Johann Georg Hamann
Johann Georg Hamann
Johann Georg Hamannwas a German philosopher, whose work was used by his student J. G. Herder as a main support of the Sturm und Drang movement, and associated by historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin with the Counter-Enlightenment. However, recent scholarship such as that by theologian Oswald Bayer places Hamann into a more nebulous category of theologian and philologist; he views him as less the proto-Romantic that Herder presented, and more a premodern-postmodern thinker who brought the consequences of Lutheran theology...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth27 August 1730
CountryGermany
When I rest my feet my mind also ceases to function.
The philosophers have always given truth a bill of divorce, by separating what nature has joined together and vice versa.
Hence it happens that one takes words for concepts, and concepts for the things themselves
Self knowledge begins with the neighbor, the mirror, and just the same with true self-love; that goes from the mirror to the matter
Few authors understand themselves, and a proper reader must not only understand his author but also be able to see beyond him
The product of paper and printed ink, that we commonly call the book, is one of the great visible mediators between spirit and time, and, reflecting zeitgeist, lasts as long as ore and stone.
Being, belief and reason are pure relations, which cannot be dealt with absolutely, and are not things but pure scholastic concepts, signs for understanding, not for worshipping, aids to awaken our attention, not to fetter it.
The farther reason looks the greater is the haze in which it loses itself.
Nature is a book, a letter, a fairy tale (in the philosophical sense) or whatever you want to call it.
What Tarquin the Proud said in his garden with the poppy blooms was understood by the son but not by the messenger.
What good to me is the festive garment of freedom when I am in a slave's smock at home?
Physics is nothing but the ABC's. Nature is an equation with an unknown, a Hebrew word which is written only with consonants to which reason has to add the dots.
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 only I was as eloquent as Demosthenes, I would have to do no more than repeat a single word three times.