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From Shakespeare to Existentialism

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The Princeton philospher was not noted for original thought, unlike other more well known 20th century philosophers such as Russell, Wittgenstein and Sartre. However, what he was good at was being a sort of philosophical "critic." Kaufmann was a very erudite man who wrote lots of great stuff on the arts, history, literature and philosophy as well as the relationship that the three share with each other.

The present book details the infamous existential motif of art replacing religion as the representative of what is most sacred in the human spirit. Kaufmann writes about the joys and knowledge that are offered by great tragedies and the dark poetry of writers such as Rilke.

Kaufmann also does a credible job of critiquing several philosophers, historians and literary figures. Among the people he discusses are Goethe, Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Rilke and Hegel. Particularly interesting is his napalming of Heidegger. I have always thought Heidegger was over-rated & Kaufmann's comical (although valid) tirades were quite refreshing.

Kaufmann ends with a compelling critique of the historian Arnold Toynbee, insisting that Toynbee's attempt to be both poet and historian calls into question the veracity of his exegesis of the facts of history.

This is a great book for anyone who is interested in philosophy & the arts since the time of Shakespeare. This book is especially for people interested in 20th century philosophy & those who ponder its future trajectory.

Walter Kaufmann's essay collection is well worth reading, if only for one reason: he believes passionately that the act of reading, and the things read, matter. It's rare to encounter anyone who really cares about ideas, and who really believes that what you read says a lot about you. Books are normally treated as throwaway objects, like most television shows: turn them on, watch them for a little while, and move on to the next thing. Reading Kaufmann reminded me that there have been people who felt great passion in what they read; for a few hours, I was in the company of a man who valued the same things that I did, and it felt deeply relaxing.

The content of the book is an elaboration of the idea that existentialism isn't very new at all -- that it in fact has very strong roots in Shakespeare and even as far back as Socrates, and that the existentialist worldview, properly understood, is nothing more than the philosophical worldview. An existentialist, says Kaufmann, realizes that we are alone in the world without God to justify our existence; viewed as the greatest thinkers have viewed it, this confers enormous power on us, rather than desolation. Without God, we are free to shape the life we want and live it in all its potential and excess.

Kaufmann says that this was Nietzsche's dominant idea, while embodying the true philosopher's rejection of all ideologies. We should believe nothing unless we've examined it critically, said Nietzsche (or rather, says Kaufmann about Nietzsche; I've not yet read much of Uncle Fritz himself); From Shakespeare to Existentialism is, in essence, a mirror held up to philosopher after philosopher, examining whether they've achieved the Nietzschean ideal. Kaufmann is largely displeased.

When it comes to Heidegger, Kaufmann is not only dissatisfied with what he sees as Heidegger's abandonment of critical thinking, but objects to the apparently widespread belief that Heidegger invented the notion of modern man's being "thrown into the world" without moorings. This idea dates back at least to Nietzsche, says Kaufmann (who is, it's fair to say, perhaps unhealthily obsessed with Nietzsche), but probably would take us back to Shakespeare, and possibly even back to the Aristotelian "great-souled man." Indeed, one of Kaufmann's main arguments is that the Greek understanding of tragedy -- in which great-souled men are destroyed by their fate, and hold their heads high as they fall -- prefigured much of "modern" existentialism.

It's fair to say that Kaufmann sees much of existentialism -- in its modern understanding -- as a perversion of all that was hopeful in Nietzsche and in the Greeks. While Nietzsche would have told us that being thrown into the world is liberating, Kaufmann sees many anti-rationalist philosophers of the 19th and 20th centuries as fundamentally pessimistic and hopeless; he singles out Jaspers, Kierkegaard and Heidegger for much criticism on this score, even while praising Jaspers and Kierkegaard in other respects. Kaufmann is scrupulous in his adherence to Nietzsche's standard: don't believe in any idea just because someone with a great name believes it.

Kaufmann's erudition is immense, and one of the greatest joys of the book is the discovery of new, interesting, important works to read. Nietzsche (of course), Freud, and Goethe are the big ones, and I inch ever closer to reading Kant and Hegel at Kaufmann's prodding. Under Kaufmann's gaze, all these philosophers become great defenders of the beauty and richness of life, rather than the black-turtleneck-clothed, clove-cigarette-smoking, morose Germans or Austrians that they've become over the past century. Understanding how German philosophy came to be viewed as a rather morbid and incomprehensible beast, and stripping off that imposing garb, is Kaufmann's great goal. Inasmuch as I now intend to dive headfirst into German philosophy, he has succeeded.

