Discovering aesthetic truth with Käte Hamburger

Concepts put to the test

Precision was the maxim of Käte Hamburger's life and thinking. She demanded conceptual precision and linguistic accuracy from both her students and conversation partners. Even renowned experts were not safe from her remorseless analyses. She referred to vague use of language or inaccurate interpretations of concepts in the works of such famous figures such as Schiller, Lessing or Schopenhauer as "illustrious flawed thought".

Her major works dealt with concepts such as literature, humour, truth and pity. In her work "Truth and Aesthetic Truth" she investigates the concept of truth in all its forms. The main target of her scrutinising analysis is "aesthetic truth" and the problem of truth in literature.

The two sentences
Ravens are black
and
It is true that ravens are black
make it clear that "truth" is not a characteristic or attribute that is given to an utterance by the author. Instead "truth" is identical to "being the case" and the statement "It is true that ..." can thus be omitted. Conversely, concepts such as "beauty" and "good", which are traditionally and stereotypically equated with truth (especially in literature, art, aesthetics or in art criticism), are in fact relative and subject to the assessment of the individual beholder.

Hamburger shows how often writers and artists themselves equate aesthetics and truth in a completely unproblematic and matter-of-course manner: for Schiller, for instance, "a poetical description is absolutely true", and the painter Max Liebermann describes poetry as Artistic Truth that "grasps the essence of nature through genius". Yet semantic considerations make it impossible to apply the term truth to the interpretation of works of art, nor can truth be shown to be "aesthetic truth", as this is a contradiction in itself.