CREATIVE GENIUS

In most histories of German and European literature Hamann — if he is mentioned at all — is considered as one of the inspirers of the German literary movement known as the Sturm und Drang, among the most prominent attributes of which were a belief in self-abandonment to spontaneous feeling and passion, hatred of rules, and a desire for unbridled self-expression and self-assertion on the part of the artist, whether in life or in the creation of his works — the conception of the poet, the thinker, as a superior being, subject to agonies not known to the common run of men, seeking to realise himself in some unique, violent, unheard-of fashion, obedient to his own passion and will alone. This is in part true. Hamann, who mildly scandalised his contemporaries by placing the emblem of a horned Pan on some of his works, by his writings probably helped to stimulate some of his contemporaries into violent outbreaks against classicism and order, and did emphasise the irrational sources of man’s creative power. If he did not encourage divine frenzy, he had less against it than the champions of neo-classicism among whom he lived.

Nevertheless his romanticism needs a good deal of qualification. He was not a ‘heaven-storming’ irrationalist. When J. K. Lavater wrote to him confessing to spiritual agonies because he was not sure of his faith, Hamann replied: ‘Eat your bread joyfully, drink your wine with good heart — for your work pleases God.’ To be concerned too deeply about one’s own spiritual condition is to lack faith in God, that simple childlike faith upon which all rests; self-doubts and self-tortures (although Hamann was not a stranger to them) are mere pathological symptoms. To Jacobi, who complained that he could not reconcile his head and his heart, he replied in similar terms — submission, not Promethean struggle, is the way to serenity and truth, however great the obstacles in our path. Our parents heard ‘the voice of God walking in the garden in the cool of the evening’. (w iii 31.30, alluding to Genesis 3: 8) We may never be able to return to this, but that is the radiant vision in the light of which we must live. We are all God’s children — so long as we live in this knowledge, we shall not go astray.

So, too, he told the Roman Catholic Princess Golitsyn, who was troubled by her unquiet conscience, about whether she had done all that it was right for a good Christian to have done, and lived a sufficiently pure and dedicated life, that she should sow her seed and trust in God. Do not wait for the seed to bloom; do not look for a quiet conscience too anxiously — one must learn to support one’s ‘nothingness’ (Nichtigkeit) and have faith in God’s mercy. One must do what appears right to oneself and then let well alone. To be preoccupied with one’s virtue is appalling arrogance and a wall against God. She was particularly troubled about the education of her children. From her journal we learn that Hamann’s tranquil sermon on the holiness of humility, on the need to learn to be contented, indeed happy, in one’s own insignificance, liberated her from her self-torment. God speaks to us through his works, through the world that he gave us, and in particular to our senses — do not seek to reduce him or his world to some inner core, some irreducible and ultimate entity. Accept what is given — flesh, passions — and do not attempt to explain them, transform them or deduce them. What is given is given; to learn to submit is to learn to understand.

Nevertheless Hamann naturally has thoughts about genius that are of interest. The notion of the free, spontaneous, creative impulse in man that knows no rules, or creates as the wind blows — this penetrates, as might be expected, everything that he wrote; he was not, of course, its originator, but he gave it a new and historically important direction. The notion that genius is a divine afflatus, so that the artist himself does not always know what it is that he is making, since he is but an instrument through which a higher — superhuman — power is speaking, is, at least as old as Plato’s Ion. Young’s celebrated essay on the subject *{Conjectures on Original Composition (1759)} released a great volume of pent-up German feeling on this topic. The second half of the eighteenth century is full of denunciations of narrowness and specialisation — of anything that cribs and confines men and prevents the richest realisation of the ‘complete man’, which is conceived as a harmonious process, prevented hitherto only by human error or vice and the destructive institutions that this has bred. This is not confined to German writers: Diderot, too, speaks of the battle between the natural and the artificial man within civilised man, and Rousseau’s sermon on the destructive effect of man’s institutions upon those who are brought up under them is well enough known. But the real revolt against neo-classicism is German, and directed against the ascendancy of the thinkers of Paris.

