Rudolf Eucken : his philosophy and influence

Front matter

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HIS PHILOSOPHY & INFLUENCE no* }

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Preface

This little book is an attempt to provide a popular account of a philosophy which is playing a leading part in shaping the thought and life of the modern world. It has been my endeavour to avoid technical philosophical language, and to treat the subject throughout in such a fashion as to appeal to those who have made no special study of philosophy or theology.

Professor Eucken has no dearer wish than that philosophy should cease to be a mere academic speciality and become a power in the life of the people ; and he seeks, in particular, to interest all those men and women who are growing tired of mere negation and agnosticism. I feel, therefore, that my imperfect attempt to interpret his comprehensive work of construction perhaps needs no apology. For Eucken has done much — more perhaps than any other living man — to render possible to modern people a belief in the reality and supremacy of the spiritual world. And what he finally seeks is nothing less than the reconstruction of our entire life and civilisation upon a positive spiritual basis.

As one who attended Professor Eucken's vi PREFACE

lectures for more than two years, it gives me peculiar pleasure to assist in the task of spreading his convictions throughout the English-speaking world, in which his teaching has already met with such a favourable reception.

The early portion of this study (Chapters I. to V.) is concerned with an explanation of the main principles of Eucken's thought. The latter section (Chapters VI. to XII.) seeks to bring his philosophy into contact with some of the central problems of modern life and thought. In the second part the treatment is necessarily, to some extent, independent ; but I have kept closely to the lines laid down in Eucken's works.

The reader will see that four of the longest chapters have been devoted to the social side of Eucken's philosophy (including one on Education). In assigning so much space to this topic the present work has, I hope, done something to justify its existence ; for this most important aspect of his philosophy has been singularly neglected in this country.

Eucken's theological views are already well known to English readers ; and this must be my excuse for having left only one chapter for their discussion.

MEYRICK BOOTH.

. Letchworth, August, 1913.

RELIGION

. 183

Index

. 205

SOME ABBREVIATIONS OF EUCKEN'S WORKS USED IN THE TEXT

The Problem of Human Life . . . . = ThePfob,ofH,Life.

The Meaning and Value of Life . . . . = The M, and V. of Life.

Life's Basis and Life's

Ideal . . , . = Life's Basis.

Main Currents of Modern

Thought . . . = Main Currents.

Other titles are quoted in full.

INTRODUCTORY HISTORICAL SKETCH

In explaining the ideas of any philosopher it is in the highest degree essential that there should exist in the reader's mind a suitable background against which the teaching in question may stand out in clear relief. For the sake, therefore, of those who have made no special study of the history of philosophy, it will be desirable to attempt a very brief historical outline leading up to Eucken's own position. In so doing I shall confine myself to that aspect of philosophy which is especially important to an understanding of Eucken's thought. It is thus hoped that this sketch may not be entirely useless even to those to whom any ordinary outline of the history of philosophy would be the merest repetition.

The Problem of Nature and Spirit

Rudolf Eucken's thought centres round the great and ancient problem of nature and spirit. Is nature (that is, the world of matter xii INTRODUCTORY HISTORICAL SKETCH

seen in the light of science) the true basis of reaHty, of which spirit, if it be allowed to exist at all, is a bye-product ? Or is spirit the source and fundament of all reaUty, nature being ultimately dependent upon an invisible world ? This is the great alternative.

In placing this decisive question in the centre of his whole work, Eucken at once puts himself into the closest touch not only with the philosophical and scientific problems of to-day, but with all the great philosophies of the past. For the attitude which a thinker will adopt with regard to any given problem must be decisively influenced by his answer to this question. It will be immediately obvious, to take a few examples, that his views upon the nature of reality, the problem of knowledge, the relationship between mind and body, the freedom of the will, the nature of personality, the basis of ethics, the immortality of the soul, and the religious problem, will be radically affected by his belief or disbelief in the existence of a spiritual principle as the root of reality.

