Isaiah Berlin (2013) – Hamann on konwledge

DESCARTES   BELIEVED THAT it was possible to acquire knowledge of reality from a priori sources, by deductive reasoning. This, according to Hamann  , is the first appalling fallacy of modern thought. The only true subverter of this false doctrine was Hume  , [1] whom Hamann read with enthusiastic agreement. Indeed, it is not too much to say that the Bible   and Hume are the two oddly interwoven roots of his ideas.

Hume had declared that the foundation of our knowledge of ourselves and the external world was belief – something for which there could be no a priori reasons; something to which all principles, theories, the most coherent and elaborate constructions of our minds, practical or theoretical, could in the end be reduced. We believed that there were material objects round us that behaved in this or that way; we believed that we were identical with ourselves through time. In Hamann’s words: ‘Our own existence and the existence of all things outside us must be believed and cannot be determined in any other way.’ And again: ‘Belief is not the product of the intellect, and can therefore also suffer no casualty by it: since belief has as little grounds as taste or sight.’ Belief gives us all our values, heaven and earth, morals and the real world. ‘Know ye, philosophers, that between cause and effect, means and ends, the connection is not physical but spiritual, ideal; that is the nexus of blind faith.’ We do not perceive causes or necessity in nature; we believe them, we act as if they existed; we think and formulate our ideas in terms of such beliefs, but they are themselves mental habits, de facto forms of human behaviour, and the attempt to deduce the structure of the universe from them is a monstrous attempt to convert our subjective habits – which differ in different times and places and between different individuals – into unalterable, objective ‘necessities’ of nature.

Hamann read Hume with great attention. Hume was of course an unbeliever, an enemy of the Christian faith, but God spoke the truth through him all the same. He is a ‘Saul among the Prophets’, a kind of Balaam, a reluctant witness to the truth, an ally despite himself. Hamann translated Hume’s Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, of which he thought most highly, and regarded Kant   as a kind of Prussian Hume,6 even though Kant ignored Hume’s teaching on belief: where Hume is content to report that we can neither know nor reasonably ask why things are as they are, and must content ourselves with describing what we cannot help believing any more than we can help seeing, smelling, hearing, Kant attempts to erect these empirical habits into categories. ‘Hume is always my man.’ The Dialogues concerning Natural Religion are ‘full of poetic beauties’ and ‘not dangerous at all’. ‘To eat an egg, to drink a glass of water Hume needs belief; [2] […] but if belief is needed even for eating or drinking, why does Hume break his own principle when judging of things higher than eating or drinking?’ All wisdom begins in sense. ‘Wisdom is feeling, the feeling of a father and a child’; and again, ‘The existence of the smallest things rests on immediate impression, and not on ratiocination.’ Faith is the basis of our knowledge of the external world. We may crave for something else: logical deduction, guarantees given by infallible intuition. But Hume is right, all we have is a kind of animal faith. This is the great battering-ram with which Hamann seeks to destroy the edifice of traditional metaphysics and theology.

Hume’s principle was that from one fact no other fact can be deduced, that necessity is a logical relation, that is, a relation between symbols and not between the real things in the world, and that all proponents of doctrines that claim to know existential propositions that are not based on experience, or to infer other existential propositions by methods of pure thought, are deceiving either themselves or others or both. To this Hamann held steadily all his life: it is the basis of his entire attack on the methods and values of the scientific Enlightenment. There are no innate ideas in the sense in which the rationalists, Descartes, Leibniz   and the Platonists spoke of them. We depend on metabolism with external nature: ‘The senses are to the intellect what the stomach is to the vessels which separate off the finer and higher juices of the blood: the blood-vessels abstract what they need from the stomach. […] our bodies are nothing but what comes from our or our parents’ stomachs. The stamina and menstrua of our reason are properly only revelation and tradition.’ Tradition is accumulation of past beliefs; revelation is God’s appearance to us through nature, or through Holy Writ.

Apart from the metaphysical implications of this, Hamann’s constantly repeated point is that revelation is direct contact between one spirit and another, God and ourselves. What we see, hear, understand is directly given. Yet we are not mere passive receptacles, as Locke   had taught: our active and creative powers are empirical attributes that different men or societies have in different degrees and kinds, so that no generalisations can be guaranteed to hold for too long. Hamann boldly turns Hume’s scepticism into an affirmation of belief – in empirical knowledge – that is its own guarantee: the ultimate datum, for which it makes no sense to ask for some general rationale.

In this way Hamann turns those very empirical weapons that were earlier used against dogmatic theology and metaphysics against rationalist epistemology – Cartesian, Leibnizian, Kantian – as his admirer Kierkegaard   used them against the Hegelians. Nature and observation become weapons against a priori or quasi-a-priori guarantees of progress, or axioms for natural sciences, or any other large, metaphysically grounded, world-enveloping schemas. The metaphysician Fichte   was right from this point of view to exclaim that empiricism was or could be a danger to Rousseau   and the French Revolution and the absolute principles which they had invoked. Hamann is among the earliest empiricist reactionaries who seek to blow up the constructions of audacious scientific reason by appeals – somewhat like Burke  ’s, but much further-reaching and more radical – to asymmetrical, untidy reality, the reality revealed to a vision not distorted by metaphysical spectacles, or by knowledge of the certain existence of the cut and dried pattern which one professes to be attempting to find; for there is no knowledge without belief, unreasoned belief, at its base.

All general propositions rest on this. All abstractions are, in the end, arbitrary. Men cut reality, or the world of their experience, as they wish, or as they are used to doing, without any special warrant from nature, which has no grooves of an a priori kind. Yet our most famous philosophers cut away the branch on which they are sitting, hide with shame, like Adam, their unavoidable and agreeable sin; they deny the brute fact, the irrational. Things are as they are; without accepting this there is no knowledge, for all knowledge reposes on belief or faith, Glaube (that is the transition that Hamann makes without argument), faith in the existence whether of chairs and tables and trees, or of God and the truth of his Bible, all given to faith, to belief, to no other faculty. The contrast between faith and reason is for him a profound fallacy. There are no ages of faith followed by ages of reason. These are fictions. Reason is built on faith, it cannot replace it; there are no ages that are not ages of both: the contrast is unreal. A rational religion is a contradiction in terms. A religion is true not because it is rational but because it is face to face with what is real: modern philosophers pursue rationality like Don Quixote, and will in the end, like him, lose their wits.