 All forms of knowledge, of learning and development even of the most natural functions, require the help of another. (The ‘Knight of the Rose Cross’, while jesting with Hume, tells us ironically that even eating and drinking, and indeed excretion, are not instinctual or innate but require teaching.) (N III, 28:26–28; N III, 29:7–10) This is conceived not only in such immediately interpersonal ways, but also more widely in the context of the community. The indispensability of ‘the other’ for knowledge is also the reason that Hamann gives the importance he does to tradition in the formation of knowledge. “Our reason arises, at the very least, from this twofold lesson of sensuous revelations and human testimonies” (N III 29:28–30). Years before Kant’s first Critique, Hamann attempts to relate the senses and the understanding and their roles in knowledge, using a characteristically concrete metaphor: the senses are like the stomach, the understanding like blood vessels. Not only do the blood vessels need the stomach to receive the nourishment that they distribute; the stomach also needs the blood vessels to function. This insistence on the mutual dependency and interrelation of sense experience and understanding (as opposed to many Enlightenment views that plumped for either reason or the senses as the dominant party) was refined in his engagement with Kant’s critique. Throughout his life, he was neither materialist, purely empiricist or positivist, nor idealist, rationalist or intellectualist in his epistemology. Rather, he is firmly against dividing knowledge or ways of knowing into different kinds. “The philosophers have always given truth a bill of divorce, by separating what nature has joined together and vice versa” (N III, 40: 3–5). With Kant’s critique, the problem becomes still more urgent; Kant’s treatment of the issue is a “violent, unwarranted, obstinate divorce of what nature has joined together”. Revising Kant’s metaphor of sensibility and understanding as two stems of human knowledge, he suggests we see knowledge as a single stem with two roots. Thus he rejects the division of what can be known a priori from what can be known a posteriori, and many of the consequences of such a stance. Here again he reaches for the ‘Principle of the Union of Opposites’ in his deployment of imagery to suggest a different approach. The relation of the senses and understanding is a ‘hypostatic union’, a ‘communicatio idiomatum’ (phrases borrowed from Christian theological discussion of how the two natures of divine and human are united in Christ). This mysterious union can only be revealed and understood by ‘ordinary language’. (In suggesting that the problems in philosophy can be cured by attending to ‘ordinary language’, he clearly anticipates the late Wittgenstein).