Writer lsquoAesthetica in nucersquordquo in Skirting the Ethical Stanford Stan-

ford UP 2008 pp 111-130 OrsquoFlaherty James C The Quarrel of Reason with Itself Essays on Hamann Michaelis Lessing Nietzsche Co-

lumbia SC Camden 1988

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 scripturesmdashwritten by God but one must bring onersquos

own vowels to read it

But is this not going too far While we may not just have misrepresented Hamannrsquos 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 doesnrsquot make sense as

written without those vowels itrsquos still easily interpretable If Hamann had not named it as a line from the

Iliad any educated person on seeing the word microῆνιν 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 miss-

ing places in the line the shape of the dactyls and the grammatical possibilities offered by the Greek lan-

guage 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 En-

lightened 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 objec-

tion of this scientist would be absurd because it would miss the point of Hamannrsquos critiquemdashhe goes

around the backs of the Enlighteners contending that they are moved by passion even in what they be-

lieve to be their exercises of pure reason that the arguments they invoke to defend their conception of rea-

son 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 ldquoTurbatverserdquo1 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 Hamannrsquos altered line from the Iliad) But it refers most specif-

ically 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 Θεά ἄειδε μῆνιν Ἀχιλῆος Πηληϊάδεω In a certain sense there is nothing of Homerrsquos 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 ob-

viously 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 ldquogoddessrdquo and not ldquowrathrdquo In the Turbatverse of nature then the superficial meaning of the speak-

ing 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 niltts als Turbatvere und disiecti membra poetae zu unerm Gebrault uumlbrig Diee zu ammeln ifrac34 des Gelehrten ie auszulegen des Philoophen ie naltzuahmenmdashoder nolt kuumlhnermdash mdashie in Gefrac14ick zu bringen des Poeten befrac14eiden Theil2

1 Nadler 198

2 Nadler 199

20

The hierarchy that is here established with the scholar philosopher and poet presented with responsibili-

ties of increasing creativity should not surprise us as it is exactly in line with what Hamann says else-

where about the high dignity of the poet to whom is compared even God himself1 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 ade-

quate 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 consti-

tuent 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

1 ldquoDer Poet am Anfange der Tagerdquo Nadler 206

21

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

Hamannrsquos coincidentia oppositorum is not any kind of dialectical synthesis Creation is speech ndash so is Hamannrsquos 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 Aesthe-

tica in nuce relate to the argument he makes about the proper use of reason There is significant ldquooverlaprdquo

here the various images and descriptions Hamann uses are parallel making the same argument in differ-

ent ways From what we have already said we can derive a kind of table showing how the various images

used map onto Hamannrsquos argument about the reason and the passions

Passions Reason

Vowels Consonants Words Mere arrangements of letters Poetic Meter Turbatverse God Nature Christianity Classical civilization Alpha and Omega 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 refus-

es 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 to-

gether 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 ldquoit is not clear how far he understood it and he certainly gives it a

1 Though not in the Aesthetica See eg Betz 28 note 17

22

sense of his ownrdquo1 In fact it is not easy to see where the ldquocoincidencerdquo comes in at all Regarding every

text every object as part of his ldquoBiblerdquo 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 themselvesmdashto

the letters of a text (in literary criticism) and the phenomena of nature unreduced to their universal ra-

tional 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 pro-

duced of these elements He beholds in a single vision der rollende Donner der Beredamkeit and der

einylbicltte Blitz2 This strangemdashor strange to us and Hamann would not hesitate to say that our sensibili-

ties need correctionmdashthis strange conjunction of opposites confronts us even on the title page of the Aes-

thetica in nuce Eine Rhapodie in kabbalifrac34ifrac14er Proe A rhapsodymdasha stitching-together of pieces into an ar-

tistic unitymdashthat 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 ldquoApostillerdquo ndash whether Hamann himself some per-

sonified commentator or anyone else ndash remarks that the author of the Aesthetica in nuce ldquohat Satz und

Satz zuammengereltnet wie man die Pfeile auf einem Sltlalttfelde zaumlhltrdquo3 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 Romansrsquo shots though fewer were fired with greater force It is not clear which side better corres-

ponds to Hamannrsquos 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 Therersquos a case to be made for either in-

terpretation But whichever we take the view wersquore given of the Aesthetica in nuce is still of individual

Saumltze piled up one after another as discrete countable units This treatise says the speaker of the Apos-

tille is just a pile of sentences But in an instant our perspective is shifted ldquoLaszligt uns jetzt die Hauptumme

1 Berlin 115

2 Nadler 208

3 Nadler 217 The reference given by Hamann (ldquoProcop De bello persico I 18rdquo) is explained at Haynes 94 note

kkk

23

[hellip] houmlrenldquo1 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 vari-

ous meditations on human life that compose the text of the biblical book2 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

summarymdasha 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 Hamannrsquos 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 readerrsquos confusion It is not Hamannrsquos 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 writings3 it is perhaps not sur-

prising then if the Aesthetica in nuce presents us with hermeneutic difficulties that neither the text itself

nor comparisons with Hamannrsquos other works nor consideration of Hamannrsquos engagement with the issues

of his time are adequate to dispel But the paradox we are considering heremdashthe simultaneous focus on

both columns of the table with which this chapter beganmdashis so fundamental to the thought of the Aesthe-

tica in nuce that unless we can come to terms with it in some way Hamannrsquos 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

1 Ibid

2 Cf Lutherbibel Predig 1213 ldquoLaszligt uns die Hauptumme aller Lehre houmlrenldquo 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 ldquoApostillerdquo likewise to be a undermining of all that goes before it 3 ldquoI no longer understand myself quite differently from then some [writings I understand] better some worse [hellip]

[hellip] 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 stuffrdquo Briefwechsel V p 358 trans in Betz 229

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 ldquodie ilt nolt im bloszligen Bult-frac34a-bi-ren uumlbenmdashmdashund wahrlilt wahrlilt Kinder muumlfrac12en

wir werden wenn wir den Geifrac34 der Wahrheit empfahen ollenldquo1 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 ldquoSpirit of

Truth whom the world cannot receiverdquo (Jn 1417) 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 spiri-

tual pole than to the elemental literal material one But how says Hamannrsquos Nuszlig is this Spirit of Truth

to be received By becoming like children who are just learning to spellmdashand 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 ldquoBultfrac34abirenrdquo syllable by syllable confirms that Hamann is referring to this style of interpreta-

tion Recalling now the table at the start of this chapter in which letters and the ldquospirit of truthrdquo

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 ldquoVerlieren die Elemente des A B C ihre natuumlrlilte

Bedeutung wenn ie in der unendlichen Zuammenetzung willkuumlrlilter Zeilten uns an Ideen erinnern die wo niltt

im Himmel dolt im Gehirn indrdquo2 To this question of course we are meant to answer ldquonordquo But there is

much here that is not unproblematic or at least not simple What for instance is the ldquonatuumlrlilte Bedeu-

tungrdquo of a letter And how if the combination of these signs be arbitrary does it recall for us ideas And

1 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 Hamannrsquos voice at least on Hamannrsquos 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 wersquore 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 Greeksmdashbut 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 coin-

cidence is merely an opportunity to bring the opposites as opposites together But this assumption natu-

ral 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 experiencemdashthis 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 Hamannrsquos writing admits of both a macros-

copic 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 conjunc-

tion 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 them1 considering these various levels of read-

ing 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 simultaneous-

ly 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 interpreta-

tion could be set forth that might allow us to translate Hamannrsquos simultaneously cabalistic and rhapsodic

utterances into academic language or to devise summaries of his arguments in a neatly symbolic lan-

guage 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 oumlffentlilter Gebrault 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 Hamannrsquos thought is useful also here Sltoumlpfung ifrac34 eine Rede an die Kreatur durlt die Kreatur The

Christian overtones of such a formulation are obvious Hamann once offered an encapsulation of his

thought in the word λόγος2 a famously polysemous term every sense of which Hamann intends The in-

timate connection between reason and language is of course the most obvious philosophical implication of

1 For Hamannrsquos defense of this possibility see Chapter 4

2 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 Hamannrsquos philosophy But for Hamann λόγος 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 Hamannrsquos piety placed a great emphasis on the self-emptying of Christ Howev-

er much he might stress Christrsquos humanity and suffering though he remained well within the main-

stream 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 diffi-

culties here But there is a clear parallel between the way a Christian thinks of Christ and how Hamann

thinks ofmdashwell more or less everything Christ is a man who lived for a certain stretch of time in a cer-

tain place and is also the eternal God A word is a string of letters small shapes arbitrarily strung togeth-

er and is also a sign of a concept an immaterial thing existing in the mind Hamann is no dualistmdashit 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

Zufoumlrderfrac34 muumlfrac34e man D George Benon fragen ob die Einheit mit der Mannigfaltigkeit niltt befrac34ehen koumlnne [hellip] Der bultfrac34aumlblilte oder grammatifrac14e der fleifrac14liche oder dialectifrac14e der ka-pernaitifrac14e oder historifrac14e Sinn ind im houmlltfrac34en Grade myfrac34ilt und haumlngen von ollten augen-blicklilten pirituoumlen willkuumlhrlilten Nebenbefrac34immungen und Umfrac34aumlnden ab daszlig man ohne hinauf gen Himmel zu fahren die Schluumlfrac12el ihrer Erkenntnis niltt herabholen kann1

1 Nadler 203 note 23 Hamannrsquos footnote is attached to some lines of Latin verse which conclude the Nutrsquos letter to the Learned Rabbi They come from a poem traditionally and falsely attributed to the Emperor Augustus explain-ing why Vergilrsquos orders to destroy the drafts of the Aeneid were ignored after the poetrsquos death The excerpts are

Ah scelus indignum soluetur litera diues Frangatur potius legum veneranda potestas Liber amp alma Ceres succurrite mdash mdash [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 mdashwhich for Hamann who does not oppose the spirit and the letter in a conventional way is a spiritual richnessmdashis 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

28

It is not that interpretation ought to be literal physical or ldquoCapernaiticrdquo 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 understandingmdashthat is unless one has

attained a certain degree of spiritual insight ndashone will be unable to understand things even in their literal

senses for the spiritual and literal senses are one Hamannrsquos 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 expe-

rience 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 inten-

tion of this line of thought has been least of all to stimulate pious feelings Hamannrsquos goal is not to spiri-

tualize 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 (ldquoDie Sinne aber ind Ceres und Bacltus die Leidenfrac14aftenrdquo [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 simplis-tically 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 Hamannrsquos ability to com-press his meaning into very few and very cryptic words NB The ldquoCapernaiticrdquo sense refers to the sense in which Christ is literally present in the Christian sacrament This unusual word is used derogatively in Lutheran texts (eg the Epitome of the Konkordienformel) to disparage Catholic sacramental teaching Its origins are in Jn 65559 ldquoFor my flesh is meat indeed and my blood is drink in-deed [hellip] These things he said in the synagogue as he taught in Capernaumrdquo 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 Luthe-ran understanding according to which Christ is present in the sacrament in a merely spiritual way is less than per-fectly compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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

Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 im-

plied meanings into the literal tropological allegorical and anagogical senses that Christians have tradi-

tionally 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 ormdashto employ a metaphor

more perhaps more congenial to Hamannmdashdiscerning 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 indul-

gence 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 slo-

gan from the text itselfmdashldquoto speak is to translaterdquomdashand 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 uumlberetzenmdashaus einer Engelpralte in eine Menfrac14enpralte das heifrac34 Gedanken in WortemdashSalten in NamenmdashBilder in Zeilten die poetifrac14 oder kyriologifrac14 hifrac34orifrac14 oder ymbolifrac14 oder hieroglyphifrac14mdashmdashund philoophifrac14 oder ltarakterifrac34ifrac14 eyn koumlnnen1

Here we are given a license to translate Hamannrsquos images into signs of various kinds It is no surprise that

in a footnote attached to this text he derogates the ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs by citing a pas-

sage of Petronius which complains that a new fashion of ldquopuffed-up and formless talkativenessrdquo has cor-

1 Nadler 199

31

rupted speech so that ldquothe standard of eloquence being corrupted has been halted and struck dumbrdquo

and ldquonot even poetry displays a healthy colorrdquo1 By ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs we should un-

derstand something like Leibnizrsquos 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 criti-

cism 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 cor-

respondences out of the text But the other kinds of signsmdashthe poetic or symbolicmdashdo not seem to fall

under the same criticismmdashthese suggest a kind of sign which indeed has meaning but whose interpreta-

tion 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 Hamannrsquos thought allows even for this kind of correspon-

dence 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 Hamannrsquos text but also is deeply compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos text to assert that he intends the literal and symbolic meanings to be taken as

of equal importancemdashfor us to devote our full attention to take up one of the governing metaphors of this

1 N 199 n10 ldquoNuper ventosa isthaec amp enormis loquacitas Athenas ex Asia conmigrauit [hellip] simulque correpta elo-quentiae regula stetit amp obmutuit [hellip] Ac ne carmen quidem sani coloris enituitrdquo

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 discuss-

ing how Hamann refuses to privilege abstract ldquopurely mentalrdquo thought over the particular words in

which that thought finds expression Berlin concludes that ldquofor 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)rdquo1 As an example of one such contradiction Berlin cites the line placed at the head

of this section ldquoto speak is to translaterdquo For Berlin it follows from Hamannrsquos insistence on the unity of

reason and language that no translation no correspondence between words ideas and things can be es-

tablished

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 attend-ing to ideas or to language and through them (because they correspond) to the facts was a method of judging and knowing reality [hellip But the] notion of a correspondence that there is an objective world on one side and on the other man and his instruments ndash lan-guage ideas and so forth ndash attempting to approximate to this objective reality is a false picture There is only a flow of sensations2

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 ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 reproduced3 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 Hamannrsquos treatise but unable to claim any continuity of thought therewith

1 Berlin 81

2 Ibid

3 Though one might question even this Ποταμῷ γὰρ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐμβῆναι δὶς τῷ αὐτῷ and there is no reason to think

any two ldquoflows of sensationrdquo could ever be substantially identical Necessarily every ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos view Berlin is perplexed when confronted with Hamannrsquos open assertion

that translation is possible between ldquohuman speechrdquo and the ldquospeech of angelsrdquo and can only conclude

that Hamann here contradicts himself And for Berlin it is quite to be expected that Hamann should con-

tradict himself he regards Hamannrsquos thought in general as highly creative and intriguing Schwaumlrmerei

of note for its pivotal place in intellectual history but completely insusceptible or unworthy of serious

philosophic attention Berlin appreciates Hamannrsquos criticism of the Enlightenment and his prescient

awareness of the lifeless bloodless conception of manrsquos spiritual life that the Enlighteners would ultimate-

ly produce While Berlin claims to understand Hamannrsquos motives in writing he utterly rejects the content

of his writings which he regards as ldquothe cry of a trapped man hellip who cannot be brought to see that to be

regimented or eliminated is either inevitable or desirablerdquo1 For Berlin Hamann is simply a ldquofanaticrdquo

whose writings consist of ldquopassionate rhetoric and not careful thoughtrdquo and whose opinions are ldquogrotes-

quely one-sided a violent exaggeration of the uniqueness of men and things [and] a passionate hatred of

menrsquos wish to understand the universerdquo2 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 pur-

ism of Hitler3 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 Berlinrsquos judgment that Hamann

1 Berlin 116

2 Berlin 121

3 This accusation is presented in Berlinrsquos book in a series of insinuations we are told for example that Hamannrsquos

ldquohatred and blind irrationalism have fed the stream that has led to social and political irrationalism particularly in German in our own [20

th] centuryrdquo (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 Berlinrsquos 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

34

simply contradicts himself in allowing for the possibility of translation in and out of symbolic ldquolanguag-

esrdquo Hamann has very little patience for ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs which promise patent

meaning and unambiguous interpretation This is perfectly in keeping with his general distaste for effi-

cient 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 ldquopoeticrdquo and ldquosymbolicrdquo signs not to fall under the same fierce criticism as the others

ldquoTo speak is to translaterdquo and ldquocreation is a speech to the creature through the creaturerdquo These

two maxims placed very near to each other in the text1 suggest something of a solution to the problem to

which Berlin directs our attention The conjunction of these lines should remind us that Hamann wheth-

er he directing his attention to literature philology esthetics or any other subject is always also a reli-

gious thinker The archetype of every text is for him the Bible and biblical exegesis is the model and ca-

non 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 Michaelisrsquos ldquodenial of a mystical typological sense

of Scripturerdquo2 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 Mi-

chaelis 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 ldquoTo merdquo says Hamann ldquoevery book is a Biblerdquo3 like the Bible then every

book must be read not merely for its literal sense Berlinrsquos reading of Hamann might be correct if Ha-

1 N 118-119

2 Betz 114

3 Briefwechsel I p 309 trans in Betz 47

35

mann were speaking about the everyday world of words and things understood as a brute fact But Ha-

mann 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 re-

mind us that the interpretation of tongues is also a divine gift1 he admits even that persons may not un-

derstand what they themselves to and say Even a figure such as Voltaire hardly a friend of religious out-

looks testifies for those who have ears to hear to the rightness of Hamannrsquos views

kann man wohl einen glaubwuumlrdigern Zeugen als den unfrac34erblilten Voltaire anfuumlhren wellter bey-nahe die Religion fuumlr den Eckfrac34ein der epifrac14en Dilttkunfrac34 erklaumlrt [hellip] Voltaire aber der Hohe-priefrac34er im Tempel des Gefrac14macks frac14luumlszligt so buumlndig als Kaiphas und denkt frulttbarer als He-rodes2

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 ldquoHo-

hepriefrac34er im Tempelrdquo but also a somewhat Machiavellian politician) justifies the crucifixion of Christ by

arguing that ldquoit is expedient that one man should die for the peoplerdquo3 believing himself to be discussing a

political necessity while as if prophetically describing the Christian doctrine of the atonement And He-

rodrsquos deceitful remark to the Magi ldquothat I might also come and worship himrdquo is taken since Herod was

king of the Jews though a gentile by race to represent the universal destiny of the Christian religion4 This

tradition of interpretation habitual in Biblical exegesis Hamann applies also to analysis of the wordmdashso

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 1210

2 Nadler 204-5

3 John 1150

4 It is telling that Hamann chooses such a contrived and complicated case of biblical parallelism as this one his ar-

gument 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

36

will readily concede that ldquowe see through a glass darklyrdquo1 and that we may not even be able to descry the

true outlines of our own persons in this mirrormdashbut by invoking the language of mirrors2 he locates him-

self within a tradition of thought according to which nature however flawed parts of it may be and how-

ever dulled our ability to discern itmdashis 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 se-

cular 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 ldquoblind heathensrdquo

Blinde Heyden haben die Unilttbarkeit erkannt die der Menfrac14 mit GOTT gemein hat Die verhuumlllte Figur des Leibes das Antlitz des Hauptes und das Aumluszligerfrac34e der Arme ind das ilttbare Sltema in dem wir einher gehn dolt eigentlilt niltts als ein Zeigefinger des verborge-nen Menfrac14en in unsmdash Exemplumque DEI quisque est in imagine parva3

Note that the ldquospiritualrdquo 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 ldquoindex fingersrdquo which direct the inner man to

our attention Hamann let us recall4 does not believe that the target of this ldquoZeigefingerrdquo can always be

1 1 Cor 1312

2 Though Hamann is in some ways a very modern thinker who anticipates 20

th century thought about the kinship of

reason and language he here looks back to the middle ages Cf Alan of Lille ldquoOmnis mundi creatura Quasi liber et pictura Nobis est et speculumrdquo With the sentiment and conceit of this verse Hamann could not agree more 3 N 198 The quotation from the Astronomicon of Manilius (IV895) is mainly noteworthy for its having been writ-

ten by a pagan author while echoing the language of Genesis regarding the ldquoimage of Godrdquo The Cambridge edition of Hamann misenglishes this line rendering it as ldquoEach one is an instance of God in miniaturerdquo This not only loses the connection to the book of Genesis conveyed by the word ldquoimagordquo but puts far too much weight on the word ldquoexemplumrdquo as well An exemplum is not an instance but a type model or analogue ldquoInstancerdquo implies an occur-rence of a rationally determinable kind a ldquotyperdquo or ldquoanaloguerdquo 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

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 circumstancesmdashthis 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 re-

fers to ldquocorrespondencesrdquo of thing and idea and of idea and word these ldquocorrespondencesrdquo are for Berlin

relations between two different things of different types He is quite correct to judge that Hamann consid-

ers 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 meaningmdashhe 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 justifica-

tion 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 ldquoConclusionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos own line that ldquocreation is a speech to the creature

through the creaturerdquo 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 cor-

respond to each other based on no apodictically determinable system knowable a priori but on the gra-

tuitous (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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 com-

pared translation to the art of understanding the image of a tapestry from looking only at the backs of the

threads he remarks ldquoDort [ie in the original contexts of the metaphors borrowed from other authors for

39

Hamannrsquos text] werden ie aber ad illustrationem (zur Verbraumlmung des Rockes) hier ad inuolucrum (zum

Hemde auf bloszligem Leibe) gebrauchtrdquo1 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 deco-

rated 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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos which ac-

cording to the line of interpretation I have explored reveals as much about Hamannrsquos 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 tear-

ing 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 Hamannrsquos motion between images his construction of typological

schemes that resist easy classification and one-for-one interpretation is not antirational raving or obscu-

rantism but rather an alternativemdashand a quite compelling onemdashto 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

1 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 tho-

roughly religious vision of the world If one is willing to do this Hamann is a kind of prophetmdashand the

horned head of Pan on his title-page is also the horned head of Moses1 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 pro-

ducing neat tables of Hamannrsquos 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 Aes-

thetica 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 somethingmdashunless there really is some secret ineffable law of correspondences that un-

ites 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 commen-

tators and writers of senior essays have no right to tread

1 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 agrave la Mosaiumlque (Roth 103 343)

41

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin Isaiah The Magus of the North JG Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism ed Henry

Hardy London John Murray 1993 Betz John After Enlightenment the Post-Secular Vision of JG Hamann Chichester John Wiley amp Sons

2009 Hamann Johann Georg Hamannrsquos Schriften ed Friedrich Roth Berlin G Reimer 1821 (Cited as

ldquoRothrdquo All citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Saumlmtliche Werke ed Josef Nadler Wien Verlag Herder 1950 (Cited as ldquoNad-

lerrdquo Unless otherwise noted all citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Writings on Philosophy and Language trans and ed Kenneth Haynes Cam-

bridge Cambridge UP 2007 (Cited as ldquoHaynesrdquo) Jacobs Carol ldquoHamann Is a Nomadic Writer lsquoAesthetica in nucersquordquo in Skirting the Ethical Stanford Stan-

ford UP 2008 pp 111-130 OrsquoFlaherty James C The Quarrel of Reason with Itself Essays on Hamann Michaelis Lessing Nietzsche Co-

lumbia SC Camden 1988

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 ldquoTurbatverserdquo1 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 Hamannrsquos altered line from the Iliad) But it refers most specif-

ically 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 Θεά ἄειδε μῆνιν Ἀχιλῆος Πηληϊάδεω In a certain sense there is nothing of Homerrsquos 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 ob-

viously 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 ldquogoddessrdquo and not ldquowrathrdquo In the Turbatverse of nature then the superficial meaning of the speak-

ing 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 niltts als Turbatvere und disiecti membra poetae zu unerm Gebrault uumlbrig Diee zu ammeln ifrac34 des Gelehrten ie auszulegen des Philoophen ie naltzuahmenmdashoder nolt kuumlhnermdash mdashie in Gefrac14ick zu bringen des Poeten befrac14eiden Theil2

1 Nadler 198

2 Nadler 199

20

The hierarchy that is here established with the scholar philosopher and poet presented with responsibili-

ties of increasing creativity should not surprise us as it is exactly in line with what Hamann says else-

where about the high dignity of the poet to whom is compared even God himself1 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 ade-

quate 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 consti-

tuent 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

1 ldquoDer Poet am Anfange der Tagerdquo Nadler 206

21

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

Hamannrsquos coincidentia oppositorum is not any kind of dialectical synthesis Creation is speech ndash so is Hamannrsquos 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 Aesthe-

tica in nuce relate to the argument he makes about the proper use of reason There is significant ldquooverlaprdquo

here the various images and descriptions Hamann uses are parallel making the same argument in differ-

ent ways From what we have already said we can derive a kind of table showing how the various images

used map onto Hamannrsquos argument about the reason and the passions

Passions Reason

Vowels Consonants Words Mere arrangements of letters Poetic Meter Turbatverse God Nature Christianity Classical civilization Alpha and Omega 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 refus-

es 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 to-

gether 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 ldquoit is not clear how far he understood it and he certainly gives it a

1 Though not in the Aesthetica See eg Betz 28 note 17

22

sense of his ownrdquo1 In fact it is not easy to see where the ldquocoincidencerdquo comes in at all Regarding every

text every object as part of his ldquoBiblerdquo 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 themselvesmdashto

the letters of a text (in literary criticism) and the phenomena of nature unreduced to their universal ra-

tional 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 pro-

duced of these elements He beholds in a single vision der rollende Donner der Beredamkeit and der

einylbicltte Blitz2 This strangemdashor strange to us and Hamann would not hesitate to say that our sensibili-

ties need correctionmdashthis strange conjunction of opposites confronts us even on the title page of the Aes-

thetica in nuce Eine Rhapodie in kabbalifrac34ifrac14er Proe A rhapsodymdasha stitching-together of pieces into an ar-

tistic unitymdashthat 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 ldquoApostillerdquo ndash whether Hamann himself some per-

sonified commentator or anyone else ndash remarks that the author of the Aesthetica in nuce ldquohat Satz und

Satz zuammengereltnet wie man die Pfeile auf einem Sltlalttfelde zaumlhltrdquo3 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 Romansrsquo shots though fewer were fired with greater force It is not clear which side better corres-

ponds to Hamannrsquos 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 Therersquos a case to be made for either in-

terpretation But whichever we take the view wersquore given of the Aesthetica in nuce is still of individual

Saumltze piled up one after another as discrete countable units This treatise says the speaker of the Apos-

tille is just a pile of sentences But in an instant our perspective is shifted ldquoLaszligt uns jetzt die Hauptumme

1 Berlin 115

2 Nadler 208

3 Nadler 217 The reference given by Hamann (ldquoProcop De bello persico I 18rdquo) is explained at Haynes 94 note

kkk

23

[hellip] houmlrenldquo1 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 vari-

ous meditations on human life that compose the text of the biblical book2 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

summarymdasha 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 Hamannrsquos 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 readerrsquos confusion It is not Hamannrsquos 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 writings3 it is perhaps not sur-

prising then if the Aesthetica in nuce presents us with hermeneutic difficulties that neither the text itself

nor comparisons with Hamannrsquos other works nor consideration of Hamannrsquos engagement with the issues

of his time are adequate to dispel But the paradox we are considering heremdashthe simultaneous focus on

both columns of the table with which this chapter beganmdashis so fundamental to the thought of the Aesthe-

tica in nuce that unless we can come to terms with it in some way Hamannrsquos 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

1 Ibid

2 Cf Lutherbibel Predig 1213 ldquoLaszligt uns die Hauptumme aller Lehre houmlrenldquo 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 ldquoApostillerdquo likewise to be a undermining of all that goes before it 3 ldquoI no longer understand myself quite differently from then some [writings I understand] better some worse [hellip]

[hellip] 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 stuffrdquo Briefwechsel V p 358 trans in Betz 229

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 ldquodie ilt nolt im bloszligen Bult-frac34a-bi-ren uumlbenmdashmdashund wahrlilt wahrlilt Kinder muumlfrac12en

wir werden wenn wir den Geifrac34 der Wahrheit empfahen ollenldquo1 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 ldquoSpirit of

Truth whom the world cannot receiverdquo (Jn 1417) 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 spiri-

tual pole than to the elemental literal material one But how says Hamannrsquos Nuszlig is this Spirit of Truth

to be received By becoming like children who are just learning to spellmdashand 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 ldquoBultfrac34abirenrdquo syllable by syllable confirms that Hamann is referring to this style of interpreta-

tion Recalling now the table at the start of this chapter in which letters and the ldquospirit of truthrdquo

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 ldquoVerlieren die Elemente des A B C ihre natuumlrlilte

Bedeutung wenn ie in der unendlichen Zuammenetzung willkuumlrlilter Zeilten uns an Ideen erinnern die wo niltt

im Himmel dolt im Gehirn indrdquo2 To this question of course we are meant to answer ldquonordquo But there is

much here that is not unproblematic or at least not simple What for instance is the ldquonatuumlrlilte Bedeu-

tungrdquo of a letter And how if the combination of these signs be arbitrary does it recall for us ideas And

1 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 Hamannrsquos voice at least on Hamannrsquos 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 wersquore 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 Greeksmdashbut 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 coin-

cidence is merely an opportunity to bring the opposites as opposites together But this assumption natu-

ral 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 experiencemdashthis 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 Hamannrsquos writing admits of both a macros-

copic 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 conjunc-

tion 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 them1 considering these various levels of read-

ing 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 simultaneous-

ly 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 interpreta-

tion could be set forth that might allow us to translate Hamannrsquos simultaneously cabalistic and rhapsodic

utterances into academic language or to devise summaries of his arguments in a neatly symbolic lan-

guage 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 oumlffentlilter Gebrault 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 Hamannrsquos thought is useful also here Sltoumlpfung ifrac34 eine Rede an die Kreatur durlt die Kreatur The

Christian overtones of such a formulation are obvious Hamann once offered an encapsulation of his

thought in the word λόγος2 a famously polysemous term every sense of which Hamann intends The in-

timate connection between reason and language is of course the most obvious philosophical implication of

1 For Hamannrsquos defense of this possibility see Chapter 4

2 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 Hamannrsquos philosophy But for Hamann λόγος 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 Hamannrsquos piety placed a great emphasis on the self-emptying of Christ Howev-

er much he might stress Christrsquos humanity and suffering though he remained well within the main-

stream 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 diffi-

culties here But there is a clear parallel between the way a Christian thinks of Christ and how Hamann

thinks ofmdashwell more or less everything Christ is a man who lived for a certain stretch of time in a cer-

tain place and is also the eternal God A word is a string of letters small shapes arbitrarily strung togeth-

er and is also a sign of a concept an immaterial thing existing in the mind Hamann is no dualistmdashit 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

Zufoumlrderfrac34 muumlfrac34e man D George Benon fragen ob die Einheit mit der Mannigfaltigkeit niltt befrac34ehen koumlnne [hellip] Der bultfrac34aumlblilte oder grammatifrac14e der fleifrac14liche oder dialectifrac14e der ka-pernaitifrac14e oder historifrac14e Sinn ind im houmlltfrac34en Grade myfrac34ilt und haumlngen von ollten augen-blicklilten pirituoumlen willkuumlhrlilten Nebenbefrac34immungen und Umfrac34aumlnden ab daszlig man ohne hinauf gen Himmel zu fahren die Schluumlfrac12el ihrer Erkenntnis niltt herabholen kann1

1 Nadler 203 note 23 Hamannrsquos footnote is attached to some lines of Latin verse which conclude the Nutrsquos letter to the Learned Rabbi They come from a poem traditionally and falsely attributed to the Emperor Augustus explain-ing why Vergilrsquos orders to destroy the drafts of the Aeneid were ignored after the poetrsquos death The excerpts are

Ah scelus indignum soluetur litera diues Frangatur potius legum veneranda potestas Liber amp alma Ceres succurrite mdash mdash [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 mdashwhich for Hamann who does not oppose the spirit and the letter in a conventional way is a spiritual richnessmdashis 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

28

It is not that interpretation ought to be literal physical or ldquoCapernaiticrdquo 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 understandingmdashthat is unless one has

attained a certain degree of spiritual insight ndashone will be unable to understand things even in their literal

senses for the spiritual and literal senses are one Hamannrsquos 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 expe-

rience 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 inten-

tion of this line of thought has been least of all to stimulate pious feelings Hamannrsquos goal is not to spiri-

tualize 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 (ldquoDie Sinne aber ind Ceres und Bacltus die Leidenfrac14aftenrdquo [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 simplis-tically 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 Hamannrsquos ability to com-press his meaning into very few and very cryptic words NB The ldquoCapernaiticrdquo sense refers to the sense in which Christ is literally present in the Christian sacrament This unusual word is used derogatively in Lutheran texts (eg the Epitome of the Konkordienformel) to disparage Catholic sacramental teaching Its origins are in Jn 65559 ldquoFor my flesh is meat indeed and my blood is drink in-deed [hellip] These things he said in the synagogue as he taught in Capernaumrdquo 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 Luthe-ran understanding according to which Christ is present in the sacrament in a merely spiritual way is less than per-fectly compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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

Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 im-

plied meanings into the literal tropological allegorical and anagogical senses that Christians have tradi-

tionally 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 ormdashto employ a metaphor

more perhaps more congenial to Hamannmdashdiscerning 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 indul-

gence 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 slo-

gan from the text itselfmdashldquoto speak is to translaterdquomdashand 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 uumlberetzenmdashaus einer Engelpralte in eine Menfrac14enpralte das heifrac34 Gedanken in WortemdashSalten in NamenmdashBilder in Zeilten die poetifrac14 oder kyriologifrac14 hifrac34orifrac14 oder ymbolifrac14 oder hieroglyphifrac14mdashmdashund philoophifrac14 oder ltarakterifrac34ifrac14 eyn koumlnnen1

Here we are given a license to translate Hamannrsquos images into signs of various kinds It is no surprise that

in a footnote attached to this text he derogates the ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs by citing a pas-

sage of Petronius which complains that a new fashion of ldquopuffed-up and formless talkativenessrdquo has cor-

1 Nadler 199

31

rupted speech so that ldquothe standard of eloquence being corrupted has been halted and struck dumbrdquo

and ldquonot even poetry displays a healthy colorrdquo1 By ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs we should un-

derstand something like Leibnizrsquos 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 criti-

cism 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 cor-

respondences out of the text But the other kinds of signsmdashthe poetic or symbolicmdashdo not seem to fall

under the same criticismmdashthese suggest a kind of sign which indeed has meaning but whose interpreta-

tion 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 Hamannrsquos thought allows even for this kind of correspon-

dence 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 Hamannrsquos text but also is deeply compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos text to assert that he intends the literal and symbolic meanings to be taken as

of equal importancemdashfor us to devote our full attention to take up one of the governing metaphors of this

1 N 199 n10 ldquoNuper ventosa isthaec amp enormis loquacitas Athenas ex Asia conmigrauit [hellip] simulque correpta elo-quentiae regula stetit amp obmutuit [hellip] Ac ne carmen quidem sani coloris enituitrdquo

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 discuss-

ing how Hamann refuses to privilege abstract ldquopurely mentalrdquo thought over the particular words in

which that thought finds expression Berlin concludes that ldquofor 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)rdquo1 As an example of one such contradiction Berlin cites the line placed at the head

of this section ldquoto speak is to translaterdquo For Berlin it follows from Hamannrsquos insistence on the unity of

reason and language that no translation no correspondence between words ideas and things can be es-

tablished

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 attend-ing to ideas or to language and through them (because they correspond) to the facts was a method of judging and knowing reality [hellip But the] notion of a correspondence that there is an objective world on one side and on the other man and his instruments ndash lan-guage ideas and so forth ndash attempting to approximate to this objective reality is a false picture There is only a flow of sensations2

