Klaus OTTMANN

KLAUS OTTMANN

Klaus Ottmann is a writer, translator, and independent curator. In 2016, Dr. Ottmann was conferred the insignia of Chevalier of France’s Order of Arts and Letters by the French ministry of culture and communication.

His publications include Yves Klein by Himself: His Life and Thought; The Genius Decision: The Extraordinary and the Postmodern Condition; and The Essential Mark Rothko. In 2006, he translated and edited Yves Klein's complete writings, Overcoming the Problematics of Art: The Writings of Yves Klein. In 2010, he edited and translated F. W. J. Schelling’s Philosophy and Religion (1804) and in 2020, he edited and translated Schelling’s Philosophy of Revelation (1842–42) and Related Texts.

THOUGHT THROUGH MY EYES
Writings on Art, 1977–2005

Paperback original, 344 pages, $22
ISBN: 978-0-88214-578-5

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A thoughtful, serious-minded and insightfully contemplative distillation.
—Wisconsin Bookwatch (September 2006)

THE GENIUS DECISION
The Extraordinary and the Postmodern Condition

Paperback original, 216 pages, $22
ISBN: 978-0-88214-592-1

Kindle/Apple Books edition, $9.99
ISBN: 978-0-88214-037-7

The Genius Decision is not an attempt at explaining or predicting genius. Nor is its goal to construct a concept or the concept of genius. Rather, the following should be considered as a horizon of conceptual events that constitute an philosophy of desire within the ethical-aesthetical writings of seven of Western philosophy’s most influential thinkers: Spinoza, Schelling, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Peirce, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger. This postmodern reevaluation of genius suggests that while there is no essentialist quality of genius, the postmodern artist can reach the Extraordinary by way of an active-passive Genius Decision, which is engaged in an activity of failure in its desire to represent the Nonrepresentable.

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Ottmann convincingly argues, genius is simply not an innate essential quality. It involves action, risk and failure.
—Lincoln Journal Star, January 23, 2005

COLOR SYMBOLISM
The Eranos Lectures
Edited by KLAUS OTTMANN

Paperback original, 336 pages, $26 USD
ISBN: 978-0-88214-554-9

Kindle/Apple Books edition, $9.99
ISBN 978-0-88214-056-8

This revised and expanded edition includes, for the first time in English translation, Gershom Scholem’s paper on “Colors and their Symbolism in Jewish Tradition and Mysticism” and Henry Corbin’s paper on “The Realism and Symbolism of Colors in Shiite Cosmology.”

ALCHEMY AND KABBALAH
by GERSHOM SCHOLEM

Translated by KLAUS OTTMANN

Paperback original, 112 pages, $20
ISBN: 978-0-88214-566-2

Kindle/Apple Books edition, $9.99
ISBN: 978-0-88214-599-0

A groundbreaking text on alchemy by the leading scholar of Jewish mysticism is presented here for the first time in English translation. Scholem looks critically at the connections between alchemy, the Jewish Kabbalah; its christianized varieties, such as the gold- and rosicrucian mysticisms, and the myth-based psychology of C. G. Jung, and uncovers forgotten alchemical roots embedded in the Kabbalah.

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Skillfully translated from the original German …, Alchemy and Kabbalah is a classic text on alchemy by a leading scholar of Jewish mysticism, now available in English for the first time …. A serious-minded, in-depth metaphysical scrutiny, especially recommended for college-level students of Judaic theology.
—Oliver Norton, Midwest Book review

cover for Schelling’s Philosophy and Religion

PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
by F.W.J. SCHELLING

Translated, with an introduction
by KLAUS OTTMANN

Paperback original, 112 pages, $20
ISBN: 978-0-88214-593-8

Kindle/Apple Books edition, $9.99
ISBN: 978-0-88214-591-4

For Schelling, Philosophy and Religion represented a new approach to the goal initially set in 1801 with his Representation of My System of Philosophy, the first system of philosophy he had conceived entirely on his own, after having seen “the light in philosophy,” which led him to philosophize, as it were, out of the Absolute itself: “All philosophizing begins, and has always begun, with the idea of the Absolute come alive.” In Philosophy and Religion, Schelling tackled the problem of the manifestation of the finite world and human freedom by evoking Plato and Spinoza, yet by his own admission he did not reach his goal “with complete determinateness” until 1809 when he published his Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom. Because it is the only work prior to the Philosophical Investigations that discusses the issue of freedom of will, it is regarded as a precursor to Schelling’s 1809 magnum opus on human freedom.

cover for Schelling’s Philosophy of Revelation

PHILOSOPHY OF REVELATION (1841–42)
and Related Texts
by F.W.J. SCHELLING

Edited, translated, and with an introduction
by KLAUS OTTMANN

Paperback original, 384 pages, $32
ISBN: 978-0-88214-066-7

Kindle/Apple Books edition, $9.99
ISBN: 978-0-88214-080-3

The first complete translation into English language of the 1841-42 lectures on “Philosophy and Revelation” by the German idealist philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854), which until now have been largely neglected in the English-speaking world. Schelling’s “Philosophy of Revelation” was never published during his lifetime. The historically most significant 1841-42 lectures in Berlin exist only in transcriptions, which form the basis of this volume. Translated, edited, and annotated by Klaus Ottmann, Philosophy of Revelation (1841–42) and Related Texts pairs Schelling’s influential lectures with some of the philosopher’s earlier writings and lectures on the subject of philosophy and religion, such as his 1798 text on “Revelation and National Education”; his 1802 Jena lecture “On the Historical Construct of Christianity”; and his 1827 inaugural lecture in Munich.

FIRST PHILOSOPHY, OR ONTOLOGY
Treated According to the Scientific Method,
Containing the Principles of All Human Cognition
(1730)

PART 1: §§1–78

Translated, annotated, and with an introduction
by KLAUS OTTMANN

Paperback original, 120 pages, $22
ISBN: 978-0-88214-968-4

Kindle e-book edition, $9.99
ISBN: 978-0-88214-969-1

The first English translation of Part 1 of Christian Wolff’s Philosophia prima, sive Ontologia (1730). Considered one of the seminal thinkers of the German Enlightenment—a group that included Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Moses Mendelssohn, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and Immanuel Kant—Wolff exerted his influence on the German Enlightenment through his development of a rationalist system of knowledge in which all the propositions of science are demonstrated from first principles. By grounding metaphysics in mathematics, detangling it from the Scholastics’ focus on the supernatural (that which is beyond the physical), and making ontology the first philosophy—elevating it above metaphysics as a science that subsumes metaphysics (i.e., natural theology) as well as psychology and cosmology—he took the first significant steps towards a Philosophy of Enlightenment.