If One Lives Intensely: On Stanley Corngold’s Walter Kaufmann: Philosopher, Humanist, Heretic
Walter Kaufmann (1921–80) played a major role in bringing Central European thought to the English-speaking world
Walter Kaufmann (1921–80) played a major role in bringing Central European thought to the English-speaking world. Yet, he was also a philosopher in his own right. Until now, there has been no exposition of his work as a whole. Literary critic Stanley Corngold has attempted such a comprehensive interpretation. Since his effort strikes out in new territory, it is worth asking what Kaufmann’s thought means for the study of philosophy and the humanities, as well as what academic and existential instruction there is in Corngold’s quest to make sense of Kaufmann’s oeuvre.
Stanley Corngold has written a 744-page book on Walter Kaufmann, a Princeton professor, and prolific, charismatic writer and philosopher. The book has the potential to renew interest in Kaufmann (1921–80) and establish his rank as a major writer of his generation and even to revivify the humanities in the present. For the moment, Corngold’s effort is sui generis. There is no comparable study of Kaufmann examining his place in cultural memory. His achievement is not a byway or backwater in intellectual history: it is still visible in the humanities. Kaufmann’s books continue to be read; his translations and anthologies are in use some sixty years after their publication. A lifetime of intense productivity, spent engaging, among others, with Goethe, Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger, continues to shape the discursive agenda of our own day. Hence, even if Kaufmann has never been fully dislodged from the somewhat submerged place he currently holds in academic opinion, examining what he did and did not accomplish will suggest what we have not only inherited from our ancestors in spirit but what we actually possess. Normally, works of this sort receive reviews, but since what is at stake is so fateful for the way the English-speaking world reads the thinkers of the German-speaking one, meaning that it has much to say about the prognosis for humanistic (and perhaps humane) traditions in scholarship in general, a larger exposition is in order. The following pages take up the question of why this is so.
In 1977, Kaufmann published a book titled On the Future of the Humanities; yet there is a sense that everything he produced — some 8,000 pages according to Corngold (WK, p. xi) — concern the future of the humanities and humane traditions altogether. Therefore, the appearance of Corngold’s volume raises the perennial question of where the republic of letters is heading. Corngold’s starting point is to addresses Kaufmann as a humanist, noting that reader will find in Kaufmann a “scrupulous humanistic moral philosophy,” and, pressing the point that this matter should be taken seriously, that those who “ignore Kaufmann’s work risk courting a moral despair” (WK, p. viii). For readers who associate Kaufmann exclusively with Nietzsche, this claim may seem puzzling; but the Nietzsche book, though formidable, is only one part of a highly variegated and complex oeuvre. Indeed, a glance at Corngold’s seventeen chapters reveals only one chapter — and a postscript — directly concerned with Nietzsche, though his thought is present all throughout the book. This is so because Kaufmann was a philosopher in his own right. Apart from one monograph dedicated to explicating Nietzsche, the majority of his more than twenty published works are dedicated to advancing his own theories in, inter alia, the philosophy of religion, ethics, aesthetics and more, including a meta-category of the quest to discover ourselves in an effort to know what makes us most human. This full effort is what Corngold, in all the book’s details, does not want us to ignore.
Hence, Corngold’s book’s title, which pointedly refers to Kaufmann as a philosopher, humanist and heretic, is an obvious echo of the title of the 1950 work both established Kaufmann as a thinker and sought to provide a comprehensive overview of its subject, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. Attuned to nuance, Corngold is aware that Kaufmann did not put the “psychologist” in the middle of his title arbitrarily. Rather, Kaufmann’s underscoring of Nietzsche’s psychological insight signaled a concern for the motivation behind the work of philosophers present in all of Kaufmann’s books. In a quieter key, Corngold suggests that the philosophy that sprang from Kaufmann’s energy, dedication, effort — it was, in fact, all completed before an early death — is forever intertwined with a fundamental “humanism [that] implies an anthropological study centered on man’s subjectivity — his thoughts, feelings, velleities, moods — accompanied by a sense of self” (WK, p. 81).
But to re-capture such a humanism is hard work, for Kaufmann did no favors to those readers hoping to sum him up with one oracular pronouncement, since he almost always wrote with clarity and concision. There are no obscurities to get lost in or mysteries requiring exegesis. Instead, there is Kaufmann’s sustained aspiration, his effort to show that the works and figures that he admired did indeed demonstrate, as Corngold puts it, “greatness of soul” (WK, p. x) a project which, by the by, led Kaufmann to spare no little effort in showing what greatness was not.