There is abundance of evidence to show that from the very earliest times the problem of nature and spirit, in some form or another, has been a subject of intense human interest. In

INTRODUCTORY HISTORICAL SKETCH xiii

the primitive races, while it was commonly believed that soul and body were quite distinct and separable realities, no clear distinction was made between nature and spirit in the modern sense of the terms, because the soul was regarded as itself a more or less ponderable thing. There is room for controversy, however, as to how far primitive man really regarded the soul in a material sense.

The Early Greek Thinkers

The history of European philosophy begins with the Greek physicists of the sixth century B.C., who were the first thinkers to attempt a systematic, rational explanation of the universe. Their efforts tended in the direction of monism ; they fixed, in turn, upon various substances (such as water, air and fire) which they beheved to constitute the basis of reality, and the human soul, like the rest of the universe, was classed as a manifestation of this basic substance. This monism tended sometimes towards spiritualism and sometimes towards materialism. Heraclites, for example, gave philosophy a decidedly spiritual turn ; and his conception of fire as the basis of life reminds one very forcibly of Bergson's view of the elan vital. He it was who said : '' It is xiv INTRODUCTORY HISTORICAL SKETCH

wise to hearken not to me, but to my word, and to confess that all things are one ''; " The one is made up of all things, and all things issue from the one "; and " All human laws are fed by the one divine law."

Idealism and Materialism in Ancient Greece

It was not long before Greek thought fell apart into two sharply opposed tendencies, corresponding, roughly, to materialism and idealism. On the one side Democritus and Protagoras gave to the Ionian philosophy a thoroughly materiaHstic turn, reducing the whole of life, including the human soul, to a system of moving atoms, and denying the possibility of immortality. On the other, Pythagoras, Empedocles and their followers laid peculiar stress upon the uniqueness and independence of the soul, and the existence of an invisible, spiritual realm.

Plato

This intensification of the problem helped to prepare the way for Plato, with his sharp separation of life into the material and spiritual planes. He performed a great work of synthesis by the construction of a philosophical system which included all the main

INTRODUCTORY HISTORICAL SKETCH xv

tendencies of early Greek thought and sought to render them mutually compatible. Plato placed the centre of reality in the spiritual world, which he conceived of as being an independent realm superior to the sensuous or merely phenomenal world, which is a changeful and shadowy reflection of the eternal reality. The human soul belongs to the spiritual world as its true home, and dwells only temporarily in the lower world of phenomena. Upon the subject of Plato's view of the soul I may, with advantage, quote a few sentences from Professor McDougalFs Body and Mind (p. 19) : —

"... his teaching as to the purely immaterial and immortal nature of the soul is clear enough. The soul of man, though it is in some sense derived from the world-soul, is not merely a ray of the universal energy, life, or mind, as it appears in the systems of the Ionian philosophers. It is a self-contained individual being, the ground of personality ; as such it exists in the realm of pure Being before incarnation ; from that realm it brings the knowledge of the ideas manifested in reminiscence ; and as such it endures through all the vicissitudes of its successive re-incarnations."

Plato first clearly perceived and systematised that great truth of the existence of a spiritual world of absolute values, above and xvi INTRODUCTORY HISTORICAL SKETCH

beyond all the imperfections of the human sphere, a world in which our earthly life first discovers its real meaning. He was influenced to a considerable extent by ethical considerations, and deeply felt that great need for a clear separation between the spiritual and the natural which has invariably been experienced by thinkers capable of fathoming the more profound needs of the soul ; for the desire for an unshakable spiritual reality which shall stand out clear above the apparent chaos of ordinary human conditions is ineradicably planted in the human spirit. However arbitrary his system may appear to the reader of to-day, he set humanity a task which raised it above all materiaHsm, individuaHsm and subjectivity.

Plato in relation to Eucken

Eucken, like other ideaUstic philosophers, follows Plato in his insistence upon a realm of universal and absolute truth, towards which we must strive and in which we find our true being, in the stress laid upon the spiritual Hfe of the individual, and in the recognition of a sharp distinction between the spiritual and the natural spheres. The Greek thinker's intellectualism and transcendentalism find.

