Only then, approaching my fortieth birthday, I made philosophy my life’s work.
As a universal history of philosophy, the history of philosophy must become one great unity.
The history of philosophy is not, like the history of the sciences, to be studied with the intellect alone. That which is receptive in us and that which impinges upon us from history is the reality of man’s being, unfolding itself in thought.
Philosophy is tested and characterised by the way in which it appropriates its history.
Philosophy can only be approached with the most concrete comprehension.
If philosophy is practice, a demand to know the manner in which its history is to be studied is entailed: a theoretical attitude toward it becomes real only in the living appropriation of its contents from the texts.
The great philosophers and the great works are standards for the selection of what is essential. Everything that we do in studying the history of philosophy ultimately serves their better understanding.
Philosophy as practice does not mean its restriction to utility or applicability, that is, to what serves morality or produces serenity of soul.
At the present moment, the security of coherent philosophy, which existed from Parmenides to Hegel, is lost.
Just as primitive man believed himself to stand face to face with demons and believed that could he but know their names he would become their master, so is contemporary man faced by this incomprehensible, which disorders his calculations. If I can but grasp it, if I can but cognise it, so he thinks, I can make it my servant.