Humor and Irony
HAMANN—HUMOR AND IRONY AS CATEGORIES OF UNDERSTANDING
I am the most Christian Eulenspiegel.
—Hamann (1949–57, II, 117)
The eighteenth-century German philosopher and theologian, Johann Georg Hamann, converted in his 20s to Lutheran Protestantism, the religion of his youth, and has been widely known by the singular epithet “Magus in Norden” ever since. The epithet, which refers to the star of Bethlehem and the Magi in Matthew 2:2, ascribes great religious fervor to Hamann, and it is Hamann’s defense of religion in the midst of the Enlightenment that gives him historical importance. Isaiah Berlin describes him as the one man who “struck the most violent blow against the Enlightenment and began the whole romantic process” (Berlin 1999, 40): “Half hidden by the fame of his disciples: F. H. Jacobi, Schelling, Niebuhr, Jean Paul, Friedrich Carl von Moser, and by the admiration of Herder, Goethe, and Kierkegaard,” Hamann is “the forgotten source of a movement that in the end engulfed the whole of European culture” (Berlin 1994, 4–5). Immanuel Kant, his neighbor and friend, with whom he quarreled all his life, financially supported this “pioneer of anti-rationalism in every sphere.”
Hamann wrote under many pseudonyms and in a style that has proved to this day to be unreadable. The obscurity of his writings has contributed to his disputable status as a philosopher. Renowned for his humor and irony, Hamann dubbed himself the “most Christian Eulenspiegel” (Hamann 1949–57, II, 117; O’Flaherty 1967, 36). He is introduced here as an important link on the subject of humor between Shaftesbury and Kierkegaard. The influence of this obscure thinker on Kierkegaard has led commentators to deem Kierkegaard Hamann’s sole “authentic disciple” (Jørgensen 1968, 164), and Kierkegaard himself viewed his own work as a development of Hamann’s (JP 2, 1559). On the subject of humor, Hamann’s influence on Kierkegaard is unmistakable: Kierkegaard found in Hamann his view of humor and a model for using irony and humor as indirect communication in the service of Christianity.
Hamann was influenced by Shaftesbury. He translated Shaftesbury’s essays into German and referred to him often in his writings. He carried on Shaftesbury’s intent to write a Socratic history, by writing his Socratic Memorabilia, Compiled for the Boredom of the Public by a Lover of Boredom, With a Double Dedication to Nobody and to Two. More than the memoirs, Hamann’s search for a new understanding of what it means to be human in Aesthetics in a Nutshell bears the mark of Shaftesbury’s influence. Moreover, despite their different approaches to truth, Hamann adopts Shaftesbury’s view of the habilitating role of humor with regard to truth.
Hamann is deeply religious; God, for him, is certainly not the abstract unity and harmony that serves Shaftesbury and other deists, but is rather creative and passionate—above all He is to be loved and worshipped. More importantly, although for Shaftesbury Christ plays no role in religion, for Hamann religion is inconceivable without Him. Hamann opposes Shaftesbury’s dismissal of the supernatural foundation of religion, and rejects the idea that philosophy is a rival to theology. He objects to natural religion because it is not connected to tradition, sense experience, or history. Hamann accepts, however, Shaftesbury’s positive view of enthusiasm, his criticism of abstractions in philosophy, his identification of theory with practice, and his emphasis on practical morality, self-knowledge as the goal of all knowledge, and human communication as mutual mirroring, as well as Shaftesbury’s views on creativity. He agrees with Shaftesbury on the correspondence of true humor to reality and therefore on the view that humor represents the state of mind in which truth is best apprehended. However, truth, for Hamann, is the reality of Christ that can only be apprehended by faith. Participation in humor is analogous to repentance, which in itself is closely connected with faith. Humor and irony are omnipresent in Hamann’s style because they represent for him categories of understanding. The person who cannot see the humor or the irony literally “cannot see the point.”
