Customer Reviews

Discovering the Mind: Goethe, Kant, and Hegel

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Is it fair to rate such persons by other authors who analyze them? I think so. In the case of Goethe, I highly recommend reading some of his works and the conversations with Peter Eckermann. What's crucial is understanding Goethe's main thesis and outlook in comparison to his contemporary Kant and how he influenced subsequent philosophers such as Hegel, who tried to bridge Kant and Goethe, unsuccessfully and Shiller, the poet, who unsuccessfully tried the same.

On Kant: you can spend a year or more reading his verbose and heavily obscure style which one must read each sentence twice before digesting, or one can read Kaufmann's book and another great book on Kant - Karl Jaspers, Philosophy Volume 1. You really do walk away from this book with a basic understanding of Kant and how he both differs from Goethe - allot, and how he influenced philosophy as we know it. He was a Platonist, Goethe was not. Kant equated life a series of maxims all based on reason, part of a universal, while Goethe saw humanity always in developmental stages, living in uncertainty.

This goes with Hegel too. Read some amazon.com reviews on his Phenomenology of the Spirit and you can see, there are those that love to read philosophy but recommend not investing a great deal of time and effort on Hegel. Although one must read Hegel to fully know Hegel. I think Kaufmann does justice. It's nice to have at least a basic grip on both who these men were, what they taught and a limited degree on their background and minds - psychology.

Definitely worth the read.

This is quite possibly the poorest exposition of these people ever written- and the rest of the series is the same. His translations of Nietzche are excellent and beautiful but as a philosopher Kaufmann is trying to speak with the mouth of Nietzche, but a rather poor Nietzche at best. The angry style is sad for an academician unless he or she is a genius of Nietzche's calibre.

I read this book in its early years, and the subjects of the book hardly excited me, but it was the first volume of a trilogy, and I was ready to try to prove that figures in a modern America rich with electronic soundtracking of music for every form of public activity (and for more private activities than were written about in his philosophy) was a much richer form of emotional communication than any that Goethe was able to write down on a page. On the topic of sex alone, I could hum more tunes than he knew, maybe. But the funny thing was that he considered "Kant's immense influence has proved catastrophic." Among the recently departed, Isaiah Berlin is quoted on the back of this book praising Kaufmann for making people see that Hegel "was a most audacious, profound and devastating, at times wildly turbulent, thinker." I wish I could ask everybody, aren't we all? Page 288 raised the question "how I would feel if someone sent me an essay of such length in which he tried to show how Nietzsche had been 'a disaster.'" I think he would feel even worse, or possibly more joyous in another's misfortune, if he could read all the web pages that show what people, now, are saying about Martin Heidegger, who is merely accused of "Dogmatic Anthropology" in the Trilogy outline which appeared in this volume.