The Magus of the North: J.G. Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism

The Konigsberg lay theologian and philosopher J. G. Hamann (1730-88) is undeniably an obscure figure. A solitary, isolated thinker inclined to mysticism, he lived all his life in poverty and neglect, despite the admiration of Herder and Goethe. Yet this neglect, Isaiah Berlin argues, is undeserved. Hamann was a man of profoundly original opinions whose importance has only become apparent in our own time. He was the first out-and-out opponent of the Enlightenment, the father of modern European irrationalism, and a crucial forerunner of romanticism and existentialism - a uniquely independent thinker who deserves to be rescued from the comparative oblivion in which, at any rate in the English-speaking world, he has languished since his death two centuries ago. Berlin's study will do much to secure this rescue. Hamann's writings are notoriously opaque: part of his rejection of all abstraction and system was to present himself as an oracular sage' the 'Magus of the North', as he liked to be called. However ' with his customary powers of empathy Berlin penetrates to the heart of Hamann's concerns and extracts a clear and convincing account of his main ideas on human knowledge on the relationship between language and thought, on creative genius and the relation of God to man. He demonstrates the power of the insights that emerge from Hamann's queer mixture of visionary pietism and sceptical empiricism. Hamann will never fully emerge from the darkness with which he surrounded himself, but this book makes plain why the effort to understand him is both important and worthwhile.