Hence, there is little doubt that when discussing the philosophical arguments, Kaufmann also asked about the philosophers who created it. On considering foundational religious texts, he asked about the impact they have had on their followers. On thinking about poetry and tragedy, Kaufmann compared art with religion and philosophy in a quest to gauge which of these disciplines best heightens our understanding of humanity. This effort was continual, both throughout the pages of Kaufmann’s work and throughout Corngold’s critical appreciation of him. In saying that his book offers a “continuum in which Kaufmann’s voice will sound and resound” (WK, p. xi), Corngold makes it clear that his book will not explicate Kaufmann’s words, which are plain enough, but show how Kaufmann stands between our day and the sources of this humanist greatness, shaping the ways we look both to our past and our future.
What is Corngold’s method? The answer is twofold. First, his chapters proceed in a reasonably strict chronological order, as they trace Kaufmann’s principal works in the order of their appearance. But once we enter a chapter, we do not find ourselves on a trunk highway with predictable exit ramps. Instead, Corngold’s technique is to follow selected ideas of Kaufmann as they unfold, using this very unfolding — here is the demanding part — to enmesh us further in other worlds within worlds. Naturally, this approach is hardly foreign to the field of literary criticism, but it is worth specifying what it means in practice for Corngold’s treatment of Kaufmann. Thus, beginning properly with Nietzsche, since it was Kaufmann’s work on Nietzsche that established him in the Princeton philosophy department and sustained his subsequent career, Corngold notes the strong connections Kaufmann draws between Nietzsche and both Hegel and Goethe, particularly in relation to Nietzsche’s philosophy of power. Kaufmann’s epigraph comes from a Goethe poem that concludes, Von der Gewalt, die alle Wesen bindet, Befreit der Mensch sich, der sich überwindet. The motto is appropriate because Kaufmann portrays Nietzsche’s ideal of power — in his argument, the sublimation of it — on the model of Goethe. In his words:
The Übermensch is the “Dionysian” man . . . who has overcome his animal nature, organized the chaos of his passions, sublimated his impulses, and given style to his character — or, as Nietzsche said of Goethe, “He disciplined himself to wholeness, he created himself’ and became ‘the man of tolerance, not from weakness but from strength,” “a spirit who has become free” (N p. 316, WK, p. 20).
That other critics do not invariably read Nietzsche this way is evident. But as opposed to the attack attitude, an evaluation of Kaufmann calls for a high level of intertextuality, together with an appreciation of Kaufmann’s own intellectual role models — his “educators.” We must note not only what Kaufmann chose to highlight in Nietzsche, but, in this instance, we must consider Goethe’s ideal, Nietzsche’s depiction of this ideal, and the way that Kaufmann received both versions. Beyond this, we have Corngold’s perspective on all three.
An example: in reference to a passage from Zarathustra, which seems, in fact, to be referring to Goethe, Corngold comments, also referring to Goethe:
“His Bildung was an affair of sublimation, a will to power that turns on more nearly contingent forms of itself — ‘your thoughts and feelings’ — in the name of a perfection of reason, the self being ‘your great reason . . . an unknown sage’” (WK, p. 38). Corngold justly comments that “Kaufmann reads Nietzsche through Goethe” and that this praise of Goethe’s self-overcoming “resonate(s) with aspects of Kaufmann’s own self-styling” (WK, p. 40). There is nothing atypical about this interweaving. It extends through almost every page of Corngold’s work, precisely because Kaufmann’s own oeuvre is so interwoven with a heavily German, literary-philosophical tradition. In a well-known image, Freud asked us to imagine a city of Rome in which landmarks and monuments from different eras exist simultaneously. Imagine that each one of these buildings somehow represents an intellectual tradition and you are with a guide who could tilt his head and somehow catch sight of all of them and always knowledgably but never quite predictably have something of value to say about them. In such a fashion, this guide leads you from place to place, pointing in different directions all the while, and gives you a sense of the plan only after you have followed his path. This is an approximation of Corngold on Kaufmann, which is — in this way — a view on the Germans, and through all of them together, a view on the world.
Furthermore, the topic of Kaufmann on the world is not a stationary one. It continued/continues to overflow its banks because it never was school-bound or academic. It was scholarly, yes. But Kaufmann had other, less consensus-grounded, aspirations. It is to these aspirations we must turn if we want to delve deeper into the task that Corngold has assumed.
