His work ranged from scholarly books to playful essays on issues like ethics, anthropology, the meaning of life.
After the publication of his thesis as An essay on the metaphysics of Descartes (1940), Versfeld's first book was the polemical Oor gode en afgode [On gods and idols] (1948).
One also notices the gradual increase in his attention to classical Eastern wisdom: he offered a translation of Lao-Tzu's Tao te ching (Die lewensweg van Lao-Tse, 1988) and a series of essays, especially in Our selves and in Pots and poetry (1985).
Eating became a central motive in his ethics, as is witnessed by Food for thought (1983) All Versfeld's work bear the trace of his religious convictions.
At the same time, this fervour is strongly opposed to the petit-bourgeois morality of South African cultural conservatism and it is explicitly against the ideological combination of "Christian Nationalism".
[5] At the end of his life, he reiterated this view: “there are works of Catholic apologetics of the very recent past which claim to provide all the answers, falling very far short of the wisdom of the sage in Chuang-zu (22.1) who said: ‘We come nowhere being near right, since we have the answers.”[6] Furthermore, he acknowledged the ambiguity of his own faith: "To be a Christian cannot possibly mean to conform to a type or to coincide with the paradigm case.
[8] This almost negative-theological trait of his later religious thought is accompanied by a secularising turn – his later philosophy is shot through with the conviction that "The secular is the miraculous.
In the autobiographical essay, "Descartes and me" (1960), Versfeld described his intellectual development as the move away from the certainty of the Cartesian cogito to the Augustine's "factus eram ipse mihi magna questio, I became a great puzzle to myself.
"[14] Essentially, this problem of being human has to do with the conflict between two selves:[15] the real, historically situated, but nevertheless abysmally mysterious self and the pathological masquerades thereof, the grasping, dominating, manipulating self.
Although there is no sustained examination of the apartheid state in Versfeld’s work, his judgement on the injustice and harm of this system is clearly expressed: “The whites accelerated their self-exploitation by means of the exploitation of other races.
Through their ingenuity in the sphere of transport and explosives they were in the position to utilise the non-whites as means for their own ends.”[17] and in the religious parlance that was his in the 1948 book, he categorically rejects “racial discrimination, one-sided patriotism, participation in unjust war, exploitation, etc.”[18] In South Africa, he writes in 1971 “we are bedevilled by a racialist capitalism exacerbated by our industrial and technological revolution, which justifies itself by a scriptural literalism.”[19] His dissatisfaction with the contemporary solutions to the country’s political situation is captured succinctly as follows: “On the one hand we have the inadequate response of a nominalism of race, and on the other the conceptualism of abstract liberalism.
Justice is colour-blind, and requires for its realisation that we should see, beyond the contingencies of biology and history the image of truth in every man, which often in spite of himself is striving for expression in a common world.
Among his students count Athol Fugard, Adam Small, Jeremy Cronin,[22] Breyten Breytenbach,[23] Richard Turner, Augustine Shutte and Jane Carruthers.
[26] He was invited by the University of Notre Dame to participate in the 1966–67 "Perspectives in Philosophy" lecture series (with Stephan Körner, A. J. Ayer, Stephen Pepper and O. K. Bouwsma).