back to and beyond socrates.pdf

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Back To and Beyond Socrates

An Essay on the Rise and Rhetoric of

Existential Pedagogy

Alexander Sohlman

Magisteruppsats VT 2007/HT 2008

Institutionen fr id- och lrdomshistoria

Uppsala universitet


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Abstract

Alexander Sohlman:Back To and Beyond Socrates: An Essay on the Rise and Rhetoric of

Existential Pedagogy.Uppsala universitet: Inst. fr id- och lrdomshistoria, Magisteruppsats,

Vr 2007/Hst 2008.

This essay concerns itself with the historical background to what it refers to as existential

pedagogy, which designates the way in which existential literature presumably seeks to affect

the reader so that he experiences his existence as isolated, and how this is done through the

employment of harsh and uncompromising language and rhetorical devices. The assumption

underlying this project is that there is a pedagogical purpose to the existential manner of de-

livery, and this essay traces this purpose back to how in the 18th

century certain thinkers

Johann Georg Hamann and Friedrich Schlegel came to look back at Socrates rhetorical en-

deavour in order to perfect their own desire to place the question of meaning, knowledge

or truth into the hands of the receiving individual the reader of a text or the student of a

teacher. By studying the manner in which Hamann and Schlegel used this Socratic rhetoric in

their own authorship, I seek to establish how they considered it vital that the recipient experi-

enced himself as thoroughly alone in order to cultivate his ability to infuse meaning into the

world. The essay continues to examine how Sren Kierkegaard in his capacity as the mythi-cal father of existentialism conceived of the Socratic rhetoric as lacking in sufficiently

accounting for the despair and sinfulness he saw as being intertwined with experiencing one-

self as lonely and ignorant. By studying how Kierkegaard approached the reader in his pseu-

donymous and existential literature, the essay makes it clear that the existential pedagogy util-

ized by Kierkegaard works in order to simultaneously infuse the reader with a feeling of isola-

tion and ignorance, as it, through repeatedly focusing on the despair involved in that condi-

tion, provoked the reader into taking action, despite (or, existentially, because he was) being

taught that he, on account of his inevitable loneliness and ignorance, could not.

Keywords: Existential, Pedagogy, Rhetoric, Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788), Friedrich

Schlegel (1772-1829), Sren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)


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CONTENTS

PROLOGUE: The Why, What and Who of Our Story

The Ambition to Achieve 2

The Theses to Defend 3

CHAPTER I: Socrates Rising (or The Pedagogy of Hamann)

Introduction 10

The London Experience 13

The Socratic Answer to the Enlightenment 19

CHAPTER II: Socrates Radicalized (or The Pedagogy of Schlegel)

Introduction 23

The Fragments: Socrates Maturing 27

ber die Unverstndlichkeit On Perpetual Irony 30

CHAPTER III: Socrates Ghost (or The Pedagogy of Kierkegaard)

Introduction 33

What Others Have Said 36

Concerning Pseudonymity 38

Towards an Existential Pedagogy: A Question of Loneliness 40

Existential Pedagogy I: The Harsh Guide to Loneliness 43

Existential Pedagogy II: Sinful Ignorance 50

EPILOGUE: A Rapid Recap and Climatic Conclusion 59

LITERATURE 61


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PROLOGUE: The Why, What and Who of Our Story

The Ambition to Achieve

Why would I read a text written by someone who only

seeks to show how lonely and isolated I am, and why this

situation is essentially tormenting?

The above question was put to me by a friend, and it was the immediate response to my push-

ing for him to read Sartre, as the French existentialist had made such an impact on my own

thought regarding the human condition and the constitution of man. Had the question been a

critique of the psychological theory of Sartre, or the philosophical system which he put forth,

I imagine that my retort had appeared less tentative and all the more confident. Instead I found

myself grasping for intellectual straws, philosophical escape routes, of which I would hope to

build at least a temporary residence for the existential philosophy to reside in, during which

time I would explore the cerebral landscape for more enduring materials to contain, and most

of all illustrate, the worth of such obviously hostile thought. Yet whenever two straws were

put to keep each other standing straight, they crooked and curved, unable to even for a second

of desperate deliberation restrain the boiling force of that destructive enquiry. Why, indeed,

would one wish to put ones own state of mind against the restless chaos of existential

thought, especially when given in such a cold and calculated manner as Sartres? This ques-

tion, it seemed to me, had to be at least explored in search for an answer, before one could

even start thinking about construing a system to contain it let it then be of straws glued to-

gether by mere willpower, or something less artificially, and more immediately adhesive.

Without mulling over the questions philosophical significance (without thereby denying it

the right to be mulled over), the ambition of this paper is rather to reach back in time to grasp

for the somewhat thicker branches of existential thought, and then particularly the rhetorical

technique by which, I suggest, the vehement feeling first arises. For it is not, I dare say, the

mere fact that the existential author seems to tell us that we are fundamentally on our own

when travelling the route of existence that provokes the opposition to reading him, but rather

how the author of existential literaturepersists in telling us this, and that he does not seem to

be content with explaining this as fact until we have also come to be convinced of it ourselves

(at least this would seem to be the point of it all). It is this persistence that provokes us toquestion if we ought even to pick up the book to begin with, had we beforehand known what


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nuisance it would be not only to know what it wishes to say, but to have the decrees ringing in

our ears for time to come. And then we are no longer dealing merely with philosophical

thought, but we are in the midst of a rhetorical delivery of this thought. If we wish to gain any

insight the foundation of the question posed by my friend (and which I in this paper pose to

myself and to you), and have any hope of finding an answer to it, we must therefore prod the

intricacy of the oratory style which, involves so much more than mere continual repetition of

what is considered an existential truth. The mannerism of the text is essential to our under-

standing not only what makes it repugnant to our sense of harmonic well-being, but also to

our grasping what worth might, with great effort, be extracted and explicated from it.

The ambition of this paper is an historical study of the rhetorical backdrop to the play of

existential thought, in an attempt to explain why the delivery is often so harsh and uncompro-

mising. It is this ambition that has decided the cast of the historical yarn which we will soon

embark on, the moment that we have begun spinning the thread that will guide us throughout

the narrative. The cast consists primarily of Johann Georg Hamann, Friedrich Schlegel, and

Sren Kierkegaard. It will be through the respective pedagogical enterprises of these three

men that we approach an answer to the question why existential literature looks the way it

does. Hamann and Schlegel will both be treated as instigators of a specific kind of philosophi-

cal-rhetorical delivery which culminated in Kierkegaard, in whose writings the rhetoric will

be seen to have undergone a drastic change concerning how the reader was to experience what

he read. It was this change of rhetorical tune, it will be argued, which defined the point in his-

tory of philosophy when existential considerations were actively processed as they were being

delivered. It is through an understanding of Kierkegaards rhetoric and its historical back-

ground, that we will understand the circumstances surrounding the characteristic of existential

thought discussed above. Let us now acquaint ourselves with the figures and thoughts that we

will encounter in our story.

The Theses to Defend

Against this [the Enlightenment project that all things were

knowable], there persisted the doctrine that went back to the

Greek Sophists, Protagoras, Antiphon, and Critias, that beliefs

involving value-judgments,and the institutions founded upon

them, rested not on discoveries of objective and unalterable

natural facts, but on human opinion []


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The words are Isaiah Berlins, as he articulated them in his seminal essay The Counter-

Enlightenment, wherein he argues the case that ever since the Enlightenment began its illu-

minating rise in 17thcentury France, it had been faced with opposition from those who for

various reasons found the shadows emerging from such light to be an important nuance to the

canvas of human existence they shone upon. What can be seen as the intellectual movement

opposing the Enlightenment (so not to confuse it with the religious and royalist opposition) is

without much flare for words referred to by Berlin simple enough as the Counter-Enlighten-

ment. The idea behind this counter movement, argues Berlin, was that when it came to ques-

tions concerning human affairs involving morality and art in all its shades and shapes, one

could not hope to reach any definitive answer underlying every variation of such dealings.

One would have to take into account the plurality of human forms, each with a more or less

particular linguistic and socio-historical background to which the individual human related his

experiences and, conversely, according to which he experienced the world in a specific way.

The apparent fact that the human condition was best to be considered in plural, and also that

one form might contradict another, the Counter-Enlightenment saw as a sign that the attempts

to enlighten the world (and so rid it of these dark forms which could not be accounted for by

one specific human being in her socio-historically determined frame, being preoccupied with

the one, specific form making out her own existence) could do nothing but blind us from see-

ing anything of it, if not altogether burning it to cinders.

