Johann Georg Hamann

This chapter follows a neglected tradition (Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Benjamin, Celan) which finds in Hamann a problem that, in its many different forms, becomes the problem of a Romanticism that goes beyond a Kantian framing of philosophy, namely the problem of poetical thinking that encompasses the world or, to put it in Schlegelian terms, conceiving of the world as poesy. Hamann is a figure who offers completely new and unusual ways of thinking about issues that are central to our understanding of the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and modernity. One example for this is the connection of thought and language. Such enquiries can uncover historically specific, and important, material as well as go beyond this recovery. They suggest that Hamann’s unorthodox way of framing the problem of poesis, thinking, and language constitutes a real invitation radically to reconsider many assumptions that we recognize as central to both us and to the period.