Not yet in English
No public-domain English edition of this book exists. The original is free to read below, and our English edition is still to come.
Read the original ↗1759 · German original
Sokratische Denkwürdigkeiten
by Johann Georg Hamann
Hamann went to London in 1757 on a business errand, failed at it, fell apart, and read the Bible straight through in a rented room — emerging with a conviction that ended his Enlightenment career and began his real one. The Sokratische Denkwürdigkeiten, which he called the beginning of his authorship, uses Socrates against the rationalists of Berlin: the wisest man is the one who knows he does not know, and faith is not the opposite of reason but its ground.
The convert behind the argument
Hamann was a Königsberg intellectual, a friend of Kant, working as a merchant's agent when the London mission collapsed and he was left broke and humiliated. The reading and the crisis that followed produced a conversion that his Enlightenment friends — Kant among them — tried and failed to talk him out of. He spent the rest of his life as a minor customs official and the most formidable critic the Aufklärung had.
Summary
The book was written in 1759 as an answer to Kant and Berens, who had been trying to recall Hamann to reason after his conversion. Its dedication is famously double-edged — addressed to the public and to 'the two', meaning them — and its manner is deliberately oracular. Hamann wrote to be misunderstood by the wrong readers.
The argument runs through Socrates, and the choice of figure is the point: the Enlightenment claimed Socrates as its patron, and Hamann takes him back. Socratic ignorance is presented not as an intellectual position but as an act of faith; the daemon, the appeal to what cannot be demonstrated, is exactly what the rationalists cannot account for in their own hero.
The editor of the collected edition notes that when Hamann wrote it he had read neither Plato nor Xenophon, working only from Cooper and Charpentier, and that he later marked parallel passages in his own copy after reading Plato. It is short, dense and notoriously difficult, and it shaped Herder, Jacobi, Kierkegaard and, through them, a great deal of later thought.
Who was Johann Georg Hamann?
Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788) was born in Königsberg and educated there, a contemporary and friend of Immanuel Kant. He worked as a tutor and then as a commercial agent, and it was on a badly handled business mission to London in 1757–58 that he collapsed, read the scriptures, and was converted.
He returned to Königsberg, took a modest post in the customs administration, and wrote in a compressed, allusive style that earned him the name the Magus of the North. His influence on German Romanticism and on Kierkegaard was out of all proportion to the size of his output.
Common questions
- What are the Sokratische Denkwürdigkeiten?
- Hamann's first book, published in 1760, which he called the beginning of his authorship. It uses the figure of Socrates against the Berlin Enlightenment, arguing that Socratic ignorance is an act of faith and that the rationalists cannot account for their own patron saint.
- Is there a free English translation?
- No. The available English translations are still under copyright. The German original is free at Archive.org, in Fraktur type.
A note on the text. Sokratische Denkwürdigkeiten is in the public domain. Its public-domain text is the Germanoriginal — the English translations still in print are under copyright, so we can't reprint them. Our own English edition is still to be made. The original text is also available free here.