In Berlins view, the Counter-Enlightenment was an idealistic movement, meaning that it

argued its case from the point of view of an ideal: the pluralistic world and the individual sub-

jects inhabiting it. He considers one of the decisive instigators shaping this ideal to have been

the character of Johann Georg Hamann. It was Hamann, says Berlin, who first turned his

critical gaze directly at the presumptions of the Enlightenment, and he is seen to with great

wit and irony having argued the point that man could not escape the circumstances of his

emergence as a knowing subject. If man was to know himself as a subject of the world, Berli-

n understand Hamann as having meant, then he was a fool to think himself able to shed his

worldly shell in order to observe existence as was it conceivable on its own. This was simply

not how the world harmonized with human existence, which implied a much more intertwined

relationship than could any philosophy, however critical, ever untwine. The universal man,

we can understand Berlins reading of Hamann, existed only insofar that he contradicted him-

self, giving weight to the idea that no coherent system could ever encompass the pluralisticnature of existence.


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It is not the ambition of this paper to criticize Berlins reading of Hamann, nor any other

reading like it, but rather I wish to take my first leap into exploring the question I posed be-

fore by acknowledging Berlins judgment of Hamann as the first proper critic of the Enlight-

enment, and, consequently, a critic of the notion that all men are alike in reason. What makes

Hamanns critique interesting for our purposes, however, is not, I dare say, necessarily the

implicit points he makes, but the way in which he explicates them. Or rather how he does not.

When Berlin likens the intellectual opposition to the Enlightenment to the Greek Sophists,

alluding chiefly to the homo mensura thesis of Protagoras, in order to clarify the points made

by, first and foremost, Hamann, it is with blatant (yet perhaps unintentional) irony. For one

need only glance at the title of Hamanns first published work, Sokratische Denkwrdigkeiten,

to see that it was not the Sophists that interested him, but the memory of their greatest oppo-

nent. Indeed, further on in the work he even likened himselfto Socrates, and the proponents of

the Enlightenment came to be regarded as modern Sophists, which is more or less the oppo-

site of Berlins relative comparison. Yet, interestingly enough, this is not to say that Berlin

(and many with him) is wrong in his estimate of the Socratic character of Hamann, for, taking

a page from Aristophanes assessment of Socrates himself, one cannot but wonder what man-

ner of sophistry Hamanns thoughts were delivered by. If explicated his ideas can be seen as

the foundation of the Counter-Enlightenment (as argues Berlin), and so resemble the explica-

tions of the Greek Sophists, then perhaps while being allowed to remain implicit, clouded by a

mist of irony and incongruity, we are served better by viewing Hamann as a rhetorician in the

Socratic school.

The first thesis I wish to defend in this paper is that Hamanns critique of the Enlight-

enment, or the ideas carrying it, can rewardingly be understood in the manner of their deliv-

ery, which, I will argue, suggests a re-awakening of the Socratic irony or, anachronistically

put, reader-response dialectic. I am helped in this aspiration by L. O. Lundgren, who in his

albeit very short mentioning of Hamann in the book Sokratesbilden, depicts him as one whose

image of Socrates differed from those before him by the particular way in which Hamann put

the style of Socrates thought before its presumed content. And this style, argues Lundgren,

was for Hamann that of a teacher who did not presume to know the answers, or even how to

get to them, but spent his time educating those who, in the certainty of their thoughts, per-

ceived themselves to already possess them.1The pedagogy of Socrates, which Hamann can

be seen to have made his own, heavily involved the student, and one could not imagine some

1L. O. Lundgren, Sokratesbilden: Frn Aristofanes till Nietzsche(Stockholm 1978)


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knowledge being taught, without also imagining someone responding to the lesson. This

manner of teacher-student interaction (or, in a more general way, the interplay of author and

reader), I will argue, was something that rose to (re)new(ed) heights with Hamann, going

back, as he did, to the style and rhetoric of Socrates.

With Hamanns appearance we are still only at the beginning of our story, which continues

most immediately by introducing the early romanticists, in particular the character of Frie-

drich Schlegel. They can be seen to have sought to go back to a Socrates of a somewhat more

radical disposition than the one Hamann remembered. According to Berlin, the position of

these unbridled romantics was that one ought not to take a position, but rather engage in

several, preferably contradictory explanations of phenomena, without ever settling for one. 2

The moment the audience or the reader could point out what was being said or taught, it was

necessary for the author to turn the tables and suggest the opposite interpretation. By keeping

her in a state of uncertainty, the reader would have to recognize her own role as a most vital

contributor to what was being said. Without the reader of the text, the text itself was meaning-

less. In order for the author to keep the reader in perpetual suspense regarding what was

really being said, these romantics took to use what Schlegel refers to as Socratic irony. It

was by going back to Socrates means of delivering a lesson, that the only important lesson

could at all be taught: the creative and poetic responsibility of the reader. If Hamann can be

seen to have re-introduced the Socratic as a reader-response dialectics, it was, so I will argue,

radically intensified by the early romanticists, who saw in Socrates a whirlwind of incessant

creation, yet always given by the hands of the student.

Acknowledging this rhetorical aspect of the early romanticists, founded on their going-

back to Socrates, is, as far as I can tell, something which tends to go missing in the stories

dealing with their philosophical thought. Berlin barely recognizes it as anything but danger-

ous and insane, and Lundgren, in an otherwise broad study of the image of Socrates

throughout history, neglects to mention Schlegels view except in one single sentence, where

it is put as a counter-position to G. W. F. Hegels.3This blindness to Socrates ghostly pres-

ence in the development of early romanticism a moment which according to some has

2 Isaiah Berlin, Roots of Romanticism (Lecture given at Washington, D.C.'s National Gallery of Art in 1965)edited by Henry Hardy (Princeton 2001) 100ff.3I concede that this might have more to do with the philosophical-historical repute of Schlegel, than being atestament to Lundgren forgetting to mention it (after all, the only thing he does say about Schlegel is in accor-dance with his relationship to Socrates). Nevertheless, even interested studies on Schlegel, such as Paul de MansThe Concept of Irony, and Georgia Alberts Understanding Irony, fail to see the emphasis Schlegel puts on

the Socratic in Socratic irony as anything but an attempt by Schlegel to distinguish his rhetoric of irony fromgeneral irony. To my knowledge, Tieck has not at all been analysed concerning any implicit debt to Socratesrhetoric.


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shaped the course of literary history since it was then that the notion of literary theory

emerged as a proper cultural and intellectual discipline can to some extent be excused by

taking note of the traditional goal of the history of ideas to trace the history of ideas. Socra-

tes, I admit, was perhaps not a direct influence on the general idea of early romanticism. As

with Hamann, their relativistic or pluralistic ideas, when explicated, seem to turn out to be

more sophistic than what one is taught to be platonic. Even if the historian of ideas was to

actively search for Socratic influence on romantic thought, he or she would likely come up

with mere crumpets. This, however, is not because Socrates played a minor role, but rather

that he was, if the metaphor is excused, the demonic director of the entire spectacle. As long

as one seeks for his words in the romantic script, one will not hear him, for he, in a way, can

be considered to have been the model for the structure of the romantic discourse. I am looking

for his voice, not his words. And if there has been any attempt at locating the spectre of Soc-

rates in early romanticism, that is a journey which seem to have been undertook exclusively in

the realm of literary theory or philosophy.4I believe it is possible to also travel this distant to

the Socratic in early romanticism in our realm of history, if one will only allow ideas to in-

clude also the manner of their delivery.5

The second thesis, thus, that I wish to defend in our rapidly approaching story, is that after

Hamann re-introduced the Socratic as a rhetorical device in order to, as it were, educate his

reluctant opponents by letting (or, if we will, forcing) them to partake in their own critique,

this was taken up by the early romanticists for much the same purpose. We will find, how-

ever, that where Hamanns reach for the ancient father of philosophy was rather nave, touch-

ing upon the Socratic rhetoric in order to use it himself for the purpose of involving the stu-

dent or reader in the lesson or text, the romanticists were slightly more sophisticated in their

4Jean-Luc Nancys and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthes The Literary Absolute might serve as the exemplary phi-losophically minded exposition in the literary theory and literary history of the early romanticism. Here the ro-

mantic view of Socrates is considered in unison with the view of the prototypical Subject, making his role thatof a presence in the philosophy of early romanticism and not, as we want it, a model for the stylistic delivery ofthe same.5One influential historian and historical theorist who springs to mind when speaking of the manner in whichhistorically situated ideas came to be delivered, is Quentin Skinner of the Cambridge school. Skinner proposesin Visions of Politics: Volume I: Regarding Method(Cambridge University Press, 2002) that one ought to studyintellectual history contextually, by connecting the ideas held by historical persona to the political landscape inwhich they first emerged. The initiative declares that only by understanding historical thought in its historicalcontext, does one understand it as a historian. When understanding authorial intent, then, one ought, according toSkinner, place the author among the readers to which he supposedly wrote and sought a reaction. However,Skinner fails to acknowledge how certain authors explicitly (and many more did so implicitly) stated that theydid not write for their time, but for a (to them) future to come. So was the case with Hamann, Schlegel and alsoKierkegaard; all of whom said that they wrote for a perpetual tomorrow. In order for us to understand the rheto-

ric of these self-declared ahistorical writers, we must not restrict ourselves to the historical context of their writ-ings, but must rather engage them head-on, keeping in mind how they see themselves as writing for no particularaudience, and treat their rhetoric as such.