Career Heretic
Kaufmann spent his childhood in Berlin, where, according to his own account, he converted, aged 12, from Protestantism to Judaism. This was 1933. In reality, from the Nazi standpoint, this change was of no great consequence, as his family — which had previously converted from Judaism — was already “racially Jewish.” But for Kaufmann, this decision was momentous in another way. He had decided that it was impossible to believe in the Holy Ghost and that further allegiance to Lutheranism was out of the question. This fidelity to Word and Conscience — to the Word as he interpreted it and to Conscience as he chose to obey it — followed him through a lifetime of effort. He escaped in early 1939, shortly after Kristallnacht: he was alone in his new world, and like others in his position, evidently decided that he had nowhere to go but forward. In this decision, there is no indication that Kaufmann wanted to be the type of the thinker in exile. He subsequently wrote poems and essays lambasting what he saw as a self-pitying tendency to see the present age as significantly worse than any earlier one. Still, while Kaufmann had his own brand of modesty, which he called, “with a certain central European drollness,” according to Corngold, “humbition” — i.e., in Kaufmann’s own coinage, “humility winged by ambition” (WK, p. 167). No reader of Kaufmann can overlook the seriousness with which he addressed his work and the topic of aspiring work in all his writings. To follow him, therefore, Corngold needs ambition winged (or is it weighted?) by humility.
The reason for Corngold’s ambitious modesty is not as straightforward as it might appear. Any significant and prolific scholar will leave behind a corpus that requires skill and delicacy in exposition. However, given all that has been said, it comes as no surprise to learn that it is only partially accurate to say that Kaufmann had a scholarly career. After his 1950 monograph of Nietzsche was published, and he was a firm presence in the Princeton philosophy department, Kaufmann stopped producing entirely “normal” philosophical books, books that one would expect an academic to write in both his day and ours. Indeed, except for the partial exception of a Hegel volume, Kaufmann never published another monograph; and the long preface to his existentialism anthology savaged the notion that philosophy, or what a later generation would call “theory,” required a special vocabulary, accessible only to specialists and practitioners. From his perspective, having done what was expected once, Kaufmann had no intention of hewing to a trodden professional path. “Had I survived to write monographs on Nietzsche first, then on Hegel, and perhaps eventually on Kant?” was the rhetorical question he asked. Should the point be missed, he added, “I do not mean to disparage scholarship or painstaking work of a highly technical nature…[however] I was confronted not with a drab life but with the question whether I had become a traitor” (FH, p. 7). Kaufmann never stopped testing himself for a possible trahison des clercs, since “conscience was at stake.” A reprieve, if there ever was one, could be found only when “scholarship had become engaged” (FH, p. 8). Corngold, who clearly registers this passionate quality in Kaufmann, takes it upon himself to follow Kaufmann as he made himself into the “career heretic” that he remained.
This last point requires explanation. Toward the end of the Eisenhower era, Kaufmann’s writing, which already swam against the current of the analytic philosophy of the time, took a significant individuating turn. With his Critique of Religion and Philosophy (1958) or the small essay “The Faith of Heretic,” which appeared in the popular Harper’s Magazine in February of 1959, Kaufmann went beyond exposition or even advocacy of an intellectual position. He wrote to address the whole person of the reader — to shake his or her confidence in what he considered to be false comfort and to inspire his reader to go forward. He outlined three goals: “To communicate to others some feeling for man’s religious quest, to arouse an aspiration in them which nothing but death can quell, and to develop their critical powers.” Such aims do not easily fit his or any era’s academic compartmentalization. Yet, Kaufmann redoubled his efforts. By 1961 he had expanded his “Faith of a Heretic” essay to an almost four-hundred-page volume and offered a kind of companion anthology, Religion from Tolstoy to Camus, which in almost five hundred pages, true to form, was designed to open a critical evaluation of religion from multiple perspectives and — well — to shake us to our core. (The opening reading is The Death of Ivan Ilyitch, and not for nothing.) That Kaufmann produced a translation of Faust in the very same years also makes sense.