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 ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 reproduced3 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 Hamannrsquos treatise but unable to claim any continuity of thought therewith

1 Berlin 81

2 Ibid

3 Though one might question even this Ποταμῷ γὰρ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐμβῆναι δὶς τῷ αὐτῷ and there is no reason to think

any two ldquoflows of sensationrdquo could ever be substantially identical Necessarily every ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos view Berlin is perplexed when confronted with Hamannrsquos open assertion

that translation is possible between ldquohuman speechrdquo and the ldquospeech of angelsrdquo and can only conclude

that Hamann here contradicts himself And for Berlin it is quite to be expected that Hamann should con-

tradict himself he regards Hamannrsquos thought in general as highly creative and intriguing Schwaumlrmerei

of note for its pivotal place in intellectual history but completely insusceptible or unworthy of serious

philosophic attention Berlin appreciates Hamannrsquos criticism of the Enlightenment and his prescient

awareness of the lifeless bloodless conception of manrsquos spiritual life that the Enlighteners would ultimate-

ly produce While Berlin claims to understand Hamannrsquos motives in writing he utterly rejects the content

of his writings which he regards as ldquothe cry of a trapped man hellip who cannot be brought to see that to be

regimented or eliminated is either inevitable or desirablerdquo1 For Berlin Hamann is simply a ldquofanaticrdquo

whose writings consist of ldquopassionate rhetoric and not careful thoughtrdquo and whose opinions are ldquogrotes-

quely one-sided a violent exaggeration of the uniqueness of men and things [and] a passionate hatred of

menrsquos wish to understand the universerdquo2 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 pur-

ism of Hitler3 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 Berlinrsquos judgment that Hamann

1 Berlin 116

2 Berlin 121

3 This accusation is presented in Berlinrsquos book in a series of insinuations we are told for example that Hamannrsquos

ldquohatred and blind irrationalism have fed the stream that has led to social and political irrationalism particularly in German in our own [20

th] centuryrdquo (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 Berlinrsquos 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

34

simply contradicts himself in allowing for the possibility of translation in and out of symbolic ldquolanguag-

esrdquo Hamann has very little patience for ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs which promise patent

meaning and unambiguous interpretation This is perfectly in keeping with his general distaste for effi-

cient 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 ldquopoeticrdquo and ldquosymbolicrdquo signs not to fall under the same fierce criticism as the others

ldquoTo speak is to translaterdquo and ldquocreation is a speech to the creature through the creaturerdquo These

two maxims placed very near to each other in the text1 suggest something of a solution to the problem to

which Berlin directs our attention The conjunction of these lines should remind us that Hamann wheth-

er he directing his attention to literature philology esthetics or any other subject is always also a reli-

gious thinker The archetype of every text is for him the Bible and biblical exegesis is the model and ca-

non 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 Michaelisrsquos ldquodenial of a mystical typological sense

of Scripturerdquo2 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 Mi-

chaelis 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 ldquoTo merdquo says Hamann ldquoevery book is a Biblerdquo3 like the Bible then every

book must be read not merely for its literal sense Berlinrsquos reading of Hamann might be correct if Ha-

1 N 118-119

2 Betz 114

3 Briefwechsel I p 309 trans in Betz 47

35

mann were speaking about the everyday world of words and things understood as a brute fact But Ha-

mann 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 re-

mind us that the interpretation of tongues is also a divine gift1 he admits even that persons may not un-

derstand what they themselves to and say Even a figure such as Voltaire hardly a friend of religious out-

looks testifies for those who have ears to hear to the rightness of Hamannrsquos views

kann man wohl einen glaubwuumlrdigern Zeugen als den unfrac34erblilten Voltaire anfuumlhren wellter bey-nahe die Religion fuumlr den Eckfrac34ein der epifrac14en Dilttkunfrac34 erklaumlrt [hellip] Voltaire aber der Hohe-priefrac34er im Tempel des Gefrac14macks frac14luumlszligt so buumlndig als Kaiphas und denkt frulttbarer als He-rodes2

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 ldquoHo-

hepriefrac34er im Tempelrdquo but also a somewhat Machiavellian politician) justifies the crucifixion of Christ by

arguing that ldquoit is expedient that one man should die for the peoplerdquo3 believing himself to be discussing a

political necessity while as if prophetically describing the Christian doctrine of the atonement And He-

rodrsquos deceitful remark to the Magi ldquothat I might also come and worship himrdquo is taken since Herod was

king of the Jews though a gentile by race to represent the universal destiny of the Christian religion4 This

tradition of interpretation habitual in Biblical exegesis Hamann applies also to analysis of the wordmdashso

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 1210

2 Nadler 204-5

3 John 1150

4 It is telling that Hamann chooses such a contrived and complicated case of biblical parallelism as this one his ar-

gument 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

36

will readily concede that ldquowe see through a glass darklyrdquo1 and that we may not even be able to descry the

true outlines of our own persons in this mirrormdashbut by invoking the language of mirrors2 he locates him-

self within a tradition of thought according to which nature however flawed parts of it may be and how-

ever dulled our ability to discern itmdashis 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 se-

cular 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 ldquoblind heathensrdquo

Blinde Heyden haben die Unilttbarkeit erkannt die der Menfrac14 mit GOTT gemein hat Die verhuumlllte Figur des Leibes das Antlitz des Hauptes und das Aumluszligerfrac34e der Arme ind das ilttbare Sltema in dem wir einher gehn dolt eigentlilt niltts als ein Zeigefinger des verborge-nen Menfrac14en in unsmdash Exemplumque DEI quisque est in imagine parva3

Note that the ldquospiritualrdquo 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 ldquoindex fingersrdquo which direct the inner man to

our attention Hamann let us recall4 does not believe that the target of this ldquoZeigefingerrdquo can always be

1 1 Cor 1312

2 Though Hamann is in some ways a very modern thinker who anticipates 20

th century thought about the kinship of

reason and language he here looks back to the middle ages Cf Alan of Lille ldquoOmnis mundi creatura Quasi liber et pictura Nobis est et speculumrdquo With the sentiment and conceit of this verse Hamann could not agree more 3 N 198 The quotation from the Astronomicon of Manilius (IV895) is mainly noteworthy for its having been writ-

ten by a pagan author while echoing the language of Genesis regarding the ldquoimage of Godrdquo The Cambridge edition of Hamann misenglishes this line rendering it as ldquoEach one is an instance of God in miniaturerdquo This not only loses the connection to the book of Genesis conveyed by the word ldquoimagordquo but puts far too much weight on the word ldquoexemplumrdquo as well An exemplum is not an instance but a type model or analogue ldquoInstancerdquo implies an occur-rence of a rationally determinable kind a ldquotyperdquo or ldquoanaloguerdquo 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

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 circumstancesmdashthis 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 re-

fers to ldquocorrespondencesrdquo of thing and idea and of idea and word these ldquocorrespondencesrdquo are for Berlin

relations between two different things of different types He is quite correct to judge that Hamann consid-

ers 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 meaningmdashhe 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 justifica-

tion 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 ldquoConclusionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos own line that ldquocreation is a speech to the creature

through the creaturerdquo 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 cor-

respond to each other based on no apodictically determinable system knowable a priori but on the gra-

tuitous (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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 com-

pared translation to the art of understanding the image of a tapestry from looking only at the backs of the

threads he remarks ldquoDort [ie in the original contexts of the metaphors borrowed from other authors for

39

Hamannrsquos text] werden ie aber ad illustrationem (zur Verbraumlmung des Rockes) hier ad inuolucrum (zum

Hemde auf bloszligem Leibe) gebrauchtrdquo1 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 deco-

rated 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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos which ac-

cording to the line of interpretation I have explored reveals as much about Hamannrsquos 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 tear-

ing 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 Hamannrsquos motion between images his construction of typological

schemes that resist easy classification and one-for-one interpretation is not antirational raving or obscu-

rantism but rather an alternativemdashand a quite compelling onemdashto 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

1 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 tho-

roughly religious vision of the world If one is willing to do this Hamann is a kind of prophetmdashand the

horned head of Pan on his title-page is also the horned head of Moses1 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 pro-

ducing neat tables of Hamannrsquos 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 Aes-

thetica 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 somethingmdashunless there really is some secret ineffable law of correspondences that un-

ites 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 commen-

tators and writers of senior essays have no right to tread

1 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 agrave la Mosaiumlque (Roth 103 343)

41

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin Isaiah The Magus of the North JG Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism ed Henry

Hardy London John Murray 1993 Betz John After Enlightenment the Post-Secular Vision of JG Hamann Chichester John Wiley amp Sons

2009 Hamann Johann Georg Hamannrsquos Schriften ed Friedrich Roth Berlin G Reimer 1821 (Cited as

ldquoRothrdquo All citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Saumlmtliche Werke ed Josef Nadler Wien Verlag Herder 1950 (Cited as ldquoNad-

lerrdquo Unless otherwise noted all citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Writings on Philosophy and Language trans and ed Kenneth Haynes Cam-

bridge Cambridge UP 2007 (Cited as ldquoHaynesrdquo) Jacobs Carol ldquoHamann Is a Nomadic Writer lsquoAesthetica in nucersquordquo in Skirting the Ethical Stanford Stan-

ford UP 2008 pp 111-130 OrsquoFlaherty James C The Quarrel of Reason with Itself Essays on Hamann Michaelis Lessing Nietzsche Co-

lumbia SC Camden 1988

20

The hierarchy that is here established with the scholar philosopher and poet presented with responsibili-

ties of increasing creativity should not surprise us as it is exactly in line with what Hamann says else-

where about the high dignity of the poet to whom is compared even God himself1 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 ade-

quate 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 consti-

tuent 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

1 ldquoDer Poet am Anfange der Tagerdquo Nadler 206

21

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

Hamannrsquos coincidentia oppositorum is not any kind of dialectical synthesis Creation is speech ndash so is Hamannrsquos 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 Aesthe-

tica in nuce relate to the argument he makes about the proper use of reason There is significant ldquooverlaprdquo

here the various images and descriptions Hamann uses are parallel making the same argument in differ-

ent ways From what we have already said we can derive a kind of table showing how the various images

used map onto Hamannrsquos argument about the reason and the passions

Passions Reason

Vowels Consonants Words Mere arrangements of letters Poetic Meter Turbatverse God Nature Christianity Classical civilization Alpha and Omega 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 refus-

es 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 to-

gether 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 ldquoit is not clear how far he understood it and he certainly gives it a

1 Though not in the Aesthetica See eg Betz 28 note 17

22

sense of his ownrdquo1 In fact it is not easy to see where the ldquocoincidencerdquo comes in at all Regarding every

text every object as part of his ldquoBiblerdquo 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 themselvesmdashto

the letters of a text (in literary criticism) and the phenomena of nature unreduced to their universal ra-

tional 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 pro-

duced of these elements He beholds in a single vision der rollende Donner der Beredamkeit and der

einylbicltte Blitz2 This strangemdashor strange to us and Hamann would not hesitate to say that our sensibili-

ties need correctionmdashthis strange conjunction of opposites confronts us even on the title page of the Aes-

thetica in nuce Eine Rhapodie in kabbalifrac34ifrac14er Proe A rhapsodymdasha stitching-together of pieces into an ar-

tistic unitymdashthat 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 ldquoApostillerdquo ndash whether Hamann himself some per-

sonified commentator or anyone else ndash remarks that the author of the Aesthetica in nuce ldquohat Satz und

Satz zuammengereltnet wie man die Pfeile auf einem Sltlalttfelde zaumlhltrdquo3 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 Romansrsquo shots though fewer were fired with greater force It is not clear which side better corres-

ponds to Hamannrsquos 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 Therersquos a case to be made for either in-

terpretation But whichever we take the view wersquore given of the Aesthetica in nuce is still of individual

Saumltze piled up one after another as discrete countable units This treatise says the speaker of the Apos-

tille is just a pile of sentences But in an instant our perspective is shifted ldquoLaszligt uns jetzt die Hauptumme

1 Berlin 115

2 Nadler 208

3 Nadler 217 The reference given by Hamann (ldquoProcop De bello persico I 18rdquo) is explained at Haynes 94 note

kkk

23

[hellip] houmlrenldquo1 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 vari-

ous meditations on human life that compose the text of the biblical book2 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

summarymdasha 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 Hamannrsquos 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 readerrsquos confusion It is not Hamannrsquos 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 writings3 it is perhaps not sur-

prising then if the Aesthetica in nuce presents us with hermeneutic difficulties that neither the text itself

nor comparisons with Hamannrsquos other works nor consideration of Hamannrsquos engagement with the issues

of his time are adequate to dispel But the paradox we are considering heremdashthe simultaneous focus on

both columns of the table with which this chapter beganmdashis so fundamental to the thought of the Aesthe-

tica in nuce that unless we can come to terms with it in some way Hamannrsquos 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

1 Ibid

2 Cf Lutherbibel Predig 1213 ldquoLaszligt uns die Hauptumme aller Lehre houmlrenldquo 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 ldquoApostillerdquo likewise to be a undermining of all that goes before it 3 ldquoI no longer understand myself quite differently from then some [writings I understand] better some worse [hellip]

[hellip] 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 stuffrdquo Briefwechsel V p 358 trans in Betz 229

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 ldquodie ilt nolt im bloszligen Bult-frac34a-bi-ren uumlbenmdashmdashund wahrlilt wahrlilt Kinder muumlfrac12en

wir werden wenn wir den Geifrac34 der Wahrheit empfahen ollenldquo1 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 ldquoSpirit of

Truth whom the world cannot receiverdquo (Jn 1417) 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 spiri-

tual pole than to the elemental literal material one But how says Hamannrsquos Nuszlig is this Spirit of Truth

to be received By becoming like children who are just learning to spellmdashand 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 ldquoBultfrac34abirenrdquo syllable by syllable confirms that Hamann is referring to this style of interpreta-

tion Recalling now the table at the start of this chapter in which letters and the ldquospirit of truthrdquo

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 ldquoVerlieren die Elemente des A B C ihre natuumlrlilte

Bedeutung wenn ie in der unendlichen Zuammenetzung willkuumlrlilter Zeilten uns an Ideen erinnern die wo niltt

im Himmel dolt im Gehirn indrdquo2 To this question of course we are meant to answer ldquonordquo But there is

much here that is not unproblematic or at least not simple What for instance is the ldquonatuumlrlilte Bedeu-

tungrdquo of a letter And how if the combination of these signs be arbitrary does it recall for us ideas And

1 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 Hamannrsquos voice at least on Hamannrsquos 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 wersquore 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 Greeksmdashbut 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 coin-

cidence is merely an opportunity to bring the opposites as opposites together But this assumption natu-

ral 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 experiencemdashthis 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 Hamannrsquos writing admits of both a macros-

copic 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 conjunc-

tion 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 them1 considering these various levels of read-

ing 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 simultaneous-

ly 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 interpreta-

tion could be set forth that might allow us to translate Hamannrsquos simultaneously cabalistic and rhapsodic

utterances into academic language or to devise summaries of his arguments in a neatly symbolic lan-

guage 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 oumlffentlilter Gebrault 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 Hamannrsquos thought is useful also here Sltoumlpfung ifrac34 eine Rede an die Kreatur durlt die Kreatur The

Christian overtones of such a formulation are obvious Hamann once offered an encapsulation of his

thought in the word λόγος2 a famously polysemous term every sense of which Hamann intends The in-

timate connection between reason and language is of course the most obvious philosophical implication of

1 For Hamannrsquos defense of this possibility see Chapter 4

2 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 Hamannrsquos philosophy But for Hamann λόγος 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 Hamannrsquos piety placed a great emphasis on the self-emptying of Christ Howev-

er much he might stress Christrsquos humanity and suffering though he remained well within the main-

stream 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 diffi-

culties here But there is a clear parallel between the way a Christian thinks of Christ and how Hamann

thinks ofmdashwell more or less everything Christ is a man who lived for a certain stretch of time in a cer-

tain place and is also the eternal God A word is a string of letters small shapes arbitrarily strung togeth-

er and is also a sign of a concept an immaterial thing existing in the mind Hamann is no dualistmdashit 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

Zufoumlrderfrac34 muumlfrac34e man D George Benon fragen ob die Einheit mit der Mannigfaltigkeit niltt befrac34ehen koumlnne [hellip] Der bultfrac34aumlblilte oder grammatifrac14e der fleifrac14liche oder dialectifrac14e der ka-pernaitifrac14e oder historifrac14e Sinn ind im houmlltfrac34en Grade myfrac34ilt und haumlngen von ollten augen-blicklilten pirituoumlen willkuumlhrlilten Nebenbefrac34immungen und Umfrac34aumlnden ab daszlig man ohne hinauf gen Himmel zu fahren die Schluumlfrac12el ihrer Erkenntnis niltt herabholen kann1

1 Nadler 203 note 23 Hamannrsquos footnote is attached to some lines of Latin verse which conclude the Nutrsquos letter to the Learned Rabbi They come from a poem traditionally and falsely attributed to the Emperor Augustus explain-ing why Vergilrsquos orders to destroy the drafts of the Aeneid were ignored after the poetrsquos death The excerpts are

Ah scelus indignum soluetur litera diues Frangatur potius legum veneranda potestas Liber amp alma Ceres succurrite mdash mdash [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 mdashwhich for Hamann who does not oppose the spirit and the letter in a conventional way is a spiritual richnessmdashis 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

28

It is not that interpretation ought to be literal physical or ldquoCapernaiticrdquo 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 understandingmdashthat is unless one has

attained a certain degree of spiritual insight ndashone will be unable to understand things even in their literal

senses for the spiritual and literal senses are one Hamannrsquos 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 expe-

rience 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 inten-

tion of this line of thought has been least of all to stimulate pious feelings Hamannrsquos goal is not to spiri-

tualize 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 (ldquoDie Sinne aber ind Ceres und Bacltus die Leidenfrac14aftenrdquo [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 simplis-tically 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 Hamannrsquos ability to com-press his meaning into very few and very cryptic words NB The ldquoCapernaiticrdquo sense refers to the sense in which Christ is literally present in the Christian sacrament This unusual word is used derogatively in Lutheran texts (eg the Epitome of the Konkordienformel) to disparage Catholic sacramental teaching Its origins are in Jn 65559 ldquoFor my flesh is meat indeed and my blood is drink in-deed [hellip] These things he said in the synagogue as he taught in Capernaumrdquo 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 Luthe-ran understanding according to which Christ is present in the sacrament in a merely spiritual way is less than per-fectly compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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

Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 im-

plied meanings into the literal tropological allegorical and anagogical senses that Christians have tradi-

tionally 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 ormdashto employ a metaphor

more perhaps more congenial to Hamannmdashdiscerning 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 indul-

gence 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 slo-

gan from the text itselfmdashldquoto speak is to translaterdquomdashand 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 uumlberetzenmdashaus einer Engelpralte in eine Menfrac14enpralte das heifrac34 Gedanken in WortemdashSalten in NamenmdashBilder in Zeilten die poetifrac14 oder kyriologifrac14 hifrac34orifrac14 oder ymbolifrac14 oder hieroglyphifrac14mdashmdashund philoophifrac14 oder ltarakterifrac34ifrac14 eyn koumlnnen1

Here we are given a license to translate Hamannrsquos images into signs of various kinds It is no surprise that

in a footnote attached to this text he derogates the ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs by citing a pas-

sage of Petronius which complains that a new fashion of ldquopuffed-up and formless talkativenessrdquo has cor-

1 Nadler 199

31

rupted speech so that ldquothe standard of eloquence being corrupted has been halted and struck dumbrdquo

and ldquonot even poetry displays a healthy colorrdquo1 By ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs we should un-

derstand something like Leibnizrsquos 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 criti-

cism 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 cor-

respondences out of the text But the other kinds of signsmdashthe poetic or symbolicmdashdo not seem to fall

under the same criticismmdashthese suggest a kind of sign which indeed has meaning but whose interpreta-

tion 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 Hamannrsquos thought allows even for this kind of correspon-

dence 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 Hamannrsquos text but also is deeply compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos text to assert that he intends the literal and symbolic meanings to be taken as

of equal importancemdashfor us to devote our full attention to take up one of the governing metaphors of this

1 N 199 n10 ldquoNuper ventosa isthaec amp enormis loquacitas Athenas ex Asia conmigrauit [hellip] simulque correpta elo-quentiae regula stetit amp obmutuit [hellip] Ac ne carmen quidem sani coloris enituitrdquo

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 discuss-

ing how Hamann refuses to privilege abstract ldquopurely mentalrdquo thought over the particular words in

which that thought finds expression Berlin concludes that ldquofor 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)rdquo1 As an example of one such contradiction Berlin cites the line placed at the head

of this section ldquoto speak is to translaterdquo For Berlin it follows from Hamannrsquos insistence on the unity of

reason and language that no translation no correspondence between words ideas and things can be es-

tablished

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 attend-ing to ideas or to language and through them (because they correspond) to the facts was a method of judging and knowing reality [hellip But the] notion of a correspondence that there is an objective world on one side and on the other man and his instruments ndash lan-guage ideas and so forth ndash attempting to approximate to this objective reality is a false picture There is only a flow of sensations2

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 ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 reproduced3 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 Hamannrsquos treatise but unable to claim any continuity of thought therewith

1 Berlin 81

2 Ibid

3 Though one might question even this Ποταμῷ γὰρ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐμβῆναι δὶς τῷ αὐτῷ and there is no reason to think

any two ldquoflows of sensationrdquo could ever be substantially identical Necessarily every ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos view Berlin is perplexed when confronted with Hamannrsquos open assertion

that translation is possible between ldquohuman speechrdquo and the ldquospeech of angelsrdquo and can only conclude

that Hamann here contradicts himself And for Berlin it is quite to be expected that Hamann should con-

tradict himself he regards Hamannrsquos thought in general as highly creative and intriguing Schwaumlrmerei

of note for its pivotal place in intellectual history but completely insusceptible or unworthy of serious

philosophic attention Berlin appreciates Hamannrsquos criticism of the Enlightenment and his prescient

awareness of the lifeless bloodless conception of manrsquos spiritual life that the Enlighteners would ultimate-

ly produce While Berlin claims to understand Hamannrsquos motives in writing he utterly rejects the content

of his writings which he regards as ldquothe cry of a trapped man hellip who cannot be brought to see that to be

regimented or eliminated is either inevitable or desirablerdquo1 For Berlin Hamann is simply a ldquofanaticrdquo

whose writings consist of ldquopassionate rhetoric and not careful thoughtrdquo and whose opinions are ldquogrotes-

quely one-sided a violent exaggeration of the uniqueness of men and things [and] a passionate hatred of

menrsquos wish to understand the universerdquo2 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 pur-

ism of Hitler3 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 Berlinrsquos judgment that Hamann

1 Berlin 116

2 Berlin 121

3 This accusation is presented in Berlinrsquos book in a series of insinuations we are told for example that Hamannrsquos

ldquohatred and blind irrationalism have fed the stream that has led to social and political irrationalism particularly in German in our own [20

th] centuryrdquo (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 Berlinrsquos 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

34

simply contradicts himself in allowing for the possibility of translation in and out of symbolic ldquolanguag-

esrdquo Hamann has very little patience for ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs which promise patent

meaning and unambiguous interpretation This is perfectly in keeping with his general distaste for effi-

cient 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 ldquopoeticrdquo and ldquosymbolicrdquo signs not to fall under the same fierce criticism as the others

ldquoTo speak is to translaterdquo and ldquocreation is a speech to the creature through the creaturerdquo These

two maxims placed very near to each other in the text1 suggest something of a solution to the problem to

which Berlin directs our attention The conjunction of these lines should remind us that Hamann wheth-

er he directing his attention to literature philology esthetics or any other subject is always also a reli-

gious thinker The archetype of every text is for him the Bible and biblical exegesis is the model and ca-

non 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 Michaelisrsquos ldquodenial of a mystical typological sense

of Scripturerdquo2 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 Mi-

chaelis 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 ldquoTo merdquo says Hamann ldquoevery book is a Biblerdquo3 like the Bible then every

book must be read not merely for its literal sense Berlinrsquos reading of Hamann might be correct if Ha-

1 N 118-119

2 Betz 114

3 Briefwechsel I p 309 trans in Betz 47

35

mann were speaking about the everyday world of words and things understood as a brute fact But Ha-

mann 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 re-

mind us that the interpretation of tongues is also a divine gift1 he admits even that persons may not un-

derstand what they themselves to and say Even a figure such as Voltaire hardly a friend of religious out-

looks testifies for those who have ears to hear to the rightness of Hamannrsquos views

kann man wohl einen glaubwuumlrdigern Zeugen als den unfrac34erblilten Voltaire anfuumlhren wellter bey-nahe die Religion fuumlr den Eckfrac34ein der epifrac14en Dilttkunfrac34 erklaumlrt [hellip] Voltaire aber der Hohe-priefrac34er im Tempel des Gefrac14macks frac14luumlszligt so buumlndig als Kaiphas und denkt frulttbarer als He-rodes2

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 ldquoHo-

hepriefrac34er im Tempelrdquo but also a somewhat Machiavellian politician) justifies the crucifixion of Christ by

arguing that ldquoit is expedient that one man should die for the peoplerdquo3 believing himself to be discussing a

political necessity while as if prophetically describing the Christian doctrine of the atonement And He-

rodrsquos deceitful remark to the Magi ldquothat I might also come and worship himrdquo is taken since Herod was

king of the Jews though a gentile by race to represent the universal destiny of the Christian religion4 This

tradition of interpretation habitual in Biblical exegesis Hamann applies also to analysis of the wordmdashso

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 1210

2 Nadler 204-5

3 John 1150

4 It is telling that Hamann chooses such a contrived and complicated case of biblical parallelism as this one his ar-

gument 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

36

will readily concede that ldquowe see through a glass darklyrdquo1 and that we may not even be able to descry the

true outlines of our own persons in this mirrormdashbut by invoking the language of mirrors2 he locates him-

self within a tradition of thought according to which nature however flawed parts of it may be and how-

ever dulled our ability to discern itmdashis 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 se-

cular 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 ldquoblind heathensrdquo

Blinde Heyden haben die Unilttbarkeit erkannt die der Menfrac14 mit GOTT gemein hat Die verhuumlllte Figur des Leibes das Antlitz des Hauptes und das Aumluszligerfrac34e der Arme ind das ilttbare Sltema in dem wir einher gehn dolt eigentlilt niltts als ein Zeigefinger des verborge-nen Menfrac14en in unsmdash Exemplumque DEI quisque est in imagine parva3

Note that the ldquospiritualrdquo 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 ldquoindex fingersrdquo which direct the inner man to

our attention Hamann let us recall4 does not believe that the target of this ldquoZeigefingerrdquo can always be

1 1 Cor 1312

2 Though Hamann is in some ways a very modern thinker who anticipates 20

th century thought about the kinship of

reason and language he here looks back to the middle ages Cf Alan of Lille ldquoOmnis mundi creatura Quasi liber et pictura Nobis est et speculumrdquo With the sentiment and conceit of this verse Hamann could not agree more 3 N 198 The quotation from the Astronomicon of Manilius (IV895) is mainly noteworthy for its having been writ-

ten by a pagan author while echoing the language of Genesis regarding the ldquoimage of Godrdquo The Cambridge edition of Hamann misenglishes this line rendering it as ldquoEach one is an instance of God in miniaturerdquo This not only loses the connection to the book of Genesis conveyed by the word ldquoimagordquo but puts far too much weight on the word ldquoexemplumrdquo as well An exemplum is not an instance but a type model or analogue ldquoInstancerdquo implies an occur-rence of a rationally determinable kind a ldquotyperdquo or ldquoanaloguerdquo 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

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 circumstancesmdashthis 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 re-

fers to ldquocorrespondencesrdquo of thing and idea and of idea and word these ldquocorrespondencesrdquo are for Berlin

relations between two different things of different types He is quite correct to judge that Hamann consid-

ers 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 meaningmdashhe 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 justifica-

tion 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 ldquoConclusionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos own line that ldquocreation is a speech to the creature

through the creaturerdquo 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 cor-

respond to each other based on no apodictically determinable system knowable a priori but on the gra-

tuitous (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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 com-

pared translation to the art of understanding the image of a tapestry from looking only at the backs of the

threads he remarks ldquoDort [ie in the original contexts of the metaphors borrowed from other authors for

39

Hamannrsquos text] werden ie aber ad illustrationem (zur Verbraumlmung des Rockes) hier ad inuolucrum (zum

Hemde auf bloszligem Leibe) gebrauchtrdquo1 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 deco-

rated 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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos which ac-

cording to the line of interpretation I have explored reveals as much about Hamannrsquos 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 tear-

ing 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 Hamannrsquos motion between images his construction of typological

schemes that resist easy classification and one-for-one interpretation is not antirational raving or obscu-

rantism but rather an alternativemdashand a quite compelling onemdashto 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

1 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 tho-

roughly religious vision of the world If one is willing to do this Hamann is a kind of prophetmdashand the

horned head of Pan on his title-page is also the horned head of Moses1 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 pro-

ducing neat tables of Hamannrsquos 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 Aes-

thetica 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 somethingmdashunless there really is some secret ineffable law of correspondences that un-

ites 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 commen-

tators and writers of senior essays have no right to tread

1 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 agrave la Mosaiumlque (Roth 103 343)

41

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin Isaiah The Magus of the North JG Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism ed Henry

Hardy London John Murray 1993 Betz John After Enlightenment the Post-Secular Vision of JG Hamann Chichester John Wiley amp Sons

2009 Hamann Johann Georg Hamannrsquos Schriften ed Friedrich Roth Berlin G Reimer 1821 (Cited as

ldquoRothrdquo All citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Saumlmtliche Werke ed Josef Nadler Wien Verlag Herder 1950 (Cited as ldquoNad-

lerrdquo Unless otherwise noted all citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Writings on Philosophy and Language trans and ed Kenneth Haynes Cam-

bridge Cambridge UP 2007 (Cited as ldquoHaynesrdquo) Jacobs Carol ldquoHamann Is a Nomadic Writer lsquoAesthetica in nucersquordquo in Skirting the Ethical Stanford Stan-

ford UP 2008 pp 111-130 OrsquoFlaherty James C The Quarrel of Reason with Itself Essays on Hamann Michaelis Lessing Nietzsche Co-

lumbia SC Camden 1988

21

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

Hamannrsquos coincidentia oppositorum is not any kind of dialectical synthesis Creation is speech ndash so is Hamannrsquos 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 Aesthe-

tica in nuce relate to the argument he makes about the proper use of reason There is significant ldquooverlaprdquo

here the various images and descriptions Hamann uses are parallel making the same argument in differ-

ent ways From what we have already said we can derive a kind of table showing how the various images

used map onto Hamannrsquos argument about the reason and the passions

Passions Reason

Vowels Consonants Words Mere arrangements of letters Poetic Meter Turbatverse God Nature Christianity Classical civilization Alpha and Omega 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 refus-

es 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 to-

gether 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 ldquoit is not clear how far he understood it and he certainly gives it a

1 Though not in the Aesthetica See eg Betz 28 note 17

22

sense of his ownrdquo1 In fact it is not easy to see where the ldquocoincidencerdquo comes in at all Regarding every

text every object as part of his ldquoBiblerdquo 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 themselvesmdashto

the letters of a text (in literary criticism) and the phenomena of nature unreduced to their universal ra-

tional 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 pro-

duced of these elements He beholds in a single vision der rollende Donner der Beredamkeit and der

einylbicltte Blitz2 This strangemdashor strange to us and Hamann would not hesitate to say that our sensibili-

ties need correctionmdashthis strange conjunction of opposites confronts us even on the title page of the Aes-

thetica in nuce Eine Rhapodie in kabbalifrac34ifrac14er Proe A rhapsodymdasha stitching-together of pieces into an ar-

tistic unitymdashthat 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 ldquoApostillerdquo ndash whether Hamann himself some per-

sonified commentator or anyone else ndash remarks that the author of the Aesthetica in nuce ldquohat Satz und

Satz zuammengereltnet wie man die Pfeile auf einem Sltlalttfelde zaumlhltrdquo3 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 Romansrsquo shots though fewer were fired with greater force It is not clear which side better corres-

ponds to Hamannrsquos 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 Therersquos a case to be made for either in-

terpretation But whichever we take the view wersquore given of the Aesthetica in nuce is still of individual

Saumltze piled up one after another as discrete countable units This treatise says the speaker of the Apos-

tille is just a pile of sentences But in an instant our perspective is shifted ldquoLaszligt uns jetzt die Hauptumme

1 Berlin 115

2 Nadler 208

3 Nadler 217 The reference given by Hamann (ldquoProcop De bello persico I 18rdquo) is explained at Haynes 94 note

kkk

23

[hellip] houmlrenldquo1 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 vari-

ous meditations on human life that compose the text of the biblical book2 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

summarymdasha 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 Hamannrsquos 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 readerrsquos confusion It is not Hamannrsquos 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 writings3 it is perhaps not sur-

prising then if the Aesthetica in nuce presents us with hermeneutic difficulties that neither the text itself

nor comparisons with Hamannrsquos other works nor consideration of Hamannrsquos engagement with the issues

of his time are adequate to dispel But the paradox we are considering heremdashthe simultaneous focus on

both columns of the table with which this chapter beganmdashis so fundamental to the thought of the Aesthe-

tica in nuce that unless we can come to terms with it in some way Hamannrsquos 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

1 Ibid

2 Cf Lutherbibel Predig 1213 ldquoLaszligt uns die Hauptumme aller Lehre houmlrenldquo 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 ldquoApostillerdquo likewise to be a undermining of all that goes before it 3 ldquoI no longer understand myself quite differently from then some [writings I understand] better some worse [hellip]

[hellip] 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 stuffrdquo Briefwechsel V p 358 trans in Betz 229

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 ldquodie ilt nolt im bloszligen Bult-frac34a-bi-ren uumlbenmdashmdashund wahrlilt wahrlilt Kinder muumlfrac12en

wir werden wenn wir den Geifrac34 der Wahrheit empfahen ollenldquo1 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 ldquoSpirit of

Truth whom the world cannot receiverdquo (Jn 1417) 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 spiri-

tual pole than to the elemental literal material one But how says Hamannrsquos Nuszlig is this Spirit of Truth

to be received By becoming like children who are just learning to spellmdashand 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 ldquoBultfrac34abirenrdquo syllable by syllable confirms that Hamann is referring to this style of interpreta-

tion Recalling now the table at the start of this chapter in which letters and the ldquospirit of truthrdquo

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 ldquoVerlieren die Elemente des A B C ihre natuumlrlilte

Bedeutung wenn ie in der unendlichen Zuammenetzung willkuumlrlilter Zeilten uns an Ideen erinnern die wo niltt

im Himmel dolt im Gehirn indrdquo2 To this question of course we are meant to answer ldquonordquo But there is

much here that is not unproblematic or at least not simple What for instance is the ldquonatuumlrlilte Bedeu-

tungrdquo of a letter And how if the combination of these signs be arbitrary does it recall for us ideas And