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use. The student did not only play a vital part as they came to see and use the Socratic rhetoric

the student came to play the onlypart, anticipating the Barthian move from the author to the

reader. Socrates and Socratic irony became the spiritual hallmarks of the rhetoric and literary

ideal reached for by early romanticists such as Schlegel, an ideal which involved the recipient

of a thought or idea in the perpetual creation of that idea (unlike Hamann, who had used the

rhetoric so to have the reader criticize what ideas he held). With the early romanticists, so I

will argue, the Socratic wheel had been turned full-circle now the student had to look into

himself for answers (an attempt, as we will see, which necessarily had to fail).

This romantic image of Socrates, understood as a radicalization of the Socrates who Ham-

man remembered, was the image of Socrates that we encounter, and whose presence is felt,

throughoutthe authorship of Sren Kierkegaard. Now, Kierkegaard is often said to have been

the father of existentialism, which, if one considers this to be a more or less reasonable (if

mythical) assessment, would make his thought and its delivery an excellent case to study if

we want to live up to the general ambition I set at the beginning of this prologue. As we re-

call, the question that provoked us was why one ought to read something which only sought to

intensify the tormenting feeling of loneliness and isolation as constitutive of the human condi-

tion. The question was directed as a passionate polemic against the existential works of Sartre,

who, we can at this point spell out, was singularly influenced by Kierkegaard regarding his

conception of anxiety as undirected, non-relational fear: It was with Kierkegaard that anxiety

or despair was first conceptualized as fear of nothing. Since our question is very much con-

cerned with this particular (yet overflowing) strand of existential thought, it is only reasonable

that we consider Kierkegaard the first, and for that reason most important, stop on our quest

to illuminate why existential rhetoric tends to be harsh and uncompromising. Kierkegaard

was, so to say, the first to be like so rhetorical.

Given the former two theses I have said that I wish to defend, it should come as no surprise

that the third and, for our purposes, also the most relevant thesis is that Kierkegaard, too,

went back to Socrates for rhetorical tutoring. Yet we will wish to qualify this further, and say

that in going back to Socrates, Kierkegaard simultaneously sought to go beyond the Socratic

in his own rhetorical endeavour. According to Lundgren, Kierkegaard was of the opinion that

Socrates lacked any conception of sin, and that it was in this respect that the Greek philoso-

pher (together with his modern heralds) failed to account for the entirety of the human condi-

tion. It was by being conscious of himself as a sinner, that man came to understand the full

extent of his existence as something deeply problematic. The concept of sin was tricky evenfor Kierkegaard, and we will not be so bold as to attempt an explanation in this essay. Suffice


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to say, it was in recognizing that he was a sinner that man the student could save himself

from that unfortunate state, yet at the same time it was in recognizing himself a sinner that

man establishedhis sinfulness as that of coming to know himself as a sinner. In order for the

student to be saved he had to simultaneously come to know, and come to forget that he was a

sinner. And to make the student aware of his condition, I will argue, was what urged Kierke-

gaards existential pedagogy onward. For this was not something that could be done within

the bounds of Socratic rhetoric, as Kierkegaard understood it, where the opposition was dis-

solved and the student was placed/placed himself in a state of perpetual ignorance. Any de-

finitive decision concerning himself or his relationship to the world was here suspended,

awaiting an ever-approaching future. To go beyond Socratic ignorance, thus, meant that

Kierkegaard had to coerce his reader into recognizing(or rather deciding) himself as essen-

tially alone, even to their own sentiments, and convince them that they could only relate to the

world as distant. This was done, I will argue, in order for the readers to, in that last moment of

existential anxiety of never being able to properly know themselves or the world for certain,

passionately declare that the very ladder which pedagogically brought them to this conception

of themselves as sinners (that is, of claiming to know that they knew Nothing) was rubbish,

and so they would kick it away. The Socratic became, in existential pedagogy, something of a

harsh realization of the human condition. Once the student was left wholly to himself and his

own judgment, he would no longer be able to sustain such wilful ignorance (the knowledge of

which was sinful) but he was to be compelled into taking decisive action. In a way, Kierke-

gaard can be seen to have coerced the student to forget his Socratically induced ignorance,

but only after it had been painfully traversed.

To summarize, the three theses of this paper are: 1) Hamann re-awoke the Socratic rhetoric

in his critique of the Enlightenment, in which he involved the reader or student to partake in

the critique; 2) the early romantics intensified and radicalized the Socratic rhetoric by envis-

aging the author of a text, or the teacher, to be peripheral to the lessons taught, to the degree

that the student came to be the perpetual creator of ever fluctuating meaning; and finally that

3) Kierkegaard, as the originator of existential pedagogy, went beyond the Socratic when he

suggested its tenet of invoking ignorance to be sinful, yet used the Socratic in order to save

the student (or have the student realize that he had the means of saving himself) from his sin-

ful state. By telling the story in this manner, I hope to be able to show how, by delving into

the historical background of existential play, we will come to understand how the harsh and

uncompromising nature of the rhetoric or pedagogy by which existential thought is deliveredis essential to reaching the goal of such thought.


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Now, we will finally embark on our journey, leaving what we can of philosophy and the-

ory behind. It cannot be stressed enough how, in the following, we will be concerned with the

deliveryof philosophical thought, and not the thought as directly expressed by its adherents.

All the same, we will not be awfully concerned with the synchronic context of such delivery,

but we are interested solely in the way in which the image of Socrates on our historical stage

can be used in order to understand the rise of existential pedagogy, which we have, in accor-

dance with established mythology, located to Kierkegaard.

CHAPTER I:

Socrates Rising (or The Pedagogy of Hamann)

Introduction

The character of Johann Georg Hamann is elusive at best. Certain scholars of the history of

German idealism, such as Frederick C. Beiser in The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy

from Kant toFichte and Isaiah Berlin inRoots of Romanticism, are prone to view him as hav-

ing had a significant influence on the thought following him in the likes of Johann Gottfried

Herder, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Friedrich Schlegel and G. W. F. Hegel.6

Beiser furtherargues that the influence he had on Kierkegaard translates directly to Hamann as having had a

decisive impact on existential thought in general.7Together with Berlin, he puts Hamann at

the forefront of the thought following the Enlightenment, be it left to semantics if one wishes

to call it Counter-Enlightenment, romanticism or, as does Beiser, Sturm und Drang and Ger-

man idealism. Yet they both speak of this influence as having to do with philosophical in-

sights, and care little for the stylistic achievements by which they took hold of the readers

mind and memory.Hamanns writings evade any simple means of systematization, for they consisted to a sig-

nificant degree of criticizing the systematic thought which flourished during the eighteenth-

century and that was an attempt at limiting the perceivable world to the principles of human

understanding. In order for his critique to be effective, Hamann must have felt the need to be

unsystematic, so not to play into the hands of the people and the mentality he sought to fight.

Isaiah Berlin touches upon this manner of eccentric critique when he describes Hamanns

6

Frederick C. Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (1987) (Harvard UniversityPress 2006) 18. Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism 40ff.7Beiser, 16f.


