The Online Library of Liberty

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• Editorial Staff
• Associate Editors
• Editorial
• Bibliographical Essay: Contemporary Currents In Libertarian Political Philosophy By David Gordon
• I: Social Science Methodology
• Social Science Paradigms
• Sociology, Theory, & the Welfare State
• Durkheim, Ideology, and Method
• Polanyi, Hierarchy & Reductionism
• Historicism: Individuality Or Pattern?
• Social Science: Game, Drama, and Text
• Alfred Schutz and Phenomenology
• Moral Honesty In Social Science
• II: Economic Analysis
• Austrian Vs. Neoclassical Economics: Equilibrium
• Frank Fetter & the Austrian School
• Subjective Vs. Objective Costs
• The Significance of Subjective Costs
• Socialist Economic Calculation
• The Welfare State: Business & Labor
• Child Labor and Capitalism
• Economics Vs. Minimum Wage Politics
• Adam Smith Vs. Neo-mercantilism
• Laissez Faire and Moral Revolution
• III: Human Rights and Ethics
• Recent Scholarship On Rights
• Two Concepts of Rights
• Establishing Human Rights
• Misunderstanding Human Rights
• Is Privacy an Absolute Right?
• Animal Rights
• Nature and the Tao
• Self-knowledge: Nietzsche, Heidegger & Buber
• The Prospects of Objective Morality
• Measuring Ethical Ideologies
• Individualism and “locus of Control”
• Should We License Parents?
• IV: The Heritage of Freedom
• How Conservatives Differ From Liberals
• English Radicalism: Rights Vs. War & Taxes.
• Liberalism: the Seedbed of American Culture
• Republican Liberty & Military Policy
• Thomas Burke: Whig Radical
• Liberal Republicans During Reconstruction
• Adam Smith & the Liberal Tradition
• Human Individuality and Autonomy

Self-Knowledge: Nietzsche, Heidegger & Buber

Walter Kaufman

• Princeton University

Discovering the Mind: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Buber. Volume II of a Trilogy. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980.

How has the discovery of the mind been advanced or impeded by Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Buber? Professor Kaufman, who died September 4, 1980, gives his analysis in the second volume of his last work.

Nietzsche (1844–1900) liberated psychology from moral prejudice and thereby prepared the ground for Freud's major breakthroughs. Nietzsche's contributions can be summarized by five theses: (1) The thesis that “consciousness is a surface” is a major insight which highlighted the role of the un-conscious in our psychic life which had been widely underestimated. (2) Nietzsche's theory of “the will to power” is primarily a psychological thesis rather than a metaphysical theory. It means that most psychological phenomena are strategies that we adopt to maximize the feeling of power or control. This drive is more basic than either self-preservation or pleasure since people will risk their life to increase their feeling of efficacy or will become ascetics to enhance their feeling of worth. (3) Nietzsche developed a psychology of world-views; for example, he analyzed the resentment that underlay Christian metaphysics. (4) Nietzsche pioneered psychohistory with his portraits of St. Paul, Luther, and Wagner, for example. (5) Nietzsche also developed a subtle “philosophy of masks,” by which multiple meanings can be more adequately conveyed by a kind of “role-playing.”

In sharp contrast to Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger (1889–1970) is seen as impeding the discovery of the mind's constitution. Attempting to reconcile Nietzsche with Kant, Heidegger searched for the necessary modes of human existence. His stark contrast between authentic and inauthentic existence was a dogmatic, non-historical oversimplification of man's nature.” His thinking was “deeply authoritarian,” as when he simply assumed that “Being” has only one meaning. Heidegger's interpretations of other thinkers ignored their context, and he merely secularized Christian preaching about guilt, dread, and death. His thought belongs to the romantic revival in Germany and not to the pre-Socratics, as he believed.

Martin Buber (1878–1965) advanced the discovery of the mind insofar as his theory of translation required that writers be interpreted in their own terms, according to their own distinctive voices and styles of thinking. Buber also revealed how the discovery of another individual requires opening our heart to their distinctive voice and uniqueness, rather than subsuming the individual under general terms or laws. Unfortunately, his own interpretation of authenticity was too one-sided, because genuine, intimate encounters between people need not be either brief or destroyed by thinking about the other person. Also, there are more ways of avoiding genuine encounter than by turning the other individual into an “it” or an “object.”