Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race.
Category Archive: Johann Georg Hamann
Our reason arises, at the very least, from this twofold lesson of sensuous revelations and human testimonies.
Every phenomenon of nature was a word, – the sign, symbol and pledge of a new, mysterious, inexpressible but all the more intimate union, participation and community of divine energies and ideas.
Indeed, if a chief question does remain: how is the power to think possible? – The power to think right and left, before and without, with and above experience? then it does not take a deduction to prove the genealogical priority of language.
Being, belief and reason are pure relations, which cannot be dealt with absolutely, and are not things but pure scholastic concepts, signs for understanding, not for worshipping, aids to awaken our attention, not to fetter it.
Everything is vain and tortures the spirit instead of calming and satisfying it.
What good to me is the festive garment of freedom when I am in a slave’s smock at home?
The weakness of ourselves and of our reason makes us see flaws in beauties by making us consider everything piece by piece.
Nature is a book, a letter, a fairy tale (in the philosophical sense) or whatever you want to call it.
Everything the human being heard from the beginning, saw with its eyes, looked upon and touched with its hands was a living word; for God was the word.