1 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 Hamannrsquos voice at least on Hamannrsquos 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 wersquore 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 Greeksmdashbut 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 coin-

cidence is merely an opportunity to bring the opposites as opposites together But this assumption natu-

ral 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 experiencemdashthis 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 Hamannrsquos writing admits of both a macros-

copic 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 conjunc-

tion 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 them1 considering these various levels of read-

ing 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 simultaneous-

ly 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 interpreta-

tion could be set forth that might allow us to translate Hamannrsquos simultaneously cabalistic and rhapsodic

utterances into academic language or to devise summaries of his arguments in a neatly symbolic lan-

guage 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 oumlffentlilter Gebrault 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 Hamannrsquos thought is useful also here Sltoumlpfung ifrac34 eine Rede an die Kreatur durlt die Kreatur The

Christian overtones of such a formulation are obvious Hamann once offered an encapsulation of his

thought in the word λόγος2 a famously polysemous term every sense of which Hamann intends The in-

timate connection between reason and language is of course the most obvious philosophical implication of

1 For Hamannrsquos defense of this possibility see Chapter 4

2 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 Hamannrsquos philosophy But for Hamann λόγος 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 Hamannrsquos piety placed a great emphasis on the self-emptying of Christ Howev-

er much he might stress Christrsquos humanity and suffering though he remained well within the main-

stream 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 diffi-

culties here But there is a clear parallel between the way a Christian thinks of Christ and how Hamann

thinks ofmdashwell more or less everything Christ is a man who lived for a certain stretch of time in a cer-

tain place and is also the eternal God A word is a string of letters small shapes arbitrarily strung togeth-

er and is also a sign of a concept an immaterial thing existing in the mind Hamann is no dualistmdashit 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

Zufoumlrderfrac34 muumlfrac34e man D George Benon fragen ob die Einheit mit der Mannigfaltigkeit niltt befrac34ehen koumlnne [hellip] Der bultfrac34aumlblilte oder grammatifrac14e der fleifrac14liche oder dialectifrac14e der ka-pernaitifrac14e oder historifrac14e Sinn ind im houmlltfrac34en Grade myfrac34ilt und haumlngen von ollten augen-blicklilten pirituoumlen willkuumlhrlilten Nebenbefrac34immungen und Umfrac34aumlnden ab daszlig man ohne hinauf gen Himmel zu fahren die Schluumlfrac12el ihrer Erkenntnis niltt herabholen kann1

1 Nadler 203 note 23 Hamannrsquos footnote is attached to some lines of Latin verse which conclude the Nutrsquos letter to the Learned Rabbi They come from a poem traditionally and falsely attributed to the Emperor Augustus explain-ing why Vergilrsquos orders to destroy the drafts of the Aeneid were ignored after the poetrsquos death The excerpts are

Ah scelus indignum soluetur litera diues Frangatur potius legum veneranda potestas Liber amp alma Ceres succurrite mdash mdash [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 mdashwhich for Hamann who does not oppose the spirit and the letter in a conventional way is a spiritual richnessmdashis 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

28

It is not that interpretation ought to be literal physical or ldquoCapernaiticrdquo 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 understandingmdashthat is unless one has

attained a certain degree of spiritual insight ndashone will be unable to understand things even in their literal

senses for the spiritual and literal senses are one Hamannrsquos 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 expe-

rience 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 inten-

tion of this line of thought has been least of all to stimulate pious feelings Hamannrsquos goal is not to spiri-

tualize 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 (ldquoDie Sinne aber ind Ceres und Bacltus die Leidenfrac14aftenrdquo [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 simplis-tically 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 Hamannrsquos ability to com-press his meaning into very few and very cryptic words NB The ldquoCapernaiticrdquo sense refers to the sense in which Christ is literally present in the Christian sacrament This unusual word is used derogatively in Lutheran texts (eg the Epitome of the Konkordienformel) to disparage Catholic sacramental teaching Its origins are in Jn 65559 ldquoFor my flesh is meat indeed and my blood is drink in-deed [hellip] These things he said in the synagogue as he taught in Capernaumrdquo 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 Luthe-ran understanding according to which Christ is present in the sacrament in a merely spiritual way is less than per-fectly compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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

Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 im-

plied meanings into the literal tropological allegorical and anagogical senses that Christians have tradi-

tionally 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 ormdashto employ a metaphor

more perhaps more congenial to Hamannmdashdiscerning 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 indul-

gence 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 slo-

gan from the text itselfmdashldquoto speak is to translaterdquomdashand 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 uumlberetzenmdashaus einer Engelpralte in eine Menfrac14enpralte das heifrac34 Gedanken in WortemdashSalten in NamenmdashBilder in Zeilten die poetifrac14 oder kyriologifrac14 hifrac34orifrac14 oder ymbolifrac14 oder hieroglyphifrac14mdashmdashund philoophifrac14 oder ltarakterifrac34ifrac14 eyn koumlnnen1

Here we are given a license to translate Hamannrsquos images into signs of various kinds It is no surprise that

in a footnote attached to this text he derogates the ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs by citing a pas-

sage of Petronius which complains that a new fashion of ldquopuffed-up and formless talkativenessrdquo has cor-

1 Nadler 199

31

rupted speech so that ldquothe standard of eloquence being corrupted has been halted and struck dumbrdquo

and ldquonot even poetry displays a healthy colorrdquo1 By ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs we should un-

derstand something like Leibnizrsquos 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 criti-

cism 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 cor-

respondences out of the text But the other kinds of signsmdashthe poetic or symbolicmdashdo not seem to fall

under the same criticismmdashthese suggest a kind of sign which indeed has meaning but whose interpreta-

tion 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 Hamannrsquos thought allows even for this kind of correspon-

dence 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 Hamannrsquos text but also is deeply compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos text to assert that he intends the literal and symbolic meanings to be taken as

of equal importancemdashfor us to devote our full attention to take up one of the governing metaphors of this

1 N 199 n10 ldquoNuper ventosa isthaec amp enormis loquacitas Athenas ex Asia conmigrauit [hellip] simulque correpta elo-quentiae regula stetit amp obmutuit [hellip] Ac ne carmen quidem sani coloris enituitrdquo

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 discuss-

ing how Hamann refuses to privilege abstract ldquopurely mentalrdquo thought over the particular words in

which that thought finds expression Berlin concludes that ldquofor 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)rdquo1 As an example of one such contradiction Berlin cites the line placed at the head

of this section ldquoto speak is to translaterdquo For Berlin it follows from Hamannrsquos insistence on the unity of

reason and language that no translation no correspondence between words ideas and things can be es-

tablished

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 attend-ing to ideas or to language and through them (because they correspond) to the facts was a method of judging and knowing reality [hellip But the] notion of a correspondence that there is an objective world on one side and on the other man and his instruments ndash lan-guage ideas and so forth ndash attempting to approximate to this objective reality is a false picture There is only a flow of sensations2

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 ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 reproduced3 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 Hamannrsquos treatise but unable to claim any continuity of thought therewith

1 Berlin 81

2 Ibid

3 Though one might question even this Ποταμῷ γὰρ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐμβῆναι δὶς τῷ αὐτῷ and there is no reason to think

any two ldquoflows of sensationrdquo could ever be substantially identical Necessarily every ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos view Berlin is perplexed when confronted with Hamannrsquos open assertion

that translation is possible between ldquohuman speechrdquo and the ldquospeech of angelsrdquo and can only conclude

that Hamann here contradicts himself And for Berlin it is quite to be expected that Hamann should con-

tradict himself he regards Hamannrsquos thought in general as highly creative and intriguing Schwaumlrmerei

of note for its pivotal place in intellectual history but completely insusceptible or unworthy of serious

philosophic attention Berlin appreciates Hamannrsquos criticism of the Enlightenment and his prescient

awareness of the lifeless bloodless conception of manrsquos spiritual life that the Enlighteners would ultimate-

ly produce While Berlin claims to understand Hamannrsquos motives in writing he utterly rejects the content

of his writings which he regards as ldquothe cry of a trapped man hellip who cannot be brought to see that to be

regimented or eliminated is either inevitable or desirablerdquo1 For Berlin Hamann is simply a ldquofanaticrdquo

whose writings consist of ldquopassionate rhetoric and not careful thoughtrdquo and whose opinions are ldquogrotes-

quely one-sided a violent exaggeration of the uniqueness of men and things [and] a passionate hatred of

menrsquos wish to understand the universerdquo2 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 pur-

ism of Hitler3 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 Berlinrsquos judgment that Hamann

1 Berlin 116

2 Berlin 121

3 This accusation is presented in Berlinrsquos book in a series of insinuations we are told for example that Hamannrsquos

ldquohatred and blind irrationalism have fed the stream that has led to social and political irrationalism particularly in German in our own [20

th] centuryrdquo (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 Berlinrsquos 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

34

simply contradicts himself in allowing for the possibility of translation in and out of symbolic ldquolanguag-

esrdquo Hamann has very little patience for ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs which promise patent

meaning and unambiguous interpretation This is perfectly in keeping with his general distaste for effi-

cient 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 ldquopoeticrdquo and ldquosymbolicrdquo signs not to fall under the same fierce criticism as the others

ldquoTo speak is to translaterdquo and ldquocreation is a speech to the creature through the creaturerdquo These

two maxims placed very near to each other in the text1 suggest something of a solution to the problem to

which Berlin directs our attention The conjunction of these lines should remind us that Hamann wheth-

er he directing his attention to literature philology esthetics or any other subject is always also a reli-

gious thinker The archetype of every text is for him the Bible and biblical exegesis is the model and ca-

non 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 Michaelisrsquos ldquodenial of a mystical typological sense

of Scripturerdquo2 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 Mi-

chaelis 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 ldquoTo merdquo says Hamann ldquoevery book is a Biblerdquo3 like the Bible then every

book must be read not merely for its literal sense Berlinrsquos reading of Hamann might be correct if Ha-

1 N 118-119

2 Betz 114

3 Briefwechsel I p 309 trans in Betz 47

35

mann were speaking about the everyday world of words and things understood as a brute fact But Ha-

mann 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 re-

mind us that the interpretation of tongues is also a divine gift1 he admits even that persons may not un-

derstand what they themselves to and say Even a figure such as Voltaire hardly a friend of religious out-

looks testifies for those who have ears to hear to the rightness of Hamannrsquos views

kann man wohl einen glaubwuumlrdigern Zeugen als den unfrac34erblilten Voltaire anfuumlhren wellter bey-nahe die Religion fuumlr den Eckfrac34ein der epifrac14en Dilttkunfrac34 erklaumlrt [hellip] Voltaire aber der Hohe-priefrac34er im Tempel des Gefrac14macks frac14luumlszligt so buumlndig als Kaiphas und denkt frulttbarer als He-rodes2

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 ldquoHo-

hepriefrac34er im Tempelrdquo but also a somewhat Machiavellian politician) justifies the crucifixion of Christ by

arguing that ldquoit is expedient that one man should die for the peoplerdquo3 believing himself to be discussing a

political necessity while as if prophetically describing the Christian doctrine of the atonement And He-

rodrsquos deceitful remark to the Magi ldquothat I might also come and worship himrdquo is taken since Herod was

king of the Jews though a gentile by race to represent the universal destiny of the Christian religion4 This

tradition of interpretation habitual in Biblical exegesis Hamann applies also to analysis of the wordmdashso

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 1210

2 Nadler 204-5

3 John 1150

4 It is telling that Hamann chooses such a contrived and complicated case of biblical parallelism as this one his ar-

gument 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

36

will readily concede that ldquowe see through a glass darklyrdquo1 and that we may not even be able to descry the

true outlines of our own persons in this mirrormdashbut by invoking the language of mirrors2 he locates him-

self within a tradition of thought according to which nature however flawed parts of it may be and how-

ever dulled our ability to discern itmdashis 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 se-

cular 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 ldquoblind heathensrdquo

Blinde Heyden haben die Unilttbarkeit erkannt die der Menfrac14 mit GOTT gemein hat Die verhuumlllte Figur des Leibes das Antlitz des Hauptes und das Aumluszligerfrac34e der Arme ind das ilttbare Sltema in dem wir einher gehn dolt eigentlilt niltts als ein Zeigefinger des verborge-nen Menfrac14en in unsmdash Exemplumque DEI quisque est in imagine parva3

Note that the ldquospiritualrdquo 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 ldquoindex fingersrdquo which direct the inner man to

our attention Hamann let us recall4 does not believe that the target of this ldquoZeigefingerrdquo can always be

1 1 Cor 1312

2 Though Hamann is in some ways a very modern thinker who anticipates 20

th century thought about the kinship of

reason and language he here looks back to the middle ages Cf Alan of Lille ldquoOmnis mundi creatura Quasi liber et pictura Nobis est et speculumrdquo With the sentiment and conceit of this verse Hamann could not agree more 3 N 198 The quotation from the Astronomicon of Manilius (IV895) is mainly noteworthy for its having been writ-

ten by a pagan author while echoing the language of Genesis regarding the ldquoimage of Godrdquo The Cambridge edition of Hamann misenglishes this line rendering it as ldquoEach one is an instance of God in miniaturerdquo This not only loses the connection to the book of Genesis conveyed by the word ldquoimagordquo but puts far too much weight on the word ldquoexemplumrdquo as well An exemplum is not an instance but a type model or analogue ldquoInstancerdquo implies an occur-rence of a rationally determinable kind a ldquotyperdquo or ldquoanaloguerdquo 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

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 circumstancesmdashthis 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 re-

fers to ldquocorrespondencesrdquo of thing and idea and of idea and word these ldquocorrespondencesrdquo are for Berlin

relations between two different things of different types He is quite correct to judge that Hamann consid-

ers 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 meaningmdashhe 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 justifica-

tion 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 ldquoConclusionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos own line that ldquocreation is a speech to the creature

through the creaturerdquo 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 cor-

respond to each other based on no apodictically determinable system knowable a priori but on the gra-

tuitous (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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 com-

pared translation to the art of understanding the image of a tapestry from looking only at the backs of the

threads he remarks ldquoDort [ie in the original contexts of the metaphors borrowed from other authors for

39

Hamannrsquos text] werden ie aber ad illustrationem (zur Verbraumlmung des Rockes) hier ad inuolucrum (zum

Hemde auf bloszligem Leibe) gebrauchtrdquo1 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 deco-

rated 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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos which ac-

cording to the line of interpretation I have explored reveals as much about Hamannrsquos 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 tear-

ing 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 Hamannrsquos motion between images his construction of typological

schemes that resist easy classification and one-for-one interpretation is not antirational raving or obscu-

rantism but rather an alternativemdashand a quite compelling onemdashto 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

1 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 tho-

roughly religious vision of the world If one is willing to do this Hamann is a kind of prophetmdashand the

horned head of Pan on his title-page is also the horned head of Moses1 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 pro-

ducing neat tables of Hamannrsquos 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 Aes-

thetica 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 somethingmdashunless there really is some secret ineffable law of correspondences that un-

ites 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 commen-

tators and writers of senior essays have no right to tread

1 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 agrave la Mosaiumlque (Roth 103 343)

41

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin Isaiah The Magus of the North JG Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism ed Henry

Hardy London John Murray 1993 Betz John After Enlightenment the Post-Secular Vision of JG Hamann Chichester John Wiley amp Sons

2009 Hamann Johann Georg Hamannrsquos Schriften ed Friedrich Roth Berlin G Reimer 1821 (Cited as

ldquoRothrdquo All citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Saumlmtliche Werke ed Josef Nadler Wien Verlag Herder 1950 (Cited as ldquoNad-

lerrdquo Unless otherwise noted all citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Writings on Philosophy and Language trans and ed Kenneth Haynes Cam-

bridge Cambridge UP 2007 (Cited as ldquoHaynesrdquo) Jacobs Carol ldquoHamann Is a Nomadic Writer lsquoAesthetica in nucersquordquo in Skirting the Ethical Stanford Stan-

ford UP 2008 pp 111-130 OrsquoFlaherty James C The Quarrel of Reason with Itself Essays on Hamann Michaelis Lessing Nietzsche Co-

lumbia SC Camden 1988

22

sense of his ownrdquo1 In fact it is not easy to see where the ldquocoincidencerdquo comes in at all Regarding every

text every object as part of his ldquoBiblerdquo 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 themselvesmdashto

the letters of a text (in literary criticism) and the phenomena of nature unreduced to their universal ra-

tional 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 pro-

duced of these elements He beholds in a single vision der rollende Donner der Beredamkeit and der

einylbicltte Blitz2 This strangemdashor strange to us and Hamann would not hesitate to say that our sensibili-

ties need correctionmdashthis strange conjunction of opposites confronts us even on the title page of the Aes-

thetica in nuce Eine Rhapodie in kabbalifrac34ifrac14er Proe A rhapsodymdasha stitching-together of pieces into an ar-

tistic unitymdashthat 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 ldquoApostillerdquo ndash whether Hamann himself some per-

sonified commentator or anyone else ndash remarks that the author of the Aesthetica in nuce ldquohat Satz und

Satz zuammengereltnet wie man die Pfeile auf einem Sltlalttfelde zaumlhltrdquo3 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 Romansrsquo shots though fewer were fired with greater force It is not clear which side better corres-

ponds to Hamannrsquos 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 Therersquos a case to be made for either in-

terpretation But whichever we take the view wersquore given of the Aesthetica in nuce is still of individual

Saumltze piled up one after another as discrete countable units This treatise says the speaker of the Apos-

tille is just a pile of sentences But in an instant our perspective is shifted ldquoLaszligt uns jetzt die Hauptumme

1 Berlin 115

2 Nadler 208

3 Nadler 217 The reference given by Hamann (ldquoProcop De bello persico I 18rdquo) is explained at Haynes 94 note

kkk

23

[hellip] houmlrenldquo1 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 vari-

ous meditations on human life that compose the text of the biblical book2 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

summarymdasha 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 Hamannrsquos 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 readerrsquos confusion It is not Hamannrsquos 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 writings3 it is perhaps not sur-

prising then if the Aesthetica in nuce presents us with hermeneutic difficulties that neither the text itself

nor comparisons with Hamannrsquos other works nor consideration of Hamannrsquos engagement with the issues

of his time are adequate to dispel But the paradox we are considering heremdashthe simultaneous focus on

both columns of the table with which this chapter beganmdashis so fundamental to the thought of the Aesthe-

tica in nuce that unless we can come to terms with it in some way Hamannrsquos 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

1 Ibid

2 Cf Lutherbibel Predig 1213 ldquoLaszligt uns die Hauptumme aller Lehre houmlrenldquo 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 ldquoApostillerdquo likewise to be a undermining of all that goes before it 3 ldquoI no longer understand myself quite differently from then some [writings I understand] better some worse [hellip]

[hellip] 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 stuffrdquo Briefwechsel V p 358 trans in Betz 229

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 ldquodie ilt nolt im bloszligen Bult-frac34a-bi-ren uumlbenmdashmdashund wahrlilt wahrlilt Kinder muumlfrac12en

wir werden wenn wir den Geifrac34 der Wahrheit empfahen ollenldquo1 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 ldquoSpirit of

Truth whom the world cannot receiverdquo (Jn 1417) 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 spiri-

tual pole than to the elemental literal material one But how says Hamannrsquos Nuszlig is this Spirit of Truth

to be received By becoming like children who are just learning to spellmdashand 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 ldquoBultfrac34abirenrdquo syllable by syllable confirms that Hamann is referring to this style of interpreta-

tion Recalling now the table at the start of this chapter in which letters and the ldquospirit of truthrdquo

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 ldquoVerlieren die Elemente des A B C ihre natuumlrlilte

Bedeutung wenn ie in der unendlichen Zuammenetzung willkuumlrlilter Zeilten uns an Ideen erinnern die wo niltt

im Himmel dolt im Gehirn indrdquo2 To this question of course we are meant to answer ldquonordquo But there is

much here that is not unproblematic or at least not simple What for instance is the ldquonatuumlrlilte Bedeu-

tungrdquo of a letter And how if the combination of these signs be arbitrary does it recall for us ideas And

1 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 Hamannrsquos voice at least on Hamannrsquos 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 wersquore 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 Greeksmdashbut 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 coin-

cidence is merely an opportunity to bring the opposites as opposites together But this assumption natu-

ral 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 experiencemdashthis 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 Hamannrsquos writing admits of both a macros-

copic 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 conjunc-

tion 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 them1 considering these various levels of read-

ing 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 simultaneous-

ly 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 interpreta-

tion could be set forth that might allow us to translate Hamannrsquos simultaneously cabalistic and rhapsodic

utterances into academic language or to devise summaries of his arguments in a neatly symbolic lan-

guage 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 oumlffentlilter Gebrault 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 Hamannrsquos thought is useful also here Sltoumlpfung ifrac34 eine Rede an die Kreatur durlt die Kreatur The

Christian overtones of such a formulation are obvious Hamann once offered an encapsulation of his

thought in the word λόγος2 a famously polysemous term every sense of which Hamann intends The in-

timate connection between reason and language is of course the most obvious philosophical implication of

1 For Hamannrsquos defense of this possibility see Chapter 4

2 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 Hamannrsquos philosophy But for Hamann λόγος 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 Hamannrsquos piety placed a great emphasis on the self-emptying of Christ Howev-

er much he might stress Christrsquos humanity and suffering though he remained well within the main-

stream 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 diffi-

culties here But there is a clear parallel between the way a Christian thinks of Christ and how Hamann

thinks ofmdashwell more or less everything Christ is a man who lived for a certain stretch of time in a cer-

tain place and is also the eternal God A word is a string of letters small shapes arbitrarily strung togeth-

er and is also a sign of a concept an immaterial thing existing in the mind Hamann is no dualistmdashit 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

Zufoumlrderfrac34 muumlfrac34e man D George Benon fragen ob die Einheit mit der Mannigfaltigkeit niltt befrac34ehen koumlnne [hellip] Der bultfrac34aumlblilte oder grammatifrac14e der fleifrac14liche oder dialectifrac14e der ka-pernaitifrac14e oder historifrac14e Sinn ind im houmlltfrac34en Grade myfrac34ilt und haumlngen von ollten augen-blicklilten pirituoumlen willkuumlhrlilten Nebenbefrac34immungen und Umfrac34aumlnden ab daszlig man ohne hinauf gen Himmel zu fahren die Schluumlfrac12el ihrer Erkenntnis niltt herabholen kann1

1 Nadler 203 note 23 Hamannrsquos footnote is attached to some lines of Latin verse which conclude the Nutrsquos letter to the Learned Rabbi They come from a poem traditionally and falsely attributed to the Emperor Augustus explain-ing why Vergilrsquos orders to destroy the drafts of the Aeneid were ignored after the poetrsquos death The excerpts are

Ah scelus indignum soluetur litera diues Frangatur potius legum veneranda potestas Liber amp alma Ceres succurrite mdash mdash [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 mdashwhich for Hamann who does not oppose the spirit and the letter in a conventional way is a spiritual richnessmdashis 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

28

It is not that interpretation ought to be literal physical or ldquoCapernaiticrdquo 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 understandingmdashthat is unless one has

attained a certain degree of spiritual insight ndashone will be unable to understand things even in their literal

senses for the spiritual and literal senses are one Hamannrsquos 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 expe-

rience 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 inten-

tion of this line of thought has been least of all to stimulate pious feelings Hamannrsquos goal is not to spiri-

tualize 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 (ldquoDie Sinne aber ind Ceres und Bacltus die Leidenfrac14aftenrdquo [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 simplis-tically 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 Hamannrsquos ability to com-press his meaning into very few and very cryptic words NB The ldquoCapernaiticrdquo sense refers to the sense in which Christ is literally present in the Christian sacrament This unusual word is used derogatively in Lutheran texts (eg the Epitome of the Konkordienformel) to disparage Catholic sacramental teaching Its origins are in Jn 65559 ldquoFor my flesh is meat indeed and my blood is drink in-deed [hellip] These things he said in the synagogue as he taught in Capernaumrdquo 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 Luthe-ran understanding according to which Christ is present in the sacrament in a merely spiritual way is less than per-fectly compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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

Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 im-

plied meanings into the literal tropological allegorical and anagogical senses that Christians have tradi-

tionally 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 ormdashto employ a metaphor

more perhaps more congenial to Hamannmdashdiscerning 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 indul-

gence 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 slo-

gan from the text itselfmdashldquoto speak is to translaterdquomdashand 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 uumlberetzenmdashaus einer Engelpralte in eine Menfrac14enpralte das heifrac34 Gedanken in WortemdashSalten in NamenmdashBilder in Zeilten die poetifrac14 oder kyriologifrac14 hifrac34orifrac14 oder ymbolifrac14 oder hieroglyphifrac14mdashmdashund philoophifrac14 oder ltarakterifrac34ifrac14 eyn koumlnnen1

Here we are given a license to translate Hamannrsquos images into signs of various kinds It is no surprise that

in a footnote attached to this text he derogates the ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs by citing a pas-

sage of Petronius which complains that a new fashion of ldquopuffed-up and formless talkativenessrdquo has cor-

1 Nadler 199

31

rupted speech so that ldquothe standard of eloquence being corrupted has been halted and struck dumbrdquo

and ldquonot even poetry displays a healthy colorrdquo1 By ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs we should un-

derstand something like Leibnizrsquos 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 criti-

cism 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 cor-

respondences out of the text But the other kinds of signsmdashthe poetic or symbolicmdashdo not seem to fall

under the same criticismmdashthese suggest a kind of sign which indeed has meaning but whose interpreta-

tion 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 Hamannrsquos thought allows even for this kind of correspon-

dence 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 Hamannrsquos text but also is deeply compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos text to assert that he intends the literal and symbolic meanings to be taken as

of equal importancemdashfor us to devote our full attention to take up one of the governing metaphors of this

1 N 199 n10 ldquoNuper ventosa isthaec amp enormis loquacitas Athenas ex Asia conmigrauit [hellip] simulque correpta elo-quentiae regula stetit amp obmutuit [hellip] Ac ne carmen quidem sani coloris enituitrdquo

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 discuss-

ing how Hamann refuses to privilege abstract ldquopurely mentalrdquo thought over the particular words in

which that thought finds expression Berlin concludes that ldquofor 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)rdquo1 As an example of one such contradiction Berlin cites the line placed at the head

of this section ldquoto speak is to translaterdquo For Berlin it follows from Hamannrsquos insistence on the unity of

reason and language that no translation no correspondence between words ideas and things can be es-

tablished

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 attend-ing to ideas or to language and through them (because they correspond) to the facts was a method of judging and knowing reality [hellip But the] notion of a correspondence that there is an objective world on one side and on the other man and his instruments ndash lan-guage ideas and so forth ndash attempting to approximate to this objective reality is a false picture There is only a flow of sensations2

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 ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 reproduced3 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 Hamannrsquos treatise but unable to claim any continuity of thought therewith

1 Berlin 81

2 Ibid

3 Though one might question even this Ποταμῷ γὰρ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐμβῆναι δὶς τῷ αὐτῷ and there is no reason to think

any two ldquoflows of sensationrdquo could ever be substantially identical Necessarily every ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos view Berlin is perplexed when confronted with Hamannrsquos open assertion

that translation is possible between ldquohuman speechrdquo and the ldquospeech of angelsrdquo and can only conclude

that Hamann here contradicts himself And for Berlin it is quite to be expected that Hamann should con-

tradict himself he regards Hamannrsquos thought in general as highly creative and intriguing Schwaumlrmerei

of note for its pivotal place in intellectual history but completely insusceptible or unworthy of serious

philosophic attention Berlin appreciates Hamannrsquos criticism of the Enlightenment and his prescient

awareness of the lifeless bloodless conception of manrsquos spiritual life that the Enlighteners would ultimate-

ly produce While Berlin claims to understand Hamannrsquos motives in writing he utterly rejects the content

of his writings which he regards as ldquothe cry of a trapped man hellip who cannot be brought to see that to be

regimented or eliminated is either inevitable or desirablerdquo1 For Berlin Hamann is simply a ldquofanaticrdquo

whose writings consist of ldquopassionate rhetoric and not careful thoughtrdquo and whose opinions are ldquogrotes-

quely one-sided a violent exaggeration of the uniqueness of men and things [and] a passionate hatred of

menrsquos wish to understand the universerdquo2 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 pur-

ism of Hitler3 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 Berlinrsquos judgment that Hamann

1 Berlin 116

2 Berlin 121

3 This accusation is presented in Berlinrsquos book in a series of insinuations we are told for example that Hamannrsquos

ldquohatred and blind irrationalism have fed the stream that has led to social and political irrationalism particularly in German in our own [20

th] centuryrdquo (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 Berlinrsquos 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

34

simply contradicts himself in allowing for the possibility of translation in and out of symbolic ldquolanguag-

esrdquo Hamann has very little patience for ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs which promise patent

meaning and unambiguous interpretation This is perfectly in keeping with his general distaste for effi-

cient 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 ldquopoeticrdquo and ldquosymbolicrdquo signs not to fall under the same fierce criticism as the others

ldquoTo speak is to translaterdquo and ldquocreation is a speech to the creature through the creaturerdquo These

two maxims placed very near to each other in the text1 suggest something of a solution to the problem to

which Berlin directs our attention The conjunction of these lines should remind us that Hamann wheth-

er he directing his attention to literature philology esthetics or any other subject is always also a reli-

gious thinker The archetype of every text is for him the Bible and biblical exegesis is the model and ca-

non 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 Michaelisrsquos ldquodenial of a mystical typological sense

of Scripturerdquo2 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 Mi-

chaelis 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 ldquoTo merdquo says Hamann ldquoevery book is a Biblerdquo3 like the Bible then every

book must be read not merely for its literal sense Berlinrsquos reading of Hamann might be correct if Ha-

1 N 118-119

2 Betz 114

3 Briefwechsel I p 309 trans in Betz 47

35

mann were speaking about the everyday world of words and things understood as a brute fact But Ha-

mann 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 re-

mind us that the interpretation of tongues is also a divine gift1 he admits even that persons may not un-

derstand what they themselves to and say Even a figure such as Voltaire hardly a friend of religious out-

looks testifies for those who have ears to hear to the rightness of Hamannrsquos views

kann man wohl einen glaubwuumlrdigern Zeugen als den unfrac34erblilten Voltaire anfuumlhren wellter bey-nahe die Religion fuumlr den Eckfrac34ein der epifrac14en Dilttkunfrac34 erklaumlrt [hellip] Voltaire aber der Hohe-priefrac34er im Tempel des Gefrac14macks frac14luumlszligt so buumlndig als Kaiphas und denkt frulttbarer als He-rodes2

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 ldquoHo-

hepriefrac34er im Tempelrdquo but also a somewhat Machiavellian politician) justifies the crucifixion of Christ by

arguing that ldquoit is expedient that one man should die for the peoplerdquo3 believing himself to be discussing a

political necessity while as if prophetically describing the Christian doctrine of the atonement And He-

rodrsquos deceitful remark to the Magi ldquothat I might also come and worship himrdquo is taken since Herod was

king of the Jews though a gentile by race to represent the universal destiny of the Christian religion4 This

tradition of interpretation habitual in Biblical exegesis Hamann applies also to analysis of the wordmdashso

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 1210

2 Nadler 204-5

3 John 1150

4 It is telling that Hamann chooses such a contrived and complicated case of biblical parallelism as this one his ar-

gument 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

36

will readily concede that ldquowe see through a glass darklyrdquo1 and that we may not even be able to descry the

true outlines of our own persons in this mirrormdashbut by invoking the language of mirrors2 he locates him-

self within a tradition of thought according to which nature however flawed parts of it may be and how-

ever dulled our ability to discern itmdashis 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 se-

cular 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 ldquoblind heathensrdquo

Blinde Heyden haben die Unilttbarkeit erkannt die der Menfrac14 mit GOTT gemein hat Die verhuumlllte Figur des Leibes das Antlitz des Hauptes und das Aumluszligerfrac34e der Arme ind das ilttbare Sltema in dem wir einher gehn dolt eigentlilt niltts als ein Zeigefinger des verborge-nen Menfrac14en in unsmdash Exemplumque DEI quisque est in imagine parva3

Note that the ldquospiritualrdquo 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 ldquoindex fingersrdquo which direct the inner man to

our attention Hamann let us recall4 does not believe that the target of this ldquoZeigefingerrdquo can always be

1 1 Cor 1312

2 Though Hamann is in some ways a very modern thinker who anticipates 20

th century thought about the kinship of

reason and language he here looks back to the middle ages Cf Alan of Lille ldquoOmnis mundi creatura Quasi liber et pictura Nobis est et speculumrdquo With the sentiment and conceit of this verse Hamann could not agree more 3 N 198 The quotation from the Astronomicon of Manilius (IV895) is mainly noteworthy for its having been writ-

ten by a pagan author while echoing the language of Genesis regarding the ldquoimage of Godrdquo The Cambridge edition of Hamann misenglishes this line rendering it as ldquoEach one is an instance of God in miniaturerdquo This not only loses the connection to the book of Genesis conveyed by the word ldquoimagordquo but puts far too much weight on the word ldquoexemplumrdquo as well An exemplum is not an instance but a type model or analogue ldquoInstancerdquo implies an occur-rence of a rationally determinable kind a ldquotyperdquo or ldquoanaloguerdquo 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

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 circumstancesmdashthis 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 re-

fers to ldquocorrespondencesrdquo of thing and idea and of idea and word these ldquocorrespondencesrdquo are for Berlin

relations between two different things of different types He is quite correct to judge that Hamann consid-

ers 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 meaningmdashhe 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 justifica-

tion 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 ldquoConclusionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos own line that ldquocreation is a speech to the creature

through the creaturerdquo 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 cor-

respond to each other based on no apodictically determinable system knowable a priori but on the gra-

tuitous (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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 com-

pared translation to the art of understanding the image of a tapestry from looking only at the backs of the

threads he remarks ldquoDort [ie in the original contexts of the metaphors borrowed from other authors for

39

Hamannrsquos text] werden ie aber ad illustrationem (zur Verbraumlmung des Rockes) hier ad inuolucrum (zum

Hemde auf bloszligem Leibe) gebrauchtrdquo1 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 deco-

rated 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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos which ac-

cording to the line of interpretation I have explored reveals as much about Hamannrsquos 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 tear-

ing 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 Hamannrsquos motion between images his construction of typological

schemes that resist easy classification and one-for-one interpretation is not antirational raving or obscu-

rantism but rather an alternativemdashand a quite compelling onemdashto 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

1 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 tho-

roughly religious vision of the world If one is willing to do this Hamann is a kind of prophetmdashand the

horned head of Pan on his title-page is also the horned head of Moses1 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 pro-

ducing neat tables of Hamannrsquos 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 Aes-

thetica 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 somethingmdashunless there really is some secret ineffable law of correspondences that un-

ites 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 commen-

tators and writers of senior essays have no right to tread

1 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 agrave la Mosaiumlque (Roth 103 343)

41

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin Isaiah The Magus of the North JG Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism ed Henry

Hardy London John Murray 1993 Betz John After Enlightenment the Post-Secular Vision of JG Hamann Chichester John Wiley amp Sons

