Walter Kaufmann: Philosopher, Humanist, Heretic by Stanley Corngold (review)

"Plainly, most reviews should not be taken very seriously." This is Walter Kaufmann's judgment on the ethics of book reviewing, from one of his later works, The Future of the Humanities (1977; quoted here by Corngold). Who would dispute such an assessment, even in the present context? Book reviews are minor works that offer only the briefest reflections, so there is nothing particularly surprising about this statement. The only aspect of this pronouncement on the "meaning and importance" of reviews that one might find peculiar is that so much importance is placed on reviews in Corngold's book. Kaufmann's sensitivity to the way his work was received is a persistent sore spot throughout his career, and by the time he wrote The Future of the Humanities, he was disappointed, indignant, and felt betrayed by the humanities, and philosophy more specifically. One might also note that Corngold's study of Kaufmann is essentially a series of extended book reviews, reporting on what he considers most salient and valuable, while also dedicating significant space and energy to responding to reviewers and scholars who dismiss Kaufmann as something other than a philosopher or, at best, an unreliable one (this includes comments posted on Brian Leiter's blog, as well as amazon.com reviews and an anonymous online reviewer calling himself "Goosta," alongside the thoughts of eminent philosophers like Karl Jaspers, whose assessment, "how little Kaufmann understands of philosophy," provoked diatribes against Jaspers in Kaufmann's work). The first chapter offers an account of Kaufmann's Nietzsche book, but there is also a postscript, which attempts to answer critics of Kaufmann's Nietzsche, the work that made such an impression on the young Corngold that he begins this study with an anecdote about being accused of "wasting" his time reading that book as a young naval cadet in 1954. "Ever since then, I have felt myself especially protective of this book, the author, and his subject." Corngold's own book is clearly modeled on Kaufmann's Nietzsche, as one recognizes already in the subtitle, and Walter Kaufmann rings with admiration, as Corngold's explicit intention in writing is "to heighten the pleasure and instruction you will find in Kaufmann's work."

In offering this intellectual biography, Corngold serves ably to identify what is worth one's attention in Kaufmann's vast body of work. One of the key features of Kaufmann's work that Corngold highlights again and again is the signature structure of thought that imprints itself on everything that Kaufmann produces, "Kaufmann's signature logic," or "Kaufmann's conciliatory dialectic," "the antiphonic Yes—No." This dialectical style of thought presents a position articulated by a thinker like Kant, Hegel, or Nietzsche, a proposition, which is clearly "stated, then denied utterly, then modified in relation to the negative, so that both thesis and antithesis survive." This structure of argumentation, developing through a series of positions <p, ~p, p+>, finally produces an "enriched first term as the most truthful." This intellectual procedure allowed Kaufmann to engage seriously with thinkers and topics largely avoided by other academic philosophers of his day. Kaufmann's famous rehabilitation of Nietzsche is the obvious example, but Kaufmann also wrote extensively on religion, tragedy, poetry, and even a late photographic trilogy entitled Man's Lot (1978).

In striking out on his own path, venturing away from the paradigm problems of contemporary philosophy (in conventional terms of either analytic or continental philosophical approaches), Kaufmann saw himself as a poet-philosopher, following the example of his greatest educators, Goethe and Nietzsche: "Chief among Kaufmann's exemplary personalities is the German poet, novelist, dramatist, scientist, privy councilor, and crafter of shrewd aphorisms Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Nietzsche—Kaufmann's Nietzsche, who idolized Goethe—is not far behind." Indeed, in his final book, the trilogy Discovering the Mind (1980), each volume of which takes up the thought of three (Germanophone) philosophers, Kaufmann devises an alternative tradition to the binary of analytic/continental, with Goethe as the cornerstone of a style of thought that...