Language, Humour And Human Nature: Hamann’s challenge to Enlightenment philosophy (original) (raw)

Abstract

What can jokes tell us about human nature? Many philosophical works have a serious style and suggest that clarity is the best way to philosophically understand something. The German philosopher, Johann Georg Hamann (1730-88), takes a very different view. For Hamann, wit and humour offer unique access to human nature because they allow us to recognise phenomena at the limit of our perception. This approach is found in his own work; he often attacks his opponents through ridicule than rigorous philosophical argumentation. This style is by no means accidental but based on his belief that the so-called ‘rational’ approach of his contemporaries denied its own foundations. Likewise Hamann thought that language was by its nature indeterminable and it is this indeterminable quality of language that allows us to grasp reality even when it doesn’t fit within our clear understanding. This idea in turn reveals Hamann’s understanding of human nature as irreducible to rationality. He does not deny rationality but only the idiosyncratic definition of rationality employed by his contemporaries, such as Immanuel Kant and Christian Wolff, who see rationality as detached from tradition. Instead Hamann argues that reason is not ahistorical but develops out of a tradition. This tradition contains contradictions and complications that Kant and Wolff believe they have eliminated in the clarity of their approaches. The result is that Wolff, Kant and their fellows produce a narrow anthropology that over-emphasise rationality to the detriment of other factors in human nature. Hamann tries to redress this problem by drawing attention to aspects of life that the ‘rationalist’ philosophers wanted to deny. This paper will focus on the role of humour, although Hamann also highlights other features of life that he thinks the rationalists deny, such as revelation, sexuality and tradition. The role of humour is interdependent with Hamann’s understanding of language, which is something that is not completely under our control. This idea is evident in Hamann’s essay on the silent h in German words (Hamann is referring here mostly to archaic uses of German spelling, as in thun). The say concerns a debate at that time over whether unpronounced letters should be removed. One argument for the proposal is that the silent letter h corrupts the minds of children by leading them to believe in things that are superfluous to the principle of sufficient reason. This is an implicit attack against rationalist philosophy: primarily this is aimed against Leibniz and Wolff who most clearly espouse the ultimate principle of sufficient reason, but by extension it also serves as a retort to Kant. There is a clear irony in the way Hamann presents the argument. It is clearly not used by the proponents of spelling change but instead forms an argumentum absurdum. Rather than simply presenting phenomena that cannot be grasped by the principle of sufficient reason to defend the existence of things superfluous to our conscious knowledge, Hamann pushes the idea to the extreme. The result is farcical because even if the spelling reform were successful it would not bring about the true universal that is derived from the principle of reason because there simply remain too many phenomenon that are indeterminate beyond the superfluity of silent letters. The effect of this argumentative approach is to highlight the absurdity of the argument. In the comedic, we see that there is something that we can recognise but not quite comprehend. The idea that all the world’s problems could be solved by spelling reform (or for that matter reading Origen!) is over-optimistic. The problem is that when we are immersed in rational argumentation we are not aware of the limits of the principles of reason. Within this system of argumentation there is an apparent circularity in which the reason justifies itself to the extent that considerations that do not fit this pattern are not considered because we would only ever consider arguments within the limits of reason. Hamann’s approach is to disrupt this circularity by making fun of it. By pushing the method to its limits, Hamann indicates its contradiction. There is something else that we didn’t consider in our style of reasoning that nevertheless defines our life. This is intended by Hamann to encourage the rationalist philosophers to look outside of their customary framework and consider reality as something more complicated than they could conceive by their use of the principle of sufficient reason. In this way Hamann is not defending the irrational per se, an accusation he is often charged with (most notably by Isiah Berlin), but rather to point out that when someone thinks they have properly grasped rationality, in fact we only have an understanding that remains in part irrational. Hamann’s point is not to give up the idea of rationality and resign ourselves to irrationality. Instead Hamann wants us to reject the rationality of our reason because it is not rational enough. Humour is the tool that Hamann uses in order to provoke this response because it is external to the method of reasoning and it is only by recognising something external can we recognise the problem of a system that purports to have internal consistency (as the rationalist systems of Wolff and Leibniz did). Hamann thinks that humour and language have indeterminacy because they reflect the indeterminacy in human nature. This is why humour can have an effect on us because it tells us something about the human condition that we can recognise in laughter even when we fail to understand it by relying on our own hubris of rationality. https://soundcloud.com/user-237248455/joshua-roe-language-humour-and-human-nature-hamanns-challenge-to-enlightenment-philosophy

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