2009 Hamann Johann Georg Hamannrsquos Schriften ed Friedrich Roth Berlin G Reimer 1821 (Cited as

ldquoRothrdquo All citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Saumlmtliche Werke ed Josef Nadler Wien Verlag Herder 1950 (Cited as ldquoNad-

lerrdquo Unless otherwise noted all citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Writings on Philosophy and Language trans and ed Kenneth Haynes Cam-

bridge Cambridge UP 2007 (Cited as ldquoHaynesrdquo) Jacobs Carol ldquoHamann Is a Nomadic Writer lsquoAesthetica in nucersquordquo in Skirting the Ethical Stanford Stan-

ford UP 2008 pp 111-130 OrsquoFlaherty James C The Quarrel of Reason with Itself Essays on Hamann Michaelis Lessing Nietzsche Co-

lumbia SC Camden 1988

23

[hellip] houmlrenldquo1 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 vari-

ous meditations on human life that compose the text of the biblical book2 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

summarymdasha 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 Hamannrsquos 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 readerrsquos confusion It is not Hamannrsquos 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 writings3 it is perhaps not sur-

prising then if the Aesthetica in nuce presents us with hermeneutic difficulties that neither the text itself

nor comparisons with Hamannrsquos other works nor consideration of Hamannrsquos engagement with the issues

of his time are adequate to dispel But the paradox we are considering heremdashthe simultaneous focus on

both columns of the table with which this chapter beganmdashis so fundamental to the thought of the Aesthe-

tica in nuce that unless we can come to terms with it in some way Hamannrsquos 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

1 Ibid

2 Cf Lutherbibel Predig 1213 ldquoLaszligt uns die Hauptumme aller Lehre houmlrenldquo 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 ldquoApostillerdquo likewise to be a undermining of all that goes before it 3 ldquoI no longer understand myself quite differently from then some [writings I understand] better some worse [hellip]

[hellip] 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 stuffrdquo Briefwechsel V p 358 trans in Betz 229

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 ldquodie ilt nolt im bloszligen Bult-frac34a-bi-ren uumlbenmdashmdashund wahrlilt wahrlilt Kinder muumlfrac12en

wir werden wenn wir den Geifrac34 der Wahrheit empfahen ollenldquo1 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 ldquoSpirit of

Truth whom the world cannot receiverdquo (Jn 1417) 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 spiri-

tual pole than to the elemental literal material one But how says Hamannrsquos Nuszlig is this Spirit of Truth

to be received By becoming like children who are just learning to spellmdashand 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 ldquoBultfrac34abirenrdquo syllable by syllable confirms that Hamann is referring to this style of interpreta-

tion Recalling now the table at the start of this chapter in which letters and the ldquospirit of truthrdquo

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 ldquoVerlieren die Elemente des A B C ihre natuumlrlilte

Bedeutung wenn ie in der unendlichen Zuammenetzung willkuumlrlilter Zeilten uns an Ideen erinnern die wo niltt

im Himmel dolt im Gehirn indrdquo2 To this question of course we are meant to answer ldquonordquo But there is

much here that is not unproblematic or at least not simple What for instance is the ldquonatuumlrlilte Bedeu-

tungrdquo of a letter And how if the combination of these signs be arbitrary does it recall for us ideas And

1 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 Hamannrsquos voice at least on Hamannrsquos 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 wersquore 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 Greeksmdashbut 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 coin-

cidence is merely an opportunity to bring the opposites as opposites together But this assumption natu-

ral 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 experiencemdashthis 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 Hamannrsquos writing admits of both a macros-

copic 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 conjunc-

tion 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 them1 considering these various levels of read-

ing 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 simultaneous-

ly 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 interpreta-

tion could be set forth that might allow us to translate Hamannrsquos simultaneously cabalistic and rhapsodic

utterances into academic language or to devise summaries of his arguments in a neatly symbolic lan-

guage 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 oumlffentlilter Gebrault 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 Hamannrsquos thought is useful also here Sltoumlpfung ifrac34 eine Rede an die Kreatur durlt die Kreatur The

Christian overtones of such a formulation are obvious Hamann once offered an encapsulation of his

thought in the word λόγος2 a famously polysemous term every sense of which Hamann intends The in-

timate connection between reason and language is of course the most obvious philosophical implication of

1 For Hamannrsquos defense of this possibility see Chapter 4

2 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 Hamannrsquos philosophy But for Hamann λόγος 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 Hamannrsquos piety placed a great emphasis on the self-emptying of Christ Howev-

er much he might stress Christrsquos humanity and suffering though he remained well within the main-

stream 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 diffi-

culties here But there is a clear parallel between the way a Christian thinks of Christ and how Hamann

thinks ofmdashwell more or less everything Christ is a man who lived for a certain stretch of time in a cer-

tain place and is also the eternal God A word is a string of letters small shapes arbitrarily strung togeth-

er and is also a sign of a concept an immaterial thing existing in the mind Hamann is no dualistmdashit 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

Zufoumlrderfrac34 muumlfrac34e man D George Benon fragen ob die Einheit mit der Mannigfaltigkeit niltt befrac34ehen koumlnne [hellip] Der bultfrac34aumlblilte oder grammatifrac14e der fleifrac14liche oder dialectifrac14e der ka-pernaitifrac14e oder historifrac14e Sinn ind im houmlltfrac34en Grade myfrac34ilt und haumlngen von ollten augen-blicklilten pirituoumlen willkuumlhrlilten Nebenbefrac34immungen und Umfrac34aumlnden ab daszlig man ohne hinauf gen Himmel zu fahren die Schluumlfrac12el ihrer Erkenntnis niltt herabholen kann1

1 Nadler 203 note 23 Hamannrsquos footnote is attached to some lines of Latin verse which conclude the Nutrsquos letter to the Learned Rabbi They come from a poem traditionally and falsely attributed to the Emperor Augustus explain-ing why Vergilrsquos orders to destroy the drafts of the Aeneid were ignored after the poetrsquos death The excerpts are

Ah scelus indignum soluetur litera diues Frangatur potius legum veneranda potestas Liber amp alma Ceres succurrite mdash mdash [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 mdashwhich for Hamann who does not oppose the spirit and the letter in a conventional way is a spiritual richnessmdashis 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

28

It is not that interpretation ought to be literal physical or ldquoCapernaiticrdquo 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 understandingmdashthat is unless one has

attained a certain degree of spiritual insight ndashone will be unable to understand things even in their literal

senses for the spiritual and literal senses are one Hamannrsquos 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 expe-

rience 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 inten-

tion of this line of thought has been least of all to stimulate pious feelings Hamannrsquos goal is not to spiri-

tualize 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 (ldquoDie Sinne aber ind Ceres und Bacltus die Leidenfrac14aftenrdquo [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 simplis-tically 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 Hamannrsquos ability to com-press his meaning into very few and very cryptic words NB The ldquoCapernaiticrdquo sense refers to the sense in which Christ is literally present in the Christian sacrament This unusual word is used derogatively in Lutheran texts (eg the Epitome of the Konkordienformel) to disparage Catholic sacramental teaching Its origins are in Jn 65559 ldquoFor my flesh is meat indeed and my blood is drink in-deed [hellip] These things he said in the synagogue as he taught in Capernaumrdquo 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 Luthe-ran understanding according to which Christ is present in the sacrament in a merely spiritual way is less than per-fectly compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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

Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 im-

plied meanings into the literal tropological allegorical and anagogical senses that Christians have tradi-

tionally 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 ormdashto employ a metaphor

more perhaps more congenial to Hamannmdashdiscerning 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 indul-

gence 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 slo-

gan from the text itselfmdashldquoto speak is to translaterdquomdashand 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 uumlberetzenmdashaus einer Engelpralte in eine Menfrac14enpralte das heifrac34 Gedanken in WortemdashSalten in NamenmdashBilder in Zeilten die poetifrac14 oder kyriologifrac14 hifrac34orifrac14 oder ymbolifrac14 oder hieroglyphifrac14mdashmdashund philoophifrac14 oder ltarakterifrac34ifrac14 eyn koumlnnen1

Here we are given a license to translate Hamannrsquos images into signs of various kinds It is no surprise that

in a footnote attached to this text he derogates the ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs by citing a pas-

sage of Petronius which complains that a new fashion of ldquopuffed-up and formless talkativenessrdquo has cor-

1 Nadler 199

31

rupted speech so that ldquothe standard of eloquence being corrupted has been halted and struck dumbrdquo

and ldquonot even poetry displays a healthy colorrdquo1 By ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs we should un-

derstand something like Leibnizrsquos 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 criti-

cism 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 cor-

respondences out of the text But the other kinds of signsmdashthe poetic or symbolicmdashdo not seem to fall

under the same criticismmdashthese suggest a kind of sign which indeed has meaning but whose interpreta-

tion 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 Hamannrsquos thought allows even for this kind of correspon-

dence 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 Hamannrsquos text but also is deeply compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos text to assert that he intends the literal and symbolic meanings to be taken as

of equal importancemdashfor us to devote our full attention to take up one of the governing metaphors of this

1 N 199 n10 ldquoNuper ventosa isthaec amp enormis loquacitas Athenas ex Asia conmigrauit [hellip] simulque correpta elo-quentiae regula stetit amp obmutuit [hellip] Ac ne carmen quidem sani coloris enituitrdquo

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 discuss-

ing how Hamann refuses to privilege abstract ldquopurely mentalrdquo thought over the particular words in

which that thought finds expression Berlin concludes that ldquofor 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)rdquo1 As an example of one such contradiction Berlin cites the line placed at the head

of this section ldquoto speak is to translaterdquo For Berlin it follows from Hamannrsquos insistence on the unity of

reason and language that no translation no correspondence between words ideas and things can be es-

tablished

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 attend-ing to ideas or to language and through them (because they correspond) to the facts was a method of judging and knowing reality [hellip But the] notion of a correspondence that there is an objective world on one side and on the other man and his instruments ndash lan-guage ideas and so forth ndash attempting to approximate to this objective reality is a false picture There is only a flow of sensations2

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 ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 reproduced3 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 Hamannrsquos treatise but unable to claim any continuity of thought therewith

1 Berlin 81

2 Ibid

3 Though one might question even this Ποταμῷ γὰρ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐμβῆναι δὶς τῷ αὐτῷ and there is no reason to think

any two ldquoflows of sensationrdquo could ever be substantially identical Necessarily every ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos view Berlin is perplexed when confronted with Hamannrsquos open assertion

that translation is possible between ldquohuman speechrdquo and the ldquospeech of angelsrdquo and can only conclude

that Hamann here contradicts himself And for Berlin it is quite to be expected that Hamann should con-

tradict himself he regards Hamannrsquos thought in general as highly creative and intriguing Schwaumlrmerei

of note for its pivotal place in intellectual history but completely insusceptible or unworthy of serious

philosophic attention Berlin appreciates Hamannrsquos criticism of the Enlightenment and his prescient

awareness of the lifeless bloodless conception of manrsquos spiritual life that the Enlighteners would ultimate-

ly produce While Berlin claims to understand Hamannrsquos motives in writing he utterly rejects the content

of his writings which he regards as ldquothe cry of a trapped man hellip who cannot be brought to see that to be

regimented or eliminated is either inevitable or desirablerdquo1 For Berlin Hamann is simply a ldquofanaticrdquo

whose writings consist of ldquopassionate rhetoric and not careful thoughtrdquo and whose opinions are ldquogrotes-

quely one-sided a violent exaggeration of the uniqueness of men and things [and] a passionate hatred of

menrsquos wish to understand the universerdquo2 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 pur-

ism of Hitler3 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 Berlinrsquos judgment that Hamann

1 Berlin 116

2 Berlin 121

3 This accusation is presented in Berlinrsquos book in a series of insinuations we are told for example that Hamannrsquos

ldquohatred and blind irrationalism have fed the stream that has led to social and political irrationalism particularly in German in our own [20

th] centuryrdquo (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 Berlinrsquos 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

34

simply contradicts himself in allowing for the possibility of translation in and out of symbolic ldquolanguag-

esrdquo Hamann has very little patience for ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs which promise patent

meaning and unambiguous interpretation This is perfectly in keeping with his general distaste for effi-

cient 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 ldquopoeticrdquo and ldquosymbolicrdquo signs not to fall under the same fierce criticism as the others

ldquoTo speak is to translaterdquo and ldquocreation is a speech to the creature through the creaturerdquo These

two maxims placed very near to each other in the text1 suggest something of a solution to the problem to

which Berlin directs our attention The conjunction of these lines should remind us that Hamann wheth-

er he directing his attention to literature philology esthetics or any other subject is always also a reli-

gious thinker The archetype of every text is for him the Bible and biblical exegesis is the model and ca-

non 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 Michaelisrsquos ldquodenial of a mystical typological sense

of Scripturerdquo2 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 Mi-

chaelis 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 ldquoTo merdquo says Hamann ldquoevery book is a Biblerdquo3 like the Bible then every

book must be read not merely for its literal sense Berlinrsquos reading of Hamann might be correct if Ha-

1 N 118-119

2 Betz 114

3 Briefwechsel I p 309 trans in Betz 47

35

mann were speaking about the everyday world of words and things understood as a brute fact But Ha-

mann 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 re-

mind us that the interpretation of tongues is also a divine gift1 he admits even that persons may not un-

derstand what they themselves to and say Even a figure such as Voltaire hardly a friend of religious out-

looks testifies for those who have ears to hear to the rightness of Hamannrsquos views

kann man wohl einen glaubwuumlrdigern Zeugen als den unfrac34erblilten Voltaire anfuumlhren wellter bey-nahe die Religion fuumlr den Eckfrac34ein der epifrac14en Dilttkunfrac34 erklaumlrt [hellip] Voltaire aber der Hohe-priefrac34er im Tempel des Gefrac14macks frac14luumlszligt so buumlndig als Kaiphas und denkt frulttbarer als He-rodes2

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 ldquoHo-

hepriefrac34er im Tempelrdquo but also a somewhat Machiavellian politician) justifies the crucifixion of Christ by

arguing that ldquoit is expedient that one man should die for the peoplerdquo3 believing himself to be discussing a

political necessity while as if prophetically describing the Christian doctrine of the atonement And He-

rodrsquos deceitful remark to the Magi ldquothat I might also come and worship himrdquo is taken since Herod was

king of the Jews though a gentile by race to represent the universal destiny of the Christian religion4 This

tradition of interpretation habitual in Biblical exegesis Hamann applies also to analysis of the wordmdashso

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 1210

2 Nadler 204-5

3 John 1150

4 It is telling that Hamann chooses such a contrived and complicated case of biblical parallelism as this one his ar-

gument 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

36

will readily concede that ldquowe see through a glass darklyrdquo1 and that we may not even be able to descry the

true outlines of our own persons in this mirrormdashbut by invoking the language of mirrors2 he locates him-

self within a tradition of thought according to which nature however flawed parts of it may be and how-

ever dulled our ability to discern itmdashis 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 se-

cular 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 ldquoblind heathensrdquo

Blinde Heyden haben die Unilttbarkeit erkannt die der Menfrac14 mit GOTT gemein hat Die verhuumlllte Figur des Leibes das Antlitz des Hauptes und das Aumluszligerfrac34e der Arme ind das ilttbare Sltema in dem wir einher gehn dolt eigentlilt niltts als ein Zeigefinger des verborge-nen Menfrac14en in unsmdash Exemplumque DEI quisque est in imagine parva3

Note that the ldquospiritualrdquo 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 ldquoindex fingersrdquo which direct the inner man to

our attention Hamann let us recall4 does not believe that the target of this ldquoZeigefingerrdquo can always be

1 1 Cor 1312

2 Though Hamann is in some ways a very modern thinker who anticipates 20

th century thought about the kinship of

reason and language he here looks back to the middle ages Cf Alan of Lille ldquoOmnis mundi creatura Quasi liber et pictura Nobis est et speculumrdquo With the sentiment and conceit of this verse Hamann could not agree more 3 N 198 The quotation from the Astronomicon of Manilius (IV895) is mainly noteworthy for its having been writ-

ten by a pagan author while echoing the language of Genesis regarding the ldquoimage of Godrdquo The Cambridge edition of Hamann misenglishes this line rendering it as ldquoEach one is an instance of God in miniaturerdquo This not only loses the connection to the book of Genesis conveyed by the word ldquoimagordquo but puts far too much weight on the word ldquoexemplumrdquo as well An exemplum is not an instance but a type model or analogue ldquoInstancerdquo implies an occur-rence of a rationally determinable kind a ldquotyperdquo or ldquoanaloguerdquo 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

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 circumstancesmdashthis 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 re-

fers to ldquocorrespondencesrdquo of thing and idea and of idea and word these ldquocorrespondencesrdquo are for Berlin

relations between two different things of different types He is quite correct to judge that Hamann consid-

ers 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 meaningmdashhe 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 justifica-

tion 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 ldquoConclusionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos own line that ldquocreation is a speech to the creature

through the creaturerdquo 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 cor-

respond to each other based on no apodictically determinable system knowable a priori but on the gra-

tuitous (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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 com-

pared translation to the art of understanding the image of a tapestry from looking only at the backs of the

threads he remarks ldquoDort [ie in the original contexts of the metaphors borrowed from other authors for

39

Hamannrsquos text] werden ie aber ad illustrationem (zur Verbraumlmung des Rockes) hier ad inuolucrum (zum

Hemde auf bloszligem Leibe) gebrauchtrdquo1 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 deco-

rated 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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos which ac-

cording to the line of interpretation I have explored reveals as much about Hamannrsquos 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 tear-

ing 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 Hamannrsquos motion between images his construction of typological

schemes that resist easy classification and one-for-one interpretation is not antirational raving or obscu-

rantism but rather an alternativemdashand a quite compelling onemdashto 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

1 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 tho-

roughly religious vision of the world If one is willing to do this Hamann is a kind of prophetmdashand the

horned head of Pan on his title-page is also the horned head of Moses1 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 pro-

ducing neat tables of Hamannrsquos 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 Aes-

thetica 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 somethingmdashunless there really is some secret ineffable law of correspondences that un-

ites 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 commen-

tators and writers of senior essays have no right to tread

1 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 agrave la Mosaiumlque (Roth 103 343)

41

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin Isaiah The Magus of the North JG Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism ed Henry

Hardy London John Murray 1993 Betz John After Enlightenment the Post-Secular Vision of JG Hamann Chichester John Wiley amp Sons

2009 Hamann Johann Georg Hamannrsquos Schriften ed Friedrich Roth Berlin G Reimer 1821 (Cited as

ldquoRothrdquo All citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Saumlmtliche Werke ed Josef Nadler Wien Verlag Herder 1950 (Cited as ldquoNad-

lerrdquo Unless otherwise noted all citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Writings on Philosophy and Language trans and ed Kenneth Haynes Cam-

bridge Cambridge UP 2007 (Cited as ldquoHaynesrdquo) Jacobs Carol ldquoHamann Is a Nomadic Writer lsquoAesthetica in nucersquordquo in Skirting the Ethical Stanford Stan-

ford UP 2008 pp 111-130 OrsquoFlaherty James C The Quarrel of Reason with Itself Essays on Hamann Michaelis Lessing Nietzsche Co-

lumbia SC Camden 1988

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 ldquodie ilt nolt im bloszligen Bult-frac34a-bi-ren uumlbenmdashmdashund wahrlilt wahrlilt Kinder muumlfrac12en

wir werden wenn wir den Geifrac34 der Wahrheit empfahen ollenldquo1 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 ldquoSpirit of

Truth whom the world cannot receiverdquo (Jn 1417) 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 spiri-

tual pole than to the elemental literal material one But how says Hamannrsquos Nuszlig is this Spirit of Truth

to be received By becoming like children who are just learning to spellmdashand 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 ldquoBultfrac34abirenrdquo syllable by syllable confirms that Hamann is referring to this style of interpreta-

tion Recalling now the table at the start of this chapter in which letters and the ldquospirit of truthrdquo

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 ldquoVerlieren die Elemente des A B C ihre natuumlrlilte

Bedeutung wenn ie in der unendlichen Zuammenetzung willkuumlrlilter Zeilten uns an Ideen erinnern die wo niltt

im Himmel dolt im Gehirn indrdquo2 To this question of course we are meant to answer ldquonordquo But there is

much here that is not unproblematic or at least not simple What for instance is the ldquonatuumlrlilte Bedeu-

tungrdquo of a letter And how if the combination of these signs be arbitrary does it recall for us ideas And

1 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 Hamannrsquos voice at least on Hamannrsquos 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 wersquore 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 Greeksmdashbut 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 coin-

cidence is merely an opportunity to bring the opposites as opposites together But this assumption natu-

ral 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 experiencemdashthis 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 Hamannrsquos writing admits of both a macros-

copic 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 conjunc-

tion 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 them1 considering these various levels of read-

ing 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 simultaneous-

ly 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 interpreta-

tion could be set forth that might allow us to translate Hamannrsquos simultaneously cabalistic and rhapsodic

utterances into academic language or to devise summaries of his arguments in a neatly symbolic lan-

guage 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 oumlffentlilter Gebrault 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 Hamannrsquos thought is useful also here Sltoumlpfung ifrac34 eine Rede an die Kreatur durlt die Kreatur The

Christian overtones of such a formulation are obvious Hamann once offered an encapsulation of his

thought in the word λόγος2 a famously polysemous term every sense of which Hamann intends The in-

timate connection between reason and language is of course the most obvious philosophical implication of

1 For Hamannrsquos defense of this possibility see Chapter 4

2 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 Hamannrsquos philosophy But for Hamann λόγος 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 Hamannrsquos piety placed a great emphasis on the self-emptying of Christ Howev-

er much he might stress Christrsquos humanity and suffering though he remained well within the main-

stream 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 diffi-

culties here But there is a clear parallel between the way a Christian thinks of Christ and how Hamann

thinks ofmdashwell more or less everything Christ is a man who lived for a certain stretch of time in a cer-

tain place and is also the eternal God A word is a string of letters small shapes arbitrarily strung togeth-

er and is also a sign of a concept an immaterial thing existing in the mind Hamann is no dualistmdashit 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

Zufoumlrderfrac34 muumlfrac34e man D George Benon fragen ob die Einheit mit der Mannigfaltigkeit niltt befrac34ehen koumlnne [hellip] Der bultfrac34aumlblilte oder grammatifrac14e der fleifrac14liche oder dialectifrac14e der ka-pernaitifrac14e oder historifrac14e Sinn ind im houmlltfrac34en Grade myfrac34ilt und haumlngen von ollten augen-blicklilten pirituoumlen willkuumlhrlilten Nebenbefrac34immungen und Umfrac34aumlnden ab daszlig man ohne hinauf gen Himmel zu fahren die Schluumlfrac12el ihrer Erkenntnis niltt herabholen kann1

1 Nadler 203 note 23 Hamannrsquos footnote is attached to some lines of Latin verse which conclude the Nutrsquos letter to the Learned Rabbi They come from a poem traditionally and falsely attributed to the Emperor Augustus explain-ing why Vergilrsquos orders to destroy the drafts of the Aeneid were ignored after the poetrsquos death The excerpts are

Ah scelus indignum soluetur litera diues Frangatur potius legum veneranda potestas Liber amp alma Ceres succurrite mdash mdash [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 mdashwhich for Hamann who does not oppose the spirit and the letter in a conventional way is a spiritual richnessmdashis 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

28

It is not that interpretation ought to be literal physical or ldquoCapernaiticrdquo 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 understandingmdashthat is unless one has

attained a certain degree of spiritual insight ndashone will be unable to understand things even in their literal

senses for the spiritual and literal senses are one Hamannrsquos 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 expe-

rience 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 inten-

tion of this line of thought has been least of all to stimulate pious feelings Hamannrsquos goal is not to spiri-

tualize 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 (ldquoDie Sinne aber ind Ceres und Bacltus die Leidenfrac14aftenrdquo [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 simplis-tically 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 Hamannrsquos ability to com-press his meaning into very few and very cryptic words NB The ldquoCapernaiticrdquo sense refers to the sense in which Christ is literally present in the Christian sacrament This unusual word is used derogatively in Lutheran texts (eg the Epitome of the Konkordienformel) to disparage Catholic sacramental teaching Its origins are in Jn 65559 ldquoFor my flesh is meat indeed and my blood is drink in-deed [hellip] These things he said in the synagogue as he taught in Capernaumrdquo 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 Luthe-ran understanding according to which Christ is present in the sacrament in a merely spiritual way is less than per-fectly compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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

Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 im-

plied meanings into the literal tropological allegorical and anagogical senses that Christians have tradi-

tionally 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 ormdashto employ a metaphor

more perhaps more congenial to Hamannmdashdiscerning 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 indul-

gence 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 slo-

gan from the text itselfmdashldquoto speak is to translaterdquomdashand 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 uumlberetzenmdashaus einer Engelpralte in eine Menfrac14enpralte das heifrac34 Gedanken in WortemdashSalten in NamenmdashBilder in Zeilten die poetifrac14 oder kyriologifrac14 hifrac34orifrac14 oder ymbolifrac14 oder hieroglyphifrac14mdashmdashund philoophifrac14 oder ltarakterifrac34ifrac14 eyn koumlnnen1

Here we are given a license to translate Hamannrsquos images into signs of various kinds It is no surprise that

in a footnote attached to this text he derogates the ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs by citing a pas-

sage of Petronius which complains that a new fashion of ldquopuffed-up and formless talkativenessrdquo has cor-

1 Nadler 199

31

rupted speech so that ldquothe standard of eloquence being corrupted has been halted and struck dumbrdquo

and ldquonot even poetry displays a healthy colorrdquo1 By ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs we should un-

derstand something like Leibnizrsquos 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 criti-

cism 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 cor-

respondences out of the text But the other kinds of signsmdashthe poetic or symbolicmdashdo not seem to fall

under the same criticismmdashthese suggest a kind of sign which indeed has meaning but whose interpreta-

tion 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 Hamannrsquos thought allows even for this kind of correspon-

dence 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 Hamannrsquos text but also is deeply compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos text to assert that he intends the literal and symbolic meanings to be taken as

of equal importancemdashfor us to devote our full attention to take up one of the governing metaphors of this

1 N 199 n10 ldquoNuper ventosa isthaec amp enormis loquacitas Athenas ex Asia conmigrauit [hellip] simulque correpta elo-quentiae regula stetit amp obmutuit [hellip] Ac ne carmen quidem sani coloris enituitrdquo

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 discuss-

ing how Hamann refuses to privilege abstract ldquopurely mentalrdquo thought over the particular words in

which that thought finds expression Berlin concludes that ldquofor 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)rdquo1 As an example of one such contradiction Berlin cites the line placed at the head

of this section ldquoto speak is to translaterdquo For Berlin it follows from Hamannrsquos insistence on the unity of

reason and language that no translation no correspondence between words ideas and things can be es-

tablished

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 attend-ing to ideas or to language and through them (because they correspond) to the facts was a method of judging and knowing reality [hellip But the] notion of a correspondence that there is an objective world on one side and on the other man and his instruments ndash lan-guage ideas and so forth ndash attempting to approximate to this objective reality is a false picture There is only a flow of sensations2

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 ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 reproduced3 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 Hamannrsquos treatise but unable to claim any continuity of thought therewith

1 Berlin 81

2 Ibid

3 Though one might question even this Ποταμῷ γὰρ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐμβῆναι δὶς τῷ αὐτῷ and there is no reason to think

any two ldquoflows of sensationrdquo could ever be substantially identical Necessarily every ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos view Berlin is perplexed when confronted with Hamannrsquos open assertion

that translation is possible between ldquohuman speechrdquo and the ldquospeech of angelsrdquo and can only conclude

that Hamann here contradicts himself And for Berlin it is quite to be expected that Hamann should con-

tradict himself he regards Hamannrsquos thought in general as highly creative and intriguing Schwaumlrmerei

of note for its pivotal place in intellectual history but completely insusceptible or unworthy of serious

philosophic attention Berlin appreciates Hamannrsquos criticism of the Enlightenment and his prescient

awareness of the lifeless bloodless conception of manrsquos spiritual life that the Enlighteners would ultimate-

ly produce While Berlin claims to understand Hamannrsquos motives in writing he utterly rejects the content

of his writings which he regards as ldquothe cry of a trapped man hellip who cannot be brought to see that to be

regimented or eliminated is either inevitable or desirablerdquo1 For Berlin Hamann is simply a ldquofanaticrdquo

whose writings consist of ldquopassionate rhetoric and not careful thoughtrdquo and whose opinions are ldquogrotes-

quely one-sided a violent exaggeration of the uniqueness of men and things [and] a passionate hatred of

menrsquos wish to understand the universerdquo2 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 pur-

ism of Hitler3 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 Berlinrsquos judgment that Hamann

1 Berlin 116

2 Berlin 121

3 This accusation is presented in Berlinrsquos book in a series of insinuations we are told for example that Hamannrsquos

ldquohatred and blind irrationalism have fed the stream that has led to social and political irrationalism particularly in German in our own [20

th] centuryrdquo (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 Berlinrsquos 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

34

simply contradicts himself in allowing for the possibility of translation in and out of symbolic ldquolanguag-

esrdquo Hamann has very little patience for ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs which promise patent

meaning and unambiguous interpretation This is perfectly in keeping with his general distaste for effi-

cient 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 ldquopoeticrdquo and ldquosymbolicrdquo signs not to fall under the same fierce criticism as the others

ldquoTo speak is to translaterdquo and ldquocreation is a speech to the creature through the creaturerdquo These

two maxims placed very near to each other in the text1 suggest something of a solution to the problem to

which Berlin directs our attention The conjunction of these lines should remind us that Hamann wheth-

er he directing his attention to literature philology esthetics or any other subject is always also a reli-

gious thinker The archetype of every text is for him the Bible and biblical exegesis is the model and ca-

non 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 Michaelisrsquos ldquodenial of a mystical typological sense

of Scripturerdquo2 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 Mi-

chaelis 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 ldquoTo merdquo says Hamann ldquoevery book is a Biblerdquo3 like the Bible then every

book must be read not merely for its literal sense Berlinrsquos reading of Hamann might be correct if Ha-

1 N 118-119

2 Betz 114

3 Briefwechsel I p 309 trans in Betz 47

35

mann were speaking about the everyday world of words and things understood as a brute fact But Ha-

mann 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 re-

mind us that the interpretation of tongues is also a divine gift1 he admits even that persons may not un-

derstand what they themselves to and say Even a figure such as Voltaire hardly a friend of religious out-

looks testifies for those who have ears to hear to the rightness of Hamannrsquos views

kann man wohl einen glaubwuumlrdigern Zeugen als den unfrac34erblilten Voltaire anfuumlhren wellter bey-nahe die Religion fuumlr den Eckfrac34ein der epifrac14en Dilttkunfrac34 erklaumlrt [hellip] Voltaire aber der Hohe-priefrac34er im Tempel des Gefrac14macks frac14luumlszligt so buumlndig als Kaiphas und denkt frulttbarer als He-rodes2

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 ldquoHo-

hepriefrac34er im Tempelrdquo but also a somewhat Machiavellian politician) justifies the crucifixion of Christ by

arguing that ldquoit is expedient that one man should die for the peoplerdquo3 believing himself to be discussing a

political necessity while as if prophetically describing the Christian doctrine of the atonement And He-

rodrsquos deceitful remark to the Magi ldquothat I might also come and worship himrdquo is taken since Herod was

king of the Jews though a gentile by race to represent the universal destiny of the Christian religion4 This

tradition of interpretation habitual in Biblical exegesis Hamann applies also to analysis of the wordmdashso

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 1210

2 Nadler 204-5

3 John 1150

4 It is telling that Hamann chooses such a contrived and complicated case of biblical parallelism as this one his ar-

gument 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

36

will readily concede that ldquowe see through a glass darklyrdquo1 and that we may not even be able to descry the

true outlines of our own persons in this mirrormdashbut by invoking the language of mirrors2 he locates him-

self within a tradition of thought according to which nature however flawed parts of it may be and how-

ever dulled our ability to discern itmdashis 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 se-

cular 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 ldquoblind heathensrdquo

Blinde Heyden haben die Unilttbarkeit erkannt die der Menfrac14 mit GOTT gemein hat Die verhuumlllte Figur des Leibes das Antlitz des Hauptes und das Aumluszligerfrac34e der Arme ind das ilttbare Sltema in dem wir einher gehn dolt eigentlilt niltts als ein Zeigefinger des verborge-nen Menfrac14en in unsmdash Exemplumque DEI quisque est in imagine parva3

Note that the ldquospiritualrdquo 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 ldquoindex fingersrdquo which direct the inner man to

our attention Hamann let us recall4 does not believe that the target of this ldquoZeigefingerrdquo can always be

1 1 Cor 1312

2 Though Hamann is in some ways a very modern thinker who anticipates 20

th century thought about the kinship of

reason and language he here looks back to the middle ages Cf Alan of Lille ldquoOmnis mundi creatura Quasi liber et pictura Nobis est et speculumrdquo With the sentiment and conceit of this verse Hamann could not agree more 3 N 198 The quotation from the Astronomicon of Manilius (IV895) is mainly noteworthy for its having been writ-

ten by a pagan author while echoing the language of Genesis regarding the ldquoimage of Godrdquo The Cambridge edition of Hamann misenglishes this line rendering it as ldquoEach one is an instance of God in miniaturerdquo This not only loses the connection to the book of Genesis conveyed by the word ldquoimagordquo but puts far too much weight on the word ldquoexemplumrdquo as well An exemplum is not an instance but a type model or analogue ldquoInstancerdquo implies an occur-rence of a rationally determinable kind a ldquotyperdquo or ldquoanaloguerdquo 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

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 circumstancesmdashthis 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 re-

fers to ldquocorrespondencesrdquo of thing and idea and of idea and word these ldquocorrespondencesrdquo are for Berlin

relations between two different things of different types He is quite correct to judge that Hamann consid-

ers 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 meaningmdashhe 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 justifica-

tion 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 ldquoConclusionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos own line that ldquocreation is a speech to the creature

through the creaturerdquo 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 cor-

respond to each other based on no apodictically determinable system knowable a priori but on the gra-

tuitous (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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 com-

pared translation to the art of understanding the image of a tapestry from looking only at the backs of the

threads he remarks ldquoDort [ie in the original contexts of the metaphors borrowed from other authors for

39

Hamannrsquos text] werden ie aber ad illustrationem (zur Verbraumlmung des Rockes) hier ad inuolucrum (zum

Hemde auf bloszligem Leibe) gebrauchtrdquo1 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 deco-

rated 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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos which ac-

cording to the line of interpretation I have explored reveals as much about Hamannrsquos 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 tear-

ing 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 Hamannrsquos motion between images his construction of typological

schemes that resist easy classification and one-for-one interpretation is not antirational raving or obscu-

rantism but rather an alternativemdashand a quite compelling onemdashto 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

1 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 tho-

roughly religious vision of the world If one is willing to do this Hamann is a kind of prophetmdashand the

horned head of Pan on his title-page is also the horned head of Moses1 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 pro-

ducing neat tables of Hamannrsquos 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 Aes-

thetica 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 somethingmdashunless there really is some secret ineffable law of correspondences that un-

ites 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 commen-

tators and writers of senior essays have no right to tread

1 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 agrave la Mosaiumlque (Roth 103 343)

41

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin Isaiah The Magus of the North JG Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism ed Henry

Hardy London John Murray 1993 Betz John After Enlightenment the Post-Secular Vision of JG Hamann Chichester John Wiley amp Sons

