Man's Lot: A Trilogy

by Walter Kaufmann

From inside dust Man's Lot fuses photography and poetry, scholarship and philosophy to present a vision of the human condition.... In "Life at the Limits," all of the color photographs are of people in India while the text deals largely with the West. The final chapters compare attitudes toward extreme situations in India and in the West. The second part, "Time Is an Artist," shows us time's artistry in nature as well as time's effects on human art, including patina, torsos, and ruins. It deals critically with multimillion-dollar restoration projects and shows how different attitudes toward time are related to our attitudes toward ourselves and the past, old age, and death, widows and witches. The social implications are developed, and the epilogue bears the title "Old is Beautiful." The last part, "What Is Man?," represents the culmination of the Trilogy. The text and pictures are meant to be lived with, and the whole book is intended for continued meditation and reflection....

Genres: Philosophy

250 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

Walter Arnold Kaufmann was a German-American philosopher, translator, and poet. A prolific author, he wrote extensively on a broad range of subjects, such as authenticity and death, moral philosophy and existentialism, theism and atheism, Christianity and Judaism, as well as philosophy and literature. He served for over 30 years as a Professor at Princeton University.

He is renowned as a scholar and translator of Nietzsche. He also wrote a 1965 book on Hegel, and a translation of most of Goethe's Faust.