Although Hamann was among the earliest European thinkers to protest against the effect of French education and French doctrines based on a false psychology and a false view of God and of nature, this is not where his strongest claim to originality in this field lies. He is not principally interested in creating conditions in which a small group of the elect may be able to express themselves freely at the expense of, or at any rate beyond the horizon of, the common man. Nor is he interested in the social conception of genius as it was treated, for instance, by the French Encyclopaedists, some of whom thought that in a rationally organised society any man could in principle be transformed into a genius, as for example Trotsky seemed to believe (this is what Diderot, with his customary sense of reality, mocked so exquisitely in his essay on Helvetius’ On Man); nor is he with Mendelssohn and Nicolai, who conceived of genius as consisting in the communication of ideas until they became universally accepted and so raised human life to a new level.

As against the stress on social conditions, Hamann believed that genius was individual and incapable of being bred or cultivated by social organisation; each man was as he was, saw what he saw, and spoke to those who understood him — not everyone, but those with whom he had special rapport; how large or small a number, there was no telling. Against Mendelssohn and Nicolai he maintained that only the free can understand or inspire or be inspired; and freedom consists in being at once one’s master and one’s most faithful subject; acceptance of general rules was always slavery — ‘he who trusts the judgement of another more than his own ceases to be a man’. Even though Winckel-mann had said that by imitating the Greeks modern man would become inimitable, Hamann remained suspicious. Like Prometheus, we must steal the divine fire, not make a picture of it: he who wishes to rob the arts of fantasy and arbitrary freedom is making an attempt on their honour and their life. We must commit ‘a Promethean plagiarism of the primal, animal light of nature’; hence the dichotomy of originality and slavery, spontaneity and abdication; hence, also, the hostility to classical models and utilitarian or other brands of moral and aesthetic didacticism.

But this is not Hamann’s principal concern. He is not interested in the needs of the artistic elite. He is a moralist and a critic of life, and wishes to go to war with the enemies of mankind in general; he wishes to help to liberate human beings as such. His originality consists in translating the appeal to the authority of the individual conscience and the rejection of institutional authority, which came to him from his pietist upbringing, to the whole of life; save that by a self he means something that is in constant communication with others and with God, and sees the truth, practical and theoretical, only through the medium of these relationships and submission to them — self-knowledge (which for him is obtained in communion with God) is not a threat against one’s freedom, not a painful act of artificial self-discipline. He rejects with both hands the puritanism of the pietists: the notion that man is no more than an unclean vessel, a mass of sin and corruption, and that since all men are accursed they must seek to root out of themselves all natural desires: ‘Victory consists in death; life in dying’, as a line of contemporary pietist verse runs. *{Nordische Sammlungen, welche unterschiedene Exempel einer lebendigen und wahren Gottseligkeit, im Reiche Schweden, in sich halten …, vol. [i] ({Altona}, 1755), part 1, p. 123. (Copy in Royal Library, Stockholm.)

Hamann is as passionately opposed to this as he is to the utilitarian harmonisation of the passions, as advocated by the French philosophes. He goes so far as to accept the pietists’ doctrine that reason is a poisonous snake, the arch-heretic, the great enemy of God and his truth - thus Johann Konrad Dippel,* {Christen-Statt auff Erden ohne gewohnlichen Lehr-, Wehr- und Nebr-Stand … (n.p., 1700; published under the pseudonym ‘Christianus Democritus’), pp. 18, 78—9, 111. (Microfilm in Taylor Institution Library, Oxford.)} who, like Schopenhauer after him, thought that all suffering was caused by a thirst that could never be satisfied, and tried to demonstrate this by instances of children who died ecstatically. But thereafter Hamann parts company with this grim sect far more sharply than does their other scion, Immanuel Kant. His words of praise for his peasant common-law wife - indeed, his motive for living with her — are rooted in his love of what seemed to him healthy, innocent, natural, free from the self-torture to which the misuse of our God-given sense and languages leads the learned: better provincialism, roots in local life, than bloodless uniformity, hot-house plants, the death in life of sophisticated academics; the greatest crime is to divorce the intellect from ‘the deepest abysses of the most tangible sensuousness’. ‘Let there be light!’ This is joy in creation, sensuous joy. God himself was made flesh, else he could not discourse to us, who also are flesh; but we have divided the spirit and the flesh. ‘To gather the fragments together - disjecti membra poetae — is the work of a scholar; to interpret them, of a philosopher; to imitate them or shape them [sie in Geschick bringen], of the poet.’ Poetry gives unity and life. So, too, history is only a valley of dead bones, unless a prophet comes, like Ezekiel, to clothe them with flesh.

