  In the condensed and all too general format of the Correspondence with Dilthey, Yorck develops the practical “application” of philosophy in only the most fragmentary fashion. Its most important part is the actual clarification of the contemporary situation, the determination of the given historical possibilities, and the avenues for implementing some of them. Yorck holds that since the Renaissance and through the works of such thinkers as Galileo, Descartes, and Hobbes, the self-interpretation of life has found its centre of gravity in the cultivation of the theoretical understanding [Verstand]. The primacy accorded to theoretical understanding and what it projects as objective, unchangeable, and ultimate reality (metaphysical &amp; physical) has ushered in “the natural sciences,” “nominalism,” “rationalism,” and “mechanism,” (CR, pp. 68, 63 &amp; 155). But this has come at the exclusion of the full thematization, expression, and appreciation of human affectivity [Gefühl], including the underlying feeling of human connectivity through a shared life in history. Blocked-out are questions which affect the temporal, historical and personal existence of human beings, or what Yorck once calls “existential questions” [Existenzialfragen] (CR, p. 62), which relate to the life-goals human beings strive after, the recognition of dependency, and the awareness of human mortality, finitude, and death (CR, p. 120). The relative sidelining of these aspects in the psychology of human beings lies at the bottom of Yorck's diagnosis of the increasing self-alienation of modern man and the crisis of his time.