#walter kaufmann

[majestativa]

That […] mixture of sensuality and cruelty which has always seemed to me to be the real “witches’ brew.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Medusa Reader, transl by Walter Kaufmann, (2013)

[dark-wackademia]

Dostoevsky and Existentialism

From his teenage years, Dostoevsky has been in search of truth. Not the scientific truth that is constant across different observers, but being true towards yourself. At the age of 18, in a personal correspondence, he said that “To study the meaning of man and of life — I am making significant progress here. I have faith in myself. Man is a mystery: if you spend your entire life trying to puzzle it out, then do not say that you have wasted your time. I occupy myself with this mystery, because I want to be a man”

source

As Kaufmann remarks on the novel Notes from Underground, “What we perceive is an unheard-of song of songs on individuality; not classical, not Biblical, and not at all romantic. No, individuality is not retouched, idealized, or holy; it is wretched and revolting, and yet, for all its misery, the highest good”

[theidealistphilosophy]

It is not enough to know the language; one must also acquire some feeling for an author.

Walter Kaufmann, Genealogy Of Morals; Editor’s Introduction.

[anaxerneas]

The question is how we use language - to vivisect experience, killing it for the sake of generalized knowledge, or to capture experience alive. The scientist does the former, the poet the latter, and the philosopher must often try to do both and capture the experience before analyzing it. At its best, philosophy does not live in the shadow of either science or poetry: it offers something compared to which both science and poetry are restricted in scope.

Walter Kaufmann, Critique of Religion and Philosophy

[pandaemoniumpancakes]

   What does the great poet do? I have rejected the traditionalists’ account of the relation of poetry to tradition, reality, and truth: they fail to recognize the essential autonomy of poetry that subverts stereotypes hallowed by tradition, changes our perception of reality, and makes accepted truths questionable by making us aware of the concrete meanings of ideas.    The poet does not imitate reality. This Greek conception, which was originally suggested by epic and dramatic poetry, does not do justice to Homer and Sophocles any more than to Shakespeare. The great poet is the enemy of our everyday reality: he makes that which we have seen with our own eyes appear as a mere shadow of that reality which we encounter in Oedipus, Lear, or The Brothers Karamazov. He shows us that we live blindly on the surface and says in Rilke’s words: “you must change your life.”    In drama and epic, novel and lyrical poem, the poet records individual experiences in their unmitigated subjectivity and thus expands our subjectivity and cracks our horizons.

Walter Kaufmann, from ‘13. Art, Tradition, and Truth: 7′ in From Shakespeare to Existentialism. 

[freewayhaunt]

“Those who loved with all their heart and mind and might have always thought of death, and those who knew the endless nights of harrowing concern for others have longed for it. The life I want is a life I could not endure in eternity. It is a life of love and intensity, suffering and creation, that makes life worthwhile and death welcome. There is no other life I should prefer. Neither should I like not to die.”

― Walter Kaufmann

[weil-weil-lautre]

The basic idea of the Phenomenology of Spirit is that a philosopher should not confine himself to views that have been held but penetrate behind these to the human reality they reflect. It is not enough to consider propositions, or even the content of concsiousness; it is worth while to ask in every instance what kind of spirit would entertain such propositions, hold such views, and have such a consciousness. Every outlook, in other words, is to be studied not merely as an academic possibility but as an existential reality.

Walter Kaufmann, Hegel: A Reinterpretation, 115

[svvedishgod]

i did a bit of blackout/erasure poetry from Kaufmann's translation of Goethe's Faust