Tag Archives: Walter Kaufmann

Great Secondary Philosophical Work

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Walter Kaufmann’s Nietzsche is pleasing in several different ways. A great start to a new year’s reading, as it’s got me reading, writing and thinking like a man on fire.

I’ve always been stubborn about tackling the major thinkers directly, head on. Stubborn and in cases like Derrida, likely to end in tears. Kaufmann’s Nietzsche is a first-rate work of literature, as good as Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which Nietzsche felt, probably correctly, was his finest moment. I’ve lined up other secondary material on Nietzsche by Nehemas, Safranski and Malcolm Bull.

But I’m wondering what other books on the major thinkers stand up as works of literature in their own right? Is there someone I ought to be reading that will open up Bourdieu’s philosophy/sociology in the way Kaufmann has for Nietzsche’s work? Or Deleuze’s work, which I almost read as poetry, allowing meaning to sink in where it can?

It isn’t just Kaufmann that has me thinking along these lines. Richard Geldard’s Remembering Heraclitus was enlightening. I also became aware from Samuel Beckett’s Library, one of my all-time favourite pieces of secondary literature, how much Beckett approached the major thinkers indirectly before, if ever, launching a direct assault on their major works.

If you have any suggestions please reply in Comments (so other readers can share) rather than Twitter, where everything just gets lost or buried in Favourites.

Kaufmann, Nietzsche and the Cretan

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It doesn’t surprise me that Walter Kaufmann’s philosophy is studied alongside his scholarly interpretations of Nietzsche and other thinkers. In Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, Kaufmann’s personality comes across directly and clearly. Using relevant material from Nietzsche’s notebooks, Kaufmann is able to offer a less ambiguous, coherent interpretation of Nietzsche’s published works.

The following passages come from Kaufmann’s pursuit of the trajectory of one of Nietzsche’s two great insights, the will to power (the other being the eternal recurrence). The numbering is my own. These passages interest me to the degree they evince Kaufmann’s disposition. (Except number ten, all are Kaufmann’s words.)

What is also striking is the extent to which, particularly in 4-5, though Nietzsche had in mind the German Reich, the will to power concept applies to world’s sole remaining superpower.

  1. Primarily, however, fear is nothing but our attitude toward power-or, in Nietzsche’s own previous words, the negative aspect of our will to power.
  2. There is, first, man’s desire to find scapegoats, the quest of the weak and the impotent to find somebody upon whom they can look down and to whom they may feel superior.
  3. [The] sudden association of the will to power with the Greeks was one of the most decisive steps in the development of this conception into an all-embracing monism.
  4. The “history of culture” is thus to be explained in terms of man’s will to overwhelm, outdo, excel, and overpower his neighbour. The barbarian does it by torturing his neighbour. In the light of Nietzsche’s previous comments, he is essentially weak, else he would not need to inflict hurt. Nietzsche speaks of this as a low degree of the striving for excellence because he wishes to express that, quantitatively, we find little power at the bottom of the scale. Toward the middle of the scale, we find what might be called the normal degree of power: one seeks to evoke envy and admiration; one even seeks to elevate one’s neighbour and derives a sense of power from doing so; one gives him joy and gaiety and lets him laugh, saying to oneself, as it were: I have the power to impress and delight them.
  5. One might expect Nietzsche to base his repudiation on the assertion that only a weak nation finds it necessary to impress itself and others with barbarian brawn and armies, and that culture is a higher, i.e., a quantitatively greater, form of power. Instead Nietzsche refers to “the degree of reason in strength”.
  6. The will to power is … introduced as the will to overcome oneself.
  7. Nietzsche asserts that any attempt to understand the universe is prompted by man’s will to power. If so, it would seem that his own conception of the will to power must be admitted by him to be a creation of his own will to power. Is not Nietzsche therefore in the predicament of Epimenides, the Cretan? If his assertion is correct, then it is a fiction.
  8. His theory of the will to power might be the one and only interpretation of human behaviour of which we are capable when we consider the evidence and think about it as clearly as we can. Not only Nietzsche but mankind would then be in the position of the Cretan, and the dilemma-however ridiculous it might seem to the angel Gabriel- would be inescapable for us.
  9. … there “really” is no will, or that the will is “really” a fiction.
  10. “Wherever I found the living, there I found the will to power.”