INTRODUCTORY HISTORICAL SKETCH xvii

however, no echo in the teaching of the Jena philosopher ; for the difficulty of bridging the gap between the superior spiritual world and the inferior sphere of phenomena left Plato's system branded with the sign of an abstract intellectualism, a defect which has clung, as we shall see, to his idealistic followers. In Plato we trace in cold, clear, simple outlines those central and abiding philosophical problems which subsequently became so much deeper, wider and more complex. And, in particular, we have our attention fixed here, in peculiarly striking fashion,' upon that great antithesis of spirit and nature which runs through the whole history of religious and philosophical thought.

Aristotle and his Followers

Aristotle's abandonment of the Platonic world of independent spirituality did not have the hoped-for effect of creating a well-established unity, and in his devotion to the world of external reality Plato's great successor prepared the way for the fatal duaHsm which was to wreck Greek thought. The followers of Aristotle gradually lost their hold of any objective spiritual reality, with the result that

R.E. b xviii INTRODUCTORY HISTORICAL SKETCH

they fell back into various forms of subjectivism, such as Stoicism, Epicureanism and Scepticism, types of thought which could not long satisfy a people who had been accustomed in the past to a life in close touch with positive spiritual ideals.

In Eucken's The Life of the Spirit (p. 210) we read : —

" The whole course of Greek history presents us with the spectacle of the gradual retreat of the sensible world before the spiritual. In the beginning the sensible world took complete possession of man, but the craving after spiritual self-preservation drove him to the elaboration of a super-sensible world.''

Plotinus and the Problem of Spirit and Nature

In its later stages Greek thought increasingly perceived the real centre of life to lie in the super-sensible world ; but, as we have already noted, there arose a great difficulty in relating the higher spiritual world to the natural world in which man is compelled to live and work, and this resulted in an impossible dualism. This difficulty was very vividly present to Plotinus (b. 205 A.D.) ; and his school (Neo- Platonism), which may be looked upon as a European form of Hinduism, represents an

INTRODUCTORY HISTORICAL SKETCH xix

attempt at its solution along mystical and ascetic lines, an endeavour to transcend the dualism through an absorption of the subject in a transcendental world. The contrast between spirit and nature is here carried to its greatest extent. Plotinus' system marks the logical completion of that process of retirement from the material world which went on, as Eucken says, through the whole of Greek history. He bade man seek satisfaction in a spiritual reality remote from all sensuous interests — here he would find the real centre of his life, and not in that lower world which the Neo-Platonists looked upon as a shadowy emanation of the transcendent Being. Perhaps the most valuable element in Plotinus' thought is his deep and inspiring conception of the human soul. Although dwelling on a lower plane of existence, man was able, he declared, to enter into direct mystic unity with the Divine reality, and indeed his chief task was to liberate himself from all earthly ties in order to attain to this transcendent unity, A powerful impetus towards asceticism and self-purification thus flowed from the Neo-Platonic school. Man's highest goal was to lose himself in an ecstatic contemplation of the universal reality. That such a tendency

XX INTRODUCTORY HISTORICAL SKETCH

— though containing elements of immense value which were essential to the development of the race — is open to many grave objections must at once be clear. In such a devotion to a vague cosmic unity, devoid of all specific attributes, the individual necessarily withdrew himself from the life of this world and ceased to exert any influence upon it, whether for good or evil. Moreover, in its divorce from every sort of tangible reality and in the abandonment of the idea of positive love, the inner life itself necessarily underwent a lamentable impoverishment. The concepts of God and of human personality were in the last degree negative, and were obviously incapable of giving rise to any positive activities.

Christianity

While Greek thought was thus turning to a species of sterile mysticism (carefully to be distinguished from Christian mysticism), which was virtually equivalent to a surrender of the task of life on this earth, there was arising in Europe, in the form of Christianity, the greatest spiritual force that the world has ever seen, a force destined speedily to swallow up the pale, white flame of Neo-Platonism in a glowing fire of triumphant faith and love. The

INTRODUCTORY HISTORICAL SKETCH xxi

Greek world had, finally, failed in the central task of philosophy and Hfe, namely, the reconcUiation of nature and spirit. It had left the gap unbridged.

