Stanley Corngold
In a disarmingly simple sentence in The Faith of a Heretic, Walter Kaufmann writes of the commitments made by two formidable men of letters, Hermann Hesse and Martin Buber: “Their personalities qualify their ideas.” Kaufmann means that such commitments—Hesse’s apolitical, quietist reclusiveness and Martin Buber’s “subjective” principles of Bible translation—may not have the same value “when accepted by men of a different character.” Here we have the author’s recurrent insistence on the exemplary importance of great personalities, if we are ever to learn “the meaning of humanity.” He might have quoted Stephen Spender: “I think continually of those who were truly great.”1 Shakespeare, Goethe, Nietzsche, and Freud are Kaufmann’s distinctive examples. This high valuation of character over culture—a character informed by what was once called virtù—will, flooded with intelligence—could make Kaufmann’s thoughts seem out of season in our acquisitive, culture-besotted age. But his distaste throughout the 1950s and 1960s for the feeling that the times could no longer countenance greatness of soul would have survived him into our century. His short life gives us a good, strong taste of what such greatness of soul would be like.
Kaufmann was born in 1921 in Freiburg, Germany, into a Protestant family with Jewish forebears. His heretical disposition was in evidence at a very early age. In a vivid interview, he recalls that he was unable to understand who or what the Holy Ghost was and asked his father for an explanation. The explanation fell short, and Kaufmann replied, “Well, I don’t believe in Jesus and I don’t believe in the Holy Ghost either, so it seems I just believe in God, and then I cannot really be a Christian.”2 He took this conclusion very seriously and, not yet twelve years old, formally abjured Christianity, asking for—and receiving—an official document that confirmed his decision.
His abjuration of Christianity was not an abjuration of religion, a subject that would occupy him for the rest of his life. It is the essential subject of The Faith of a Heretic. At twelve, he converted to Judaism, ignorant of the fact that all his grandparents were born Jewish. Thereafter, he intended to become a rabbi, a not-surprising impulse, he explains, since
in Germany at that time, there was nothing else to study. As a Jew I couldn’t go to the university, so, being terribly interested in religion at that time, and in Judaism in particular, that was what I thought I would do.3
Kaufmann immigrated to the United States in 1939, escaping the fate of several members of his family. Their change of faith meant nothing to the Nazis; the entire family, Walter Kaufmann included, could have expected certain death had they not left Germany. One of Walter’s uncles, fighting for the fatherland in the First World War, died in Russia; two others were murdered. The dedication to this volume reads:
To My Uncles
Walter Seligsohn
who volunteered in 1914 and was
shot off his horse on the Russian front in 1915
Julius Seligsohn
Franz Kaufmann
both Oberleutnant, Iron Cross, First-Class, 1914–18, one a devout Jew,
one a devout convert to Christianity,
one killed in a Nazi concentration camp in 1942,
one shot by the Secret Police in 1944,
both for gallantly helping others
in obedience to conscience, defiant
On arriving in the United States, Kaufmann enrolled at Williams College, where he majored in philosophy and religion. His likely path was to graduate school, to write a doctoral thesis in philosophy, but his ever-present will to action, and now with a war on, urged him, after a year at Harvard, to join the Army Air Force and thereafter the Military Intelligence Service. His experience with the occupying troops was morally vexing, and a poem in his volume Cain and Other Poems tells of his chagrin:
Occupation
Parading among a conquered and starving people
among the ruins
with patches and stripes and ribbons and hash marks
one for a year in the army
for having grown callous and dumb
one for a year in the States
for learning to goldbrick and pass the buck
one for the fight and one for the occupation
for drinking and whoring and black marketeering
one for the victory that is melting away
while they parade among the ruins with ribbons and stripes.4
The poem makes the point that Kaufmann’s spiritual and emotional attachment was not confined to a single nation or culture. Charged with excessive pity for a corrupted people or ingratitude to his host country, he would reply—so The Faith of a Heretic suggests—that one must seek out the truth, whatever offense it gives to conventional opinion. Kaufmann was never prepared to abjure the higher German culture that had nourished him.
