Aesthetics at the College of Technology

By Monika Jörg-Rössler

It goes without saying that the engineering sciences were the main focus of attention and research at Stuttgart College of Technology. Nevertheless, aesthetics was one of the first humanities disciplines to establish itself here from the mid-19th century onwards. Through its work on demanding fundamental philosophical questions, captivatingly presented lectures and distinctive personalities, aesthetics has fascinated a broad audience from all fields of study throughout its history. Here we will present three famous figures.

Friedrich Theodor Vischer
As a child Vischer once said that he either wanted to become a painter or Tom Fool. He didn't become a painter, but a feared and respected academic and publisher. His enthralling lectures in Tübingen, Zurich and later at Stuttgart Polytechnic made him famous and attracted a wide audience.

Käte Hamburger
Forced to emigrate to Sweden by the war and the National Socialists, she removed the "h" in her first name as an outward sign of the deprivation she had had to endure. She did not complete her post-doctoral thesis until she returned to Germany late in life. In her Stuttgart years she wrote countless works and became a world famous academic, who also made a major contribution to shaping teaching at Universität Stuttgart.

Max Bense
An anarchic unorthodox thinker, a man of letters of the avant-garde, creator of "the aesthetics of information", an advocate of "concrete poetry", philosopher, mathematician, physicist, etc., Max Bense left his mark after his 41 years in Stuttgart.

Friedrich Theodor Vischer in Tübingen

Although Vischer was a feared unorthodox free thinker from the very beginning, he ultimately established his reputation at the University of Tübingen through his brilliance and precision.

Fighting spirit and rhetorical skills

Both Vischer's life and his academic work often brought him back to Tübingen. His theological training took him twice to the Tübingen Seminary – once as a pupil, once as a teacher – and after obtaining his post-doctoral degree he was able to treat audiences to the first samples of his extraordinary oratory skills and energetic rhetoric when he was made Associate Professor at the university in 1837. Whether it was Faust, Aesthetics or Philosophy – Vischer was always meticulous in his preparation, identified completely with his subject matter and always lectured and spoke freely into ripe old age, often using dramatic phrases spiced with his unique humour.

As a disputatious spirit, he made both friends and enemies in the University Senate, but his lectures were so popular with the students and so well attended that he could no longer be refused a Full Professorship in 1844 when he applied for the fourth time. He started his time as Full Professor in typical dramatic style and in his inaugural speech overstepped all the limits imposed by the Church and state. The "Vischer affair" became a political issue extending far beyond the state borders. To restore the peace the authorities banned him from teaching for two years. During this enforced break he set about writing his two ambitious works on aesthetics.

First political activity and "exile"

In addition to teaching, Vischer later tested the mettle of the politics of his time. More out of a sense of duty than out of ambition, he became a member of parliament for the left-wing democrats in the National Assembly in St. Paul's Church in Frankfurt, and was involved in the Stuttgart rump parliament of 1849. His commitment and spirited clashes with Pietism were not exactly beneficial to his standing in Tübingen society, which led him to "emigrate" to Zurich Polytechnic in 1855.

The return to Swabia

In 1866 Vischer returned as a professor from Switzerland to Tübingen and also took on additional teaching duties in Stuttgart. However, the tiny university town seemed too claustrophobic to him after having spent 11 years in the "great wide world" in Zurich, and, after a wearying struggle he succeeded in having a Chair for Aesthetics and German Literature founded at Stuttgart Polytechnic in 1869. Aesthetics in Stuttgart had finally been born.

Yet over many years he was obsessed by the idea of moving the university from the petit bourgeois setting of Tübingen to the big capital city of Stuttgart. He even devoted a speech held on the occasion of the king's birthday to this topic – clearly to no avail.

Vischer in Stuttgart

"Even if Vischer was to lecture on broom binding, I would attend the lectures."
(A student)

Education for the widest audience

His years in Stuttgart were a triumph for Vischer. His lectures were soon an integral part of the educational canon of Stuttgart society, and the students worshipped him too.

His precisely and meticulously prepared lectures and speeches, with his inimitable free and flawless delivery, soon became his hallmark and made the Polytechnic, which had previously focussed almost exclusively on technical disciplines, into the educational heart of the capital. Soon it was the done thing to go to the opera, theatre and "to Vischer". His lecture cycles on German literary history and aesthetics were celebrated as pinnacle achievements in the very highest circles.

Goethe micrologists versus Hegel

Vischer never worked in the evenings, spending his time in taverns with such famous figures as Mörike and Count von Zeppelin.

Hegel and the writer Jean Paul were among his idols, and he never tired of battling against the type of philologists – who he referred to as "Stoffhuber" and "micrologists" – who tried to analyse the works of poets such as Goethe down to the most minute detail.

