Marxism is another species of liberalism

Marx has a profound analysis of capitalism, with sharp insights into modernity, yet Marx, and Marxism, have a fatal blindspot in historical analysis - the role of religion, and ultimately Marxism fails to transcend the categories of capitalism necessary for its critique.

Marx *imagines the secular was lurking behind the mask of sacrality, ready to be revealed once religious illusions were stripped away.... but this "secular space" had to be imagined, instituted and constructed. 

Theorists like Marx imagined the secular as a “natural” sphere of sheer power, where egotistical self-interest reigns, free of the “artificial” constraints of religion and morality.

However, such a thing never appears in *actual history. For example, in the medieval town, guilds and corporations were inspired by and infused with Christianity. Political life was imbued with religious norms, symbols, and rituals. Through mechanisms like the just price, economics was molded toward charity. In this setting, “the social” isn’t a separable, or even a distinguishable, factor. Neither is religion: medieval religion is always already social, even as medieval society is always already religion. The more a social order exists “inside” religion, the less one is capable of isolating social factors in order to explain religion.

Just one example, Eamon Duffy, in The Stripping of the Altars, shows in historical detail how the traditional religion of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries actually did form a very strong social bond. The sacraments of the Church brought about the interweaving of the sacred and the social that is the lived reality of sacred tradition. Duffy insists on “the social homogeneity of late medieval religion.” As he demonstrates: “Rich and poor, simple and sophisticate could kneel side by side, using the same prayers and sharing the same hopes.” In spite of the differences of sophistication about the faith, “they did not have a different religion.”

The social bond of medieval Europe was not found in an idea, or theory, but in worship, in the Eucharist.

Marx considers all religions to occupy the realm of mere belief, ignoring the dimension of religious practice.

But in in all anthropological studies one simply cannot recognize a separate economic function at all, acts of production and exchange are always regarded as part of a religious ritual.

There is nothing purely “social” that can be isolated from the complex of cultural, political and religious realities - there’s no “social” to which something else might be reduced.

No “religion” or culture can be operated from "nature".

There does not exist a “pre-religious”, “natural” state of existence (“pre-cultural humanity”) so Marx ends up reifying the political economic conception of “human nature”, he thinks capitalism actually reveals the “true nature” of economics, and man !

Marx, therefore, does not recognize the historically contingent character of economics - rather he posits an ahistorical fictional essence of man outside all culture and all history.

In the face of all the evidence (and there is vastly more such evidence, in virtually every tribal society every studied), sociologists continue to treat “society” as an independent, fundamental, explanatory variable and social factors considered more fundamental than religion - this is a myth.

Ironically, Marxists themselves espouse the “liberal protestant metanarrative,”an account of universal history that traces stages in religious development – from myth and magic through the salvation religions to modern privatized religion of ethics and humanitarianism.

Rather than seeing the development of Western Christianity from patristic to medieval to modern as a series of contingent modifications within Christian ethos and doctrine, being blind to the ubiquitous religious factors, Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch elevated this history into a metanarrative, a gradual unveiling of what was latent in Christianity all along, even as the unveiling of the universal truth of religion itself.

But this universalizes a particular and contingent history.

“Progress,” the story goes, lies in the direction of the privatization of religion, individualism, anti-ritualism. Armed with this narrative, sociology guards the supposed neutrality of liberal order from every substantive overarching purpose and goal.

Sociology thereby defends the secular order it helps to constitute and claims to study.

Furthermore, Marx retained “modern natural law” as well as the “modern secular order.”

Marxism, thus, turns out to be a mode of liberalism.

Veroufakis, in his article HERE, is perfectly right that the Communist Manifesto is a liberal text - which is exactly why it fails adequately to criticise capitalism or adequately to be socialist, thus Marxists promotes the myth that the rationalism of capitalism will ensure the eventual collapse of its contradictory irrational element.

Of course, instead of an ethical and spiritual critique of capitalism as destruction of sacred value, Marx celebrates the destruction and promotes the myth that the rationalism of capitalism will ensure the eventual collapse of its contradictory irrational element, but Marx's notions of the rational/irrational are nominalistic, contra any Greek/Latin/Christian understanding.

In the end, Marx was not materialistic enough, one can propose poesis as opposed to praxis, that in making we make ourselves, we self-create through labour.

But then, unlike Ruskin, neither Marx nor Hegel realized capitalism is the logical managment of the death of the belief that one can discover through art and practice the ‘proper end’ of things, particularly in labor by integrating poesis with ethical praxis, thus only in the invocation of transcendence can there be a critique of capitalist order, whose ‘secularity’ is its primary character.

Briefly, I sum up John Milbank's useful metacritique of Marxist critique:

1 Marx takes over from Feuerbach an account of projection which assumes that all human reality derives from a self-positing ego.

2 He cannot show why religion should occur as an epiphenomenon.

3 He exposes cultural processes as themselves ‘religious’, but can only contrast these with an imaginary, naturalistic norm, a new ‘natural law’of humanity.

4 Historical religions, like Christianity, can only be shown to be illusory, if they are represented as departures from an impossible pre-cultural humanity, or else as necessary stages on the way to an impossible post-cultural humanity, where peace and freedom emerge ‘spontaneously’ with the mere negative abolition of what is holding them back.

5 Christianity is only criticized by ‘situating’ it within a metanarrative which has itself a quasi-religious and ‘heterodox’ character.

Creation or Void ? Christ vs Nietzsche according to Hart

David Bentley Hart has much regard for Nietzsche, even affirming that he was, in fact, correct in holding Christianity responsible for the catastrophe around us - but that he misunderstood why, which, according to Hart, is because,

"Christianity was complicit in the death of antiquity and in the birth of modernity, not because it was an accomplice of the latter, but because it alone, in the history of the West, was a rejection of and alternative to nihilism’s despair, violence, and idolatry of power; as such, Christianity shattered the imposing and enchanting façade behind which nihilism once hid, and thereby, inadvertently, called it forth into the open.

The command to have no other god but Him whom Christ revealed was never for Christians simply an invitation to forsake an old cult for a new, but was an announcement that the shape of the world had changed, from the depths of hell to the heaven of heavens, and all nations were called to submit to Jesus as Lord. In the great “transvaluation” that followed, there was no sphere of social, religious, or intellectual life that the Church did not claim for itself; much was abolished, and much of the grandeur and beauty of antiquity was preserved in a radically altered form, and Christian civilization—with its new synthesis and new creativity—was born.

But what is the consequence, then, when Christianity, as a living historical force, recedes?

