Spermalogy

Hamann opposed the abstractionism of the Enlightenment partly by emphasizing the centrality of sexuality in language, experience, and thought. He called himself a “spermatologist” in the sense that he was sowing seeds and in the sense that the thought of the relation of revelation and reason in sexual terms: “our reason should be impregnated by the seed of the divine word . . . and live as man and wife under one roof.” We must resist the devil to tries to “put asunder what God has joined together” and who tries “in our times to institute a formal divorce between them, and to titillate the reason through systems, dreams, etc.”

Hamann sometimes put it this way: “the heart beats before the head thinks.” As Garrett Green points out, he “is also capable of making the point in explicitly sexual terms. ‘The pudenda of four nature,’ he wrote to Johann Friedrich Hartknoch . . . ‘are so closely connected with the chambers of the heart and the brain that too strict an abstraction of such a natural bond is impossible.’ Some years later he had confessed to Herder that ‘my crude imagination has never been able to picture a creative spirit without genitalia.’”