After the war, Kaufmann returned to Harvard to complete his Ph.D., in 1947, with a dissertation titled “Nietzsche’s Theory of Values,” and in the fall of that year began teaching at Princeton University, where he continued to teach until his untimely death. In 1950, soon after arriving in Princeton, he published his remarkable first opus, with signature provocativeness, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, which utterly transformed the reception of Nietzsche in America and Europe. In his hands Nietzsche emerged as a great deal more than his pejorative image as wild man and proto-Nazi. Nietzsche studies in America have since flourished as a rigorous discipline in the light of Kaufmann’s intellectual revision—one recent scholar calls it a “revolution.” By seeing Nietzsche “in the grand tradition of Western thought and envisioned against the background of Socrates and Plato, Luther and Rousseau, Kant and Hegel,”5 Kaufmann would rescue Nietzsche for the German contribution to Western thought. More, this revision would help rescue the German tradition as such. At Princeton Kaufmann was promoted to full professor in 1962 and then to the Stuart Professorship of Philosophy in 1979.
There is a sort of permanent youthfulness—zest and pugnacity—in all of Kaufmann’s writing, consistent with the picture of him in life that many people retain. I first saw him in 1955, in the early summer following my graduation from Columbia College, when he came to lecture there on that new and exciting philosophical movement called “existentialism.” To my regret, I was unable to feel myself addressed for the very callow reason that I could not expect a professor who looked like an undergraduate and, as I recall, wore lederhosen, to speak with much authority. (I was used to the solemnity and air of mature grandeur that attached to the great figures at that university—Quentin Anderson, Moses Hadas, Lionel Trilling, et al.) My impression of Kaufmann was shared by others, to judge from passages in a story titled “Princeton Idyll” by Princeton’s own Joyce Carol Oates. One of her two narrators writes, “I do remember the philosopher and Nietzsche translator Walter Kaufmann, who came by on his bicycle to introduce himself … and who became one of my grandfather’s good friends. So boyish-looking, people mistook him for an undergraduate at the university.” The second narrator, a semiliterate housekeeper, recalls: “One of them [the geniuses] came alone on his bicycle. I thought he was a student, but this was ‘WK’ who was so kind to me…. Once on Olden Lane I was walking & WK stopped his bicycle to walk with me. He wore cordroy trousers and a V neck sweater like a boy. His hair was very dark and his eyes were dark and lively. He was not much older than I was.”6
Kaufmann died, in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1980, at the premature age of fifty-nine—far too young for someone of his vitality. A colleague of his, the eminent Princeton historian Carl Schorske, is lucid at this writing at ninety-nine; Arthur Szathmary, fellow philosopher at Princeton, died in 2013, at ninety-seven; Joseph Frank, with whom Walter debated an understanding of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, passed away in the same year at ninety-four, some months after publishing his last book. It is hard to imagine Kaufmann’s death arising from an ordinary illness, and in fact the circumstances fit a conception of the tragic—if not his own. According to his brother, Felix Kaufmann, Walter, while on one of his Faustian journeys of exploration to Central Africa, ingested a parasite that attacked his heart. Walter died of a burst aorta some months later in his Princeton home.
His death does not meet his own conception of the tragic, for The Faith of a Heretic contains these extraordinary sentences:
When I die, I do not want them to say: Think of all he still might have done. There is cowardice in wanting to have that said. Let them say—let me live so they can say: There was nothing left in him; he did not spare himself; he put everything he had into his work, his life.
He would also not want to have it otherwise than his readers’ confronting him, for only some of this claim would prove true. Against his will, and yet at no threat to his nobility (for “nobility squanders itself”), I do think of all he still might have done. This awareness, too, is heartbreaking, when one reads more and more of his vast and lively work: think of all the joy of creativity denied to him—and to us, who study him with such complex pleasure and instruction. (I associate Kaufmann with his “educator,” Nietzsche, who “associated Zarathustra with the joy in which he had composed it.”)7
Kaufmann’s life, even as a tenured university professor of philosophy, was full of incident and adventure, which he achieved quite possibly within earshot of the mutterings of some colleagues. In a passage from an earlier work, Critique of Religion and Philosophy, we read in italic, “That those who prefer freedom to the existence of the intellectual shut-in must of necessity be unable to make up their minds or to act with a will is a myth popular in institutions.”8 He went his own way, with striking independence, in love with proofs of his autonomy. Something of the scope of the lands he surveyed is suggested in the 1979 preface to the book From Shakespeare to Existentialism, whose first edition preceded by a year the appearance of The Faith of a Heretic. There, he writes of discovering, in summer 1979, his penchant for returning again and again to places that had once fascinated him in the course of “traveling around the world for the fourth time.”9 On returning to Rembrandt’s Large Self Portrait in the Vienna art museum, he had a sort of moral epiphany. Seeing an “integrity incarnate” in the painter’s eyes, he felt as if he were being “mustered” by that gaze. He explained: “One has to do something for a living, especially if one has a family, but I felt that I wanted to write only in the spirit in which Rembrandt had painted himself, without regard for what might pay or advance my career.”10
He would write (following Stendhal) with what he called “the logic of passion” for a larger reading public. After completing his breakthrough study Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist in 1950 when he was not yet thirty, he finished his fourth decade by publishing three volumes in nearly consecutive years: the above-mentioned Critique in 1958; From Shakespeare to Existentialism in 1959; and the book we hold in our hands, The Faith of a Heretic, in 1961. The scope of his intellectual concerns is admirable, the erudition breathtaking, and for one so young, the tempo of production uncanny: each of these three near masterpieces is around four hundred pages long in hard covers. At this early stage he had already created what the Germans call ein Werk, a monumental, coherent, interrelated body of work. And this prolific evidence of a sustained life of writing and reflection would continue to the very end of his days.