To live truly and to create is one: this is the gist of the ‘rhapsody in cabbalistic prose’ hurled at Michaelis’ head in 1762 under the title of ‘Aesthetics in a Nutshell’. *{Aesthetica in nuce(w ii 195-217): ‘A Rhapsody in Cabbalistic Prose’ is Hamann’s subtitle} Leben ist actio — life is action, not some impersonal metaphysical power, the self-developing Idea of Hegel, or the praxis of Marx, which it is difficult to identify in concrete spatial or temporal terms, something which even in the most materialistic terminology retains the mythical quality of its metaphysical origins; but day-to-day action, faith in instinct, in that understanding without which there is no communication with others, in direct face-to-face encounters with things or men, in the fullness of life. This is how artists create, but it is also how all men achieve the realisation of what is most human in them, how societies achieve unity of spirit, their members that blend of practical wisdom and love and sensuous satisfaction that distinguishes full human beings from the absurd two-dimensional figments of theorists, and from that inner desiccation and alienation in the theorists themselves which cause them to confound real life with their bloodless, stylised categories. A connoisseur who sits in his study, contemplating now a picture upon his wall, now a volume upon his table, is not a living human being at all, but a marionette. The beaux esprits for whom the French are writing will never see the dawn of the rising day, for they do not believe in the resurrection of the flesh. No! Nature, to repeat, is Hebrew consonants from which the vowels are missing, an equation with at least one unknown, and we can fathom this unknown only by action, not by contemplation in accordance with rules.

What kind of action? He speaks, as always, in metaphors. We must ravish nature, enter into and be at one with her: ‘Nature is our old grandmother … to commit incest with this grandmother is the most important commandment of the Koran of the arts, and it is not obeyed.’ How can fastidious modern connoisseurs do this, since they are ashamed of nature, cover her up, concern themselves only with the pretty clothes with which they hide her? Hamann’s denunciations of the rationalists, and insistence on the wisdom that comes from true participation in life — at its highest level by the genius, at every level by human beings seeking to fulfil themselves — are perhaps the earliest hymn to the rejection of rules and norms and contemplation in favour of action. ‘Think less and live more,’ he said to Herder — in that long line of the champions of life against Creative genius what Goethe famously called ‘grey theory’,1 *{Faust, part i, line 2038.} which begins in earnest with the German Sturm und Drang, from Heinse’s Ardinghello, *{Johann Jakob Wilhelm Heinse, Ardinghello und die gluckseeligen Inseln (1787).} with its passionate call to throw away all convention and let all passions fulfil themselves, no matter how destructively or how great the scandal to the respectable, to Jacobi’s Allwill and Woldemar (with its central doctrine that ‘What cannot be got wrong … has not much in it; and what cannot be abused has little practical value’), *{Eduard Allwills Papiere (the titles of later revisions differ) was published in 1775, Woldemar in 1779. The quotation from Woldemar may be found in Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s Werke, vol. 5 (Leipzig, 1820), p. 113.} to the cult of unbridled individualism of Schlegel’s Lucinde, *{Published in 1799.} and continues towards Byron and Stirner and Nietzsche and Hamsun and D. H. Lawrence.

