Johann Georg Hamann

Johann Georg Hamann (1730 - 1788) was a German pietist protestant, thinker, and friend of the philosopher Immanuel Kant. His distrust of reason led him conclude that a childlike faith in God was the only solution to the vexing problems of philosophy. Also known by the epithet Magus of the North, he was one of the precipitating forces for the counter-enlightenment. He was an influence to Herder, Goethe, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Hegel and Kierkegaard.

Life

Johann Georg Hamann was born in Königsberg in 1730, the son of a midwife and a barber-surgeon. At 16 he began study in philosophy and theology, later changing to law; he also was widely read in literature, philology, mathematics and science. He left university without completing his studies and became the governor to a wealthy family on a Baltic estate, continuing his extraordinarily broad reading and private research. He took up a job in the family firm of a friend from his Königsberg days, Christoph Berens, and was sent on an obscure mission to London, in which he evidently failed. He then led a high life until he ran out of friends, money and support. In a garret, depressed and impoverished, he read the Bible cover to cover and experienced a religious conversion.

He returned to the House of Berens in Riga, where they evidently forgave him his failure. He fell in love with Christoph Berens' sister, Katharina, but was refused permission to marry her by his friend, on the grounds of his religious conversion; Berens was an enthusiastic follower of the Enlightenment and was nauseated by the more pious manifestations of Hamann's new-found religiosity. Smarting from this blow and its motivations, Hamann returned to his father's house in Königsberg, where he lived for the rest of his life until his final months.

In Königsberg, he never held an official academic or ecclesiastical post, in part due to a pronounced speech impediment. Eventually, through the intercession of his acquaintance Immanuel Kant, he found work as a civil servant in the tax office of Frederick the Great, whom Hamann in fact despised. Nevertheless his principal activity was as an editor and a writer; he was considered one of the most widely-read scholars of his time (greatly aided by his fluency in many languages), as well as a notorious author. During this time, despite his committed Christianity, he lived with a woman whom he never married but to whom he remained devoted and faithful, having four children on whom he doted, and who occasionally feature in his writings (principally as unruly distractions to the author's scholarship).

At the end of his life he accepted an invitation to Münster from one of his admirers, Princess Gallitzin . He died in Münster in 1788.

External links

Entry on Hamann in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy