Eucken, Rudolf
Eucken, Rudolf
(1846-1926) Being a writer of wide popularity, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1908, Eucken defends a spiritualistic-idealistic metaphysics against materialistic naturalism, positivism and mechanism. Spiritual life, not being an oppositionless experience, is a struggle, a self-asserting action by resistance, a matter of great alternatives, either-ors between the natural and the spiritual, a matter of vital choice. Thus all significant oppositions are, within spiritual life itself, at once created and overcome. Immanence and transcendence, personalism and absolutism are the two native spiritual oppositions that agitate Eucken’s system. Reconciliation between the vital dualities therefore depends not on mere intellectual insight, but on personal effort, courageous, heroic, militant and devoted action. He handles the basic oppositions of experience in harmony with the activist tenor of liberal Protestantism. Eucken sought to replace the prevailing intellectualistic idealism by an activistic idealism, founded on a comprehensive and historical consideration of culture at large. He sought to interpret the spiritual content of historical movements. He conceived of historical facts as being so many systematized wholes of life, for which he coined the term syntagma. His distinctive historical method consists of the reductive and the noological aspects. The former considers the parts directly in relation to an inward whole. The latter is an inner dialectic and immanent criticism of the inward principles of great minds, embracing the cosmologicnl and psychological ways of philosophical construction and transcending by the concept of spiritual life the opposition of the world and the individual soul. Preaching the need of a cultural renewal, not a few of his popularized ideas found their more articulated form in the philosophical sociology of his most eminent pupil, Max Scheler, in the cultural psychology of both Spranger and Spengler. His philosophy is essentially a call to arms against the deadening influences of modern life. — H.H.