During the greater part of the nineteenth century, when naturalism and positivism prevailed, Hamann is generally neglected by leading scholars. Already in 1960, however, Ronald Gregor Smith refers to a “Hamann renaissance” (Smith 1960b, 17; 1960a), which Berlin attributes to Hamann’s originality: Hamann was “a man of original opinions, the importance of which has become apparent only in our time” (Berlin 1962, 272). This includes his view of humor and irony and the crucial role he ascribes to them in the good life.
Hamann holds that there exists a prerational reality, and the way we arrange it is ultimately arbitrary (Hamann 1949–57, III, 191). He denies that there is an objective order, a rerum natura, whether factual or normative, from which all knowledge and all values stem and by which all action can be tested. Reason is given to the heathen, he insists, and the Law to the Jews, so that they can see their ignorance and their sins. The worship of reason that characterizes prominent figures of the Enlightenment, such as Frederick the Great and Voltaire, is not only mistaken, but tyrannical, leading to the suppression of individuality, as well as of the individual’s irrational and unconscious forces. Systems and epistemologies are philosophy’s idols, and few, such as Socrates and Hume in their ignorance of the truth, are able to see through them. God works in ironic ways to advance his purpose. Faith, not knowledge is the answer to ignorance. Hamann sees himself as the Socrates of Christianity, with his wooden arm showing the way, the role that Kierkegaard later adopts for himself.
According to biographer Oswald Bayer, Hamann converts in his 20s to Lutheran Protestantism, the religion of his youth (Bayer 2011). His religious conversion is to a doctrine known to those familiar with the writings of the German Protestant mystics and their followers in Scandinavia and England. They view the sacred history of the Jews as not merely an account of that nation’s guidance from darkness to light by God’s almighty hand, but a timeless allegory of the inner history of the soul of each person. The sins of individuals are like the sins of nations, and the story of the wanderings of the Israelites, Hamann declares, is the story of his life. This is the inner sense of the biblical words, and he who understands them understands himself because all understanding is self-understanding. The spirit alone can be understood, and to find it the human being needs only, and must only, look within himself. God’s word is the ladder between heaven and earth sent to aid weak and foolish children—it alone will vouchsafe them a glimpse of what they are and why they are as they are, and what their place is, and what they must do, and what they must avoid. The Bible is a great universal allegory, a similitude of that which occurs everywhere and at every moment. So indeed is human history and nature properly understood with the eyes not of analytical reason but of faith, trust in God, and self-examination, for all these are one.
To be human is to understand oneself, which can only be accomplished through that kind of exchange in which persons mirror one another, as humans are social by nature. Hamann does not glorify the emotions nor does he prize the power of volition. Rather, the gospel engages an existent being, a unity; faith points to a certain mode of existence of the whole being. Hamann’s individual is the historical, authentic being, as opposed to the abstract “pure” mind inhabiting a body. He is flesh and blood, rational yet emotional, intellectual but also sexual. In his autobiography, Goethe expresses Hamann’s central principle thus: “Whatever a man wants to accomplish—by deed or word—must have as its source his united powers in their totality, since all that is divided is worthless” (Goethe 1848, 446–7). Goethe sees Hamann as a great awakener, the first champion of the unity of the human being involving all faculties—mental, emotional, physical, and creative—as well as the response to the misunderstanding, misrepresentation, and harm created by lifeless French criticism’s dissection of his activity.
Self-knowledge is a descent into hell, yet the human being is described not only in terms of depths, but also of heights (Hamann 1949–57, III, 199). It is the inherent human contradiction that provides the most striking content of self-knowledge. Hamann’s concern is the significance of the “infinite incongruity between man and God” and the “similar incongruity between man and man” (312–13). It is this infinite incongruity that makes all imperatives, no matter how categorical, witnesses to human damnation. Moreover, the greater the approximation to this imperative, the stronger the threat; the more sensitive an individual becomes to this “incongruity,” the less he wishes to ground his personal being in his sense of accomplishment.
