Nietzsche, Heidegger and Buber: Discovering the Mind, Volume Two (review)

128 SHOFAR Winter 1994 Vol. 12, No.2 Nietzsche, Heidegger and Huber: Discovering the Mind, Volume Two, by Walter Kaufmann. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1992. 305 pp. $19.95. Walter Kaufmann's legacy to the discovery of the western mind is considerable. As a translator of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Buber he was unparalleled; as a teacher he left behind a legion of students-including Ivan SoIl, author of the thoughtful introductions to several of Kaufmann's works and editor of those left unfinished at Kaufmann's too-early death. As an interpreter, Kaufmann presented his arguments at great length, with regard primarily to Hegel and his (Kaufmann's) great hero, Nietzsche. What he intended as his most extensive contribution, however, is his threevolume work, Discovering the Mind, which assesses Western thought, focusing in each volume primarily on three thinkers. In Volume One, Hegel stood side-by-side with Goethe and Kant, and while Volume Two, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Buber, is ideally read against the background of the first, it is designed, as both SoIl and Kaufmann point out, to stand on its own. There are many strengths to this work-not least of all its full-blooded humanistic outlook so out of synch with the patterns of thought which characterize many of Kaufmann's colleagues, who prefer the cold spaces of British analytic philosophy to the ethical fevers which so obsessed Kaufmann and which made him an anachronism to them. There are weaknesses to this work as well. The key to the work is Kaufmann's distinction between the quality of philosophy of a given thinker and the influence of that thinker on philosophy . It is interesting that he should focus on the second phenomenon, in assessing the importance of these individuals (and others, in passing, like Kierkegaard, for example) in a context which is limited to the West and to the last two hundred years. The issue of influence rather than quality is one that rarely enters the ivory tower. I suspect that Kaufmann's choice of focus, appropriate to his humanism, is largely influenced by the time we live in. That is, western civilization has endured, in living through the Nazi era, an ineffable trauma, a substantial part of whose ideological foundations were laid by distorting the thought and the influence of-particularly -Nietzsche, Kaufmann's hero. And Heidegger's intellectual influence helped further to develop that ideology, even if only indirectly. One might say that after Auschwitz we no longer have the luxury of remaining safely enwombed in the ivory tower, judging the quality of a thinker's thoughts and ignoring the influence of those thoughts and the ramifications of such influence. This subtext emerges not infrequently from Kaufmann's discussion. Book Reviews 129 In conjunction with his focus on influence rather than quality per se, he spends a good deal of time considering style, offering the observation that not all works which are difficult to read are difficult because of the density of their profundity. On the contrary, Kaufmann asserts: in many cases inaccessibility is a function of deliberate attempts to obfuscate, and such attempts are a function of an author's fear of clarity, because clarity might reveal triviality in the author's thought. Kaufmann's overriding interest is to show that Nietzsche is a much greater giant than he has been credited with being, due to the mis-view of his thinking engendered by the distortions which his sister crafted and Nazi ideologues extended. In recapitulating, in large part, his earlier works on Nietzsche, Kaufmann offers Nietzsche's contributions to the discovery of mind, including his pre-Freudian discussion of the unconscious (in this area Kaufmann asserts that Nietzsche has gone unrecognized) and his theory of the Will to Power (in this area in particular, Kaufmann asserts that Nietzsche has been distorted by others and misunderstood-and this is a claim made elsewhere and often by others). Aristotle's Will to Happiness, which Kaufmann ignores, and Freud's Will to Pleasure, which he mentions, are deemed by him less significant in explaining human behavior. He goes on to consider Nietzsche's pioneering of the psychology of different world-views and the pioneering of psychohistory...