Hamanns Socratic Memorabilia: A Translation and Commentary by Johann Georg Hamann

Hamanns Socratic Memorabilia: A Translation and Commentary Reviews

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  Erick

  I've wanted to read Johann Hamann for a while and I finally got around to it. I was very impressed with this work and I hope to read more in the near future.
  Johann Georg Hamann was a German Romantic prose writer; a leader of the so-called "sturm und drang", or "storm and stress" movement, which was really the quintessential German romantic movement. He was opposed to much that passed for enlightenment ideals in the late 18th and early 19th century. He was a committed Lutheran Christian with a strong poetic sense; although, he wrote mostly prose as far as I am aware. He was friends with Kant, but obviously they didn't see eye to eye when it came to the primacy of reason. Hamann influenced quite a number of German writers at the time: Johann Gottfried Herder, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and, later, influenced the Dane, Soren Kierkegaard. One definitely can see some echoes in Kierkegaard. It can probably be safely assumed that as far as writers go, Hamann may have been one of the favorites of Kierkegaard.
  This is one of Hamann's primary works. It is actually more of an essay. It is sort of a commentary on the enlightenment with Socrates as Hamann and the enlightenment philosophers as the sophists. The work itself is fairly short, but the thought is dense enough, with numerous literary allusions, that it warranted a treatment like you have here. O'Flaherty has provided plenty of notes and an ample introduction to make this work more accessible for a first time reader of Hamann. Cambridge has an anthology of Hamann's writings that I intend to read next; one should note that this work is not included in that anthology and that is why I purchased and read this first.