The Question Of Truth In Literature: Die Poetische Auffassung Der Welt (original) (raw)

This chapter starts with the question of truth in literature, noting that this question has several interrelated senses: can literature present (significant) truths at all?; what does its presentation of truths (if it exists) have to do with its manner of presentation (with literary language)?; and is the presentation of truth a central aim of literary art? The chapter surveys a variety of neo-Fregean (Lamarque and Olsen, Walton) views that reject the very possibility of literary truth as well as a variety of anti-Fregean views (Goodman, Heidegger) that endorse it. But those endorsements often do not say enough about literary language and its grip on specific actualities. To move beyond this dispute, the chapter argues that Hegel, in his remarks on literary imagination in his Lectures on Fine Art, shows illuminatingly how literary writers sometimes arrive (and centrally aspire to arrive) at a distinctively poetic grasp of the world: die poetische Auffassung der Welt.