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literary style in the seminal article The Counter-Enlightenment as, a series of polemical

attacks written in a highly idiosyncratic, perversely allusive, contorted, deliberately obscure

style, as remote as he could make it from the, to him, detestable elegance, clarity, and smooth

superficiality of the bland and arrogant French dictators of taste and thought.8 If the wish

was to attack the presumptions of the Enlightenment, then Hamann saw that it could not be

done by secretly relying upon the very pillars he sought to shatter. He would have to find new

and alternative means of speaking his mind; his thoughts would have to be delivered in stylis-

tic fashion alien to the would-be rationalism of his time. As Berlin says, this implied a hefty

dosage of idiosyncrasy and allusions to the perversion of systematic thought. Yet this aversion

to the rationalistic ideal of the Enlightenment ought to make it impossible to properly under-

stand Hamanns thought, if this understanding meant translating his subjective approach to the

sought language of objectivity that we connect to the Enlightenment. When Berlin writes in

his article on the Counter-Enlightenment what Hamanns theses rested on, and contrasts Ha-

manns subjective understanding of truth to the objective goal of the Enlightenment, he seems

to forget or ignore the fact that Hamanns peculiar style disqualifies any reading of him as a

systematic philosopher. It is vital to the understanding of Hamann that his style is put into

focus, for it was the rhetoric with which his ideas were delivered that made him a potent critic

of his time.

It is not an uncommon sentiment which is shared between commentators and scholars of

Hamanns thought, that one cannot understand Hamanns ideas without taking into account

the particular life surrounding their emergence. 9 Ronald Gregor Smith is very explicit to

point this out when saying that, It is fundamental to an understanding of Hamann to see his

thought and his action as thoroughly integrated. He continues: The thought cannot be sepa-

rated from the life, and though the life is everything, it is so as an expression of the

thought.10Unlike Berlin, who after having mentioned the idiosyncrasy of Hamanns writings

goes on to treat his thoughts as capable of being clearly understood, Gregor Smith makes it an

aim in his study to say that if we are to understand Hamanns ideas, we will have to under-

stand Hamanns life. Rather than being merely a quaint way of introducing a biographical

8Isaiah Berlin, The Counter-Enlightenment inDictionary of the History of Ideas: Volume 2 (New York 1973-74) 1039There are, of course, several scholars who disregard Hamanns style, or at most considers it a poetical point.Isaiah Berlins systematic approach to Hamanns thought in The Counter-Enlightenment has already beenmentioned, and Berlin continues in a similar vein in his The Magus of the North: J G Hamann and the Origins ofModern Irrationalism(Farrar Straus & Giroux 1994) and The Roots of Romanticism (Chatto & Windus 1999).

An earlier example is Unity and Language: A study in the philosophy of Johann Georg Hamann (Chapel Hill1952) by James C. OFlaherty, where Hamann is directly treated as a systematic philosopher of language.10Ronald Gregor Smith,J. G. Hamann A Study in Christian Existence (London 1960) 25.


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chapter on Hamann, we can take note of how Gregor Smith utilizes Hamanns own ideas on

language and reason when approaching his object of study. As we will see, it is a very Ha-

mann:esque tactic to advance towards a target by pointing out how one cannot isolate the prey

from its terrain, but that one must also take into account everything which surrounds it.11

Gwen Griffith Dickinson builds her study of Hamann on the notion that his philosophy was

about relations between objects, and she is well aware of how one cannot properly understand

him without treating him according to the same method with which he treated his own targets

- relationally. That is, if we wish to at all grasp what he was saying, we must not merely con-

textualize him, but we must do so by looking at how he sought to affect his readers. She

quotes Goethes assessment of Hamann that, when reading him, one must completely rule

out what one normally means by understanding.12She continues by saying that the idiosyn-

cratic style of Hamanns writings and the hiding behind masks demands a great personal

response from its readers.13If we are to understand Hamanns intention, we will have to un-

derstand what it was that drew him into writing in such an obscure style that he alienated

those who wished to understand him by conventional means, and forced those open to his

experimentation into making a personal response rather than an intellectually distanced

evaluation.

Walter Leibrecht wishes to understand Hamanns style in much the same way as Gregor

Smith, yet with more emphasis on how it relates to him as a Christian. For Leibrecht, Ha-

manns aversion to systematic thought was based on his desire for a total and continual ex-

perience of God, as he had personally experienced it, all at one time.14Why Hamann wrote

as he did, argues Leibrecht, was so that his reader would not be at loss for the experience that

Hamann treasured, and which demanded that one could not distance oneself from what was

taught by treating the lesson as a structural critique that could be manhandled as one best saw

fit. It was vital for the reader to personally come to the insight which Hamann had felt, means

Leibrecht, otherwise the lesson would fall short of completion. The idea was not to give to the

reader something new, but merely to make him aware of what he already knew yet could not

see for all the enlightened schemes doing their best to explain what was so obvious that one

scarcely noticed it.15

11Unlike Gregor Smith, however, we will see how Hamann also made it clear that not only do we have to under-stand the life of our object of study, but using his particular rhetorical style, Hamann also shows how we willhave to recognize our own impact on the object in our capacity of studying it.12Gwen Griffith Dickinson,Johann Georg Hamanns Relational Metacriticism (New York 1995) 2513

Ibid. 2714Walter Leibrecht, God and Man in the Thought of Hamann (Fortress Press 1966) 8315Ibid. 85


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These are some of the ways in which Hamanns style has been interpreted as significant for

understanding him, and I will do build on them as I continue to explore the significance of

Hamanns own religious experience as recollected by him in one his first published works, the

spiritual autobiography Thoughts about My Life (Gedanken ber meinen Lebenslauf), written

at the end of a life-altering business trip to London between 1758 and 1759. I hope to show

how in his recollection of this trip Hamann can be seen to have described his stylistic move

away from a desire embraced by the Enlightenment in which truth were seen to travel from

teacher to student, author to reader, to a pedagogical insight which saw the reader as pulling

truth out of his own life, and where the author humbly partook as the one who provoked forth

this desire by rhetorically convincing the reader that any other means of acquiring knowledge

was illusionary and essentially a demonstration of the readers ignorance.

The London Experience

Concerning Hamanns London experience, Breiser follows the line of interpreters who mean

that the religious conversion evident by Hamanns own writings, had important philosophi-

cal consequences.16He then continues to suggest precisely what this experience implied by

looking to how it ended, which he contends was that Hamann, by means of the Bible readings

he undertook when down to his last guinea, saw his own life unfolding in the pages of the

book. It was this mystical vision, argues Breiser, which made Hamann question the sanctity

of language as being a rigid structure carrying predefined meanings. Indeed, Breiser elabo-

rates well on how the result of Hamanns London experience came to shape his subsequent

philosophical thought, as well as the pedagogy through which it was delivered. However, as

seems to be common among Hamann scholars, Breiser fails to acknowledge the process

through which this conversion took place. That is, he is interested solely in the result of Ha-

manns London experience, and considers the prelude to the mystical experience at the end of

it as, dramatic and moving, the stuff of a novel or play. Yet as with any good novel, one

cannot expect that the moral will be presented in its entirety at the very end. Had that been the

case with Hamann, we are left to wonder why he at all bothered to mention the process

through which he came to experience his conversion, and, if all that truly mattered was its

completion, he did not spend the pages elaborating on that, rather than wasting them on a de-

tailed explanation of its emergence. It would rather seem that Hamann, sooner than having his

actual conversion demand the entirety of the readers attention, he would have his reader fol-

16Beiser, 20


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low him through all the hassle that brought it to be. In fact, viewing the process by which the

conversion emerged as mere background would be to seriously neglect the pedagogical as-

pects of any conversion story, and would be to treat it as simply a dramatic and moving way

of telling a story that could have been told in less dramatic fashion, which ought to be seen as

one having failed to be moved by it. As this paper seeks to establish the historical underpin-

nings of the pedagogical framework of existential thought, which, as is supported by Breiser,

has Hamann as one of its great influences, it would be a grave error on our part not to exam-

ine exactly what it was that he had his reader go through when reading about what he had

gone through in order to arrive at the point when he began to look back to Socrates for peda-

gogical guidance. Crudely put, we wish to recognize how it was that Hamann sought to move

his readers by writing as he did.