‘Every creature has a natural right to appropriate all that surrounds it to the limits of its power’; these limits will be determined only by the resistance of other creatures. All calls to discipline are mere manifestations of ‘bourgeois order, which ruins man’, just so much ‘barbaric legislation’. *{Wilhelm Heinse, Ardinghello und die gluckseeligen Inseln, ed. Carl Schiidderkopf (Leipzig, 1911) [vol. 4 of his edition of Heinse’s Sdmmt-liche Werke}, pp. 155, 111.}These doctrines of Heinse, which he admits may seem wild, debauched, horrible to the mass of the philistine public, *{Willhelm Korte (ed.), Briefe zwischen Gleim, Wilhelm Heinse und Johann von Mu’ller (Zurich, 1806), vol. 1 [Briefe deutscher Gelehrten, vol. 2], p. 123; cf. pp. 10, 55.}but will govern the lives of the truly free, who will alone understand them, these are not the views of Hamann, who believed in submission to the laws of God as we feel them with our whole being; yet though he opposed the general spirit of this cry for anarchy he admired the novel in which it was contained. ‘Beauty is the appearance of our entire being unfalsified,’ said Heinse, *{ibid., p. 255.} and this was Hamann’s doctrine also. Beauty is life in its most characteristic, whole, dynamic, palpable form, full of conflict and contradiction as it may be — not smoothed out and brought to order by some theory-ridden Frenchman in a wig and silk stockings. This is the doctrine that he communicated to Herder, and that was destined to influence German romanticism, and through it all European thought.

He detested the tame imitations of this attitude more even than the materialism of the French. He disliked Sterne, for example, who was greatly admired by the romantics, because although he broke through the conventions and the rules, he took too much pleasure in his own waywardness, his attitude was too narcissistic, not passionate and single-minded enough, not serious, a mere pretence at uncon-ventionality while remaining deeply embedded in the convention, a mild titillation of the philistine and the orthodox; and he equally detested the ‘Anacreontic’ poetry of Wieland and his disciples, pseudo-idyllic exercises, remoter from actio than the wrong-headed but formidable activity of, say, Voltaire, whose brilliance and verve Hamann admired as much as he condemned his doctrines.

The reader may enquire why Rousseau is not included in this catalogue of anti-intellectual naturalism. The reason is that Hamann’s attitude to Rousseau, like that of many of the anti-rationalists, is exceedingly ambivalent. On the one hand Emile and The Social Contract are rationalist treatises with an artificial view of man worthy of Voltaire or Raynal or d’Alembert or the miserable Berlin rationalists, men who in the battle against fanaticism have themselves become rationalist fanatics, murderers, incendiaries, robbers, cheats of God and man. Rousseau is Utopian, a dabbler in abstractions; his theory of education is founded upon the absurd myth of’beautiful nature, good taste and balanced reason’; school is not a peaceful harmony of teacher and pupil, as Rousseau would have it, but ‘a mountain of God like Dothan, full of fiery chargers and chariots round Elisha’. On the other hand there is a ‘sensuous fascination’ in his novels greater than that of Richardson’s, and his bitter indignation with the salons and convention, and his wish ‘to serve men by his knowledge of the human heart acquired by his excesses and those of others’, are sympathetic. All this before he had read Rousseau’s Confessions, before indeed these had appeared. And he had a kind word for Diderot, the most German among the French, who, in spite of his terrible rationalist views, realises that rules are not everything, that ‘something more immediate, intimate, obscure, certain’ is what matters. Still, of course, Diderot follows a false philosophy - he occasionally repents of it, but is mostly in error. Hamann would have approved of Diderot’s paean to genius (in a section of a Salon devoted to the painter Carle Van Loo) as something dark, farouche, unapproachable, as opposed to the twitter, the charm and sweetness, of the fashionable wits. *{Diderot, Salon de 1765, ed. Else Marie Bukdahl and Annette Lorenceau (Paris, 1984), p. 47.} Yet Hamann is inconstant: he bursts forth with the most passionate admiration for La Nouvelle Heloise, but later attacks it. Saint-Preux is an idiot and my Lord Edward is not an Englishman. Julie does not deserve love or admiration or the absurd sacrifice of these to the insupportable Wolmar: Rousseau’s language is not that of the passions but of rhetoric. It is all false. It is all French.

