Back To and Beyond Socrates
An Essay on the Rise and Rhetoric of Existential Pedagogy
Alexander Sohlman
Magisteruppsats VT 2007/HT 2008 Institutionen för idé- och lärdomshistoria
Uppsala universitet
Alexander Sohlman: Back To and Beyond Socrates: An Essay on the Rise and Rhetoric of Existential Pedagogy. Uppsala universitet: Inst. för idé- och lärdomshistoria, Magisteruppsats, Vår 2007/Höst 2008.
This essay concerns itself with the historical background to what it refers to as existential pedagogy, which designates the way in which existential literature presumably seeks to affect the reader so that he experiences his existence as isolated, and how this is done through the employment of harsh and uncompromising language and rhetorical devices. The assumption underlying this project is that there is a pedagogical purpose to the existential manner of de- livery, and this essay traces this purpose back to how in the 18th century certain thinkers – Johann Georg Hamann and Friedrich Schlegel – came to look back at Socrates rhetorical en- deavour in order to perfect their own desire to place the question of ‘meaning’, ‘knowledge’
or ‘truth’ into the hands of the receiving individual – the reader of a text or the student of a teacher. By studying the manner in which Hamann and Schlegel used this Socratic rhetoric in their own authorship, I seek to establish how they considered it vital that the recipient experi- enced himself as thoroughly alone in order to cultivate his ability to infuse meaning into the world. The essay continues to examine how Sören Kierkegaard – in his capacity as the mythi- cal ‘father of existentialism’ – conceived of the Socratic rhetoric as lacking in sufficiently accounting for the despair and sinfulness he saw as being intertwined with experiencing one- self as lonely and ignorant. By studying how Kierkegaard approached the reader in his pseu- donymous and existential literature, the essay makes it clear that the existential pedagogy util- ized by Kierkegaard works in order to simultaneously infuse the reader with a feeling of isola- tion and ignorance, as it, through repeatedly focusing on the despair involved in that condi- tion, provoked the reader into taking action, despite (or, existentially, because he was) being taught that he, on account of his inevitable loneliness and ignorance, could not.
Keywords: Existential, Pedagogy, Rhetoric, Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788), Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829), Sören Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
PROLOGUE: The Why, What and Who of Our Story
The Ambition to Achieve 2
The Theses to Defend 3
CHAPTER I: Socrates Rising (or The Pedagogy of Hamann) Introduction 10
The London Experience 13
The Socratic Answer to the Enlightenment 19
CHAPTER II: Socrates Radicalized (or The Pedagogy of Schlegel) Introduction 23
The Fragments: Socrates Maturing 27
Über die Unverständlichkeit – On Perpetual Irony 30
CHAPTER III: Socrates’ Ghost (or The Pedagogy of Kierkegaard) Introduction 33
What Others Have Said 36
Concerning Pseudonymity 38
Towards an Existential Pedagogy: A Question of Loneliness 40
Existential Pedagogy I: The Harsh Guide to Loneliness 43
Existential Pedagogy II: Sinful Ignorance 50
EPILOGUE: A Rapid Recap and Climatic Conclusion 59
LITERATURE 61
PROLOGUE: The Why, What and Who of Our Story
The Ambition to Achieve
“Why would I read a text written by someone who only seeks to show how lonely and isolated I am, and why this situation is essentially tormenting?”
The above question was put to me by a friend, and it was the immediate response to my push- ing for him to read Sartre, as the French existentialist had made such an impact on my own thought regarding the human condition and the constitution of man. Had the question been a critique of the psychological theory of Sartre, or the philosophical system which he put forth, I imagine that my retort had appeared less tentative and all the more confident. Instead I found myself grasping for intellectual straws, philosophical escape routes, of which I would hope to build at least a temporary residence for the existential philosophy to reside in, during which time I would explore the cerebral landscape for more enduring materials to contain, and most of all illustrate, the worth of such obviously hostile thought. Yet whenever two straws were put to keep each other standing straight, they crooked and curved, unable to even for a second of desperate deliberation restrain the boiling force of that destructive enquiry. Why, indeed, would one wish to put one’s own state of mind against the restless chaos of existential thought, especially when given in such a cold and calculated manner as Sartre’s? This ques- tion, it seemed to me, had to be at least explored in search for an answer, before one could even start thinking about construing a system to contain it – let it then be of straws glued to- gether by mere willpower, or something less artificially, and more immediately adhesive.
Without mulling over the question’s philosophical significance (without thereby denying it the right to be mulled over), the ambition of this paper is rather to reach back in time to grasp for the somewhat thicker branches of existential thought, and then particularly the rhetorical technique by which, I suggest, the vehement feeling first arises. For it is not, I dare say, the mere fact that the existential author seems to tell us that we are fundamentally on our own when travelling the route of existence that provokes the opposition to reading him, but rather how the author of existential literature persists in telling us this, and that he does not seem to be content with explaining this as fact until we have also come to be convinced of it ourselves (at least this would seem to be the point of it all). It is this persistence that provokes us to question if we ought even to pick up the book to begin with, had we beforehand known what
nuisance it would be not only to know what it wishes to say, but to have the decrees ringing in our ears for time to come. And then we are no longer dealing merely with philosophical thought, but we are in the midst of a rhetorical delivery of this thought. If we wish to gain any insight the foundation of the question posed by my friend (and which I in this paper pose to myself and to you), and have any hope of finding an answer to it, we must therefore prod the intricacy of the oratory style which, involves so much more than mere continual repetition of what is considered an existential truth. The mannerism of the text is essential to our under- standing not only what makes it repugnant to our sense of harmonic well-being, but also to our grasping what worth might, with great effort, be extracted and explicated from it.
The ambition of this paper is an historical study of the rhetorical backdrop to the play of existential thought, in an attempt to explain why the delivery is often so harsh and uncompro- mising. It is this ambition that has decided the cast of the historical yarn which we will soon embark on, the moment that we have begun spinning the thread that will guide us throughout the narrative. The cast consists primarily of Johann Georg Hamann, Friedrich Schlegel, and Sören Kierkegaard. It will be through the respective pedagogical enterprises of these three men that we approach an answer to the question why existential literature looks the way it does. Hamann and Schlegel will both be treated as instigators of a specific kind of philosophi- cal-rhetorical delivery which culminated in Kierkegaard, in whose writings the rhetoric will be seen to have undergone a drastic change concerning how the reader was to experience what he read. It was this change of rhetorical tune, it will be argued, which defined the point in his- tory of philosophy when existential considerations were actively processed as they were being delivered. It is through an understanding of Kierkegaard’s rhetoric and its historical back- ground, that we will understand the circumstances surrounding the characteristic of existential thought discussed above. Let us now acquaint ourselves with the figures and thoughts that we will encounter in our story.
