A lot of pivoting questions have arised as of late, questions that evidently bear the stamp of an after thought - namely of something that hasn't been thought of ex nihilo but rather bears the weightful chain not of the tradition but of the experience in everyday situations; to use the better refined language of Jaspers: "borderline situations". I'm certainly interested in philosophical questions, but not those that belong in the realm of philosophy but rather those that border on "philosophizing" - as an activity, a process; namely a mode of action for philosophy, that of exercising a critique of culture in the sense of Lessing: a world-building activity that prescribes modes of political action, especially the judgement in everyday situations, either borderline or not, and the existential choice of oneself for a decent person.
Roseznweig wrote to Mennecke, expressing his growing interest in "questions asked by human beings", instead of mere intellectual discourse... that as in Jaspers, is unable to pose questions in the language of necessity (and here we have to return to Marx a little bit only to leave him altogether for good) and doesn't enable the "communicability" necessary to establish the language of judgement and responsibility that can safeguard the course of Modernity; in general philosophy even lacks the "attitude" to be this-worldly and in a sense the old dogmas of myths and fantasies have only become secularized by the Godess-of-Reason, which as someone pointed out, had been already buried by Kant before the French actually heard of her at all.
This convinced me even more than before that the next school of Existential Philosophy will be that of "Hermeneutics of Everyday Life", a subject that has been in public discourse perhaps since Weber but that actually no one had formalized or coined before my teacher and my own person. A philosophical revolution that started with the Exodus philosophers (this term belongs to Gillian Rose), Kierkegaard and Nietzsche (specially the latter, even though I'm particularly closer to the former) and was "completed" (only in the sense that its ideas became de-radicalized) with Cassirer and then officially with Jaspers, despite Heidegger's contribution to the discussion which is secondary to none, for it was him who shifted the attention of thought from Existentialist philosophy (which to this idea remains a French school of literature and philosophy without much influence in history of ideas - other than the recognition of a break in the tradition that happened sidedly with the Enlightenment and saw its peak in a negation of itself in the most Hegelian fashion: The Holocaust) to Existential philosophy.
What is at stake here is not a mere philosophical system, but the whole existence of modernity at large and per se the political consequences of thinking, which has hardly been considered a too respectable object of inquiry for modern philosophy, even despite the progress achieved in the fields of political and moral philosophy. There are no longer issues of Thought separated from Action, the old Cartesian model has been long dead altogether with the totalized view of Idealism and its imaginary flights that caused the "philosophical error" on which the Enlightenment had been built creating the most lonesome of all possible existence for men under the yoke of everyday life. This philosophy can only that of the decent type, boasting more than philosophical discourse the mere pride of thinking, unburdened and without a bannister. No other people I've heard of who embodied this decency than Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas and Karl Jaspers; while at the same time no other people whom I've known have embodied this decency more than Eveline and Agnes, my teachers.
"Was ich bei Ihnen gelernt habe und was mir in den folgenden Jahren half, mich in der Wirklichkeit zurechtzufinden, ohne mich ihr zu verschreiben, wie man sich frueher dem Teufel verschrieb, ist, dass es nur auf die Wahrheit ankommt und nicht auf Weltanschauungen, dass man im Freien leben und denken muss und nicht in einem noch so schoen eingerichteten "Gehaeuse", und dass die Notwendigkeit in jeder Gestalt nur der Spuk ist, der uns locken moechte, eine Rolle zu spielen, anstatt zu versuchen, irgenwie ein Mensch zu sein."
Hannah Arendt to Karl Jaspers
"Sechs Essays", 1948
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