 At the end of his life, Hamann chose to designate his authorship as “Metacritique”, a word he coined for his engagement with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Instead of creating a systematic theology, or an epistemology, he seems to have seen his work as one that examines the foundations and nature of philosophical and theological critique itself. Rather like the late Wittgenstein, his work was deconstructive; he belongs in the camp of philosophers whom Richard Rorty has described as “edifying and therapeutic” rather than “constructive and systematic” (Rorty, 5–6). He brings to any issue in philosophy not a constructive account, but an approach, a set of convictions, something akin to ethical principles. He anticipated Rorty’s emphasis on the curative aspects of this task; at the end of his life, he wanted his collected works to be published under the title “Curative Baths” (“Saalbadereyen” — a reference to healing practices of the time and an allusion to his father’s profession.) Each volume was to be called a ‘Tub’. This project was sadly never realized, not even under a more conventional title.