The Theses to Defend
Against this [the Enlightenment project that all things were knowable], there persisted the doctrine that went back to the Greek Sophists, Protagoras, Antiphon, and Critias, that beliefs involving value-judgments,and the institutions founded upon them, rested not on discoveries of objective and unalterable natural facts, but on human opinion […]
The words are Isaiah Berlin’s, as he articulated them in his seminal essay ‘The Counter- Enlightenment’, wherein he argues the case that ever since the Enlightenment began its illu- minating rise in 17th century France, it had been faced with opposition from those who for various reasons found the shadows emerging from such light to be an important nuance to the canvas of human existence they shone upon. What can be seen as the intellectual movement opposing the Enlightenment (so not to confuse it with the religious and royalist opposition) is without much flare for words referred to by Berlin simple enough as the Counter-Enlighten- ment. The idea behind this counter movement, argues Berlin, was that when it came to ques- tions concerning human affairs involving morality and art in all its shades and shapes, one could not hope to reach any definitive answer underlying every variation of such dealings.
One would have to take into account the plurality of human forms, each with a more or less particular linguistic and socio-historical background to which the individual human related his experiences and, conversely, according to which he experienced the world in a specific way.
The apparent fact that the human condition was best to be considered in plural, and also that one form might contradict another, the Counter-Enlightenment saw as a sign that the attempts to enlighten the world (and so rid it of these dark forms which could not be accounted for by one specific human being in her socio-historically determined frame, being preoccupied with the one, specific form making out her own existence) could do nothing but blind us from see- ing anything of it, if not altogether burning it to cinders.
In Berlin’s view, the Counter-Enlightenment was an idealistic movement, meaning that it argued its case from the point of view of an ideal: the pluralistic world and the individual sub- jects inhabiting it. He considers one of the decisive instigators shaping this ideal to have been the character of Johann Georg Hamann. It was Hamann, says Berlin, who first turned his critical gaze directly at the presumptions of the Enlightenment, and he is seen to with great wit and irony having argued the point that man could not escape the circumstances of his emergence as a knowing subject. If man was to know himself as a subject of the world, Berli- n understand Hamann as having meant, then he was a fool to think himself able to shed his worldly shell in order to observe existence as was it conceivable on its own. This was simply not how the world harmonized with human existence, which implied a much more intertwined relationship than could any philosophy, however critical, ever untwine. The universal man, we can understand Berlin’s reading of Hamann, existed only insofar that he contradicted him- self, giving weight to the idea that no coherent system could ever encompass the pluralistic nature of existence.
It is not the ambition of this paper to criticize Berlin’s reading of Hamann, nor any other reading like it, but rather I wish to take my first leap into exploring the question I posed be- fore by acknowledging Berlin’s judgment of Hamann as the first proper critic of the Enlight- enment, and, consequently, a critic of the notion that all men are alike in reason. What makes Hamann’s critique interesting for our purposes, however, is not, I dare say, necessarily the implicit points he makes, but the way in which he explicates them. Or rather how he does not.
When Berlin likens the intellectual opposition to the Enlightenment to the Greek Sophists, alluding chiefly to the homo mensura thesis of Protagoras, in order to clarify the points made by, first and foremost, Hamann, it is with blatant (yet perhaps unintentional) irony. For one need only glance at the title of Hamann’s first published work, Sokratische Denkwürdigkeiten, to see that it was not the Sophists that interested him, but the memory of their greatest oppo- nent. Indeed, further on in the work he even likened himself to Socrates, and the proponents of the Enlightenment came to be regarded as modern Sophists, which is more or less the oppo- site of Berlin’s relative comparison. Yet, interestingly enough, this is not to say that Berlin (and many with him) is wrong in his estimate of the Socratic character of Hamann, for, taking a page from Aristophanes’ assessment of Socrates himself, one cannot but wonder what man- ner of sophistry Hamann’s thoughts were delivered by. If explicated his ideas can be seen as the foundation of the Counter-Enlightenment (as argues Berlin), and so resemble the explica- tions of the Greek Sophists, then perhaps while being allowed to remain implicit, clouded by a mist of irony and incongruity, we are served better by viewing Hamann as a rhetorician in the Socratic school.
The first thesis I wish to defend in this paper is that Hamann’s critique of the Enlight- enment, or the ideas carrying it, can rewardingly be understood in the manner of their deliv- ery, which, I will argue, suggests a re-awakening of the Socratic irony or, anachronistically put, reader-response dialectic. I am helped in this aspiration by L. O. Lundgren, who in his albeit very short mentioning of Hamann in the book Sokratesbilden, depicts him as one whose image of Socrates differed from those before him by the particular way in which Hamann put the style of Socrates’ thought before its presumed content. And this style, argues Lundgren, was for Hamann that of a teacher who did not presume to know the answers, or even how to get to them, but spent his time educating those who, in the certainty of their thoughts, per- ceived themselves to already possess them.1 The pedagogy of Socrates’, which Hamann can be seen to have made his own, heavily involved the student, and one could not imagine some
1 L. O. Lundgren, Sokratesbilden: Från Aristofanes till Nietzsche (Stockholm 1978)
knowledge being taught, without also imagining someone responding to the lesson. This manner of teacher-student interaction (or, in a more general way, the interplay of author and reader), I will argue, was something that rose to (re)new(ed) heights with Hamann, going back, as he did, to the style and rhetoric of Socrates.
With Hamann’s appearance we are still only at the beginning of our story, which continues most immediately by introducing the early romanticists, in particular the character of Frie- drich Schlegel. They can be seen to have sought to go back to a Socrates of a somewhat more radical disposition than the one Hamann remembered. According to Berlin, the position of these “unbridled romantics” was that one ought not to take a position, but rather engage in several, preferably contradictory explanations of phenomena, without ever settling for one.2 The moment the audience or the reader could point out what was being said or taught, it was necessary for the author to turn the tables and suggest the opposite interpretation. By keeping her in a state of uncertainty, the reader would have to recognize her own role as a most vital contributor to what was being said. Without the reader of the text, the text itself was meaning- less. In order for the author to keep the reader in perpetual suspense regarding what was
‘really’ being said, these romantics took to use what Schlegel refers to as Socratic irony. It was by going back to Socrates’ means of delivering a lesson, that the only important lesson could at all be taught: the creative and poetic responsibility of the reader. If Hamann can be seen to have re-introduced the Socratic as a reader-response dialectics, it was, so I will argue, radically intensified by the early romanticists, who saw in Socrates a whirlwind of incessant creation, yet always given by the hands of the student.
