ABSTRACT
Christian philosophy assigned for itself the study of God and of the reasons why he should be worshipped and followed. Modern philosophy concerned itself with the transformation of the world by science, to which the contemporary quest superadded the mission of changing human nature itself. The subsequent history of Western philosophy is the record of the dialectics of the permanent and of the changing—of the foundation and the phenomena—in philosophy itself and in the philosophically authorized area of science, statecraft, ethics, and art. Philosophy always left around its enterprise a penumbra of mystery, unexplorability, doubt, regret, unfulfilled aspirations. A mystical union with the object-world would be pure idolatry— or poetic license. The condition of philosophizing is the acceptance of the hiatus at the heart of reality, or, put otherwise, the unbridgeable distance, neither wide nor narrow but distance nevertheless, which separates reality from observing and acting man.
