Walter Kaufmann (philosopher)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Walter Kaufmann arrived at Princeton University in 1947 as a young philosopher with a freshly minted Harvard doctorate, a dissertation completed in under a year, and a singular mission: to rescue Friedrich Nietzsche from decades of misreading. He would spend the next three decades at Princeton doing precisely that, while also tackling questions about religion, death, existentialism, and the nature of morality. His life, which began in Freiburg im Breisgau on the 1st of July 1921 and ended on the 4th of September 1980 at age 59, traced a remarkable arc from a Lutheran childhood in Nazi Germany to a career that shaped how English speakers understood European philosophy. How did a boy who converted to Judaism at eleven become the foremost English-language interpreter of a philosopher who criticized Christianity? What drove Kaufmann to challenge not just Nietzsche's critics but Nietzsche himself? And what was his own philosophy, the one he developed in his own voice, apart from the translations and commentaries?

• 2. From Freiburg to Princeton

  ›

  At age eleven, Walter Kaufmann decided he did not believe in the Trinity or the divinity of Jesus. That conviction led him to convert from Lutheranism to Judaism. The timing could not have been more dangerous. Kaufmann subsequently discovered that all four of his grandparents were Jewish, which meant he was both a convert and a person of Jewish descent under Nazi law. In 1939 he emigrated to the United States and enrolled at Williams College, where, according to scholar Stanley Corngold, he abandoned his commitment to Jewish ritual while developing a deeply critical attitude toward all established religions. He graduated from Williams College in 1941 and moved to Harvard University, completing an MA in Philosophy in 1942. His studies were interrupted by the war. He enlisted with the US Army Air Force and was posted to Camp Ritchie, becoming one of the Ritchie Boys who served as interrogators for the Military Intelligence Service in Europe. Kaufmann specifically conducted interrogations in Germany. He became a US citizen in 1944. His 1947 Harvard dissertation, titled "Nietzsche's Theory of Values," won him his PhD and, in the same year, a faculty position in Princeton's Philosophy Department. He held visiting appointments in both the United States and abroad but never left Princeton as his base for the rest of his career. Among his students were Nietzsche scholars Frithjof Bergmann, Richard Schacht, Ivan Soll, and Alexander Nehamas.

• 3. Reclaiming Nietzsche

  ›

  Kaufmann believed that Nietzsche had been gravely misunderstood by English-speaking readers, and he set out to correct that in his 1950 book Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. His central argument was that Nietzsche belonged in the company of serious philosophers, despite the objection that he lacked a formal system. Kaufmann dealt with that objection directly, pointing out that Socrates, many of the pre-Socratics, Kant in some respects, and Plato also resisted systematic organization. He argued that Nietzsche had strong philosophical reasons for avoiding a system. Kaufmann also positioned Nietzsche as a major early existentialist and as an unexpected precursor to Anglo-American analytic philosophy. Reception was mixed. Michael Tanner called Kaufmann's commentaries on Nietzsche "obtrusive, self-referential, and lacking insight." Llewellyn Jones argued that Kaufmann's fresh insights could deepen the understanding of every discriminating student of literature. The New Yorker wrote that Kaufmann had produced what might be the definitive study of Nietzsche's thought, describing it as an informed, scholarly, and lustrous work. Kaufmann's admiration for Nietzsche was not uncritical. He wrote that his disagreements with Nietzsche were "legion," and he singled out Thus Spoke Zarathustra as badly written in parts, melodramatic, and verbose in places, while still concluding that the book was both a mine of ideas and a major work of literature. He translated a wide range of Nietzsche's texts, including The Birth of Tragedy, The Gay Science, Beyond Good and Evil, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, Ecce Homo, and The Will to Power (the last two with R. J. Hollingdale), as well as editing The Portable Nietzsche and Basic Writings of Nietzsche.