Acknowledging this rhetorical aspect of the early romanticists, founded on their going- back to Socrates, is, as far as I can tell, something which tends to go missing in the stories dealing with their philosophical thought. Berlin barely recognizes it as anything but “danger- ous” and “insane”, and Lundgren, in an otherwise broad study of the image of Socrates throughout history, neglects to mention Schlegel’s view except in one single sentence, where it is put as a counter-position to G. W. F. Hegel’s.3 This blindness to Socrates’ ghostly pres- ence in the development of early romanticism – a moment which according to some has
2 Isaiah Berlin, Roots of Romanticism (Lecture given at Washington, D.C.'s National Gallery of Art in 1965) edited by Henry Hardy (Princeton 2001) 100ff.
3 I concede that this might have more to do with the philosophical-historical repute of Schlegel, than being a testament to Lundgren “forgetting” to mention it (after all, the only thing he does say about Schlegel is in accor- dance with his relationship to Socrates). Nevertheless, even interested studies on Schlegel, such as Paul de Man’s
‘The Concept of Irony’, and Georgia Albert’s ‘Understanding Irony’, fail to see the emphasis Schlegel puts on the Socratic in ‘Socratic irony’ as anything but an attempt by Schlegel to distinguish his rhetoric of irony from
‘general’ irony. To my knowledge, Tieck has not at all been analysed concerning any implicit debt to Socrates’
rhetoric.
shaped “the course of literary history” since it was then that the notion of literary theory emerged as a proper cultural and intellectual discipline – can to some extent be excused by taking note of the traditional goal of the history of ideas – to trace the history of ideas. Socra- tes, I admit, was perhaps not a direct influence on the general idea of early romanticism. As with Hamann, their relativistic or pluralistic ideas, when explicated, seem to turn out to be more sophistic than what one is taught to be platonic. Even if the historian of ideas was to actively search for Socratic influence on romantic thought, he or she would likely come up with mere crumpets. This, however, is not because Socrates played a minor role, but rather that he was, if the metaphor is excused, the demonic director of the entire spectacle. As long as one seeks for his words in the romantic script, one will not hear him, for he, in a way, can be considered to have been the model for the structure of the romantic discourse. I am looking for his voice, not his words. And if there has been any attempt at locating the spectre of Soc- rates in early romanticism, that is a journey which seem to have been undertook exclusively in the realm of literary theory or philosophy.4 I believe it is possible to also travel this distant to the Socratic in early romanticism in our realm of history, if one will only allow ‘ideas’ to in- clude also the manner of their delivery.5
The second thesis, thus, that I wish to defend in our rapidly approaching story, is that after Hamann re-introduced the Socratic as a rhetorical device in order to, as it were, educate his reluctant opponents by letting (or, if we will, forcing) them to partake in their own critique, this was taken up by the early romanticists for much the same purpose. We will find, how- ever, that where Hamann’s reach for the ancient father of philosophy was rather naïve, touch- ing upon the Socratic rhetoric in order to use it himself for the purpose of involving the stu- dent or reader in the lesson or text, the romanticists were slightly more sophisticated in their
4 Jean-Luc Nancy’s and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s The Literary Absolute might serve as the exemplary phi- losophically minded exposition in the literary theory and literary history of the early romanticism. Here the ro- mantic view of Socrates is considered in unison with the view of the prototypical ‘Subject’, making his role that of a presence in the philosophy of early romanticism and not, as we want it, a model for the stylistic delivery of the same.
5 One influential historian and historical theorist who springs to mind when speaking of the manner in which historically situated ideas came to be delivered, is Quentin Skinner of the ‘Cambridge school’. Skinner proposes in Visions of Politics: Volume I: Regarding Method (Cambridge University Press, 2002) that one ought to study intellectual history contextually, by connecting the ideas held by historical persona to the political landscape in which they first emerged. The initiative declares that only by understanding historical thought in its historical context, does one understand it as a historian. When understanding authorial intent, then, one ought, according to Skinner, place the author among the readers to which he supposedly wrote and sought a reaction. However, Skinner fails to acknowledge how certain authors explicitly (and many more did so implicitly) stated that they did not write for their time, but for a (to them) future to come. So was the case with Hamann, Schlegel and also Kierkegaard; all of whom said that they wrote for a perpetual tomorrow. In order for us to understand the rheto- ric of these self-declared ahistorical writers, we must not restrict ourselves to the historical context of their writ- ings, but must rather engage them head-on, keeping in mind how they see themselves as writing for no particular audience, and treat their rhetoric as such.
use. The student did not only play a vital part as they came to see and use the Socratic rhetoric – the student came to play the only part, anticipating the Barthian move from the author to the reader. Socrates and Socratic irony became the spiritual hallmarks of the rhetoric and literary ideal reached for by early romanticists such as Schlegel, an ideal which involved the recipient of a thought or idea in the perpetual creation of that idea (unlike Hamann, who had used the rhetoric so to have the reader criticize what ideas he held). With the early romanticists, so I will argue, the Socratic wheel had been turned full-circle – now the student had to look into himself for answers (an attempt, as we will see, which necessarily had to fail).
This romantic image of Socrates, understood as a radicalization of the Socrates who Ham- man remembered, was the image of Socrates that we encounter, and whose presence is felt, throughout the authorship of Sören Kierkegaard. Now, Kierkegaard is often said to have been the father of existentialism, which, if one considers this to be a more or less reasonable (if mythical) assessment, would make his thought and its delivery an excellent case to study if we want to live up to the general ambition I set at the beginning of this prologue. As we re- call, the question that provoked us was why one ought to read something which only sought to intensify the tormenting feeling of loneliness and isolation as constitutive of the human condi- tion. The question was directed as a passionate polemic against the existential works of Sartre, who, we can at this point spell out, was singularly influenced by Kierkegaard regarding his conception of anxiety as undirected, non-relational fear: It was with Kierkegaard that anxiety or despair was first conceptualized as fear of nothing. Since our question is very much con- cerned with this particular (yet overflowing) strand of existential thought, it is only reasonable that we consider Kierkegaard the first, and for that reason most important, ‘stop’ on our quest to illuminate why existential rhetoric tends to be harsh and uncompromising. Kierkegaard was, so to say, the first to be like so rhetorical.
