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.