Kaufmann declared that he conceived The Faith of a Heretic in good measure in response to a review of the Critique that appeared in the Times Literary Supplement (London), in which the reviewer, a dissatisfied professor of Catholic philosophy, asked him, in the end, for his doctrine—his own beliefs. A preliminary sketch was then commissioned by Harper’s magazine, to which The Faith of a Heretic apparently alludes. Kaufmann, believing passionately in “evidence and reason” and heretic to the “church” of ordinary irrationality, writes:
If we discard our reason, mortify our understanding, and take leave of our senses, how can we be sure that what we accept is the word of God? The mere fact that something is presented to us as the word of God is clearly insufficient. One has only to write an article on matters of religion in a popular magazine to be swamped with letters, little pamphlets, and big books that claim to offer nothing less than God’s own truth; but, alas, they are far from agreeing with each other…. How are we to choose if evidence and reason are thrown out of court?
In this book, a declaration of faith, we have Kaufmann taking stock of his well-stocked mind, in answer to more than a need to flesh out a magazine article. He answers to an urgent compulsion, and it is an admirable one: he explains that when he was young, he read that van Gogh went down to be among the miners, but also how little it helped them. Zola did not go down among them, but he wrote Germinal, as a result of which there was immense publicity and a good deal of legislation for the good of their condition. Kaufmann wills that effect. In 1959 he had already made his mark as a superlative academic writer and thinker; he now wants to write with effect. “For centuries,” he writes,
heretics have been persecuted by men of strong faiths who hated non-conformity and heresy and criticism while making obeisances to honesty—within limits. In our time millions have been murdered in cold blood by the foes of nonconformity and heresy and criticism, who paid lip service to honesty—within limits.
I have less excuse than many others for ignoring all this. If even I do not speak up, who will? And if not now when? (emphasis added)
But what effect can this work have on an age with so few beliefs, with so few commitments, so little faith? In a key passage, as Kaufmann points out in his study of Nietzsche, which appears at the end of the first part of Zarathustra and is quoted again in the preface to Ecce Homo: “[A]ll faith amounts to so little.”11 Thomas Mann, too, wrote, in 1952, “I have not much faith—Or even faith in faith.”12 But, as Kaufmann also wrote in his Nietzsche, “I love Nietzsche’s books but am no Nietzschean”;13 ergo, faith has a role to play in his philosophy. We, who allege ourselves to be more skeptical, might be inclined to reply: Well, I will scratch at my consciousness to see what I believe (and I intend to conclude that I believe only in what I see and know). I believe, yes, what I know, what I know to be true, the facts of the case—but that is a far cry from a belief in God or progressive history or the equal genetic endowments of all human beings. So … what do I believe? In what do I have faith? And if I am asked by this book to question my beliefs, what precisely am I to do?
One might at first glance withdraw from the challenge by considering as outdated such questions as these: What is your faith? How good is your theology? Do you have a single, overriding concern or many different concerns? Or as unaccustomed: How theological is your literary criticism? Certainly, these questions are untimely. But on second glance one may very well be inclined—it might be good to be so inclined—to ask why these questions are outdated. On what grounds?