Authority must be one and not many. Residing not in reason, but in paradox and absurdity, it is “foolishness to the Greeks” (III, 410; IV 462; see I Cor. I: 23). Hamann’s principal emphasis is on the humility of God and the corresponding humility of the human being. God is humble in condescending to be the Father in creation, the Son in incarnation, and the Holy Spirit that communicates the message of life through human history, human language, and a human book. The corresponding humility of the human being is the sine qua non condition for understanding the Bible. If the condescension of God is God’s humility, the response of the individual’s life that “answers to” this humility is faith or humility. Faith is the mode of existence of the whole human being—head, heart, and bowels—which corresponds to God’s condescension, receives God’s gifts under the conditions in which they are given, and therefore sees the exalted in the lowly, the majestic in the humble, the Lord of glory in the Crucified, the Christ in the bread and wine, the Presence of God in all His creation, and the Spirit in human language. This humility is similar to the concern, the single-mindedness, the tenderness, the warmth, and the sensitivity to the Other found in friends and particularly in lovers (II, 171).
For Hamann, faith is not irrational or even “super-rational.” It is not a leap across an abyss, but a stooping down. It is not discontinuous with our experience as creatures of God, but only discontinuous with the ways we conduct ourselves. Although “crisis” and “decision” are part of the whole cloth of human existence, these phenomena are carefully guarded from overemphasis. Hamann expresses his own “conversion” as a meditation over a considerable period of time (“The Diary of a Christian,” 1949–57, I). Yet faith is a miracle, the miracle par excellence: It is a gift of the Spirit. “Miracle” points to the fact that one cannot engineer this event of faith in another person, as faith is “not communicable as a type of goods …” (To Jacobi, 27–30 Apr. 1787). Miracle does not mean the irrational and the “supernatural” because if all is of God, then all is natural. For Hamann, miracle is not an erratic disturbance in the external order of things. Miracle is an event in the inner being of the individual; it is the mover from pride to humility, from independence to dependence: “All the miracles of the holy scriptures happen in our souls” (Hamann 1955–79, I, 78).
The opposite of faith as humility is the human predicament of the separation from God, which is maintained by pride and an unwillingness to relinquish the human drive for autonomy and passion for self-dependence. This is sin. In its intellectual form this predicament is illustrated by the philosophy of Hamann’s day. The criteria for faith as humility are derived from the Object of faith, the Truth itself: Genuine God in condescension and genuine man in humility (i.e., Jesus Christ). The criteria for faith are given by the appearance of truth, and the truth is marked off by these criteria.
This view of condescension in Hamann has several correlates. First, the revelation of God comes in concealed form, as the lowly and the offensive. God’s means of reaching the individual or God’s revelation are concrete, even foolish. The Holy Spirit has become a history writer of foolish, indeed sinful human actions (First Hellenistic Letter, 1955–79, II, 171). The only appropriate mode for the incredible condescension of God in telling us about the creation is the simple, the lowly and the foolish. In fact, Hamann’s life and authorship are a commentary on the first four chapters of First Corinthians from which his grave inscription was taken: “The one becomes all; the Word becomes flesh; the Spirit becomes letter; to the Jews an offense, to the Greeks foolishness …” Hamann declares that “the foolishness of Christianity” is entirely to his taste and the desire of his heart, suitable to his “sound reason and human feelings …” (To Jacobi, 1–2 March 1786; To Jacobi, 1–5 December 1784).
A second correlate of Hamann’s view of condescension is that truth is tied to the sensual and the physical. His concern is a concept of truth that implicates faith. If truth is flesh (John I: 14), then Christianity is incompatible with, or at least cannot allow itself to be dominated by, certain concepts of truth. Under the conditions of existence pure truth, abstracted from the sensual and material, is inaccessible. A third correlate is that the natural and the concrete take primacy over the artificial and the abstract. A fourth and final correlate is that God takes seriously the human situation of existence in the flesh as well as human history. That which has occurred in the Incarnation is not an isolated truth, but has pregnant suggestions for understanding Hamann’s view of his task as a thinker and his existence as a Christian. This is the significance of his program of metaschematism—taking up his opponent’s position as if it were his own in order to expose its weaknesses and contradictions. It is also the significance of his style and method, exemplified in his use of humor and irony.
