 These factors combine to make Hamann’s writings notoriously difficult to understand and interpret. Goethe observed that when reading Hamann, “one must completely rule out what one normally means by understanding” [Goethe, 550]. Even if one has – or painfully acquires, or borrows from other current scholars – the breadth of reference to understand the source of an allusion or citation, it is not always clear what the citation is doing there, and what Hamann means to suggest by referring to it. He delighted in sporting with his reader; preferring to present a balled fist and leave it to the reader to unroll it into a flat hand (to borrow one of his own images; cf. the end of the “Metacritique of the Purism of Reason”, 1780).