The Recursive Paradox of Johann Georg Hamann’s Linguistic Ontology
In the vast, neglected corridors of Enlightenment counter-thought, there echoes the obscure but endlessly resonant voice of Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788), that thorn in the side of rationalist orthodoxy. Overshadowed by his cosmopolitan friend Kant and long dismissed as the “Magus of the North” whose gnomic prose concealed more madness than method, Hamann has lately begun to be reevaluated as a precursor of postmodern hermeneutics. Yet there remains one largely overlooked feature of his work, a subtle but deeply consequential ontological conviction nested in his rhapsodic musings: namely, his recursive theory of meaning as originating not in reason but in language itself, which in turn is ontologically grounded in divine Incarnation. In this brief exposition, I aim to articulate how Hamann’s metaphysics of language entails a paradox wherein the origin of meaning dissolves into a simultaneity of speaker and Word, thus overturning the primacy of reason and rehabilitating mystery as epistemic foundation.
Let us begin by recalling that for Hamann, “Reason is language—Logos itself: divine and embodied,” a declaration which appears in his 1784 letter to Johann Gottfried Herder. This identity of reason and language is not merely metaphorical; it is ontological. The inceptive act of meaning, for Hamann, cannot be isolated in some Cartesian cogito or in a disembodied formal logic but takes place in the living act of speech, and more mysteriously, in the Logos being made flesh. Language, then, is not an instrument of thought but the medium through which thought becomes possible—a view echoing Vico and anticipating Heidegger’s dictum that “Language is the house of Being.” Yet Hamann’s theological commitment propels him beyond these secular formulations, rooting the linguistic in Christological dogma.
The subtlety we explore here resides not merely in Hamann’s rejection of Enlightenment rationalism, but in the recursive structure of his linguistic ontology: language comes from God (through the Incarnation), and God speaks through language (in revelation), which is itself intelligible only through language. This circularity is no accident. It is a reflection of Hamann’s conviction that the divine mystery is tautegorical—not reducible to discursive clarity, but self-same and self-grounding. He writes in his “Aesthetica in Nuce” (1762), “All human knowledge is but a reflex of the divine poetry which created the world.” Note the word “reflex”: meaning bounces back upon itself; the sign does not transparently point to the signified, but enfolds it in symbolic veiling.
It is here that the recursive paradox manifests: if all knowledge is linguistic, and all language is theological, then even meta-language—that which purports to analyze language—is bound within the same divine recursion. One cannot stand outside of language to assess its structure, because such a position is itself only attainable through language. In this sense, Hamann prefigures not only Derrida’s critique of the metaphysics of presence but also Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, though by a wholly different route. Whereas Gödel reaches recursion through arithmetic formalism, Hamann arrives at it via the Incarnate Word. Both, however, foreclose the hope of a complete and self-contained rational system.
To make this philosophical insight more vivid, consider Hamann’s re-interpretation of the Fall of Man. For the rationalist theologians of his day, the Fall merely inaugurated moral alienation; for Hamann, it was a linguistic catastrophe. Adam’s act was not disobedience per se but a misuse of naming—a deviation from the divine logos entrusted to him in Eden. To sin is to miss the mark not merely ethically, but semiotically. If language is sacred, then error in speech is error in being. Thus, redemption must take the form of restored language—a theology of poetic reconciliation.
Hamann writes, “Poetry is the mother tongue of the human race,” implying that metaphor, myth, and parable are not ornamental but originary. In denying this, Enlightenment thinkers invert the order of epistemic trust: they privilege the abstract over the symbolic, clarity over ambiguity, the proposition over the parable. But Hamann insists that the parable is more foundational because it allows for multiplicity of sense—a hallmark of divine communication. It is not clarity but fecundity that marks the origin of meaning.
The implications of this view are momentous. First, it undermines the notion of a “neutral” or “objective” language for philosophy or science. All speech is saturated with presuppositions, not only cultural and hermeneutic but metaphysical. Second, it suggests that the only appropriate posture of the human mind toward truth is one of poetic humility, for truth unveils itself only in forms that resist transparent disclosure. Third, it challenges the anthropocentric conceit of meaning as human construct, asking instead whether man might be the medium through which divine meaning unfolds.
Scholars such as Isaiah Berlin and John Betz have underlined Hamann’s role as precursor to Romanticism and theological hermeneutics respectively, but neither has attended fully to the paradoxical recursion of Hamann’s linguistic metaphysics. This oversight may stem from the difficulty of his style—disjointed, aphoristic, and studded with biblical allusions. But to read Hamann superficially is to miss his greatest contribution: namely, the retrieval of mystery not as epistemic deficiency but as metaphysical necessity. If God speaks, then God’s Word exceeds our grasp. And if God’s speech becomes flesh, then ontology unfolds in metaphor, and metaphor in turn becomes the only authentic epistemology.
This realization places Hamann not merely in opposition to the likes of Kant and Wolff, but outside their conceptual framework altogether. He cannot be apprehended through categories of rationalist critique, for he inhabits the dimension of the oracular, the inspired, the poetic. And yet his thought is not irrational—it is supra-rational, working along dimensions of symbol and recursion that logic can only imperfectly delineate.
In conclusion, Hamann’s recursive view of language as both the origin and expression of being, rooted in theological Incarnation, reveals a profound insight obscured by his reputation for mystical obscurantism. His vision offers not a repudiation of truth, but a recalibration of its nature: not as proposition but as paradox; not as clarity, but as fecund, reverential mystery. Herein lies his enduring significance—for in our age, ravaged by the illusions of transparency and mastery, we would do well to remember the Magus of the North, who taught that to speak truly is to speak in riddles, and to know is to dwell in the shadowed brilliance of the Word made flesh.
By Martijn Benders – Philosophy Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
language, recursion, logos, theological semiotics, hamann, metaphysical linguistics, mystery