HUMOR AND IRONY
Hamann’s style is his soul, a deliberate mimicry of the Incarnation to which it is a witness. Referring to the Memorabilia, James O’Flaherty notes, “all the elements which characterize the outward form of the work are designed so as to transcend themselves, to point beyond themselves to a greater reality” (O’Flaherty 1967, 84). Years later, Hamann emphasizes this principle as characteristic of his writings in general: “The inner or invisible part of my few writings may indeed even remain the most excellent part. …” (Letter to J. G. Herder, 20 March, 1773; Hamann 1955–79, III, 40). Such a practice was for him symbolic of God’s dealing with the human being, and, hence, was more veridical than classical art with its rationalistic implication of being an adequate and exhaustive surrogate for that which it represents.
In an attempt to understand Hamann’s view of his own method, we can do no better than to consider the lines he wrote in 1773 to Friedrich Carl von Moser:
Your Excellency has had the grace to sympathize most cordially with the invisible aspect of my writings. … Socrates’ vocation of transplanting morality from Olympus to the earth and of rendering it visible in a practical way coincides with my own in that I have sought to profane a higher sanctuary and, to the proper umbrage of our lying, sham, and boastful prophets, to make it commonplace in an analogous way. In short, all my opuscula taken together comprise an Alcibiadean shell. Everyone has found fault with the form of the satyr or Pan, and no one has taken notice of the old relic of the smaller Luther catechism … (December 1; Hamann 1955–79, III, 66)
In Plato’s Symposium, Alcibiades compares Socrates to Silenus, ugly outside and beautiful inside. In his writings, Hamann seeks to emulate the Alcibiadean shell, hiding the Christian message the same way Socrates has hidden Pagan ethics.
One form of Hamann’s style, which is used as a variant form of concealment, is his humor. Hamann applies the same categories of understanding that are central to his theological epistemology. Contrary to the usual philosophical categories, they are the only appropriate modes of thought for grasping the truth, that is, the “Word that has become flesh.” Because he considers humor and irony categories of understanding he uses them abundantly in his writings. Participation in humor, he claims, is analogous to repentance, which in itself is closely connected with faith, and the person who cannot understand the humor cannot see the truth.
Faith is the existence of the whole person in the mode of humility. It has the further correlates of, (1) offense at God’s condescension, (2) the concealment of God’s revelation, (3) a characterizing sign of contradiction, and (4) metaschematism. Hamann uses humor to express the first three ideas and irony for the fourth.
1. To express God’s condescension, Hamann uses the device of Stillbruch or contrasts. Hamann’s style of writing attempts to conform deliberately to the truth in Christ (i.e., to the condescension of God in Incarnation and in the Spirit). Truth is always embodied for Hamann. The more elevated the concept, the more he seems delighted in juxtaposing it to what is lowly, eccentric, or even trivial. The contrasts involved in Stillbruch stem from his notion of the brokenness and incompleteness of human nature and the world, and thus form the profoundest depths of his religious faith. The effect of mixing the farcical with the sublime is always to raise a question in the reader’s mind as to the author’s real intention, a question that can only be resolved by further reflection beyond the self-contradictory appearance.
2. Conformity to the Incarnation means conformity to the “truth which lies in concealment” (Hamann 1949–57, II, 77). This is the theological theory of Kneschtsgestalt Christi, which emphasizes the contradiction of Christ himself appearing in the “form of a servant,” as the Apostle Paul says in his letter to the Philippians (2:7), and the idea that divinity most often appears in lowly form and is thus often unrecognized. Hamann insists on a variant of this theory as the inescapable precondition for a valid aesthetic, ethical, and religious knowledge. For Hamann, the genuinely moral person is always better than he appears to be—the “hypocrite reverse” (Hamann 1949–57, III, 410; IV, 462). Authentic knowledge is not a product of overweening reason, he claims, but of ordinary language, which is lower in the hierarchy of things than the ratio (see O’Flaherty 1966). In theological matters he ascertains that divinity appears most redemptive in lowly, despised, or foolish form, that is, in forma servi.
