Walter Arnold Kaufmann was born on July 1, 1921 in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany, the son of Bruno Kaufmann, a lawyer, and Edith Seligsohn. The family lived in Berlin until late 1938, when Kaufmann fled the Nazis alone and settled in the United States. He became an American citizen in 1944.
Williams College admitted Kaufmann as a sophomore in the spring 1939 semester. There he was influenced by two prominent philosophers: John William Miller, whose metaphysics of history was grounded in the human "free act proposing systematic consequences, " and James Bissett Pratt, who offered physiological interpretations of religious phenomena. Both of these strains of thought were later manifested in Kaufmann's own thought, such that the habitual disagreements between Miller and Pratt seemed to be resolved in the work of their student. Kaufmann claimed that the Williams course that influenced him most was Pratt's on comparative religion. After receiving his Bachelor of Arts degree from Williams in 1941, he enrolled at Harvard University, convinced by both Miller and Pratt that it was the only worthwhile place in America for graduate work in philosophy. He earned his Master of Arts degree in 1942 and received his Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1947 with a dissertation titled "Nietzsche's Theory of Values. "
In 1944 Kaufmann enlisted in the United States Army, serving first in the Army Air Forces and then in military intelligence, including fifteen months in Germany. He was discharged with honors in 1946. In 1947 he was hired to teach at Princeton University, where he spent the rest of his career except for visiting professorships at Cornell (1952), Columbia (1955), Heidelberg (1955 - 1956), the University of Washington (1958), the University of Michigan (1959), Hebrew University in Jerusalem (1962 - 1963, 1975), Purdue (1966), and Australian National University in Canberra (1974).
In 1950, Kaufmann published his first book, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, a revolutionary interpretation that single-handedly destroyed the hitherto dominant myth, promulgated by Crane Brinton, George Santayana, and others, that Nietzsche was a proto-Nazi. In place of this myth, Kaufmann provided his own: that Nietzsche was an existentialist. From Shakespeare to Existentialism (1959), published in England as The Owl and the Nightingale (1960), was particularly significant among Kaufmann's other books in establishing existentialism as the leading Anglo-American intellectual tendency of the mid-twentieth century, both in the ivied halls and in the streets. Thus, Kaufmann remained a major American cultural force for the latter half of the twentieth century. Evidence of his stature as fountainhead of the existentialism that pervaded the student movements of the 1960's is that in 1962 the Princeton undergraduates named him a Witherspoon Lecturer, the highest honor that they could formally give to a faculty member. Other major works of this period were Critique of Religion and Philosophy (1958), The Faith of a Heretic (1961), Cain, and others.
Kaufmann was a tireless translator, not only of Nietzsche but also of a great variety of German authors and poets, notably Goethe, Faust: Part One and Sections from Part Two (1961). He edited several anthologies of his translations of German poetry. His translations are readable and accurate, yet occasionally cater more to popular culture than to high scholarly standards of adherence to the text. For example, he allowed a comic book hero and Bernard Shaw's play to affect his decision to render Nietzsche's key term Übermensch by the false cognate "overman" instead of the more descriptive "superman. " As a translator, anthologist, and editor, he has been accused of manipulating authors to serve his own existentialist interpretation rather than letting either them or the issues speak for themselves.
In 1965, Kaufmann published his other truly revolutionary work, Hegel: A Reinterpretation, which, along with his often reprinted article, "The Hegel Myth and Its Method" (1951), and his anthology, Hegel's Political Philosophy (1970), are benchmarks of the Anglo-American Hegel renaissance that began in the 1950's. With Hegel as with Nietzsche, Kaufmann's forte was in dispelling prevalent myths about the thinker--for example, the allegations that Hegel regarded Napoleon as "the world-soul on a horse" and history as the inexorable "march of God" through time. His fundamental method in this book, as in the Nietzsche book, was to discover the private consciousness of the thinker. This kind of analysis appeals more to the "intelligent laity" than to specialists in the field. His scholarly detractors claim that Kaufmann's conclusions about Hegel's and Nietzsche's psyches are too speculative--for example, his idea that Hegel's fathering of an illegitimate child materially affected the content of the Phenomenology of Spirit. These detractors have dubbed the posthumous psychoanalysis of philosophers "Kaufmannization. " Kaufmann's most effective writing was done in the first two decades of his thirty-year public career. Yet his last decade was no less prolific, and includes Without Guilt and Justice: From Decidophobia to Autonomy (1973), Traveling Mind (1976) and other writtings.
Toward the end of his life he became absorbed with the relationship of the arts, especially photography, to philosophy, religion, and particularly ethics. He began to illustrate his philosophical books with his own photographs, had several one-person shows, and in 1978 published Man's Lot, a trilogy of photographs and commentary comprising Life at the Limits, Time Is an Artist, and What Is Man? His last major work was a self-illustrated trilogy, a massive philosophical exegesis called Discovering the Mind: vol. 1, Goethe, Kant, and Hegel; vol. 2, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Buber; vol. 3, Freud Versus Adler and Jung (1980).
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Kaufmann was raised as Lutheran but later he converted to Judaism. He opposed religious values and practices of the liberal Protestantism of continental Europe.
Kaufmann promoted living in accordance with what he proposed as the four cardinal virtues: ambition or humility, love, courage, and honesty.
The consensus among his contemporaries at Princeton was that Kaufmann was extremely self-contained, even for an academic. His world consisted of nineteenth- and twentieth-century German thought and literature--and very little else. He was not liked by either graduate students or his colleagues. If he was a favorite of undergraduates, it was only because of the reputation and influence of his books. Indeed, the reading lists for his usually well-attended courses were filled with his own titles.
Kaufmann married Hazel Dennis on July 12, 1941. They had two children.
