Walter A. Kaufmann - Critique of Religion and Philosophy

CRITIQUE

OF

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY

CRITIQUE

of RELIGION

and PHILOSOPHY

by

Walter Kaufmann

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Copyright 1958 by Walter Kaufmann

Published by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey

In the U. K. : Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex

LCC 78-424

ISBN 0-691-02001-9 (paperback edition)

ISBN 0-691-07230-2 (hardcover edition)

eISBN 978-0-691-21430-6

Originally published by Harper & Row, 1958

Harper Torchbook edition published 1972

ISBN-13: 978-0-691-02001-3

ISBN-10: 0-691-02001-9

TO

BRUNO KAUFMANN

1881-1956

PREFACE TO THE PRINCETON PAPERBACK EDITION

REMBRANDTS Large Self-Portrait in the Vienna art museum cast a spell on me when I first saw it. But it spoke to me even more when I saw it again in 1962 after three weeks in Poland. In Warsaw I had virtually smelled the blood of the Jews killed there in 1943, and I had also spent an afternoon in Auschwitz. The portrait looked more powerful than ever after these experiences. Rembrandt had been twelve when the Thirty Years War began, and this painting was done four years after the devastation of Europe had ended. In those days there was no market for Rembrandts many self-portraits. They were not painted for clients nor with any hope of a sale. Here was integrity incarnate. But how could one pass the muster of these eyes? One has to do something for a living, especially if one has a family, but I felt that I wanted to write only in the spirit in which Rembrandt had painted himself, without regard for what might pay or advance my career. And whenever I think about the millions killed during the second World War and ask myself what I have done with the life granted to me but not to so many others, the books I have written spell some small comfort.

Critique of Religion and Philosophy is very different from most scholarly books. Perhaps others felt like Dwight MacDonald who told me before he actually read it that he had seen it at somebodys house and it had struck him as really crazy. It certainly did not fail to impede my career, but I have never regretted writing and publishing it. What keeps surprising me is how many people, including even reviewers, understood and appreciated it. Yet the immediate reception of a book, whether it is ignored or wins a great deal of praise, means little. The true test is whether it endures.

The survival of a human being creates no presumption whatsoever in his favor. Many of the finest die early. It is different with books and works of art. Most die in their infancy, and there is no good reason to feel ambivalent about the survival of ones works. I feel unalloyed gratitude to the publisher for keeping Critique in print more than twenty years after it first appeared.

The reader has a right to ask why I have not revised and updated it like my first book, Nietzsche. The nature of Critique did not make this feasible. It is a voyage of discovery in which the author comes to grips with a multitude of points of view that seemed to call for a response. It would not do to doctor the log and insert additional ports of call; the less so because the book also has the kind of unity that one associates with works of art. One cannot expect a painter to update his paintings, least of all a self-portrait. Of course, Critique is nowhere near that personal, and I have continued my researches into some of the questions broached here. But the results have appeared in other books; notably in The Faith of a Heretic (1961, reprinted with a new preface in 1978), in Religions in Four Dimensions (1976), and in Mans Lot: A Trilogy (1978). The trilogy consists of Life at the Limits, Time Is an Artist, and What is Man? It is even more unconventional than Critique and contains more than 330 color photographs as well as many in black and white.

Looking back on Critique now, I find that today I would do countless things differently. There are some ports at which I would no longer stop at allbecause of what I discovered when I called there. And that information may still be worth sharing. The aspect of the book about which I dont have any second thoughts at all is that I feel more than ever that humanists should be concerned less with the opinions of their peers and elders than with the challenge of Rembrandts eyes.

September 1978

W.K.

PREFACE TO THE 1972 EDITION

THIS NEW EDITION is UNCHANGED. What needed to be added I put into the sequel, The Faith of a Heretic. But the publishers request for a new preface evokes reflections on what has happened since the original edition appeared in 1958. Consider my central intentions, as stated in the original preface: To get many small suggestions acceptedsay, about the interpretation of Hegelis far less intriguing than the hope of pricking some pervasive prejudices and thus changing not only ones readers but also, if only a little, the whole intellectual climate.

Since then the intellectual climate has changed so dramatically that one might suppose that the battle is won, and the book dated or at most of historical interest now. This change, of course, had a multitude of causes. It took ten thousand Greeks to stem the Persian tide at Marathon. Even so, Aeschylus was prouder of having been one of these ten thousand than he was of his tragedies. But in the realm of the spirit triumphs are double-edged. The battle that this book helped to win was no Marathon; neither is this book dated.

It is convenient to distinguish three groups of readers. First, there are those who were changed by this book. They comprise much the smallest group, but letters from many countries still assure me occasionally that it exists. If this should be accounted a triumph, I do not know enough about most of these readers to tell whether and how it is double-edged.

Then there is the far larger group of those who were not affected by this book nor by the change in our intellectual climate. This group includes a great many professional philosophers. Although those who welcomed this book included many distinguished philosophers, professional philosophy has become even more scholastic since the fifties. Among professors the sixties actually witnessed a revival of keen interest in the medieval arguments for Gods existence.

This development is balanced to some extent by the growth of interest in Hegel, Nietzsche, and existentialism. With that we have come to the third group; for this interest might be accounted a triumph. But among professional philosophers these new concerns are rarely informed by the spirit of this book. Whatever professors of philosophy take up nowadays tends to become scholastic, and the rigor of the scholastics is rigor mortis.

Goethes Mephistopheles urged the student who sought advice about courses to start with Logic:

For thus your mind is trained and braced,

In Spanish boots it will be laced,

That on the road of thought maybe

It henceforth creep more thoughtfully ...

Who would study and describe the living, starts

By driving the spirit out of the parts:

In the palm of his hand he holds all the sections,

Lacks nothing, except the spirits connections.