EXISTENZ PHILOSOPHY
45
directly opposite pole, lies the case of Marx, who likewise explained
philosophically that man can change the world and hence should
cease to interpret it. Common to both was the fact that they immedi–
ately wished to arrive at activity and did not get the idea of begin–
ning philosophy on a new basis after they had once begun to doubt
the prerogatives of contemplation and to despair of the possibility
of a purely contemplative knowledge. The result was that Kierkegaard
took refuge in psychology in the description of inner activity, Marx
in political science in the description of external activity. With the dif–
erence, to be sure, that Marx again accepted the certainty of Hegelian
philosophy, which his "turning it on its head" changed less than he
supposed.
It
was not so decisive for philosophy that Hegel's principle
of mind was replaced by Marx's principle of matter, as that the unity
of man and the world was restored in a doctrinaire, purely hypothet–
ical manner-hence, one not convincing to modern man.
Since Kierkegaard held fast to his despair with philosophy, he
has become so much the more important for the later development of
philosophy. Philosophy has taken over from him all its new concrete
contents. These are, essentially, the following:
Death
as guarantee
of the
principium individuationis,
since death, as the most common
of occurrences, nevertheless strikes me unavoidably alone.
Contingency
as guarantee of reality as only given, which overwhelms and per–
suades me precisely through its incalculability and irreducibility to
thought.
Guilt
as the category of all human activity, which is wrecked
not upon the world but upon itself, insofar as I always take respon–
sibiljties upon myself which I cannot overlook, and am compelled
through my decisions themselves to neglect other activity. Guilt is
thus the mode and the manner in which I myself become real, plunge
into reality.
In full explicitness these new contents of philosophy appear for
the first time in Jaspers'
Psychologie der W eltanschauungen
as "Ex–
treme situations" (
Grenzsituationen),
in which Man is placed because
of the contradictory structure of his human reality and which give
him his proper impulse to philosophize. Jaspers himself seeks to found
a new kind of philosophy on the basis of these situations, and he adds
to the content he has taken over from Kierkegaard something further,
which he now calls struggle, now love, but which later becomes, in
his theory of communication, the new form of philosophic intelligence.
As
opposed to Jaspers, Heidegger se
ks
with the new content to
revive Systematic Philosophy in the completely traditional sense.
