 Hamann’s treatment of reason instead is a deconstruction, both of the prosopopoeic use of the word and the Enlightenment valuation of it. There is no such thing as reason — there is only reasoning. Reasoning, as something we do, is as fallible as we are, and as such is subject to our position in history, or own personality, or the circumstances of the moment. ‘It’ is therefore not a universal, healthy and infallible ‘faculty’ as Hamann’s Enlightenment contemporaries often maintained: