The philosophy of the Enlightenment comprises three central ideas. The first is that people can give reasonable answers to reasonable questions and thereby gain reliable knowledge about the world.
The second idea states that the answers sought can be found, and the third states that they are all compatible with each other and that no contradictions arise. Under this premise of a world that is completely accessible to human reason, Immanuel Kant, as an admirer of Newtonian physics with its calculability of planetary orbits, developed the idea that astronomy and probably all of physics was approaching the stage of completion and that its representatives would soon know everything there was to know about the stars. Kant saw this expected completeness of human knowledge as a satisfying fact, which is why he was quite surprised when he learned that this thought infuriated a contemporary named Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788). How could anyone have come up with the idiotic idea - Hamann said - that there would soon be no more secrets in the world? As if any human endeavor could come to an end and be completed once and for all! Hamann considered the idea that there are questions that can be answered definitively and conclusively to be disconcerting and downright stupid, as he rantingly proclaimed. Known as the "Magus (Magician) of the North", Hamann was an early representative of the emerging Romantic movement, which countered the Enlightenment attitude of all-encompassing knowledge by pointing out that there are questions - such as the right way for a person to act - that cannot be answered by reason. Hamann contrasted the rational desire for explanation of his era with the much older interest in myths, which people have always used to express their experience of the inexpressible and unspeakable mysteries of nature. For Hamann, God did not act as a mathematician or geometer, but as a poet. He thus addresses a moment of creativity or creation that was immediately familiar to Romantic thinking but rather alien to the Enlightenment program. The creative power of both nature and mankind destroys any hope of the world being predictable and does not allow the future to be something fixed (determined). It remains open!
"God does not act as a mathematician, but as a poet!"
