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The article focuses on continental philosophy. Continental philosophy in recent times has tended to become highly cerebral and often esoteric in the sense of being addressed and accessible only to a narrow circle of fellow academics. Only rarely do recent works in that genre make an effort, or are able, to appeal to a broader audience, including practitioners in the "human sciences". A prominent exception to this general tendency is Calvin Schrag whose writings combine philosophical depth with social political relevance and thus manage to transgress the customary boundaries separating philosophy from the social sciences, from literature, and from the public at large.

The article focuses on the philosophy of life. Life is a value for itself: whatever are alive wishes to remain alive. The gipsy moth seeking to avoid the menacing hand, the spider protecting her eggs, even the plant struggling to recover from an injury all testify to it. Granted, the metaphor of wanting to stay alive is anthropomorphic in the extreme, but the metaphor of instinct or of chemical reactions is no less metaphoric and rather less experientially accurate. All such metaphors are ways of pointing to a basic reality which we seek to capture by assertions such as that being seeks to persist in being, that whatever is alive wants to remain alive and will struggle to do so, or that for all being life is a victory and death a defeat. Certainly, there are situations when a particular living being, for reasons specific to it, chooses to give up, accepting voluntary death, as an old, ailing moose walking toward the wolf pack. Certainly, death has its place in the cycle of life.

Waiting, a phenomenon that is essentially neutral is a form of intentionality, which can bestow striking qualities to the act. Waiting is a temporal experience most often characterized by its directedness toward the future. In this article, on the other hand, the author intend to examine the question of whether or not it is possible in the social sciences to develop a social theory that is neither immediately taken from our prescientific, everyday conception of social action in relation to social institutions, nor is just an ideology, nor the immediate reflection of the social philosophy of one of the many trends in contemporary philosophy. In order to be able to formulate the problem more carefully the author shall limit his reflections to sociology, although in his opinion much of what will be argued for will apply to the other social sciences, also. Those who adhere to the belief in the possibility of a genuinely scientific social science do not deny that one encounters certain problems in the realm of the social sciences that are not met in the natural sciences.