Walter Kaufmann 1921 – 1980
Walter Arnold Kaufmann was a German-American philosopher, translator, and poet and the principal English-language interpreter of Nietzsche in the second half of the twentieth century. Forced into exile from Nazi Germany in 1939 as a teenager of Jewish descent, he settled in the United States, served in army intelligence during the Second World War, and after the war took a long professorship at Princeton. His Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist of 1950 demolished the Nazi reading of Nietzsche and remains a foundational study, while his translations of Nietzsche, Hegel, Goethe, Buber, and others made central works of German thought available to a wide English readership.
Key facts
- Nationality
- German-American
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Analytic, Continental
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Walter Kaufmann:
“Nietzsche was no proto-Nazi; his thought is the most resolute opposition to mass conformism.”
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Attributed to Walter Kaufmann:
“Religion at its best is a way of asking questions, not of refusing them.”
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Attributed to Walter Kaufmann:
“Tragedy is the noblest answer to the absurd.”
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Attributed to Walter Kaufmann:
“Existentialism is the philosophy of authentic individuality.”
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Attributed to Walter Kaufmann:
“To translate is to read with double care.”