Although Rousseau’s tone, particularly in La Nouvelle Heloise and the Confessions, is that of a free, rebellious spirit, what he advocates is the striking off of the old yoke — of convention or science or art — in order to impose anew one of those eternal laws which are graven within our hearts: the old morality preached by Plato and all the true sages of all times and climes. This is not what Hamann advocated. He wished to destroy what seemed to him the fixed, frozen establishment of rules and regulations as such, in order to reawaken in man a sense of his unity with God, and make him live spontaneously in him — if in a troubled relationship — obedient to no rules that could be embodied in letters of any kind, ephemeral or eternal, least of all eternal. Hence Rousseau, in the end, was for him as Protagoras for Socrates, the best among the sophists, but still a sophist.

Goethe said of Hamann (to Chancellor Miiller), ‘He had a clear head in his day, and knew what he wanted,’ * {Kanzler [Friedrich] von Miiller, Unterhaltungen mit Goethe, ed. Ernst Grumach (Weimar, 1956), p. 99, 18 December 1823.} but Kant said ‘The late Hamann had such a gift for thinking of things in general, but he did not have the power to point out their principles clearly, or at least to detach anything specific out of this wholesale trade of his.’ *{See C. H. Gildemeister, Johann Georg Hamann’s, des Magus in Norden, LebenundSchriften, vol. 6: Hamann-Studien (Gotha, 1873), P- 5^-} This is both amusing and true. But Hamann remained untouched by what he knew of Kant’s attitude to him, and was, indeed, confirmed in his view of Kant as an intelligent man but blind — his eyes shut tightly against reality in order to perceive his own internal, imaginary structure more clearly. He would have echoed the romantic dramatist Klinger, who said ‘Kant’s iron Colossus of Rhodes — his imperative — or his fantastic touchstone swinging suspended over the moral world by a hair’ was not a fit instrument by which to explain or judge mankind. *{F. M. Klinger, Betrachtungen und Gedanken iiber verschiedene Gegen-standeder Welt undder Literatur, § 55: p. 40 in F. M. Klinger’s Sa’mmtliche Werke, vol. 11 (Stuttgart/Tubingen, 1842).} Hamann, who was not an altogether modest man, saw himself as a German Socrates, who refuses to engage in vain talk with the sophists, and silences the importunate Athenians who pester him with too many questions, and gives his disciples courage to conquer their vanity by his example. His business was to blow up established values, both those of tradition and those of philosophy, and to organise a counter-revolution back towards simplicity and faith against the arrogance and optimism of the new science.

Socrates attempted to do his work by means of analytical reason. Hamann saw himself as doing so by other methods, by breaking through established conventions and expectations with every weapon that could break the crust of custom or dogma. This was the justification, in his own eyes, for his hermetic style, his mysterious formulae, with which he hoped to puzzle, intrigue and awaken the reader, his frenzied scurrying from one topic to another, his deliberately disordered succession of ideas, the constant self-incarnation in fantastic personages drawn from mythology or poetry or his own wild, extravagant imagination — anything to stop the reader in his tracks, harry him, astonish, irritate, open windows on new vistas; above all, to break the normal train of association to which his own unselfcritical life or the authority of his spiritual or literary guides had accustomed him. Into the reader thus awakened he hoped to pour the true word of God — the unity of spirit and flesh, the oneness of life, the need to live and create, the paramountcy of belief, the feebleness of reason, the fatal delusiveness of all contrived answers, constructed theories, everything calculated to lull the spirit into the false dream of reality. The true image of the practical man is that of a sleepwalker, a man who, with infinite sagacity, reflection, coherence, talks, acts, executes perilous enterprises, and does this with greater sureness of touch than he would — or could — do it if his eyes were even a little open.

