Daily Inspiration Quote by Walter Kaufmann

Kaufmann doesn’t come for faith with torches and pitchforks; he dissects it with a philosopher’s scalpel. The key move is his careful calibration of what counts as “faith”: not just belief, but “intense” and “usually confident” belief. That extra pressure matters. He’s not targeting mild hunches or provisional commitments. He’s describing a psychological posture that treats uncertainty as something to be overcome by force of conviction.

Then comes the quietly devastating clause: “not based on evidence sufficient to command assent from every reasonable person.” Kaufmann isn’t saying faith is irrational in a simplistic, sneering way. He’s framing faith as belief that outruns public standards of justification. “Every reasonable person” is doing heavy work: it’s a benchmark drawn from Enlightenment ideals of shared reason, the kind of evidence that can travel across backgrounds and still persuade. Faith, in this view, is defined by its refusal (or inability) to cash out into arguments that would compel broad agreement.

The subtext is about authority. If your belief can’t compel assent through evidence, what holds it in place? Tradition, community, temperament, need, identity. Kaufmann’s intent isn’t merely to insult believers; it’s to clarify an epistemic boundary and, implicitly, to question institutions that demand certainty where the evidence won’t support it.

Contextually, Kaufmann wrote in a 20th-century landscape shaped by existentialism, postwar disillusionment, and skepticism toward inherited metaphysics. His definition reads like a warning label: when confidence outpaces warrant, belief stops being a conclusion and becomes a loyalty test.