Walter A. Kaufmann (photograph via Princeton University)

Corngold’s ‘philosophical biography’ portrays Kaufmann as a fascinating, admirable, and flawed character. After a brief biographical chapter, Corngold takes us through Kaufmann’s intellectual journey from his first book to his last. The detailed discussions of Kaufmann’s individual works, supplemented by an array of philosophical and literary references, are balanced and rich, although they expand the book to what might be considered an intimidating size. Corngold aims to assess Kaufmann’s contribution and the potential of his books to ‘educate’ us through agreement or disagreement. For Corngold, Kaufmann is by no means right about everything, but he is a provocative and, at times, brilliant thinker.

Kaufmann is praised for his unfailing effort to draw upon the humanities to address crucial concerns of human existence, such as suffering, ethics, autonomy, and meaning. While Corngold admits that Kaufmann’s efforts are not always convincing – indeed, for Corngold, they are sometimes hasty or haphazard, particularly later in Kaufmann’s life – the treatment of them is largely sympathetic. Corngold admires Kaufmann for his humanist ethical vision. Throughout his works, Kaufmann holds human capacities in high regard. In reflecting on Nietzsche, Freud, poetry, tragic theatre, religious texts, and more, Kaufmann articulates a compelling ethical vision of ‘self-overcoming’, focusing on the relentless pursuit of self-knowledge and self-improvement.

An interesting subtheme of Corngold’s book is its meditations on reading. Corngold admires Kaufmann’s approach to reading, which sought to combine rigorous and clear-sighted criticism with generosity. Kaufmann considered himself a heretic; he prided himself on posing radical questions and maintaining his independence from any particular school or doctrine. But he also went to unusual lengths to identify what is insightful in the views of those with whom he disagreed. Corngold rightly admires this quality in a time where empathetic treatment of opposing viewpoints seems rare, both in scholarly debates and in everyday life. Kaufmann believes that even those with whom we disagree can be our ‘educators’ if they are read critically yet generously. Corngold’s own readings of Kaufmann admirably live up to this standard. He draws out the lessons Kaufmann’s writings offer with subtlety, erudition, and empathy, while remaining attentive to his shortcomings.

Another aspect of Kaufmann’s practice of reading is his sense of the practical significance of the humanities. Philosophy and literature have the power to help us deal with existential concerns. The point of studying them is not to decide questions of scholarly curiosity but to ‘change your life’. This makes Kaufmann hostile to overly scholastic approaches to philosophy. Kaufmann’s verve is refreshing for readers concerned about the embattled state of the humanities in today’s corporatist universities.

Arguably, Kaufmann’s most famous book is his first, entitled Nietzsche: Philosopher, psychologist, Antichrist (1950). This work is widely acknowledged as pivotal in challenging the Nazi appropriation of Nietzsche and rehabilitating him as a philosopher worthy of study following World War II. But lately the fashion in Nietzsche scholarship is to criticise Kaufmann for going too far and for whitewashing some of Nietzsche’s more disturbing themes to make him inoffensive. In Corngold’s view, this criticism misrepresents Kaufmann. Eager for a straw man to attack, the critics have not followed the practice of generous yet critical reading espoused by Kaufmann (and Corngold).

Opinions about how to receive Kaufmann’s work on Nietzsche, and his whole opus, will differ. This question can be situated in a broader debate about the future of humanism. In the twentieth century, critiques of humanism emerged from a number of angles. Critics argue that a problematic essentialist notion of humanity undergirds humanism. They purport to identify links between humanism and colonialism, sexism, or abuse of the natural world. They see promise in Michel Foucault’s suggestion, in The Order of Things (1970), that the prevalent understanding of the human could be surpassed, so that Man as we know him ‘would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of a sea’. Perhaps a ‘posthuman’ future would follow, inaugurating new understandings of subjectivity free from the supposedly problematic presuppositions of humanism, like that proposed by Rosi Braidotti in The Posthuman (2013).

Contemporary work from this perspective locates Nietzsche as a precursor of postmodernism, ambivalent about humanism. Such work is inspired by interpretations of Nietzsche by such writers as Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, another twentieth-century French thinker. This angle of attack on Kaufmann’s Nietzsche is neglected by Corngold. For example, he does not discuss Deleuze’s influential Nietzsche et la philosophie (1962), although that work’s depiction of Nietzsche’s philosophy as completely anti-Hegelian jars with Kaufmann’s assessment that the two have a certain kinship.

Corngold sympathises with humanism. In a previous work, The Fate of the Self: German writers and French theory (1986), he defends a broadly humanist concept of selfhood derived from the German philosophical and literary tradition from postmodernists like Foucault. I think this is why Corngold sees Kaufmann’s humanist interest in Bildung as so worthy. The debate about the value and future of humanist ideals is very much open. I for one think that we have a great deal to learn from humanists like Kaufmann, although I think the critics have a point. Corngold’s empathetic and insightful treatment ensures that Kaufmann’s contribution to these questions will not be lost. Whether or not we agree with Kaufmann’s positions, the integrity, energy, and intellect of his writings, conveyed elegantly in Corngold’s book, mean that either way he has much to teach us.