We have no need to speculate, as it happens; modernity speaks for itself: with the withdrawal of Christian culture, all the glories of the ancient world that it baptized and redeemed have perished with it in the general cataclysm. Christianity is the midwife of nihilism, not because it is itself nihilistic, but because it is too powerful in its embrace of the world and all of the world’s mystery and beauty; and so to reject Christianity now is, of necessity, to reject everything except the barren anonymity of spontaneous subjectivity.

The only cult that can truly thrive in the aftermath of Christianity is a sordid service of the self, of the impulses of the will, of the nothingness that is all that the withdrawal of Christianity leaves behind. The only futures open to post-Christian culture are conscious nihilism, with its inevitable devotion to death, or the narcotic banality of the Last Men, which may be little better than death.

Nor will the ululations and lugubrious platitudes and pious fatalism of the tragic chorus ever again have the power to recall us to sobriety. The gospel of a God found in broken flesh, humility, and measureless charity has defeated all the old lies, rendered the ancient order visibly insufficient and even slightly absurd, and instilled in us a longing for transcendent love so deep that—if once yielded to—it will never grant us rest anywhere but in Christ."

Read the rest HERE

But what has Hart to say TO Nietzsche’s story ? In his book, The Beauty of the Infinite, pgs 93-127, he has much to say, below are some relevant passages, all of which can be found HERE :

"All very bracing rhetoric. But when one steps back from the flow of Nietzsche’s polemic, one becomes uncomfortably aware of a certain stress at the heart of this critique, a fissure of contradiction constantly displacing the center of the Nietzschean narrative to one or the other side (bridged, perhaps, by a furtive irony, which refuses to take too seriously the claims it impregnates); at one and the same time an edifice of “truth” is in the process of being dismantled and erected. 

One can scarcely deny, to begin with, the appearance of a seemingly unreflective naturalism in Nietzsche’s thought, prompting him to employ such words as “life,” “instinct,” and “nature” with a casual assurance that belies his own acute awareness of the cultural contingency of all “truths”; and one might justly wonder whether the life he celebrates is anything more diverting than the upward thrusting of an empty will, blind and idiotic, to which he has arbitrarily ascribed (in an ebullition of romantic enthusiasm) such qualities as richness, vitality, and creativity. 

One is often sorely pressed to hear the ironic tone that will indicate to the attentive ear that discreet juncture where an apparently absolutist metaphysics reveals itself as an intentional and exotic feat of fabulation. If Nietzsche’s vision of nature – of being – is simply that of the pagan (Heracleitean, Epicurean, etc.) αγων κοσμικος, if the “life” of which he speaks is essentially appropriation, injury, and overpowering, then of course ontic difference appears in Nietzschean narrative as opposition and contradiction; indeed, difference is appreciably different precisely in the degree to which each force resists, succumbs to, or vanquishes another force: an ontology of violence in its most elementary form. 

Not that this is in any sense a startling observation, nor does it somehow tell against Nietzsche’s position; it merely renders dubious the antimetaphysical rigor of his arguments. Can any degree of ironic distance make the Nietzschean critique any less “metaphysical” than what it attacks? Or, rather, can that critique sustain itself with any force or durability unless it stakes itself upon the “truth” of the narrative it invokes? And is then the nostalgia of Janus, at the last, unconquerable?

This is a question probably of more interest in retrospect, from the perspective of Nietzsche’s postmodern disciples (those who hope to reject not only metanarratives but narrativity as such, with its “closure” and hierarchy of meaning), than it could ever have been for the man himself. But it is also a question that cannot simply be ignored as a humorless concern with “literal” readings, because even if one grant that Nietzsche is entirely conscious of his doubleness of tone, this in no way alters the truth that in posing an ontology of violence against the Christian narrative, the advantage that Nietzsche seems to have gained turns out to be, ultimately, only as compelling as any other aesthetic preference. 

There would be no objection to this, of course, if it were not for Nietzsche’s habit of treating his preference as a more honest, less resentful, less arbitrary, and more truthful account of reality; Nietzsche’s post-Christian counternarrative (which is itself perhaps occasionally tainted by resentment rather than honesty) cannot be denied its power and its appeal, but it should be recognized not simply as critique but as always already another kerygma. 

Between Nietzsche’s vision of life and an agon and the Christian vision of life as creation – as a primordial “gift and “grace” – there is nothing (not even the palpable evidences of “nature red in tooth and claw”) that makes ether perspective self-evidently more correct than the other. Each sees and accounts for the violence of experience and the beauty of being, but each according to an irreducible mythos and a particular aesthetics. A battle of tastes is being waged by Nietzsche, and the metaphysical appears therein as a necessary element of his narrative’s completeness; the difference that is immediately noticeable, however, between the Christian and Nietzschean narrative dynamisms is not that the former is indisceptibly bound to the metaphysics of identity and presence, but that the latter is simply more disingenuous regarding the metaphysics it advances.

One should probably ask whether the phenomenalistic monism of Nietzsche’s account of noble naturality is not still as firmly wedded to a subjective essentialism as Christian thought could ever be. When, after all, one likens the unfettered power and uncomplicated immanence of the noble in his action to the indivisibility of lightning and the lightning flash, the felicity of the image veils a fairly obvious intellectual crudity. 

Lightning, as it happens, possesses very little in the way of linguistic ambiguity, and any given flash has a very particular and uninvolved history; but one need only consider the linguistic, social, and political complexity of human existence, the historicity and metaphorical provisionality of every human “essence,” to recognize in the martial virtues of the noble not simply an original and natural phenomenon, but an effect – and a stage effect, at that. Were the noble warrior simply his own phenomenon, an immediate expression of himself, present to himself in the event of his “unveiling,” what would he be other than an egological substance?

Where there is no distinction between action and identity, where no moral space intervenes, is this not still the concrete reality of a self, invariable and absolute, the Cartesian ego transposed into a phenomenalist key? A moral interval is characteristic of a metaphysics of the “self” (of a Cartesian soul) presumably because it is thought of as an interval that can be traversed “backwards,” in order to find that fixed terminus a quo whence moral action proceeds and so to alight upon a simple substance of self-present identity; the reproaches of the slave are meant to arrive at an agent, to whom actions are exterior and accidental, and in whom there is no division between what he is and how he is: an agency immediately at hand – unwritten – within the interiority of the soul. 

The inward space of Cartesian reflection still remains an “exterior” apprehension of the manifold, from which thought retreats to fall back upon the indivisible substance of an unquestioned and monadic identity, inseparable from the action of thought. Is it not obvious that his account of the self is just as irredeemably “identitial” from the very ease with which Nietzsche can construct analogies of resemblance: lightning, eagles, lions…? 

