Johann Georg Hamann is accused of the ›dark style‹ like hardly any other author. This accusation became a topos of Hamann reading and criticism, which continues unabated to this day and only finds its most prominent representatives in Goethe and Hegel. Hamann has repeatedly dealt with questions of rhetoric and the "correct" way of writing. In numerous writings and letters he explicitly refers to the accusation of darkness, justifies his special way of writing and explains his ideas about the concept of style. However, it is above all the ›doing‹ of his writings that moves on the limits of classical rhetoric or beyond it and confronts the reader with texts that seek to exhaust the linguistic possibilities of individual presentation and textuality. Rhetorical means do not serve Hamann as a mere cladding of the thoughts, but are an inseparable expression of the peculiarity of the writer and emphasize the inextricable tension between the generality of language and the individual need for expression of the individual.