[1] This is a marvelous work on Hamann’s thinking, providing a fine introduction to the novice and offering new insights for those already acquainted with Hamann. Kocziszky accents Hamann’s critique of modernity, particularly the autonomy of reason. For Hamann, philosophy is less a constructive, systematic, or descriptive science but rather a rhetorical discipline. She interprets Hamann with an eye to postmodern thinkers such as Paul de Man, Richard Rorty, and Jacques Derrida, making Hamann our contemporary. While sensitive to the development of Hamann’s work, Kocziszky presents Hamann’s thinking not primarily chronologically as by the order of his writings, but conceptually under the broad, appropriate themes of: (a) Socrates, (b) rhetoric, (c) Babel, (d) body, (e) love, and (f) poetry. His work undermines the autonomy of reason and a view of the agent’s subjectivity as non-linguistic or traditionless. He insists on recognizing an interplay between reason and rhetoric, and that scientific and philosophical inquiry is upheld by history and language.
[2] For Hamann, Christian faith ought not to be accommodated to modern philosophy. With Pascal, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is not the God of the philosophers (8). As such, the Christian faith cannot be used to justify or defend modern ways of thinking or doing. Rather, faith is to expose the way philosophers defend human power and control over nature and the world. The Christian philosopher is to be deconstructive of philosophy, exposing its aim to control nature. The attempt to map reality as such, so treasured in modern metaphysics, is wrong-headed. As placing reason within a rhetorical framework within culture and history, Hamann was no irrationalist but a true contemporary of Kant. Hamann looks at philosophy not as mirroring reality but literarily, figurally, and rhetorically.
[3] In light of his work in philology, Hamann significantly contributed to hermeneutics. For Hamann, the meaning of the text is not found only in its historical context but also in its future understanding. How is one able to understand the past if one is not able to rightly know the present (17)? Indeed, the art of interpretation can be compared to scientific inquiry. Today we would call Hamann’s view intertextuality (18). We deal not just with the text, but only and always within texts. Hence, the interpreter must acknowledge the fundamental heterogeneity that subverts the intention to totalize or schematize all reality into a unified theory. Texts are also physical: they evoke a passionate, even sensuous, love for the word (20).
[4] From Socrates, a hero of the Enlightenment, Hamann sees the task of the philosopher as not primarily system building or the quest to decipher nature or the mind, but as hermeneutical and rhetorical. Socrates is the master sculpturer who chisels away the dead wood of philosophical systematizing so that philosophy’s proper, hermeneutical image might appear. Socrates understands that reason needs to recognize its limits. The task of philosophy is largely rhetorical (30). Socrates offers neither moral nor theoretical coherence (31), but self-knowledge. Self-knowledge and knowledge of God are inseparable from each other as self-love is from other-love. Faith is not a work of reason any more than is taste. However, reason does not underlie faith because faith happens as little through grounds or reasons as tasting and seeing (35). For Hamann, there is no secular space that the modern world can create.
[5] Modernity tends to reduce reason to its instrumentality (45). However, modernity is out of touch with the fact that human language at its origins is rhetorical and formed poetically; it is not a mere, neutral instrument in the service of thought. Indeed, in language, morality and syntax are one (47). Poetry allows truth as manifestation in distinction to verification (48).
[6] For Hamann, style and content cannot be separated. Hamann favors the development of typologies, but in so doing, he permits typology to forgo a tidy relation between type and antitype, and thus preserves the contradictoriness of the sign (54). Indeed, the various texts of the Bible form an organic unity that can be understood analogically. More importantly, all texts, and not only scripture, witness to Christ (55). Christ is the clue to understanding experience, to making it intelligible. All texts speak of God, then. This is because God’s authorship is found in nature and scripture (55).
[7] The most basic of questions, asked by Job, about the meaning of suffering, is given only a rhetorical answer by God (62), since there is no logical answer to be procured. Even dialogue falls short of the inability of language to garner totalization. Dialogue itself is to be deconstructed. Humans’ first language was found in response and responsibility to God (64). Much philosophy is simply idle talk; indeed, Plato is the most beautiful of the idle talkers (67). Socrates exposes this idle talk for what it is and directs philosophy to its proper rhetorical horizon. Hamann, following Justin Martyr, sees his role as discerning the ‘seed of the word’ (Spermologos) in all reality, akin to that of Socrates.
[8] Hamann’s concern is not: what is reason?, but, what is language? (74). Hamann thinks in language, but is no philosopher of language with a coherent theory of language (74). Indeed, without the word, there is no reason, and no world. The world is nothing other than God’s speech. The world is God’s writing, even as we humans think with symbols and signs. God thinks in flowers, rivers, rocks, and seas (‘every appearance of nature was a word…’) (74). Poetry is the original language of the human race (79). Hence, speaking is translating (86). Revelation is language (88). And, language is the revelation of God. In contrast, modernity is like Babel, not only dictatorial but also chaotic (98).
[9] We are deeply physical creatures for Hamann. In contrast to the views of Plato and Descartes, we don’t possess a body; we are a body. A body cannot be made into a thing; it is existence itself (106). Indeed, for Hamann, one can say, ‘I am a body’ (109), predating views of Marcel, Merleau-Ponty, and Ricoeur. This truth Hamann maintains in opposition to the Cartesian tendency to polarize mind, as thinking and non-extended in space, with body non-thinking and as extended in space. For Hamann, this is an entirely artificial and false distinction. With affirmation of earthly existence and its life-world, Hamann can affirm that even physical love is the highest form of God’s revelation (139). Not only an indictment of human failure, the cross permits a relishing of our existence (142). Hamann’s work is framed as an aesthetics, in which acknowledging God’s deity over the world permits a non-anxious, non-controlling, enjoyment of sense-experience.
[10] Hamann, for Kocziszky, opens new vistas of interpreting the world, beyond the modern tendencies to reduce truth to measurement, or see the mind as mirroring nature, or the attempt to control the world through systematically mapping it. Rather, through an interpenetration of language, text, and nature, which still permits their differences to remain, Hamann long before the rise of post modernity permits an overcoming of ‘logo-centricism,’ since for him poetry is the most basic mode in which we live (177). Indeed, poetry is a natural form of prophesizing (150). He predates Habermas’ and others’ postmodern ‘linguistic turn’
[11] Des Moines, Iowa, USA