Bewitched by language

In a proto-Wittgensteinian vein, Hamann wrote to Jacobi: “Metaphysics has its own school and court languages . . . and I am incapable of either understanding or making use of them. Hence I am close to suspecting that the whole of our philosophy consists more of language than of reason, and the misunderstandings of countless words, the personification of arbitrary abstractions . . . have generated an entire world of problems which it is as vain to try to solve as it was to invent them.”