Karl Marx in his Theses on Feuerbach protested that the philosophers have merely interpreted the world in various ways, when the point is to change it. (Die Philosophen haben die Welt verschieden interpretiert; aber es kommt darauf an, sie zu veraendern.) His century-mate, Soren Kierkegaard, at the opposite end of the political spectrum, but sharing Marx’s disdain for mere theory, might have said that the point was to change oneself, to become oneself. Both thinkers were anti-contemplative and anti-speculative, but in such wildly divergent ways! The social activist Marx denied interiority by trying to merge the individual into his species-being (Gattungswesen) while the existentialist Kierkegaard fetishized interiority: “Truth is subjectivity” (Concluding Unscientific Postscript).
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