2009 Hamann Johann Georg Hamannrsquos Schriften ed Friedrich Roth Berlin G Reimer 1821 (Cited as

ldquoRothrdquo All citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Saumlmtliche Werke ed Josef Nadler Wien Verlag Herder 1950 (Cited as ldquoNad-

lerrdquo Unless otherwise noted all citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Writings on Philosophy and Language trans and ed Kenneth Haynes Cam-

bridge Cambridge UP 2007 (Cited as ldquoHaynesrdquo) Jacobs Carol ldquoHamann Is a Nomadic Writer lsquoAesthetica in nucersquordquo in Skirting the Ethical Stanford Stan-

ford UP 2008 pp 111-130 OrsquoFlaherty James C The Quarrel of Reason with Itself Essays on Hamann Michaelis Lessing Nietzsche Co-

lumbia SC Camden 1988

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 wersquore 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 Greeksmdashbut 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 coin-

cidence is merely an opportunity to bring the opposites as opposites together But this assumption natu-

ral 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 experiencemdashthis 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 Hamannrsquos writing admits of both a macros-

copic 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 conjunc-

tion 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 them1 considering these various levels of read-

ing 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 simultaneous-

ly 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 interpreta-

tion could be set forth that might allow us to translate Hamannrsquos simultaneously cabalistic and rhapsodic

utterances into academic language or to devise summaries of his arguments in a neatly symbolic lan-

guage 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 oumlffentlilter Gebrault 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 Hamannrsquos thought is useful also here Sltoumlpfung ifrac34 eine Rede an die Kreatur durlt die Kreatur The

Christian overtones of such a formulation are obvious Hamann once offered an encapsulation of his

thought in the word λόγος2 a famously polysemous term every sense of which Hamann intends The in-

timate connection between reason and language is of course the most obvious philosophical implication of

1 For Hamannrsquos defense of this possibility see Chapter 4

2 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 Hamannrsquos philosophy But for Hamann λόγος 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 Hamannrsquos piety placed a great emphasis on the self-emptying of Christ Howev-

er much he might stress Christrsquos humanity and suffering though he remained well within the main-

stream 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 diffi-

culties here But there is a clear parallel between the way a Christian thinks of Christ and how Hamann

thinks ofmdashwell more or less everything Christ is a man who lived for a certain stretch of time in a cer-

tain place and is also the eternal God A word is a string of letters small shapes arbitrarily strung togeth-

er and is also a sign of a concept an immaterial thing existing in the mind Hamann is no dualistmdashit 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

Zufoumlrderfrac34 muumlfrac34e man D George Benon fragen ob die Einheit mit der Mannigfaltigkeit niltt befrac34ehen koumlnne [hellip] Der bultfrac34aumlblilte oder grammatifrac14e der fleifrac14liche oder dialectifrac14e der ka-pernaitifrac14e oder historifrac14e Sinn ind im houmlltfrac34en Grade myfrac34ilt und haumlngen von ollten augen-blicklilten pirituoumlen willkuumlhrlilten Nebenbefrac34immungen und Umfrac34aumlnden ab daszlig man ohne hinauf gen Himmel zu fahren die Schluumlfrac12el ihrer Erkenntnis niltt herabholen kann1

1 Nadler 203 note 23 Hamannrsquos footnote is attached to some lines of Latin verse which conclude the Nutrsquos letter to the Learned Rabbi They come from a poem traditionally and falsely attributed to the Emperor Augustus explain-ing why Vergilrsquos orders to destroy the drafts of the Aeneid were ignored after the poetrsquos death The excerpts are

Ah scelus indignum soluetur litera diues Frangatur potius legum veneranda potestas Liber amp alma Ceres succurrite mdash mdash [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 mdashwhich for Hamann who does not oppose the spirit and the letter in a conventional way is a spiritual richnessmdashis 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

28

It is not that interpretation ought to be literal physical or ldquoCapernaiticrdquo 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 understandingmdashthat is unless one has

attained a certain degree of spiritual insight ndashone will be unable to understand things even in their literal

senses for the spiritual and literal senses are one Hamannrsquos 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 expe-

rience 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 inten-

tion of this line of thought has been least of all to stimulate pious feelings Hamannrsquos goal is not to spiri-

tualize 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 (ldquoDie Sinne aber ind Ceres und Bacltus die Leidenfrac14aftenrdquo [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 simplis-tically 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 Hamannrsquos ability to com-press his meaning into very few and very cryptic words NB The ldquoCapernaiticrdquo sense refers to the sense in which Christ is literally present in the Christian sacrament This unusual word is used derogatively in Lutheran texts (eg the Epitome of the Konkordienformel) to disparage Catholic sacramental teaching Its origins are in Jn 65559 ldquoFor my flesh is meat indeed and my blood is drink in-deed [hellip] These things he said in the synagogue as he taught in Capernaumrdquo 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 Luthe-ran understanding according to which Christ is present in the sacrament in a merely spiritual way is less than per-fectly compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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

Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 im-

plied meanings into the literal tropological allegorical and anagogical senses that Christians have tradi-

tionally 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 ormdashto employ a metaphor

more perhaps more congenial to Hamannmdashdiscerning 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 indul-

gence 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 slo-

gan from the text itselfmdashldquoto speak is to translaterdquomdashand 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 uumlberetzenmdashaus einer Engelpralte in eine Menfrac14enpralte das heifrac34 Gedanken in WortemdashSalten in NamenmdashBilder in Zeilten die poetifrac14 oder kyriologifrac14 hifrac34orifrac14 oder ymbolifrac14 oder hieroglyphifrac14mdashmdashund philoophifrac14 oder ltarakterifrac34ifrac14 eyn koumlnnen1

Here we are given a license to translate Hamannrsquos images into signs of various kinds It is no surprise that

in a footnote attached to this text he derogates the ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs by citing a pas-

sage of Petronius which complains that a new fashion of ldquopuffed-up and formless talkativenessrdquo has cor-

1 Nadler 199

31

rupted speech so that ldquothe standard of eloquence being corrupted has been halted and struck dumbrdquo

and ldquonot even poetry displays a healthy colorrdquo1 By ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs we should un-

derstand something like Leibnizrsquos 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 criti-

cism 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 cor-

respondences out of the text But the other kinds of signsmdashthe poetic or symbolicmdashdo not seem to fall

under the same criticismmdashthese suggest a kind of sign which indeed has meaning but whose interpreta-

tion 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 Hamannrsquos thought allows even for this kind of correspon-

dence 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 Hamannrsquos text but also is deeply compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos text to assert that he intends the literal and symbolic meanings to be taken as

of equal importancemdashfor us to devote our full attention to take up one of the governing metaphors of this

1 N 199 n10 ldquoNuper ventosa isthaec amp enormis loquacitas Athenas ex Asia conmigrauit [hellip] simulque correpta elo-quentiae regula stetit amp obmutuit [hellip] Ac ne carmen quidem sani coloris enituitrdquo

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 discuss-

ing how Hamann refuses to privilege abstract ldquopurely mentalrdquo thought over the particular words in

which that thought finds expression Berlin concludes that ldquofor 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)rdquo1 As an example of one such contradiction Berlin cites the line placed at the head

of this section ldquoto speak is to translaterdquo For Berlin it follows from Hamannrsquos insistence on the unity of

reason and language that no translation no correspondence between words ideas and things can be es-

tablished

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 attend-ing to ideas or to language and through them (because they correspond) to the facts was a method of judging and knowing reality [hellip But the] notion of a correspondence that there is an objective world on one side and on the other man and his instruments ndash lan-guage ideas and so forth ndash attempting to approximate to this objective reality is a false picture There is only a flow of sensations2

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 ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 reproduced3 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 Hamannrsquos treatise but unable to claim any continuity of thought therewith

1 Berlin 81

2 Ibid

3 Though one might question even this Ποταμῷ γὰρ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐμβῆναι δὶς τῷ αὐτῷ and there is no reason to think

any two ldquoflows of sensationrdquo could ever be substantially identical Necessarily every ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos view Berlin is perplexed when confronted with Hamannrsquos open assertion

that translation is possible between ldquohuman speechrdquo and the ldquospeech of angelsrdquo and can only conclude

that Hamann here contradicts himself And for Berlin it is quite to be expected that Hamann should con-

tradict himself he regards Hamannrsquos thought in general as highly creative and intriguing Schwaumlrmerei

of note for its pivotal place in intellectual history but completely insusceptible or unworthy of serious

philosophic attention Berlin appreciates Hamannrsquos criticism of the Enlightenment and his prescient

awareness of the lifeless bloodless conception of manrsquos spiritual life that the Enlighteners would ultimate-

ly produce While Berlin claims to understand Hamannrsquos motives in writing he utterly rejects the content

of his writings which he regards as ldquothe cry of a trapped man hellip who cannot be brought to see that to be

regimented or eliminated is either inevitable or desirablerdquo1 For Berlin Hamann is simply a ldquofanaticrdquo

whose writings consist of ldquopassionate rhetoric and not careful thoughtrdquo and whose opinions are ldquogrotes-

quely one-sided a violent exaggeration of the uniqueness of men and things [and] a passionate hatred of

menrsquos wish to understand the universerdquo2 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 pur-

ism of Hitler3 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 Berlinrsquos judgment that Hamann

1 Berlin 116

2 Berlin 121

3 This accusation is presented in Berlinrsquos book in a series of insinuations we are told for example that Hamannrsquos

ldquohatred and blind irrationalism have fed the stream that has led to social and political irrationalism particularly in German in our own [20

th] centuryrdquo (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 Berlinrsquos 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

34

simply contradicts himself in allowing for the possibility of translation in and out of symbolic ldquolanguag-

esrdquo Hamann has very little patience for ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs which promise patent

meaning and unambiguous interpretation This is perfectly in keeping with his general distaste for effi-

cient 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 ldquopoeticrdquo and ldquosymbolicrdquo signs not to fall under the same fierce criticism as the others

ldquoTo speak is to translaterdquo and ldquocreation is a speech to the creature through the creaturerdquo These

two maxims placed very near to each other in the text1 suggest something of a solution to the problem to

which Berlin directs our attention The conjunction of these lines should remind us that Hamann wheth-

er he directing his attention to literature philology esthetics or any other subject is always also a reli-

gious thinker The archetype of every text is for him the Bible and biblical exegesis is the model and ca-

non 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 Michaelisrsquos ldquodenial of a mystical typological sense

of Scripturerdquo2 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 Mi-

chaelis 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 ldquoTo merdquo says Hamann ldquoevery book is a Biblerdquo3 like the Bible then every

book must be read not merely for its literal sense Berlinrsquos reading of Hamann might be correct if Ha-

1 N 118-119

2 Betz 114

3 Briefwechsel I p 309 trans in Betz 47

35

mann were speaking about the everyday world of words and things understood as a brute fact But Ha-

mann 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 re-

mind us that the interpretation of tongues is also a divine gift1 he admits even that persons may not un-

derstand what they themselves to and say Even a figure such as Voltaire hardly a friend of religious out-

looks testifies for those who have ears to hear to the rightness of Hamannrsquos views

kann man wohl einen glaubwuumlrdigern Zeugen als den unfrac34erblilten Voltaire anfuumlhren wellter bey-nahe die Religion fuumlr den Eckfrac34ein der epifrac14en Dilttkunfrac34 erklaumlrt [hellip] Voltaire aber der Hohe-priefrac34er im Tempel des Gefrac14macks frac14luumlszligt so buumlndig als Kaiphas und denkt frulttbarer als He-rodes2

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 ldquoHo-

hepriefrac34er im Tempelrdquo but also a somewhat Machiavellian politician) justifies the crucifixion of Christ by

arguing that ldquoit is expedient that one man should die for the peoplerdquo3 believing himself to be discussing a

political necessity while as if prophetically describing the Christian doctrine of the atonement And He-

rodrsquos deceitful remark to the Magi ldquothat I might also come and worship himrdquo is taken since Herod was

king of the Jews though a gentile by race to represent the universal destiny of the Christian religion4 This

tradition of interpretation habitual in Biblical exegesis Hamann applies also to analysis of the wordmdashso

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 1210

2 Nadler 204-5

3 John 1150

4 It is telling that Hamann chooses such a contrived and complicated case of biblical parallelism as this one his ar-

gument 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

36

will readily concede that ldquowe see through a glass darklyrdquo1 and that we may not even be able to descry the

true outlines of our own persons in this mirrormdashbut by invoking the language of mirrors2 he locates him-

self within a tradition of thought according to which nature however flawed parts of it may be and how-

ever dulled our ability to discern itmdashis 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 se-

cular 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 ldquoblind heathensrdquo

Blinde Heyden haben die Unilttbarkeit erkannt die der Menfrac14 mit GOTT gemein hat Die verhuumlllte Figur des Leibes das Antlitz des Hauptes und das Aumluszligerfrac34e der Arme ind das ilttbare Sltema in dem wir einher gehn dolt eigentlilt niltts als ein Zeigefinger des verborge-nen Menfrac14en in unsmdash Exemplumque DEI quisque est in imagine parva3

Note that the ldquospiritualrdquo 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 ldquoindex fingersrdquo which direct the inner man to

our attention Hamann let us recall4 does not believe that the target of this ldquoZeigefingerrdquo can always be

1 1 Cor 1312

2 Though Hamann is in some ways a very modern thinker who anticipates 20

th century thought about the kinship of

reason and language he here looks back to the middle ages Cf Alan of Lille ldquoOmnis mundi creatura Quasi liber et pictura Nobis est et speculumrdquo With the sentiment and conceit of this verse Hamann could not agree more 3 N 198 The quotation from the Astronomicon of Manilius (IV895) is mainly noteworthy for its having been writ-

ten by a pagan author while echoing the language of Genesis regarding the ldquoimage of Godrdquo The Cambridge edition of Hamann misenglishes this line rendering it as ldquoEach one is an instance of God in miniaturerdquo This not only loses the connection to the book of Genesis conveyed by the word ldquoimagordquo but puts far too much weight on the word ldquoexemplumrdquo as well An exemplum is not an instance but a type model or analogue ldquoInstancerdquo implies an occur-rence of a rationally determinable kind a ldquotyperdquo or ldquoanaloguerdquo 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

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 circumstancesmdashthis 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 re-

fers to ldquocorrespondencesrdquo of thing and idea and of idea and word these ldquocorrespondencesrdquo are for Berlin

relations between two different things of different types He is quite correct to judge that Hamann consid-

ers 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 meaningmdashhe 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 justifica-

tion 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 ldquoConclusionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos own line that ldquocreation is a speech to the creature

through the creaturerdquo 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 cor-

respond to each other based on no apodictically determinable system knowable a priori but on the gra-

tuitous (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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 com-

pared translation to the art of understanding the image of a tapestry from looking only at the backs of the

threads he remarks ldquoDort [ie in the original contexts of the metaphors borrowed from other authors for

39

Hamannrsquos text] werden ie aber ad illustrationem (zur Verbraumlmung des Rockes) hier ad inuolucrum (zum

Hemde auf bloszligem Leibe) gebrauchtrdquo1 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 deco-

rated 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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos which ac-

cording to the line of interpretation I have explored reveals as much about Hamannrsquos 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 tear-

ing 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 Hamannrsquos motion between images his construction of typological

schemes that resist easy classification and one-for-one interpretation is not antirational raving or obscu-

rantism but rather an alternativemdashand a quite compelling onemdashto 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

1 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 tho-

roughly religious vision of the world If one is willing to do this Hamann is a kind of prophetmdashand the

horned head of Pan on his title-page is also the horned head of Moses1 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 pro-

ducing neat tables of Hamannrsquos 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 Aes-

thetica 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 somethingmdashunless there really is some secret ineffable law of correspondences that un-

ites 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 commen-

tators and writers of senior essays have no right to tread

1 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 agrave la Mosaiumlque (Roth 103 343)

41

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin Isaiah The Magus of the North JG Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism ed Henry

Hardy London John Murray 1993 Betz John After Enlightenment the Post-Secular Vision of JG Hamann Chichester John Wiley amp Sons

2009 Hamann Johann Georg Hamannrsquos Schriften ed Friedrich Roth Berlin G Reimer 1821 (Cited as

ldquoRothrdquo All citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Saumlmtliche Werke ed Josef Nadler Wien Verlag Herder 1950 (Cited as ldquoNad-

lerrdquo Unless otherwise noted all citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Writings on Philosophy and Language trans and ed Kenneth Haynes Cam-

bridge Cambridge UP 2007 (Cited as ldquoHaynesrdquo) Jacobs Carol ldquoHamann Is a Nomadic Writer lsquoAesthetica in nucersquordquo in Skirting the Ethical Stanford Stan-

ford UP 2008 pp 111-130 OrsquoFlaherty James C The Quarrel of Reason with Itself Essays on Hamann Michaelis Lessing Nietzsche Co-

lumbia SC Camden 1988

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 them1 considering these various levels of read-

ing 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 simultaneous-

ly 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 interpreta-

tion could be set forth that might allow us to translate Hamannrsquos simultaneously cabalistic and rhapsodic

utterances into academic language or to devise summaries of his arguments in a neatly symbolic lan-

guage 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 oumlffentlilter Gebrault 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 Hamannrsquos thought is useful also here Sltoumlpfung ifrac34 eine Rede an die Kreatur durlt die Kreatur The

Christian overtones of such a formulation are obvious Hamann once offered an encapsulation of his

thought in the word λόγος2 a famously polysemous term every sense of which Hamann intends The in-

timate connection between reason and language is of course the most obvious philosophical implication of

1 For Hamannrsquos defense of this possibility see Chapter 4

2 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 Hamannrsquos philosophy But for Hamann λόγος 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 Hamannrsquos piety placed a great emphasis on the self-emptying of Christ Howev-

er much he might stress Christrsquos humanity and suffering though he remained well within the main-

stream 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 diffi-

culties here But there is a clear parallel between the way a Christian thinks of Christ and how Hamann

thinks ofmdashwell more or less everything Christ is a man who lived for a certain stretch of time in a cer-

tain place and is also the eternal God A word is a string of letters small shapes arbitrarily strung togeth-

er and is also a sign of a concept an immaterial thing existing in the mind Hamann is no dualistmdashit 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

Zufoumlrderfrac34 muumlfrac34e man D George Benon fragen ob die Einheit mit der Mannigfaltigkeit niltt befrac34ehen koumlnne [hellip] Der bultfrac34aumlblilte oder grammatifrac14e der fleifrac14liche oder dialectifrac14e der ka-pernaitifrac14e oder historifrac14e Sinn ind im houmlltfrac34en Grade myfrac34ilt und haumlngen von ollten augen-blicklilten pirituoumlen willkuumlhrlilten Nebenbefrac34immungen und Umfrac34aumlnden ab daszlig man ohne hinauf gen Himmel zu fahren die Schluumlfrac12el ihrer Erkenntnis niltt herabholen kann1

1 Nadler 203 note 23 Hamannrsquos footnote is attached to some lines of Latin verse which conclude the Nutrsquos letter to the Learned Rabbi They come from a poem traditionally and falsely attributed to the Emperor Augustus explain-ing why Vergilrsquos orders to destroy the drafts of the Aeneid were ignored after the poetrsquos death The excerpts are

Ah scelus indignum soluetur litera diues Frangatur potius legum veneranda potestas Liber amp alma Ceres succurrite mdash mdash [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 mdashwhich for Hamann who does not oppose the spirit and the letter in a conventional way is a spiritual richnessmdashis 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

28

It is not that interpretation ought to be literal physical or ldquoCapernaiticrdquo 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 understandingmdashthat is unless one has

attained a certain degree of spiritual insight ndashone will be unable to understand things even in their literal

senses for the spiritual and literal senses are one Hamannrsquos 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 expe-

rience 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 inten-

tion of this line of thought has been least of all to stimulate pious feelings Hamannrsquos goal is not to spiri-

tualize 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 (ldquoDie Sinne aber ind Ceres und Bacltus die Leidenfrac14aftenrdquo [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 simplis-tically 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 Hamannrsquos ability to com-press his meaning into very few and very cryptic words NB The ldquoCapernaiticrdquo sense refers to the sense in which Christ is literally present in the Christian sacrament This unusual word is used derogatively in Lutheran texts (eg the Epitome of the Konkordienformel) to disparage Catholic sacramental teaching Its origins are in Jn 65559 ldquoFor my flesh is meat indeed and my blood is drink in-deed [hellip] These things he said in the synagogue as he taught in Capernaumrdquo 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 Luthe-ran understanding according to which Christ is present in the sacrament in a merely spiritual way is less than per-fectly compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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

Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 im-

plied meanings into the literal tropological allegorical and anagogical senses that Christians have tradi-

tionally 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 ormdashto employ a metaphor

more perhaps more congenial to Hamannmdashdiscerning 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 indul-

gence 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 slo-

gan from the text itselfmdashldquoto speak is to translaterdquomdashand 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 uumlberetzenmdashaus einer Engelpralte in eine Menfrac14enpralte das heifrac34 Gedanken in WortemdashSalten in NamenmdashBilder in Zeilten die poetifrac14 oder kyriologifrac14 hifrac34orifrac14 oder ymbolifrac14 oder hieroglyphifrac14mdashmdashund philoophifrac14 oder ltarakterifrac34ifrac14 eyn koumlnnen1

Here we are given a license to translate Hamannrsquos images into signs of various kinds It is no surprise that

in a footnote attached to this text he derogates the ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs by citing a pas-

sage of Petronius which complains that a new fashion of ldquopuffed-up and formless talkativenessrdquo has cor-

1 Nadler 199

31

rupted speech so that ldquothe standard of eloquence being corrupted has been halted and struck dumbrdquo

and ldquonot even poetry displays a healthy colorrdquo1 By ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs we should un-

derstand something like Leibnizrsquos 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 criti-

cism 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 cor-

respondences out of the text But the other kinds of signsmdashthe poetic or symbolicmdashdo not seem to fall

under the same criticismmdashthese suggest a kind of sign which indeed has meaning but whose interpreta-

tion 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 Hamannrsquos thought allows even for this kind of correspon-

dence 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 Hamannrsquos text but also is deeply compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos text to assert that he intends the literal and symbolic meanings to be taken as

of equal importancemdashfor us to devote our full attention to take up one of the governing metaphors of this

1 N 199 n10 ldquoNuper ventosa isthaec amp enormis loquacitas Athenas ex Asia conmigrauit [hellip] simulque correpta elo-quentiae regula stetit amp obmutuit [hellip] Ac ne carmen quidem sani coloris enituitrdquo

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 discuss-

ing how Hamann refuses to privilege abstract ldquopurely mentalrdquo thought over the particular words in

which that thought finds expression Berlin concludes that ldquofor 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)rdquo1 As an example of one such contradiction Berlin cites the line placed at the head

of this section ldquoto speak is to translaterdquo For Berlin it follows from Hamannrsquos insistence on the unity of

reason and language that no translation no correspondence between words ideas and things can be es-

tablished

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 attend-ing to ideas or to language and through them (because they correspond) to the facts was a method of judging and knowing reality [hellip But the] notion of a correspondence that there is an objective world on one side and on the other man and his instruments ndash lan-guage ideas and so forth ndash attempting to approximate to this objective reality is a false picture There is only a flow of sensations2

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 ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 reproduced3 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 Hamannrsquos treatise but unable to claim any continuity of thought therewith

1 Berlin 81

2 Ibid

3 Though one might question even this Ποταμῷ γὰρ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐμβῆναι δὶς τῷ αὐτῷ and there is no reason to think

any two ldquoflows of sensationrdquo could ever be substantially identical Necessarily every ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos view Berlin is perplexed when confronted with Hamannrsquos open assertion

that translation is possible between ldquohuman speechrdquo and the ldquospeech of angelsrdquo and can only conclude

that Hamann here contradicts himself And for Berlin it is quite to be expected that Hamann should con-

tradict himself he regards Hamannrsquos thought in general as highly creative and intriguing Schwaumlrmerei

of note for its pivotal place in intellectual history but completely insusceptible or unworthy of serious

philosophic attention Berlin appreciates Hamannrsquos criticism of the Enlightenment and his prescient

awareness of the lifeless bloodless conception of manrsquos spiritual life that the Enlighteners would ultimate-

ly produce While Berlin claims to understand Hamannrsquos motives in writing he utterly rejects the content

of his writings which he regards as ldquothe cry of a trapped man hellip who cannot be brought to see that to be

regimented or eliminated is either inevitable or desirablerdquo1 For Berlin Hamann is simply a ldquofanaticrdquo

whose writings consist of ldquopassionate rhetoric and not careful thoughtrdquo and whose opinions are ldquogrotes-

quely one-sided a violent exaggeration of the uniqueness of men and things [and] a passionate hatred of

menrsquos wish to understand the universerdquo2 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 pur-

ism of Hitler3 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 Berlinrsquos judgment that Hamann

1 Berlin 116

2 Berlin 121

3 This accusation is presented in Berlinrsquos book in a series of insinuations we are told for example that Hamannrsquos

ldquohatred and blind irrationalism have fed the stream that has led to social and political irrationalism particularly in German in our own [20

th] centuryrdquo (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 Berlinrsquos 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

34

simply contradicts himself in allowing for the possibility of translation in and out of symbolic ldquolanguag-

esrdquo Hamann has very little patience for ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs which promise patent

meaning and unambiguous interpretation This is perfectly in keeping with his general distaste for effi-

cient 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 ldquopoeticrdquo and ldquosymbolicrdquo signs not to fall under the same fierce criticism as the others

ldquoTo speak is to translaterdquo and ldquocreation is a speech to the creature through the creaturerdquo These

two maxims placed very near to each other in the text1 suggest something of a solution to the problem to

which Berlin directs our attention The conjunction of these lines should remind us that Hamann wheth-

er he directing his attention to literature philology esthetics or any other subject is always also a reli-

gious thinker The archetype of every text is for him the Bible and biblical exegesis is the model and ca-

non 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 Michaelisrsquos ldquodenial of a mystical typological sense

of Scripturerdquo2 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 Mi-

chaelis 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 ldquoTo merdquo says Hamann ldquoevery book is a Biblerdquo3 like the Bible then every

book must be read not merely for its literal sense Berlinrsquos reading of Hamann might be correct if Ha-

1 N 118-119

2 Betz 114

3 Briefwechsel I p 309 trans in Betz 47

35

mann were speaking about the everyday world of words and things understood as a brute fact But Ha-

mann 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 re-

mind us that the interpretation of tongues is also a divine gift1 he admits even that persons may not un-

derstand what they themselves to and say Even a figure such as Voltaire hardly a friend of religious out-

looks testifies for those who have ears to hear to the rightness of Hamannrsquos views

kann man wohl einen glaubwuumlrdigern Zeugen als den unfrac34erblilten Voltaire anfuumlhren wellter bey-nahe die Religion fuumlr den Eckfrac34ein der epifrac14en Dilttkunfrac34 erklaumlrt [hellip] Voltaire aber der Hohe-priefrac34er im Tempel des Gefrac14macks frac14luumlszligt so buumlndig als Kaiphas und denkt frulttbarer als He-rodes2

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 ldquoHo-

hepriefrac34er im Tempelrdquo but also a somewhat Machiavellian politician) justifies the crucifixion of Christ by

arguing that ldquoit is expedient that one man should die for the peoplerdquo3 believing himself to be discussing a

political necessity while as if prophetically describing the Christian doctrine of the atonement And He-

rodrsquos deceitful remark to the Magi ldquothat I might also come and worship himrdquo is taken since Herod was

king of the Jews though a gentile by race to represent the universal destiny of the Christian religion4 This

tradition of interpretation habitual in Biblical exegesis Hamann applies also to analysis of the wordmdashso

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 1210

2 Nadler 204-5

3 John 1150

4 It is telling that Hamann chooses such a contrived and complicated case of biblical parallelism as this one his ar-

gument 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

36

will readily concede that ldquowe see through a glass darklyrdquo1 and that we may not even be able to descry the

true outlines of our own persons in this mirrormdashbut by invoking the language of mirrors2 he locates him-

self within a tradition of thought according to which nature however flawed parts of it may be and how-

ever dulled our ability to discern itmdashis 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 se-

cular 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 ldquoblind heathensrdquo

Blinde Heyden haben die Unilttbarkeit erkannt die der Menfrac14 mit GOTT gemein hat Die verhuumlllte Figur des Leibes das Antlitz des Hauptes und das Aumluszligerfrac34e der Arme ind das ilttbare Sltema in dem wir einher gehn dolt eigentlilt niltts als ein Zeigefinger des verborge-nen Menfrac14en in unsmdash Exemplumque DEI quisque est in imagine parva3

Note that the ldquospiritualrdquo 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 ldquoindex fingersrdquo which direct the inner man to

our attention Hamann let us recall4 does not believe that the target of this ldquoZeigefingerrdquo can always be

1 1 Cor 1312

2 Though Hamann is in some ways a very modern thinker who anticipates 20

th century thought about the kinship of

reason and language he here looks back to the middle ages Cf Alan of Lille ldquoOmnis mundi creatura Quasi liber et pictura Nobis est et speculumrdquo With the sentiment and conceit of this verse Hamann could not agree more 3 N 198 The quotation from the Astronomicon of Manilius (IV895) is mainly noteworthy for its having been writ-

ten by a pagan author while echoing the language of Genesis regarding the ldquoimage of Godrdquo The Cambridge edition of Hamann misenglishes this line rendering it as ldquoEach one is an instance of God in miniaturerdquo This not only loses the connection to the book of Genesis conveyed by the word ldquoimagordquo but puts far too much weight on the word ldquoexemplumrdquo as well An exemplum is not an instance but a type model or analogue ldquoInstancerdquo implies an occur-rence of a rationally determinable kind a ldquotyperdquo or ldquoanaloguerdquo 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

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 circumstancesmdashthis 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 re-

fers to ldquocorrespondencesrdquo of thing and idea and of idea and word these ldquocorrespondencesrdquo are for Berlin

relations between two different things of different types He is quite correct to judge that Hamann consid-

ers 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 meaningmdashhe 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 justifica-

tion 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 ldquoConclusionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos own line that ldquocreation is a speech to the creature

through the creaturerdquo 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 cor-

respond to each other based on no apodictically determinable system knowable a priori but on the gra-

tuitous (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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 com-

pared translation to the art of understanding the image of a tapestry from looking only at the backs of the

threads he remarks ldquoDort [ie in the original contexts of the metaphors borrowed from other authors for

39

Hamannrsquos text] werden ie aber ad illustrationem (zur Verbraumlmung des Rockes) hier ad inuolucrum (zum

Hemde auf bloszligem Leibe) gebrauchtrdquo1 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 deco-

rated 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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos which ac-

cording to the line of interpretation I have explored reveals as much about Hamannrsquos 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 tear-

ing 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 Hamannrsquos motion between images his construction of typological

schemes that resist easy classification and one-for-one interpretation is not antirational raving or obscu-

rantism but rather an alternativemdashand a quite compelling onemdashto 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

1 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 tho-

roughly religious vision of the world If one is willing to do this Hamann is a kind of prophetmdashand the

horned head of Pan on his title-page is also the horned head of Moses1 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 pro-

ducing neat tables of Hamannrsquos 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 Aes-

thetica 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 somethingmdashunless there really is some secret ineffable law of correspondences that un-

ites 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 commen-

tators and writers of senior essays have no right to tread

1 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 agrave la Mosaiumlque (Roth 103 343)

41

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin Isaiah The Magus of the North JG Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism ed Henry

Hardy London John Murray 1993 Betz John After Enlightenment the Post-Secular Vision of JG Hamann Chichester John Wiley amp Sons

2009 Hamann Johann Georg Hamannrsquos Schriften ed Friedrich Roth Berlin G Reimer 1821 (Cited as

ldquoRothrdquo All citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Saumlmtliche Werke ed Josef Nadler Wien Verlag Herder 1950 (Cited as ldquoNad-

lerrdquo Unless otherwise noted all citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Writings on Philosophy and Language trans and ed Kenneth Haynes Cam-

bridge Cambridge UP 2007 (Cited as ldquoHaynesrdquo) Jacobs Carol ldquoHamann Is a Nomadic Writer lsquoAesthetica in nucersquordquo in Skirting the Ethical Stanford Stan-

ford UP 2008 pp 111-130 OrsquoFlaherty James C The Quarrel of Reason with Itself Essays on Hamann Michaelis Lessing Nietzsche Co-

lumbia SC Camden 1988

27

the conjunction of meanings in that Greek word and that intimate connection is indeed an important part

of Hamannrsquos philosophy But for Hamann λόγος 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 Hamannrsquos piety placed a great emphasis on the self-emptying of Christ Howev-

er much he might stress Christrsquos humanity and suffering though he remained well within the main-

stream 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 diffi-

culties here But there is a clear parallel between the way a Christian thinks of Christ and how Hamann

thinks ofmdashwell more or less everything Christ is a man who lived for a certain stretch of time in a cer-

tain place and is also the eternal God A word is a string of letters small shapes arbitrarily strung togeth-

er and is also a sign of a concept an immaterial thing existing in the mind Hamann is no dualistmdashit 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

Zufoumlrderfrac34 muumlfrac34e man D George Benon fragen ob die Einheit mit der Mannigfaltigkeit niltt befrac34ehen koumlnne [hellip] Der bultfrac34aumlblilte oder grammatifrac14e der fleifrac14liche oder dialectifrac14e der ka-pernaitifrac14e oder historifrac14e Sinn ind im houmlltfrac34en Grade myfrac34ilt und haumlngen von ollten augen-blicklilten pirituoumlen willkuumlhrlilten Nebenbefrac34immungen und Umfrac34aumlnden ab daszlig man ohne hinauf gen Himmel zu fahren die Schluumlfrac12el ihrer Erkenntnis niltt herabholen kann1

1 Nadler 203 note 23 Hamannrsquos footnote is attached to some lines of Latin verse which conclude the Nutrsquos letter to the Learned Rabbi They come from a poem traditionally and falsely attributed to the Emperor Augustus explain-ing why Vergilrsquos orders to destroy the drafts of the Aeneid were ignored after the poetrsquos death The excerpts are

Ah scelus indignum soluetur litera diues Frangatur potius legum veneranda potestas Liber amp alma Ceres succurrite mdash mdash [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 mdashwhich for Hamann who does not oppose the spirit and the letter in a conventional way is a spiritual richnessmdashis 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

28

It is not that interpretation ought to be literal physical or ldquoCapernaiticrdquo 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 understandingmdashthat is unless one has

attained a certain degree of spiritual insight ndashone will be unable to understand things even in their literal

senses for the spiritual and literal senses are one Hamannrsquos 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 expe-

rience 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 inten-

tion of this line of thought has been least of all to stimulate pious feelings Hamannrsquos goal is not to spiri-

tualize 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 (ldquoDie Sinne aber ind Ceres und Bacltus die Leidenfrac14aftenrdquo [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 simplis-tically 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 Hamannrsquos ability to com-press his meaning into very few and very cryptic words NB The ldquoCapernaiticrdquo sense refers to the sense in which Christ is literally present in the Christian sacrament This unusual word is used derogatively in Lutheran texts (eg the Epitome of the Konkordienformel) to disparage Catholic sacramental teaching Its origins are in Jn 65559 ldquoFor my flesh is meat indeed and my blood is drink in-deed [hellip] These things he said in the synagogue as he taught in Capernaumrdquo 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 Luthe-ran understanding according to which Christ is present in the sacrament in a merely spiritual way is less than per-fectly compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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

Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 im-

plied meanings into the literal tropological allegorical and anagogical senses that Christians have tradi-

tionally 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 ormdashto employ a metaphor

more perhaps more congenial to Hamannmdashdiscerning 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 indul-

gence 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 slo-

gan from the text itselfmdashldquoto speak is to translaterdquomdashand 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 uumlberetzenmdashaus einer Engelpralte in eine Menfrac14enpralte das heifrac34 Gedanken in WortemdashSalten in NamenmdashBilder in Zeilten die poetifrac14 oder kyriologifrac14 hifrac34orifrac14 oder ymbolifrac14 oder hieroglyphifrac14mdashmdashund philoophifrac14 oder ltarakterifrac34ifrac14 eyn koumlnnen1