Corngold’s challenge in accounting for Kaufmann’s development is to capture this transformation by providing a vocabulary to understand what Kaufmann calls “ontological privation.” He titles the chapter devoted to this theme “Transcending the Human,” quoting an idea from Harold Bloom that there are writers engaged in an “incessant effort to transcend the human without forsaking humanism.” Corngold begins with the words “On the threshold of Critique of Religion and Philosophy stands the theme of ‘man’s aspirations,’ an idea charged with passionate conviction. It is indispensable to Kaufmann’s humanism and the basis of the religious impulse everywhere alive and to which he is no stranger” (WK, p. 100). All this is entirely correct as a description of Kaufmann’s aim in this book, but, from the larger philosophical standpoint, it remains to be clarified how the theme of aspiration can be expressed in both humanism and religion — at least in the sense that Kaufmann frames the issue. Corngold’s answer is to show that in Kaufmann’s view, both humanism and religion aspire to an escape from the falsehoods that limit and degrade us. “For how could we respect a creature equipped to aspire, yet who will not aspire to the knowledge of its condition?” (WK, p. 100) is how Corngold sums up the challenge Kaufmann levels against both philosophy and religion. Examining the details of Kaufmann’s critique, we see that each discipline is, by turns, methodically evaluated — in exactly one hundred numbered sections. We are admonished to read these sections in order — and the fruit of this effort is a testing of the “knowledge of one’s own condition.” Expectedly, perhaps, neither philosophy nor religion scores especially high. Here, for instance, is a section of Kaufmann’s appraisal of church history, and an arrow in his quiver, against the notion that the Christian God is an “unequivocal symbol of love” (CPR, p. 107):
Again and again, the Jews accorded the highest honor to men like Hillel, Akiba, and Maimonides, while the Christians have consistently condemned the relatively humane teachings of Origen regarding hell, of Arius concerning Christ, and of Pelagius against original sin. The church persecuted those who championed these views, and it canonized St. Athanasius and St. Augustine. Calvin still burned Servetus, the Unitarian.(CPR, p. 110).
It is no exaggeration to say that moments like these are more the rule than the exception on Kaufmann’s pages. That is, we are neither presented with a mere opinion, which can be neutralized as (merely) the author’s own, nor can we distance ourselves from the consciousness that in Kaufmann we are confronted with the record of an existential path and the outcome of a highly personal struggle. To what extent is Kaufmann’s (deeply felt) argument right? It does not speak about a school or an era, which we might judge to have been discredited or surpassed. It speaks simply about Jews and Christians, asking — challenging us, really — about the extent to which we agree or disagree — and challenging us even further to articulate the reasons for our views.
Given this example, one can appreciate the delicacy and difficulty of Corngold’s position. In this short passage Kaufmann identifies ten major figures of religious history and has demanded of us, at least implicitly, not to speak of religion in general, which would be too easy, but to learn this history and determine for ourselves the impact these figures have had on our humanity.
Answering Kaufmann means something more than acquiring a bit of specialized scholarship, since an immersion in detail will not lead to answers and may allow us to evade the consciousness of a decision altogether. Yet, even if we do not lose ourselves in minutiae, the basic references of scholarship have multiplied since the days that Kaufmann wrote. Thus, to return to the matter of Christian and Jewish history — and narrow it down simply to early church history — which more recent works should we use to take our own stand on Kaufmann’s charge of its listing toward inhumanity? Those of Elaine Pagels? Of Peter Brown? Constantine’s Sword by James Carroll? I mention these authors not to settle the issue but to highlight the difficulties inherent in commenting on Kaufmann’s commentary. The matter goes well beyond looking up St. Athanasius and placing him in a responsible scholarly context. It is reasonable to expect that this is what Kaufmann would have wanted us to do, since no matter how much he eschewed pedantic footnotes, he always located his argument within a precisely informed intellectual horizon. This, in turn, poses another task for Corngold, as this horizon is heavily German, at least in the sense of German scholarship and erudition. Thus, in reference to Kaufmann’s positive contrast of Judaism to Christianity, one would have to look, for one, at the essays of Leo Baeck, with its polemics against “romantic religion.” Kaufmann not only translated this essay, he knew Baeck personally. In addition, one would have to consider the influence of Ernst Troeltsch, whose 1912 Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen is very much alive in Kaufmann’s reading of history. Indeed, the meaning of the passage from Kaufmann cited above acquires clearer and sharper contours by viewing it through the prism of Troeltsch and Baeck. Kaufmann was not the kind of heretic who sought to do away with books, learning and the authority redounding to (some) scholars.
