Thus the public use of reason and freedom is nothing but a dessert, a sumptuous dessert.

Influences on Hamann
Hamann was a Pietist Lutheran and a friend (while being an intellectual opponent) of the philosopher Immanuel Kant. For example his work Golgatha and Scheblimini! By a Preacher in the Wilderness (1784) was directed against Moses Mendelssohn's Jerusalem or on Religious Might and Judaism (1782). Also Hamann asserted that the efficacy of a concept arises from the habits it reflects rather than any inherent quality it possesses.

Johann Georg Hamann (27 August 1730 – 21 June 1788) was a noted German philosopher a main proponent of the Sturm und Drang movement and associated by historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin with the Counter-Enlightenment.