Johann Georg Hamann
Johann Georg Hamann was an eighteenth-century Prussian philosopher, writer, theologian, and art historian who also played the lute and worked in the German language.
Born in Königsberg on 27 August 1730, Hamann spent his life as a citizen of the Kingdom of Prussia. His work ranged across philosophy, theology, and art history, making him a figure whose output resisted easy categorization. He wrote in German at a time when other languages carried considerable prestige among European intellectuals, and his choice to work in the vernacular was a notable feature of his practice. He died on 21 June 1788 in Münster, having lived nearly fifty-eight years.
Hamann is associated with the Sturm und Drang movement, a literary and intellectual current that drew writers, philosophers, and thinkers working in the German language during the latter half of the eighteenth century. His roles as philosopher, theologian, writer, and art historian, alongside his practice as a lutenist, reflect a breadth of engagement that ran through his career from his birthplace of Königsberg to his death in Münster. His connection to the Sturm und Drang movement remains the most consistently noted thread running through accounts of his life and work.
Quotes by Johann Georg Hamann
Everything that man in the beginning heard, saw with his eyes, contemplated, and felt with his hands, was a living word. For God was the Word. With this Word in his mouth and in his heart, the origin of language was as natural, as near and easy, as child’s play.
The most miraculous researchers into language are also, from time to time, the most impotent exegetes; – the strongest lawgivers are the destroyers of their tables, or they will become one-eyed through the fault of their children.
What good to me is the festive garment of freedom when I am in a slave’s smock at home?
What one believes does not, therefore, have to be proved, and a proposition can be ever so incontrovertibly proven without on that account being believed.
Indeed, if a chief question does remain: how is the power to think possible? – The power to think right and left, before and without, with and above experience? then it does not take a deduction to prove the genealogical priority of language.
If sensibility and understanding as the two branches of human knowledge spring from one common root, to what end such a violent, unauthorized and willful separation of that which nature has joined together! Will not both branches wither away and die through a dichotomy and division of their common root?
Do nothing or everything; the mediocre, the moderate, is repellent to me; I prefer an extreme.
Self knowledge begins with the neighbor, the mirror, and just the same with true self-love; that goes from the mirror to the matter.
Hence it happens that one takes words for concepts, and concepts for the things themselves.
Every phenomenon of nature was a word, – the sign, symbol and pledge of a new, mysterious, inexpressible but all the more intimate union, participation and community of divine energies and ideas.