A “phenomenalized” substance, a soul brought to the surface of time and space, is still a pristine essence, in which identity vibrates as a single note of absolute presence. And a self that is called “event” rather than “substance” is at least as mythical as an enduring subjectivity. If what one refers to as the subject is in truth a series of happenings rather than a substratum of identity, one still indicates a substance: one that exists as the univocally reiterated moment of self-presence, and as an identifiable sequence of concrete eventuations of identity; it is even a substance to which one may point, a causal and phenomenal insistence, a concatenating presentation of self, neither retaining nor protaining, but whole and complete in its repetition.

 One catches a hint in Nietzsche’s language of the most substantial metaphysical “substance” of all: Did not Augustine, for example, speak of God as being without accidents (De Trinitate 5.3), who is what he has (De civitate Dei 1.10.10.1), and did not Aquinas, in keeping with tradition, deny accidents to God because such constitute the potential of becoming other than what he is (Summa theologiae 1.3.6)? 

What exactly, after all, is the “moral” interval that Christian thought imagines the soul to possess, if not precisely an interval, an opening or delay, where will doubles back upon itself or divides, where thought hesitates between identity and difference, where desire pendulates from delight to delight (“delectatio quippe quasi pondus est animae,” as Augustine says; “delectatio ergo orinate animam”), and where the self finds itself always subject to the bearing over (μεταφερειν) of metaphor? Is it not such an “interiority” merely an intensity, an inward fold of an outward surface (to misappropriate Deleuzean terminology), a space of interpretation, where the self’s “plot” may be rewritten? 

One might argue against Nietzsche that only an essential self could be immutable and resistant to renarration. The special pathos of the human is one of ubiquitous metaphor, the condition of being always an interpreted being, never to be traced back to a place prior to culture or language, to a state of nature and simple presence; there is always in the action of the person a formidable absence of the person; an “otherwise” within presence, even the instincts of the flesh, upon which Nietzsche places so great an emphasis, are curiously inadequate in delineating the shape of the human – “totemism” is born with human “nature.” In the end, for all his efforts tot liberate the subject from the labyrinthine metaphorics of the soul, Nietzsche can at best merely prefer the kids of animals that the “noble” chose to imitate...

Yet, predictably, the flight from metaphysics is described metaphysically: intention is a surface, a symptom, because Nietzsche too must find depths within depths, a changeless substrate of anarchic and autotelic will to power that, like Dionysus, is rent into innumerable fragments without ceasing to be one indestructible essence. 

It is difficult to see, in fact, in precisely what sense the twin practices of Nietzschean genealogy and Nietzschean psychology do not tend toward a metaphysics of the self that, far from dismantling subjectivity, merely brings it to rest upon a different foundation or “motive.” When, for instance (to choose among hundreds of examples), Nietzsche asserts that a popular pious adoration of saints is really only an admiration for the clarity of the saint’s expression of the will to power, the intensity with which he manifests our shared desire for dominion (BGE, 65), it seems all to obvious that this narrative of power has become an excuse for avoiding the testimony of the surface.

Neither what appears in saintliness nor what moves others to admire it can be grasped by so simple and mechanical a psychology as animates Nietzsche’s science of the soul. Nietzsche, though, cannot rest content with the ambiguity and richness of the surface; he must imagine instead an interiority of invariable disposition, by which the surface may be uniformly explained: as symbol, symptom, lie. But surfaces are always more complicated than “depths.”

What, indeed, is the Christian understanding of the soul? What is the imago Dei, and how does it resemble God? There is no entirely adequate answer to such questions, but any of worth will look nothing like the “subject” lost in the ruins of modern metaphysics.

The imago Dei is not simply a possession of the soul so much as a future, a hope; the self forever displaced and exceeded by its desire for God is a self displaced toward an image it never owns as a “substance.”

And while Nietzsche may dispense with such notions as the thing-in-itself or the “soul,” he nevertheless clings to an equally naïve belief in the essential event, the transcendent event of power present in all the universe’s finite transactions: hence, a Christian repudiation of power must turn out to be the strategy whereby power assumes an unprecedentedly potent form. The will to power necessarily remains hidden within, and is indeed advanced by, its own negation. This is metaphysics tout court, more crudely monistic than Hegel’s, and no less dependent on the circular myth of negation….

Difference cannot be sustained simply within a relationship of love; there is no perfect openness before the other, nor very much real openness at all except what is left open as a ruse or broken open by force. This is the magisterial metaphysics that for Nietzsche uniformily validates the world’s multiplicity of values, its always deeper and invariable truth; and he reserves such special acrimony for Christian morality because its language has tried to subvert the game – the agon – that sets the rules of that multiplicity.

However, when all of this has been said, little has been achieved. Once one has demonstrated that Nietzsche proceeds from a fairly foundational set of premises, that he is a metaphysical fabulist and that his metaphysics is circular, one has made only a very small advance against his position.

In general, Christian thought has understood as well as Nietzsche that truth cannot be decided by pure and disinterested reason (as if there were such a thing), but must be allowed to disclose itself as rhetoric, persuasion, narrative form; the evangel makes its appeal to the heart and eye, and has no arguments profounder than the forma Christi.

What is most astonishing about The Anti-Christ is that Nietzsche makes no attempt therein to argue that the ministry of Jesus can, like the ministry of the Christian church, be treated as a covert strategy of the will to power; if his Jesus is moved in any way by this will, it is only in its most rarefied form: not as a crude desire to dominate, expand, or acquire, but as an overwhelming sense of the presence of eternal bliss in the present moment, of universal reconciliation with God, and of the solidarity of all men in a fraternity of mutual love and forgiveness. 

Nietzsche never gives the slightest indication that he does not take entirely seriously Christ’s own repudiation of power; he seeks only to demonstrate that such repudiation belonged to a way of life that was incommunicable and flawed, blighted at the roots, incapable of entering into history or of changing the conditions of human existence.

Nietzsche is a pure metaphysician insofar as he cannot endure the “irrational” idea of a freely creative and utterly transcendent love; he thirsts for the soothing fatalism of “necessity.” Thus he merely repeats the wisdom of totality, how redoubled and reinvigorated by a critique internal to itself: like Dionysus, totality rends itself apart to give itself new birth; the limbs of Parmenides are reassembled in the form of Heracleitos."

DBH asks, can such a narrative as Christianity’s be believed ?


"To entertain the possibility that such a language could indeed effect the reality it depicts, even if fitfully and failingly, or to imagine that the future that impends upon every instant might lie open to the practice of such a reality, would require a far more radical historicization of thought, a more radical antiessentialism, than Nietzsche’s: it would require the belief that nothing in the world so essentially determines the nature of humanity or the scope of the human soul that there is no possibility of being reborn."

