"All-Crushing" Critic of Metaphysics 253much while rejecting Berkeley so thoroughly. Without Berkeley, there would
be no Hume; without Hume, there would be no Kant. Therefore without
Berkeley, there would be no Kant. Furthermore, Kant's antinomies are for
Hamann antinomies not of reason but of language. When Hamann ironi¬
cally called himself a "misologist," he was calling attention to this. Philoso¬
phers have been misled by language for the longest time, and Kant was no
exception; indeed, in his disregard for language, he was even more misled
by it than others before him. Accordingly, Hamann argued that a critique
of language and its functions was more necessary than overly subtle philo¬
sophical inquiries into the nature of pure reason. It is on this that he tried
to base his own Metakritik.^24
In 1782, Hamann also planned another work that was to be called Schib-
limi, or Epistolary Findings of a Metacritic. He meant to include the follow¬
ing parts:
The first epistle deals with the printed version of Hume's Dialogues; the second with
the hand-written one [i.e., his own translation of Hume that was never published
and appears to be lost] and Mendelssohn's judgment; the third compares Jews and
philosophers; the fourth is a warmed over translation of the last chapter of Hume's
first part of human nature which in 1771 appeared in a couple of Supplements under
the title "Night Thoughts or Confessions of a Skeptic." The fifth will certainly deal
with Kant.. .2S
So Hamann still thought in 1782 that the "Night Thoughts" were relevant
to his dialogue with Kant. What bothered Hamann most in Kant's Critique
was Kant's emphasis on pure reason and purely formal characteristics, and
Kant's tendency to downplay sensation and faith. In other words, what
Hamann found most bothersome was Kant's Platonism. While he admired
Kant's critique of rational theology, he rejected entirely Kant's rational¬
ism as a mysticism of the Platonic sort. Again, Hamann defends his fideism
and attacks Kant's (even more) radical intellectualism by relying on Hume's
arguments.
Kant's contemporaries viewed the Critique as the work of a skeptic. To
them, he was a Humean. There was not only no fundamental incompati¬
bility between the critical enterprise and Hume's skepticism, there was con¬
tinuity; and this was a continuity they did not like. They accused Kant of
being a negative skeptic like Hume. As the review of the Critique in the Göt-
tingische Anzeigen pointed out, it could serve as a good corrective to exag¬
gerated dogmatism. It could sharpen the mind of those who read it, but it
relied too heavily on skeptical arguments and thus was too radical. For this
reason Kant was led toward the sort of idealism that Berkeley had defended.