"Precisely herein lies our own plight--the plight of all of us who are not philosophical literati but who, educated by the genuine philosophers of the great past, live for truth, who only in this way are and seek to be in our own truth.  But as philosophers of the present we have fallen into a painful existential contradiction.  The faith in the possibility of philosophy as a task, that is, in the possibility of universal knowledge, is something we cannot let go.  We know that we are called to this task as serious philosophers.  And yet, how do we hold onto this belief, which has meaning only in relation to the single goal which is common to us all, that is, philosophy as such?"
(Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.  On-line selections: 1   2)