One scholar who argues that Hamanns manner of pedagogy worked by order of Socratic

analogy is Griffith Dickinson. In her study of Hamanns Socratic Memorabilia, she declares

that Hamann wrote the text analogically, and suggests that Hamann conceived of the success-

ful reader as belonging to the same socio-historical landscape (that is, the Enlightenment) as

did he.17 If the reader was of another linguistic constitution, the work would fail to make

sense the way it did for someone able to pick up on the many references appearing through-

out.18It is possible, however, and I would say correct, to view also Hamanns description of

his London journey as analogical. That is, when Hamann chose to depict for his reader the

hardship he had himself gone through in coming to the insight connected to his spiritual con-

version, he can be considered to have sought for the reader not only to better understand the

process, but to connect his own ambitions for (in Hamanns view illusionary) knowledge and

achievements to the lies elaborated by Hamann. The recollection, as written, would there-

fore carry pedagogical weight in how it was analogical to what Hamann understood as being

the human condition of living in the delusion of knowledge and inter-subjective means of

validation of ones worth as an individual. People could not essentially justify each other, as

they could only perceive what their socio-historically determined conceptual scheme allowed

them to, why any attempt to credit ones knowledge by looking at how it was accepted by

others was fundamentally erroneous. Hamann, I would argue, did not argue philosophically

for this position (since his words would never escape the language through which he spoke),

17Griffith Dickinson, 30ff.18We will come back to what Hamann might have intended with this later on, and it will become clear that evenif the kind of reading carried out by Griffith Dickinson and others is supported by the structure of Hamanns

work (especially the countless and carefully hidden religious references that might be lost on a child of theEnlightenment, yet not on one whose parents trace their identity also to the Church), it does not account for theentirety of what Hamann can be seen to have considered the reader-response to his literary output.


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but he actively wrote so that any reader, of whatever language and referential network, would

be able to relate their own lifes struggle for knowledge and companionship to his. As the

dedication to his first explicit critique of the Enlightenment reads A Double Dedication to

Nobody and Two he did not merely conceive of his immediate readers (Two, which

where two of his friends) but also an unspecified, public reader (Nobody).19We will want to

consider Hamanns decision to include the meansby which he underwent his spiritual conver-

sion as he told it to the reader as a pedagogical manoeuvre by way of analogy, in order for the

reader to better appreciate what he wished to show by it.

Hamann told of his London experience in the autobiography Thoughts about My Life,

which covered his life to the point of his conversion in 1758. The work was not intended for

publication, and it was supposedly only meant to be read by a few chosen individuals. Never-

theless, as it apparent by the structure of the work, Hamann wished that these chosen few

knew what had led him to his point of conversion, and would not have them speculate widely.

Even if Hamann wished that his readers saw themselves in his writings, it was his purpose as

an educator to make sure they did. The London part of the recollection thus consisted of al-

most an excessive amount of anxiety and despair. He made his reader aware of how he had

arrived at the capital of the world with great admiration for the British, only to be swiftly

robbed of his esteem for the people.

We arrived late in the evening of 18 April, 1757, in London. There I spent a very restless night with myBremen acquaintance at the inn, for it seemed to be a den of murderers, full of a perfect rabble; our roomwas so insecure that anyone could in by the window who did not want to waken us by coming in by thedoor.20

While one might wish to see Hamanns first impression of London as quite ordinary and not

exceptional from how anyone might experience a sense of danger when arriving in the capital

of the world, or for that matter any large and unfamiliar locale. However, we will remind our-

selves of how Hamann did not write of his experience as part of a journal, but that he wrote

the entirety of it when undergoing the last stages of his conversion. Everything he recollected

from his arrival to his conversion ought therefore to be read as the words of one who consid-

ered it important in order to grasp what he saw as a spiritual awakening. Whilst the story as

such might be ordinary and, with Beiser, dramatic and moving, it is quite extraordinary

when viewed through the lenses of a pedagogy. Hamann wished to move his reader, and in

19

Johann Georg Hamann, Socratic Memorabilia (1759). Gregor Smith, 176. The translations of Hammanswork are from Ronald Gregor SmithsJ. G. Hamann A Study in Christian Existence(London 1960)20Gregor Smith 145.


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cation, intended to be read only by those friends who would question his conversion, in a

manner so that they would follow him on his journey and experience it for themselves.

Having brought his reader to the point when, if attentive to the drama by which Hamann

recollects his story, he would think himself educated in how these delusions of mans pride

worked, Hamann brought out more cards from his sleeve. Since the idea, as we consider the

pedagogy of it, was to have the reader become aware of his ignorance, and not to treat the

sheer knowledge of ignorance as being interchangeable for the experience of it, Hamann con-

tinued to recollect his encounter with a man who, at first sight, seemed to live up to what he

had sought for in terms of a friend who would advise and help him. The lutenist, being the

mans profession and how Hamann referred to him, was presented to the reader as a man who

had an explanation for everything and how Hamann felt that he could become as fortunate

as he.23In the despair with which Hamann had explained that he had come to accept the cha-

rade of human knowledge and companionship as founded on something other than lies and

deceit, in order for the reader to entertain similar thoughts regarding his own existence and its

pretensions, he had now found a man who would alleviate such tension and offer distractions

from it. Of course, Hamann served for his reader the same purpose of being a man who could

tone down the hardship of coming to know ones life as a lie, merely by being one who could

account for it. In knowing life as a lie, at least one knew something. Yet when presenting the

character of the lutenist, Hamann also removed the sanctity of this knowledge from his

readers futile desire to escape his ignorance. In a Socratic vein, Hamann allowed the audi-

ence to be the one to realize its ignorance merely by suggesting that its presumed knowledge

(even of its ignorance!) rested on shaky grounds. Indeed, the lutenist revealed himself to the

reader as being anything but firm ground for Hamann to hold on to. With a dramatic and rhe-

torical twist, Hamann described how the lutenists fortune was maintained by someone else,

who, when questioned about it, teamed up with the lutenist to disdain the ever inquisitive

Hamann: instead of separating, they joined forces to stop my mouth.24Likewise; would the

reader question the knowledge-of-ignorance projected to Hamann, all they would achieve was

to give further testament to the misguided attempt at apprehending knowledge. Something

which, at this point in Hamanns Socratic endeavour, they ought to experience as an expres-

sion of their vanity of self-deception accepting ignorance was stylistically unavoidable.

To this point, Hamann had only mentioned what happened prior to his conversion. After

these events had brought him down to his last guinea, and he was filled with despair and

23Ibid. 14824Ibid. 150


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hopelessness, only then did he open the Bible and saw in it his own life unfolding, now that

he had, so Hamann understood it, experienced what the Bible teaches. Beiser says that Ha-

mann saw himself in the Bible stories, and that he came to understand them as symbolic for

his life.25However, what Beiser fails to acknowledge was how Hamann conceived of himself

as having come to this realization of his own part in gaining answers from the Bible only after

he had been left ignorant and without answers in a world of inter-subjective interaction. Only

when he had been left all alone to his ignorance was he receptive to his the symbolism of the

Bible. The notion that Hamanns conversion story carried a pedagogical motive is therefore

lost on Beiser, and that it was here Socrates had risen for Hamann does not become clear

unless one undertakes a pedagogical reading as we have done.

Hamann can be seen to have intended for the reader to undergo a similar process of despair

and anxiety as he had, and when Walter Leibrecht in God and man in the thought of Hamann

argues that Hamanns stylistic delivery must be seen as an attempt to put the reader in-touch

with the same feelings of devotion that Hamann had experienced in London, he approaches

this territory. This would imply, put somewhat drastic, that Hamann not only sought to tell

people about his conversion in London, but also provoke the reader into a similar position. If

Hamann was down to his last guinea before coming to read the Bible in a new and (to him)

rewarding light, it is not very far-fetched to suppose that Hamann similarly sought to put the

reader in a position when he, metaphorically, was down his last guinea in terms of what to

make of the process of conversion. When Hamann explained that he had never before read the

Bible as he read it in those most dire of circumstances, when he found himself alone in the

capital of the world with every delusion of knowledge and the prospect of human self-made

fortune lost to the stormy sea of increasing anxiety and despair, we can tie his description to

his role as an educator. There was a reason to why Hamann chose to include the process pre-

ceding his conversion when writing about the conversion itself, and this reason, I argue, was

that he, stepping into the shoes of Socrates, sought to have his reader experience what he had

experienced. If the reader did not follow Hamann on his journey to God, the reader would not

understand the choice Hamann had made; if the reader did not feel the same loss that Hamann

had felt, they would persist in viewing his conversion as leaving reason for irrationality,

knowledge for ignorance. In what he considered the manner of Socrates, we can see how al-

ready in the recollection of his London trip Hamann sought to confront his audience in such a

25Beiser, 20


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way that they came to realize that he had never left reason or knowledge he had merely

questioned what he saw as the delusion that anyone remained within its bounds.

