Walter Kaufmann (1) (1921–1980)

Later: OK, very glad I pushed passed the block of Jaspers. An overall great collection, and it's pretty funny in itself to find Heidegger and Sartre, who follow J, a wondrous relief of comparatively easy understanding.

Everything was going well until I snagged on the LONG, LONG excerpt from Karl Jaspers's Existenzphilosophie. I finally broke out in laughter yesterday at what seems like a manic parody of mid-20th-century European philosophers. The only way I'll get through this section is if I show more view it as unintentional comedy. show less

I read this book in my late teens. It concisely expressed much of my own thinking at the time. It laid down a gauntlet, so to speak, offered me a challenge. What is justice? Does it have any meaning?

I think it does, and I think Kaufmann is wrong here, wrong especially in not looking at justice as one virtue among many that gained its meaning as a means to reduce conflict in a world where conflict was king, but co-operation always possible.

These are the ideas I grappled with before I settled show more on my political beliefs. (I found the key to resolving Kaufmann’s anti-justice position while reading the works of Ludwig von Mises.) But this book solidified my commitment to taking seriously value diversity and the nature of conflict of interest - indeed, looking at “interest” in a skeptical way.

I gave away my copy, alas, so I cannot now readily quote from it. It’s worth noting that philosopher Walter Kaufmann has written a philosophical work in the form of a self-help book. It’s an odd achievement, and quite admirable.

His defense of alienation struck me, in the late days of my youth, as spot on, pitch perfect. And every leftist and alleged admirer of po-mo post-Marxian claptrap should read it. show less

I especially enjoyed the chapter on Martin Heidegger, which gives a devastatingly simple yet undeniable critique of Heidegger's entire philosophical project. I had been previously reading Heidegger sympathetically, but this chapter brought the dishonesty of Heidegger's main ideas to my attention. Kaufmann is emphatic that we not therefore disregard Heidegger as unimportant nor is he suggesting that we ignore Heidegger. He is only suggesting that Heidegger was guilty of covering up the show more problems he set himself to dissolving by needlessly impeding his readers with inconsistent language, failing to honestly identify the intellectual lineage of his contentions, employing a language of "ontology" to disguise his fundamentally anthropological enterprise, and subscribing to a Manichæan opposition of inauthenticity/authenticity. There is more to the critique than just this, but these were the points that most pressingly stood out to me. show less

This anthology has been the first introduction to existentialism for English readers since it first appeared in 1956. It collects nine authors but devotes unequal amounts of attention to them, with the selections from Jaspers and Sartre being the longest. Every collection is a selection and always leaves room for discussion of what was included and left out. In this book, I missed Simone de Beauvoir and wondered about the inclusion of Rilke. Even Camus’s presence is questionable; he show more claimed he wasn’t an existentialist, nor did Sartre recognize him as one.
I was struck by the variation in readability, especially in the principal two authors represented. At times, Jaspers lapsed into jargon. I imagine a serious read of one of his books in German would involve coming to terms with him. With Sartre, it was more extreme. I had a hard time following the chapter on self-deception (“mauvaise foi”) from Being and Nothingness. Sartre seemed to pursue his own dialectic, negating every term he introduced. The lecture, “Existententialism is a Humanism,” on the other hand, was easily readable. show less