Walter Kaufmann Biography Quotes 18 Report mistakes

Early Life
Walter Arnold Kaufmann was born in 1921 in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany. Coming of age as the Weimar Republic collapsed and the Nazi dictatorship rose, he developed early a suspicion of slogans and a lasting commitment to intellectual honesty. The climate of persecution and ideological conformity that defined the 1930s in Germany shaped his sense of the stakes of philosophy and literature, and it left him with a life-long determination to separate genuine thought from cant and coercion.

Emigration and Education
On the eve of the Second World War he left Germany for the United States. In his adopted country he pursued intensive study of philosophy and the humanities, completing advanced work in the field soon after the war. The experience of migration, of changing languages and academic traditions, would remain central to his outlook: he became a bridge between German thought and Anglophone readers, attentive to the nuances of both traditions and wary of the misunderstandings that pass too easily across them.

Princeton Years
Kaufmann spent more than three decades at Princeton University, teaching in philosophy and often ranging into comparative literature. His classrooms introduced generations of students to the moral urgency of existentialism, the rigor of classical German philosophy, and the drama of tragedy. Colleagues and interlocutors at Princeton and beyond, including figures such as Richard Rorty, encountered in him a critic of systematizing fashions and a defender of clarity without reduction. He remained on the Princeton faculty until his death in 1980.

Interpreter of Nietzsche
Kaufmann's name is inseparable from Friedrich Nietzsche. At mid-century Nietzsche was widely misread in the English-speaking world as either a literary curiosity or a proto-fascist ideologue. Kaufmann's studies and translations helped overturn this caricature. In Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist he argued for Nietzsche's philosophical depth, situating him alongside the canonical moderns and exposing the distortions propagated by Nietzsche's sister, Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche. His editions, introductions, and commentaries, including The Portable Nietzsche and later collections of Basic Writings, made the aphoristic style and evolving arguments legible to new readers. In debate with other translators and scholars, among them R. J. Hollingdale, Kaufmann emphasized accuracy, context, and the integrity of Nietzsche's voice.

Beyond Nietzsche: Existentialism, Religion, and Modern Thought
Kaufmann's interests radiated outward from Nietzsche to the broader constellation of existential and post-idealistic thought. In Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, he assembled texts that placed Søren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Karl Jaspers in conversation, while clarifying the shared themes and crucial differences among them. He wrote trenchantly on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in Hegel: A Reinterpretation, resisting both hero-worship and dismissal. Confronting Martin Heidegger's philosophy, he criticized obscurity and spoke plainly about the ethical and political failures shadowing Heidegger's work. His Critique of Religion and Philosophy and The Faith of a Heretic examined belief and unbelief with equal rigor, rejecting dogma yet respecting the depth of religious experience. Late in life, the multi-volume Discovering the Mind drew a historical arc from Goethe through Kant and Hegel to Nietzsche, Heidegger, Buber, Freud, and their heirs.

Translator and Editor
Kaufmann believed that the fate of ideas in a new language hinges on translation and editorial framing. He produced influential English versions of Nietzsche's major works and of Goethe's Faust, bringing both philosophical precision and poetic sensitivity to the task. He also translated Martin Buber's I and Thou, introducing a new generation to Buber's dialogical philosophy. As an editor and anthologist, he crafted selections and introductions that steered readers away from cliches toward the core arguments and their historical stakes.

Style, Teaching, and Colleagues
In prose and in the lecture hall, Kaufmann favored lucidity over jargon and confrontation over evasion. He relished direct engagement with canonical figures and contemporaries alike, meeting Hegel and Kierkegaard as living minds rather than as museum pieces, and addressing Sartre and Camus without the pieties that sometimes insulated them. Students who encountered him at Princeton often recalled not only a scholar of uncommon range but a teacher who insisted that philosophy matters for how one lives. His work helped set the stage for later Anglophone studies of Nietzsche and existentialism; scholars such as Alexander Nehamas would write in a landscape reshaped by his translations and arguments.

Final Years and Legacy
Kaufmann died in 1980 while still active as a writer and teacher. He left behind a body of work that broadened and deepened the Anglophone understanding of German philosophy and European literature. By recovering the seriousness of Nietzsche, clarifying the varieties of existential thinking from Kierkegaard to Sartre and Camus, engaging critically with Heidegger, Hegel, and Buber, and insisting on the connection between clear writing and clear thought, he altered the syllabus of postwar philosophy. His books remain in print, his translations continue to be read, and his example endures: a scholar-translator who made difficult ideas accessible without diluting them, and who treated philosophy as both an intellectual and a moral vocation.

Our collection contains 18 quotes who is written by Walter, under the main topics: Wisdom - Justice - Meaning of Life - Deep - Free Will & Fate.