[13th Paragraph]
It is therefore to be regarded as a stroke of luck for science—in fact it is the necessity of the matter—that that philosophizing, which might have continued to spin itself out as a school wisdom within itself, has placed itself in a closer relationship with actuality and that it has thus come to an open breach. It is precisely this position of philosophy toward actuality that the misunderstandings concern, and I return herewith to what I noted earlier: that philosophy, because it is the exploration of the rational, is precisely the grasping of the present and the actual, not the setting up of a beyond that should be God knows where—or of which one indeed knows quite well where it is, namely in the error of a one-sided, empty reasoning. In the course of the following treatise, I have noted that even the Platonic Republic essentially grasped nothing but the nature of Greek ethical life; and that then, in the consciousness of the deeper principle breaking into it, Plato had to seek help against it, but most deeply injured its deeper drive, the free infinite personality. By this, however, he proved himself the great spirit, in that precisely the principle around which the distinguishing feature of his idea revolves is the pivot upon which the revolution of the world turned.
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