The Socratic Answer to the EnlightenmentUpon Hamanns return to Germany, his friends were taken aback by the new tune playing

from his lute. Gregor Smith tells of how J. C. Berens had skimmed the pages of Hamanns

Thoughts about my Lifewith loathing, and that Hamanns old friends came to view him as

having turned into a bigoted Christian, crediting God with what they saw man himself as ca-

pable of achieving.26Griffith Dickinson speaks of how Hamann met at several occasions with

Berens and Immanuel Kant, who both attempted to convince their mutual friend to return to

the positive ideals of the Enlightenment, where knowledge was power.

27

They saw Hamannsnewfound faith as doing little but disrupting this power surge by refusing man entrance to the

halls of true knowledge. They did not see Hamanns point that only by realizing their human

knowledge as subjective, could they fully welcome the objectivity of true knowledge as given

them by other means than what they in their vanity sought for in others. To understand him,

they had to experience what he had experienced in London. They must come to see the folly

of their way, we understand Hamann as having thought. They must see the pretentiousness of

the Enlightenment, in order to grasp Gods grace as he had. He could not tell them where they

went wrong, for they had to see it and come to this insight themselves.

During their second meeting, Berens and Kant sought to get Hamann interested in translat-

ing articles from the French Encyclopedia into German, a request which Hamann saw as an

attempt by the two to test his conversion. Had he complied, he would simply have perpetuated

the myth that men could come to know the world by themselves, and fail to understand that as

humans they were ignorant, and that it was only in embracing their ignorance that they could

come to true knowledge Rather than complying with Kants request, then, Hamann cancelled

any further meetings between the three friends and instead wrote the essay Socratic Memora-

bilia (Sokratische Denkwrdigkeiten) in 1759, no more than a year after he had written his

autobiographical account, which he underscored: With a Double Dedication To Nobody and

to Two to the unspecified public, and to the two friends Berens and Kant.

The Socratic Memorabilia was an attempt by Hamann to allow his readers most directly

consisting of Berens and Kant to see where they went wrong rather than telling it to their

faces. It is perhaps the most explicit example of the Socratic rhetoric which Hamann came to

26Gregor Smith 2927Griffith Dickinson 29f.


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establish, in which he deconstructed the object of his critique so to have it turn upon itself

and be seen as the basis of its own downfall. Griffith Dickinson argues in her analysis that in

the MemorabiliaHamann made it clear to his reader that there was a difference in knowing

that one was ignorant, and to experience ones ignorance. The latter, she contends, was what

Hamann sought to have his readers indulge in. 28As with his London experience, he can be

seen to have wished for his readers to for themselves grasp their ignorance, and in his desire

to make this wish come true, he had to provoke them into taking a stance. Convinced that the

Enlightenment was founded upon shaky grounds that could not live up to its pretensions, Ha-

mann had to bring its underlying assumptions to the surface of its thought. Rather than out-

right criticising these assumptions he knew that as soon as what hid deep down in the murky

layers of enlightened thought brought itself before the very light it sustained, the Enlighten-

ment project would turn to stone and crumble before the eyes of its adherents. What was im-

portant was that they experienced this downfall first-hand, by their own hand. All Hamann

would do, in the spirit of Socrates, was to ask the right questions, or, as with the Socratic

Memorabilia insinuate the matter with illuminating analogies that the reader could (or could

not) decipher. This was done in order for the reader to himself appear as the one who mas-

tered the critique. Instead of answering Kants request that he ought to return to the ideals of

the Enlightenment, Hamann used the Socratic Memorabilia - which Beiser somewhat drasti-

cally has called a short apology for his faith as an outlet through which Kant and Berens

could realize, by virtue of their own experience, the folly involved in their appeal for Hamann

to return to their cause. This way, sooner than offering his reader an argument against which

he could react and respond all in the spirit of the ever-critical Enlightenment Hamann let

the reader be the one who made the argument, his own role as the author being reduced to that

of a provocateur who indirectly challenged the assumptions his reader was supposedly used in

taking for granted. Directly, all Hamann ever did was speaking of things easily recognizable

28Ibid. 68ff. We can mention how Griffith Dickinson sees this endeavour as being tied to Hamanns use of typo-logical analogies, through which the reader would come to experience his ignorance (and, consequently, hisrelationship to knowledge as one who does not possess it) by being able to relate accordingly to the analogieshidden references. This, she argues, was so that Hamann could show how spatially disconnected individuals didnot work according to the same set of linguistic criteria. In doing this, she does not appreciate how Hamann, byrestricting direct access to his analogies for one who does not belong to the referential network, includesalso astranger to this network by capacity of exclusion. That is, even the reader who did not get it was invited toactively relate by capacity of his own linguistic belonging; i.e. by being excluded from any direct understand-ing the reader would indirectly relate as ignorant. This reading is supported by Hamanns thoughts on language

as socio-historically determined, as the notion of an outsider reader implied in Hamanns philosophy supportsthe thesis that people of another language will understand the world radically different, thus weakening theEnlightenment pretension of universal knowledge.


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as having to do with his answer to the Enlightenment project, yet he never went the length of

actually saying so.

According to Beiser, one thrust of the text was that of explicitly presenting Socrates in

light of his professed lack of knowledge, whereby Hamann supposedly challenged the estab-

lished picture of Socrates as an early spokesperson of the Enlightenment. 29Socrates not only

strove for wisdom, but to Hamann his greatest feat was admitting to ignorance. We can see

how Beisers view is supported by what Hamann says about Socrates as he compared his own

manner of criticism to that of the Greek philosopher:

Socrates, gentlemen, was no common critic. In the writings of Heraclitus he distinguished between whathe understood and what he did not understand, and from what he understood he made aproper and mod-est supposition of what he did not. He spoke on this occasion of readers who could swim. 30

Further on, Hamann referred Socrates ability at making a modest supposition of what he,

as a reader, did not know to Socrates genius. It was this genius, we understand Hamann,

which enabled the reader to make sense of ignorance. If we take into consideration that one of

Hamanns readers was Kant, who would go on some near thirty years after the Socratic

Memorabilia to explain that which could not be known by the strict use of reason, one can

imagine how Hamanns readers who could swim was a challenge to his own reader, who

supposedly sought to understand their author without making it a modest proposition:

It was certainly alright for Socrates to be ignorant: he had a genius on whose knowledge he could rely,whom he loved and feared as his god, with whose peace he was more concerned that with all the reasonof the Egyptians and Greeks [,,,]31

If the reader would experience ignorance as had Socrates, it was insinuated, his reason would

be of no assistance. As with the recollection of his London experience, Hamann build through

the Socratic Memorabilia a pit filled with water, and provoked the reader to jump in and

swim. Socrates not only served as a justification or explanation of Hamanns apology, but

he was also a tool for provoking those readers that would think him their intellectual saviour

against ignorance. In saying that Socrates made use of his mystic genius when coming to un-

derstand, Hamann can be seen to have violated the supposedly established view that Socrates

29Beiser, 2630Hamann, Socratic Memorabilia in Gregor Smith, 179. Hamann here supposedly spoke of a passage in Dio-genes Laertius. wherein it was mentioned how Socrates, upon receiving a copy of Heraclitus On Nature, he saidof it that "What I have understood is good; and so, I think, what I have not understood is; only the book requires

a Delian diver to get at the meaning of it." (Diogenes Lartius, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers,trans. C. D. Yong, Kessinger Publishing 2006, 65).31Ibid. 183


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was a champion of rationality and knowledge. Nevertheless, Hamann never said that Socrates

was anything but such a champion, he merely suggested that his strength came elsewhere than

pure reason. The rest was up for the reader to decipher.32

At one exemplary point in the text, Hamann asked his reader to suppose they engage in a

game of cards. As he elaborated on what it would mean if a man, who they knew to be a great

card player who never says no to a game, nevertheless declined to play, Hamann wrote that

this would mean that this man considered his fellow players cheaters, and that there would be

little for him to gain in playing with them.