I’ve enough interest in Kaufmann’s contribution to philosophy to look forward to an updated edition of his The Faith of a Heretic (foreword by Stanley Corngold), due in the summer, and to read his Discovering the Mind series.

The Devilish State

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In winter, my reading appetite requires more fibrous material. This year I reread Nietzsche and continue Walter Kaufmann’s Nietzsche. As I read Kaufmann’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s early books I realise that I’ve skipped what Kaufmann calls the Untimely Mediations, translated now as Unfashionable Observations.These four essays are integral to understanding Nietzsche’s early philosophical development, but also make less ambiguous his later work.

If this writing is incomprehensible for anybody or will not go into his head, the fault, it seems to me, is not necessary mine. It is plain enough, assuming-as I do assume-that one has read my earlier writings and not spared some trouble in doing this.

His early recognition of the oppressive and intimidating nature of the State is prescient of his own time, but no less compelling today:

the second side [of the Nation state] is not a bit more delightful but only more disturbing. There are certainly . . . tremendous forces, but they are savage, primordial, and utterly merciless. One looks upon them with uneasy expectations as upon the seething cauldron of a witch’s kitchen: any moment it may flash and lighten to announce terrible apparitions . . . the so-called Nation State . . . is . . . only an increment of the general insecurity and menace . . . and the hunt for happiness will never be greater than when it must be caught between today and tomorrow: because the day after tomorrow all hunting time may have come to an end altogether. We live in the period of atoms, of atomistic chaos . . .  Now almost everything on earth is determined by the crudest and most evil forces, by the egotism of the purchasers and the military despots. The State, in the hands of the latter . . . wishes that people would lavish on it the same idolatrous cult that they used to lavish on the Church.

Kaufmann further interprets his attack on the State:

Nonconformity is the necessary condition of self-realisation. The State is the devil who tempts and intimidates man into animal conformity and thus keeps him from rising into the heaven of true humanity; the Church is the Antichrist who has perverted Christ’s original call to man to break with father and mother and become perfect: she has sold Christ to Caesar and become the chief accomplice of the State in compelling uniformity.

Reading Nietzsche Through Walter Kaufmann

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Since I was seventeen I’ve read Nietzsche. I can no longer recall what I read first, probably the yellowing Thus Spake Zarathustra, annotated in two different pens, that still sits on my bookshelf. Nietzsche understands teenagers. He speaks to their complexity and anguish, and they approve of his desire to shatter the tenets of their culture. Nietzsche faced down the nihilism of his age with style, humour and strength. Though Nietzsche’s thinking only partially penetrated my younger self, he left me fortified with the necessity of going deeply into myself to fully experience life.

Over the years I read all of Nietzsche’s published books, though undoubtedly in less reliable translations and editions than are now starting to become available. Nietzsche’s aphoristic style lends itself to dipping into a few lines. Though this achieves little, it is a thought-provoking compass for how one has changed during all the years of reading the same lines. My reading of Nietzsche is changed with all the later reading and thinking I’ve done.

At the moment I’m reading Nietzsche through Walter Kaufmann, only a hundred pages or so in but enjoying his thoughts and observations. Kaufmann untangles Nietzsche’s relations with his anti-Semitic sister Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche and the intriguing Lou Andreas-Salomé to clarify how both women set out to distort how Nietzsche’s thoughts were later interpreted. Kaufmann then proceeds to show with some elegance how the contradictions in Nietzsche’s arguments are merely superficial. He argues that Socrates is Nietzsche’s ideal, that he is not a ‘system thinker [unlike Kant or Spinoza] but a problem thinker.’

The result is less a solution of the initial problem than a realisation of its limitations: typically the problem is not solved but ‘outgrown’.

Though first published in 1950, Kaufmann’s interpretations are an inspiration for more contemporary readings of Nietzsche, one of which I also wish to read is Alexander Nehamas’ NIETZSCHE Life as Literature (1985). If you know of other Nietzsche secondary literature (not biography) worth reading please let me know.