Walter Kaufmann spent 33 years teaching philosophy at Princeton. More than anyone else, Kaufmann introduced Nietzsche’s philosophy to the English-speaking world and made it possible to take Nietzsche seriously as a thinker – something there wasn’t always room to do in American intellectual circles up until that time.Kaufmann saw Nietzsche as an early existentialist, whose writings broke with convention and attempted to interrogate what it meant to be a free thinker in an age of conformity and stagnation.
Below is an audio recording of Kaufmann lecturing on those strains of thinking in Nietzsche’s work that were the most focused on existential topics. The lecture was delivered and recorded in 1960:
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2 comments:
it would be hard to exagerate the impact that Kaufmann's translations of Nietzsche had not just on my thinking but in some ways on my life, made me feel a bit less lonely/offcenter,
not until years later when I read James Hillman on depression/depersonalization did I have a similar sense of companionship from a writer.
ditto - his 'existentialism from dostoevsky to sartre' was a massive influence on me. I still have the worn paperback on my shelf in my office, about 4 feet from my desk.
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