If he says, I dont play, we should have to look with his eyes at the people with whom he is speaking,and could complete what he says as follows: I dont play, that is, with people of your kind, who break therules and force the luck. When you offer me a game, then our mutual understanding is that we accept ar-

bitrary chance as our master. But what you call chance is the science of your slick fingers, and I must ac-cept this, if I will, or run the risk of insulting you, or choose the shame of imitating you. Had you offereda trial to see who the best cheat was, then I might have replied differently, and perhaps joined you in agame in order to show you that you have learned to deal cards as badly as you know how to play whatyou have.33

Anyone who knew the circumstances behind the essay would realize what Hamann was refer-

ring to in this analogy, yet in order to go beyond the analogy and look at it as having to do

with something other than card play, the reader would himself have to engage in it and be the

one who marked its referent.34By using analogies in his critique, Hamann forced the reader

to, if any concrete meaning was to be exhumed from the text, be the one who criticized. Ha-

mann only spoke of a game of cards, whereas his reader was the one who saw it as having to

do with something more significant. The intention behind this pedagogical move, we under-

stand, was to thieve from the reader the notion that they could gain answers from what they

read. Hamanns text simply provoked his readers desire to receive meaning; provoked them

to swim, if we will. When the meaning he found explicated in the text (as having to do with a

32Beiser and Griffith Dickinson both make excellent readings of Hamanns allegorical use of Socrates, not leastof which, they contend, consisted in him juxtaposing Socrates to Jesus Christ in order to further provoke hiscontemporary readers. I have not engaged in a discussion with these readings, since they are far too philosophi-cally tortuous for this study, and also because they, after all, tend to arrive beside the point I wish to make of the

pedagogical use of Socrates in Socratic Memorabilia. They treat Socrates as a typological stepping stone to getat the true meaning of the work as dealing with philosophical issues, whereas I wish to view the usage as im-

portant in its own right.33Socratic Memorabiliain Gregor Smith, 180f.34As we have discussed, Griffith Dickinson, among others, makes a point out of Hamanns use of literary de-vices, yet she fails to recognize the width of what Hamann is doing. She seems to think that since Hamann tookto use contextually dependent analogies, one would have to be acquainted with the proper context in order to

get something out of what he was saying. I think that this view reduces the focus Hamann put on the reader asbeing the most important player in the game with the author, as she persists in viewing Hamanns authorial intentas prescribing the correct response from the reader.


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game of cards) did not sustain this desire, they looked to themselves for answers and thus ap-

pliedto this story of a card game additional meaning.

In letting his reader realize that whatever meaning they found would be of their own mak-

ing, Hamann did not, I suggest, propose a subjective or pluralistic view of truth. When Isaiah

Berlin says that Hamann fought the Enlightenment on account of its belief that truth was ob-

jective and for all men to know, he does not pay enough attention to Hamanns stylistic deliv-

ery. It was not Hamanns intention, as shown in the Socratic Memorabilia, to convince his

readers that they were able to create meaning by use of their genius, and so that whatever

understanding of the world they comprehended was according to their own subjectivity. To

Hamann, subjective knowledge was not knowledge at all it was a symptom of mans vanity.

True knowledge came from accepting that you knew nothing, and as his readers saw that they

were so fluent in applying their own meaning to a text, they simply proved to thesmelves that

they still lived in the delusion of being knowledgeable, not that they belonged to the correct

referential network. As Leibrecht says, Hamanns style grew from the desire to have his fel-

low men experience the same feeling of ineptitude that he had felt when he in London had lost

faith in humanity. Likewise, Hamann sought to thieve from the reader what faith they had in

locating meaning outside of themselves. Only by letting the reader experience the ability to

create knowledge, could the same reader realize that in persisting with this act of creation did

he remain blind to the truth which supposedly flourished beyond his narrow perception. In

this way, Hamann involved the reader to partake in the critique he directed against the

Enlightenment project of meaning-creation, by letting the reader be the one who experienced

the madness of eschewing his human ignorance. The reader became the focal point of experi-

encing the text, and Socrates had risen.

CHAPTER II:

Socrates Radicalized (or The Pedagogy of Schlegel)

Introduction

If Hamann introduced the reader as the creator of meaning, he still allowed the author the role

of the devilish provocateur that lured the reader into using his creative ability. The only real

difference between a conventional author and a Socratic, looking to Hamann, would have

been that the Socratic author made it blatantly clear that he intended for his words of igno-


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rance to be interpreted. He wished for the interpreter (that is, the reader) to recognize that his

role as meaning-creator was active also in conventional readings, which were not always as

hospitable as Hamanns when it came to offering themselves for arbitrary scrutiny. Whatever

can be said of Hamanns Socratic rhetoric and pedagogy, he never failed to speak in and of it

to the reader as was the reader a potential author, a creator of meaning, and it was in this ca-

pacity that he intended for the reader to experience himself as utterly ignorant of everything

he had thought himself to know in looking to the text. It is through this understanding of Ha-

manns stylistic enterprise that we are given room to approach the romantic version of So-

cratic rhetoric as a radicalization, in which the author and the reader were no longer conceived

of as pairs in reader-response dialectic. The romantic Socrates, we will see, completely eradi-

cated the author from the equation, making him into a figment of romantic imagination, and

placed the reader as the only and perpetual variable. One can say that the romantic image of

Socratic ignorance saw that the only proper way of embracing Socratic rhetoric was to ignore

or forget that anyone had ever opened up the arena for interpretation or meaning-creation. For

the romantics, embracing ignorance was necessary in order tocreate meaning, and not, as had

Hamann perceived the Socratic, as a way out of such creation as he saw it happening all

around him.

Even though several of the romantics were interested in Socrates, and many more delved

into the feeling that mans creative capacity seemed to hold no bounds, none seems to have

made more out of it than Friedrich Schlegel. Berlin says of Schlegel that he were the most

extreme of the unbridled romantics, and goes as far as to call his ideas on irony insane. 35

Without saying much about the style of Schlegels irony (which Schlegel himself referred to

as Socratic irony), Berlin manages to say that it had consisted in the continual disruption of

established conventions. whenever you see a well-composed poem a poem composed

according to the rules whenever you see a peaceful institution which protects the lives and

property of citizens, laugh at it, mock at it, be ironical, blow it up, point out that opposite is

equally true.36This, we understand Berlin, was all for the purpose of opening up for new

interpretations, new conventions that could be destroyed, everything to make room for further

use of the human creative capacity. In order for man to create meaning, he had to make cer-

tain that what meaning he thought solid was actually fluid, and this was done by ironically

ignoring any unspoken agreement of its solidity. In Berlins view, then, we can understand

Schlegels challenging style as anticipating that of Wittgenstein, that whatever can be de-

35Berlin,Roots of Romanticism 11736Ibid.


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stroyed is not worth keeping, or maybe the less forgiving stance of the Futurists, that the only

aspect of existence worth preserving is the continual disruption of that which man create. Yet

in his reading of Schlegel, which is obviously tainted by these modern cultural movements, he

fails to recognize the style Schlegel uses in order to carry this supposed point across. Berlin

merely looks at what Schlegel and his cohorts did, and creates out of this an understanding of

what they meant to do, without paying any real attention to how Schlegel can be understood

as having intended for his reader to experience something quite implicit by means of his (as it

was) ironic explications.

Perhaps the most dedicated study into the complexities of Schlegels irony is Paul de

Mans aptly titled essay The Concept of Irony.37In this essay, he seeks to understand how

Schlegel worked with irony, and in what way this particular rhetorical trope served for him to

interact with his reader. The rather depressing conclusion reached by de Man, is that one can-

not understand Schlegels irony. And if one wishes to view this as Schlegels point, one sim-

ply has not understood the ironic style. However, de Man still wishes to say of the relation-

ship to the reader that faced with Schlegels irony a world of meaning opens up before him.

Irony served this purpose for Schlegel, we can understand de Man, but it did nothing to close

the world around any one meaning. This was a problem left for the reader to deal with, and

anything Schlegel might have said about it cannot honestly be read as anything but more

irony, more destruction opening up for endless possibilities of creation. And indeed, de Man

points to a passage when Schlegel offers the resulting chaos and ignorance of irony as build-

ing blocks for meaning-creation, in the manner which Berlin understood him, but says: This

sounds very nice, but you should remember that chaos is error, madness, and stupidity, in all

its forms. Any expectation that one may have that destruction might be able to construct is

suspended by such a passage For de Man, Schlegels use of Socrates (who, indeed, played

the part of the continual master ironist for Schlegel) only served to teach the reader that he

had learned nothing, that he had only been bereft knowledge he once had, without gaining

anything from it besides error, madness, and stupidity.

