 Hamann is sometimes portrayed simply as an opponent of “the Enlightenment”. This presupposes of course that “the Enlightenment” constitutes a unified stance on a number of philosophical issues, an assumption which is questionable. The majority of Hamann scholars today see his position in a more complex way. Hamann opposed many of the popular convictions of his time. However, Hamann fought his contemporaries on many fronts; therefore there were often areas of considerable agreement with some of his opponents. One example would be the way that he deployed Hume as a weapon against Enlightenment rationalism, not least against Kant (although Hamann was the one who introduced Kant to Hume’s writings in the first place). Although Hamann, as a Christian, had profound disagreements with Hume’s thought in its atheistic aspects, nevertheless he used Humean skepticism in his own deconstructive writings. Hume’s doubts about the reliability and self-sufficiency of reason were grist to Hamann’s mill. Hume’s insistence that “belief” underlies much of our thinking and reasoning was adopted and deployed by Hamann, often with a linguistic sleight of hand. By using the word “Glaube” (which in German includes both “belief” in an epistemic sense and “faith” in a religious sense), Hamann could assert that “faith”, not rational grounds, underlies his contemporaries’ high valuation of reason. Thus even the enthusiastic advocates of impartiality and “reason”, who are also skeptics about “blind faith”, have ultimately only faith as the ground for their convictions.