Observation and prophecy

Hamann writes, “The spirit of observation and the spirit of prophecy are the wings of human genius. All that is present belongs to the domain of the former; all that is absent, the past and the future, belongs to the domain of the latter. Philosophical genius expresses its power through striving, by means of abstraction, to make what is present absent; it disrobes actual objects into naked concepts and merely conceivable attributes, into pure appearances and phenomena. Poetic genius expresses its power through transfiguring, by means of fiction, visions of the absent past and future into present representations. Criticism and politics resist the usurpations of both powers and ensure that they are balanced, through these positive forces and means of observation and prophecy.”

This provides a scheme for thinking about the Enlightenment and its critics.

For Hamann, the Enlightenment is an effort to exorcise the spirit of prophecy, but in reality the two spirits are mutually dependent: “the spirits of observation and of prophecy are expressions of a single positive power which cannot be divorced by their nature but only in thoughts and for the use of thoughts; they in fact mutually presuppose themselves, refer to each other, and have effects in common.” Though Hamann describes the present as “an indivisible point,” he also affirmed that “the duplication of its power and its close connection with the past, as effect, and with the future, as cause, are not at all cancelled.”

He asks rhetorically, “What would all knowledge of the present be without a divine remembrance of the past, and without an even more fortunate intimation of the future, as Socrates owed to his daemon? What would the spirit of observation be without the spirit of prophecy and its guiding threads of the past and future?” And, “Are not prophecy and chop-logic the universal magnetism of our intellectual inertia and motive force within the entrails and brain of our small world?”

Hamann’s lament over the Enlightenment is a lament about the absence of prophecy among those who are gripped by the spirit of observation: “Are there no longer Sauls among the prophets? prophesying Caiaphases among the high priests? no Pontii Pilati who despite their skepticism become the closes witnesses of truth?”

But the Enlightenment has its limits and internal contradictions. Prophecy can’t be suppressed; the spirit blows where He will: “A spirit of prophecy still fills with wisdom the Bezaleels and Aholiabs, Nicolaitanes and Balaamites, letter-men and writing-men of all times, to work all manner of work, of the engraver, of the cunning workman, and of the embroiderer.”

Hamann’s categories not only give us a handle on Enlightenment (observation/present), but also on contemporary assaults on the Enlightenment. These critiques are often critiques of the Enlightenment notion of presence, and insist, with Hamann, that presence is always infected and inflected by absence, that within the present there is always the trace of the past and future. Critics of the Enlightenment, on Hamann’s terms, are attempting to revive the spirit of prophecy.

Unlike Hamann, however, in some critics of the Enlightenment, prophecy swallows up observation, absence nullifies presence. Hamann thinks prophecy greater than observation, but doesn’t eject observation.