Be sure to check put David Bentley Hart’s superb lecture on Nihilism here 

The problem of Nihilism by Vittorio Possenti

Excerpts on the problem of Nihilism by Vittorio Possenti :

Four characteristics are presented as integrating the very nature of nihilism: crisis in the concept of truth, neglect or oblivion of being, breakdown of real or objective knowledge, negation of man's humanity: we might say that nihilism arises when the light of the speculative intellect is no longer directed on being, so that men and things are no longer ordered according to their nature and value of being (3).

The original speculative core, to which many forms of nihilism (first of all theoretical nihilism and subsequently, and with specific modes, practical nihilism) can be traced, can be found in a compact, negative structure, within which some events combine to reinforce each other, and in which as many negations are clearly perceptible: a) a profound existential rift between man and reality, of which gnoseological antirealism is the most decisive theoretic expression; b) oblivion/concealment of being, so that the aim always and continually sought by philosophy is not (any longer) the knowledge of being, which it considers to be permanently blocked or obstructed. The knowledge that escapes philosophy may, perhaps, be replaced by the scientific knowledge or by the will to power; c) victory of nominalism over realism within the framework of a widespread antirealism, in which generally the concern with being is abandoned for a concern with the text, in the passage from a metaphysical ontology to an "indirect" ontology of some other kind. The fundamental language of philosophy is no longer seen as that of metaphysics but that of the sciences, or in the hermeneutic axis addressed towards the understanding of texts and hence at most within a second degree of immediacy; d) the attempt to do without the concept of truth or to transform it by attacking the very idea of truth as adaequatio between thought (or statement) and being: truth is born of consensus and not of a consonance between intellect and objective reality (� 56). In the compact core of nihilism there also takes place a sort of annihilation or dissolution of the object, considered by idealism as an unconscious product of the Self (4).

The probings of Fides et ratio, compared with some intuitions of Nietzsche and Heidegger, but transported into a different horizon of thought, help to conceive the post-metaphysical and post-Christian essence of nihilism. It includes a strong 'antinomianism' (antinomos), a notable sign of which is the widespread rejection and at times even the hatred of the lex naturalis; as well as a comprehension that is no longer revelatory ( phanic and theophanic), but mute of being and the cosmos. Man, engaged in surviving in a hostile cosmos, develops within himself an anti-contemplative spirit and a corresponding innerworldly activism. If the eclipse of the "phanic" or revelatory nature of being and an anti-contemplative attitude refer to each other, the search, so common today, for a barrier against nihilism, identified in ethics, risks becoming a diversion. Ethics cannot last long when the realm of truth and meaning is compromised. With clear insight Nietzsche grasped that the death of ethics would follow upon the "death of God", if only because (I would add) it is a "secret agent" in the service of the Almighty.

Objectively bound up with these fundamental definitions of nihilism, beyond the intentions of the author, is Nietzsche's dazzling statement: "Nihilism: the end is lacking, the answer to the question 'why?' is lacking!" (5). Reality exists, being is a donnée, yet everything is without meaning, since it is rigorously impossible to discover any meaning when the ideas of purpose, of intelligibility, of reason of being (raison d'être), have failed. Nihilism appears to us here as the loss or total concealment of meaning, and most probably the refusal of the original, primordial Logos as everywhere present in the whole (en archè logos en; in principio erat Verbum). If right from the beginning there is Logos, this implies that being, life, nature be intelligible, in principle open to the human reason. And reason cannot proceed from an obscure, original abyss of irrationality.

The above mentioned assumptions, anything but isolated, hold in their grasp, for example, the generative insights that underpin the monumental work of Weber, a lucid yet disenchanted disciple of Nietzsche; for, unlike him, Weber felt no confidence in future philosophy as creation and place of manifestation of the superman (Ubermensch). The nihilistic character of the work of Weber emerges in many of his formulations. Especially eloquent among them is his statement that culture "is a finite section of the infinite, meaningless world-becoming, to which is attributed sense and significance from man's point of view" (6). This formulation confirms that a feature of nihilism is the lack of meaning (the answer to the question 'why?' is missing, the purpose is missing), and its reduction to an act of will on the part of the subject, who to survive and not fall into the absurd posits meaning as a challenge to an existence devoured by becoming and which appears to be hostile, mute, absolutely non-revelatory. The Weberian idea of the modern era as directed by a powerful "instrumental rationality" is highly dependent on nihilistic presuppositions and mainly on Nietzsche's determination of nihilism as lack of end/purpose. If ends cannot be neither known by reason nor placed in hierarchy, then a science of ends will be impossible, and only a science of means - in sight of purposes which will be only decided by desire or by factual power actually in force - , is allowed. The "instrumental rationality" exactly consists in irrationality of ends accompanied by technical decisions about means.

The nihilistic content of the core, in which the rift between man and reality, oblivion of being, and the crisis of the idea of the truth all combine, is high because, bearing on the origin, its effects are transmitted indefinitely in many directions. One of them is the question of essence, to which the philosophical tradition attributed great importance for the comprehension of existence and the whole. There is a nihilism that holds the concept of essence to be inconsequential, a mere linguistic convention, flatus vocis. I term this attitude nihilism of the essences. To it is directed the ideology (in itself nihilistic) of technological scientism, whose advanced wing today is in the biological-genetic sector. The source from which this specific form of nihilism is nurtured lies in an emphatic raising of becoming alone, conjoined with the a priori negation of the necessary stratum of being and the assumption that essences are mere lexical conventions, something that depends fundamentally on the choices of man and on the never firm determinations of his freedom.

The gnoseological-ontological antirealism here takes the form of unreality of the essences/natures. Given that this negation is postulated and therefore illusory, it appears to the scrutiny of the intellect to be condemned to failure and also dangerous, since many undesirable results can flow from the attempts to violate the inviolable. For this reason Fides et ratio shows itself clear-sighted in its invitation not to stop at how language expresses and understands reality, but to go further and verify the ability of reason to discover essences. This would make it possible to establish a limit to the drive towards the omnipotence of technology, which can "attempt essences" but not transform them. The essences represent the 'unavailable'. To the oblivion of being and of essences corresponds with geometrical precision nihilism as the will to power of technology.

Coordinate with the position defined as "nihilism of the essences" is the attack on the idea of substance, in an attempt to resolve it into that of function, as in the case of Kelsen. An inner necessity links theoretical nihilism as oblivion of being with the abandonment of the concept of substance, as it is the first and fundamental expression of real being: only individuals or individual substances exist.