Given the former two theses I have said that I wish to defend, it should come as no surprise that the third – and, for our purposes, also the most relevant – thesis is that Kierkegaard, too, went back to Socrates for rhetorical tutoring. Yet we will wish to qualify this further, and say that in going back to Socrates, Kierkegaard simultaneously sought to go beyond the Socratic in his own rhetorical endeavour. According to Lundgren, Kierkegaard was of the opinion that Socrates lacked any conception of sin, and that it was in this respect that the Greek philoso- pher (together with his modern heralds) failed to account for the entirety of the human condi- tion. It was by being conscious of himself as a sinner, that man came to understand the full extent of his existence as something deeply problematic. The concept of sin was tricky even for Kierkegaard, and we will not be so bold as to attempt an explanation in this essay. Suffice
to say, it was in recognizing that he was a sinner that man – the student – could save himself from that unfortunate state, yet at the same time it was in recognizing himself a sinner that man established his sinfulness as that of coming to know himself as a sinner. In order for the student to be saved he had to simultaneously come to know, and come to forget that he was a sinner. And to make the student aware of his condition, I will argue, was what urged Kierke- gaard’s existential pedagogy onward. For this was not something that could be done within the bounds of Socratic rhetoric, as Kierkegaard understood it, where the opposition was dis- solved and the student was placed/placed himself in a state of perpetual ignorance. Any de- finitive decision concerning himself or his relationship to the world was here suspended, awaiting an ever-approaching future. To go beyond Socratic ignorance, thus, meant that Kierkegaard had to coerce his reader into recognizing (or rather deciding) himself as essen- tially alone, even to their own sentiments, and convince them that they could only relate to the world as distant. This was done, I will argue, in order for the readers to, in that last moment of existential anxiety of never being able to properly know themselves or the world for certain, passionately declare that the very ladder which pedagogically brought them to this conception of themselves as sinners (that is, of claiming to know that they knew Nothing) was rubbish, and so they would kick it away. The Socratic became, in existential pedagogy, something of a harsh realization of the human condition. Once the student was left wholly to himself and his own judgment, he would no longer be able to sustain such wilful ignorance (the knowledge of which was sinful) but he was to be compelled into taking decisive action. In a way, Kierke- gaard can be seen to have coerced the student to ‘forget’ his Socratically induced ignorance, but only after it had been painfully traversed.
To summarize, the three theses of this paper are: 1) Hamann re-awoke the Socratic rhetoric in his critique of the Enlightenment, in which he involved the reader or student to partake in the critique; 2) the early romantics intensified and radicalized the Socratic rhetoric by envis- aging the author of a text, or the teacher, to be peripheral to the lessons taught, to the degree that the student came to be the perpetual creator of ever fluctuating meaning; and finally that 3) Kierkegaard, as the originator of existential pedagogy, went beyond the Socratic when he suggested its tenet of invoking ignorance to be sinful, yet used the Socratic in order to ‘save’
the student (or have the student realize that he had the means of saving himself) from his sin- ful state. By telling the story in this manner, I hope to be able to show how, by delving into the historical background of existential play, we will come to understand how the harsh and uncompromising nature of the rhetoric or pedagogy by which existential thought is delivered is essential to reaching the goal of such thought.
Now, we will finally embark on our journey, leaving what we can of philosophy and the- ory behind. It cannot be stressed enough how, in the following, we will be concerned with the delivery of philosophical thought, and not the thought as directly expressed by its adherents.
All the same, we will not be awfully concerned with the synchronic context of such delivery, but we are interested solely in the way in which the image of Socrates on our historical stage can be used in order to understand the rise of existential pedagogy, which we have, in accor- dance with established mythology, located to Kierkegaard.
CHAPTER I:
Socrates Rising (or The Pedagogy of Hamann)
Introduction
The character of Johann Georg Hamann is elusive at best. Certain scholars of the history of German idealism, such as Frederick C. Beiser in The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte and Isaiah Berlin in Roots of Romanticism, are prone to view him as hav- ing had a significant influence on the thought following him in the likes of Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Friedrich Schlegel and G. W. F. Hegel.6 Beiser further argues that the influence he had on Kierkegaard translates directly to Hamann as having had a decisive impact on existential thought in general.7 Together with Berlin, he puts Hamann at the forefront of the thought following the Enlightenment, be it left to semantics if one wishes to call it Counter-Enlightenment, romanticism or, as does Beiser, Sturm und Drang and Ger- man idealism. Yet they both speak of this influence as having to do with philosophical in- sights, and care little for the stylistic achievements by which they took hold of the reader’s mind and memory.
Hamann’s writings evade any simple means of systematization, for they consisted to a sig- nificant degree of criticizing the systematic thought which flourished during the eighteenth- century and that was an attempt at limiting the perceivable world to the principles of human understanding. In order for his critique to be effective, Hamann must have felt the need to be unsystematic, so not to play into the hands of the people and the mentality he sought to fight.
Isaiah Berlin touches upon this manner of eccentric critique when he describes Hamann’s
6 Frederick C. Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (1987) (Harvard University Press 2006) 18. Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism 40ff.
7 Beiser, 16f.
literary style in the seminal article ‘The Counter-Enlightenment’ as, “a series of polemical attacks written in a highly idiosyncratic, perversely allusive, contorted, deliberately obscure style, as remote as he could make it from the, to him, detestable elegance, clarity, and smooth superficiality of the bland and arrogant French dictators of taste and thought.”8 If the wish was to attack the presumptions of the Enlightenment, then Hamann saw that it could not be done by secretly relying upon the very pillars he sought to shatter. He would have to find new and alternative means of speaking his mind; his thoughts would have to be delivered in stylis- tic fashion alien to the would-be rationalism of his time. As Berlin says, this implied a hefty dosage of idiosyncrasy and allusions to the perversion of systematic thought. Yet this aversion to the rationalistic ideal of the Enlightenment ought to make it impossible to properly under- stand Hamann’s thought, if this understanding meant translating his subjective approach to the sought language of objectivity that we connect to the Enlightenment. When Berlin writes in his article on the Counter-Enlightenment what Hamann’s theses rested on, and contrasts Ha- mann’s subjective understanding of truth to the objective goal of the Enlightenment, he seems to forget or ignore the fact that Hamann’s peculiar style disqualifies any reading of him as a systematic philosopher. It is vital to the understanding of Hamann that his style is put into focus, for it was the rhetoric with which his ideas were delivered that made him a potent critic of his time.
It is not an uncommon sentiment which is shared between commentators and scholars of Hamann’s thought, that one cannot understand Hamann’s ideas without taking into account the particular life surrounding their emergence. 9 Ronald Gregor Smith is very explicit to point this out when saying that, ”It is fundamental to an understanding of Hamann to see his thought and his action as thoroughly integrated.” He continues: “The thought cannot be sepa- rated from the life, and though the life is everything, it is so as an expression of the thought.”10 Unlike Berlin, who after having mentioned the idiosyncrasy of Hamann’s writings goes on to treat his thoughts as capable of being clearly understood, Gregor Smith makes it an aim in his study to say that if we are to understand Hamann’s ideas, we will have to under- stand Hamann’s life. Rather than being merely a quaint way of introducing a biographical
8 Isaiah Berlin, ‘The Counter-Enlightenment’ in Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Volume 2 (New York 1973- 74) 103
9 There are, of course, several scholars who disregard Hamann’s style, or at most considers it a poetical point.
Isaiah Berlin’s systematic approach to Hamann’s thought in ‘The Counter-Enlightenment’ has already been mentioned, and Berlin continues in a similar vein in his The Magus of the North: J G Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism (Farrar Straus & Giroux 1994) and The Roots of Romanticism (Chatto & Windus 1999).