Certainly, had Corngold chosen, he could have settled the question of how to evaluate Kaufmann’s manifold arguments by making a commitment to a particular cause or a way of seeing things and interpreting all via this “once and for all” decided angle. Yet, as scornful as he was toward the uniformed, Kaufmann reserved an even greater ire toward those who wrote as if a single momentous decision would settle matters of all subsequent interpretation. He excoriated those who thought that resolute allegiance — even if its initial leap was made with fear and trembling — could, from that point onward, relieve them from what Kaufmann considered the “anguish of freedom.” This sentiment lay at the base of his critique of Kierkegaard, and, in a more virulent form, undergirded his rejection of Heidegger. Nor is there any escape route in the other direction of “lightening up.” To the extent that Kaufmann had anything to do with it, one was not supposed to dabble in his books or minimize the gravity of the issues treated. In fact, in imagining the devil’s rejoinder to an atheist who thinks that scriptures are so irrelevant that they require nothing more than a quick “dip,” he says: “These are not things merely to know about or to have handy for a dinner conversation. The Bible and the Buddha, the Upanishads and the Bhagavadgita, Lao-tze and the Tales of the Hassidim, these are not things about which one is informed or not informed: what matters is that they speak to you and in some way change you.” (CPR, p. 258). “I wish you’d go to heaven” is what Kaufmann’s Satan says to the non-believer, no matter how academically credentialed, who shrugs at the seriousness of what’s at stake. So Corngold has had no choice but to follow Kaufmann’s path and follow it intensely. It makes sense, therefore, that this necessarily long book would, nevertheless, not be able to follow every individual thread. Kaufmann wove too many together. In such a situation, we must ask what Corngold has done.
Catholic Kaufmann
I judge Corngold to have traveled Kaufmann’s thought catholically. Clearly, “catholic” here has the sense of “broad minded” and “of interest to all.’” Rather than set up each chapter to build a particular case (i.e., his own case), Corngold casts a net and brings a large haul to the surface. There is generosity in this, but we should not think of it as being “nice” in an anodyne sense — the broadmindedness has a point. Corngold does not only follow Kaufmann’s way of thinking. He also follows the authors Kaufmann treats — and not necessarily to treat them in the same way that Kaufmann does. Moreover, Corngold follows his own notions, sometimes his own whimsy, to elaborate his understanding of an issue raised. The goal is a broad assembly of ideas in which exploration and discovery is not constrained. In this manner, Corngold threads a needle that the less nimble could miss. He does not blandly approve of what he sees. That would cross Kaufmann’s injunction to wrestle with meaning. But neither does he detract from Kaufmann’s efforts to “heresize” himself — to stubbornly maintain and promulgate a teaching at odds with what is taught from a pulpit or its academic analogue. What he does is try to register the nature and impact of the arguments involved.
Before one passes judgment on this method, it helps to ask what a comprehensive work on Kaufmann would have been like had it sought to co-speak with the subject. For instance, here is how Kaufmann described his effort to set forth a “constructive” rather than a critical philosophy: “But affirmations that entail no negations are empty. Those who loudly say Yes, but No under their breath only, or No only to what their audience negates anyway or what it does not hurt to deny, are false prophets that cry ‘peace, peace,’ when there is no peace” (FH, preface). In response to a claim like this, neither Kaufmann nor the reader needs a “co-Jeremiah,” and Corngold wisely eschews any attempt to play the disciple. But the cost of this balancing is that it is not always easy to grasp why his interesting account takes up one topic rather than another.
This is more than a built-in problem of a wide-ranging interpretive approach. At the same time that Kaufmann insisted that intellectual traditions be grasped and perpetuated with fidelity and exactitude, he did not shy away from envisaging where the tradition should take us. Even in an early 1955-essay on Nietzsche and Rilke, he wrote:
The peculiar piety of Nietzsche and Rilke does not consist in any reverent acceptance of some tradition, but rather in a rejection of all that has hardened into stereotypes, and in the resolve to be open and ready for their own individual call. Without believing in any god, they feel that if only they will be entirely receptive they will be addressed personally and experience a necessity, a duty, a destiny which will be just theirs and nobody else’s, but no less their duty than any categorical imperative What Nietzsche and Rilke want is a new honesty… Honesty is the new piety.