"Was it six or seven, - When this verse he did pen? Perhaps half seven on the dot – When these words he did jot, - This genius, this wit?"

Yet especially in his later years he became more reconciliatory and did admit that there were two opposing ways of seeing the truth: reading thoughts and reading pictures. "There need not be a dispute between aesthetics and philology."

Vischer and aesthetics

"... for it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world find eternal justification."
(F. Nietzsche, "The Birth of Tragedy")

"On the sublime and the ridiculous"

Even during his time as a student, Vischer had been more fascinated by the subjects of philosophy, aesthetics and literature than by theology. In 1837 he completed his post-doctoral thesis, entitled “On the sublime and the ridiculous”, in which he expanded on Hegel's philosophy.
Yet Vischer wanted to demonstrate that the sublime and the ridiculous were not historical transitional forms, as in Hegel's works, but were aspects of beauty itself. To him, beauty was a sensual apparition, an image of a specific idea. Taking a somewhat idiosyncratic approach to the dialectical method, Vischer showed how an idea can extend beyond an image, become sublime in its infiniteness and ultimately be transformed into the ridiculous.

The science of beauty

With his major work, the six-volume "Aesthetics of the Science of Beauty", written from 1846 to 1857, Vischer had created one of the most important universal aesthetic descriptions of post-Hegelian aesthetics. Vischer's wish was to continue, expand and complete Hegel's idealist aesthetics.

In his work, he attempted to find a metaphysical justification for beauty. The "absolute idea" of beauty and the various forms in which it is realised in art and nature sublimates all "everyday" random aspects and contradictions by linking them to a "greater necessity" and thus leads to a reconciliation between "humans and the world". In this understanding, beauty functions as the last instance that helps humans to survive in the world.

Whereas Hegel's aesthetics were primarily permeated by theological concepts, Vischer's aesthetics had a fundamentally different objective in mind. Its purpose was to put post-theological humanity into a deeper and immediate relationship with the world based on a new, non-theological aesthetic approach.

Vischer wanted this work to constitute a complete aesthetic system. Yet he soon began to be plagued by doubts, and criticised his own work as early as 1873. He preferred to formulate criticism himself, as he found it difficult to tolerate criticism by other people.

What is the epic preterite?

With her post-doctoral thesis "The Logic of Literature", published in 1957, Käte Hamburger managed to create a standard work of literary theory that immediately gained international renown. In it she revealed previously unnoticed narrative structures, primarily by asking unconventional questions of literary texts.

Tomorrow was Christmas ...

Käte Hamburger was always both a literary scholar and a philosopher to equal degrees. She combined philosophical and literary issues even when she was a young student herself (studying History of Literature, Philosophy and History of Art, first in Berlin, then in Munich, where she completed her PhD in Philosophy in 1922), and in especially so in her PhD thesis entitled "Schiller's analysis of human nature as the basis of his philosophy of history and culture". In her work, she also tried to include poetic statements within the field of logic.

Her main work, "The Logic of Literature", which she completed in 1956 at the age of 60 as her post-doctoral dissertation at what was then Stuttgart College of Technology, highlights the relationship between reality and fiction in various genres of literature. In it her main concern is to reflect on the basic grammatical preconditions of speech. She highlights the grammatical phenomenon of the "epic preterite". The stock formula of fairy tales "Once upon a time there lived ..." refers to a narrative time and nothing else. Only in literature can a sentence such as "Tomorrow was Christmas" make sense – a context in which we don't even notice its apparent grammatical impossibility.

Käte Hamburger and Universität Stuttgart

Born in Hamburg into a bourgeois family, Hamburger was among the first generation of women in Germany to be able to study at university properly. In 1928 she went to Berlin and became the private assistant of Paul Hofmann (Associate Professor of Philosophy at Berlin University). As a Jew, she fled from National Socialist Germany in 1933 and spent 22 years in exile in Sweden, where she worked as a teacher and author.

At a conference in Berlin on Thomas Mann in 1956, she was invited by Fritz Martini, then Full Professor of Literature and Aesthetics at Stuttgart, to come to Stuttgart College of Technology. At first she was involved in the so-called "educational subjects" and the General Studies programme, but soon enhanced the reputation of the College of Technology through her excellent lectures and seminars, and supported the expansion of the humanities.

Thus from 1957 to 1977 she worked as a professor at Stuttgart, impressing both student and non-student audiences with her precise thinking and conceptual precision, as well as with her knowledge of a broad spectrum of European literature. As a philosopher and scholar of aesthetics she focussed on those authors who had written philosophical works or at least had been influenced by philosophy, such as Schiller, Novalis, Jean Paul, Sartre and Rilke, whose work she saw as poetic philosophy.