This paradox is echoed by nearly every romantic writer — the confidence of the sleepwalker which comes from his blindness: reality is disturbing, but must be faced. The only way to awaken such deluded beings is by breaking the spectacles through which they normally look at reality, by affectation of madness, by the methods used later by Novalis, Hoffmann, Gogol, and in our own day by Pirandello, Kafka and the surrealists. Of course, only men of original genius can achieve this, and Hamann certainly believed himself to be one, no less than Socrates. Genius is not healthy, but a divine malady which, as Hippocrates says, is at once divine and human - panta theia kai panta anthropina1 *{On the Sacred Disease xxi, (mis)quoted at w ii 105.24.} — that which unites heaven and earth. Genius is mad in the worldly sense, for the wisdom of this, world is folly; and the only use of reason is not to give us knowledge but to expose to ourselves our own ignorance - to conduce to humility. That we have learnt from Socrates. But, as Hume correctly says, reason taken by itself is impotent, and when it dictates it is a usurper and an impostor.

This is Hamann’s central message, and his own justification for his method. If it was a rationalisation of the fact - supposing it was a fact - that he was unable to write clearly because his thoughts were turbid and chaotic, the apologia is ingenious and had a powerful historical effect. Kant was properly horrified: ‘One can only laugh’, he said, at these ‘men of genius, or perhaps apes of genius’ — ‘one can only laugh and continue on one’s own path with assiduity, order, clarity, paying no attention to these jugglers’. *{Immanuel Kant, Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, part 1, book 1, § 58: p. 226, line 10, in Kant’s gesammelte Schriften, vol. 8 (Berlin, 1912).} He was, no doubt, right. Nevertheless, it is doubtful whether without Hamann’s revolt - or at any rate something similar — the worlds of Herder, Friedrich Schlegel, Tieck, Schiller, and indeed of Goethe too, would have come into being. Herder owed Hamann a great deal, and he and Jacobi -who owed him even more — were, with the brothers Schlegel, the chief subverters of the tradition of order, rationalism, classicism, not only in Germany but in Europe. Madame de StaeTs De I’Allemagne lifted the curtain on a part of this turbulence. The doctrines of Fichte and Schelling and even of Hegel, which strike the reader brought up in the Anglo-Saxon tradition of philosophy as wild irruptions into the well-ordered procession of sane and scrupulous rational European thinkers, could scarcely have taken place without this counter-revolution, which has cast alternate light and darkness upon the European scene, and, whether as cause or as symptom, is indissolubly connected with the most creative and the most destructive phenomena of our own time; this is the revolt of which Hamann was the first standard-bearer and perhaps the most original figure.

POLITICS
Hamann’s political views, such as they were, emerge most clearly, as always, in a protest against a particular position that irritated him: in this case one of Kant’s best short essays, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ Kant’s central thesis is that to be enlightened is to be responsible, even when obedience to legitimate authority is demanded, for one’s own choices, to be independent, to determine oneself: not to allow others to lead one by the hand; not to be treated as a child, a minor, a ward. It is a passionate attack on paternalism, however benevolent, and a plea for individual freedom, equality and dignity, which Kant identifies with maturity and civilisation.
Hamann, of course, was outraged. Pride, independence, are the most fatal of all spiritual delusions. He protests, not of course against Kant’s disapproval of childlike dependence on the part of subjects, but against his conception of the liberty of action due to truly enlightened men. Who has given the State, or its ruler and his hired professors, the right to tell others how to live? Who has certified them as ultimate authority - this self-appointed elite of sages and experts who have declared themselves infallible and presume to dictate to others? For him enlightenment and despotism — intellectual and political (for they are one) — march hand in hand. The Aufklarung is nothing but an aurora borealis — cold and illusory. He sees no good in the ‘chatter’ of those emancipated children (the philosophers) who constitute themselves guardians of the other guardians (the princes). All this rationalist patter seems to him like the cold light ….. and so on