“What God has joined together, can’t any philosopher separate”. Hamann’s “metacritique” of Kant

Abstract

J.G. Hamann and I. Kant were thinkers - contemporaries connected by personal acquaintance and communication, which began in the years of their youth (in 1756) and continued until the death of Hamann in 1788. When in 1781 Kant publishes his “Critique of Pure Reason”, Hamann responds to it with his “metacriticism” of Kant’s transcendentalism. The various lines of Hamann’s critique of Kant’s philosophy converge to the decisive for Hamann problematization of language as a condition for the possibility of any thinking. Kant, according to Hamann, does not take into account the fact that his philosophy itself is a realization of the ability to think as given by language. From the standpoint of his philosophy of language Hamann criticizes Kant’s understanding of reason as a self-sufficient instance capable to be a guide for itself. According to Hamann, such a presentation of reason by Kant is a success thanks to his “violent, unlawful separation” of the sensibility and understanding as two “trunks” of knowledge, – separation, that is possible only because of the idea of sensory perception as beginning with an extralinguistic sensation. In contrast to that, Hamann defends the idea of sensory perception as being wholly accomplished in language. According to Hamann, the sensibility and understanding are not two trunks, but two roots of a single process of cognition; and those roots are presented by Hamann as “receptivity of language and spontaneity of concepts”, or “receptive and spontaneous language”. Further developing the idea of the unity of reason and language, Hamann, in contrast with Kant, defends the idea of the historicity and dialogic realization of all rational knowledge.