Art & Creativity Quote by Walter Kaufmann

Kaufmann’s line reads like a mild etiquette note, but it’s really a rebuke aimed at an entire reviewing culture that prefers performance over description. Calling the “first function” of a review to summarize “contents and character” sounds obvious until you remember how often reviews are written as auditions for the reviewer’s own sensibility: a chance to display taste, politics, or cleverness while treating the book as a prop. Kaufmann, a philosopher who spent his career translating, editing, and rescuing big, difficult thinkers (Nietzsche most famously) from lazy caricature, is insisting on intellectual fair play.

The phrasing matters. “I believe” softens the mandate just enough to sound reasonable, which makes the implicit accusation sharper: many reviewers don’t even meet this baseline. And “character” is the tell. He’s not asking for a plot recap or a list of themes; he wants the felt identity of the book - its voice, method, temperament, ambition, and limits. That word smuggles in a larger ethical claim: criticism is accountable to the object it judges. You can’t meaningfully praise or punish a work you haven’t rendered legible to the reader.

Contextually, Kaufmann is speaking from mid-century literary and academic worlds where reviews could function as gatekeeping, ideological sorting, or campus feuds in print. His intent is to re-anchor the review in service: before the reviewer becomes prosecutor, comedian, or prophet, they owe the audience a basic map of what’s actually on the page.