In the first two- chapters of this book which Walter Kaufmann says were written after the other chapters he presents a kind of credo of his own. He oddly does this by taking as his major opponent T.S. Eliot who he sees as misreading the role of Christianity in world - culture. Like his mentor Nietzsche, Kaufmann believes that Christianity has brought a false concept of Equality to the world. Kaufmann harkens back to Aristotle in defining the hero or great man who will be the subject of the tragic Literature of the ancient Greeks and Shakespeare. Kaufmann focuses on the tragic hero in Shakespeare and sees him one who acts without concept of reward and punishment. Great action is action in sacrifice and even suffering but without expectation of otherwordly reward. The great hero is one who 'claims much for himself and gives much'. In another essay in which he compares Rilke and Nietzsche, he praises them both for their this - worldliness. He too has high - words of praise for the Biblical prophets, for those he conceives of as having struggled courageously against the masses for their own conception of Right. Kauffman writes in this work of Goethe, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche,Rilke,Freud, Jaspers, Heidegger, Toynbee. And in doing so he presents his own this- worldly creed of the existensial struggle of mankind to live heroically, without guarantee of any future promise of bliss or immortality.
One of the most enjoyable parts of this book for me was the quotations presented from the great thinkers and poets he writes about.
Kauffman is one who too has a strong sense of the aesthetic. One of the many powerful quotations he presents is Nietzsche's concluding words in 'The Birth of Tragedy'. ' How much did this people have to suffer, to become so beautiful.'

this book caused my brain some pain, but after reading it twice i started to appreciate its magnificence, and understand why it was recommended to me by a friend who said it's such an important modern work in philosophy. It's essays are eloquent and easy to read, but the thinking is complex and deep. I tried my bes tto rise to the occasion!

The reader from Canada, while certainly correct on the perception that Kaufmann generalizes K's statements and still in turn "pot-peeks" by critiquing his motives in certain paragraphs, has erred in that subjective or objective, personal motives or distresses do seep out of K's writings and his father certainly played a role in the development of his theories. Piety is a powerful friend or foe!

Concurrently, these motives can be seen when reading any author, be it Nietzsche or Kierkegaard and to condemn the use of critiquing such motives is obtuse pedantry. Kaufmann had motives in writing about K or N as the reader did in writing about Kaufmann, as consequently so do I in writing about the reader!

Also, Nietzsche was speaking against reading into the origins of any particular work and not the value of the work itself. Kierkegaard was commenting that no one would be able to interpret the motives behind his work and he would ultimately be read and not critiqued. Kaufmann was drawing the correlation between the two's ultimate goal that their work should be read and not pulled apart by so much microscopic dissecting. Kaufmann does in fact contradict these wishes by doing just that, but such is the nature of philosophy.

You don't have to agree with everything Kaufmann writes to find the book valuable for the range of the ideas it touches on. At times, direct and humorous.

I think that Kaufmann has trouble with Kierkegaard. there must be more to the Dane than his 'deformity' which is all that Kaufmann seems interested in:

There is more dialectical despair to be found in from Shakespeare to Existentialism. Wk seems to have trouble in quoting Nietzsche to make his point. In response to K's claim that:

"After my death no one will find in my papers (this is my comfort) a single explanation of what it was that really filled my life, the secret writing of my inmost parts which explains everything and often transforms what the world would call bagatelles into events of prodigious importance for me, which I regard as insignificant apart from the secret gloss which explains them" (K: S to E 185-186)

Wk says, "This note should be compared with Nietzsche's observation: "The worst readers of aphorisms are the writers friends if they are intent on guessing back from the general to the particular instance to which the aphorism owes its origin: for with this pot-peeking they reduce the whole author's effort to nothing, and they only deserve it when, instead of philosophical outlook or instruction, they gain nothing but-at best, or at worst- the satisfaction of a vulgar curiosity." (N: S to E 186)

Kierkegaard is talking about writing, and Nietzsche is talking about reading, so the quote is not very applicable to what K said. But two paragraphs later WK seems to do some pot-peeking:

"I have said that Kierkegaard's range of experience was narrow; and yet his life was certainly no less interesting than Freud's or Nietzsche's. [...] In the concept of dread for example where he deals psychologically with original sin and admits that his psychology is based on his own case, he is preoccupied with the relation of his own sin to his father's; and he probably wondered whether his own deformity was not a punishment for his fathers sins." (WK: S to E 186)

Also, wk's charge of self-deception is based on this pot peeking:

"...And when we read his books in these terms, his conception of the three stages and the teleological suspension of the ethical are seen to be in part the desperate attempts of a misshapen man who was as he reveals in other contexts completely dominated by the figure of his father, to convince himself as well as a woman that the strange way in which he had broken his engagement with her had nothing to do with all-too-human motives? It would be absurd to claim that such a psychological analysis does justice to his work. Of course it does not. The only reason for as much as mentioning these matters is that the desire not to know the truth was as important element in K's faith." (WK: D to S 20)

Is WK's knowledge of what constitutes all-too-human motives objective or subjective? Does WK assume the objective truth of certain beliefs?

Is he wiggin' out?