Kaufmann raises question after question that we have not asked ourselves, questions that change us by making us realize how few questions we might have set ourselves. The whole point about the cogency of this book is right here: it will not allow you to dismiss the questions it asks on the grounds that they are questions no longer relevant … to the time—or the Times! The sort of relevance they have is not a matter of their applicability to the moment. As individual questions and as insistent questioning, they will put you out of joint with your age, make you independent of your age. The prospect is bottomless—and anxious-making—since what now comes in for questioning is the manner in which you have lived your whole life. Have you lived attentively? What have you done with the gift of your life? The urge to ask these questions arises from a philosopher’s credo, which Kaufmann finds in Nietzsche and his sources: “The philosopher … must always stand opposed to his time and may never conform; it is his calling to be a fearless critic and diagnostician—as Socrates was.”14 This credo comes under the heading of “Nietzsche’s Socratic protestantism and chronic heresy (emphasis added).”15
The questions Kaufmann asks arise from a critical reflection on a vast range of cultural materials, for his range is extraordinary, extending from the civilization of ancient Egypt (ca. 4000 BC) to contemporary America (ca. 1960), with easily recoverable references to General Eisenhower’s faith in organized religion, Joseph McCarthy’s slanders, race tensions, the atom bomb. Were it not for a few unmovable place and time markers, one could readily attach these references to present-day persons and events, especially in Kaufmann’s ruthless examination of the “religious revival” and organized religion as such. His chief topics are set out at the beginning: the quest for honesty, the questionable value of “commitment,” the masquerade of theology, the problem of suffering, the moral core of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, Freud and the tragic virtues, the meaning of death, and a jeu d’esprit, titled “Trilogue on Heaven, Love, and Peace,” reminding readers that Kaufmann is a brilliant stylist, a translator of German thought and writing of unparalleled clarity, and a poet himself.
Here is the barest sampling of his eloquence, a description of Moses, as contrasted with Jesus Christ:
He went away to die alone, lest any man should know his grave to worship there or attach any value to his mortal body. Having seen Egypt, he knew better than the Buddha how prone men are to such superstitions. Going off to die alone, he must have left his people with the image of a mystery, with the idea of some supernatural transfiguration, with the thought that he did not die but went up to heaven—with the notion that he was immortal and divine. He might have created the suspicion that, when his mission was accomplished, he returned to heaven. Instead he created an enduring image of humanity: he left his people with the thought that, being human and imperfect, he was not allowed to enter the promised land, but that he went up on the mountain to see it before he died.
Kaufmann writes in several tonalities: here is his witty, audacious mind at work. How generally useful, he asks urbanely, en passant, is the Golden Rule—“Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them”—as a sexual ethic? He writes of the Mormon religion:
Mormons believe that couples joined in holy matrimony in a Mormon Temple will enjoy each other’s company in all eternity, while those married elsewhere are married for this life only. What strikes them as enviable would be more likely, in most cases, to be hell itself.
The temptation to go on quoting is barely resistible, but this is only a brief plaidoyer, meaning to suggest the charm and usefulness of this one book. In his chapter titled “Morality,” Kaufmann celebrates Plato, who, he declares, is nonpareil in his philosophical power to educate the mind:
At every turn he challenges the reader to consider new ideas, to examine striking arguments, to be surprised at unforeseen conclusions, and to reconsider. Few, if any, writers are more worth reading.
I believe the vigilant reader of The Faith of a Heretic will come to a similar conclusion, as have readers of this book in the past, about the intellectual prowess of Walter Kaufmann, a thinker making his critical way through the thickets of historical philosophy and religion, bent on constituting the whole man of humility, ambition, love, honesty, and courage. On the philosophical side readers will be impressed by his relentlessly critical stance. It will be exhilarating for scholars—whose task, it seems, has always been the obedient exegesis of past authorities—to read him say of Heidegger: “But does Heidegger ever entertain the possibility that Hölderlin or Sophocles, Heraclitus or Parmenides might be mistaken about anything?”16 Kaufmann has no hesitation—indeed it is the leading edge of his thought—to dare to criticize … Plato, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Heidegger.
On the religious side, Kaufmann is cogent, for one thing, in proving the intellectual hollowness of the trimmer’s agnostic position. What sort of evidence is the agnostic waiting for en route to his final decision that God exists (or does not exist)? To count as relevant, it would need to be preceded by a prior understanding of the proposition “God exists (or does not exist),” with equal stress on the noun and verb. Just what is it, precisely, that the agnostic is uncertain about?
