To Quote Arendt At Length...

I cannot say precisely how much I enjoy studying Hannah Arendt. She is a most wonderful substitute for life, which life unfortunately has demanded that I seek!

Existentialism, the rebellion of the philosopher against philosophy, did not arise when philosophy turned out to be unable to apply its own rules to the realm of political affairs; this failure of political philosophy as Plato would have understood it is almost as old as the history of Western philosophy and metaphysics; and it did not even arise when it turned out that philosophy was equally unable to perform the task assigned to it by Hegel and the philosophy of history, that is, to understand and grasp conceptually historical reality and the events that made the modern world what it is. The situation, however, became desperate when the old metaphysical questions were shown to be meaningless; that is, when it began to dawn upon modern man that he had come to live in a world in which his mind and his tradition of thought were not even capable of asking adequate, meaningful questions, let alone of giving the answers to its own perplexities.

Hannah Arendt, Preface to Between Past and Future

This to me is a great sum of what has occupied my mind recently, and it ties this pre-occupation into the history of Western philosophy. What is one to do when the spaces, the "ontological difference," in metaphysics are laid bare? I am recently turned toward another question, also uncovered I think by Nietzsche. Is it not the case that "history," a story authored and told by human beings, can be fundamentally ruptured by certain happenings that defy formalization into the constructive narrative of human happenings? Are there spaces, "between past and future," where we must devise a new set of rules in order to complete the story, or at least that chapter of the story? Morality, demonstrated by minds much greater than mine to be tied to the same conditions that accompany/create history, is also disrupted, even violently disrupted, by these spaces in the historical narrative. How does one move past?