• 4. Wrestling with Religion

  ›

  A 1959 article Kaufmann published in Harper's Magazine set out his position on religion with unusual directness. He rejected all religious values and practice, and he was particularly pointed about the liberal Protestantism that had developed from Schleiermacher through Paul Tillich and Rudolf Bultmann. He did not replace religion with atheism alone; instead he praised what he called the moralists: the biblical prophets, the Buddha, and Socrates. He argued that critical analysis and the pursuit of knowledge were genuinely liberating forces. He elaborated these arguments in his 1958 book Critique of Religion and Philosophy. Despite his break from observance, Kaufmann retained deep respect for certain religious thinkers. He held great admiration for Kierkegaard's passion and for what Kierkegaard had understood about freedom and anxiety. He quoted Kierkegaard on this directly: "Nobody before Kierkegaard had seen so clearly that the freedom to make a fateful decision that may change our character and future breeds anxiety." Yet Kaufmann parted sharply from Kierkegaard's Protestant theology. He also wrote at length on Karl Jaspers. His personal statements about Kierkegaard were strikingly candid: "I know of no other great writer in the whole nineteenth century, perhaps even in the whole of world literature, to whom I respond with less happiness and with a more profound sense that I am on trial and found wanting, unless it were Søren Kierkegaard." Kaufmann disliked Martin Heidegger's thinking and criticized his unclear writing, a contrast that sharpened his appreciation for the writers he did admire.

• 5. A Philosophy of His Own

  ›

  Kaufmann did not only interpret other thinkers. In The Faith of a Heretic (1961) and Without Guilt and Justice: From Decidophobia to Autonomy (1973), he laid out his own ethical commitments. In the earlier book he proposed four cardinal virtues, which he named "humbition" (a fusion of humility and ambition), love, courage, and honesty. The coinage "humbition" pointed at something Kaufmann thought most moral systems missed: that genuine ambition and genuine humility were not opposites but necessary partners in a life well lived. He also translated Martin Buber's I and Thou in 1970 and wrote extensively on Buber's religious significance, even as he remained an outsider to the faith commitments Buber embodied. His anthology Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre gathered the existentialist tradition across literary and philosophical sources. His 1965 book on Hegel, which he titled Hegel: A Reinterpretation, was accompanied by a separate Hegel: Texts and Commentary and by articles such as "The Hegel Myth and Its Method," published in the Philosophical Review in 1951. His output spanned poetry, including the 1962 volume Cain and Other Poems, as well as a late trilogy called Man's Lot, published in 1978, which examined the human condition across three volumes titled Life at the Limits, Time is an Artist, and What is Man.

• 6. Voice Beyond the Page

  ›

  Kaufmann extended his reach through recorded lectures. Among his sound recordings were a series of three lectures titled "Kierkegaard and the Crisis in Religion," "Nietzsche and the Crisis in Philosophy," and "Sartre and the Crisis in Morality." He also recorded discussions of Oedipus Rex, Homer and the birth of tragedy, and Aeschylus and the death of tragedy, as well as a lecture titled "The Will to Power Reexamined." These recordings preserved his voice in a form suited to the same questions he had spent his career addressing in print. His Goethe's Faust translation, published in 1963 and covering Part One plus selections from Part Two, brought him beyond philosophy into German literary translation. His 1975 anthology Twenty-Five German Poets extended a volume he had first published as Twenty German Poets in 1962. Kaufmann's career output, spread across more than thirty years at Princeton, included original philosophical works, translations from German, edited anthologies, academic articles in journals including the Journal of the History of Ideas, the Philosophical Review, the Kenyon Review, and the Partisan Review, forewords to books by other scholars, and the recorded lectures that carried his ideas into the spoken word. The first article in this bibliography, an essay on Nietzsche's admiration for Socrates, appeared in October 1948 under the pseudonym David Dennis as a Bowdoin Prize entry, and the last entry in the record, a letter to the journal Encounter, appeared in 1980, the year of his death.