Daily Inspiration Quote by Walter Kaufmann

Kaufmann’s sentence is doing more than describing a doctrine; it’s indicting a moral technology. “Here an attempt is made to explain suffering” sounds almost neutral, but the neutral tone is bait: he immediately shows how explanation slides into justification. The outcaste “is held to deserve” what happens to him, and the passive construction matters. No one person has to say “I choose this cruelty.” The system says it for them. Responsibility is laundered into metaphysics.

The key phrase is “fetched fate.” Kaufmann isn’t disputing that people search for meaning in pain; he’s skeptical of the particular kind of meaning being sold. “Fate” suggests inevitability; “fetched” suggests an implausible story patched together after the fact. Karma and rebirth, in this framing, aren’t spiritual insights so much as a retroactive alibi for hierarchy. If suffering is punishment for a previous life, then pity becomes interference, reform becomes impiety, and the social order can present itself as cosmic bookkeeping rather than human design.

Contextually, Kaufmann sits in a mid-20th-century Western philosophical moment suspicious of grand theodicies, influenced by Nietzsche’s attacks on moralized suffering and by postwar unease with any worldview that makes misery “deserved.” His target isn’t “Hinduism” in the tourist-brochure sense; it’s the way a tradition can be mobilized to naturalize caste oppression. The sentence’s tight logic delivers the sting: once you explain suffering as earned, you don’t need to end it.