The magus of the North

The Konigsberg lay theologian and philosopher J. G. Hamann (1730-88) is undeniably an obscure figure. A solitary, isolated thinker inclined to mysticism, he lived all his life in poverty and neglect, despite the admiration of Herder and Goethe. Yet this neglect, Isaiah Berlin argues, is undeserved. Hamann was a man of profoundly original opinions whose importance has only become apparent in our own time. He was the first out-and-out opponent of the Enlightenment, the father of modern European irrationalism, and a crucial forerunner of romanticism and existentialism - a uniquely independent thinker who deserves to be rescued from the comparative oblivion in which, at any rate in the English-speaking world, he has languished since his death two centuries ago.