An earlier example is Unity and Language: A study in the philosophy of Johann Georg Hamann (Chapel Hill 1952) by James C. O’Flaherty, where Hamann is directly treated as a systematic philosopher of language.
10 Ronald Gregor Smith, J. G. Hamann – A Study in Christian Existence (London 1960) 25.
chapter on Hamann, we can take note of how Gregor Smith utilizes Hamann’s own ideas on language and reason when approaching his object of study. As we will see, it is a very Ha- mann:esque tactic to advance towards a target by pointing out how one cannot isolate the prey from its terrain, but that one must also take into account everything which surrounds it.11
Gwen Griffith Dickinson builds her study of Hamann on the notion that his philosophy was about relations between objects, and she is well aware of how one cannot properly understand him without treating him according to the same method with which he treated his own targets - relationally. That is, if we wish to at all grasp what he was saying, we must not merely con- textualize him, but we must do so by looking at how he sought to affect his readers. She quotes Goethe’s assessment of Hamann that, when reading him, “one must completely rule out what one normally means by understanding.”12 She continues by saying that the idiosyn- cratic style of Hamann’s writings and the “hiding behind masks” demands a “great personal response from its readers”.13 If we are to understand Hamann’s intention, we will have to un- derstand what it was that drew him into writing in such an obscure style that he alienated those who wished to understand him by conventional means, and forced those open to his experimentation into making a personal response rather than an intellectually distanced evaluation.
Walter Leibrecht wishes to understand Hamann’s style in much the same way as Gregor Smith, yet with more emphasis on how it relates to him as a Christian. For Leibrecht, Ha- mann’s aversion to systematic thought was based on his desire for a total and continual ex- perience of God, “as he had personally experienced it, all at one time.”14 Why Hamann wrote as he did, argues Leibrecht, was so that his reader would not be at loss for the experience that Hamann treasured, and which demanded that one could not distance oneself from what was taught by treating the lesson as a structural critique that could be manhandled as one best saw fit. It was vital for the reader to personally come to the insight which Hamann had felt, means Leibrecht, otherwise the lesson would fall short of completion. The idea was not to give to the reader something new, but merely to make him aware of what he already knew yet could not see for all the enlightened schemes doing their best to explain what was so obvious that one scarcely noticed it.15
11 Unlike Gregor Smith, however, we will see how Hamann also made it clear that not only do we have to under- stand the life of our object of study, but using his particular rhetorical style, Hamann also shows how we will have to recognize our own impact on the object in our capacity of studying it.
12 Gwen Griffith Dickinson, Johann Georg Hamann’s Relational Metacriticism (New York 1995) 25
13 Ibid. 27
14 Walter Leibrecht, God and Man in the Thought of Hamann (Fortress Press 1966) 83
15 Ibid. 85
These are some of the ways in which Hamann’s style has been interpreted as significant for understanding him, and I will do build on them as I continue to explore the significance of Hamann’s own religious experience as recollected by him in one his first published works, the spiritual autobiography Thoughts about My Life (Gedanken über meinen Lebenslauf), written at the end of a life-altering business trip to London between 1758 and 1759. I hope to show how in his recollection of this trip Hamann can be seen to have described his stylistic move away from a desire embraced by the Enlightenment in which truth were seen to travel from teacher to student, author to reader, to a pedagogical insight which saw the reader as pulling truth out of his own life, and where the author humbly partook as the one who provoked forth this desire by rhetorically convincing the reader that any other means of acquiring knowledge was illusionary and essentially a demonstration of the reader’s ignorance.
The London Experience
Concerning Hamann’s London experience, Breiser follows the line of interpreters who mean that the religious conversion evident by Hamann’s own writings, “had important philosophi- cal consequences”.16 He then continues to suggest precisely what this experience implied by looking to how it ended, which he contends was that Hamann, by means of the Bible readings he undertook when down to his last guinea, saw his own life unfolding in the pages of the book. It was this “mystical vision”, argues Breiser, which made Hamann question the sanctity of language as being a rigid structure carrying predefined meanings. Indeed, Breiser elabo- rates well on how the result of Hamann’s London experience came to shape his subsequent philosophical thought, as well as the pedagogy through which it was delivered. However, as seems to be common among Hamann scholars, Breiser fails to acknowledge the process through which this conversion took place. That is, he is interested solely in the result of Ha- mann’s London experience, and considers the prelude to the mystical experience at the end of it as, “dramatic and moving, the stuff of a novel or play”. Yet as with any good novel, one cannot expect that the moral will be presented in its entirety at the very end. Had that been the case with Hamann, we are left to wonder why he at all bothered to mention the process through which he came to experience his conversion, and, if all that truly mattered was its completion, he did not spend the pages elaborating on that, rather than wasting them on a de- tailed explanation of its emergence. It would rather seem that Hamann, sooner than having his actual conversion demand the entirety of the reader’s attention, he would have his reader fol-
16 Beiser, 20
low him through all the hassle that brought it to be. In fact, viewing the process by which the conversion emerged as mere background would be to seriously neglect the pedagogical as- pects of any conversion story, and would be to treat it as simply a “dramatic and moving” way of telling a story that could have been told in less dramatic fashion, which ought to be seen as one having failed to be moved by it. As this paper seeks to establish the historical underpin- nings of the pedagogical framework of existential thought, which, as is supported by Breiser, has Hamann as one of its great influences, it would be a grave error on our part not to exam- ine exactly what it was that he had his reader go through when reading about what he had gone through in order to arrive at the point when he began to look back to Socrates for peda- gogical guidance. Crudely put, we wish to recognize how it was that Hamann sought to move his readers by writing as he did.
One scholar who argues that Hamann’s manner of pedagogy worked by order of Socratic analogy is Griffith Dickinson. In her study of Hamann’s Socratic Memorabilia, she declares that Hamann wrote the text analogically, and suggests that Hamann conceived of the success- ful reader as belonging to the same socio-historical landscape (that is, the Enlightenment) as did he.17 If the reader was of another linguistic constitution, the work would fail to make sense the way it did for someone able to pick up on the many references appearing through- out.18 It is possible, however, and I would say correct, to view also Hamann’s description of his London journey as analogical. That is, when Hamann chose to depict for his reader the hardship he had himself gone through in coming to the insight connected to his spiritual con- version, he can be considered to have sought for the reader not only to better understand the process, but to connect his own ambitions for (in Hamann’s view illusionary) knowledge and achievements to the ‘lies’ elaborated by Hamann. The recollection, as written, would there- fore carry pedagogical weight in how it was analogical to what Hamann understood as being the human condition of living in the delusion of knowledge and inter-subjective means of validation of one’s worth as an individual. People could not essentially justify each other, as they could only perceive what their socio-historically determined conceptual scheme allowed them to, why any attempt to credit one’s knowledge by looking at how it was accepted by others was fundamentally erroneous. Hamann, I would argue, did not argue philosophically for this position (since his words would never escape the language through which he spoke),
17 Griffith Dickinson, 30ff.
18 We will come back to what Hamann might have intended with this later on, and it will become clear that even if the kind of reading carried out by Griffith Dickinson and others is supported by the structure of Hamann’s work (especially the countless and carefully hidden religious references that might be lost on a child of the Enlightenment, yet not on one whose parents trace their identity also to the Church), it does not account for the entirety of what Hamann can be seen to have considered the reader-response to his literary output.
