Life at the Limits

✍ Scribed by Walter Kaufmann

• Publisher: Reader's Digest Press
• Year: 1978
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 162
• Series: Man's Lot: A Trilogy, Part 3
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

From Archive.org: Part 1 of a trilogy of books celebrating human tenacity and human genius, with a diatribe against “most philosophers,” by secular humanist Princeton philosopher and Nietzsche scholar Walter Kaufmann. Each book in the trilogy contains didactic texts from the Great Books along with philosophical commentary, poems (many are Kaufmann’s own), and a great many spectacular photographs taken by Kaufmann on his journeys around the world. Most of the photographs in this volume are taken in India—some in Benares, some in Calcutta, and most in Khajuraho, known for a cluster of Hindu and Jain temples, some with astonishing erotic sculpture.

✦ Table of Contents

NOTES ON THE PHOTOGRAPHS

PROLOGUE - 65
1. “Much of the greatest art shows us life at the limits, which almost all philosophers have ignored.” “A quick way of sketching a more inclusive and differentiated conception of life at the limits is to present two lists.”

I MUSIC AND NATURE - 68
2. “Operas differ widely, but almost all of the best-loved transfigure stories that, in real life, would have been thought to be very depressing.” “Pure music is not so much life at the limits as life beyond them.”
3. “Few, if any, landscapes are more moving than those suggesting life at the limits.”

II WESTERN LITERATURE - 72
4. Tragedy and epic. “Suffering that seemed to defy endurance was brought on the stage and made beautiful.”
5. “Most of the greatest novels explore life at the limits.”
6. “All the major poets who wrote short poems have dealt, again and again, with life at the limits.”
7. Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, The Rubaiyat, Tennyson, Arnold.
8. American poets.
9. “In German poetry, the confrontation with death is a central theme.”
10. “In American poetry, the social conscience... found eloquent expression much earlier.”
11. Rilke: “What he brought to perfection was the short poem that deals with extreme experiences.”
12. “Rilke’s central concern with the alternative of Nirvana and intensity.”
13. “Rilke’s late poems, which were revolutionary.”
14. “In these late poems, the fusion of peace and intensity is attained.”
15. “Short poems about the sufferings of others are rarely, if ever, as splendid as Shakespeare’s sonnets about his own despair, or Milton’s about his blindness, or Rilke’s poem about his dying.”

III WESTERN PHILOSOPHY - 90
16. “Philosophy is a branch of literature in which suffering and extreme situations have traditionally been largely ignored... But, to understand man’s lot, one cannot ignore life at the limits.”
17. “The two modern philosophers who first derided our philosophical tradition for ignoring human suffering... were both militant anti-Christians.”
18. Nietzsche. “Live dangerously!”
19. “German existentialism is chatter about life at the limits.”
20. “No speed limit, and no cooling it down on the curves.” “Here we are beyond the ken of German existentialism.”
21. “Sartre and Camus have popularized that side of Nietzsche which the German professors ignored.”

IV WESTERN ART - 97
22. “Any attempt to understand life at the limits in terms of twenty-four categories is rather like trying to paint a sunset using twenty-four colors.”
23. “Ancient Egyptian and Near-Eastern art.”
24. “Greek art.” “The tragic poets explored life at the limits, while the sculptors and painters did not.” “Suddenly Greek art acquires ‘soul.’” “Eventually, Christian art went far beyond the funerary kitsch of the Etruscans.”
25. “Christian art.” “Why this sudden concern with anguish?”
26. “Bruegel’s concern with life at the limits.”
27. Michelangelo.
28. Rembrandt. “No other artist has done so much to change our view of life at the limits.”
29. “The great artists of the eighteenth and early-nineteenth century represent a marked decline in originality, except for two astonishing painters who came close to concealing their genius from their contemporaries.”
30. Goya. “Often we can learn more from great artists than from philosophers.”
31. “Turner is Dionysian.”
32. Van Gogh: “One feels in the presence of this whole life at the limits.”
33. “In former ages the courage to transcend hallowed limits had to be drawn, as a rule, from a shattering experience in which the artist stood at the edge of life, and saw an abyss. After that, the judgments of one’s contemporaries mattered less. In the twentieth century this changed.”
34. Picasso.
35. “Several other twentieth-century artists have dealt with life at the limits, more or less, as Kollwitz did.”
36. “Life at the limits has become one of the staples of photography.” Films.

V INDIA VERSUS THE WEST - 115
37. “India never... experienced anything like the European Renaissance... The sculptors and painters of India remain cloaked by medieval anonymity, and their subjects are either nameless or gods.”
38. “What is distinctive in Calcutta and other large Indian cities...” “Men, women, and children starving to death in the streets raise no questions for Hindus about divine justice or love, and bear little relation to a man’s spiritual quest.” “Indian art is essentially escapist.” “Existence and the world seem justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon.”

EPILOGUE: PHOTOGRAPHS - 120
39. “Photography can falsify; it can be an art... it can communicate a distinctive vision.” “A cycle of color photographs that are offered on eighty pages without captions.”
40. “Is finding beauty in Calcutta like finding beauty in Auschwitz?” “People in the West tend to associate extreme situations with solitude, and the existentialists have unthinkingly accepted this premise.” “The crowding in Calcutta.” “These pictures...”

BIBLIOGRAPHY - 125