actual philosophizing which would not be Historical. The separation between systematic philosophy and Historical presentation is essentially incorrect' (p. 251). 'That a science can become practical is now, of course, the real basis for its justification. But the mathematical praxis is not the only one. The practical aim of our standpoint is one that is pedagogical in the broadest and deepest sense of the word. Such an aim is the soul of all true philosophy, and the truth of Plato and Aristotle' (pp. 42 f.). 'You know my views on the possibility of ethics as a science. In spite of that, this can always be done a little better. For whom are such books really written? Registries about registries! The only thing worthy of notice is what drives them to come from physics to ethics' (p. 73). 'If philosophy is conceived as a manifestation of life, and not as the coughing up of a baseless kind of thinking (and such thinking appears baseless because one's glance gets turned away from the basis of consciousness), then one's task is as meagre in its results as it is complicated and arduous in the obtaining of them. Freedom from prejudice is what it presupposes, and such freedom is hard to gain' (p. 250).
It is plain from Yorck's allusion to the kind of difficulty met with in such investigations, that he himself was already on the way to bringing within our grasp categorially the Historical as opposed to the ontical (ocular), and to raising up 'life' into the kind of scientific understanding that is appropriate to it. The aesthetico-mechanistic way of thinking1 'finds verbal expression more easily than does an analysis that goes behind intuition, and this can be explained by the wide extent to which words have their provenience in the ocular ... On the other hand, that which penetrates into the basis of vitality eludes an exoteric presentation; hence all its terminology is symbolic and ineluctable, not intelligible to all. [403] Because philosophical thinking is of a special kind, its linguistic expression has a special character' (pp. 70 f.). 'But you are acquainted with my liking for paradox, which I justify by saying that paradoxicality is a mark of truth, and that the communis opinio is nowhere in the truth, but is like an elemental precipitate of a halfway understanding which makes generalizations; in its relationship to truth it is like the sulphurous fumes which the lightning leaves behind. Truth is never an element. To dissolve elemental public opinion, and, as far as possible, to make possible the moulding of individuality in seeing and looking, would be a pedagogical
1 Yorck is here discussing Lotze and Fechner, and suggestiong that their 'rare talent for expression' was abetted by their 'aesthetico-mechanistic way of thinking', as Heidegger calls it. The reader who is puzzled by the way Yorck lumps together the 'aesthetic', the 'mechanistic', and the 'intuitive', should bear in mind that here the words 'aesthetic' and 'intuition' are used in the familiar Kantian sense of immediate sensory experience, and that Yorck thinks of 'mechanism' as falling entirely within the 'horizon' of such experience without penetrating beyond it.