Life's Basis and Life's Ideal: The Fundamentals of a New Philosophy of Life

by Rudolf Eucken

All this involves particular estimates of value, a characteristic solution of the problems and a harmonising of the oppositions of our existence. It is a matter of general knowledge how this synthesis has elevated and ennobled life, and is still increasingly felt as an influence tending to further development and harmony. But it is equally well known how the progress of life has rebuffed the claim of this system of life to be the only valid one. We have become aware of contradictions which do not find sufficient acknowledgment in this system: a gulf deeper than it is able to transcend has made its appearance between man and his environment: in particular, the supremacy of form, which constitutes the basis of the system, has been shaken. Antiquity, at its highest development, had, without much consideration, given to form a living soul; its later course dissolved this union, the soul degenerated more and more into an inwardness of feeling, and gave up all claim, if not to the world, yet to its organisation and formation: form, deprived of soul, threatened to become superficial, and to change life into play and enjoyment. It was at this point that Christianity intervened with a powerful effect, but it has not, in the sense with which we are here concerned, produced an organised system of life.

Such a system was first produced in the Modern Age, and more particularly in the period of the Enlightenment. This system makes force the centre of life; to increase force without limit is the task of tasks. The elements of reality are centres of force; but these elements are not isolated, because force is called forth only by force, and the amount of life depends on the degree to which relations are developed. Since in this way one tends towards another, they become interweaved and joined, and the many are united. For this system the world does not appear as a work of art which rests in itself, but as a process that ceaselessly increases in volume: the main achievement of spiritual work is, with complete consciousness and self-determining activity, to take possession of this process, which actually surrounds us; to change its infinite life as much as possible into our own life, and to co-operate to the best of our capacity for its advancement. Since here spiritual work never tolerates a state of inactive peace, never accepts the world as a rigid destiny, but is concerned to develop the world, to analyse the world as it first appears into its elements in order to reach the forces that move it, life acquires a more active relation to the environment than it does in the earlier, more contemplative system, and feels itself to be more in the workshop of reality.

The relation of knowledge and life is changed from its traditional character. Research cannot transform the world from the apparent calm and completeness of the immediate impression into movement and development, without analysing the representation offered into its ultimate elements; ascertaining their laws, and finally, with the help of the idea of unlimited time, reconstructing from the beginning the world, which it had first of all destroyed. With such destruction and reconstruction modern research brings the world much nearer to us, and gives us more power over it than does the earlier type. Corresponding to the understanding of reality from its evolution, man finds his own life in a progressive movement. Human society is regarded less as a well-arranged work of art than as a complex of forces, which come to full development and make sure progress only in their relation. The chief demand is for the greatest amount of freedom of movement; the greatest number of relations between individuals, and a ceaseless increase of the stream of life, that should take up into itself all that bear human features. The individual also must realise his existence as one of “becoming” and motion; he is not bound by a closed standard of nature. Through the power of his spiritual nature he is able to assimilate ever new capacity, and to grow without limit: nothing gives more proud courage and joyous force to his life than this consciousness of an inner infinitude. A characteristic ideal of culture and education is formed: all individual departments of spiritual work are now regarded primarily as means to the increase of human power, and must assume a form corresponding to this. And so life everywhere becomes more active and more powerful: it finds its aim within itself, in its own elevation, and has therefore no need to seek it in something external; the whole existence of man becomes more his own work. As work comes more deeply into touch with the nature of things the development of power becomes at the same time a controlling of the world. It was not to be wondered at, therefore, when the modern man, with the development of this system of life, believed that for the first time he had left a childlike condition of constraint and limitation, and entered a state of freedom and maturity.

But the further development of life shows clearly enough that this system, which makes force and movement its leading principles, is not the final stage of human endeavour: the leading idea of our whole investigation is that human endeavour is more than this. We have seen that a system of mere force and movement gives no soul to work and does not lead life to self-consciousness and self-determination. A rushing stream seizes us and carries us along with it, but we reach no position independent of it; and so we cannot unify the multiplicity, nor gain a content from its immeasurable achievement; indeed, the increasing extension of life divides us more and more into single forces, and deprives us of a self that transcends the movement. At first this was not fully perceived, since the soul was implicitly assumed to be force and the extension of movement was regarded as a pure gain to the life of the soul. But the further development and the keener emphasis on the new state attained could not but clearly indicate the contradiction here involved; could not but lead to a separation between soul and work, and force them into conflict. Hence there is a danger of work becoming mechanical, and of the life of the soul, which, with this separation, is thrown back entirely upon the subjective, being lost in indefiniteness.