Building on de Mans reading, Georgia Albert offers to shed a somewhat more positive

light on Schlegels irony, without really losing any of the darkness handed us by de Man. 38

She conceives of the ironic style of Schlegels as just as destructive and unforgiving as does

de Man, and she builds her case on Schlegels understanding of the parabasis. The parabasis is

37

Paul de Man, The Concept of Irony (1977) inAesthetic Ideology (University of Minnesota Press 1996) 163-18438Georgia Albert, Understanding Irony: Three Essais on Friedrich Schlegel inMLN, (Dec 1993) 825-848


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The Fragments Socrates Maturing

Our story of Friedrich Schlegel begins at the turn of a century raised on Enlightenment ideals,

yet that had also given birth to Counter-Enlightenment frustration. Hamann was dead, and had

posthumously published a very critical, very ironic metacritic of the defining work of theEnlightenment Kants Critique of Pure Reason. Kant had sought to abstractly distinguish

between experience and what was experienced, between sensibility and the understanding of

what was being sensed, in an attempt to better understand the limits of human knowledge.

Hamann had asked in his Metacritique of the Purism of Reasonwhether such a distinction

amounted to anything, if it could only be imagined in the abstract.

But if sensibility and understanding spring as two branches of human knowledge from one common root,so that through sensibility objects are, through understanding they are thought, what is the use of such anarbitrary, improper and self-willed divorce of that which nature has joined together? Will not such a di-chotomy or cleavage of their common root cause both branches to die and wither away?39

Beiser suggests that Hamanns critique of an abstract and pure reason greatly influenced

post-Kantian thought, and says that Schlegel appreciated how Hamann seemingly conceived

of reason as socio-historically dependent, and utilized this in the development of his own

thought.40Yet in so far that Schlegels philosophical style borrowed anything from his most

immediate predecessors, it was not Hamann but Johann Gottlieb Fichte who served as theinspiration. Paul R. Sweet cites several letters from Schlegel illustrating the admiration he

held for Fichte, where phrases such as the greatest metaphysical writer now alive and this

thinker is leaving Kant and Spinoza behind are heard together with sheer astonishment: It is

impossible to grasp how a young man, twenty-five years old, can know so much and be so

original in this thinking.41De Man goes as far as to suggest that one cannot begin to under-

stand Schlegel, before one has come to an understanding of Fichte.42 Rather than buying

Hamanns clouded argument, then, the intellectual response to the critical endeavour of the

Enlightenment continued, not least of all with Fichtes writings. Continuing the fashionable

abstract philosophizing, Fichte brought such line of thinking to a point where any notion of a

what which was experienced seemed redundant. All we had to work with, Fichte would

argue, was our own experiencing and the abstract mind allowing us to experience, whereas

39Johann Georg Hamann, Metacritique of the Purism of Reason (1784) in Gregor Smith, 21740Beiser, 1841

Paul R. Sweet Sir Isaiah Berlin, Fichte, and German Romanticism in German Studies Review vol. 23, No. 2(2000) 24742De Man, 173ff.


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anything else must reasonably be considered figments of the minds creation.43 However,

Fichte realized the difficulty of arguing in this way, since he could not easily make a system

of how mans knowledge related to what he experienced whilst simulatenously treating that to

which man related as man himself (that is, as a manifestation of himself). As every such

system would presuppose a distinction between man and what he experienced, Fichte

proposed the logical necessity that man could never fail to imagine himself by way of his

opposite, his negation. In proposing self-negation as a principle to be reckoned with, Fichte

had set the terms for the future of critique which, according to Schlegel, left Kant behind.

Proper critique would not only criticize what was explicitly given for its scrutiny, Schlegel

would understand it, but would also have to deal with the possibility that the critical enterprise

as such was mistunderstood. By continually deferring the question concerning whether or not

one was on the right track for knowledge, and always hesitate to make a final decision

pertaining to the certainty of ones critical system (as had Fichte left room for doubt in the

second introduction to his Science of Knowledge), Schlegel understood knowledge as being in

the botchy hands of the supposedly knowing subject. So was it that Schlegel said that, Its

equally fatal for the mind to have a system and to have none . 44In order for doubt to truly

surface in the mind of the subject, and so put him on the path to continual ignorance, man

could not only discard systems, but he had also to continually create them. Philippe Lacouer-

Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy conceives of this simultaneous meaning-creation/meaning-

destruction as marking the theoretical point at which romanticism and idealism broke from

each other, as the former consciously carried out this paradoxical duality in poetry, whereas

the latter kept philosophically elaborating on the complexity first envisioned by Fichte.45We

will see how Schlegel, by going back to Socrates and what he understood as Socratic irony,

found the means by which he would have his reader experience ignorance whilst at the same

time constitute that which he was, in the end, ignorant about.

In 1797, Schlegels style could be seen in the literary journalLyceum der Schnen Knste,

and here he first described his fascination for the Socratic technique, and how it made the re-

ceiver of a proposition into the one who decided its meaning.

Socratic irony is the only involuntary and yet completely deliberate dissimulation. It is equally impossibleto feign it or divulge it. To a person who hasnt got it, it will remain a riddle even after it is openly con-

43Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The Science of Knowledge: With the First and Second Introductions(1794) eng. trans.Peter Lauchlan Heath, John Lachs (Cambridge 1982) ex. 9344

Friedrich Schlegel, AthenumFragment 53 in Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics ed. J. M. Bernstein(Cambridge 2003) 24745Lacouer-Labarthe, Nancy 33-36


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fessed. It is meant to deceive no one except those who consider it a deception and who either take pleas-ure in the delightful roguery of making fools of the whole world, or else become angry when they get aninkling they themselves might be included. In this sort of irony, everything should be playful and serious,guilelessly open and deeply hidden.46

In this fragment, we see how Schlegel considered irony to be hidden on account of its open-ness. We can understand him as implying that in order for irony to truly be impossible to

feign or divulge, it could not be allowed to hideany particular meaning that one could dis-

tance oneself from by simulating another meaning. Irony must rather have left itself guile-

lessly open for countless interpretations, where divulging one would not alter the fact that

irony kept itself in intense darkness given the vast amount of unexplored interpretations it

offered. Since the continual plurality of possible interpretations made it impossible to settle

for any one meaning to the ironic proposition, the Socratic irony was effectively deeply hid-

den concerning its true intent. This intent, moreover, was effective only in so far that it pro-

voked the receiver into deciding a meaning, an intention behind what was being ironically

uttered. That is, the supposedly hidden meaning was nothing but the ironic veil suggesting

something less ironic being covered by it. It was the provocation offered by irony that consti-

tuted irony; the actof suggestion as opposed to the thing suggested (which was a thing cre-

ated in its absence entirely by the receiving subject, the victim of irony). All Socrates ever

did, Schlegel suggested in another passage, was postulating irony as a mean to inspire his lis-

teners.47 Similarly, Schlegels own irony can be spotted in how he insinuated a meaning

which he left it for his reader to creatively imagine to know. Schlegels stylistic use of the

Socratic rhetoric could be seen as he continued the quoted passage:

It is a very good sign when the harmonious bores are at a loss about how they should react to this con-tinuous self-parody, when they fluctuate endlessly between belief and disbelief until they get dizzy andtake what is meant as a joke seriously and what is meant seriously as a joke.48

Who were these harmonious bores Schlegel spoke to his reader of? Albert suggests thatthey were the people who took irony to be deception, and who therefore felt cheated when

victimized by it. She also contends that the harmonious bores, having become dizzy, sought

something to hold on to, and how irony denied them this option.49Provoking dizziness into

the readers would be part of the ironic weaponry, as Albert understands Schlegel, as it kept

46Friedrich Schlegel, CriticalFragment 108 (1797) in Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics (Cambridge2003), 24347Fragment42,48

Friedrich Schlegel, CriticalFragment 108 (1797) in Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics (Cambridge2003), 24349Albert, 829


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them in suspense concerning settling for one meaning or another. Whoever the harmonious

bores were, Schlegel made certain not to be the one telling, for he did not merely seek to raise

his readers awareness concerning their ignorance, but he forced them to face it head-on.

Studying the pedagogical structure of the fragment, we see how Schlegel began by telling his

presumed reader what irony was all about, and once this was established, he continued to sug-

gest that if they took what he had just said as a joke or as being serious, was up to them. Far

from being a definitive explanation of Socratic irony, the explanation was itself the very prac-

tice of irony, construed so that the reader would be forced to make up their own mind. How

else would an attentive reader be expected to react to a fragment such as the one quoted

above, in which the first part be served to a conclusive, if complicated, meaning of irony, only

to in the second part be faced with the mere ironic notion t

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