Hamann on Kant

[Doug Mounce]

Dear All, I've posted some of this before, but this excerpt from "Metacritique on the Purism of Reason" 1784 has relevance to our current study on Rahner.  No doubt that Kant had significant influence, but his lesser-known contemporary immediately recognized the limitations in Kant's worldview.  Hamann is one of those writers who forces the reader to think-through their own thinking by using a style that makes you think, 'what exactly is it that he's thinking?'

"If then a chief question indeed still remains - how is the faculty of thought possible?(1)  the faculty to think right and left, before and without, with and beyond experience? - then no deduction is needed to demonstrate the genealogical priority of language, and its heraldry, over the seven holy functions of logical propositions and inferences.(2)  Not only is the entire faculty of thought founded on language, according to the unrecognized prophecies and slandered miracles of the very commendable Samuel Heinicke,(3) but language is also the centerpoint of reason's misunderstanding with itself,(4) partly because of the frequent coincidence of the greatest and the smallest concept, its vacuity and its plenitude in ideal propositions, partly because of the infinite [advantage] of rhetorical over inferential figures, and much more of the same.

"Sounds and letters are therefore forms *a priori,*(5) in which nothing belonging to the sensation (6) or concept of an object is found; they are the true, aesthetic elements of all human knowledge and reason.  The oldest language was music, and along with the palpable rhythm of the pulse and of the breath in the nostrils, it was the original bodily image of all temporal measures and intervals.  The oldest writing was painting and drawing, and therefore was occupied as early as then with the economy of space, its limitations and determination (7) by figures.  Thence, under the exuberant persistent influence of the two noblest senses sight and hearing, the concepts of space and time have made themselves so universal and necessary in the whole sphere of understanding (just as light and air are for the eye, ear, and voice) that as a result space and time, if not *ideae innatae seem to be at least matrices of all intuitive knowledge.(8)

"(1) Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A xvii: "For the chief question is always simply this: - what and how much can the understanding and reason know apart from experience? not: - how is the faculty of thought possible?"
(2) Kant identifies twelve logical functions of the understanding in judgment (A 70 = B 95), arranged under four heads, each in three moments (perhaps Hamann added the four heads and three moments to yield seven, a numerological indication of perfection).
(3) Samuel Heinicke (1727-90) founded the first school for the deaf and dumb in Germany in 1778.  Heinicke insisted on the priority of the spoken language for both deaf and hearing people.
(4) For Kant, not language but errors in the non-empirical employment of reason set "reason at variance with itself"; he claims to have solved the problem by "locating the point at which, through misunderstanding, reason comes into conflict with itself" (A xii).
(5) For Kant, space and time are the pure forms; see A 22 ( B 36): "there are two pure forms of sensible intuition, service as principles of a priori knowledge, namely, space and time."
(6) A 20 (B 34): "I term all representations pure...in which there is nothing that belongs to sensation."
(7) A 32 (B 48): "every determinate magnitude of time is possible only through limitations of one single time that underlies it."
(8) The theory of innate ideas was opposed to the theory of the tabular rassa, the blank slate. Matrices are wombs."

--quoted from Kenneth Haynes translation, Metacritique on the Purism of Reason, Georg Hamann

[jaraymaker]

Doug, an interesting recollection-commparison of two great thinkers from Königsberg you sent us. As I read the below 18th century analysis of Kant's Critique by Hamann in the PS, (taken from 

https://www.google.com/search?q=Hamann%27s+critique+of+Kant+&sca_esv=d49addb7d865e5f4&source=hp&ei=ai9pZuC8Mcjo7_UPh-ONOA&iflsig=AL9hbdgAAAAAZmk9eqOeVi2qH7h2pd5mHsNCyFH2arcv&ved=0ahUKEwjgmZ7-p9WGAxVI9LsIHYdxAwcQ4dUDCA8&uact=5&oq=Hamann%27s+critique+of+Kant+&gs_lp=Egdnd3Mtd2l6IhpIYW1hbm4ncyBjcml0aXF1ZSBvZiBLYW50IDIIEAAYgAQYogQyCBAAGIAEGKIEMggQABiABBiiBEilpwNQAFjdjwNwBHgAkAEAmAGiCaAB3DGqARAxOC42LjEuMS4wLjIuMC4yuAEDyAEA-AEBmAIfoALaMsICCxAuGIAEGNEDGMcBwgIFEAAYgATCAgUQLhiABMICCBAuGIAEGNQCwgIOEC4YgAQYxwEYjgUYrwHCAg4QLhiABBjRAxjUAhjHAcICBxAAGIAEGArCAg0QLhiABBjRAxjHARgKwgILEC4YgAQYxwEYrwHCAgQQABgewgIHEC4YgAQYCsICDRAuGIAEGMcBGAoYrwHCAgYQABgHGB7CAggQABgHGAgYHsICCBAAGAUYBxgewgIHECEYoAEYCsICBBAhGArCAgUQIRigAZgDAJIHEDE5LjYuMS4wLjIuMS4wLjKgB7zHAQ&sclient=gws-wiz ),

 

I had the impression that Hamann anticipated some of Lonergan's criticism of Kant. Comparing Lonergan's critique of Kant, with Hamann's earlier critique of Kant  as to the

revolutionary role of the Enlightenment etc might be a good theme for a PhD dissertation, 

 

PS   "Johann Georg Hamann was the philosophically most sophisticated thinker of the German Counter-enlightenment. Born in 1730 in Königsberg in eastern Prussia, Hamann was a contemporary and friendly acquaintance of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, and in many ways Hamann’s career can be seen in parallel to that of his great friend. Like Kant, Hamann attended the University of Königsberg, and in his early life was a devoted partisan of the Enlightenment, the philosophical and literary movement that emphasized the clearing away of outdated prejudice and the application of scientific reason to every area of human life. But during a business trip to London (on behalf of the firm of the Berens family, who also published Kant’s works), Hamann underwent a sort of conversion that involved giving up his commitment to the secular Enlightenment in favor of a more orthodox view of Protestant Christianity. As a consequence, he embarked on a career of trenchant and often scathing criticism of the Enlightenment. This change in world-views coincided with his reading of the British empiricist philosophers George Berkeley and David Hume. Hamann saw the idealism of the former and the skepticism of the latter as constituting a reductio ad absurdum of Enlightenment thought: Scientific reason leads us inevitably either to doubt or to deny the reality of the world around us. Three of Hamann’s intellectual achievements are of particular significance: His writings Sokratische Denkwürdigkeiten (Socratic Memorabilia) and Aesthetica in nuce (Aesthetics in a Nutshell), in which he opposed Enlightenment thought with an indirect and ironic mode of discourse emphasizing the importance of aesthetic experience and the role of genius in intuiting nature; his views on language; and his influential criticisms of Kant’s critical thought, expressed in his “Metakritik über den Purismum der Vernunft” and in his commentary, in a letter to Johann Gottfried Herder, on Kant’s essay “What is Enlightenment?”   End quote      John