but he actively wrote so that any reader, of whatever language and referential network, would be able to relate their own life’s struggle for knowledge and companionship to his. As the dedication to his first explicit critique of the Enlightenment reads – ‘A Double Dedication to Nobody and Two’ – he did not merely conceive of his immediate readers (‘Two’, which where two of his friends) but also an unspecified, public reader (‘Nobody’).19 We will want to consider Hamann’s decision to include the means by which he underwent his spiritual conver- sion as he told it to the reader as a pedagogical manoeuvre by way of analogy, in order for the reader to better appreciate what he wished to show by it.
Hamann told of his London experience in the autobiography Thoughts about My Life, which covered his life to the point of his conversion in 1758. The work was not intended for publication, and it was supposedly only meant to be read by a few chosen individuals. Never- theless, as it apparent by the structure of the work, Hamann wished that these chosen few knew what had led him to his point of conversion, and would not have them speculate widely.
Even if Hamann wished that his readers saw themselves in his writings, it was his purpose as an educator to make sure they did. The London part of the recollection thus consisted of al- most an excessive amount of anxiety and despair. He made his reader aware of how he had arrived at the capital of the world with great admiration for the British, only to be swiftly robbed of his esteem for the people.
We arrived late in the evening of 18 April, 1757, in London. There I spent a very restless night with my Bremen acquaintance at the inn, for it seemed to be a den of murderers, full of a perfect rabble; our room was so insecure that anyone could in by the window who did not want to waken us by coming in by the door.20
While one might wish to see Hamann’s first impression of London as quite ordinary and not exceptional from how anyone might experience a sense of danger when arriving in the capital of the world, or for that matter any large and unfamiliar locale. However, we will remind our- selves of how Hamann did not write of his experience as part of a journal, but that he wrote the entirety of it when undergoing the last stages of his conversion. Everything he recollected from his arrival to his conversion ought therefore to be read as the words of one who consid- ered it important in order to grasp what he saw as a spiritual awakening. Whilst the story as such might be ordinary and, with Beiser, “dramatic and moving”, it is quite extraordinary when viewed through the lenses of a pedagogy. Hamann wished to move his reader, and in
19 Johann Georg Hamann, ’Socratic Memorabilia’ (1759). Gregor Smith, 176. The translations of Hamman’s work are from Ronald Gregor Smith’s J. G. Hamann – A Study in Christian Existence (London 1960)
20 Gregor Smith 145.
order to understand how he wished to move them we must engage in the drama entertaining the reader as part of the moral to be picked up. With that said, we understand that when Ha- mann first told his reader of London, he did so by having the reader contemplate being sur- rounded by wicked men, despite having previously hold these men in such high regard. Ha- mann had made that error; would not the reader?
Hamann continued in his recollection to push the point that men were generally a delu- sional riff-raff, and that they lived a counterfeit existence where they took their self-fashioned pride to be more authentic and genuine than it could ever be as long they were stuck in the swamp of their own lies and deceptions. By telling his reader how, after having found a seem- ingly proper inn, he had gone to a speech-therapist, in order to circumvent his otherwise un- specified linguistic impediments with speech, and that the man had “made it a condition of his curing me that I stay in his house and pay him a large sum of money”, he can simultaneously be seen to have made the reader hesitate towards viewing men who proclaimed knowledge to be anything but charlatans.21 This desire to have his reader experience for themselves, by way of Hamann’s own recollection, the presumptuousness of man resumed when Hamann told the reader of how he had come to learn, by his interaction with the British, how the best way of building one’s reputation and rise in renown was not in doing something to validate such pres- tige, but in refraining from doing what might bring it out of focus.
There are certain posts and affairs which may be best and most honourably managed if nothing or as little as possible is done. If we were to make a point of taking heed of everything possible, then we would first have to set aside our comfort and peace, then expose ourselves to great danger and responsibility, perhaps make enemies, and be sacrificed to our good will and impotence. [---] So I believed that I had to manage my business in accordance with precisely these rules [---] So with oppressed and reeling spirit I went hither and thither, and had no one to whom I could unbosom myself and who could advise and help me.22
This is an important passage in order to understand the pedagogy at foot, as in it Hamann can be seen to have simultaneously explained to his reader what he was doing when thieving from his reader the comfortable notion that men possessed what knowledge they claimed to have (“we would first have to set aside our comfort and peace” etc.) as he permeated this realiza- tion into his own despair at playing according to the same rules. Hamann wrote of his own misery at not embracing ignorance, but rather that he played according to the deception that he, too, was knowledgeable, as an analogy to be picked up by that reader who supposedly felt a similar anxiety when contemplating whether or not his own life entertained itself by similar distractions to his human ignorance. Hamann worked his pedagogy already in this first publi-
21 Ibid. 146
22 Ibid. 146f.
cation, intended to be read only by those friends who would question his conversion, in a manner so that they would follow him on his journey and experience it for themselves.
Having brought his reader to the point when, if attentive to the drama by which Hamann recollects his story, he would think himself educated in how these delusions of man’s pride worked, Hamann brought out more cards from his sleeve. Since the idea, as we consider the pedagogy of it, was to have the reader become aware of his ignorance, and not to treat the sheer knowledge of ignorance as being interchangeable for the experience of it, Hamann con- tinued to recollect his encounter with a man who, at first sight, seemed to live up to what he had sought for in terms of a friend who would advise and help him. The lutenist, being the man’s profession and how Hamann referred to him, was presented to the reader as a man who
“had an explanation for everything” and how Hamann felt that he could “become as fortunate as he”.23 In the despair with which Hamann had explained that he had come to accept the cha- rade of human knowledge and companionship as founded on something other than lies and deceit, in order for the reader to entertain similar thoughts regarding his own existence and its pretensions, he had now found a man who would alleviate such tension and offer distractions from it. Of course, Hamann served for his reader the same purpose of being a man who could tone down the hardship of coming to know one’s life as a lie, merely by being one who could account for it. In knowing life as a lie, at least one knew something. Yet when presenting the character of ‘the lutenist’, Hamann also removed the sanctity of this knowledge from his reader’s futile desire to escape his ignorance. In a Socratic vein, Hamann allowed the audi- ence to be the one to realize its ignorance merely by suggesting that its presumed knowledge (even of its ignorance!) rested on shaky grounds. Indeed, ‘the lutenist’ revealed himself to the reader as being anything but firm ground for Hamann to hold on to. With a dramatic and rhe- torical twist, Hamann described how ‘the lutenist’s’ fortune was maintained by someone else, who, when questioned about it, teamed up with ‘the lutenist’ to disdain the ever inquisitive Hamann: “instead of separating, they joined forces to stop my mouth”.24 Likewise; would the reader question the knowledge-of-ignorance projected to Hamann, all they would achieve was to give further testament to the misguided attempt at apprehending knowledge. Something which, at this point in Hamann’s Socratic endeavour, they ought to experience as an expres- sion of their vanity of self-deception – accepting ignorance was stylistically unavoidable.
