Faith & Spirit Quote by Johann G. Hamann

Hamann is trying to blow up the Enlightenment fantasy that knowledge begins in cool, detached reason. He starts where the philosophers of his day claimed to be most trustworthy: sense experience. But he flips the register. What you hear, see, and touch isn’t raw data awaiting rational processing; it’s already speech. The world arrives not as neutral matter but as “a living word,” charged with address and intention. That adjective matters: “living” pushes back against the era’s mechanical universe, the idea that reality is a dead system of laws you can master if you just measure it hard enough.

The subtext is theological and polemical. “For God was the word” borrows the muscular opening of John’s Gospel (“In the beginning was the Word”), meaning Hamann isn’t offering a poetic metaphor so much as a rival epistemology. If creation is linguistic, then interpretation isn’t an optional overlay; it’s the human condition. And if the Word is divine, then reason is never sovereign. It’s a participant in a conversation it didn’t start, bounded by revelation, tradition, and the stubborn, symbolic thickness of lived experience.

Context sharpens the edge: Hamann is a proto-Romantic irritant in an age drunk on clarity. His target is the Enlightenment drive to purify language into transparent concepts. He insists that truth comes to us embodied, historical, and sensuous - not as abstract propositions but as meaning that can be encountered, mishandled, loved, resisted. The line works because it re-enchants perception without turning it into mere mysticism: your hands matter, your eyes matter, and yet they’re never just instruments. They’re readers.