 Judging from letters late in his life, Hamann preferred to be seen as a “metacritic” of the Enlightenment. His dissatisfactions with what he viewed as a certain Enlightenment program began early, following his conversion to Christianity; and his challenge could be seen not as a blunt, unreasoning opposition to rationality, but as a deeper (and more disruptive) challenge to what rationality and Enlightenment actually consist in. Often these are seen in his resonses to his friend Immanuel Kant. An early challenge came in his first public essay, “Socratic Memorabilia” (1759), which was dedicated to Kant and their mutual friend Christoph Berens. Kant and Berens had sought to cast him as a campaigner on behalf of the Enlightenment. In the essay he portrays Socrates, the hero of the Enlightenment, as a Christ-figure rather than a champion of secular reason. Hamann’s abreaction to what he viewed as a misguided deification and purification of reason reaches a climax in 1784, in his unpublished response to Kant — “Metacritique of the Purism of Reason” (1984) and in an inflamed private letter to Christian Jacob Kraus in the same year. This letter takes issue with Kant’s famous essay “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” (1984). Here he argues that what Kant describes as the intellectual “self-incurred minority” (minority in the sense of being a minor, immaturity, tutelage) of the general public, an (alleged) need to be told what to think, is not self-imposed. Rather, it is imposed, Hamann suggests, on the one hand by a politically authoritarian regime hostile to dissent and political free-thinking, while encouraging religious free-thinking; and on the other hand by professional experts: the “prattle and reasoning of those emancipated immature ones, who set themselves up as guardians”. “True enlightenment,” Hamann concludes sarcastically, “consists in an emergence of the immature person from a supremely self-incurred guardianship.”