To this point, Hamann had only mentioned what happened prior to his conversion. After these events had brought him down to his last guinea, and he was filled with despair and
23 Ibid. 148
24 Ibid. 150
hopelessness, only then did he open the Bible and saw in it his own life unfolding, now that he had, so Hamann understood it, experienced what the Bible teaches. Beiser says that Ha- mann saw himself in the Bible stories, and that he came to understand them as symbolic for his life.25 However, what Beiser fails to acknowledge was how Hamann conceived of himself as having come to this realization of his own part in gaining answers from the Bible only after he had been left ignorant and without answers in a world of inter-subjective interaction. Only when he had been left all alone to his ignorance was he receptive to his the symbolism of the Bible. The notion that Hamann’s conversion story carried a pedagogical motive is therefore lost on Beiser, and that it was here Socrates had risen for Hamann does not become clear unless one undertakes a pedagogical reading as we have done.
Hamann can be seen to have intended for the reader to undergo a similar process of despair and anxiety as he had, and when Walter Leibrecht in God and man in the thought of Hamann argues that Hamann’s stylistic delivery must be seen as an attempt to put the reader in-touch with the same feelings of devotion that Hamann had experienced in London, he approaches this territory. This would imply, put somewhat drastic, that Hamann not only sought to tell people about his conversion in London, but also provoke the reader into a similar position. If Hamann was down to his last guinea before coming to read the Bible in a new and (to him) rewarding light, it is not very far-fetched to suppose that Hamann similarly sought to put the reader in a position when he, metaphorically, was down his last guinea in terms of what to make of the process of conversion. When Hamann explained that he had never before read the Bible as he read it in those most dire of circumstances, when he found himself alone in the capital of the world with every delusion of knowledge and the prospect of human self-made fortune lost to the stormy sea of increasing anxiety and despair, we can tie his description to his role as an educator. There was a reason to why Hamann chose to include the process pre- ceding his conversion when writing about the conversion itself, and this reason, I argue, was that he, stepping into the shoes of Socrates, sought to have his reader experience what he had experienced. If the reader did not follow Hamann on his journey to God, the reader would not understand the choice Hamann had made; if the reader did not feel the same loss that Hamann had felt, they would persist in viewing his conversion as leaving reason for irrationality, knowledge for ignorance. In what he considered the manner of Socrates, we can see how al- ready in the recollection of his London trip Hamann sought to confront his audience in such a
25 Beiser, 20
way that they came to realize that he had never left reason or knowledge – he had merely questioned what he saw as the delusion that anyone remained within its bounds.
The Socratic Answer to the Enlightenment
Upon Hamann’s return to Germany, his friends were taken aback by the new tune playing from his lute. Gregor Smith tells of how J. C. Berens had “skimmed the pages of Hamann’s Thoughts about my Life ‘with loathing’”, and that Hamann’s old friends came to view him as having turned into a bigoted Christian, crediting God with what they saw man himself as ca- pable of achieving.26 Griffith Dickinson speaks of how Hamann met at several occasions with Berens and Immanuel Kant, who both attempted to convince their mutual friend to return to the positive ideals of the Enlightenment, where knowledge was power.27 They saw Hamann’s newfound faith as doing little but disrupting this power surge by refusing man entrance to the halls of true knowledge. They did not see Hamann’s point that only by realizing their ‘human’
knowledge as subjective, could they fully welcome the objectivity of true knowledge as given them by other means than what they in their vanity sought for in others. To understand him, they had to experience what he had experienced in London. They must come to see the folly of their way, we understand Hamann as having thought. They must see the pretentiousness of the Enlightenment, in order to grasp God’s grace as he had. He could not tell them where they went wrong, for they had to see it and come to this insight themselves.
During their second meeting, Berens and Kant sought to get Hamann interested in translat- ing articles from the French Encyclopedia into German, a request which Hamann saw as an attempt by the two to test his conversion. Had he complied, he would simply have perpetuated the myth that men could come to know the world by themselves, and fail to understand that as humans they were ignorant, and that it was only in embracing their ignorance that they could come to true knowledge Rather than complying with Kant’s request, then, Hamann cancelled any further meetings between the three friends and instead wrote the essay Socratic Memora- bilia (Sokratische Denkwürdigkeiten) in 1759, no more than a year after he had written his autobiographical account, which he underscored: “With a Double Dedication To Nobody and to Two” – to the unspecified public, and to the two friends Berens and Kant.
The Socratic Memorabilia was an attempt by Hamann to allow his readers – most directly consisting of Berens and Kant – to see where they went wrong rather than telling it to their faces. It is perhaps the most explicit example of the Socratic rhetoric which Hamann came to
26 Gregor Smith 29
27 Griffith Dickinson 29f.
establish, in which he ‘deconstructed’ the object of his critique so to have it turn upon itself and be seen as the basis of its own downfall. Griffith Dickinson argues in her analysis that in the Memorabilia Hamann made it clear to his reader that there was a difference in knowing that one was ignorant, and to experience one’s ignorance. The latter, she contends, was what Hamann sought to have his readers indulge in.28 As with his London experience, he can be seen to have wished for his readers to for themselves grasp their ignorance, and in his desire to make this wish come true, he had to provoke them into taking a stance. Convinced that the Enlightenment was founded upon shaky grounds that could not live up to its pretensions, Ha- mann had to bring its underlying assumptions to the surface of its thought. Rather than out- right criticising these assumptions he knew that as soon as what hid deep down in the murky layers of enlightened thought brought itself before the very light it sustained, the Enlighten- ment project would turn to stone and crumble before the eyes of its adherents. What was im- portant was that they experienced this downfall first-hand, by their own hand. All Hamann would do, in the spirit of Socrates, was to ask the right questions, or, as with the Socratic Memorabilia insinuate the matter with illuminating analogies that the reader could (or could not) decipher. This was done in order for the reader to himself appear as the one who mas- tered the critique. Instead of answering Kant’s request that he ought to return to the ideals of the Enlightenment, Hamann used the Socratic Memorabilia - which Beiser somewhat drasti- cally has called “a short apology for his faith” – as an outlet through which Kant and Berens could realize, by virtue of their own experience, the folly involved in their appeal for Hamann to return to their cause. This way, sooner than offering his reader an argument against which he could react and respond – all in the spirit of the ever-critical Enlightenment – Hamann let the reader be the one who made the argument, his own role as the author being reduced to that of a provocateur who indirectly challenged the assumptions his reader was supposedly used in taking for granted. Directly, all Hamann ever did was speaking of things easily recognizable
28 Ibid. 68ff. We can mention how Griffith Dickinson sees this endeavour as being tied to Hamann’s use of typo- logical analogies, through which the reader would come to experience his ignorance (and, consequently, his relationship to knowledge as one who does not possess it) by being able to relate accordingly to the analogies hidden references. This, she argues, was so that Hamann could show how spatially disconnected individuals did not work according to the same set of linguistic criteria. In doing this, she does not appreciate how Hamann, by restricting direct access to his analogies for one who does not belong to the referential network, includes also a stranger to this network by capacity of exclusion. That is, even the reader who did not ‘get it’ was invited to actively relate by capacity of his own linguistic belonging; i.e. by being excluded from any ‘direct’ understand- ing the reader would ‘indirectly’ relate as ignorant. This reading is supported by Hamann’s thoughts on language as socio-historically determined, as the notion of an ‘outsider’ reader implied in Hamann’s philosophy supports the thesis that people of another language will understand the world radically different, thus weakening the Enlightenment pretension of universal knowledge.
