Johann Georg Hamann, the German Protestant thinker and critic of the Enlightenment, was born in Königsberg. In no sense a professional philosopher, and largely self-educated, he made his living as a secretary-translator and later as a government warehouse manager in Königsberg.

Writings

Hamann's originality early caught the eye of such diverse figures as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, G. W. F. Hegel, and Søren Kierkegaard, but his famous "darkness"—his opaque style—has daunted all but the most persistent investigators. Study of Hamann has long been dominated by Hegel's picture of him as an irrationalist and the paradigm of an individualist and also impeded by discouraging delays in the publication of complete editions of his works and letters. Following World War I, Hamann's influence on Kierkegaard began to be appreciated, but only more recently have scholars been able to expose...