Here we are given a license to translate Hamannrsquos images into signs of various kinds It is no surprise that

in a footnote attached to this text he derogates the ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs by citing a pas-

sage of Petronius which complains that a new fashion of ldquopuffed-up and formless talkativenessrdquo has cor-

1 Nadler 199

31

rupted speech so that ldquothe standard of eloquence being corrupted has been halted and struck dumbrdquo

and ldquonot even poetry displays a healthy colorrdquo1 By ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs we should un-

derstand something like Leibnizrsquos 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 criti-

cism 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 cor-

respondences out of the text But the other kinds of signsmdashthe poetic or symbolicmdashdo not seem to fall

under the same criticismmdashthese suggest a kind of sign which indeed has meaning but whose interpreta-

tion 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 Hamannrsquos thought allows even for this kind of correspon-

dence 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 Hamannrsquos text but also is deeply compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos text to assert that he intends the literal and symbolic meanings to be taken as

of equal importancemdashfor us to devote our full attention to take up one of the governing metaphors of this

1 N 199 n10 ldquoNuper ventosa isthaec amp enormis loquacitas Athenas ex Asia conmigrauit [hellip] simulque correpta elo-quentiae regula stetit amp obmutuit [hellip] Ac ne carmen quidem sani coloris enituitrdquo

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 discuss-

ing how Hamann refuses to privilege abstract ldquopurely mentalrdquo thought over the particular words in

which that thought finds expression Berlin concludes that ldquofor 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)rdquo1 As an example of one such contradiction Berlin cites the line placed at the head

of this section ldquoto speak is to translaterdquo For Berlin it follows from Hamannrsquos insistence on the unity of

reason and language that no translation no correspondence between words ideas and things can be es-

tablished

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 attend-ing to ideas or to language and through them (because they correspond) to the facts was a method of judging and knowing reality [hellip But the] notion of a correspondence that there is an objective world on one side and on the other man and his instruments ndash lan-guage ideas and so forth ndash attempting to approximate to this objective reality is a false picture There is only a flow of sensations2

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 ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 reproduced3 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 Hamannrsquos treatise but unable to claim any continuity of thought therewith

1 Berlin 81

2 Ibid

3 Though one might question even this Ποταμῷ γὰρ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐμβῆναι δὶς τῷ αὐτῷ and there is no reason to think

any two ldquoflows of sensationrdquo could ever be substantially identical Necessarily every ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos view Berlin is perplexed when confronted with Hamannrsquos open assertion

that translation is possible between ldquohuman speechrdquo and the ldquospeech of angelsrdquo and can only conclude

that Hamann here contradicts himself And for Berlin it is quite to be expected that Hamann should con-

tradict himself he regards Hamannrsquos thought in general as highly creative and intriguing Schwaumlrmerei

of note for its pivotal place in intellectual history but completely insusceptible or unworthy of serious

philosophic attention Berlin appreciates Hamannrsquos criticism of the Enlightenment and his prescient

awareness of the lifeless bloodless conception of manrsquos spiritual life that the Enlighteners would ultimate-

ly produce While Berlin claims to understand Hamannrsquos motives in writing he utterly rejects the content

of his writings which he regards as ldquothe cry of a trapped man hellip who cannot be brought to see that to be

regimented or eliminated is either inevitable or desirablerdquo1 For Berlin Hamann is simply a ldquofanaticrdquo

whose writings consist of ldquopassionate rhetoric and not careful thoughtrdquo and whose opinions are ldquogrotes-

quely one-sided a violent exaggeration of the uniqueness of men and things [and] a passionate hatred of

menrsquos wish to understand the universerdquo2 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 pur-

ism of Hitler3 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 Berlinrsquos judgment that Hamann

1 Berlin 116

2 Berlin 121

3 This accusation is presented in Berlinrsquos book in a series of insinuations we are told for example that Hamannrsquos

ldquohatred and blind irrationalism have fed the stream that has led to social and political irrationalism particularly in German in our own [20

th] centuryrdquo (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 Berlinrsquos 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

34

simply contradicts himself in allowing for the possibility of translation in and out of symbolic ldquolanguag-

esrdquo Hamann has very little patience for ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs which promise patent

meaning and unambiguous interpretation This is perfectly in keeping with his general distaste for effi-

cient 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 ldquopoeticrdquo and ldquosymbolicrdquo signs not to fall under the same fierce criticism as the others

ldquoTo speak is to translaterdquo and ldquocreation is a speech to the creature through the creaturerdquo These

two maxims placed very near to each other in the text1 suggest something of a solution to the problem to

which Berlin directs our attention The conjunction of these lines should remind us that Hamann wheth-

er he directing his attention to literature philology esthetics or any other subject is always also a reli-

gious thinker The archetype of every text is for him the Bible and biblical exegesis is the model and ca-

non 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 Michaelisrsquos ldquodenial of a mystical typological sense

of Scripturerdquo2 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 Mi-

chaelis 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 ldquoTo merdquo says Hamann ldquoevery book is a Biblerdquo3 like the Bible then every

book must be read not merely for its literal sense Berlinrsquos reading of Hamann might be correct if Ha-

1 N 118-119

2 Betz 114

3 Briefwechsel I p 309 trans in Betz 47

35

mann were speaking about the everyday world of words and things understood as a brute fact But Ha-

mann 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 re-

mind us that the interpretation of tongues is also a divine gift1 he admits even that persons may not un-

derstand what they themselves to and say Even a figure such as Voltaire hardly a friend of religious out-

looks testifies for those who have ears to hear to the rightness of Hamannrsquos views

kann man wohl einen glaubwuumlrdigern Zeugen als den unfrac34erblilten Voltaire anfuumlhren wellter bey-nahe die Religion fuumlr den Eckfrac34ein der epifrac14en Dilttkunfrac34 erklaumlrt [hellip] Voltaire aber der Hohe-priefrac34er im Tempel des Gefrac14macks frac14luumlszligt so buumlndig als Kaiphas und denkt frulttbarer als He-rodes2

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 ldquoHo-

hepriefrac34er im Tempelrdquo but also a somewhat Machiavellian politician) justifies the crucifixion of Christ by

arguing that ldquoit is expedient that one man should die for the peoplerdquo3 believing himself to be discussing a

political necessity while as if prophetically describing the Christian doctrine of the atonement And He-

rodrsquos deceitful remark to the Magi ldquothat I might also come and worship himrdquo is taken since Herod was

king of the Jews though a gentile by race to represent the universal destiny of the Christian religion4 This

tradition of interpretation habitual in Biblical exegesis Hamann applies also to analysis of the wordmdashso

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 1210

2 Nadler 204-5

3 John 1150

4 It is telling that Hamann chooses such a contrived and complicated case of biblical parallelism as this one his ar-

gument 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

36

will readily concede that ldquowe see through a glass darklyrdquo1 and that we may not even be able to descry the

true outlines of our own persons in this mirrormdashbut by invoking the language of mirrors2 he locates him-

self within a tradition of thought according to which nature however flawed parts of it may be and how-

ever dulled our ability to discern itmdashis 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 se-

cular 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 ldquoblind heathensrdquo

Blinde Heyden haben die Unilttbarkeit erkannt die der Menfrac14 mit GOTT gemein hat Die verhuumlllte Figur des Leibes das Antlitz des Hauptes und das Aumluszligerfrac34e der Arme ind das ilttbare Sltema in dem wir einher gehn dolt eigentlilt niltts als ein Zeigefinger des verborge-nen Menfrac14en in unsmdash Exemplumque DEI quisque est in imagine parva3

Note that the ldquospiritualrdquo 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 ldquoindex fingersrdquo which direct the inner man to

our attention Hamann let us recall4 does not believe that the target of this ldquoZeigefingerrdquo can always be

1 1 Cor 1312

2 Though Hamann is in some ways a very modern thinker who anticipates 20

th century thought about the kinship of

reason and language he here looks back to the middle ages Cf Alan of Lille ldquoOmnis mundi creatura Quasi liber et pictura Nobis est et speculumrdquo With the sentiment and conceit of this verse Hamann could not agree more 3 N 198 The quotation from the Astronomicon of Manilius (IV895) is mainly noteworthy for its having been writ-

ten by a pagan author while echoing the language of Genesis regarding the ldquoimage of Godrdquo The Cambridge edition of Hamann misenglishes this line rendering it as ldquoEach one is an instance of God in miniaturerdquo This not only loses the connection to the book of Genesis conveyed by the word ldquoimagordquo but puts far too much weight on the word ldquoexemplumrdquo as well An exemplum is not an instance but a type model or analogue ldquoInstancerdquo implies an occur-rence of a rationally determinable kind a ldquotyperdquo or ldquoanaloguerdquo 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

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 circumstancesmdashthis 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 re-

fers to ldquocorrespondencesrdquo of thing and idea and of idea and word these ldquocorrespondencesrdquo are for Berlin

relations between two different things of different types He is quite correct to judge that Hamann consid-

ers 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 meaningmdashhe 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 justifica-

tion 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 ldquoConclusionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos own line that ldquocreation is a speech to the creature

through the creaturerdquo 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 cor-

respond to each other based on no apodictically determinable system knowable a priori but on the gra-

tuitous (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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 com-

pared translation to the art of understanding the image of a tapestry from looking only at the backs of the

threads he remarks ldquoDort [ie in the original contexts of the metaphors borrowed from other authors for

39

Hamannrsquos text] werden ie aber ad illustrationem (zur Verbraumlmung des Rockes) hier ad inuolucrum (zum

Hemde auf bloszligem Leibe) gebrauchtrdquo1 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 deco-

rated 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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos which ac-

cording to the line of interpretation I have explored reveals as much about Hamannrsquos 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 tear-

ing 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 Hamannrsquos motion between images his construction of typological

schemes that resist easy classification and one-for-one interpretation is not antirational raving or obscu-

rantism but rather an alternativemdashand a quite compelling onemdashto 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

1 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 tho-

roughly religious vision of the world If one is willing to do this Hamann is a kind of prophetmdashand the

horned head of Pan on his title-page is also the horned head of Moses1 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 pro-

ducing neat tables of Hamannrsquos 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 Aes-

thetica 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 somethingmdashunless there really is some secret ineffable law of correspondences that un-

ites 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 commen-

tators and writers of senior essays have no right to tread

1 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 agrave la Mosaiumlque (Roth 103 343)

41

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin Isaiah The Magus of the North JG Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism ed Henry

Hardy London John Murray 1993 Betz John After Enlightenment the Post-Secular Vision of JG Hamann Chichester John Wiley amp Sons

2009 Hamann Johann Georg Hamannrsquos Schriften ed Friedrich Roth Berlin G Reimer 1821 (Cited as

ldquoRothrdquo All citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Saumlmtliche Werke ed Josef Nadler Wien Verlag Herder 1950 (Cited as ldquoNad-

lerrdquo Unless otherwise noted all citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Writings on Philosophy and Language trans and ed Kenneth Haynes Cam-

bridge Cambridge UP 2007 (Cited as ldquoHaynesrdquo) Jacobs Carol ldquoHamann Is a Nomadic Writer lsquoAesthetica in nucersquordquo in Skirting the Ethical Stanford Stan-

ford UP 2008 pp 111-130 OrsquoFlaherty James C The Quarrel of Reason with Itself Essays on Hamann Michaelis Lessing Nietzsche Co-

lumbia SC Camden 1988

28

It is not that interpretation ought to be literal physical or ldquoCapernaiticrdquo 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 understandingmdashthat is unless one has

attained a certain degree of spiritual insight ndashone will be unable to understand things even in their literal

senses for the spiritual and literal senses are one Hamannrsquos 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 expe-

rience 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 inten-

tion of this line of thought has been least of all to stimulate pious feelings Hamannrsquos goal is not to spiri-

tualize 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 (ldquoDie Sinne aber ind Ceres und Bacltus die Leidenfrac14aftenrdquo [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 simplis-tically 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 Hamannrsquos ability to com-press his meaning into very few and very cryptic words NB The ldquoCapernaiticrdquo sense refers to the sense in which Christ is literally present in the Christian sacrament This unusual word is used derogatively in Lutheran texts (eg the Epitome of the Konkordienformel) to disparage Catholic sacramental teaching Its origins are in Jn 65559 ldquoFor my flesh is meat indeed and my blood is drink in-deed [hellip] These things he said in the synagogue as he taught in Capernaumrdquo 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 Luthe-ran understanding according to which Christ is present in the sacrament in a merely spiritual way is less than per-fectly compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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

Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 im-

plied meanings into the literal tropological allegorical and anagogical senses that Christians have tradi-

tionally 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 ormdashto employ a metaphor

more perhaps more congenial to Hamannmdashdiscerning 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 indul-

gence 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 slo-

gan from the text itselfmdashldquoto speak is to translaterdquomdashand 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 uumlberetzenmdashaus einer Engelpralte in eine Menfrac14enpralte das heifrac34 Gedanken in WortemdashSalten in NamenmdashBilder in Zeilten die poetifrac14 oder kyriologifrac14 hifrac34orifrac14 oder ymbolifrac14 oder hieroglyphifrac14mdashmdashund philoophifrac14 oder ltarakterifrac34ifrac14 eyn koumlnnen1

Here we are given a license to translate Hamannrsquos images into signs of various kinds It is no surprise that

in a footnote attached to this text he derogates the ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs by citing a pas-

sage of Petronius which complains that a new fashion of ldquopuffed-up and formless talkativenessrdquo has cor-

1 Nadler 199

31

rupted speech so that ldquothe standard of eloquence being corrupted has been halted and struck dumbrdquo

and ldquonot even poetry displays a healthy colorrdquo1 By ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs we should un-

derstand something like Leibnizrsquos 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 criti-

cism 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 cor-

respondences out of the text But the other kinds of signsmdashthe poetic or symbolicmdashdo not seem to fall

under the same criticismmdashthese suggest a kind of sign which indeed has meaning but whose interpreta-

tion 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 Hamannrsquos thought allows even for this kind of correspon-

dence 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 Hamannrsquos text but also is deeply compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos text to assert that he intends the literal and symbolic meanings to be taken as

of equal importancemdashfor us to devote our full attention to take up one of the governing metaphors of this

1 N 199 n10 ldquoNuper ventosa isthaec amp enormis loquacitas Athenas ex Asia conmigrauit [hellip] simulque correpta elo-quentiae regula stetit amp obmutuit [hellip] Ac ne carmen quidem sani coloris enituitrdquo

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 discuss-

ing how Hamann refuses to privilege abstract ldquopurely mentalrdquo thought over the particular words in

which that thought finds expression Berlin concludes that ldquofor 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)rdquo1 As an example of one such contradiction Berlin cites the line placed at the head

of this section ldquoto speak is to translaterdquo For Berlin it follows from Hamannrsquos insistence on the unity of

reason and language that no translation no correspondence between words ideas and things can be es-

tablished

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 attend-ing to ideas or to language and through them (because they correspond) to the facts was a method of judging and knowing reality [hellip But the] notion of a correspondence that there is an objective world on one side and on the other man and his instruments ndash lan-guage ideas and so forth ndash attempting to approximate to this objective reality is a false picture There is only a flow of sensations2

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 ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 reproduced3 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 Hamannrsquos treatise but unable to claim any continuity of thought therewith

1 Berlin 81

2 Ibid

3 Though one might question even this Ποταμῷ γὰρ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐμβῆναι δὶς τῷ αὐτῷ and there is no reason to think

any two ldquoflows of sensationrdquo could ever be substantially identical Necessarily every ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos view Berlin is perplexed when confronted with Hamannrsquos open assertion

that translation is possible between ldquohuman speechrdquo and the ldquospeech of angelsrdquo and can only conclude

that Hamann here contradicts himself And for Berlin it is quite to be expected that Hamann should con-

tradict himself he regards Hamannrsquos thought in general as highly creative and intriguing Schwaumlrmerei

of note for its pivotal place in intellectual history but completely insusceptible or unworthy of serious

philosophic attention Berlin appreciates Hamannrsquos criticism of the Enlightenment and his prescient

awareness of the lifeless bloodless conception of manrsquos spiritual life that the Enlighteners would ultimate-

ly produce While Berlin claims to understand Hamannrsquos motives in writing he utterly rejects the content

of his writings which he regards as ldquothe cry of a trapped man hellip who cannot be brought to see that to be

regimented or eliminated is either inevitable or desirablerdquo1 For Berlin Hamann is simply a ldquofanaticrdquo

whose writings consist of ldquopassionate rhetoric and not careful thoughtrdquo and whose opinions are ldquogrotes-

quely one-sided a violent exaggeration of the uniqueness of men and things [and] a passionate hatred of

menrsquos wish to understand the universerdquo2 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 pur-

ism of Hitler3 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 Berlinrsquos judgment that Hamann

1 Berlin 116

2 Berlin 121

3 This accusation is presented in Berlinrsquos book in a series of insinuations we are told for example that Hamannrsquos

ldquohatred and blind irrationalism have fed the stream that has led to social and political irrationalism particularly in German in our own [20

th] centuryrdquo (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 Berlinrsquos 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

34

simply contradicts himself in allowing for the possibility of translation in and out of symbolic ldquolanguag-

esrdquo Hamann has very little patience for ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs which promise patent

meaning and unambiguous interpretation This is perfectly in keeping with his general distaste for effi-

cient 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 ldquopoeticrdquo and ldquosymbolicrdquo signs not to fall under the same fierce criticism as the others

ldquoTo speak is to translaterdquo and ldquocreation is a speech to the creature through the creaturerdquo These

two maxims placed very near to each other in the text1 suggest something of a solution to the problem to

which Berlin directs our attention The conjunction of these lines should remind us that Hamann wheth-

er he directing his attention to literature philology esthetics or any other subject is always also a reli-

gious thinker The archetype of every text is for him the Bible and biblical exegesis is the model and ca-

non 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 Michaelisrsquos ldquodenial of a mystical typological sense

of Scripturerdquo2 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 Mi-

chaelis 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 ldquoTo merdquo says Hamann ldquoevery book is a Biblerdquo3 like the Bible then every

book must be read not merely for its literal sense Berlinrsquos reading of Hamann might be correct if Ha-

1 N 118-119

2 Betz 114

3 Briefwechsel I p 309 trans in Betz 47

35

mann were speaking about the everyday world of words and things understood as a brute fact But Ha-

mann 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 re-

mind us that the interpretation of tongues is also a divine gift1 he admits even that persons may not un-

derstand what they themselves to and say Even a figure such as Voltaire hardly a friend of religious out-

looks testifies for those who have ears to hear to the rightness of Hamannrsquos views

kann man wohl einen glaubwuumlrdigern Zeugen als den unfrac34erblilten Voltaire anfuumlhren wellter bey-nahe die Religion fuumlr den Eckfrac34ein der epifrac14en Dilttkunfrac34 erklaumlrt [hellip] Voltaire aber der Hohe-priefrac34er im Tempel des Gefrac14macks frac14luumlszligt so buumlndig als Kaiphas und denkt frulttbarer als He-rodes2

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 ldquoHo-

hepriefrac34er im Tempelrdquo but also a somewhat Machiavellian politician) justifies the crucifixion of Christ by

arguing that ldquoit is expedient that one man should die for the peoplerdquo3 believing himself to be discussing a

political necessity while as if prophetically describing the Christian doctrine of the atonement And He-

rodrsquos deceitful remark to the Magi ldquothat I might also come and worship himrdquo is taken since Herod was

king of the Jews though a gentile by race to represent the universal destiny of the Christian religion4 This

tradition of interpretation habitual in Biblical exegesis Hamann applies also to analysis of the wordmdashso

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 1210

2 Nadler 204-5

3 John 1150

4 It is telling that Hamann chooses such a contrived and complicated case of biblical parallelism as this one his ar-

gument 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

36

will readily concede that ldquowe see through a glass darklyrdquo1 and that we may not even be able to descry the

true outlines of our own persons in this mirrormdashbut by invoking the language of mirrors2 he locates him-

self within a tradition of thought according to which nature however flawed parts of it may be and how-

ever dulled our ability to discern itmdashis 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 se-

cular 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 ldquoblind heathensrdquo

Blinde Heyden haben die Unilttbarkeit erkannt die der Menfrac14 mit GOTT gemein hat Die verhuumlllte Figur des Leibes das Antlitz des Hauptes und das Aumluszligerfrac34e der Arme ind das ilttbare Sltema in dem wir einher gehn dolt eigentlilt niltts als ein Zeigefinger des verborge-nen Menfrac14en in unsmdash Exemplumque DEI quisque est in imagine parva3

Note that the ldquospiritualrdquo 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 ldquoindex fingersrdquo which direct the inner man to

our attention Hamann let us recall4 does not believe that the target of this ldquoZeigefingerrdquo can always be

1 1 Cor 1312

2 Though Hamann is in some ways a very modern thinker who anticipates 20

th century thought about the kinship of

reason and language he here looks back to the middle ages Cf Alan of Lille ldquoOmnis mundi creatura Quasi liber et pictura Nobis est et speculumrdquo With the sentiment and conceit of this verse Hamann could not agree more 3 N 198 The quotation from the Astronomicon of Manilius (IV895) is mainly noteworthy for its having been writ-

ten by a pagan author while echoing the language of Genesis regarding the ldquoimage of Godrdquo The Cambridge edition of Hamann misenglishes this line rendering it as ldquoEach one is an instance of God in miniaturerdquo This not only loses the connection to the book of Genesis conveyed by the word ldquoimagordquo but puts far too much weight on the word ldquoexemplumrdquo as well An exemplum is not an instance but a type model or analogue ldquoInstancerdquo implies an occur-rence of a rationally determinable kind a ldquotyperdquo or ldquoanaloguerdquo 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

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 circumstancesmdashthis 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 re-

fers to ldquocorrespondencesrdquo of thing and idea and of idea and word these ldquocorrespondencesrdquo are for Berlin

relations between two different things of different types He is quite correct to judge that Hamann consid-

ers 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 meaningmdashhe 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 justifica-

tion 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 ldquoConclusionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos own line that ldquocreation is a speech to the creature

through the creaturerdquo 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 cor-

respond to each other based on no apodictically determinable system knowable a priori but on the gra-

tuitous (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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 com-

pared translation to the art of understanding the image of a tapestry from looking only at the backs of the

threads he remarks ldquoDort [ie in the original contexts of the metaphors borrowed from other authors for

39

Hamannrsquos text] werden ie aber ad illustrationem (zur Verbraumlmung des Rockes) hier ad inuolucrum (zum

Hemde auf bloszligem Leibe) gebrauchtrdquo1 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 deco-

rated 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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos which ac-

cording to the line of interpretation I have explored reveals as much about Hamannrsquos 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 tear-

ing 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 Hamannrsquos motion between images his construction of typological

schemes that resist easy classification and one-for-one interpretation is not antirational raving or obscu-

rantism but rather an alternativemdashand a quite compelling onemdashto 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

1 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 tho-

roughly religious vision of the world If one is willing to do this Hamann is a kind of prophetmdashand the

horned head of Pan on his title-page is also the horned head of Moses1 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 pro-

ducing neat tables of Hamannrsquos 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 Aes-

thetica 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 somethingmdashunless there really is some secret ineffable law of correspondences that un-

ites 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 commen-

tators and writers of senior essays have no right to tread

1 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 agrave la Mosaiumlque (Roth 103 343)

41

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin Isaiah The Magus of the North JG Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism ed Henry

Hardy London John Murray 1993 Betz John After Enlightenment the Post-Secular Vision of JG Hamann Chichester John Wiley amp Sons

2009 Hamann Johann Georg Hamannrsquos Schriften ed Friedrich Roth Berlin G Reimer 1821 (Cited as

ldquoRothrdquo All citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Saumlmtliche Werke ed Josef Nadler Wien Verlag Herder 1950 (Cited as ldquoNad-

lerrdquo Unless otherwise noted all citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Writings on Philosophy and Language trans and ed Kenneth Haynes Cam-

bridge Cambridge UP 2007 (Cited as ldquoHaynesrdquo) Jacobs Carol ldquoHamann Is a Nomadic Writer lsquoAesthetica in nucersquordquo in Skirting the Ethical Stanford Stan-

ford UP 2008 pp 111-130 OrsquoFlaherty James C The Quarrel of Reason with Itself Essays on Hamann Michaelis Lessing Nietzsche Co-

lumbia SC Camden 1988

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 Hamannrsquos 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

Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 im-

plied meanings into the literal tropological allegorical and anagogical senses that Christians have tradi-

tionally 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 ormdashto employ a metaphor

more perhaps more congenial to Hamannmdashdiscerning 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 indul-

gence 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 slo-

gan from the text itselfmdashldquoto speak is to translaterdquomdashand 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 uumlberetzenmdashaus einer Engelpralte in eine Menfrac14enpralte das heifrac34 Gedanken in WortemdashSalten in NamenmdashBilder in Zeilten die poetifrac14 oder kyriologifrac14 hifrac34orifrac14 oder ymbolifrac14 oder hieroglyphifrac14mdashmdashund philoophifrac14 oder ltarakterifrac34ifrac14 eyn koumlnnen1

Here we are given a license to translate Hamannrsquos images into signs of various kinds It is no surprise that

in a footnote attached to this text he derogates the ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs by citing a pas-

sage of Petronius which complains that a new fashion of ldquopuffed-up and formless talkativenessrdquo has cor-

1 Nadler 199

31

rupted speech so that ldquothe standard of eloquence being corrupted has been halted and struck dumbrdquo

and ldquonot even poetry displays a healthy colorrdquo1 By ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs we should un-

derstand something like Leibnizrsquos 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 criti-

cism 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 cor-

respondences out of the text But the other kinds of signsmdashthe poetic or symbolicmdashdo not seem to fall

under the same criticismmdashthese suggest a kind of sign which indeed has meaning but whose interpreta-

tion 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 Hamannrsquos thought allows even for this kind of correspon-

dence 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 Hamannrsquos text but also is deeply compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos text to assert that he intends the literal and symbolic meanings to be taken as

of equal importancemdashfor us to devote our full attention to take up one of the governing metaphors of this

1 N 199 n10 ldquoNuper ventosa isthaec amp enormis loquacitas Athenas ex Asia conmigrauit [hellip] simulque correpta elo-quentiae regula stetit amp obmutuit [hellip] Ac ne carmen quidem sani coloris enituitrdquo

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 discuss-

ing how Hamann refuses to privilege abstract ldquopurely mentalrdquo thought over the particular words in

which that thought finds expression Berlin concludes that ldquofor 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)rdquo1 As an example of one such contradiction Berlin cites the line placed at the head

of this section ldquoto speak is to translaterdquo For Berlin it follows from Hamannrsquos insistence on the unity of

reason and language that no translation no correspondence between words ideas and things can be es-

tablished

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 attend-ing to ideas or to language and through them (because they correspond) to the facts was a method of judging and knowing reality [hellip But the] notion of a correspondence that there is an objective world on one side and on the other man and his instruments ndash lan-guage ideas and so forth ndash attempting to approximate to this objective reality is a false picture There is only a flow of sensations2

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 ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 reproduced3 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 Hamannrsquos treatise but unable to claim any continuity of thought therewith

1 Berlin 81

2 Ibid

3 Though one might question even this Ποταμῷ γὰρ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐμβῆναι δὶς τῷ αὐτῷ and there is no reason to think

any two ldquoflows of sensationrdquo could ever be substantially identical Necessarily every ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos view Berlin is perplexed when confronted with Hamannrsquos open assertion

that translation is possible between ldquohuman speechrdquo and the ldquospeech of angelsrdquo and can only conclude

that Hamann here contradicts himself And for Berlin it is quite to be expected that Hamann should con-

tradict himself he regards Hamannrsquos thought in general as highly creative and intriguing Schwaumlrmerei

of note for its pivotal place in intellectual history but completely insusceptible or unworthy of serious

philosophic attention Berlin appreciates Hamannrsquos criticism of the Enlightenment and his prescient

awareness of the lifeless bloodless conception of manrsquos spiritual life that the Enlighteners would ultimate-

ly produce While Berlin claims to understand Hamannrsquos motives in writing he utterly rejects the content

of his writings which he regards as ldquothe cry of a trapped man hellip who cannot be brought to see that to be

regimented or eliminated is either inevitable or desirablerdquo1 For Berlin Hamann is simply a ldquofanaticrdquo

whose writings consist of ldquopassionate rhetoric and not careful thoughtrdquo and whose opinions are ldquogrotes-

quely one-sided a violent exaggeration of the uniqueness of men and things [and] a passionate hatred of

menrsquos wish to understand the universerdquo2 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 pur-

ism of Hitler3 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 Berlinrsquos judgment that Hamann

1 Berlin 116

2 Berlin 121

3 This accusation is presented in Berlinrsquos book in a series of insinuations we are told for example that Hamannrsquos

ldquohatred and blind irrationalism have fed the stream that has led to social and political irrationalism particularly in German in our own [20

th] centuryrdquo (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 Berlinrsquos 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

34

simply contradicts himself in allowing for the possibility of translation in and out of symbolic ldquolanguag-

esrdquo Hamann has very little patience for ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs which promise patent

meaning and unambiguous interpretation This is perfectly in keeping with his general distaste for effi-

cient 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 ldquopoeticrdquo and ldquosymbolicrdquo signs not to fall under the same fierce criticism as the others

ldquoTo speak is to translaterdquo and ldquocreation is a speech to the creature through the creaturerdquo These

two maxims placed very near to each other in the text1 suggest something of a solution to the problem to

which Berlin directs our attention The conjunction of these lines should remind us that Hamann wheth-

er he directing his attention to literature philology esthetics or any other subject is always also a reli-

gious thinker The archetype of every text is for him the Bible and biblical exegesis is the model and ca-

non 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 Michaelisrsquos ldquodenial of a mystical typological sense

of Scripturerdquo2 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 Mi-

chaelis 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 ldquoTo merdquo says Hamann ldquoevery book is a Biblerdquo3 like the Bible then every

book must be read not merely for its literal sense Berlinrsquos reading of Hamann might be correct if Ha-

1 N 118-119

2 Betz 114

3 Briefwechsel I p 309 trans in Betz 47

35

mann were speaking about the everyday world of words and things understood as a brute fact But Ha-

mann 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 re-

mind us that the interpretation of tongues is also a divine gift1 he admits even that persons may not un-

derstand what they themselves to and say Even a figure such as Voltaire hardly a friend of religious out-

looks testifies for those who have ears to hear to the rightness of Hamannrsquos views

kann man wohl einen glaubwuumlrdigern Zeugen als den unfrac34erblilten Voltaire anfuumlhren wellter bey-nahe die Religion fuumlr den Eckfrac34ein der epifrac14en Dilttkunfrac34 erklaumlrt [hellip] Voltaire aber der Hohe-priefrac34er im Tempel des Gefrac14macks frac14luumlszligt so buumlndig als Kaiphas und denkt frulttbarer als He-rodes2

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 ldquoHo-

hepriefrac34er im Tempelrdquo but also a somewhat Machiavellian politician) justifies the crucifixion of Christ by

arguing that ldquoit is expedient that one man should die for the peoplerdquo3 believing himself to be discussing a

political necessity while as if prophetically describing the Christian doctrine of the atonement And He-

rodrsquos deceitful remark to the Magi ldquothat I might also come and worship himrdquo is taken since Herod was

king of the Jews though a gentile by race to represent the universal destiny of the Christian religion4 This

tradition of interpretation habitual in Biblical exegesis Hamann applies also to analysis of the wordmdashso

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 1210

2 Nadler 204-5

3 John 1150

4 It is telling that Hamann chooses such a contrived and complicated case of biblical parallelism as this one his ar-

gument 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

36

will readily concede that ldquowe see through a glass darklyrdquo1 and that we may not even be able to descry the

true outlines of our own persons in this mirrormdashbut by invoking the language of mirrors2 he locates him-

self within a tradition of thought according to which nature however flawed parts of it may be and how-

ever dulled our ability to discern itmdashis 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 se-

cular 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 ldquoblind heathensrdquo

Blinde Heyden haben die Unilttbarkeit erkannt die der Menfrac14 mit GOTT gemein hat Die verhuumlllte Figur des Leibes das Antlitz des Hauptes und das Aumluszligerfrac34e der Arme ind das ilttbare Sltema in dem wir einher gehn dolt eigentlilt niltts als ein Zeigefinger des verborge-nen Menfrac14en in unsmdash Exemplumque DEI quisque est in imagine parva3

Note that the ldquospiritualrdquo 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 ldquoindex fingersrdquo which direct the inner man to

our attention Hamann let us recall4 does not believe that the target of this ldquoZeigefingerrdquo can always be

1 1 Cor 1312

2 Though Hamann is in some ways a very modern thinker who anticipates 20

th century thought about the kinship of

reason and language he here looks back to the middle ages Cf Alan of Lille ldquoOmnis mundi creatura Quasi liber et pictura Nobis est et speculumrdquo With the sentiment and conceit of this verse Hamann could not agree more 3 N 198 The quotation from the Astronomicon of Manilius (IV895) is mainly noteworthy for its having been writ-

ten by a pagan author while echoing the language of Genesis regarding the ldquoimage of Godrdquo The Cambridge edition of Hamann misenglishes this line rendering it as ldquoEach one is an instance of God in miniaturerdquo This not only loses the connection to the book of Genesis conveyed by the word ldquoimagordquo but puts far too much weight on the word ldquoexemplumrdquo as well An exemplum is not an instance but a type model or analogue ldquoInstancerdquo implies an occur-rence of a rationally determinable kind a ldquotyperdquo or ldquoanaloguerdquo 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

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 circumstancesmdashthis 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 re-

fers to ldquocorrespondencesrdquo of thing and idea and of idea and word these ldquocorrespondencesrdquo are for Berlin

relations between two different things of different types He is quite correct to judge that Hamann consid-

ers 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 meaningmdashhe 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 justifica-

tion 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 ldquoConclusionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos own line that ldquocreation is a speech to the creature

through the creaturerdquo 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 cor-

respond to each other based on no apodictically determinable system knowable a priori but on the gra-

tuitous (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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 com-

pared translation to the art of understanding the image of a tapestry from looking only at the backs of the

threads he remarks ldquoDort [ie in the original contexts of the metaphors borrowed from other authors for

39

Hamannrsquos text] werden ie aber ad illustrationem (zur Verbraumlmung des Rockes) hier ad inuolucrum (zum

Hemde auf bloszligem Leibe) gebrauchtrdquo1 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 deco-

rated 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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos which ac-

cording to the line of interpretation I have explored reveals as much about Hamannrsquos 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 tear-

ing 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 Hamannrsquos motion between images his construction of typological

schemes that resist easy classification and one-for-one interpretation is not antirational raving or obscu-

rantism but rather an alternativemdashand a quite compelling onemdashto 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

1 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 tho-

roughly religious vision of the world If one is willing to do this Hamann is a kind of prophetmdashand the

horned head of Pan on his title-page is also the horned head of Moses1 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 pro-

ducing neat tables of Hamannrsquos 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 Aes-

thetica 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 somethingmdashunless there really is some secret ineffable law of correspondences that un-

ites 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 commen-

tators and writers of senior essays have no right to tread

1 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 agrave la Mosaiumlque (Roth 103 343)

