In existographies, Reginald John Hollingdale (1930-2001) (IQ:140|#664) (CR:55), aka R.J. Hollingdale or "Reg Hollingdale", was an English translator, existographer (biographer), and philosopher, noted for a number of German to English translations, with discerning commentary, including: Goethe, Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Georg Lichtenberg, in which he gives the most accurate and true to original English rendition, in respect to the original meaning, as compared to all other German-to-English translators; he was openly an atheist; he is most-noted for his 1971 translation and introduction of Goethe’s 1809 Elective Affinities.
Education
Education
Hollingdale, after dropping out of High School at age 16, so to work as a journalist, went on to auto-educate himself by paying his way through private German lessons, and immersing himself in German literature and philosophy, after which earned the respect of readers and academics with his translations and studies of German cultural figures, without ever possessing an actual degree.
His central effort, in his German translation efforts, was his aim to rehabilitate German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Hollingdale came to Nietzsche via Richard Wagner and Arthur Schopenhauer. [1] In 1973, Hollingdale summarized Nietzsche’s first period as follows:
“In the first period (1865-1876), Nietzsche's inner life, and a good deal of his outer life, was dominated by Schopenhauer and Wagner.”
In this sense, one can see the stepping stones from Goethe to Schopenhauer, Goethe’s human chemistry protégé, to Hollingdale, whom Penguin contracted to do the 1971 translation and introduction to Goethe’s masterpiece Elective Affinities.
Atheism
Hollingdale’s belief system outlook has been described as: “Grimly atheist, he appreciated Nietzsche's attempt to establish a philosophy that was simultaneously nihilist and life-affirming.” [1] .
Quotes | By
The following are quotes by Hollingdale:
“I admit that the generation which produced Stalin, Auschwitz and Hiroshima will take some beating, but the radical and universal consciousness of the death of god is still ahead of us. Perhaps we shall have to colonize the stars before it is finally borne in upon us that god is not out there.”
— Reginald Hollingdale (1971), Thomas Mann: A Critical Study; see: atheism atrocities fallacy
“In its pure and perfect form, the aphorism is distinguished by four qualities occurring together: it is brief, it is isolated, it is witty, and it is ‘philosophical’. This last quality marks it off from the epigram, which is essentially no more than a witty observation; the third, which it shares with the epigram, marks it off from the proverb or maxim: its point, though intended seriously, is supposed to strike the reader, not with the blunt obviousness of a palpable truth—'Many hands make light work’—but rather in the way the point of a good joke should strike him—'In the misfortunes of our best friends we find something that does not displease us’. In this pure form the aphorism disdains all giving of reasons and presents only a conclusion, so that it is often plainly intended to provoke instant contradiction in the sense that they payoff line of a joke is intended to provoke instant laughter.”
— Reginald Hollingdale (1990), “Introduction” to Georg Lichtenberg’s The Waste Books (1799) [2]
References
1. Diethe, Carol. (2001). “RJ Hollingdale: Prolific and Self-taught Scholar who rehabilitated Nietzsche”, The Guardian, Oct. 10.
2. Lichtenberg, Georg. (1799). The Waste Books (translation and Introduction: Reginald Hollingdale) (pgs. x-xi). Penguin, 1990.
External links
● R.J. Hollingdale – Wikipedia.
● R.J. Hollingdale (catalog) – Swansea University.