ChrisUanity and the Problem of Nature and Spirit

An entirely new turn was given to the whole situation through the ascent of Christianity. Plotinus had taught that man must leave the world in order to find God. But the significance of Christianity lay in the doctrine that God had descended to earth to seek and save man. Neo- Platonism called upon man to raise himself towards God ; while the new rehgion proclaimed the stooping of the Divine towards the human in an act of redemptive love. The former led to a melting-away of the human in the Di\dne ; the latter to a permeation of the human by the Di\ine. Historical Christianity bridged the gap between nature and spirit by its teaching of the incarnation of the Perfect Spirit in the world of nature. The great antithesis now gave way to an at-one-ment. The whole of human existence now acquired a new meaning and value : '' Christianity for the first time reveals a xxii INTRODUCTORY HISTORICAL SKETCH complete knowledge of Divine Being deification of man '' (Eucken).

G >

St. Augustine

In the philosophy of St. Augustine (who has exerted no little influence upon Eucken) we see abundant evidence of the great spiritual deepening and of the new valuation of humanity which Christianity brought into human life. Augustine placed the human soul in the centre of his system, and devoted himself whole-heartedly to the development of the individual in the deepest sense of the phrase ; he thus raised philosophy above the cold intellectualism of the Grecian schools and made it intensely real and personal : —

'' Happiness, blessedness, this it is upon which the whole thought and passionate longing of the man are concentrated — happiness, not in the restricted sense of the earlier Latin fathers, but as the complete satisfaction of the inner nature, as the vivifying of all the powers, as blessedness extending to the deepest foundations of being.*' {The Prob. of H. Life, p. 211,)

From the point of view of our problem no further developments of great importance took place until the Modern Era, which opened

INTRODUCTORY HISTORICAL SKETCH xxiii

with the Renaissance, the Reformation and the revival of scientific studies;

The Modern World

The central fact of the new period was the breaking away of the individual from the authority of the mediaeval, ecclesiastical system. This emancipation showed itself in two main directions. In the first place it took a religious form in the Reformation, which was a demand for a more intimate and personal relationship between the individual and God, and a reaction against the rigidity of the papal organisation. As Eucken expresses it : '' a passionate longing arose for immediate access to God, a burning thirst for a saving miracle of infinite love and grace '' {The Prob. of H. Life, p. 275) ; and this produced a new, more personal and more human type of life. We read further, on p. 277 : '' The chief characteristic of the new Hfe is freedom, so that Melancthon could say in so many words, ' In the end freedom is Christianity ' ; freedom not as a natural property, but as a favour and gift of God ; freedom not of the man in himself, but of the Christian man.'' The second manifestation of the new spirit is the general movement of modern European xxiv INTRODUCTORY HISTORICAL SKETCH

civilisation, as seen, for example, in the doctrine of the rights of man, in the development of free-thought, and in the ever-growing demand for the emancipation of the individual. Modern industrialism (more especially in its earlier phases) is one of the least desirable aspects of the same general tendency, exhibiting, as it does, individual liberty carried to the point of brutal egoism.

With the development of the new era along more independent Hues, the old problem of nature and spirit, which was more or less in abeyance as long as the mediaeval system sufficed to satisfy men's minds, again forced its way to the front. And in its new form the problem gained immensely in depth and complexity.

Spinoza

Spinoza sought to raise man above the level of mere nature by basing his life upon reason, which he regarded as the universal spiritual reality ; and he developed an intellectuaUstic system, with Neo-Platonic affinities, in which salvation is to be awaited from pure knowledge, a system resting upon a belief in the entire rationality of existence and in man's capacity to live in complete harmony with the rational principle.

INTRODUCTORY HISTORICAL SKETCH xxv

Kant

Kant pursued an opposite path. He held that reason was concerned with the natural world only, and that it could in no wise cross the gulf between nature and spirit ; the universals which it seems to give us, and upon which Spinoza leant, being true only for uSy as representing our method of viewing reality, and possessing no real objective validity. But, he explained, man is not only a thinker, he is also a doer \ he is moral as well as intellectual. And it is as a moral being that he is able to apprehend a genuine spiritual reality. Kant stands, therefore, for moral action as the method by which the antithesis of nature and spirit may be overcome. Eucken has many points of contact with Kant, and, on the other hand, few with Spinoza.