41

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin Isaiah The Magus of the North JG Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism ed Henry

Hardy London John Murray 1993 Betz John After Enlightenment the Post-Secular Vision of JG Hamann Chichester John Wiley amp Sons

2009 Hamann Johann Georg Hamannrsquos Schriften ed Friedrich Roth Berlin G Reimer 1821 (Cited as

ldquoRothrdquo All citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Saumlmtliche Werke ed Josef Nadler Wien Verlag Herder 1950 (Cited as ldquoNad-

lerrdquo Unless otherwise noted all citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Writings on Philosophy and Language trans and ed Kenneth Haynes Cam-

bridge Cambridge UP 2007 (Cited as ldquoHaynesrdquo) Jacobs Carol ldquoHamann Is a Nomadic Writer lsquoAesthetica in nucersquordquo in Skirting the Ethical Stanford Stan-

ford UP 2008 pp 111-130 OrsquoFlaherty James C The Quarrel of Reason with Itself Essays on Hamann Michaelis Lessing Nietzsche Co-

lumbia SC Camden 1988

30

Chapter 4 To speak is to translate

Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 im-

plied meanings into the literal tropological allegorical and anagogical senses that Christians have tradi-

tionally 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 ormdashto employ a metaphor

more perhaps more congenial to Hamannmdashdiscerning 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 indul-

gence 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 slo-

gan from the text itselfmdashldquoto speak is to translaterdquomdashand 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 uumlberetzenmdashaus einer Engelpralte in eine Menfrac14enpralte das heifrac34 Gedanken in WortemdashSalten in NamenmdashBilder in Zeilten die poetifrac14 oder kyriologifrac14 hifrac34orifrac14 oder ymbolifrac14 oder hieroglyphifrac14mdashmdashund philoophifrac14 oder ltarakterifrac34ifrac14 eyn koumlnnen1

Here we are given a license to translate Hamannrsquos images into signs of various kinds It is no surprise that

in a footnote attached to this text he derogates the ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs by citing a pas-

sage of Petronius which complains that a new fashion of ldquopuffed-up and formless talkativenessrdquo has cor-

1 Nadler 199

31

rupted speech so that ldquothe standard of eloquence being corrupted has been halted and struck dumbrdquo

and ldquonot even poetry displays a healthy colorrdquo1 By ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs we should un-

derstand something like Leibnizrsquos 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 criti-

cism 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 cor-

respondences out of the text But the other kinds of signsmdashthe poetic or symbolicmdashdo not seem to fall

under the same criticismmdashthese suggest a kind of sign which indeed has meaning but whose interpreta-

tion 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 Hamannrsquos thought allows even for this kind of correspon-

dence 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 Hamannrsquos text but also is deeply compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos text to assert that he intends the literal and symbolic meanings to be taken as

of equal importancemdashfor us to devote our full attention to take up one of the governing metaphors of this

1 N 199 n10 ldquoNuper ventosa isthaec amp enormis loquacitas Athenas ex Asia conmigrauit [hellip] simulque correpta elo-quentiae regula stetit amp obmutuit [hellip] Ac ne carmen quidem sani coloris enituitrdquo

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 discuss-

ing how Hamann refuses to privilege abstract ldquopurely mentalrdquo thought over the particular words in

which that thought finds expression Berlin concludes that ldquofor 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)rdquo1 As an example of one such contradiction Berlin cites the line placed at the head

of this section ldquoto speak is to translaterdquo For Berlin it follows from Hamannrsquos insistence on the unity of

reason and language that no translation no correspondence between words ideas and things can be es-

tablished

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 attend-ing to ideas or to language and through them (because they correspond) to the facts was a method of judging and knowing reality [hellip But the] notion of a correspondence that there is an objective world on one side and on the other man and his instruments ndash lan-guage ideas and so forth ndash attempting to approximate to this objective reality is a false picture There is only a flow of sensations2

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 ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 reproduced3 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 Hamannrsquos treatise but unable to claim any continuity of thought therewith

1 Berlin 81

2 Ibid

3 Though one might question even this Ποταμῷ γὰρ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐμβῆναι δὶς τῷ αὐτῷ and there is no reason to think

any two ldquoflows of sensationrdquo could ever be substantially identical Necessarily every ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos view Berlin is perplexed when confronted with Hamannrsquos open assertion

that translation is possible between ldquohuman speechrdquo and the ldquospeech of angelsrdquo and can only conclude

that Hamann here contradicts himself And for Berlin it is quite to be expected that Hamann should con-

tradict himself he regards Hamannrsquos thought in general as highly creative and intriguing Schwaumlrmerei

of note for its pivotal place in intellectual history but completely insusceptible or unworthy of serious

philosophic attention Berlin appreciates Hamannrsquos criticism of the Enlightenment and his prescient

awareness of the lifeless bloodless conception of manrsquos spiritual life that the Enlighteners would ultimate-

ly produce While Berlin claims to understand Hamannrsquos motives in writing he utterly rejects the content

of his writings which he regards as ldquothe cry of a trapped man hellip who cannot be brought to see that to be

regimented or eliminated is either inevitable or desirablerdquo1 For Berlin Hamann is simply a ldquofanaticrdquo

whose writings consist of ldquopassionate rhetoric and not careful thoughtrdquo and whose opinions are ldquogrotes-

quely one-sided a violent exaggeration of the uniqueness of men and things [and] a passionate hatred of

menrsquos wish to understand the universerdquo2 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 pur-

ism of Hitler3 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 Berlinrsquos judgment that Hamann

1 Berlin 116

2 Berlin 121

3 This accusation is presented in Berlinrsquos book in a series of insinuations we are told for example that Hamannrsquos

ldquohatred and blind irrationalism have fed the stream that has led to social and political irrationalism particularly in German in our own [20

th] centuryrdquo (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 Berlinrsquos 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

34

simply contradicts himself in allowing for the possibility of translation in and out of symbolic ldquolanguag-

esrdquo Hamann has very little patience for ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs which promise patent

meaning and unambiguous interpretation This is perfectly in keeping with his general distaste for effi-

cient 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 ldquopoeticrdquo and ldquosymbolicrdquo signs not to fall under the same fierce criticism as the others

ldquoTo speak is to translaterdquo and ldquocreation is a speech to the creature through the creaturerdquo These

two maxims placed very near to each other in the text1 suggest something of a solution to the problem to

which Berlin directs our attention The conjunction of these lines should remind us that Hamann wheth-

er he directing his attention to literature philology esthetics or any other subject is always also a reli-

gious thinker The archetype of every text is for him the Bible and biblical exegesis is the model and ca-

non 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 Michaelisrsquos ldquodenial of a mystical typological sense

of Scripturerdquo2 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 Mi-

chaelis 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 ldquoTo merdquo says Hamann ldquoevery book is a Biblerdquo3 like the Bible then every

book must be read not merely for its literal sense Berlinrsquos reading of Hamann might be correct if Ha-

1 N 118-119

2 Betz 114

3 Briefwechsel I p 309 trans in Betz 47

35

mann were speaking about the everyday world of words and things understood as a brute fact But Ha-

mann 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 re-

mind us that the interpretation of tongues is also a divine gift1 he admits even that persons may not un-

derstand what they themselves to and say Even a figure such as Voltaire hardly a friend of religious out-

looks testifies for those who have ears to hear to the rightness of Hamannrsquos views

kann man wohl einen glaubwuumlrdigern Zeugen als den unfrac34erblilten Voltaire anfuumlhren wellter bey-nahe die Religion fuumlr den Eckfrac34ein der epifrac14en Dilttkunfrac34 erklaumlrt [hellip] Voltaire aber der Hohe-priefrac34er im Tempel des Gefrac14macks frac14luumlszligt so buumlndig als Kaiphas und denkt frulttbarer als He-rodes2

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 ldquoHo-

hepriefrac34er im Tempelrdquo but also a somewhat Machiavellian politician) justifies the crucifixion of Christ by

arguing that ldquoit is expedient that one man should die for the peoplerdquo3 believing himself to be discussing a

political necessity while as if prophetically describing the Christian doctrine of the atonement And He-

rodrsquos deceitful remark to the Magi ldquothat I might also come and worship himrdquo is taken since Herod was

king of the Jews though a gentile by race to represent the universal destiny of the Christian religion4 This

tradition of interpretation habitual in Biblical exegesis Hamann applies also to analysis of the wordmdashso

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 1210

2 Nadler 204-5

3 John 1150

4 It is telling that Hamann chooses such a contrived and complicated case of biblical parallelism as this one his ar-

gument 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

36

will readily concede that ldquowe see through a glass darklyrdquo1 and that we may not even be able to descry the

true outlines of our own persons in this mirrormdashbut by invoking the language of mirrors2 he locates him-

self within a tradition of thought according to which nature however flawed parts of it may be and how-

ever dulled our ability to discern itmdashis 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 se-

cular 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 ldquoblind heathensrdquo

Blinde Heyden haben die Unilttbarkeit erkannt die der Menfrac14 mit GOTT gemein hat Die verhuumlllte Figur des Leibes das Antlitz des Hauptes und das Aumluszligerfrac34e der Arme ind das ilttbare Sltema in dem wir einher gehn dolt eigentlilt niltts als ein Zeigefinger des verborge-nen Menfrac14en in unsmdash Exemplumque DEI quisque est in imagine parva3

Note that the ldquospiritualrdquo 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 ldquoindex fingersrdquo which direct the inner man to

our attention Hamann let us recall4 does not believe that the target of this ldquoZeigefingerrdquo can always be

1 1 Cor 1312

2 Though Hamann is in some ways a very modern thinker who anticipates 20

th century thought about the kinship of

reason and language he here looks back to the middle ages Cf Alan of Lille ldquoOmnis mundi creatura Quasi liber et pictura Nobis est et speculumrdquo With the sentiment and conceit of this verse Hamann could not agree more 3 N 198 The quotation from the Astronomicon of Manilius (IV895) is mainly noteworthy for its having been writ-

ten by a pagan author while echoing the language of Genesis regarding the ldquoimage of Godrdquo The Cambridge edition of Hamann misenglishes this line rendering it as ldquoEach one is an instance of God in miniaturerdquo This not only loses the connection to the book of Genesis conveyed by the word ldquoimagordquo but puts far too much weight on the word ldquoexemplumrdquo as well An exemplum is not an instance but a type model or analogue ldquoInstancerdquo implies an occur-rence of a rationally determinable kind a ldquotyperdquo or ldquoanaloguerdquo 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

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 circumstancesmdashthis 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 re-

fers to ldquocorrespondencesrdquo of thing and idea and of idea and word these ldquocorrespondencesrdquo are for Berlin

relations between two different things of different types He is quite correct to judge that Hamann consid-

ers 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 meaningmdashhe 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 justifica-

tion 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 ldquoConclusionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos own line that ldquocreation is a speech to the creature

through the creaturerdquo 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 cor-

respond to each other based on no apodictically determinable system knowable a priori but on the gra-

tuitous (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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 com-

pared translation to the art of understanding the image of a tapestry from looking only at the backs of the

threads he remarks ldquoDort [ie in the original contexts of the metaphors borrowed from other authors for

39

Hamannrsquos text] werden ie aber ad illustrationem (zur Verbraumlmung des Rockes) hier ad inuolucrum (zum

Hemde auf bloszligem Leibe) gebrauchtrdquo1 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 deco-

rated 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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos which ac-

cording to the line of interpretation I have explored reveals as much about Hamannrsquos 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 tear-

ing 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 Hamannrsquos motion between images his construction of typological

schemes that resist easy classification and one-for-one interpretation is not antirational raving or obscu-

rantism but rather an alternativemdashand a quite compelling onemdashto 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

1 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 tho-

roughly religious vision of the world If one is willing to do this Hamann is a kind of prophetmdashand the

horned head of Pan on his title-page is also the horned head of Moses1 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 pro-

ducing neat tables of Hamannrsquos 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 Aes-

thetica 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 somethingmdashunless there really is some secret ineffable law of correspondences that un-

ites 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 commen-

tators and writers of senior essays have no right to tread

1 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 agrave la Mosaiumlque (Roth 103 343)

41

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin Isaiah The Magus of the North JG Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism ed Henry

Hardy London John Murray 1993 Betz John After Enlightenment the Post-Secular Vision of JG Hamann Chichester John Wiley amp Sons

2009 Hamann Johann Georg Hamannrsquos Schriften ed Friedrich Roth Berlin G Reimer 1821 (Cited as

ldquoRothrdquo All citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Saumlmtliche Werke ed Josef Nadler Wien Verlag Herder 1950 (Cited as ldquoNad-

lerrdquo Unless otherwise noted all citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Writings on Philosophy and Language trans and ed Kenneth Haynes Cam-

bridge Cambridge UP 2007 (Cited as ldquoHaynesrdquo) Jacobs Carol ldquoHamann Is a Nomadic Writer lsquoAesthetica in nucersquordquo in Skirting the Ethical Stanford Stan-

ford UP 2008 pp 111-130 OrsquoFlaherty James C The Quarrel of Reason with Itself Essays on Hamann Michaelis Lessing Nietzsche Co-

lumbia SC Camden 1988

31

rupted speech so that ldquothe standard of eloquence being corrupted has been halted and struck dumbrdquo

and ldquonot even poetry displays a healthy colorrdquo1 By ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs we should un-

derstand something like Leibnizrsquos 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 criti-

cism 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 cor-

respondences out of the text But the other kinds of signsmdashthe poetic or symbolicmdashdo not seem to fall

under the same criticismmdashthese suggest a kind of sign which indeed has meaning but whose interpreta-

tion 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 Hamannrsquos thought allows even for this kind of correspon-

dence 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 Hamannrsquos text but also is deeply compatible with Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos text to assert that he intends the literal and symbolic meanings to be taken as

of equal importancemdashfor us to devote our full attention to take up one of the governing metaphors of this

1 N 199 n10 ldquoNuper ventosa isthaec amp enormis loquacitas Athenas ex Asia conmigrauit [hellip] simulque correpta elo-quentiae regula stetit amp obmutuit [hellip] Ac ne carmen quidem sani coloris enituitrdquo

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 discuss-

ing how Hamann refuses to privilege abstract ldquopurely mentalrdquo thought over the particular words in

which that thought finds expression Berlin concludes that ldquofor 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)rdquo1 As an example of one such contradiction Berlin cites the line placed at the head

of this section ldquoto speak is to translaterdquo For Berlin it follows from Hamannrsquos insistence on the unity of

reason and language that no translation no correspondence between words ideas and things can be es-

tablished

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 attend-ing to ideas or to language and through them (because they correspond) to the facts was a method of judging and knowing reality [hellip But the] notion of a correspondence that there is an objective world on one side and on the other man and his instruments ndash lan-guage ideas and so forth ndash attempting to approximate to this objective reality is a false picture There is only a flow of sensations2

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 ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 reproduced3 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 Hamannrsquos treatise but unable to claim any continuity of thought therewith

1 Berlin 81

2 Ibid

3 Though one might question even this Ποταμῷ γὰρ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐμβῆναι δὶς τῷ αὐτῷ and there is no reason to think

any two ldquoflows of sensationrdquo could ever be substantially identical Necessarily every ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos view Berlin is perplexed when confronted with Hamannrsquos open assertion

that translation is possible between ldquohuman speechrdquo and the ldquospeech of angelsrdquo and can only conclude

that Hamann here contradicts himself And for Berlin it is quite to be expected that Hamann should con-

tradict himself he regards Hamannrsquos thought in general as highly creative and intriguing Schwaumlrmerei

of note for its pivotal place in intellectual history but completely insusceptible or unworthy of serious

philosophic attention Berlin appreciates Hamannrsquos criticism of the Enlightenment and his prescient

awareness of the lifeless bloodless conception of manrsquos spiritual life that the Enlighteners would ultimate-

ly produce While Berlin claims to understand Hamannrsquos motives in writing he utterly rejects the content

of his writings which he regards as ldquothe cry of a trapped man hellip who cannot be brought to see that to be

regimented or eliminated is either inevitable or desirablerdquo1 For Berlin Hamann is simply a ldquofanaticrdquo

whose writings consist of ldquopassionate rhetoric and not careful thoughtrdquo and whose opinions are ldquogrotes-

quely one-sided a violent exaggeration of the uniqueness of men and things [and] a passionate hatred of

menrsquos wish to understand the universerdquo2 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 pur-

ism of Hitler3 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 Berlinrsquos judgment that Hamann

1 Berlin 116

2 Berlin 121

3 This accusation is presented in Berlinrsquos book in a series of insinuations we are told for example that Hamannrsquos

ldquohatred and blind irrationalism have fed the stream that has led to social and political irrationalism particularly in German in our own [20

th] centuryrdquo (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 Berlinrsquos 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

34

simply contradicts himself in allowing for the possibility of translation in and out of symbolic ldquolanguag-

esrdquo Hamann has very little patience for ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs which promise patent

meaning and unambiguous interpretation This is perfectly in keeping with his general distaste for effi-

cient 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 ldquopoeticrdquo and ldquosymbolicrdquo signs not to fall under the same fierce criticism as the others

ldquoTo speak is to translaterdquo and ldquocreation is a speech to the creature through the creaturerdquo These

two maxims placed very near to each other in the text1 suggest something of a solution to the problem to

which Berlin directs our attention The conjunction of these lines should remind us that Hamann wheth-

er he directing his attention to literature philology esthetics or any other subject is always also a reli-

gious thinker The archetype of every text is for him the Bible and biblical exegesis is the model and ca-

non 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 Michaelisrsquos ldquodenial of a mystical typological sense

of Scripturerdquo2 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 Mi-

chaelis 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 ldquoTo merdquo says Hamann ldquoevery book is a Biblerdquo3 like the Bible then every

book must be read not merely for its literal sense Berlinrsquos reading of Hamann might be correct if Ha-

1 N 118-119

2 Betz 114

3 Briefwechsel I p 309 trans in Betz 47

35

mann were speaking about the everyday world of words and things understood as a brute fact But Ha-

mann 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 re-

mind us that the interpretation of tongues is also a divine gift1 he admits even that persons may not un-

derstand what they themselves to and say Even a figure such as Voltaire hardly a friend of religious out-

looks testifies for those who have ears to hear to the rightness of Hamannrsquos views

kann man wohl einen glaubwuumlrdigern Zeugen als den unfrac34erblilten Voltaire anfuumlhren wellter bey-nahe die Religion fuumlr den Eckfrac34ein der epifrac14en Dilttkunfrac34 erklaumlrt [hellip] Voltaire aber der Hohe-priefrac34er im Tempel des Gefrac14macks frac14luumlszligt so buumlndig als Kaiphas und denkt frulttbarer als He-rodes2

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 ldquoHo-

hepriefrac34er im Tempelrdquo but also a somewhat Machiavellian politician) justifies the crucifixion of Christ by

arguing that ldquoit is expedient that one man should die for the peoplerdquo3 believing himself to be discussing a

political necessity while as if prophetically describing the Christian doctrine of the atonement And He-

rodrsquos deceitful remark to the Magi ldquothat I might also come and worship himrdquo is taken since Herod was

king of the Jews though a gentile by race to represent the universal destiny of the Christian religion4 This

tradition of interpretation habitual in Biblical exegesis Hamann applies also to analysis of the wordmdashso

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 1210

2 Nadler 204-5

3 John 1150

4 It is telling that Hamann chooses such a contrived and complicated case of biblical parallelism as this one his ar-

gument 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

36

will readily concede that ldquowe see through a glass darklyrdquo1 and that we may not even be able to descry the

true outlines of our own persons in this mirrormdashbut by invoking the language of mirrors2 he locates him-

self within a tradition of thought according to which nature however flawed parts of it may be and how-

ever dulled our ability to discern itmdashis 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 se-

cular 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 ldquoblind heathensrdquo

Blinde Heyden haben die Unilttbarkeit erkannt die der Menfrac14 mit GOTT gemein hat Die verhuumlllte Figur des Leibes das Antlitz des Hauptes und das Aumluszligerfrac34e der Arme ind das ilttbare Sltema in dem wir einher gehn dolt eigentlilt niltts als ein Zeigefinger des verborge-nen Menfrac14en in unsmdash Exemplumque DEI quisque est in imagine parva3

Note that the ldquospiritualrdquo 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 ldquoindex fingersrdquo which direct the inner man to

our attention Hamann let us recall4 does not believe that the target of this ldquoZeigefingerrdquo can always be

1 1 Cor 1312

2 Though Hamann is in some ways a very modern thinker who anticipates 20

th century thought about the kinship of

reason and language he here looks back to the middle ages Cf Alan of Lille ldquoOmnis mundi creatura Quasi liber et pictura Nobis est et speculumrdquo With the sentiment and conceit of this verse Hamann could not agree more 3 N 198 The quotation from the Astronomicon of Manilius (IV895) is mainly noteworthy for its having been writ-

ten by a pagan author while echoing the language of Genesis regarding the ldquoimage of Godrdquo The Cambridge edition of Hamann misenglishes this line rendering it as ldquoEach one is an instance of God in miniaturerdquo This not only loses the connection to the book of Genesis conveyed by the word ldquoimagordquo but puts far too much weight on the word ldquoexemplumrdquo as well An exemplum is not an instance but a type model or analogue ldquoInstancerdquo implies an occur-rence of a rationally determinable kind a ldquotyperdquo or ldquoanaloguerdquo 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

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 circumstancesmdashthis 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 re-

fers to ldquocorrespondencesrdquo of thing and idea and of idea and word these ldquocorrespondencesrdquo are for Berlin

relations between two different things of different types He is quite correct to judge that Hamann consid-

ers 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 meaningmdashhe 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 justifica-

tion 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 ldquoConclusionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos own line that ldquocreation is a speech to the creature

through the creaturerdquo 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 cor-

respond to each other based on no apodictically determinable system knowable a priori but on the gra-

tuitous (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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 com-

pared translation to the art of understanding the image of a tapestry from looking only at the backs of the

threads he remarks ldquoDort [ie in the original contexts of the metaphors borrowed from other authors for

39

Hamannrsquos text] werden ie aber ad illustrationem (zur Verbraumlmung des Rockes) hier ad inuolucrum (zum

Hemde auf bloszligem Leibe) gebrauchtrdquo1 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 deco-

rated 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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos which ac-

cording to the line of interpretation I have explored reveals as much about Hamannrsquos 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 tear-

ing 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 Hamannrsquos motion between images his construction of typological

schemes that resist easy classification and one-for-one interpretation is not antirational raving or obscu-

rantism but rather an alternativemdashand a quite compelling onemdashto 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

1 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 tho-

roughly religious vision of the world If one is willing to do this Hamann is a kind of prophetmdashand the

horned head of Pan on his title-page is also the horned head of Moses1 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 pro-

ducing neat tables of Hamannrsquos 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 Aes-

thetica 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 somethingmdashunless there really is some secret ineffable law of correspondences that un-

ites 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 commen-

tators and writers of senior essays have no right to tread

1 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 agrave la Mosaiumlque (Roth 103 343)

41

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin Isaiah The Magus of the North JG Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism ed Henry

Hardy London John Murray 1993 Betz John After Enlightenment the Post-Secular Vision of JG Hamann Chichester John Wiley amp Sons

2009 Hamann Johann Georg Hamannrsquos Schriften ed Friedrich Roth Berlin G Reimer 1821 (Cited as

ldquoRothrdquo All citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Saumlmtliche Werke ed Josef Nadler Wien Verlag Herder 1950 (Cited as ldquoNad-

lerrdquo Unless otherwise noted all citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Writings on Philosophy and Language trans and ed Kenneth Haynes Cam-

bridge Cambridge UP 2007 (Cited as ldquoHaynesrdquo) Jacobs Carol ldquoHamann Is a Nomadic Writer lsquoAesthetica in nucersquordquo in Skirting the Ethical Stanford Stan-

ford UP 2008 pp 111-130 OrsquoFlaherty James C The Quarrel of Reason with Itself Essays on Hamann Michaelis Lessing Nietzsche Co-

lumbia SC Camden 1988

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 discuss-

ing how Hamann refuses to privilege abstract ldquopurely mentalrdquo thought over the particular words in

which that thought finds expression Berlin concludes that ldquofor 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)rdquo1 As an example of one such contradiction Berlin cites the line placed at the head

of this section ldquoto speak is to translaterdquo For Berlin it follows from Hamannrsquos insistence on the unity of

reason and language that no translation no correspondence between words ideas and things can be es-

tablished

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 attend-ing to ideas or to language and through them (because they correspond) to the facts was a method of judging and knowing reality [hellip But the] notion of a correspondence that there is an objective world on one side and on the other man and his instruments ndash lan-guage ideas and so forth ndash attempting to approximate to this objective reality is a false picture There is only a flow of sensations2

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 ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 reproduced3 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 Hamannrsquos treatise but unable to claim any continuity of thought therewith

1 Berlin 81

2 Ibid

3 Though one might question even this Ποταμῷ γὰρ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐμβῆναι δὶς τῷ αὐτῷ and there is no reason to think

any two ldquoflows of sensationrdquo could ever be substantially identical Necessarily every ldquoflow of sensationsrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos view Berlin is perplexed when confronted with Hamannrsquos open assertion

that translation is possible between ldquohuman speechrdquo and the ldquospeech of angelsrdquo and can only conclude

that Hamann here contradicts himself And for Berlin it is quite to be expected that Hamann should con-

tradict himself he regards Hamannrsquos thought in general as highly creative and intriguing Schwaumlrmerei

of note for its pivotal place in intellectual history but completely insusceptible or unworthy of serious

philosophic attention Berlin appreciates Hamannrsquos criticism of the Enlightenment and his prescient

awareness of the lifeless bloodless conception of manrsquos spiritual life that the Enlighteners would ultimate-

ly produce While Berlin claims to understand Hamannrsquos motives in writing he utterly rejects the content

of his writings which he regards as ldquothe cry of a trapped man hellip who cannot be brought to see that to be

regimented or eliminated is either inevitable or desirablerdquo1 For Berlin Hamann is simply a ldquofanaticrdquo

whose writings consist of ldquopassionate rhetoric and not careful thoughtrdquo and whose opinions are ldquogrotes-

quely one-sided a violent exaggeration of the uniqueness of men and things [and] a passionate hatred of

menrsquos wish to understand the universerdquo2 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 pur-

ism of Hitler3 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 Berlinrsquos judgment that Hamann

1 Berlin 116

2 Berlin 121

3 This accusation is presented in Berlinrsquos book in a series of insinuations we are told for example that Hamannrsquos

ldquohatred and blind irrationalism have fed the stream that has led to social and political irrationalism particularly in German in our own [20

th] centuryrdquo (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 Berlinrsquos 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

34

simply contradicts himself in allowing for the possibility of translation in and out of symbolic ldquolanguag-

esrdquo Hamann has very little patience for ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs which promise patent

meaning and unambiguous interpretation This is perfectly in keeping with his general distaste for effi-

cient 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 ldquopoeticrdquo and ldquosymbolicrdquo signs not to fall under the same fierce criticism as the others

ldquoTo speak is to translaterdquo and ldquocreation is a speech to the creature through the creaturerdquo These

two maxims placed very near to each other in the text1 suggest something of a solution to the problem to

which Berlin directs our attention The conjunction of these lines should remind us that Hamann wheth-

er he directing his attention to literature philology esthetics or any other subject is always also a reli-

gious thinker The archetype of every text is for him the Bible and biblical exegesis is the model and ca-

non 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 Michaelisrsquos ldquodenial of a mystical typological sense

of Scripturerdquo2 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 Mi-

chaelis 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 ldquoTo merdquo says Hamann ldquoevery book is a Biblerdquo3 like the Bible then every

book must be read not merely for its literal sense Berlinrsquos reading of Hamann might be correct if Ha-

1 N 118-119

2 Betz 114

3 Briefwechsel I p 309 trans in Betz 47

35

mann were speaking about the everyday world of words and things understood as a brute fact But Ha-

mann 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 re-

mind us that the interpretation of tongues is also a divine gift1 he admits even that persons may not un-

derstand what they themselves to and say Even a figure such as Voltaire hardly a friend of religious out-

looks testifies for those who have ears to hear to the rightness of Hamannrsquos views

kann man wohl einen glaubwuumlrdigern Zeugen als den unfrac34erblilten Voltaire anfuumlhren wellter bey-nahe die Religion fuumlr den Eckfrac34ein der epifrac14en Dilttkunfrac34 erklaumlrt [hellip] Voltaire aber der Hohe-priefrac34er im Tempel des Gefrac14macks frac14luumlszligt so buumlndig als Kaiphas und denkt frulttbarer als He-rodes2

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 ldquoHo-

hepriefrac34er im Tempelrdquo but also a somewhat Machiavellian politician) justifies the crucifixion of Christ by

arguing that ldquoit is expedient that one man should die for the peoplerdquo3 believing himself to be discussing a

political necessity while as if prophetically describing the Christian doctrine of the atonement And He-

rodrsquos deceitful remark to the Magi ldquothat I might also come and worship himrdquo is taken since Herod was

king of the Jews though a gentile by race to represent the universal destiny of the Christian religion4 This

tradition of interpretation habitual in Biblical exegesis Hamann applies also to analysis of the wordmdashso

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 1210

2 Nadler 204-5

3 John 1150

4 It is telling that Hamann chooses such a contrived and complicated case of biblical parallelism as this one his ar-

gument 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

36

will readily concede that ldquowe see through a glass darklyrdquo1 and that we may not even be able to descry the

true outlines of our own persons in this mirrormdashbut by invoking the language of mirrors2 he locates him-

self within a tradition of thought according to which nature however flawed parts of it may be and how-

ever dulled our ability to discern itmdashis 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 se-

cular 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 ldquoblind heathensrdquo

Blinde Heyden haben die Unilttbarkeit erkannt die der Menfrac14 mit GOTT gemein hat Die verhuumlllte Figur des Leibes das Antlitz des Hauptes und das Aumluszligerfrac34e der Arme ind das ilttbare Sltema in dem wir einher gehn dolt eigentlilt niltts als ein Zeigefinger des verborge-nen Menfrac14en in unsmdash Exemplumque DEI quisque est in imagine parva3

Note that the ldquospiritualrdquo 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 ldquoindex fingersrdquo which direct the inner man to

our attention Hamann let us recall4 does not believe that the target of this ldquoZeigefingerrdquo can always be

1 1 Cor 1312

2 Though Hamann is in some ways a very modern thinker who anticipates 20

th century thought about the kinship of

reason and language he here looks back to the middle ages Cf Alan of Lille ldquoOmnis mundi creatura Quasi liber et pictura Nobis est et speculumrdquo With the sentiment and conceit of this verse Hamann could not agree more 3 N 198 The quotation from the Astronomicon of Manilius (IV895) is mainly noteworthy for its having been writ-

ten by a pagan author while echoing the language of Genesis regarding the ldquoimage of Godrdquo The Cambridge edition of Hamann misenglishes this line rendering it as ldquoEach one is an instance of God in miniaturerdquo This not only loses the connection to the book of Genesis conveyed by the word ldquoimagordquo but puts far too much weight on the word ldquoexemplumrdquo as well An exemplum is not an instance but a type model or analogue ldquoInstancerdquo implies an occur-rence of a rationally determinable kind a ldquotyperdquo or ldquoanaloguerdquo 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

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 circumstancesmdashthis 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 re-

fers to ldquocorrespondencesrdquo of thing and idea and of idea and word these ldquocorrespondencesrdquo are for Berlin

relations between two different things of different types He is quite correct to judge that Hamann consid-

ers 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 meaningmdashhe 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 justifica-

tion 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 ldquoConclusionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos own line that ldquocreation is a speech to the creature

through the creaturerdquo 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 cor-

respond to each other based on no apodictically determinable system knowable a priori but on the gra-

tuitous (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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 com-

pared translation to the art of understanding the image of a tapestry from looking only at the backs of the

threads he remarks ldquoDort [ie in the original contexts of the metaphors borrowed from other authors for

39

Hamannrsquos text] werden ie aber ad illustrationem (zur Verbraumlmung des Rockes) hier ad inuolucrum (zum

Hemde auf bloszligem Leibe) gebrauchtrdquo1 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 deco-

rated 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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos which ac-

cording to the line of interpretation I have explored reveals as much about Hamannrsquos 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 tear-

ing 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 Hamannrsquos motion between images his construction of typological

schemes that resist easy classification and one-for-one interpretation is not antirational raving or obscu-

rantism but rather an alternativemdashand a quite compelling onemdashto 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

1 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 tho-

roughly religious vision of the world If one is willing to do this Hamann is a kind of prophetmdashand the

horned head of Pan on his title-page is also the horned head of Moses1 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 pro-

ducing neat tables of Hamannrsquos 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 Aes-

thetica 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 somethingmdashunless there really is some secret ineffable law of correspondences that un-

ites 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 commen-

tators and writers of senior essays have no right to tread

1 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 agrave la Mosaiumlque (Roth 103 343)

41

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin Isaiah The Magus of the North JG Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism ed Henry

Hardy London John Murray 1993 Betz John After Enlightenment the Post-Secular Vision of JG Hamann Chichester John Wiley amp Sons

2009 Hamann Johann Georg Hamannrsquos Schriften ed Friedrich Roth Berlin G Reimer 1821 (Cited as

ldquoRothrdquo All citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Saumlmtliche Werke ed Josef Nadler Wien Verlag Herder 1950 (Cited as ldquoNad-

lerrdquo Unless otherwise noted all citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Writings on Philosophy and Language trans and ed Kenneth Haynes Cam-

bridge Cambridge UP 2007 (Cited as ldquoHaynesrdquo) Jacobs Carol ldquoHamann Is a Nomadic Writer lsquoAesthetica in nucersquordquo in Skirting the Ethical Stanford Stan-

ford UP 2008 pp 111-130 OrsquoFlaherty James C The Quarrel of Reason with Itself Essays on Hamann Michaelis Lessing Nietzsche Co-

lumbia SC Camden 1988

33

Believing this to be Hamannrsquos view Berlin is perplexed when confronted with Hamannrsquos open assertion

that translation is possible between ldquohuman speechrdquo and the ldquospeech of angelsrdquo and can only conclude

that Hamann here contradicts himself And for Berlin it is quite to be expected that Hamann should con-

tradict himself he regards Hamannrsquos thought in general as highly creative and intriguing Schwaumlrmerei

of note for its pivotal place in intellectual history but completely insusceptible or unworthy of serious

philosophic attention Berlin appreciates Hamannrsquos criticism of the Enlightenment and his prescient

awareness of the lifeless bloodless conception of manrsquos spiritual life that the Enlighteners would ultimate-

ly produce While Berlin claims to understand Hamannrsquos motives in writing he utterly rejects the content

of his writings which he regards as ldquothe cry of a trapped man hellip who cannot be brought to see that to be

regimented or eliminated is either inevitable or desirablerdquo1 For Berlin Hamann is simply a ldquofanaticrdquo

whose writings consist of ldquopassionate rhetoric and not careful thoughtrdquo and whose opinions are ldquogrotes-

quely one-sided a violent exaggeration of the uniqueness of men and things [and] a passionate hatred of

menrsquos wish to understand the universerdquo2 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 pur-

ism of Hitler3 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 Berlinrsquos judgment that Hamann

