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Title: Hegel: A Reinterpretation by Walter Arnold Kaufmann ISBN: 0-268-01068-4 Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press Pub. Date: 01 September, 1977 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.50 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (3 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A big footnote on the philosophical jack of hearts.
Comment: When I was young, I was taught that I should appreciate J. S. Bach and other musical geniuses about like Walter Kaufmann grew up thinking that Hegel was really something. Kaufmann and I have both noticed how reluctant Hegel was to admit who he was talking about, so he considers it an anomaly on page 490 of the J. B. Baille translation of THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND that the name Oedipus has been inserted into the sentence "In the story of *OEdipus* the son does not see his own father in the person of the man who has insulted him . . ." Walter Kaufmann lists the persons whom Hegel actually mentioned in his manuscript ("only thirteen men and women are named." p. 125). I would say Kaufmann left out Julius Caesar, since the preface happens to discuss historical facts like the year in which Caesar was born. Reading the translation of the preface by Walter Kaufmann in HEGEL TEXT AND COMMENTARY, a separate paperback volume with the same index as HEGEL A REINTERPRETATION, is the best approach for understanding Kaufmann's method of explaining Hegel. His commentary in that book is mostly in the form of notes at particular places in the text, and they do not always refer to persons that might have been meant by Hegel, as a lot of philosophy has happened since Hegel, and Walter Kaufmann was aware of various interpretations and more modern philosophers like Kierkegaard and Heidegger (who, "unlike Hegel, seeks to move philosophy closer to poetry rather than science." note 10 on Commentary page 93). Having HEGEL A REINTERPRETATION as a separate book allows Kaufmann to try to demonstrate the scope of philosophy in a way that Hegel attempted to do, encompassing it all as no one had tried to do since Aristotle.
I learned a lot reading this book years ago, allowing myself to feel a lot like Fichte in the comparison, "Nobody today would rank Fichte with Kant;" (p.110). Self-consciousness in German is not quite what it is in America today, but a large part of how modern the intrusive nature of our media has allowed us to become is the constant measure of our own sorry self-consciousnesses becoming aware of each other, a very Hegelian philosophical theme. The appreciation of particular geniuses in our own day might be troubled by knowledge such as Kaufmann's, that "There are not many non-German composers in a class with Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven; and during their era German poetry was coming into its own, too. The great achievements of the period were triumphs of the artistic imagination." (p. 114). Our own composers always seem to be thinking about something else instead of what it would take to make their music better.
Did anybody notice how long the song "Lily Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts" was on Bob Dylan's "Blood on the Tracks" album? If "the drilling in the wall kept up, but no one seemed to pay it any mind" could be applied to philosophy, it might be as a form of consciousness which seeks to avoid an overwhelming awareness of anything which is actually going on. Hegel ought to be considered good for philosophy in the way that Bob Dylan would be good for people whose interest in music involves owning the rights to the songs. The big legal questions in our society are about who has to pay for people to keep singing or swapping this stuff. Most people who buy this book will read it as consumers. Hegel was usually not a philosopher to be considered dangerous, but somehow, people like Marx, who read Hegel as an introduction to how unsettled things of their own day were, were dangerous in a lot of intellectual fields. I learned a lot about Fichte the first time I read this book. His attempt to identify God with a moral world order is clearly stated, and it only takes a little knowledge of human nature to see how his career suffered the consequences, with the result, "Accused of atheism, he published a couple of vigorous defenses in 1799 and threatened to resign if reprimanded, which was construed as a resignation--and he was let go." (p. 102). Hegel managed to avoid getting clobbered in that kind of argument, and modern philosophy has a lot of appreciation for everything he managed to say without causing a lot of trouble. This book pulls it all together.
Rating: 5
Summary: If you have to read Hegel....
Comment: ....do start here, for Kaufmann is an able Hegel commentator, clarifier, and critic.
Rating: 5
Summary: A Valuable Road Map of the Vast Expanses of a Great Mind
Comment: Departing from his area of specialty, Nietzsche and the existentialists, Kaufmann is no less able to authoritatively present a balanced, masterful, thorough, yet concise analysis of the life and work of perhaps the least understood philosopher. As those who have assayed the Phenomenology or the Logic surely realize, exploring Hegel without a guide can be perilous. Kaufmann neutralizes many of the language barriers and ambiguities in Hegel's great works, clearly presents their core themes, and, much to the delight of this reader, locates them within the intellectual currents of the time and Hegel's own intellectual struggles and victories. As all soon find out, parsing a single work of Hegel's is less a challenge than understanding it in the broader context of Hegel's "system," let alone the movement begun by Kant and Fichte and carried onward by Schelling, Marx and others. Kaufmann brilliantly brings the reader from a tight focus on the many subtleties of Hegel's method to a broad view of the intellectual landscape of Hegel's Germany. An added bonus is a diligent if sometimes ascerbic analysis of key players in Hegelian scholarship.
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Title: Hegel: Texts and Commentary : Hegel's Preface to His System in a New Translation With Commentary on Facing Pages, and "Who Thinks Abstractly?" by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel ISBN: 0268010692 Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press Pub. Date: 01 June, 1977 List Price(USD): $7.00 |
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Title: Existentialism: From Dostoevsky to Sartre by Walter Arnold Kaufmann, Walter Kaufmann ISBN: 0452009308 Publisher: Plume Books Pub. Date: 01 February, 1988 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Religions in four dimensions: Existential and aesthetic, historical and comparative by Walter Arnold Kaufmann ISBN: 0883491052 Publisher: Reader's Digest Press : distributed by Crowell Pub. Date: 1976 |
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Title: Goethe, Kant, and Hegel: Discovering the Mind by Walter Kaufmann ISBN: 088738370X Publisher: Transaction Publishers Pub. Date: 01 March, 1991 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: From Shakespeare to Existentialism by Walter A. Kaufmann ISBN: 0691013675 Publisher: Princeton University Press Pub. Date: 01 July, 1980 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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