3. Most important for understanding Hamann’s view of humor is Giordano Bruno’s metaphysical “celebrated principle of the coincidence of opposites,” which Hamann opposes to “the principles of contradiction and sufficient reason.” He declares: “I have not been able to endure the latter from my academic youth on, and without Manichaeism have found contradictions elsewhere in the elements of the material and intellectual world” (To Jacobi, 16 Jan. 1785; Hamann 1955–79, III, 107). Everywhere Hamann sees “one note of immeasurable height and depth.” Nonetheless, it is in the Incarnation—where God and man are one—that differences, opposites, and contradictions are most clearly confirmed and made visible. Our very salvation, therefore, is based on this incarnated “coincidence of opposites”: the forgiveness and judgment of God—two opposing concepts that seem to destroy one another. For this reason he relates spiritual beauty to the unlovely, the eccentric, or the grotesque. This is how we arrive at a paradoxical view of reality and Christ as the embodiment of this reality. O’Flaherty explains the centrality of this view in Hamann:
[N]o thinker understood the vital importance of the paradox in religion more clearly than did the Magus. Although Hamann’s conviction that religious truth must be expressed in paradoxical form derived principally from the New Testament, he was also convinced that the early Greek religion had anticipated this insight and that the “rationalist” Sophists had emasculated it. He also calls attention to the contradictions in Socrates. (O’Flaherty 1967, 79)
The contradictions O’Flaherty mentions are Socrates’ homosexuality, which Hamann sees as a moral flaw, and Socrates’ ignorance defined by the god as wisdom (n. 42). Hamann thought his manner of writing more profoundly corresponded to the ambiguity and the raggedness of reality than the writing styles reflecting the prevailing spirit of the age. “Beautiful nature,” “sound nature,” and “good taste,” all Shaftesburean concepts, are lumped together by Hamann, who describes them as “chimeras and as three of the most pernicious prejudices of the ‘century of good taste’ ” (Hamann 1949–57, II, 356). His faith compelled him to speak the one veridical language, namely, the language of paradox and obscure allusion in order to be the wooden arm signpost that points the way (76).
Stillbruch, or contrasts, is associated with the theological doctrine of Knechtsgestalt Christi and the metaphysical doctrine of coincidentia oppositorum. Hamann’s theology determines his aesthetics, which is characterized by mixing the high and the low, concealing, and using contradiction—aims that are well served by humor. What is original with Hamann is the application of the Biblical doctrine of Knechtsgestalt Christi to Aesthetics, making of humor the best expression of Christian theological doctrines.
4. Hamann’s principle of “Metaschematismus” partially explains his use of irony. In order to understand what Hamann meant by this term, it is necessary to turn to the passage of the New Testament in which Paul exhorts the members of the Church at Corinth to lay aside their dissensions and their tendency to form cliques. Instead of referring directly to the various disputants at Corinth, he writes about his own relationship to Apollos and about the relationships of those who would follow him and those who would follow Apollos. He does this in order to lead them by an indirect method to an understanding of their own general predicament: “And these things, brethren, I have in a figure transferred to myself and to Apollos for your sakes that ye might learn in us not to think of men above that which is written, that none of you should be puffed up for one against the other” (I Cor. 4:6). Employing Paul’s Greek word, meaning to “transfer in a figure,” Hamann calls the process “metaschmatisieren” and extends its meaning.
For Hamann, to metaschematize means to substitute a set of objective relationships for an analogous set of personal or existential relationships, or the reverse, in order to determine through the insight born of faith their common meaning. In Hamann, it refers to the taking up of his opponent’s position—the assumption of another cause as if it were his own in order to expose its weaknesses and contradictions. On January 28, 1776, he wrote to Herder: “You know that this unknown figure is one of my cherished advantages in writing, especially in regard to that which I call the economy of the plan and which is called in poetry the fable” (Hamann 1955–79, III, 215). Thus, Hamann’s literary method requires direct personal involvement and indirect communication. The fables of an Aesop or a La Fontaine, for example, are a method of indirect communication; but they are not metaschematic, for they do not relate in any way to objective facts, and they do not bespeak the personal involvement of their authors. They share, however, one important feature with Hamann’s method: their real meaning is to be sought beneath the surface appearance. “Genuine insight into any spiritual reality does not, according to the Magus, spring directly from either the objective or the subjective facts of a given situation alone, but from the interpretation made possible by transferred or metaschematized relationships illuminated by faith” (O’Flaherty 1967, 90). What Hamann does, however, is to recognize that the base elements of life may, if transformed, serve as more effective symbols of the spirit than those elements that are by nature noble. This conception does not originate with Hamann, but is derived from the Biblical revelation and Christian theology. The Greek myths before the ancient rationalists succeeded in emasculating them are an anticipation of the Christian point of view.