If now, without losing sight of the speculative diagnosis, we pass to the practical field, we can speak of an ethical nihilism, understood as an attack on values, an attempt at their dissolution, relativism. The moral nihilism that today constitutes perhaps the most evident component of the theme of nihilism, by the frequency with which it is evoked in culture, possesses some practical roots (as well as much else). To us it seems to originate from the primacy of the negative over the positive, of eros over agape, of the indirect-negative over the direct-positive. This nihilism, in which it is postulated that the positive stems from the negative, is paradigmatically matched by Nietzsche's idea that the morality of love, of forgiveness, of mercy, is born not from a positive heroic impulse of the person, but emerges as an unconfessable disguise of a harsh feeling of ressentiment against life, strength, and joy (7).

It is not difficult to connect with this picture another remarkable meaning of ethical nihilism, which stems from a weak, plural reason, skeptical and resigned to decline. The "soft" form of moral nihilism which seems to prevail in the contemporary West, is rather like a form of "do it yourself" and originates in the metamorphosis of the criterion of autonomy, on which modernity had staked its best cards. Maintaining that the supreme principle of morality is autonomy as the self-legislation of the reason, Kant (cf. Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten) had before his mind a single moral law and a single, universal, and immutable self-legislation of the reason. But what can be said today, when the one has become many? When the moral law has crumbled into the unlimited plurality of the empirical self-legislations of single individuals? Within this new spiritual climate both prohibiting and prescribing become meaningless.

To express our own conviction fully, in many forms of speculative nihilism a leading part is played by an intimately anti-realistic logico-dialectical formalism. Empty and sterile in real terms, it is devoid of all sense of being: an absolute logicism reduces it to nullity. Its decisive origin can perhaps be found in the concealment of real being of which the great and delusive machine of Hegelian dialectic is pregnant: on this basis, being, that which is richest and most fully determinate, is seen in the Science of Logic as the emptiest, poorest, the most indeterminate, the pure nothing. Rarely in the history of philosophy has there been a form of oblivion of being of equal intensity. Meanwhile it will remain as a constantly revived question whether it is ever possible to grasp reality while remaining enclosed within a grid of merely logical concepts. In logicist nihilism there circulates to a greater or lesser degree a feeling of contempt for reality: it appears perhaps too humble to the eyes of the doctors of logic for them to pause to consider it.

Nihilism and analogia entis

The diagnosis that links nihilism to the removal of being, hence to oblivion of being and to the loss of contact with objective truth, while it goes to the roots, leaves much unexpressed. Dwelling in its space, it is now required to grasp the unspoken, starting from the element by which the dismissal of being relates to another notable core of ideas, which we shall formulate as follows: oblivion of being includes the oblivion and ultimately the rejection of the analogia entis and of onto-theology. The separation from these is often driven by a more or less conscious desire to deconstruct the concept of God as an obstacle to the radicality of the philosophical duty, and to deny the identity between God and Being. The criticism of the onto-theology and the analogy, now become almost a commonplace in many schools, is generally conducted by drawing on Heidegger. Moreover there is little awareness of a crucial point: namely, if a thought like his, which rests on the finiteness and the insuperable transcendental circle of temporality, does not seem inadequate to pass judgment (whether positively or critically) on the infinite, on whatever lies beyond that circle. To attack onto-theology and the analogia entis on this basis is like biting granite.

Heidegger's criticism is contained in numerous writings, among them those of "Identity and Difference" and especially "The onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics". They maintain the proposition that God is conceived by onto-theology as the supreme being and as causa sui. It is not an adequate solution to attribute this - colossal - misunderstanding to Heidegger's inadequate knowledge of history of philosophy, which yet played its part (where and when did the more reputable natural theologies conceive the God who enters into philosophy as causa sui?).

 In reality two positions that cannot co-exist are being maintained here: on the one hand the limitation of onto-theology is identified in having conceived God as ens and not as esse; on the other it is held to be impossible to posit the identity between God and being (esse). 

In this regard important are the passages of the Beiträge zur Philosophie where God is determined as unfailing need of being (Notschaft des Seyns), as if possessed by an obscure hunger; and also in those parts where the equation Deus=Esse is denied with a clarity that leaves nothing to be desired: "Being and God are not identical and I would never seek to think the essence of God through being. Some know that I come from theology and that I have preserved an old love for it, and understand a little about the subject. If I were to write a theology - and at times I feel the urge to do so - the term "being" would not appear in it. Faith has no need of being. If it uses the term, it is already no longer faith... I hold that being can never be thought as the essence and foundation of God" (8).

In these words are expressed two aversions: one anti-Hellenic and one anti-biblical, for in the Bible the attribution of being to God is common. This is part of the idea that he is original Perfection: he is neither a God that makes himself, that feels hunger for being, nor a future God, analogous to the "last God" introduced by the Beiträge. The denial that faith is faith if has recourse to being, vividly reveals the risk of ontophobia in Heidegger's thinking. In no onto-theology has the problem of the difference between esse and ens been explored with such profundity as in that of the Seinsphilosophie, which asserts the validity of the identity of Deus with Esse, and hence God's infinite distance from beings, his value as the Unique and Other. Only by conceiving of God as Esse can one perceive the difference between being as esse and being as ens. This grandiose development escaped Heidegger, who here, too, failed to get rid of the oblivion of being.

Attempts to break out from nihilism

If technological scientism - for which "to be/being" in the highest sense does not signify "to be forever/always being" but only "to remain in the presence, ready for every transformation" - reveals itself as an important trait of nihilism, it does not seem to us that the existentialist philosophies, those of freedom or the transcendental ones, are capable of achieving the desired escape from it. Often existentialism hangs existence to an act of freedom and ultimately to the abyss of freedom (the term is symptomatic), that is in the last resort to a decision. The existentialist, understanding that one cannot dwell endlessly in relativism and nihilism, decides to emerge from it by an act of freedom. The problem does not consist in escaping from relativism or nihilism, but in the way we do it.

Perhaps the most inward character of existentialism is its awareness that at the bottom of all knowledge and of ourselves we discover the abyss, that-which-is-not-founded. It is so radical that it threatens the Absolute itself, so that in the last analysis all truth and meaning rest on the unfounded abyss of freedom, human or divine, as the case may be, but the original structure of the reality is not altered. 

If all meaning comes from the obscure and 'principial' ( i. e., that has reference to the principle) act of freedom, then all meaning is founded on a decision and ultimately there is no such thing as meaning but only decision. Despite differences of personal intention, existentialism of this kind, which contains a misunderstanding of the essence of freedom and of the ultimate nature of being, does not seem capable of checking the progress of nihilism.

If we look at it from the aspect of transcendental philosophy, which taken as a whole has constituted the ontology of the moderns, we find it contains many things worthy of respect but not being. One finds things and men, onta and human subjects, and certainly the "anthropological difference" between the inanimate onta and living, thinking men. In fact subjectivity is raised so high that modern transcendental doctrine could hardly have been born outside the all-embracing doctrine of anthropocentrism, in which - according to Barth - man is the universal subject and Christ at best the predicate. 

