Walter Kaufmann Quotes on Truth
Walter Kaufmann (1921–1980), the German-American philosopher whose Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1950) and the long subsequent corpus on existentialism, religion, and the philosophical canon decisively reshaped the Anglophone reception of Nietzsche after the Second World War, defended philosophical honesty as the cardinal cognitive virtue. The framework presses the case across The Faith of a Heretic (1961), Without Guilt and Justice (1973), and the late Discovering the Mind that the systematic self-deceptions of inherited religious, philosophical, and political traditions are the principal obstacle to genuine truth-seeking, and Kaufmann's translations of Nietzsche, Goethe, Buber, and the existentialists supplied the Anglophone reading public with much of its primary access to the German philosophical tradition.
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.”
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“Of faith and morals, one cannot speak honestly for long without hurting feelings. Therefore, most people speak dishonestly of the most important subjects. Many recent philosophers prefer not to speak of them at all. But in some situations honesty is incompatible with silence.”
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