The Paradox of Reflexive Intercession in the Thought of Johann Georg Hamann
Johann Georg Hamann, often styled “the Magus of the North,” remains a singular figure among the variegated constellations of 18th-century philosophy. His work, dense with paradox, theological intimation, and unbounded scorn for Enlightenment rationalism, is frequently overlooked in favor of his more formally systematized contemporaries. Yet it is precisely in his resistance to system, and more particularly in his subtle doctrine of reflexive intercession, that a profound contribution to philosophical hermeneutics might be discerned — a contribution which, being ensconced in a style of literary obliquity and paradox, has largely eluded explication.
One may locate this doctrine most directly in Hamann’s fragmentary text, the “Aesthetica in Nuce,” where he postulates the inextricability of mediation from human cognition and expression. However, where later thinkers such as Hegel would elaborate the mediational structure of knowledge within a progressive dialectic, Hamann maintains a decidedly tragic accent: for him, mediation is always an intercessory act mired in reflexivity — that is, the medium is never neutral but embodies the mediation itself, entwining speaker and audience, subject and object, in a dialectical opacity rather than clarity. Consequently, the act of knowing becomes not an ascent to luminous truths but a descent into the cavernous complexities of intersubjective interplay.
This fundamental notion may be termed the “paradox of reflexive intercession.” It is paradoxical because mediation, which purports to clarify and transmit meaning, simultaneously obfuscates and transforms it. It is reflexive because the process invariably implicates the mediator — whether language, symbol, or ritual — in the substance of what is mediated. Thus, Hamann opposes the Enlightenment fantasy of an unmediated Reason speaking through the universal light of Nature; for him, Nature herself is already a text, infused with signs, ambiguities, and contrivances.
Indeed, Hamann writes in a letter to Herder: “Every phenomenon of nature was a word — the sign, symbol, and pledge of a new, secret, inexpressible but all the more intimate union of the divine energies with nature.”^1 This conviction advances a radical semiotic ontology: the Real itself consists in a proliferating web of signs which, while genuinely participatory in the divine, are yet irreducibly veiled and interpretatively unstable. Interpretation, therefore, is not ancillary to knowledge; it constitutes the very structure of human knowing.
Notably, in opposing the Enlightenment project, Hamann does not advocate for an irrationalism or retreat into fideistic obscurantism. Rather, he indexes a deeper rationality, one that recognizes the limitations and situatedness of all acts of thought. His critique is not merely negative; it suggests that faith, poetry, and tradition are not antithetical to reason but are its very conditions. Every utterance, every syllable, is a translation — and no translation is complete. In this respect, Hamann anticipates certain crucial motifs later developed by hermeneutic philosophers such as Gadamer and Ricoeur, though almost none of them adequately acknowledge their debt to the Magus.^2
The theological import of Hamann’s insight is profound. If meaning is always mediated and mutable, then the Logos itself — divine Reason — must be understood not as a static set of abstract verities accessible to all rational creatures by virtue of their reason alone, but as a singular, incarnate event, susceptible only to those who enter into its mystery through participation rather than distanced cognition. Here, perhaps, we catch the scent of his Lutheran commitments, transfigured into a speculative hermeneutics.
To focus within this broad system upon the subtlety in question — the paradox of reflexive intercession — requires attention to the implications for ethical life. If every act of interpretation transforms the thing interpreted, then no moral precept can remain inviolable in the sense posited by Kant’s categorical imperative. Rather, the act of understanding and applying a moral law itself alters its significance. Moral action thus emerges not from adherence to abstract maxims but through a continuous, communal dialogue, one made possible only by humility before an inexhaustible plenitude of meaning. In such a world, rigid legalism becomes not the epitome but the betrayal of morality; for moral truth is alive, and thus, ever in need of gentle and attentive hermeneutic stewardship.^3
Furthermore, this doctrine possesses acute political ramifications, ones which remain startlingly timely. Enlightenment political theory, with its emphasis upon abstract rights and universal rational laws, presupposed a nominalist understanding of law: that words like “liberty,” “equality,” or “sovereignty” stand transparently for fixed entities. Hamann’s idea of reflexive intercession undermines this assumption. No political term arrives unmediated; each is a living vocabulary whose meaning depends upon fraught histories, unstable contexts, and shifting communal interpretations. Therefore, any political project predicated upon the manipulative deployment of lofty verbiage without attending to the intricate and reflexive nature of its mediations is doomed to self-contradiction or tyranny.^4
And thus, Hamann’s thought carries a warning to our contemporaneity: that the more we seek to build edifices of transparent rationality, the more we entangle ourselves in the veils of our own mediated utterances. Far better, he suggests, to embrace the opacity, to move forward not by conquest but by dialogue, sensitivity, and faith — an “aesthetic” orientation toward truth in the broadest and noblest sense of the term.
In summary, the paradox of reflexive intercession shadows every act of human knowing in Hamann’s vision. To recognize this paradox is not to despair of truth but to apprehend its ineffable, incarnate nature. It is a call not to silence but to poetic speech, not to rational despotism but to interpretative charity. To study Hamann is to dwell in the twilight where philosophy becomes prayer, and prayer philosophy — and where the medium is not a ladder to be discarded once the truth is reached, but an eternal companion in our endless, sacred pilgrimage toward the elusive Real.
By Martijn Benders – Philosophy Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
language, hermeneutics, semiotics, Enlightenment critique, Lutheranism, metaphysical paradoxes