Käte Hamburger – her fame – her relationships

Although she earned recognition late in life, recognition that from an academic point of view she had doubtlessly long since earned, she reached an extraordinarily large audience in the 36 years that she spent in Stuttgart. In 1989, for instance, she was awarded the "Schiller Memorial Prize" by the state of Baden-Württemberg in the New Palace in Stuttgart. Her remarkable achievements included two honorary doctorates (in Philosophy from the University of Siegen in 1980, and in Theology from the University of Göttingen in 1989). She had famous admirers such as the Weizsäckers, was awarded numerous honours by the academic world and the state, and was accompanied throughout her life by a large circle of academic friends such as Fritz Martini, Max Bense and Elisabeth Walther-Bense.

Yet during her entire lifetime, her work was dominated by her acquaintance with and admiration for Thomas Mann, whose work had often been the subject of her research.

Discovering aesthetic truth with Käte Hamburger

"The concept of truth is constituted by being identical to what is the case."
Verum mihi videtur esse id quod est.
(St. Augustine, Soliloquies)

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.

Programming beauty

In a technology-based society there is no longer any fundamental difference between scientific and artistic production. Aesthetics ceases to lead the dubious existence of a speculative philosophical science and increasingly develops into a technical science, which can be produced by new media and can be programmed.

Bense moves to Stuttgart College of Technology

After having studied Physics, Mathematics, Philosophy and Geology at the University of Bonn, Max Bense completed his Dr. phil. nat. thesis in 1937, entitled "Quantum Mechanics and the Relativity of Existence". After working as a physicist and mathematician, and serving a period of military service, he completed his post-doctoral thesis after the war at the University of Jena.

Yet he soon realised that the political climate in the East didn't provide him with the academic freedom he was looking for, and left the Soviet occupied zone, leaving his possessions behind and without a new job to go to in the West. Even at this early stage he provoked the regime in typical style in his last lecture, attacking the Soviet philosopher Alexandrov, which thus led to the first "Bense affair".

Like with Käte Hamburger seven years later, Fritz Martini was the driving force who recommended Bense to apply for a visiting professorship in Philosophy and Theory of Science in 1949. Bense was given the post, beating fellow applicants Pascual Jordan and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, and was subsequently made Associate Professor on 1 October 1950 and Full Professor on 23 March 1963 of the newly founded Chair of Philosophy and Theory of Science at Stuttgart College of Technology.

Numerical aesthetics and semiotics in Stuttgart

Bense's many years of renown were due not least of all to his lively, anti-academic style of lecturing, which he underlined with a great deal of gesticulation before audiences consisting of a colourful mixture of intellectuals and lay philosophers from all walks of life. "But first and foremost it was probably the intellectual systematicity behind the obsessive gestures during Bense's performance that fascinated many people, the lack of respect for established conceptual clichés and lofty words."

Like Vischer 100 years previously, Bense's lectures brought a large audience to Stuttgart College of Technology. His exemplary academic research into semiotics and numerical aesthetics was in one sense an attempt to unite the natural sciences and the humanities. The semiotics of Charles Sanders Pierce, which Max Bense, Elisabeth Walther-Bense and their many students had expanded upon, were the real research focus at the Stuttgart institute from the late 1950s onwards. This led to a large number of international contacts and, importantly, to the foundation of the "Semiosis" journal for aesthetics and semiotics.

Many other of Bense's countless achievements for Universität Stuttgart could be mentioned – the following may serve as an illustration:

• In 1950 he was one of the main figures to found the General Studies programme, an institution which also allowed engineers to broaden their horizons and to take a peek at other university disciplines.
• In 1956 he supported efforts for the introduction of the right to award Philosophy doctorates at Stuttgart Technical College, which then allowed the College of Technology to be made into a university in 1967.

Beauty is taken into the outside world – the Study Gallery – the Stuttgart School

Bense's innermost desire was always to objectify aesthetic criteria. Thus the term "objective aesthetics" became the key concept in his artistic understanding.

The first exhibitions whose conceptualisation and organisation Bense was involved in were held in 1957 in cooperation with the "Gänsheide 24 Gallery", one of the few galleries at the time dealing with avant-garde art. Shortly afterwards he founded one of the first university galleries in Germany as part of the General Studies programme – the Study Gallery. It became an important forum for experimental art, with frequent exhibitions by internationally acclaimed artists. From 1965 the public were able to see a complete novelty: works of art that had been produced with the help of "computational processors", exhibited under the title of "computer graphics".