Such a philosophy could have been a philosophy of consciousness and of freedom, and it was both of these things together. Yet it failed to produce that openness of the soul to the whole, without which it is impossible to break out of nihilism. The openness of the soul, expressed in the ancient adage anima est quodammodo omnia, here signifies openness to being and to experience, in the possible acceptance of that infinite openness produced in us by the Revelation. Nietzsche had profound reasons for seeking with unflagging energy to abolish the soul as ontological and theological sensorium. Oblivion of being and of the soul and dissolution of ethics go hand in hand.

Two great and vital currents seem available to help us to break out of nihilism: the philosophy of being and the biblical tradition. Without mixing itself with questions which are left to discussion among different philosophical currents, the encyclical suggests that one of the major limits of modern philosophy lies in having put being in brackets, in not having been able to present itself as philosophy of being (9). Consequently it has encountered greater difficulties in rediscovering the proper wisdom that is peculiar to philosophical thought, going toward the fragmentation of knowledge (cf. Nos. 83 and 97, the latter a pivot of the whole discussion). With reference to metaphysics, we are justified in evoking by contrast that area of contemporary philosophy that defines itself as post-Metaphysical, in allusion to the irreversible devaluation of the foundations of the true and valid which it sees in Western culture.

Concluding words

Among the several concluding remarks that could be presented, I'll retain only a few matters:

1) The Western secularized culture is rather deeply affected by nihilism: this culture spreads and circulates a new "common sense" according to which the universe is deprived of any sense and, if God exists, he remains totally hidden to our mind. As very seldom contemporary philosophy goes beyond the border of the finite, an anguish, correlated to man's closing in the finiteness, affects the subjects living in the postmodern spiritual climate. In the realm of culture and of philosophical quest, the main challenge arising from nihilism concerns the very continuation of philosophy. With nihilism could occur not only a transformation of philosophy as provoked by linguistic and hermeneutic turn, but the very end of philosophy as an enterprise aimed at the knowledge of truth and at a form of wisdom. In fact with the advent of nihilism the sapiential dimension inherent to philosophy is progressively dissolved, while disappears the perspective according to which philosophy is seen as a vocation and an existential practice with deep resonances in personal life.

At the end of this dialectics, starting from the removal of knowledge of being, reason becomes more and more a prisoner to itself : some Kantian ideas concerning the "trascendental illusion" of reason could have prepared this attitude. Nihilism seems to be an internal parasite of reason and metaphysics, especially strong at the end of this century, when "one of our greatest threats is the temptation to despair" .

2) Breaking free from nihilism could be a kind of rebirth for philosophy; and for theology a resumption of its sapiential, contemplative, dogmatic function, now less deeply felt because of the weight of various factors, including: the still onerous influence of Heideggerianism in theology; a certain exegetical-philological positivism in the approach to the Bible, which beyond all its good intentions produces fragmentation in the understanding of God's plan. For this breakout to take place, a resumption of the dialogue between philosophy and Revelation is desirable.

But it is unclear whether in the West, the land of broken symbols (P. Tillich's words) the two will ever communicate intensely again, as many hope, including Jaspers, who declared: "The Bible and biblical tradition are one of the bases of our philosophy... The philosophical enquiry in the West - whether it is acknowledged or not - is always conducted with the Bible, even when it is directed against the Bible" (10).

 Here it is possible to suggest the fundamental meaning of open philosophy which is the matrix of the encyclical: open philosophy is that which, conscious of its limits verified through a rational and controllable process, remains on the watch for a possible Revelation, a word spoken by the Transcendent in history; and which does not preclude the possibility that a new impulse might come from it, a contribution enabling it to better attain its end. It seems that two legitimate processes go hand in hand: the process, commonly conceded, that it is reason which questions the Revelation; and that one which questions reason on behalf of the Revelation, verifying whether it cannot provide a contribution to restart the philosophical quest and reveal new horizons.

3) An open philosophy of this kind would be presented neither as a philosophical religion, whose grave limits are well known, nor yet as a generically religious philosophy. A name that would not be inappropriate, through historically charged with multiple meanings, might be "Christian philosophy", since it would be open not only to the religious phenomenon but specifically to the Revelation of Christianity. It would then be possible to resume the labour of the concept in philosophy and in theology. By recreating a virtuous circle between philosophy and Revelation we would make progress towards overcoming a state of reciprocal extraneousness that has been notable: whether because theology has sought to summarize into itself the vertex and totality of knowledge; or because the same has happened to the advantage of philosophy, which especially in the case of idealism is charged with theological purposes captured in the system.

The absorption of one discipline into another or, by contrast, their reciprocal indifference, has led to the exiguous dialogue of culture and philosophy with the Bible which, while not exhausting the totality of the Revelation, remains the great code of the European East and West. It is a solemn river that gathers the waters of a thousand streams: voices, doubts, praises, lamentations, protests, questions, answers. 

It is the book of the dialogue between man and God, the acta of God's intiative towards man. We read Hesiod, Plato, Sophocles, Cicero, Virgil, not Genesis, Luke, Paul, Clement. Why Homer and not John? Here what is called for is a far-reaching revolution in the model of education that has existed for many centuries now in Europe, and which was based first of all on the Greek and Latin humanities, with a subsequent broadening of the curriculum to science and technology, while still leaving the biblical code at a distance (11).

The integration of the paradigm presupposes the construction of a different relationship with Scripture and Revelation, a frequentation of them not limited to historico-critical method, which is certainly important but in some instances unproductive and problematic. So it is possible to glimpse the need for a concern with and use of the Bible in philosophy, rather along the method followed by some Jewish thinkers, at least in the sense that the Bible should not be understood as a document enclosed in the past.

4) The very essence of Christianity is threatened by nihilism, and the struggle against it could be a founding dimension of the present situation of Christianity. On a theologal (not simply theological) level the inner and concealed meaning of nihilism could be the man's limitation to this world, with the cutting of his desires directed toward the infinite, toward God. This is a strong challenge for Christianity and Revelation, because their ultimate meaning is not merely salvation, which implies liberation from sin, but mainly and firstly to become similar to God, i. e. deification (deificatio in Latin, theiosis in Greek). With nihilism Chistianity is no longer understood as a faith which is centered around the deification of man as a gift of God.

Only a poetic reason is adequate to reality, on Hamann

    

Truth coming from the well armed with her whip to chastise mankind by the French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme.


It is more natural for man to think in metaphors or parables, which involve analogical thinking, than to arrive at deductions based on rational principles.

