The Hamannian Antidote to Nihilism

A mask or a misunderstanding (of language and reason) plainly lies at the basis [of his philosophy]; but it is hard and perhaps impossible to uncover it if one [has already] accepted [his] conceptual assumptions. ~ Johann Georg Hamann in reference to Kant

How do we escape nihilism? It is difficult to see how anything really matters if one takes for granted, as our culture does, metaphysical materialism. Our thoughts, feelings and dreams—brain chemistry; religion, free will, right and wrong—brain chemistry. But is this really nihilism?

The term nihilism arose in late 18th century Germany with the so-called pantheism controversy. What began as a private quarrel between Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and Moses Mendelssohn became a public dispute engaging all the best minds in Germany at the time. Jacobi, echoing Blaise Pascal, argued that if we pushed enlightenment reason to its limits, we would have to deny the existence of God, freedom and even other minds. In short, reason leads to solipsism—this was what Jacobi meant by “nihilism”: a denial of the existence of everything.

While our culture uses reason to critique the foundations of morality and religion, we seldom turn it to on our metaphysical foundations. Were we to ask ourselves, on what basis can we justify the permanent existence of own selves, never mind the existence of mind-independent “physical matter”, the true extent of our skepticism would be apparent.

Instead, we adopt Jacobi’s path out of the darkness—a leap of faith, a “saito mortale”—just not in the way he would have intended. Jacobi argued that all evidence for God’s existence had to come from revelation—be it scripture or inner experience. Our culture takes a similar leap by putting its faith in the metaphysical myth of materialism—quarks an atoms instead of Cain and Able. While our faith in matter justifies “common sense” beliefs, such as the existence of other minds, an external world and so on, it undermines our ability to make sense out of experience, to give it form and order—drives anthropologist Clifford Geertz argued are as “real and pressing as the more familiar biological needs”. Would we be better served putting our faith in revealed religion? Perhaps, but without a cultural shift akin Michel Houellebecq’s France in his novel Submission, that feels a bit like trying to unboil an egg. Instead, some turn to psychedelics in hopes that an ayahuasca, LSD or shrooms trip might reveal something meaningful to our “inner experience”. But if not, then what?

The “Jacobi option” just doesn’t seem live today. But there is another way out—we just have to take skepticism and turn it in on itself, so that we may rise above it.

While Jacobi believed that reason and faith are in conflict, and hence that embracing the latter was the only way out of the skepticism and nihilism implied by the former, another veteran of the pantheism controversy, Hamann, argued that faith and reason are independent of each other, so that reason neither demonstrates nor refutes faith. Anticipating the postmodernists, he argued that reason cannot be abstracted from language, which is contingent on particular histories and cultures. Therefore, reason transcends its limits if it attempts to disprove the existence of freedom, morality or God.

Hamann sought to put reason in its proper place. But what good is avoiding skepticism with skepticism about skepticism? Does this not commit one to a wholesale rejection of the possibility of metaphysics, theology and even truth? Essentially, this is Jacques Derrida’s position. “There is nothing outside the text”, he famously wrote. Language for Derrida is “a closed system of signs, which only refer to other signs without ever meeting up with [a] referent”—there is nothing else beyond or outside it that we could call “real”. It is, as Nietzsche put it, a “prison-house”.

We appear to be at the end of philosophy. Either we run from reason, as Jacobi did, or admit that we’re trapped inside language—with no outside, no beginning or end and no ultimate significance.

But Hamann saw things differently. He, like Derrida, held that we experience the world through the medium of language and have no access to truth apart from it; but, crucially, he believed in the possibility of extrarational Truth—truths that transcend the limits of reason and thus cannot be expressed in language. For Hamann, we experience such truths immediately in an experience he called faith, one whose content is private, ineffable, and just given. In other words, it is a special—or higher—kind of knowledge that provides a pure and immediate insight into existence. Hamann is not postulating the existence of some mystical faculty of knowledge, some sixth sense. He thought that if we are truly sensitive to what is given, then we will see the underlying religious dimension of experience.

Here, Hamann also anticipates Bernardo Kastrup’s notion of the transcendent myth in More Than Allegory. Kastrup argues that the external world, the past and the future, other minds, and so on are “myths”, since they cannot be be independently verified by correspondence to something outside of our immediate experience. He argues that we should take on board transcendent myths that resonate on a subconscious, intuitive level.

Hamann and Kastrup advance different metaphysical or theological views, but they both that aim to approximate extrarational, transcendent Truth. And they would agree that reason, in its proper place, is limited—far more limited than Kant, for example, realized—but that need not be the end of philosophy.

We have a choice: accept the meta-nihilism of Derrida’s linguistic idealism, or remain open to possibility of transcendental Truth—a higher reality that we cannot express linguistically, and only experience. The former is philosophical death, while the latter opens the door to meaning.

Sources

FC Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte

JR Betz, After Enlightenment: The Post-Secular Vision of J. G. Hamann

J Milbank, Radical Orthodoxy A New Theology

B Kastrup, More Than Allegory

JG Hamann, Aesthetica in nuce

JG Hamann, Metacritique on the Purism of Reason