These experiences of mechanical work and indefinite subjectivity give birth to a new situation, in which the problem of the soul, a problem which in the earlier systems remained in the background, is forced into prominence. The task of life is seen to be a more fundamental one; it is a matter not so much of altering a given reality in one way or another as of first discovering a genuine reality, of advancing beyond all mere activity to a being which exists within the activity.

It has become evident to us in many ways that from the recognition of this a characteristic form of life proceeds. The only question is whether the change is capable of bringing about a thorough organisation of life, whether it can produce independent centres of life and unite them into a community of life, and thus lead to the development of a system of life. We ourselves most resolutely maintain the view that this is really possible; that life is in process of forming itself into a new whole, and that with the clearer establishment of this, problems which have existed from early times receive full explanation, and a definite advance is made in their solution.

We saw that, in its highest stages of development, life concentrates at particular points, and that a characteristic sphere of life is in this way brought forth, as, for example, in spiritual individualities, national character, and so on. As soon as these developments are acknowledged to be spiritual and are sufficiently distinguished from simply natural existence, as soon as the manifestation of a new world is recognised in them, they become a great problem. Then they cannot be regarded as a mere product of a particular part of nature, but must be accepted as primarily a creation from the spiritual life as a whole, a creation which at the same time must maintain itself and transform in its own activity that which it receives. The relation to the spiritual world as a whole is the fundamental relation of life, and yet the further development of life does not follow immediately from the relation to the whole, but from the relation to the innumerable other centres of life; the infinitude that the individual being acquires from the relation to the whole receives that which is particular in its organisation and its content only from the experience of the relation to others. The relation to others, however, is not produced by nature, but as spiritual, only from the spiritual world as a whole and must be continually sustained by the whole. The relations of individual to individual will therefore be included within the whole, and through the presence of the whole will be essentially advanced beyond the capacity of mere nature. The love that arises here is fundamentally different from all the love which arises from natural impulse; and, understood in this manner, notwithstanding all that may be doubtful in respect of its fulfilment in individual matters, there is much point in the demand of Augustine, that, in the relation of man to man, not man but God should be set in the first place, and that man is to be loved only through God.

However, it is not an increase of activity alone that is sought in the multiplicity of relations, but a growth of being—a being not beyond all activity, but existent within it. It is necessary not only that the life-process achieve more, but also that it grow in itself, change that which is alien to it into its own, and display more reality within itself; life must experience every single activity as the manifestation of the activity of the whole, and thus, along with unlimited extension, preserve self-consciousness.

The demand for a self-conscious life, the demand for an elevation of activity to the organisation and development of being, by no means excludes other forms of activity, if only for the reason that this demand presents a high ideal to which man can only very slowly approximate. But this ideal constitutes an aim and a standard for all other activity; the giving of form and the increasing of force must aid in the development towards this aim if they are not to become devoid of real worth. The more necessary it is to insist upon an animation of reality through the development of self-conscious life, the more must we guard against the danger of anthropomorphism, which, when we are hasty and impatient, inevitably finds an entrance to and corrupts the whole of our thought and life. Only with much toil and with continual self-criticism can life be brought to the point where the transition to self-consciousness is possible; and even then the whole cannot, under human circumstances, be attained at one stroke; but at first life must endeavour to concentrate, to form a nucleus so that in this way it may acquire a firm basis, and from this take up a struggle for its further spiritualisation.

The same thing is to be seen in the differentiation and the gradation of life: everywhere a movement towards self-consciousness begins, but the emergence of this movement forces an antithesis into prominence, and life is completely transformed into work and conflict. Thought cannot be satisfied with representing the world as a work of art or as a process; thought must seek self-consciousness in the world. This it finds in the emergence of an independent spiritual life and in reality’s coming-to-itself; at the same time the difference between spirit and nature becomes more pronounced, and all the divergences in life increase. Men can find their highest unity neither in joining together so as to form a whole as a work of art, nor in a system of progressive increase of force. Neither alone could prevent society from becoming spiritually destitute, nor could both together. Society also needs a self-consciousness and acquires it only through the development of a spiritual content and spiritual character; but this must be won by continual struggle from the medley which constitutes the general condition of social life. Again, the individual does not attain a content for his life through an immediate combination of his powers so as to form a harmonious whole, or through increasing them without limit; the individual also must by activity concentrate his life and so gain the basis of a new world: never is he in his life, as a whole, personality and spiritual individuality. True, there lies within him the potentiality to become such a spiritual individuality, and this potentiality may be transformed in his own activity; and the existence thus acquired can affect the rest of life, arousing and elevating it.