as having to do with his answer to the Enlightenment project, yet he never went the length of actually saying so.
According to Beiser, one thrust of the text was that of explicitly presenting Socrates in light of his professed lack of knowledge, whereby Hamann supposedly challenged the estab- lished picture of Socrates as an early spokesperson of the Enlightenment.29 Socrates not only strove for wisdom, but to Hamann his greatest feat was admitting to ignorance. We can see how Beiser’s view is supported by what Hamann says about Socrates as he compared his own manner of criticism to that of the Greek philosopher:
Socrates, gentlemen, was no common critic. In the writings of Heraclitus he distinguished between what he understood and what he did not understand, and from what he understood he made a proper and mod- est supposition of what he did not. He spoke on this occasion of readers who could swim.30
Further on, Hamann referred Socrates’ ability at making a “modest supposition” of what he, as a reader, did not know to Socrates’ genius. It was this genius, we understand Hamann, which enabled the reader to make sense of ignorance. If we take into consideration that one of Hamann’s readers was Kant, who would go on some near thirty years after the Socratic Memorabilia to explain that which could not be known by the strict use of reason, one can imagine how Hamann’s “readers who could swim” was a challenge to his own reader, who supposedly sought to understand their author without making it a “modest proposition”:
It was certainly alright for Socrates to be ignorant: he had a genius on whose knowledge he could rely, whom he loved and feared as his god, with whose peace he was more concerned that with all the reason of the Egyptians and Greeks [,,,]31
If the reader would experience ignorance as had Socrates, it was insinuated, his reason would be of no assistance. As with the recollection of his London experience, Hamann build through the Socratic Memorabilia a pit filled with water, and provoked the reader to jump in and swim. Socrates not only served as a justification or explanation of Hamann’s ‘apology’, but he was also a tool for provoking those readers that would think him their intellectual saviour against ignorance. In saying that Socrates made use of his mystic genius when coming to un- derstand, Hamann can be seen to have violated the supposedly established view that Socrates
29 Beiser, 26
30 Hamann, ’Socratic Memorabilia’ in Gregor Smith, 179. Hamann here supposedly spoke of a passage in Dio- genes Laertius. wherein it was mentioned how Socrates, upon receiving a copy of Heraclitus On Nature, he said of it that "What I have understood is good; and so, I think, what I have not understood is; only the book requires a Delian diver to get at the meaning of it." (Diogenes Laërtius, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, trans. C. D. Yong, Kessinger Publishing 2006, 65).
31 Ibid. 183
was a champion of rationality and knowledge. Nevertheless, Hamann never said that Socrates was anything but such a champion, he merely suggested that his strength came elsewhere than pure reason. The rest was up for the reader to decipher.32
At one exemplary point in the text, Hamann asked his reader to suppose they engage in a game of cards. As he elaborated on what it would mean if a man, who they knew to be a great card player who never says no to a game, nevertheless declined to play, Hamann wrote that this would mean that this man considered his fellow players cheaters, and that there would be little for him to gain in playing with them.
If he says, ‘I don’t play,’ we should have to look with his eyes at the people with whom he is speaking, and could complete what he says as follows: ‘I don’t play, that is, with people of your kind, who break the rules and force the luck. When you offer me a game, then our mutual understanding is that we accept ar- bitrary chance as our master. But what you call chance is the science of your slick fingers, and I must ac- cept this, if I will, or run the risk of insulting you, or choose the shame of imitating you. Had you offered a trial to see who the best cheat was, then I might have replied differently, and perhaps joined you in a game in order to show you that you have learned to deal cards as badly as you know how to play what you have.’33
Anyone who knew the circumstances behind the essay would realize what Hamann was refer- ring to in this analogy, yet in order to go beyond the analogy and look at it as having to do with something other than card play, the reader would himself have to engage in it and be the one who marked its referent.34 By using analogies in his critique, Hamann forced the reader to, if any concrete meaning was to be exhumed from the text, be the one who criticized. Ha- mann only spoke of a game of cards, whereas his reader was the one who saw it as having to do with something more significant. The intention behind this pedagogical move, we under- stand, was to thieve from the reader the notion that they could gain answers from what they read. Hamann’s text simply provoked his reader’s desire to receive meaning; provoked them to swim, if we will. When the meaning he found explicated in the text (as having to do with a
32 Beiser and Griffith Dickinson both make excellent readings of Hamann’s allegorical use of Socrates, not least of which, they contend, consisted in him juxtaposing Socrates to Jesus Christ in order to further provoke his contemporary readers. I have not engaged in a discussion with these readings, since they are far too philosophi- cally tortuous for this study, and also because they, after all, tend to arrive beside the point I wish to make of the pedagogical use of Socrates in Socratic Memorabilia. They treat Socrates as a typological stepping stone to get at the ‘true meaning’ of the work as dealing with philosophical issues, whereas I wish to view the usage as im- portant in its own right.
33 ‘Socratic Memorabilia’ in Gregor Smith, 180f.
34 As we have discussed, Griffith Dickinson, among others, makes a point out of Hamann’s use of literary de- vices, yet she fails to recognize the width of what Hamann is doing. She seems to think that since Hamann took to use contextually dependent analogies, one would have to be acquainted with the ‘proper’ context in order to get something out of what he was saying. I think that this view reduces the focus Hamann put on the reader as being the most important player in the game with the author, as she persists in viewing Hamann’s authorial intent as prescribing the ‘correct’ response from the reader.
