More specifically concerning: hamann
18.ii.2021
20 February 2021, around 7.40.
‘And it is not worth the trouble of thinking of philosophy; all the more horoscopes! – more than spider-webs in a ruined castle.’ —Hamann, Aesthetica in nuce (trans. Kenneth Haynes)
24.ii.2021
24 February 2021, around 17.25.
‘What would all knowledge of the present be without a divine remembrance of the past, and without an even more fortunate intimation of the future, as Socrates owed to his daemon?’ —Johann Georg Hamann, A flying letter to nobody, the well known (trans. K. Haynes)
fits and starts
1 March 2021, around 8.35.
This a juxtaposition of three quotations about clothes, from Boswell, Hamann, and Thomas Carlyle.
okey-dokey
23 March 2024, around 12.40.
…the field is open to conjecture, so long as conjecture does not soar in the air but follows the true tracks that survive and is in keeping with the character of the times and the persons involved. —Jacob Burckhardt (The Age of Constantine the Great, trans. Moses Hadas, p. 237) One can spend a lot […]
right round
14 April 2024, around 10.23.
Anyone who refuses to grasp the fact that this book contains many traps and multiple, deliberately intended meanings, or who has not managed to find somebody possessing the requisite qualifications and skills not to get hopelessly lost in its pages, should immediately give up all ambition of publishing it in a foreign language, thereby leaving […]
a vexed question
18 April 2024, around 8.39.
That Hamann, the son of a barber-surgeon, does not ask the (im)patient reader: what ails thee? 1But that begs the question of whom the text serves, which need not worry us here.[↩]
the lot of the faint heart
22 April 2024, around 15.34.
“Ich glaube, daß er kein Automat ist” hat, so ohne weiteres, noch gar keinen Sinn. “I believe that he is not an automaton”, just like that, so far makes no sense. —Wittgenstein (Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment, iv; trans. G.E.M. Anscombe et al.) An extract from Jean-Léon Gérôme’s ‘The Artist and His Model’ (1894) […]
moth-eaten notions
5 May 2024, around 4.35.
Minerva and Arachne, engraving by Johann Wilhelm Baur (1641) …a garment becomes a real garment only in the act of being worn; a house where no one lives is in fact not a real house… —Marx (Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus, p. 91) But truly, for mine own part, if I were as tedious as a […]
the frond
22 May 2024, around 10.33.
Words are the living carriers of feeling – only pedants and scholars dilute them with analysis or kill them with devitalising formulae. A word is the stamp of life – the richer the better. —Isaiah Berlin (‘The Magus of the North’ in Three Critics of the Enlightenment, p. 396)
Adversaria (15)
30 June 2024, around 4.16.
‘To fail in everything, it is true, will always remain possible. Nothing will ever give us any insurance against this risk, still less against this feeling’ —Derrida (Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf, p. 19) ‘He is constantly rediscovered and as constantly laid aside. He remains unreadable and unread’ —Isaiah Berlin (‘Vico: Philosophical Ideas’ in […]
august thirst
3 August 2024, around 13.49.
If Wisdom is our Lesson (and what else Ennobles Man? what else have Angels learn’d?), Grief! more Proficients in thy School are made, Than Genius, or proud Learning, e’er could boast. Voracious Learning, often over-fed, Digests not into Sense her motley Meal. This Book-Case, with dark booty almost burst, This Forager on others Wisdom, leaves […]