The Magus of the North

Sir Isaiah Berlin here explores the world and the ideas of a man he calls the Enlightenment's "most passionate, consistent, extreme, and implacable enemy," a philosopher whom he considers perhaps the only "wholly original critic of modern times." J.G. Hamann was an eccentric Prussian thinker of the eighteenth century whose peculiar and difficult work was cherished by Kant, Goethe, and other luminaries, yet to the twentieth century this self-styled Magus of the North is all but unknown." "With his customary eloquence and insight, Berlin penetrates to the heart of Hamann's concerns and shows how important they are to modern life — ideas about creativity, the nature of language and thought, human knowledge, secular and spiritual authority. Though Hamann opposed the values we think of as modern — rationalist, secular individualism — and he lived his life in poverty and neglect, his visionary pietism and skeptical empiricism, Berlin argues - his genius - deserve attention and respect.