So says Hamann, the “Magnus of the North” who was basically Kierkegaard on mescaline. Great friends with Kant, disciple of Hume, perhaps the first postmodern inventing the word “metacritique” an utterly bizarre writer full of esoteric poetic texts, much of Macintyre’s work can be viewed as filling out what was already explicit in his work.

Hamann was gripped by the insight that human rational activities are profoundly reliant upon language, and that language itself is a historical product. Language is both anchored by surfacing patterns of use, and inhabited by the particularities of its usage in the lives of situated human actors.

As such he rejected Kant’s enlightenment view of reason as universal ahistorical thought.

All thought is dependent upon language that is shaped by a specific history and lived within communal practices and experiences - and it cannot be abstracted from that.

In Wise-Men from the East at Bethlehem (1760) he wrote that

"human living seems to consist of a series of symbolic actions by means of which our soul is capable of revealing its invisible nature, and produces and communicates beyond itself an intuitive knowledge of its effective existence."

James O’Flatery points out that , “Hamann maintains that natural language is, to adopt Henri Bergson's phrase, "molded on reality." Ordinary language or "the language of nature" is for him the historically developed vernacular of a people.

It is this kind of language which can be raised to the level of poetic expression. Opposed to it is the "unnatural use of abstractions" on the part of the philosophers. Such abstract terms are "wax noses [i.e. deceivers], concoctions of sophistry and of academic reason"

Abstract terminology can never be transformed into poetry, inasmuch as it has forsaken the wellsprings of all inspira­tion, "the language of nature." To say that the abstract word can never become the poetic word is to say that it can never speak mean­ingfully of spiritual matters.”

Indeed, as Nietzsche says,

“The sphere of poetry does not lie outside of the world as a fantastic possibility conceived by the brain of a poet; it strives to be precisely the opposite, the un­adorned expression of truth, and must for just that reason reject the deceptive finery of the alleged reality of the man of culture.”

Hence, God, "the Poet at the be­ ginning of days" , always speaks to man in poetic language:

“The Scriptures cannot speak with us as human beings otherwise than in parables because all our knowledge is sensory, figurative, and because under- standing and reason transform the images of external things everywhere into allegories and signs of more abstract, more intellectual, more lofty concepts.”

O’Flatery continues,

“It is clear from this passage that Hamann conceived of the abstracting process as one which, among other things, removes the "external images of things" and replaces them with empty terminology. This process is fatal to language as a vehicle for the expression of veridical knowledge. Thus he says in the Aesthetica in nuce: "Senses and emotions speak and understand nothing but images. The entire treasury of human knowledge and felicity consists in images".

Philosophically speaking, the "images" (Bilder) of natural language represent for Hamann "objects" (Gegenstände), which may be defined as uncritically perceived entities of ordinary experience, principally visual in nature.

Abstract or discursive reason has the power, however, to eliminate such objects and to replace them with terms which actually stand for relations. Therefore, he may say that "academic reason" deals in "nothing but relations, which cannot be treated as absolutes . . . not things, but simply academic concepts, signs for understanding, not for admiring, aids in arousing and holding our attention".

In his indictment of the Kantian critical philosophy, he writes that metaphysics misuses "all the word-signs and figures of speech of our empirical knowledge" by transforming them into "nothing but hieroglyphs and types of ideal relations.

 In other words, the language of nature deals in the relations of objects, whereas abstract language deals only in the relations of relations, a procedure which can only result in "a violent divestiture of real objects, rendering them naked concepts and merely conceivable signs, pure appearances and phenomena"

Hamann wrote:

O for a muse like the fire of the goldsmiths and like the soap of the fullers! — She will dare to cleanse the natural use of the senses from the unnatural use of abstractions, by which our concepts of things are as mutilated as the name of the Creator is suppressed and blasphemed . . . Behold! the great and small Masorah of worldly wisdom has flooded the text of nature like a deluge. Was it not inevitable that all its riches come to naught?

Again, O’Flatery comments,

“Natural language, whether the everyday vernacular or its transmutation into genuine poetry, addresses itself to the whole man, to feeling as well as to intellect, for "nature works through senses and emotions. How may anyone who mutilates her instruments be capable of feeling?"

Language divested of its affective appeal cannot stir the heart or the imagination: "Emotion alone gives to abstractions as well as to hypotheses hands, feet, wings;—to images and signs spirit, life, and tongue.—Where are swifter deductions? Where is the pealing thunder of eloquence produced, and its companion—monosyllabic lightning"

The emasculation of language is not only a by-product of the abstract world-view of the physicists and philosophers who would adopt their method, but it is also a result of the deliberate effort of the prescriptive grammarians and indeed of all rationalistic arbiters of language.”

Jonathan Gray says, for Hamann, “It is tradition, experience, and language that shape our outlook on the world, our most fundamental notions of space, time, causality, number—not the elaborate system of categories and intuitions presented in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason

Whereas Kant’s prose seeks to strip away tradition, Hamann places it at the center of his writings. His prose is bursting with allusions, quotations, fragments, and metaphors. His writing gestures toward its own dependence on a rich tradition of contingent events, stories, figures, and images in the world of letters.”

Katie Terezakis says “Relation, not only as the logical category of mediation, but as the lived experience of fellowship, precedes and allows for discursive activity, which includes its abstract iteration as logic and reasoning.

She continues,

“It is not commonplace for a curt and seemingly offhanded essay to comprehend, diagnose, and significantly critique a major, soon-to-be-canonical work even before its second edition publishes. Yet this is exactly what happens with Hamann’s Metacritique of Kant’s first Critique.

Hamann names three purifications of human reason attempted in the first Critique and as hastily, in two short paragraphs…he names the misunderstandings and failures that attend them. Kant’s first attempted purification:

"....is an attempt to make reason independent of all tradition and custom and belief in them. 

The second … comes to nothing less than independence from experience and its everyday induction..

The third, highest, and as it were empirical purism is therefore concerned with language, the only, first, and last organon and criterion of reason, with no credentials but tradition and usage."

Without justification, as Hamann goes on to claim, Kant describes a reason that functions independently of conventions, of experience, and of language.

Hamann returns to the lesson he took from Hume lauding Berkeley. In the tradition Kant thinks he has radicalized, reason is ascribed the highest achievements of communicative form, by linguistic means and while simultaneously denying any essentially linguistic dependencies. In an artful elision, words are given the status of concepts and concepts the status of pure insights, freed of language.

The idealist confusion is manifold, Hamann explains. First, reason depends interminably on language for its propositions, its divisions, its ideals; indeed, reasoning activities require language for the sum and substance of their self-critique, their self-understanding, and the ‘orientation in thinking’ that proves necessary for transcendental philosophy as much as for the interpretation of empirical data.

