"The Faith of a Heretic" by Kaufman Walter

Walter Arnold Kaufmann (July 1, 1921 Freiburg, Germany - September 4, 1980 Princeton, New Jersey) was a German-American philosopher, translator, and poet.

A prolific author, he wrote extensively on a broad range of subjects, such as authenticity and death, moral philosophy and existentialism, theism and atheism, Christianity and Judaism, as well as philosophy and literature.

He served for over 30 years as a Professor at Princeton University.

He is particularly renowned as a scholar and translator of Nietzsche.

He also wrote one of the best books on Hegel.

Kaufmann's lucid English helped make accessible to an English-speaking readership the dense language and thought of many of the theologians and philosophers whom he discussed. Kaufmann also published a translation of Goethe's Faust, Part I.

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Read online : http://www.archive.org/details/faithofaheretic012669mbp

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Kaufmann was brought up in the Lutheran faith.
At age 11, finding that he believed neither in the Trinity nor in the divinity of Jesus, he converted to Judaism.
The rise of Nazism did not deter him.
Kaufmann subsequently discovered that his grandparents were all Jewish.

In a 1959 article in Harper's Magazine, he summarily rejected all religious values and practice, especially the liberal Protestantism of continental Europe that began with Schleiermacher and culminated in the writings of Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, and Rudolf Bultmann.
(He had little to say about Roman Catholicism.)

In their place, he praised moralists such as the biblical prophets, the Buddha, and Socrates.

He argued that critical analysis and the acquisition of knowledge were liberating and empowering forces.

He forcefully criticized the fashionable liberal Protestantism of the 20th century as filled with contradictions and evasions, preferring the austerity of the book of Job and the Jewish existentialism of Martin Buber. Perhaps the best exposition of the part of Kaufmann's thinking touched on in this paragraph is his 1958 Critique of Religion and Philosophy, although all of his books elaborated on his ideas to some extent.

Kaufmann wrote a good deal on the existentialism of Kierkegaard and Karl Jaspers (the French existentialism of Sartre, Gabriel Marcel, and Albert Camus interested him less). He edited the anthology Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre. He disliked Heidegger's thinking and unclear writing.

Kaufmann did much to enhance the respectability of Nietzsche and Hegel studies in the English-speaking world. He is especially renowned for his translations and exegesis of Nietzsche, whom he saw as gravely misunderstood by English speakers, as a major early existentialist, and as an unwitting precursor, in some respects, to Anglo-American analytic philosophy. Kaufmann wrote that superficially

"...it also seems that as a philosopher [Nietzsche] represents a very sharp decline [from Kant and Hegel] ... because [Nietzsche] has no 'system.' Yet this argument is hardly cogent. ... Not only can one defend Nietzsche on this score ... but one must add that he had strong philosophic reasons for not having a system."

Kaufmann also sympathized with Nietzsche's acerbic criticisms of Christianity. However, there was also much in Nietzsche that Kaufmann faulted, writing that "my disagreements with [Nietzsche] are legion."

Regarding style, Kaufmann argued that Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, for example, is in parts badly written, melodramatic, or verbose, yet concluded that the book "is not only a mine of ideas, but also a major work of literature and a personal triumph."