The "Stuttgart School" is further evidence of Bense's wide-ranging intellect. The school consisted of a group of artists, literary figures and "free-floating spirits" who were attracted by Bense's concept of aesthetics and his radicalism, and was thus a more non-university grouping. (The group's actual name was devised not by Bense himself, but by the author Manfred Esser, who spoke of the provocative theories of this Stuttgart school at a conference of the French "Tel Quel" group in Normandy, whereupon French and German newspapers immediately picked up on the term.)
The Stuttgart School's main achievements included the theory of "concrete poetry" (poetry using onomatopoeia and the arrangement of letters on the page for effect), which Bense had founded. In concrete poetry, poetry is created not in but with language, and is rearranged according to mathematical principles. A further focus of the group was the promotion of "impersonal" and – in Bense's terms - "artificial poetry": so-called stochastic texts generated with the help of mainframe computers.
Reinhard Döhl, an experimental author and Stuttgart Professor of Literature, who was closely associated with the group, later suggested that the term "Stuttgart School" should only be used for the academic work produced by Bense's institute, and to use the term "Stuttgart Group" instead.

The second Bense affair

Like in his lectures at university, Bense was outspoken and forthright in front of non-university audiences too. His unmistakably hostile remarks about the Church and the Pope led to heated disputes on the "Bense affair" in the Baden-Württemberg parliament.

On 4 December 1970 Max Bense was interviewed in the "Stuttgarter Nachrichten" newspaper, during which he was asked about the attack on the Pope in Manila:

"Question: Would you also be capable of pulling a knife on someone, on the Pope for instance?
Bense: No, I don't kill.
Question: You don't kill, but you don't object to others doing so?
Bense: Not at all. If someone does that, I might admire them for it. I personally don't do it."

Initiated by the Church, a debate began during which the Christian Democrat parliamentary party called for Bense to appear before a disciplinary hearing and for him to be immediately dismissed from his post. Other parties also reacted with fierce attacks on him. After a huge political uproar and debates on academic freedom, which led to several politicians having to resign, Bense published an extensive public defence and was allowed to continue teaching.

Aesthetics and technology

"[...] it is not the atom bomb that is the key technical event of our age, but the construction of large-scale mathematical thinking machines. They are extraordinarily universal in nature, they are at the same time technological, mathematical, logical, sociological and neurological principles [...]"

As early as 1954 onwards, Bense showed in his work "Aesthetica" that we live in a world whose reality is to a large degree artificial and technological. This insight allowed him to derive an innate connection between art and technology, aesthetics and construction.

Art and technology can both possess beauty, and thus can be given aesthetic justification. Both are "made" or "constructed". The difference lies in the finer structure of the two forms. A technical construction such as a machine, consists of interconnected parts, with each part having a specific function. A work of art, on the other hand, has an independent aesthetic existence, it does not function but simply exists. Art and technology can be brought closer together through the concept of "completeness". Completeness is a state of both artistic and technological forms. Completeness is part of aesthetics and of construction.

"How close the involuntary connection between a work of art and a product is can be demonstrated by juxtaposing sculptures and cars taken from the same period."

Thus the familiar classical aesthetic terms of "artistic beauty" and "natural beauty" can be complemented by a third term, namely "technical beauty".

Aesthetics is among the disciplines that mediate between the natural sciences and the humanities, and, like any other science, has its own philosophical basis. It is not an exhaustive system, but an as yet incomplete theory, and thus an open science that must remain in need of completion, revision and evaluation.

The legacy of aesthetics

The lectures and research of Vischer, Bense and Hamburger all provided a strong humanities-based counterbalance to the technical orientation of the Stuttgart college, a counterbalance whose reputation went far beyond the borders of the state capital. Over more than 130 years they made their mark on the profile of the humanities in Stuttgart, while managing to fascinate society as a whole with their subjects. Vischer's lecture courses, Bense's Monday lectures and Hamburger's commitment to the General Studies programme have certainly made major contributions to Stuttgart's rich academic atmosphere.

It was not least of all due to Bense's efforts to introduce the right to award doctorates in Philosophy that Stuttgart Technical College was later honoured with the title of "University".

Biography: Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807 - 1887)

In 1869 Vischer was made senior teacher at Stuttgart Polytechnical School in the newly founded German Literature and Aesthetics teaching and research institute.

Biography: Käte Hamburger (1896 - 1992)

Käte Hamburger built bridges between philosophy and literature studies, and made major contributions to literary theory and aesthetics.

Biography: Max Bense (1910 - 1990)

Bense worked as Professor of Theory of Science at Stuttgart College of Technology from 1950 onwards, where he founded his numerically-based aesthetics.