Hamann’s Style

Hamann’s style was as critical to his protest against Kant and the Encyclopedists as the content of his opaque essays. As Kenneth Haynes points out in the introduction to the recent Cambridge volume of Hamann’s writings, “The style he cultivated was the opposite of that of the Encyclopedie , obscure rather than perspicuous, personal and even private rather than disembodied and anonymous, erudite and sometimes obscene rather than polite and complacent.” In short, “The style was a reproach to the language used by Enlightenment writers; it was a critique of their language by means of his language.”

Hamann discerned an obsession with purity in much Enlightenment thought, and deliberately cultivated an impure style. Haynes again: “In the Metacritique as in all his parodies, Hamann cultivates a deliberate impurity. If philosophy desires to become independent of history and tradition, he writes with continual references to historical tradition; if it is concerned with truths that are independent of experience, he inserts the body and all its functions; if philosophy is to be reasonable, abstract, and transparent, his style will be obscure, weighted with concrete details, strange; in his prose the fact of language, especially in its non-representational aspects, is centrally obtruded.”