Getting Hamann Wrong

Frederick Beiser’s ( Fate of Reason ) account of Hamann is a mess. He gets the history right (so far as I know it), but his summary of Hamann’s thought is not only mistaken; it’s incoherent.

For Hamann, Beiser says, “faith is an immediate experience,” like sense experience, but on the very next page he says that Hamann “explicitly affirms that all our knowledge, whether religious or not, comes through our five senses.” What happened to immediacy?

He claims that “Hamann poses an antithesis between the world of spirit, where man finds grace, and the world of work, where he remains caught in this world.” This is the precise opposite of Hamann’s entire program, which is to subvert any such antithesis.

Most annoyingly, Beiser makes Hamann an aesthetic antinomian, speaking of “his radical demand to overthrow all the norms” of art in favor of “personal expression.” In the next paragraph, he’s explaining how Hamann attacked the “subjectivism” prevalent in 18th-century aesthetics. Protesting against subjectivism by rejecting norms and giving primacy to personal expression is, surely, a unique way to protest subjectivism.