The German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, writing on the creation of individuality in modern society, describes three modes: one, the copying of role models; two, a sort of cleavage of the self—self-doubling—when the pressure of experience becomes too great; and, finally, three, the experience of a career, in which the self, while constantly changing, remains compatible with “yesterday’s.”17 Do we not have in outline, here, the main motives of self-creation in the life of the author of The Faith of a Heretic? On role models, first: the chiefest of Kaufmann’s exemplary personalities is the German poet, novelist, dramatist, scientist, privy councillor, and crafter of shrewd aphorisms Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, with Nietzsche—Kaufmann’s Nietzsche, who idolized Goethe—not far behind. Consider this telling passage by Nietzsche, cited by Kaufmann in his Nietzsche study, for elements that resonate with aspects of Kaufmann’s own self-styling:
Goethe … sought help from history, natural science, antiquity, and also Spinoza, but, above all, from practical activity; he surrounded himself with limited horizons; he did not retire from life but put himself into the midst of it; he was not fainthearted but took as much as possible upon himself, over himself, into himself. What he wanted was totality; he fought the mutual extraneousness of reason, senses, feeling, and will … he disciplined himself into wholeness, he created himself …. In the middle of an age with an unreal outlook, Goethe was a convinced realist: he said Yes to everything that was related to him in this respect. Goethe conceived a human being who would be strong, highly educated, skillful in all bodily matters, self-controlled, reverent toward himself, and who might dare to afford the whole range and wealth of being natural, being strong enough for such freedom; the man of tolerance, not from weakness but from strength because he knows how to use to his advantage even that from which the average nature would perish; the man for whom there is no longer anything that is forbidden, unless it be weakness, whether called vice or virtue. Such a spirit who has become free stands amid the cosmos with a joyous and trusting fatalism, in the faith that only the particular is loathsome, and that all is redeemed and affirmed in the whole—he does not negate anymore.18
“Self-cleavage” is the act of registering a second self in oneself, which then becomes the object of self-consciousness. Kaufmann’s life story, emphasizing persecution, alienation, exile, and putative assimilation, would have produced more than one scene of consternation in him, a collision of opposite affects, including the temptation to cultivate ressentiment, to want revenge for the harm done by the Nazis to him and his family. At such moments of self-doubling, a sense of disparity in value comes into play: the higher part wants to sublimate the lower. Kaufmann could have recalled Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: “For that man be delivered from revenge, that is for me the bridge to the highest hope.”19 In a passage he knew well and cited, he could have imagined Nietzsche’s struggle as his own:
[T]he material upon which the form-giving and ravishing nature of this force [“bad conscience”] vents itself is man himself…. This secret self-ravishment, this artists’ cruelty, this pleasure in giving form to oneself as a hard, recalcitrant, suffering material—burning into it a will, a critique, a contradiction, a contempt, a No—this … work of a soul that is willingly divided against itself and makes itself suffer—this whole activistic “bad conscience” has … been the real womb of all ideal and imaginative events and has thus brought to light an abundance of strange new beauty and affirmation.
Kaufmann concludes: “The one self tries to give form to the other; man tries to make himself, to give ‘style’ to himself, and to organize the chaos of his passions.”20
Finally, with regard to the creation of individuality through a career: it goes without saying that Kaufmann found definition as a prominent teacher of philosophy at Princeton and as a moral legislator to a wide reading audience. His credo reads: “To try to fashion something from suffering, to relish our triumphs, and to endure defeats without resentment: all that is compatible with the faith of a heretic.”
His work will address you and force you to inquire into beliefs you did not know you held. It will make you go deeper into yourself. You will be amazed.
1 Stephen Spender, New Collected Poems, ed. Michael Brett (London: Faber and Faber, 2004), 16.
2 Trude Weiss-Rosmarin, “An Interview with Walter Kaufmann,” Judaism 30 (Winter 1981), 123.
3 Ibid., 125.
4 Walter Kaufmann, Cain and Other Poems (New York: Doubleday, 1962), 157.
5 Walter Kaufmann, with a foreword by Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton Classic Editions) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 405.
6 Joyce Carol Oates, “Princeton Idyll,” Dear Husband (New York: Ecco Press, 2009), 92, 101.
7 Kaufmann, Nietzsche, 65.
8 Walter Kaufmann, Critique of Religion and Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), 410.
9 Walter Kaufmann, From Shakespeare to Existentialism: An Original Study (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), ix.
10 Kaufmann, Critique, xi.
11 Kaufmann, Nietzsche, 47.
12 BBC radio broadcast, “Thomas Mann’s War,” http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a6b9bfe8–620e-11da-8470–0000779e2340.html#axzz3K2lnSyBS
13 Kaufmann, Nietzsche, vii.
14 Ibid., 405.
15 Ibid., 417.
16 Kaufmann, From Shakespeare, 360.
17 Discussed in Gerhard Neumann, “Autobiographie und Karriere: Ein Selbstporträt des literarischen Fachs am Einzelfall [Chronik der Lektüren: Portrait eines Fachs],” Wissenschaft und Universität. Das Selbstporträt einer Generation. Wolfgang Frühwald zum 70. Geburtstag, compiled by Martin Huber und Gerhard Lauer (Köln: Dumont, 2005), 242.
18 Kaufmann, Nietzsche, 281.
19 Ibid., 373.
19 Ibid., 253.