Fichte, Schelling and Hegel

Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, in spite of much that divided them, stood, in the main, for the same conception of the problem with which we are more immediately concerned. All three looked upon the ultimate reality as an expanding or evolving spiritual life, progressing according to its own inherent laws. We note

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(and this is most important) that the concept of reality has now lost the rigid and static form which it possessed in the antique world. The basis of existence has now become a selfsubsist ent thought-process, developing through the interplay of opposites ; although objective, this process works within the human soul-life. Hegel placed the idea of an independent, self-developing thought in the very centre of his system, which thus acquired what Eucken regards as an excessively formal, intellectualistic and impersonal character. We shall see, however, that in many very important respects our philosopher is subject to Hegelian influences — for example, in his view of spiritual life as a force ever striving towards expansion and growing through antitheses.

The Trend towards Materialism

During the nineteenth century men were occupied to a much greater degree than had ever before been the case with the things of the material world. Wonderful advances were made in technical science ; steam and electricity revolutionised life ; the human race threw itself with immense ardour into the betterment of the external conditions of life ; the democratic upheaval and the rise of

INTRODUCTORY HISTORICAL SKETCH xxvii

socialism were signs of the times. Along with all this there went an undue absorption of man in the world of nature, a forgetfulness of his inner life often carried to the point of a determined attempt to reject the whole idea of the soul and of any spiritual reality, as being entirely fictitious. This so-called realistic tendency, which is still immensely influential throughout the Western world, aims at a construction of life exactly opposed to Neo- Platonism. Plotinus called man to a Hfe entirely divorced from nature. Realism would place him wholly in nature.

Spirit and Nature in the Modern World

Just as the Ancient World closed with a denial of nature, so the Modern World has been led to a rejection of spirit. But neither of these two solutions is capable of truly satisfying humanity. Thus — with an important difference — we again find ourselves confronted with the identical problem of the reconciHation of nature and spirit with which we were dealing at the outset of this historical sketch. The difference consists in the enormous deepening which has taken place upon both levels : our conception of nature has been enriched beyond measure by the discoveries xxviii INTRODUCTORY HISTORICAL SKETCH

of science ; while the developments of religion and philosophy throughout the centuries have opened up to us an incomparably wider view of the spiritual world than was visible to the ancients.

Note.

Historical Influences in Eucken's Thought.

The Hibbert Journal for April, 1912, contained an article in which Baron v. Hiigel gave an account of the historical influences which have been of importance in the formation of Eucken's thought. In the ancient world he mentions Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus ; and in the modern world, Kant, Fichte and Hegel ; but most decisive of all is the Christian influence,- derived mainly from the Gospels, St. Paul and St. Augustine. Of considerable significance is Eucken's rejection of ethical monism (Leibniz and Spinoza) and his inclination towards a dualistic conception of ethics, as evidenced by his enthusiasm for Plato, St. Paul, St. Augustine and Kant. Modern thinkers related to Eucken are Windelband, Troltsch, Siebeck, Boutroux, Royce, and Pringle-Pattison.

Chapter I Life And Works

Eucken's Boyhood

Rudolf Eucken comes of the Frisian stock, a branch of the German people closely related to the English, and long noted for their freedom-loving instincts ; and his racial origin no doubt has its bearing upon the practical and ethical character of his philosophy. He was bom at Aurich, a small country town in the extreme north-west corner of Germany, on January 5th, 1846. His father died when he was very young, and, in common with so many other noted men, he owes a great deal to his mother, a woman of exceptional mental and emotional qualities, who, in the face of considerable difficulties; enabled her son to obtain the advantages of a prolonged education. The boy attended a good school in his native town, and while there was influenced to a most important extent by Wilhelm Renter, a deeply religious thinker and a pupil of the philosopher Krause. Eucken has himself said of Renter, that he was a man with '' such force of personal conviction that he left on every spiritually sensitive nature an ineffaceable impression/' While still very young, and even before he came under Renter's influence, Eucken was warmly interested in the problems of religion and philosophy. As he grew older his interest deepened, and before he left school he had read very considerably along these lines.