1 Berlin 116

2 Berlin 121

3 This accusation is presented in Berlinrsquos book in a series of insinuations we are told for example that Hamannrsquos

ldquohatred and blind irrationalism have fed the stream that has led to social and political irrationalism particularly in German in our own [20

th] centuryrdquo (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 Berlinrsquos 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

34

simply contradicts himself in allowing for the possibility of translation in and out of symbolic ldquolanguag-

esrdquo Hamann has very little patience for ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs which promise patent

meaning and unambiguous interpretation This is perfectly in keeping with his general distaste for effi-

cient 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 ldquopoeticrdquo and ldquosymbolicrdquo signs not to fall under the same fierce criticism as the others

ldquoTo speak is to translaterdquo and ldquocreation is a speech to the creature through the creaturerdquo These

two maxims placed very near to each other in the text1 suggest something of a solution to the problem to

which Berlin directs our attention The conjunction of these lines should remind us that Hamann wheth-

er he directing his attention to literature philology esthetics or any other subject is always also a reli-

gious thinker The archetype of every text is for him the Bible and biblical exegesis is the model and ca-

non 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 Michaelisrsquos ldquodenial of a mystical typological sense

of Scripturerdquo2 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 Mi-

chaelis 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 ldquoTo merdquo says Hamann ldquoevery book is a Biblerdquo3 like the Bible then every

book must be read not merely for its literal sense Berlinrsquos reading of Hamann might be correct if Ha-

1 N 118-119

2 Betz 114

3 Briefwechsel I p 309 trans in Betz 47

35

mann were speaking about the everyday world of words and things understood as a brute fact But Ha-

mann 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 re-

mind us that the interpretation of tongues is also a divine gift1 he admits even that persons may not un-

derstand what they themselves to and say Even a figure such as Voltaire hardly a friend of religious out-

looks testifies for those who have ears to hear to the rightness of Hamannrsquos views

kann man wohl einen glaubwuumlrdigern Zeugen als den unfrac34erblilten Voltaire anfuumlhren wellter bey-nahe die Religion fuumlr den Eckfrac34ein der epifrac14en Dilttkunfrac34 erklaumlrt [hellip] Voltaire aber der Hohe-priefrac34er im Tempel des Gefrac14macks frac14luumlszligt so buumlndig als Kaiphas und denkt frulttbarer als He-rodes2

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 ldquoHo-

hepriefrac34er im Tempelrdquo but also a somewhat Machiavellian politician) justifies the crucifixion of Christ by

arguing that ldquoit is expedient that one man should die for the peoplerdquo3 believing himself to be discussing a

political necessity while as if prophetically describing the Christian doctrine of the atonement And He-

rodrsquos deceitful remark to the Magi ldquothat I might also come and worship himrdquo is taken since Herod was

king of the Jews though a gentile by race to represent the universal destiny of the Christian religion4 This

tradition of interpretation habitual in Biblical exegesis Hamann applies also to analysis of the wordmdashso

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 1210

2 Nadler 204-5

3 John 1150

4 It is telling that Hamann chooses such a contrived and complicated case of biblical parallelism as this one his ar-

gument 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

36

will readily concede that ldquowe see through a glass darklyrdquo1 and that we may not even be able to descry the

true outlines of our own persons in this mirrormdashbut by invoking the language of mirrors2 he locates him-

self within a tradition of thought according to which nature however flawed parts of it may be and how-

ever dulled our ability to discern itmdashis 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 se-

cular 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 ldquoblind heathensrdquo

Blinde Heyden haben die Unilttbarkeit erkannt die der Menfrac14 mit GOTT gemein hat Die verhuumlllte Figur des Leibes das Antlitz des Hauptes und das Aumluszligerfrac34e der Arme ind das ilttbare Sltema in dem wir einher gehn dolt eigentlilt niltts als ein Zeigefinger des verborge-nen Menfrac14en in unsmdash Exemplumque DEI quisque est in imagine parva3

Note that the ldquospiritualrdquo 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 ldquoindex fingersrdquo which direct the inner man to

our attention Hamann let us recall4 does not believe that the target of this ldquoZeigefingerrdquo can always be

1 1 Cor 1312

2 Though Hamann is in some ways a very modern thinker who anticipates 20

th century thought about the kinship of

reason and language he here looks back to the middle ages Cf Alan of Lille ldquoOmnis mundi creatura Quasi liber et pictura Nobis est et speculumrdquo With the sentiment and conceit of this verse Hamann could not agree more 3 N 198 The quotation from the Astronomicon of Manilius (IV895) is mainly noteworthy for its having been writ-

ten by a pagan author while echoing the language of Genesis regarding the ldquoimage of Godrdquo The Cambridge edition of Hamann misenglishes this line rendering it as ldquoEach one is an instance of God in miniaturerdquo This not only loses the connection to the book of Genesis conveyed by the word ldquoimagordquo but puts far too much weight on the word ldquoexemplumrdquo as well An exemplum is not an instance but a type model or analogue ldquoInstancerdquo implies an occur-rence of a rationally determinable kind a ldquotyperdquo or ldquoanaloguerdquo 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

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 circumstancesmdashthis 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 re-

fers to ldquocorrespondencesrdquo of thing and idea and of idea and word these ldquocorrespondencesrdquo are for Berlin

relations between two different things of different types He is quite correct to judge that Hamann consid-

ers 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 meaningmdashhe 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 justifica-

tion 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 ldquoConclusionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos own line that ldquocreation is a speech to the creature

through the creaturerdquo 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 cor-

respond to each other based on no apodictically determinable system knowable a priori but on the gra-

tuitous (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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 com-

pared translation to the art of understanding the image of a tapestry from looking only at the backs of the

threads he remarks ldquoDort [ie in the original contexts of the metaphors borrowed from other authors for

39

Hamannrsquos text] werden ie aber ad illustrationem (zur Verbraumlmung des Rockes) hier ad inuolucrum (zum

Hemde auf bloszligem Leibe) gebrauchtrdquo1 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 deco-

rated 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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos which ac-

cording to the line of interpretation I have explored reveals as much about Hamannrsquos 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 tear-

ing 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 Hamannrsquos motion between images his construction of typological

schemes that resist easy classification and one-for-one interpretation is not antirational raving or obscu-

rantism but rather an alternativemdashand a quite compelling onemdashto 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

1 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 tho-

roughly religious vision of the world If one is willing to do this Hamann is a kind of prophetmdashand the

horned head of Pan on his title-page is also the horned head of Moses1 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 pro-

ducing neat tables of Hamannrsquos 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 Aes-

thetica 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 somethingmdashunless there really is some secret ineffable law of correspondences that un-

ites 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 commen-

tators and writers of senior essays have no right to tread

1 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 agrave la Mosaiumlque (Roth 103 343)

41

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin Isaiah The Magus of the North JG Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism ed Henry

Hardy London John Murray 1993 Betz John After Enlightenment the Post-Secular Vision of JG Hamann Chichester John Wiley amp Sons

2009 Hamann Johann Georg Hamannrsquos Schriften ed Friedrich Roth Berlin G Reimer 1821 (Cited as

ldquoRothrdquo All citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Saumlmtliche Werke ed Josef Nadler Wien Verlag Herder 1950 (Cited as ldquoNad-

lerrdquo Unless otherwise noted all citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Writings on Philosophy and Language trans and ed Kenneth Haynes Cam-

bridge Cambridge UP 2007 (Cited as ldquoHaynesrdquo) Jacobs Carol ldquoHamann Is a Nomadic Writer lsquoAesthetica in nucersquordquo in Skirting the Ethical Stanford Stan-

ford UP 2008 pp 111-130 OrsquoFlaherty James C The Quarrel of Reason with Itself Essays on Hamann Michaelis Lessing Nietzsche Co-

lumbia SC Camden 1988

34

simply contradicts himself in allowing for the possibility of translation in and out of symbolic ldquolanguag-

esrdquo Hamann has very little patience for ldquophilosophicrdquo or ldquocharacteristicrdquo signs which promise patent

meaning and unambiguous interpretation This is perfectly in keeping with his general distaste for effi-

cient 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 ldquopoeticrdquo and ldquosymbolicrdquo signs not to fall under the same fierce criticism as the others

ldquoTo speak is to translaterdquo and ldquocreation is a speech to the creature through the creaturerdquo These

two maxims placed very near to each other in the text1 suggest something of a solution to the problem to

which Berlin directs our attention The conjunction of these lines should remind us that Hamann wheth-

er he directing his attention to literature philology esthetics or any other subject is always also a reli-

gious thinker The archetype of every text is for him the Bible and biblical exegesis is the model and ca-

non 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 Michaelisrsquos ldquodenial of a mystical typological sense

of Scripturerdquo2 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 Mi-

chaelis 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 ldquoTo merdquo says Hamann ldquoevery book is a Biblerdquo3 like the Bible then every

book must be read not merely for its literal sense Berlinrsquos reading of Hamann might be correct if Ha-

1 N 118-119

2 Betz 114

3 Briefwechsel I p 309 trans in Betz 47

35

mann were speaking about the everyday world of words and things understood as a brute fact But Ha-

mann 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 re-

mind us that the interpretation of tongues is also a divine gift1 he admits even that persons may not un-

derstand what they themselves to and say Even a figure such as Voltaire hardly a friend of religious out-

looks testifies for those who have ears to hear to the rightness of Hamannrsquos views

kann man wohl einen glaubwuumlrdigern Zeugen als den unfrac34erblilten Voltaire anfuumlhren wellter bey-nahe die Religion fuumlr den Eckfrac34ein der epifrac14en Dilttkunfrac34 erklaumlrt [hellip] Voltaire aber der Hohe-priefrac34er im Tempel des Gefrac14macks frac14luumlszligt so buumlndig als Kaiphas und denkt frulttbarer als He-rodes2

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 ldquoHo-

hepriefrac34er im Tempelrdquo but also a somewhat Machiavellian politician) justifies the crucifixion of Christ by

arguing that ldquoit is expedient that one man should die for the peoplerdquo3 believing himself to be discussing a

political necessity while as if prophetically describing the Christian doctrine of the atonement And He-

rodrsquos deceitful remark to the Magi ldquothat I might also come and worship himrdquo is taken since Herod was

king of the Jews though a gentile by race to represent the universal destiny of the Christian religion4 This

tradition of interpretation habitual in Biblical exegesis Hamann applies also to analysis of the wordmdashso

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 1210

2 Nadler 204-5

3 John 1150

4 It is telling that Hamann chooses such a contrived and complicated case of biblical parallelism as this one his ar-

gument 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

36

will readily concede that ldquowe see through a glass darklyrdquo1 and that we may not even be able to descry the

true outlines of our own persons in this mirrormdashbut by invoking the language of mirrors2 he locates him-

self within a tradition of thought according to which nature however flawed parts of it may be and how-

ever dulled our ability to discern itmdashis 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 se-

cular 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 ldquoblind heathensrdquo

Blinde Heyden haben die Unilttbarkeit erkannt die der Menfrac14 mit GOTT gemein hat Die verhuumlllte Figur des Leibes das Antlitz des Hauptes und das Aumluszligerfrac34e der Arme ind das ilttbare Sltema in dem wir einher gehn dolt eigentlilt niltts als ein Zeigefinger des verborge-nen Menfrac14en in unsmdash Exemplumque DEI quisque est in imagine parva3

Note that the ldquospiritualrdquo 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 ldquoindex fingersrdquo which direct the inner man to

our attention Hamann let us recall4 does not believe that the target of this ldquoZeigefingerrdquo can always be

1 1 Cor 1312

2 Though Hamann is in some ways a very modern thinker who anticipates 20

th century thought about the kinship of

reason and language he here looks back to the middle ages Cf Alan of Lille ldquoOmnis mundi creatura Quasi liber et pictura Nobis est et speculumrdquo With the sentiment and conceit of this verse Hamann could not agree more 3 N 198 The quotation from the Astronomicon of Manilius (IV895) is mainly noteworthy for its having been writ-

ten by a pagan author while echoing the language of Genesis regarding the ldquoimage of Godrdquo The Cambridge edition of Hamann misenglishes this line rendering it as ldquoEach one is an instance of God in miniaturerdquo This not only loses the connection to the book of Genesis conveyed by the word ldquoimagordquo but puts far too much weight on the word ldquoexemplumrdquo as well An exemplum is not an instance but a type model or analogue ldquoInstancerdquo implies an occur-rence of a rationally determinable kind a ldquotyperdquo or ldquoanaloguerdquo 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

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 circumstancesmdashthis 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 re-

fers to ldquocorrespondencesrdquo of thing and idea and of idea and word these ldquocorrespondencesrdquo are for Berlin

relations between two different things of different types He is quite correct to judge that Hamann consid-

ers 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 meaningmdashhe 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 justifica-

tion 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 ldquoConclusionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos own line that ldquocreation is a speech to the creature

through the creaturerdquo 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 cor-

respond to each other based on no apodictically determinable system knowable a priori but on the gra-

tuitous (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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 com-

pared translation to the art of understanding the image of a tapestry from looking only at the backs of the

threads he remarks ldquoDort [ie in the original contexts of the metaphors borrowed from other authors for

39

Hamannrsquos text] werden ie aber ad illustrationem (zur Verbraumlmung des Rockes) hier ad inuolucrum (zum

Hemde auf bloszligem Leibe) gebrauchtrdquo1 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 deco-

rated 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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos which ac-

cording to the line of interpretation I have explored reveals as much about Hamannrsquos 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 tear-

ing 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 Hamannrsquos motion between images his construction of typological

schemes that resist easy classification and one-for-one interpretation is not antirational raving or obscu-

rantism but rather an alternativemdashand a quite compelling onemdashto 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

1 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 tho-

roughly religious vision of the world If one is willing to do this Hamann is a kind of prophetmdashand the

horned head of Pan on his title-page is also the horned head of Moses1 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 pro-

ducing neat tables of Hamannrsquos 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 Aes-

thetica 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 somethingmdashunless there really is some secret ineffable law of correspondences that un-

ites 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 commen-

tators and writers of senior essays have no right to tread

1 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 agrave la Mosaiumlque (Roth 103 343)

41

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin Isaiah The Magus of the North JG Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism ed Henry

Hardy London John Murray 1993 Betz John After Enlightenment the Post-Secular Vision of JG Hamann Chichester John Wiley amp Sons

2009 Hamann Johann Georg Hamannrsquos Schriften ed Friedrich Roth Berlin G Reimer 1821 (Cited as

ldquoRothrdquo All citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Saumlmtliche Werke ed Josef Nadler Wien Verlag Herder 1950 (Cited as ldquoNad-

lerrdquo Unless otherwise noted all citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Writings on Philosophy and Language trans and ed Kenneth Haynes Cam-

bridge Cambridge UP 2007 (Cited as ldquoHaynesrdquo) Jacobs Carol ldquoHamann Is a Nomadic Writer lsquoAesthetica in nucersquordquo in Skirting the Ethical Stanford Stan-

ford UP 2008 pp 111-130 OrsquoFlaherty James C The Quarrel of Reason with Itself Essays on Hamann Michaelis Lessing Nietzsche Co-

lumbia SC Camden 1988

35

mann were speaking about the everyday world of words and things understood as a brute fact But Ha-

mann 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 re-

mind us that the interpretation of tongues is also a divine gift1 he admits even that persons may not un-

derstand what they themselves to and say Even a figure such as Voltaire hardly a friend of religious out-

looks testifies for those who have ears to hear to the rightness of Hamannrsquos views

kann man wohl einen glaubwuumlrdigern Zeugen als den unfrac34erblilten Voltaire anfuumlhren wellter bey-nahe die Religion fuumlr den Eckfrac34ein der epifrac14en Dilttkunfrac34 erklaumlrt [hellip] Voltaire aber der Hohe-priefrac34er im Tempel des Gefrac14macks frac14luumlszligt so buumlndig als Kaiphas und denkt frulttbarer als He-rodes2

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 ldquoHo-

hepriefrac34er im Tempelrdquo but also a somewhat Machiavellian politician) justifies the crucifixion of Christ by

arguing that ldquoit is expedient that one man should die for the peoplerdquo3 believing himself to be discussing a

political necessity while as if prophetically describing the Christian doctrine of the atonement And He-

rodrsquos deceitful remark to the Magi ldquothat I might also come and worship himrdquo is taken since Herod was

king of the Jews though a gentile by race to represent the universal destiny of the Christian religion4 This

tradition of interpretation habitual in Biblical exegesis Hamann applies also to analysis of the wordmdashso

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 1210

2 Nadler 204-5

3 John 1150

4 It is telling that Hamann chooses such a contrived and complicated case of biblical parallelism as this one his ar-

gument 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

36

will readily concede that ldquowe see through a glass darklyrdquo1 and that we may not even be able to descry the

true outlines of our own persons in this mirrormdashbut by invoking the language of mirrors2 he locates him-

self within a tradition of thought according to which nature however flawed parts of it may be and how-

ever dulled our ability to discern itmdashis 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 se-

cular 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 ldquoblind heathensrdquo

Blinde Heyden haben die Unilttbarkeit erkannt die der Menfrac14 mit GOTT gemein hat Die verhuumlllte Figur des Leibes das Antlitz des Hauptes und das Aumluszligerfrac34e der Arme ind das ilttbare Sltema in dem wir einher gehn dolt eigentlilt niltts als ein Zeigefinger des verborge-nen Menfrac14en in unsmdash Exemplumque DEI quisque est in imagine parva3

Note that the ldquospiritualrdquo 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 ldquoindex fingersrdquo which direct the inner man to

our attention Hamann let us recall4 does not believe that the target of this ldquoZeigefingerrdquo can always be

1 1 Cor 1312

2 Though Hamann is in some ways a very modern thinker who anticipates 20

th century thought about the kinship of

reason and language he here looks back to the middle ages Cf Alan of Lille ldquoOmnis mundi creatura Quasi liber et pictura Nobis est et speculumrdquo With the sentiment and conceit of this verse Hamann could not agree more 3 N 198 The quotation from the Astronomicon of Manilius (IV895) is mainly noteworthy for its having been writ-

ten by a pagan author while echoing the language of Genesis regarding the ldquoimage of Godrdquo The Cambridge edition of Hamann misenglishes this line rendering it as ldquoEach one is an instance of God in miniaturerdquo This not only loses the connection to the book of Genesis conveyed by the word ldquoimagordquo but puts far too much weight on the word ldquoexemplumrdquo as well An exemplum is not an instance but a type model or analogue ldquoInstancerdquo implies an occur-rence of a rationally determinable kind a ldquotyperdquo or ldquoanaloguerdquo 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

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 circumstancesmdashthis 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 re-

fers to ldquocorrespondencesrdquo of thing and idea and of idea and word these ldquocorrespondencesrdquo are for Berlin

relations between two different things of different types He is quite correct to judge that Hamann consid-

ers 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 meaningmdashhe 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 justifica-

tion 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 ldquoConclusionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos own line that ldquocreation is a speech to the creature

through the creaturerdquo 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 cor-

respond to each other based on no apodictically determinable system knowable a priori but on the gra-

tuitous (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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 com-

pared translation to the art of understanding the image of a tapestry from looking only at the backs of the

threads he remarks ldquoDort [ie in the original contexts of the metaphors borrowed from other authors for

39

Hamannrsquos text] werden ie aber ad illustrationem (zur Verbraumlmung des Rockes) hier ad inuolucrum (zum

Hemde auf bloszligem Leibe) gebrauchtrdquo1 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 deco-

rated 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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos which ac-

cording to the line of interpretation I have explored reveals as much about Hamannrsquos 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 tear-

ing 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 Hamannrsquos motion between images his construction of typological

schemes that resist easy classification and one-for-one interpretation is not antirational raving or obscu-

rantism but rather an alternativemdashand a quite compelling onemdashto 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

1 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 tho-

roughly religious vision of the world If one is willing to do this Hamann is a kind of prophetmdashand the

horned head of Pan on his title-page is also the horned head of Moses1 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 pro-

ducing neat tables of Hamannrsquos 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 Aes-

thetica 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 somethingmdashunless there really is some secret ineffable law of correspondences that un-

ites 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 commen-

tators and writers of senior essays have no right to tread

1 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 agrave la Mosaiumlque (Roth 103 343)

41

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin Isaiah The Magus of the North JG Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism ed Henry

Hardy London John Murray 1993 Betz John After Enlightenment the Post-Secular Vision of JG Hamann Chichester John Wiley amp Sons

2009 Hamann Johann Georg Hamannrsquos Schriften ed Friedrich Roth Berlin G Reimer 1821 (Cited as

ldquoRothrdquo All citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Saumlmtliche Werke ed Josef Nadler Wien Verlag Herder 1950 (Cited as ldquoNad-

lerrdquo Unless otherwise noted all citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Writings on Philosophy and Language trans and ed Kenneth Haynes Cam-

bridge Cambridge UP 2007 (Cited as ldquoHaynesrdquo) Jacobs Carol ldquoHamann Is a Nomadic Writer lsquoAesthetica in nucersquordquo in Skirting the Ethical Stanford Stan-

ford UP 2008 pp 111-130 OrsquoFlaherty James C The Quarrel of Reason with Itself Essays on Hamann Michaelis Lessing Nietzsche Co-

lumbia SC Camden 1988

36

will readily concede that ldquowe see through a glass darklyrdquo1 and that we may not even be able to descry the

true outlines of our own persons in this mirrormdashbut by invoking the language of mirrors2 he locates him-

self within a tradition of thought according to which nature however flawed parts of it may be and how-

ever dulled our ability to discern itmdashis 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 se-

cular 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 ldquoblind heathensrdquo

Blinde Heyden haben die Unilttbarkeit erkannt die der Menfrac14 mit GOTT gemein hat Die verhuumlllte Figur des Leibes das Antlitz des Hauptes und das Aumluszligerfrac34e der Arme ind das ilttbare Sltema in dem wir einher gehn dolt eigentlilt niltts als ein Zeigefinger des verborge-nen Menfrac14en in unsmdash Exemplumque DEI quisque est in imagine parva3

Note that the ldquospiritualrdquo 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 ldquoindex fingersrdquo which direct the inner man to

our attention Hamann let us recall4 does not believe that the target of this ldquoZeigefingerrdquo can always be

1 1 Cor 1312

2 Though Hamann is in some ways a very modern thinker who anticipates 20

th century thought about the kinship of

reason and language he here looks back to the middle ages Cf Alan of Lille ldquoOmnis mundi creatura Quasi liber et pictura Nobis est et speculumrdquo With the sentiment and conceit of this verse Hamann could not agree more 3 N 198 The quotation from the Astronomicon of Manilius (IV895) is mainly noteworthy for its having been writ-

ten by a pagan author while echoing the language of Genesis regarding the ldquoimage of Godrdquo The Cambridge edition of Hamann misenglishes this line rendering it as ldquoEach one is an instance of God in miniaturerdquo This not only loses the connection to the book of Genesis conveyed by the word ldquoimagordquo but puts far too much weight on the word ldquoexemplumrdquo as well An exemplum is not an instance but a type model or analogue ldquoInstancerdquo implies an occur-rence of a rationally determinable kind a ldquotyperdquo or ldquoanaloguerdquo 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

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 circumstancesmdashthis 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 re-

fers to ldquocorrespondencesrdquo of thing and idea and of idea and word these ldquocorrespondencesrdquo are for Berlin

relations between two different things of different types He is quite correct to judge that Hamann consid-

ers 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 meaningmdashhe 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 justifica-

tion 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 ldquoConclusionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos own line that ldquocreation is a speech to the creature

through the creaturerdquo 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 cor-

respond to each other based on no apodictically determinable system knowable a priori but on the gra-

tuitous (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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 com-

pared translation to the art of understanding the image of a tapestry from looking only at the backs of the

threads he remarks ldquoDort [ie in the original contexts of the metaphors borrowed from other authors for

39

Hamannrsquos text] werden ie aber ad illustrationem (zur Verbraumlmung des Rockes) hier ad inuolucrum (zum

Hemde auf bloszligem Leibe) gebrauchtrdquo1 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 deco-

rated 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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos which ac-

cording to the line of interpretation I have explored reveals as much about Hamannrsquos 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 tear-

ing 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 Hamannrsquos motion between images his construction of typological

schemes that resist easy classification and one-for-one interpretation is not antirational raving or obscu-

rantism but rather an alternativemdashand a quite compelling onemdashto 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

1 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 tho-

roughly religious vision of the world If one is willing to do this Hamann is a kind of prophetmdashand the

horned head of Pan on his title-page is also the horned head of Moses1 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 pro-

ducing neat tables of Hamannrsquos 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 Aes-

thetica 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 somethingmdashunless there really is some secret ineffable law of correspondences that un-

ites 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 commen-

tators and writers of senior essays have no right to tread

1 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 agrave la Mosaiumlque (Roth 103 343)

41

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin Isaiah The Magus of the North JG Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism ed Henry

Hardy London John Murray 1993 Betz John After Enlightenment the Post-Secular Vision of JG Hamann Chichester John Wiley amp Sons

2009 Hamann Johann Georg Hamannrsquos Schriften ed Friedrich Roth Berlin G Reimer 1821 (Cited as

ldquoRothrdquo All citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Saumlmtliche Werke ed Josef Nadler Wien Verlag Herder 1950 (Cited as ldquoNad-

lerrdquo Unless otherwise noted all citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Writings on Philosophy and Language trans and ed Kenneth Haynes Cam-

bridge Cambridge UP 2007 (Cited as ldquoHaynesrdquo) Jacobs Carol ldquoHamann Is a Nomadic Writer lsquoAesthetica in nucersquordquo in Skirting the Ethical Stanford Stan-

ford UP 2008 pp 111-130 OrsquoFlaherty James C The Quarrel of Reason with Itself Essays on Hamann Michaelis Lessing Nietzsche Co-

lumbia SC Camden 1988

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 circumstancesmdashthis 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 re-

fers to ldquocorrespondencesrdquo of thing and idea and of idea and word these ldquocorrespondencesrdquo are for Berlin

relations between two different things of different types He is quite correct to judge that Hamann consid-

ers 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 meaningmdashhe 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 justifica-

tion 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 ldquoConclusionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos own line that ldquocreation is a speech to the creature

through the creaturerdquo 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 cor-

respond to each other based on no apodictically determinable system knowable a priori but on the gra-

tuitous (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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 com-

pared translation to the art of understanding the image of a tapestry from looking only at the backs of the

threads he remarks ldquoDort [ie in the original contexts of the metaphors borrowed from other authors for

39

Hamannrsquos text] werden ie aber ad illustrationem (zur Verbraumlmung des Rockes) hier ad inuolucrum (zum

Hemde auf bloszligem Leibe) gebrauchtrdquo1 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 deco-

rated 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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos which ac-

cording to the line of interpretation I have explored reveals as much about Hamannrsquos 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 tear-

ing 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 Hamannrsquos motion between images his construction of typological

schemes that resist easy classification and one-for-one interpretation is not antirational raving or obscu-

rantism but rather an alternativemdashand a quite compelling onemdashto 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

1 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 tho-

roughly religious vision of the world If one is willing to do this Hamann is a kind of prophetmdashand the

horned head of Pan on his title-page is also the horned head of Moses1 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 pro-

ducing neat tables of Hamannrsquos 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 Aes-

thetica 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 somethingmdashunless there really is some secret ineffable law of correspondences that un-

ites 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 commen-

tators and writers of senior essays have no right to tread

1 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 agrave la Mosaiumlque (Roth 103 343)

41

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin Isaiah The Magus of the North JG Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism ed Henry

Hardy London John Murray 1993 Betz John After Enlightenment the Post-Secular Vision of JG Hamann Chichester John Wiley amp Sons

2009 Hamann Johann Georg Hamannrsquos Schriften ed Friedrich Roth Berlin G Reimer 1821 (Cited as

ldquoRothrdquo All citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Saumlmtliche Werke ed Josef Nadler Wien Verlag Herder 1950 (Cited as ldquoNad-

lerrdquo Unless otherwise noted all citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Writings on Philosophy and Language trans and ed Kenneth Haynes Cam-

bridge Cambridge UP 2007 (Cited as ldquoHaynesrdquo) Jacobs Carol ldquoHamann Is a Nomadic Writer lsquoAesthetica in nucersquordquo in Skirting the Ethical Stanford Stan-

ford UP 2008 pp 111-130 OrsquoFlaherty James C The Quarrel of Reason with Itself Essays on Hamann Michaelis Lessing Nietzsche Co-

lumbia SC Camden 1988

38

Conclusion If this section is entitled ldquoConclusionrdquo 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 Hamannrsquos own line that ldquocreation is a speech to the creature

through the creaturerdquo 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 cor-

respond to each other based on no apodictically determinable system knowable a priori but on the gra-

tuitous (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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos 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 com-

pared translation to the art of understanding the image of a tapestry from looking only at the backs of the

threads he remarks ldquoDort [ie in the original contexts of the metaphors borrowed from other authors for

39

Hamannrsquos text] werden ie aber ad illustrationem (zur Verbraumlmung des Rockes) hier ad inuolucrum (zum

Hemde auf bloszligem Leibe) gebrauchtrdquo1 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 deco-

rated 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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos which ac-

cording to the line of interpretation I have explored reveals as much about Hamannrsquos 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 tear-

ing 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 Hamannrsquos motion between images his construction of typological

schemes that resist easy classification and one-for-one interpretation is not antirational raving or obscu-

rantism but rather an alternativemdashand a quite compelling onemdashto 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

1 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 tho-

roughly religious vision of the world If one is willing to do this Hamann is a kind of prophetmdashand the

horned head of Pan on his title-page is also the horned head of Moses1 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 pro-

ducing neat tables of Hamannrsquos 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 Aes-

thetica 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 somethingmdashunless there really is some secret ineffable law of correspondences that un-

ites 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 commen-

tators and writers of senior essays have no right to tread

1 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 agrave la Mosaiumlque (Roth 103 343)

41

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin Isaiah The Magus of the North JG Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism ed Henry

Hardy London John Murray 1993 Betz John After Enlightenment the Post-Secular Vision of JG Hamann Chichester John Wiley amp Sons

2009 Hamann Johann Georg Hamannrsquos Schriften ed Friedrich Roth Berlin G Reimer 1821 (Cited as

ldquoRothrdquo All citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Saumlmtliche Werke ed Josef Nadler Wien Verlag Herder 1950 (Cited as ldquoNad-

lerrdquo Unless otherwise noted all citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Writings on Philosophy and Language trans and ed Kenneth Haynes Cam-

bridge Cambridge UP 2007 (Cited as ldquoHaynesrdquo) Jacobs Carol ldquoHamann Is a Nomadic Writer lsquoAesthetica in nucersquordquo in Skirting the Ethical Stanford Stan-

ford UP 2008 pp 111-130 OrsquoFlaherty James C The Quarrel of Reason with Itself Essays on Hamann Michaelis Lessing Nietzsche Co-

lumbia SC Camden 1988

39

Hamannrsquos text] werden ie aber ad illustrationem (zur Verbraumlmung des Rockes) hier ad inuolucrum (zum

Hemde auf bloszligem Leibe) gebrauchtrdquo1 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 deco-

rated 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 Hamannrsquos 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 Hamannrsquos which ac-

cording to the line of interpretation I have explored reveals as much about Hamannrsquos 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 tear-

ing 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 Hamannrsquos motion between images his construction of typological

schemes that resist easy classification and one-for-one interpretation is not antirational raving or obscu-

rantism but rather an alternativemdashand a quite compelling onemdashto 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

1 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 tho-

roughly religious vision of the world If one is willing to do this Hamann is a kind of prophetmdashand the

horned head of Pan on his title-page is also the horned head of Moses1 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 pro-

ducing neat tables of Hamannrsquos 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 Aes-

thetica 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 somethingmdashunless there really is some secret ineffable law of correspondences that un-

ites 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 commen-

tators and writers of senior essays have no right to tread

1 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 agrave la Mosaiumlque (Roth 103 343)

41

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin Isaiah The Magus of the North JG Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism ed Henry

Hardy London John Murray 1993 Betz John After Enlightenment the Post-Secular Vision of JG Hamann Chichester John Wiley amp Sons

2009 Hamann Johann Georg Hamannrsquos Schriften ed Friedrich Roth Berlin G Reimer 1821 (Cited as

ldquoRothrdquo All citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Saumlmtliche Werke ed Josef Nadler Wien Verlag Herder 1950 (Cited as ldquoNad-

lerrdquo Unless otherwise noted all citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Writings on Philosophy and Language trans and ed Kenneth Haynes Cam-

bridge Cambridge UP 2007 (Cited as ldquoHaynesrdquo) Jacobs Carol ldquoHamann Is a Nomadic Writer lsquoAesthetica in nucersquordquo in Skirting the Ethical Stanford Stan-

ford UP 2008 pp 111-130 OrsquoFlaherty James C The Quarrel of Reason with Itself Essays on Hamann Michaelis Lessing Nietzsche Co-

lumbia SC Camden 1988

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 tho-

roughly religious vision of the world If one is willing to do this Hamann is a kind of prophetmdashand the

horned head of Pan on his title-page is also the horned head of Moses1 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 pro-

ducing neat tables of Hamannrsquos 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 Aes-

thetica 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 somethingmdashunless there really is some secret ineffable law of correspondences that un-

ites 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 commen-

tators and writers of senior essays have no right to tread

1 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 agrave la Mosaiumlque (Roth 103 343)

41

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin Isaiah The Magus of the North JG Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism ed Henry

Hardy London John Murray 1993 Betz John After Enlightenment the Post-Secular Vision of JG Hamann Chichester John Wiley amp Sons

2009 Hamann Johann Georg Hamannrsquos Schriften ed Friedrich Roth Berlin G Reimer 1821 (Cited as

ldquoRothrdquo All citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Saumlmtliche Werke ed Josef Nadler Wien Verlag Herder 1950 (Cited as ldquoNad-

lerrdquo Unless otherwise noted all citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Writings on Philosophy and Language trans and ed Kenneth Haynes Cam-

bridge Cambridge UP 2007 (Cited as ldquoHaynesrdquo) Jacobs Carol ldquoHamann Is a Nomadic Writer lsquoAesthetica in nucersquordquo in Skirting the Ethical Stanford Stan-

ford UP 2008 pp 111-130 OrsquoFlaherty James C The Quarrel of Reason with Itself Essays on Hamann Michaelis Lessing Nietzsche Co-

lumbia SC Camden 1988

41

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berlin Isaiah The Magus of the North JG Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism ed Henry

Hardy London John Murray 1993 Betz John After Enlightenment the Post-Secular Vision of JG Hamann Chichester John Wiley amp Sons

2009 Hamann Johann Georg Hamannrsquos Schriften ed Friedrich Roth Berlin G Reimer 1821 (Cited as

ldquoRothrdquo All citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Saumlmtliche Werke ed Josef Nadler Wien Verlag Herder 1950 (Cited as ldquoNad-

lerrdquo Unless otherwise noted all citations are from volume 2) Hamann Johann Georg Writings on Philosophy and Language trans and ed Kenneth Haynes Cam-

bridge Cambridge UP 2007 (Cited as ldquoHaynesrdquo) Jacobs Carol ldquoHamann Is a Nomadic Writer lsquoAesthetica in nucersquordquo in Skirting the Ethical Stanford Stan-

ford UP 2008 pp 111-130 OrsquoFlaherty James C The Quarrel of Reason with Itself Essays on Hamann Michaelis Lessing Nietzsche Co-

lumbia SC Camden 1988