The conventions of the academy, likewise, cannot be altogether adequate, even if exercised conscientiously, since what is at stake is, well, a new piety. This stance intensifies Corngold’s dilemma. For example, in a two-chapter discussion of what he calls Kaufmann’s “magnum opus” (WK, p. xi), Tragedy and Philosophy (1968), Corngold takes up Kaufmann on his own terms, addressing himself to the book’s key issue of whether the spectacle of tragic suffering conveys a truth about humanity that philosophy captures only glancingly, if at all. In doing so, Corngold will occasionally take issue with and even scold Kaufmann for neglecting a theme or failing to take account of earlier critical views. This is as it should be, for, if it is done too little, the reader loses a touchstone to assess Kaufmann’s claims. Yet, if it done too much, it blunts the reader’s experience of what made Kaufmann most distinctive, namely the manner in which he felt “addressed personally” and “experienced a necessity, a duty, a destiny.” The great achievement of this comprehensive study is that it allows the reader to see that this position was not a pose, that it animated a full life — one spent in creation that still speaks to us today. For this reason, Corngold’s book is conjoined to Kaufmann’s work in a manner exactly as he claimed — “sounding and resounding.” It does not replace Kaufmann’s works. It places them all in connection with each other and with the reader.
Concluding Beginning
Corngold has given Kaufmann studies momentum for a new generation. Where will it lead? Providing one’s individual answer to this question is not the least of the benefits of taking up Corngold’s volume — as not its least appeal is its capacity to evoke lively responses. It is best to close with a brief list of what makes this conjunction of Kaufmann plus Corngold worth our while.
- Like all heretics, Kaufmann was part of the world he rejected. His writing, no matter that it is in English, deserves to be called part of a German tradition. He made something of this tradition. Whether his rendition is accurate and fruitful is a question we can answer only by comparing it to other authors’ versions of the same tradition. Corngold’s volume is an invitation to try our own hand at this definition and self-definition. Such exercises could easily be healthful to the humanities as a whole.
- Corngold rightly noted that Kaufmann’s preferred conclusion was a combination or affirmation and negation, a “yes, but” or “no, but,” as Corngold put it. No appreciation of Kaufmann is possible without sharing his opposition to what he called “Manicheanism.” Has Kaufmann’s anti-Manicheanism sunk in? Can we claim that we no longer need his instruction because we have either absorbed it or gone beyond it?
- Kaufmann wrote the following: “Let people who do not know what to do with themselves in this life, but fritter away their time reading magazines and watching television, hope for eternal life. If one lives intensely, the time comes when sleep seems bliss. If one loves intensely, the time comes when death seems bliss” (FH, p. 374).
He appears to have meant it. What does this injunction mean for what we make of his work and, through that, what we make of ourselves? The value of Corngold’s book is that it brings us to Kaufmann, who brings us to the humanities, including those of our era, focusing it on this very question.
Notes
Bibliography
Corngold, Stanley. Walter Kaufmann: Philosopher, Humanist, Heretic, Princeton NJ: Princetion University Press, 2019.
Corngold, Stanley and Wagner, Benno. Franz Kafka: The Ghosts in the Machine, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011.
Hay, Malcolm. Thy Brother’s Blood, New York City, Hart Publishing Company, 1960, preface by Walter Kaufmann. (Published in Europe as The Foot of Pride.)
Kaufmann, Walter. Critique of Religion and Philosophy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978 (originally published in 1958 by PUP).
— -The Faith of a Heretic, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015 (originally published in 1961 by Doubleday).
— -From Shakespeare to Existentialism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980 (originally published in 1959 by Beacon).
— -The Future of the Humanities, New York: Reader’s Digest Press, 1977.
— -Goethe’s Faust: A New Translation and Introduction by Walter Kaufmann, Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1961.
— -Hegel: A Re-Interpretation, Anchor Books. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966; originally published in 1965 by Doubleday.
— — “Nietzsche and Rilke,” The Kenyon Review, Vol. XVII, 1, Winter 1955.
— -Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015 (originally published 1950 by PUP).
— -Religions in Four Dimensions: Existential and Aesthetic, Historical and Comparative, New York: Reader’s Digest Press/Thomas Y. Crowell, 1976.
— -Without Guilt and Justice: From Decidophobia to Autonomy, New York: Peter Wyden, 1973.
Kaufmann, Walter, ed. Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, New York: Penguin, 1975 (originally published in 1956 as a Meridian book by World Publishing).
— -Religion from Tolstoy to Camus, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1961.