It is the principle of metaschematism that determines the inner form of Hamann’s writings, “the unitary principle of organization which lends inner form to what seems at first glance to be the chaotic tangle of ideas in his writings” (Unger 1991, I, 502): “Genuine insight into any spiritual reality does not, according to the Magus, spring directly from either the objective or the subjective facts of a given situation alone, but from the interpretation made possible by transferred or metaschematized relationships illuminated by faith” (O’Flaherty 1967, 90). The Magus writes in the Socratic Year to J. G. Lindner: “I have had to write a great deal and about difficult things; therefore I have exerted myself to be brief and I have not been able to make my thoughts clearer otherwise than by expressing their main features as strongly as possible and by transferring them to foreign objects” (Hamann 1955–79, I, 324).
Hamann uses the very language of his opponent, or employs sarcasm or irony, often without warning, or any indication of its presence. He expresses himself “in many tongues” and speaks the language of the “Cretan, Arabian, white man, Moor, and Creole” (To J. G. Lindner, 18 Aug. 1759). The prophets are models of ironic style, in contrast to the “children of unbelief,” who show a weak aptitude for irony (To his brother, 21 May 1760). Hamann’s identification with Socrates for the purpose of wrestling with two intellectuals of the Enlightenment, Kant and Christoph Berens, for whom Socrates meant so much, is an example of his “metaschematism.” When he writes that there is “no better sword than Goliath’s” (To J. G. Lindner, 5 June 1759), Hamann may have been thinking of the Incarnation, whereby God identifies Himself with the human being and in effect seizes the weapons of those who have become his enemies, and in this form of irony, “catches the conscience” of humankind, turning His enemies into His own people. Hamann wishes to emulate this method despite the dangers of falling into sophistry, on the one hand, or into an autonomous, secularist enterprise on the other, two dangers he did not succeed in avoiding at times.
In addition to using irony to expose the weaknesses and contradictions of his opponent’s position, Hamann also uses irony, albeit negatively, to point to human finitude. Irony, for Hamann, is lower than humor, which also has a positive function: Humor opens the individual to paradoxical truth, thereby preparing the way to the truth of the Incarnation. Irony is necessity’s iron law of negation, canceling all human striving and aspirations, so that they amount to nothing. Whereas irony is the grim fate that inevitably triumphs over human finitude, ensuring that all human projects end in death, humor to Hamann is divine freedom, disjunctive with irony’s grim necessity. Humor, in this view, is positive in that it affirms that God is wholly other. Thus, if truth ever penetrates the sphere of human endeavor, it will surely appear very different from our finite understanding of what it ought to look like. In other words, divine reason is fundamentally disjunctive with human reason and consequently bound to appear absurd to humans. For Hamann, humor is the appropriate human attitude toward Divine folly because only in the absurd does the possibility of seeing God arise. The significance of humor, then, is not only to expose the impoverished state of finite reason, but also to laugh at all human attempts to scale the heavens with unassisted understanding. Humor’s positive function is higher than irony’s negative function: It opens a person to the acceptance of the reality of paradoxical truth, and ultimately to the acceptance of the highest paradox of all—the incarnation. Thus, humor is the road to salvation.
The habilitating function of humor, which Hamann inherited from Shaftesbury and made his own, influenced Kierkegaard. The latter continues Hamann’s use of irony and humor as devices of indirect communication in the service of Christianity, adopts Hamann’s view of humor’s superiority to irony, and most importantly, embraces humor as the means for opening the human being to paradoxical truth. In the next chapter, we see the extent of the influence of “the greatest humorist in Christianity” (Pap. II A 75), as Kierkegaard labels Hamann, on the Danish philosopher’s view of the role of humor in the good life.