Student Days

On proceeding to the University of Gottingen, he devoted himself for the most part, however, to classical philosophy and ancient history, although he found time to attend the philosophical lectures of Lotze, with whom he did not feel himself in sympathy. Before taking his degree at Gottingen, he went to study for a time at Berlin. Here he came into contact with Trendelenburg, who was at that time a great power in the philosophical world, and to the famous Aristotelian Eucken owes much of his interest in Grecian thought and of his lifelong determination to keep philosophy in close touch with history and with social and moral questions.

Academic Work

After working as a High School teacher for five years, Eucken was appointed, in 1871, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Basel. Three years later he received a call to a similar position at Jena, and from 1874 down to the present day he has remained loyal to the beautiful and historic little town by the Saale, notwithstanding temptations to transfer his influence to other and larger universities. For many generations Jena has occupied a unique position amongst German towns in consequence of its associations with literature and philosophy, and there is something peculiarly suitable in the town which is inseparably connected in history with the names of Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Hegel and Schelling, having been for so long the home of Germany's most celebrated living thinker, a man who has laboured all his life to conserve, to strengthen and to develop the principles of German idealism. Here Eucken has

B 2 lectured for thirty-eight years ; and here he has written all his more important works.

Eucken's Writings

It was as a student of Aristotle that our philosopher first came before the public, with two pamphlets published in 1870 ; while his inaugural address at Basel dealt with the significance of Aristotle's thought for the life of to-day, and was followed, in 1872, by a work upon the Aristotelian method. After taking up his residence at Jena, Eucken directed his attention more towards the history of philosophy in general, publishing a history of philosophical terminology, a number of essays on the early German philosophers, and, in 1878, the work called Die Grundbegriffe der Gegenwart, which was subsequently so much altered in character and extended in scope that it became a new book, and in its most recent form was translated into English by the author of the present study, under the title of Main Currents of Modern Thought : as originally conceived, this was a historical work, but when re-written it took on the form of an introduction to Eucken's own position, linking up his teaching with the development of philosophy throughout the ages. In 1888 there appeared the first of the great constructive works : Die Einheit des Geisteslebens in Bewusstsein und Tat der Menschheit — '' The Unity of the Spiritual Life in the Consciousness and Action of Mankind " — (which was, however, preceded, in 1885, by an important httle introduction called Prolegomena zu Forschungen Uher die Einheit des Geisteslebens in Bewusstsein und Tat der Menschheit) . In this fundamental work, which has not yet appeared in English (though much of its content is brought into the later books), Eucken criticises, at great length, naturalism and intellectualism, rejects both, on the ground of their neglect of personality, and then proceeds, in systematic fashion, to lay the foundations of his own personal idealism.

This was succeeded, two years later, by his most popular book. The Problem of Human Life (translated by Professor Boyce Gibson and Professor Hough), which deals in an extraordinarily sympathetic and illuminating fashion with the great philosophers of history and the value of their teaching for our modern life ; there have been nine German editions. This work reveals the close connection which Eucken establishes between philosophy and life, and, while not directly constructive, it enables us to understand the influences which have helped to mould our philosopher's mind. It marks the end of his historical period. A new and more complete expression of Eucken's own convictions appeared in Der Kampf um einen geistigen Lebensinhalt (1896). Eucken was now devoting himself more to the consideration of religious questions, with the result that in igoi he published a lengthy exposition of his religious philosophy — The Truth of Religion (third improved edition, 1912, translated by Dr. Tudor Jones). This was followed, in 1907, by a somewhat more popular account than had hitherto appeared of Eucken's own philosophical teaching, namely, the work which was published in England in 1911, with the title, Life's Basis and Life's Ideal (translated by Alban Widgery) ; and the same year produced a small book on the religious question : Christianity and the New Idealism (translated by Professor and Mrs. Boyce Gibson). A very useful summary of Eucken's ideas is The Meaning and Value of Life (1908), and this was succeeded in the same year by The Life of the Spirit (translated by F. L. Pogson). Of importance for the study of our philosopher's attitude towards Christianity is the short