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classical Greek tradition of thinking. 4 At the same time, however, phenomenology wasalso capable of confronting problems inherent in the crisis of this idea. Just as the notionof philosophy constitutes itself within phenomenology and simultaneously is also dropped,it requires a hermeneutic reconstruction of its own acting historicity as its complement.In order to be able to pursue our investigation of the concern uncovered above and,more particularly, with regard to the crisis surrounding the notion of tradition, the choiceof methodology cannot and must not be made at random. On the contrary, thiscontroversy, this crisis in itself, should be fruitful for finding our way, especially if weremain within the transcendental project of historicity. It is important to underline that bydoing so, we did not determine the character of this “transcendentality” in advance. It hasabsolutely nothing to do with a transcendentality of something which would existsomewhere beyond the world. This transcendentality is distinct by its worldliness, in thesense of the transient quality of the Unity and of Diversity. Even in this case, however,we would like to point out that it doesn’t allude to the experience of the world as an entityexisting in itself. The world is unambiguously a human world. (I would like to mentionin passing that the German word “Welt” [world] means generation, a life span (Menschenalter),at least according to is etymology. 5 ) Strictly speaking, a world lacking humanscould not exist at all. Even if such a world existed, it would in some way have to relateto the existence of human beings.As a result of the way in which my initial thesis was announced, according to whichphenomenological philosophy, or rather the phenomenological movement, is decisivelybound to the cultural events of the twentieth century, the following conception couldensue, namely that we are dealing with a practical development of philosophy. Thus, itis as if philosophy had abandoned its uncorrupted theoretical plane and had passed overto the practical level of concrete action in the world, as if concepts such as world view(Weltanschauung), ethics, politics, technology, etc., were at play here. The conception ofpractical experience, and of practicality in philosophy, is irrelevant to phenomenology.Hans-Georg Gadamer, who fashioned his philosophical hermeneutics in Truth and Methodon the foundations of the phenomenological insights of Heidegger and Husserl, hasconvincingly demonstrated that the concept of practical experience is already inherent inthe sphere of the purest philosophical theory. It is another question, however, to askwhether philosophy, as a theory, is conscious of this and whether it takes this observationinto account. In addition to this practical aspect, we could add that there is a poetic orcreative dimension that is also inherent in philosophy. Out of the philosophical systematizationof the whole body of knowledge into a theoretical, practical and poetic division,which originated from Aristotle and preserves its relevance to this day, primarily becauseof Kant, we still revert to dealing with the relations between philosophy and culture aswell as the feasibility of a cultural hermeneutics. We must take into account the fact thatAristotle gives deeper reasons for such a classification, in the sixth volume of theNicomachean Ethics, in which he develops his understanding of the ontological specificityof human beings as an essential part of practical experience. This suggests clearly enoughthat one should look at (and into) the human beings themselves, insofar as theyphilosophize, in order to find the reason for the practical development of philosophy.Aristotle knew that philosophizing wasn’t an arbitrary or incidental occupation. We couldalso assert that only this “occupation with philosophy” constitutes somehow the essenceof human beings, in other words, their culture.4Cf. with the phenomenological observations of Klaus Held in La fenomenologia del mondo e igreci (Milano: Guerini, 1995) and in many other essays.5Cf. Duden, vol. 7, Etymologie (Mannheim: Dudenverlag, 1963), 760.192