Hamann on self-knowledge
"Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost"
We live here on crumbs. Our thoughts are nothing more than fragments. Indeed, our knowledge is a patchwork.
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Is not the very notion of freedom merely something we use to denote various expressions of self-love? This self-love is the heart of our will; in it, all our inclinations and desires, like arteries and veins, have their source and their confluence. We can as little think without being conscious of ourselves as we can will without self-awareness.
The Japanese perceives his idol as being as intimately united with his own ideas and inclinations as the Russian with his beard and the Englishman with his Magna Carta. Thus, the superstitious man, the libertine, and the republican alike defend the object of their self-love with the same fury and longing, and with the same thirst and zeal for freedom.
Why does commerce unite the love of liberty? Because it unites both the property of the people and that of every individual citizen. We love what belongs to us. Freedom here is nothing other than self-interest, and thus a branch of self-love turned towards our possessions.
Hence there is so great a resemblance between the effects of self-love and those of freedom. Indeed, the former is the law of the latter, as Young says:
Man, love thyself;
In this alone, free agents are not free.
Just as all our faculties of knowledge have self-knowledge as their goal, so is self-love the goal of our desires and inclinations. The former is our wisdom, the latter our virtue. Insofar as man does not know himself, he can in no way love himself. Only truth, therefore, can make us free; this is the message of heavenly wisdom, which has come into the world that we might learn to know and to love ourselves.
Why is man incapable of knowing his own self? This must depend solely upon the condition of our souls. Nature, which teaches us of the invisible only through riddles and parables, shows us through the conditions to which our bodies are subject how we may imagine the relation of our spirit to other spirits. Just as our body is subject to the laws of external things — air, earth, and the influence of other bodies — so too must we imagine our soul. It is ceaselessly affected by higher spirits with which it stands in connection; this necessarily renders our own self so indistinct that we cannot recognise, distinguish, or define it.
Our inability to know ourselves may lie as much in the very essence of our nature as in a particular condition or disposition thereof. The motion of a clock presupposes not only that it has been rightly constructed, but also that it has been wound. If our nature is in some strict sense dependent upon the will of a higher being,, then it follows that only by means of the concept of this being can we understand the former; and the clearer our insight into this being, the more enlightened we must become regarding our own nature.
Our life is the primary good and the source of our blessedness. If we make the former the object of contemplation, its nature shows us what qualities the latter must possess. This life is so utterly precarious that the slightest accident may deprive us of it, and we have no more power over it than any other thing may boast of having. Yet the entire chain of possible causes through which the soul’s connection with the body may cease and be severed lies under the command of Him to whom we owe our life. All instruments are in His hand. With our blessedness, therefore, it must be the same. Hence we see how necessarily our self is grounded in its Creator, that the knowledge of our self lies by no means within our power, and that in order to measure its limits we must penetrate into the very bosom of that divinity who alone can discover and reveal the whole secret of our being.
If we wish to understand our own self — our nature, our destiny, and our limitation — we must therefore take recourse to that first cause of things upon which we so directly depend. Besides this first cause, we must also know all the intermediate beings with whom we stand in relation, and who, through their influence, may either assist or alter our development. All these aspects together we may call the condition of human nature in the world.
If I wish to explore my own self, it is not merely a question of knowing what man is, but also what station this self holds. Are you free or enslaved? Are you a minor, an orphan, a widow — and what is your relation to higher beings who lay claim to your reverence, who subdue you, who deceive you, and who seek to exploit your ignorance, weakness, and folly?
Hence it appears upon how many facts our self-knowledge depends — that it must remain impossible or most imperfect and deceptive so long as these facts are not disclosed or revealed to us; that reason can only perceive analogies, and thereby attain to but a dim light; so that only through insight into the divine order and wisdom of creation may we arrive at an experience applicable to the particular purpose of His secret will concerning us.
Our life consists in a union of the visible with a higher being, whom we can infer only through His workings. Our own will is, as it were, surrendered to this union — and exposed to countless other contingencies. Both parts obey, in an incomprehensible and hidden manner, Him whose government and providence give us life and by whose goodness it is sustained. These and similar ideas are indications we must heed if we would draw any conclusions concerning ourselves.
To make the knowledge of our self easier, every human being is as a mirror in which I may see myself. As the image of my face is reflected in the water, so my self is reflected in every fellow-creature. That this self might become as dear to me as my own, Providence has endowed human fellowship with so many advantages and charms.
God and my neighbour therefore belong to my self-knowledge, my self-love. What a glorious law, what a wonderful lawgiver, who commands us to love Him with all our heart and our neighbour as ourselves! This is the only and true self-love for man, the highest self-knowledge for a Christian — who not only loves God as the supreme, most beneficent, sole and absolute good, but also knows that God Himself, in the strictest sense, has become his neighbour and the neighbour of his fellow-man, that we might thus have every possible reason to love both God and our neighbour.
Consequently, it is only our faith that unites heavenly knowledge, true happiness, and the highest freedom of human nature. Reason, spirit, and morality are three daughters of true natural philosophy, which has no better source than revelation itself.