Fröhliche Philosophie

Im Januar-Heft von First Things bestreitet der orthodoxe Theologe David B. Hart, daß Sören Kierkegaard der witzigste und "most amusing" aller Philosophen sei (wie Thomas C. Oden belegen will).

Sein Kandidat ist der obskure, ungelesene, nicht verstandene, vergessene Johann Georg Hamann.

"... it is worth noting that Kierkegaard’s theory of comedy—at least as Oden has explicated it—is far easier to reconcile with Hamann’s writings than with Kierkegaard’s. The special logic of this theory, after all, is that the Christian philosopher — having surmounted the “aesthetic,” “ethical,” and even in a sense “religious” stages of human existence — is uniquely able to enact a return, back to the things of earth, back to finitude, back to the aesthetic; having found the highest rationality of being in God’s kenosis — His self-outpouring — in the Incarnation, the Christian philosopher is reconciled to the particularity of flesh and form, recognizes all of creation as a purely gratuitous gift of a God of infinite love, and is able to rejoice in the levity of a world created and redeemed purely out of God’s “pleasure.”

Of no philosopher could this be truer than Hamann. He was a man of the deepest, most fervent and adoring piety, and yet of an almost Nietzschean irreverence (“My unrefined imagination has never been able to conceive a Creative Spirit without genitalia”); he was practically a Christian mystic, and yet he delighted in the world of the senses, especially in the joys of sexual love (his repeated and most disdainful accusation against the apostles of Enlightenment was that they were spiritual eunuchs piping their dreary abstractions in shrill falsetto voices). This was so (however scandalous it might occasionally seem) because in the Christian evangel he had encountered a God whose creatures are the work of delight, who is pleased to reveal his majesty in total abasement, and who is Himself always “the Poet in the beginning of days.” For Hamann, the return to finitude was unreserved and utterly charitable; everything he wrote or did was touched with a spirit of festivity; his humor contained no lingering residue of fatalism, irony, or rancor."

Wenn mal wieder etwas Ruhe in mein Herz einkehrt, werde ich mir Hamanns Aesthetica in nuce vornehmen. In der Hoffnung, Bruchstücke davon zu entziffern. Oder wenigstens mich geistreich zu erfreuen.