Johann Georg Hamann
1730-1788 · Romanticism · Known
Hamann worked as a tax official in Koenigsberg and wrote rhapsodies under false names aimed at his friend Kant. Reason has no life outside language, he insisted, so the pure reason Kant sought, scrubbed clean of body, tradition and words, can never exist. This Lutheran polemicist read creation and scripture alike as God speaking in a creaturely idiom, and held that argument produces faith about as well as it produces taste.
Signature
The position Hamann is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Opposition
- leans Concurrence
- Language
- Logos
Positions on the 6 axes the sources answer
- The Divine
- mildly leans Describable (31 on a 0–100 scale from Describable to Indescribable)
- Universals
- leans Nominalism (75 on a 0–100 scale from Realism to Nominalism)
- Meaning
- strongly leans Inherent (100 on a 0–100 scale from Constructed to Inherent)
- Ground of Being
- leans Transcendence (80 on a 0–100 scale from Immanence to Transcendence)
- Opposition
- leans Concurrence (88 on a 0–100 scale from Sublation to Concurrence)
- Ignorance
- mildly leans Bondage (38 on a 0–100 scale from Bondage to Bliss)
14 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Hamann refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Theology
- Trinitarian Monotheism
What is your position on the existence and nature of God or gods? - End of Things
- Apocalyptic Renewal
What is the ultimate end of all things? - Perception
- Symbolic Forms
What do we directly perceive? - Knowledge
- Sense Experience / Testimony
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Beginning of Things
- Creation ex Nihilo
What is the origin of reality? - Time
- Eschatological
What is the fundamental shape of time? - Authority
- Divine Revelation
What is the legitimate source of authority? - Language
- Logos
What is the fundamental nature of language? - Paradox
- Coincidentia Oppositorum
What is the status of paradox? - Role of Emotion
- Other
What is the proper role of emotion? - Human Nature
- Imago Dei
What is human nature?