We cannot posit, grasp, or otherwise utilize an ideal proposition (such as an idea of reason) without the use of some actual language, bounded by its own signs and conventions. ‘How is the faculty of thought possible? The faculty to think … with and beyond experience? No deduction is needed to demonstrate the genealogical priority of language, and its heraldry, over … logical propositions and inferences.’

Hamann is taunting the critical philosopher with a kind of ontological proof: it is self-evident that language is the being whose essence entails existence and whose invocation guarantees its presence.

Hamann is arguing that language and reason arise co-dynamically in action, and co-constitute one another as they develop. In different action contexts, including in our reflection upon the formal structure, conditions, and achievement of past action, reason and language are never fully dissociated (or given a ‘bill of divorce,’ as Hamann likes to say), because each new inquiry requires the happening together of reason and language.

Hamann concludes,

“Words, therefore, have an aesthetic and logical faculty. As visible and audible objects they belong with their elements to the sensibility and intuition; however, by the spirit of their institution and meaning, they belong to the understanding and concepts. Consequently, words are pure and empirical intuitions as much as pure and empirical concepts”

Terezakis goes on to say,

“He has argued that reason cannot attain a non-linguistic vantage point and that languages tie us in to historical contexts and embedded forms of significance which should become the proper objects of criticism.

Hamann pushes at the Kantian notion of reason, geared to identify its own conditions. Once its alleged distillation from tradition, particular experience, and language is proved a contradiction in terms, we can appreciate that the principles which appear to support the self-critique of reason are themselves supported by relatively interlocking analogies, metaphors, and imaginative posits, rather that clear and distinct arguments.

Hamann finds that the cognitive framework cannot help but to manifest its linguistic context. Moreover, the language that allows us to do transcendental philosophy keeps us linked to social practices and historically contingent happenstance, even where concepts and grammars appear to be at their most formal. “

Hamann says, 

“The truth must be dug out of the earth, and not drawn from the air, from artificial words , but must be brought to light from earthly and subterranean objects by means of metaphors and parables, which cannot be direct but only reflected rays. . .Besides the principle of cognition (“principi cognoscendi") there is no special principle of being ("principium essendi") for us. In this sense, cogito, ergo sum is true. "

In a famous passage from “Truth and Lie,” Nietzsche describes truth as “a movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms” which we have forgotten are such, and compares truths to “coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins” 

Nietzsche writes that philosophers “think they are doing a thing an honor when they dehistoricize it, sub specie aeterni—when they make a mummy out of it.” Philosophers handle “conceptual mummies” such that “nothing real has ever left their hands alive”

Lacan famously claimed the unconscious was structured like a lauguage, could all of reality also be so conceived ?

Indeed, as Hamann writes in a 1787 letter to Jacobi: What is called Being in your language, I would rather name the Word.’

And David Bentley Hart claims,

“In reality, subjective certitude cannot be secured, not because the world is nothing but the aleatory play of opaque signifiers, but because subjective certitude is an irreparably defective model of knowledge; it cannot correspond to or "adequate" a world that is gratuity rather than ground, poetry rather than necessity, rhetoric rather than dialectic.”

Lacan’s good friend Pierre Klossowski actually translated Hamann’s work, according to Klossowski’s reading of Hamann, Tom Giesbers , says, “what is generally referred to as conceptual content is delegated to being primarily concerned with, and organized as, communication. This means that, in its inner construction, conceptuality is structured not so much towards the ideal reproduction of reality, but is aimed at communication through language.

Hamann, in turn, attacks the idea of a reality or a sensibility that we receive through our senses independent of language, since, after all, thinking about “the given” in this way is also a conceptual content that is geared towards communication…In fact, the minimal thesis to which Hamann is committed is that receptivity follows a linguistic structure rather than an epistemic structure, of which our own language is more translation than determined cognition.

Reason carries out this process of translation, which means that reason is, to a certain extent, an access to ideas beyond us, if we were to express it in a Platonic or Kantian way, even though the entirety of this process is completely linguistically structured and what is conveyed is sense of a linguistic kind.”

What is Truth ?

Paul Tyson points out in his excellent book, Returning to Reality - “reasoning, as something we do, is as fallible as we are, and as such is subject to our position in history, or own personality, or the circumstances of the moment. ‘It’ is therefore not a universal, healthy and infallible ‘faculty’ as Hamann's Enlightenment contemporaries often maintained:

“Being, belief and reason are pure relations, which cannot be dealt with absolutely, and are not things but pure scholastic concepts, signs for understanding, not for worshipping, aids to awaken our attention, not to fetter it.”

Neither logic nor even representation (in Rorty's sense) possesses the rights of the first-born. Representation is secondary and derivative rather than the whole function of language. Symbolism, imagery, metaphor have primacy; “Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race”

Language is forced to take part in the ‘purification of philosophy’, as Hamann describes it in his Metacritique of Kant: the attempt to expunge experience and tradition from rational reflection. Language itself is the final victim in this threefold ‘purification’. It is for this reason however that language can constitute the cure for philosophy. 

Language is the embodiment of experience and tradition; as long as the ability to think rests on language, neither ‘reason’ nor ‘philosophy’ can be pure of the empirical, of experience, and of the experience of the others to whom we relate. It itself, for Hamann, embodies a relation: it itself is a ‘union of opposites’, of the aesthetic and the logical, the bodily and the intellectual; it unites the divisions Kant's Critique creates.”

                                       

David Bentley Hart opines,

“Reason, in the classical and Christian sense, is a whole way of life, not the simple and narrow mastery of certain techniques of martial manipulation, and certainly not the childish certitude that such mastery proves that only material realities exist. A rational life is one that integrates knowledge into large choreography of virtue, imagination, patience, prudence, humility and restraint. Reason is not only knowledge, but knowledge perfected in wisdom.”

I end with Philip Pilkington, who lays out a passage to refer to as Hamann’s own epistemology :

“Sounds and letters are therefore pure forms a priori, in which nothing belonging to the sensation 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 limitation and determination by figures.

He comments,

“There is your a priori. It is in the beating of your heart and the movement of your lungs. No, that does not mean that it is biological determined or some other such nonsense. For biology is but a form of knowledge and all knowledge passes through a single filter: that of language; of sounds and letters. Language dominates Reason and is not subject to it. And language, if one cares to pick up an etymological dictionary, is handed down to us via custom and tradition. There is no escaping it. Not even by falling on one’s knees and worshiping at the temple of Science and Reason.”

..... This is a three part series on enlightenment reason, I offer four responses, DC Schindler’s more ecstatic account of an open ended reason HERE, a poetic reasoning adequate to a reality more like narrative than a mathematical equation in part two HERE, Hamann’s embedded communal approach, and Cusa's Analogical turn.