Walter Kaufmann: Philosopher, Humanist, Heretic, by Stanley Corngold (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019, ISBN 978-0-691-16501-1). 744 pp. Hardcover, $39.95.

Within the world of atheists, humanists, and freethinkers, there are some who take inspiration from the world of science and mathematics and others who take it from the arts and humanities. The former group includes giants such as Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, and Richard Dawkins. The latter group contains such luminaries as Percy Bysshe Shelley, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jean-Paul Sartre. It also includes Walter Kaufmann (1921–1980), a noted philosopher and public intellectual whose memory has somewhat faded from the scene. Stanley Corngold, professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at Princeton University, hopes to change that with his new biography, Walter Kaufmann: Philosopher, Humanist, Heretic.

Kaufmann is perhaps best known for his book Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1950). Kaufmann wrote this study to reclaim Nietzsche, a fellow humanities-oriented atheist, from his unfair association with the Nazis. Kaufmann largely succeeded in this task and did much to make the study of Nietzsche reputable again. But Kaufmann wrote many other works besides his Nietzsche study. His other published works include the edited collection Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (1956); Critique of Religion and Philosophy (1958); The Faith of a Heretic (1961); Tragedy and Philosophy (1968); and his final work, the three-volume Discovering the Mind (1980). (Princeton University Press, as Corngold notes, is currently republishing many of Kaufmann’s books; see p. vii.)

Corngold’s biography of Kaufmann, it should be noted, is an unusual one. As Corngold himself notes, the sources on Kaufmann’s life are “limited, since Kaufmann left next to no written testimony to his personal life” (613, n. 9). Kaufmann left behind “no letters, no diaries, no unpublished manuscripts,” and “the Walter Kaufmann archive at Princeton University Library [where Kaufmann taught for thirty-three years] consists entirely of manuscripts of published books” (571). As a result, there is little factual material on Kaufmann in this book that has not previously been published in magazine articles and the like. And so Corngold has deliberately produced “an intellectual biography,” one that offers “details of Kaufmann’s life only as they might add color and force to his ideas” (609).

To be sure, Kaufmann was a colorful figure. As befits a leading humanities-oriented humanist, Kaufmann published a book of poems titled Cain and Other Poems (1962) and was an accomplished photographer, publishing many of his photographs in his later books (7, 378). Sadly, Kaufmann’s artistic endeavors receive little attention in Corngold’s book, with few of his poems and none of his photographs reproduced in the biography (e.g., 4–5). Moreover, there are areas of Kaufmann’s life begging for more attention than Corngold gives them. Near the end of his life, for example, Kaufmann took part in a conference organized by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church. He defended this (highly questionable) decision in a letter published (apparently after his death) in New Scientist. Corngold only mentions this astonishing fact briefly near the end of the book’s epilogue (569–570). Perhaps no further information was available, but still, one would like to know more about the type of freethinker who hangs out with the Moonies.

What, then, does Corngold’s biography cover? His method is to “treat Kaufmann’s major works one by one, in the order of their publication, mainly keeping to one side the foreknowledge of what he was still to write” (ix). Each book gets its own chapter, with two chapters each for Critique of Religion and Philosophy and Tragedy and Philosophy and one for each volume of Discovering the Mind. (There is also a lengthy postscript dealing with the debate over Kaufmann’s writings on Nietzsche.) Corngold’s treatment of each book is odd. While the chapters are quite sizable (the shortest is twenty-five pages long), none of them offers anything like a summary of the book under consideration. Rather than summarize, Corngold uses each chapter to wax poetic in ways provoked by the book. In one chapter, he says that his plan involves “reproducing—with commentary, where called for—the observations of Kaufmann that I consider most interesting” (281). In another chapter, he declares his intention to “offer a brief anthology of the moments that especially interest me—and I hope will interest you, patient reader—in the spirit of Kaufmann’s own procedure” (395). The result, however, is that each chapter winds up telling us at least as much about Corngold as it does about Kaufmann. I’m not sure I needed to know, for example, that Corngold regards Kaufmann’s Nietzsche as “one of those books that stand out in your past as vividly as the first glimpse of a dreamlike foreign place or a first love” (11).

What, then, does this book accomplish? That is difficult to say. Corngold intends the book to be a “proper introduction” to the philosophy of a “remarkable man” (xi). But the book is very long (744 pages!) for an introduction. And as noted before, while the book addresses many of the themes in Kaufmann’s work in the course of discussing his many works, it never offers a clear summary of any of these works. One is thus left wondering, for example, just what conclusions Kaufmann wanted his readers to draw about tragedy in his book Tragedy of Philosophy. One should probably know the answer to that after reading two entire chapters (totaling seventy-three pages) on the subject.

At one point, Corngold summarizes the teaching method of a philosopher Kaufmann admired. According to this philosopher, “you will read the entire works of an author before daring to read in such [and such] a way. It is only then, after such seclusion [alone with the author], that understanding dawns; and it is only then, entirely from the reading of the text, that conceptual categories take shape; and it is only then, at the very end, that you can write something about these texts …” (quoted on p. 425). This strikes me as summarizing Corngold’s attitude quite well. Corngold stresses repeatedly, after all, that his book offers no substitute for reading Kaufmann (e.g., viii, 260). What Corngold has done, then, is produce a book that should prove quite enjoyable for anyone who has already read all Kaufmann’s work and would enjoy batting Kaufmann’s ideas around with someone. For that kind of reader, Corngold would probably make an interesting interlocutor, but the newcomer to Kaufmann is not likely to be inspired to read more (or even make it to the end of the book). This is a pity, because the book does offer some interesting glimpses into the life of a leading humanities-oriented humanist, one who really doesn’t deserve to be forgotten.