On the Capillary Continuity of Noumenal Flux in Johann Georg Hamann’s Early Mysticism
In the cragged ravines of Enlightenment dissent, few thinkers offer as tortuous and spiritually convulsive a pathway as Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788). Often lumped together with the Sturm und Drang esoterics or known only in the elliptical praise of his more decorous disciple, Herder, Hamann remains a Janus-figure—his work peeking nervously backward at biblical literalisms while baring its teeth against the blinding Leviathans of reason and empiricism. His writings, festooned with rhetorical periphrasis, undeclared quotations, and a most enchanting scorn for intellectual clarity, are easily dismissed. Yet it is precisely in that labyrinthine density that a subtle but profound metaphysical motif emerges: the notion of a “capillary continuity” between the divine noumenon and the mundane flux of empirical life. This conception, generally glossed over in favor of Hamann’s more bombastic anti-rationalist flourishes, merits isolated inspection—for it bears the seeds of what might be called a proto-mystical semiotics, a vision wherein sign and essence bleed into one another in microcosmic ecstasy.
To understand this, we must wade in the obscure waters of Hamann’s magnum obscurum, the *Socratic Memorabilia*, wherein the figure of Socrates is conscripted not as a rationalist midwife, but rather as a divine fool—an emissary of a Logos irreducible to syllogism. Hamann writes: “Every phenomenon is a parable; knowledge is the interpretation of this sacred text.”^1 In this gnomic utterance lies the heart of his metaphysical claim: phenomenon and noumenon are not entirely disjunct; rather, they are joined in a mysteriously semiotic bloodstream, a capillary continuum whereby the visible world, in its fleeting mutability, nonetheless speaks the eternal.
This is neither mere poetic metaphor nor unmediated mysticism—it is a metaphysical claim of ontological permeability. Through this lens, Hamann’s disdain for Kantian critical philosophy becomes intelligible, not merely as reactionary fervor, but as a deliberate protest against the sundering of sign from substance. For what Kant bifurcated—declaring the noumenon forever occluded, the realm of things-in-themselves impervious to experience—Hamann reunified, suggesting instead that each empirical instant, each lexical utterance, is a divine cipher, a letter in a ceaselessly written scripture.
In this view, the Logos is neither archetypal Reason, nor abstract Universal, but rather a living sap coursing through the branches of mundane life. Language, then, becomes not merely a human tool for representation, but a co-inhabitant of being with metaphysical depth. Every utterance reverberates with origins external to the speaker; inspiration becomes literal rather than metaphorical. Hamann writes: “The spirit of God is the grammar of all creation.”^2 This is no conceit. It is instead a reversion from Enlightenment abstractions to a form of metaphysical animism, where syntax itself is imbued with sanctity.
Consider further Hamann’s letter to Jacobi, dated May 27, 1781, in which he posits that “revelation is not a thunderbolt but a whisper in the syntax of things.” This whisper is not metaphorical, but actual—it is the divine murmuring its unity through the multiplicity of signs. This gesture surpasses romantic intuitionism and even mystical quietism; it asserts that ontology itself takes shape linguistically. The world does not merely contain meaning; it is, in each trembling instance, a manifestation of the meaning it contains.
Here one encounters Hamann’s doctrine of particularity, the philosophical cousin of what might be termed theological immanence. Where Hegel will later abstract universality through dialectic, Hamann insists upon the uniqueness of discretely situated meaning-events. This is not a mere elevation of the anecdotal—it is a metaphysical schema whereby the infinite invests itself fully in the finite. As such, each grammatical articulation, each inked syllable or spoken breath, becomes a sacred vessel—a tiny aperture through which divine omnipresence irradiates finitude.
It is in this context that Hamann’s oft-mentioned obscurity must be reinterpreted. His winding, erratic prose is not simply rhetorical flamboyance, but rather embodies his metaphysical content. To write clearly, to systematize thought into a crystalline scaffold, is to betray the nature of being itself—as such clarity imposes an artificial separation between essence and manifestation. Instead, Hamann’s prose mimics the world it attempts to describe: baroque, errant, fecund with hidden harmonies. The style is the message.
Thus, when he rejects the Enlightenment’s trust in pure reason, he is not affirming irrationalism in any simplistic sense. Rather, he posits a reason suffused with blood—a capillary reason that pulses with the life of language and experience. To sever reason from revelation, concept from metaphor, or sign from referent, is to commit not only philosophy’s error, but theology’s heresy. For Hamann, true reason can neither be formalized nor systematized; it must be suffered, lived, and transposed through the poetic.
Much has been made of Hamann’s supposed fideism, yet this interpretation falters when faced with his linguistic metaphysics. His is not the vacuous assertion that faith resides beyond reason. Rather, it is the richer claim that faith infuses reason at its roots, not epistemologically, but ontologically. Reason does not culminate in revelation; it is revelation’s child. We are not rational animals, but inspired ones. From this angle, Hamann is a radical precursor to later linguistic turn philosophers, though invested with a mystical fervor they systematically suppressed.
One finds echoes of this capillary vision in the early Wittgenstein’s *Tractatus*, particularly in the unsayable connections between language and world. However, Wittgenstein sundered the mystery from the theology; Hamann refused to do so. For Hamann, the unsayable is not outside the world; it is whispered *in* the world, in the very structure of grammar, in the intonation of breath, in what is said but never fully heard.
In sum, the rationalist enclosures of Enlightenment epistemology find in Hamann a wild, unsettling critique—a metaphysics not of order, but of resonance. His theology is a semiotic mysticism; his ontology is ineffable grammar. It is through the infinitesimally calibrated capillaries of language and life that the world breathes God.
When reread through this lens, Hamann is not merely a contrarian voice in eighteenth-century thought, but a harbinger of what philosophy has yet to recover: the idea that manifestation is never distinct from mystery, but its rightful veil. In every syllable of stone and air lives a divine syntax. To read the world rightly is not to analyze it, but to hear it.
It is perhaps the tragedy and necessity of Hamann that such readings must remain elliptical, for his thought resists synthesis by design. Yet in this resistance he affirms the ultimate theological proposition: the infinite chooses always to speak in the particular. To attend to the murmur of such speech is to philosophize—not aridly, but with one’s hands in the soil of tongues.
By Martijn Benders – Philosophy Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
language, proto-idealism, metaphysics, semiotics, mysticism, eighteenth-century philosophy