Daily Inspiration Quote by Walter Kaufmann

Oppression, here, isn’t the boot of a tyrant so much as the dead weight of a cosmic script. Kaufmann is writing against the religious and metaphysical reflex to treat meaning as something handed down: a verdict delivered by God, History, or “human nature.” If life is oppressive, it’s because we’ve been trained to experience it as a test we didn’t design, graded by standards we didn’t choose. His pivot - “we are free” - isn’t a motivational poster slogan. It’s a philosophical jailbreak.

Kaufmann, the great American interpreter of Nietzsche and existentialism, is pressing a distinctly modern nerve: the terror and relief of a world without guarantees. The subtext is that nihilism is not the inevitable outcome of godless modernity; it’s a transitional mood, a sulk. Meaning doesn’t disappear when the old authorities collapse. It relocates - into authorship. “Give our own lives meaning and purpose” frames the self as a maker, not a discoverer.

The line about suffering is the real knife. Kaufmann refuses the consolations that suffering is secretly “for” something. Redemption isn’t metaphysical; it’s aesthetic and ethical. You don’t justify pain by explaining it, you redeem it by converting it into work, care, commitment, art - anything that proves you weren’t merely crushed by it. The rhetorical trick is subtle: he takes the language of salvation (“redeem”) and empties it of theology, keeping the urgency while changing the owner. Meaning becomes not a gift, but a responsibility.