An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy

by W. Tudor Jones

We have followed Eucken's system developing step by step from the stage of knowing the world up through the evolution of spiritual life in history, in the soul, in art, and in society. Everywhere the investigation has revealed a progressive autonomy and duration of spiritual life in the midst of all the kaleidoscopic aspects of the objects which presented themselves to consciousness. Something spiritual has persisted and evolved in the midst of all the changes, and the changes have been utilised by this deeper potency of the soul. Through the evolution of this spiritual potency changes have been brought about in the external world, in human society, and in the individual soul. This spiritual potency has bent things to subserve its own inherent demands. The union of conation and cognition within the soul has brought forth everything that has happened outside the natural process of the physical world, and much even of that world has been made subservient to man. When the attention is turned to this "fact of facts" concerning the work of spiritual life, individually and collectively, it is impossible to consider it as a mere addendum to the natural process, however closely connected it may be with that process. Sufficient has been said to prove the superiority of spiritual life over the whole aspects and manifestations of Nature. The question, then, cannot be laid aside concerning the nature of the life of the spirit in itself. What is it now? What is it capable of becoming? Why should its evolution snap at its highest point? Why cannot the power that has accomplished so much in the history of our world, and has always done this the more efficiently the more a remove from the realm of the sensuous took place—why cannot such a power proceed farther on its course? And what limits can be set to it? The pertinency of such and other questions cannot be doubted. The spiritual life has ascended too high and accomplished too much to be treated with indifference. And yet that is the way it is being treated only too widely to-day. Men hesitate to grant to it a reality of its own because of its close connection with mechanical and chemical elements. They half affirm and half deny its reality. The question arises, What is reality? Eucken agrees with the great idealists of the world that reality in its highest manifestation is something that pertains to spirit and meaning rather than to matter and its behaviour.[44] Our rigid clinging to a meaning of reality from the side of its physical history is doubtless a remnant of a race—memory which may be largely physical in its nature. We find a difficulty in conceiving as yet a reality existing in itself—existing in itself though material elements have helped it on its upward course. But even here it is not at all certain that nothing but material elements have operated in this fundamental process. Men have by now known enough of the connection of mind with lower processes in order to be aware of a mystery present in the whole operation—a mystery which does not yield itself to the senses.

But even such a past history of the spiritual life is not all that can be said concerning it. It is now in process of evolution, and its greatest work is always accomplished not by looking backward but forward. The whole universe has operated in bringing spiritual life into existence. Are there any reasons whatever for concluding that the whole universe is not co-operating now in its further development? Life, civilisation, culture, morality, and religion are proofs that this life of the spirit is moving onward and upward. It does not move without checks and entanglements from without and within, but in every "long run" it is gaining some new ground and tilling it as its own. It dare not turn back; it dare not throw away the pack of the Sollen (the Ought) off its shoulders. The over-individual norms have planted themselves too strongly in the heart of humanity to be ever uprooted. The meaning and value of life now lie in a beyond. It is not a beyond within any physical region that was; neither is it, so far as we know, a beyond in any physical region that is to be. It is a beyond of the spirit; and as it is the most real and most requisite possession of man, how can it have anything less than a cosmic significance? The future of spiritual life is therefore governed not by something that is to be in the cosmos, but by something that is now present in it—by the acknowledgment, assimilation, and appropriation by man and humanity of spiritual norms which are far beyond their present actual situation.

The whole meaning here is that something sub specie aeternitatis has to take the foremost place in life. We are beings who perpetually move. Eucken and Bergson are both emphasising this to-day. But the latter deals with the movement alone; he has no notion whither we are going, nor can he possibly have until he revises very largely his conception of the function and meaning of intellect in life.[45] But Eucken states that we do know whither we are going. What are the over-personal spiritual norms and standards but stars by which to steer the direction of our course over the tempestuous sea of time? Everyone who guides his life in connection with reason guides it by means of some norm or other. Even the daily avocation requires this in order to be fulfilled. And the norms which furnish guidance to the spiritual life have originated and are utilised in precisely the same manner as those of the daily avocation. The only difference is that there is more meaning and value in the former than in the latter. But each is a Sollen and constitutes a beyond. This Sollen is a certainty; it exists, and its existence is in itself. It is the star for the Wollen.[46] The Will is our own; the Ought is not our own; the fact that we possess it as an idea is no proof that it has become a possession of the whole of life. In this sense the Ought has an objectivity and a subsistence of its own. The Will has to travel in the direction of the Ought, and its course is mapped out by this Ought at every step of its progress. Hence, in order to reach towards the Sollen the nature of the Sollen must become known. As noticed in previous chapters, such a movement towards so high a goal becomes a difficult task—a task which demands the activity of the whole spiritual nature. Man's dependency and the meaning of his life are thus set before his eyes, and the aspects of momentary existence are valued as of secondary importance. Unless this meaning of the norm becomes clear, life will revolve around the reality nearest-at-hand, and will consequently fail to unfold the deeper spirituality of its nature. "And if all depended on the brief flash of the moment, which endures but the twinkling of an eye, only to vanish into the dark of nothingness, then all life would mean a mere exit into death. Thus, without eternity there is no spirituality, and without connection there is no content of life. But what is enthroned in itself above Time becomes for the man who wins such a spirituality, first of all, an immense task which allows itself to be grasped on the field of Time alone; and, also, the Eternal which works within us and which hovers before us on the horizon of Eternity can become our full possession only through the movement of Time. To wish to check the course of Time means not to serve Eternity, but to ascribe to Time what belongs to Eternity."[47]

It is not said by Eucken anywhere in his writings that the natural sources at which Life drinks must be abandoned. These remain with us as long as we are in this world of space and time. But these are not found in the same place, neither is the same importance attached to them, once the meaning and value of the over-personal norms and the potency of spiritual creativeness have come into union with one another.

What Eucken means by universal religion is the establishment of this independency and supremacy of spiritual life over all else in the world. We have already dealt with this aspect in former chapters; the conclusion was reached that everywhere the presence of a life of the spirit made itself felt, and gave a meaning and interpretation to all life and existence. That is the conclusion Eucken arrives at in his Kampf um einen geistigen Lebensinhalt. The problem of religion qua religion is hardly touched. But, indeed, what other than religion can all these conclusions mean? Norm and potency are emphasised. An elevation above the world and above the "small self" has taken place. But something still has to be done before we have entered into the very heart of the matter. The problems which arise after all the conclusions previously arrived at are acknowledged must be taken into account. Having come so far in regard to the value and meaning of spiritual life, we are bound to go farther. No point occurs where we can find a terminus. Though we have already been constrained to grant the norms a reality of their own, we have only just touched, here and there, upon their cosmic significance. The matter thus reaches a further point than we have yet touched. What justification is there for granting spiritual life this cosmic significance?

Attention has already been called to the fact of a distinction between nature and spirit. But attention has now to be directed to the necessity of emphasising the reality of spirit. The nature of spirit is revealed most clearly in the life and content of human consciousness. No anthropomorphic standard from without can come to our aid to establish the existence of spirit. The standard is to be found within the consciousness itself. A distinction has to be made between nature and spirit. However much they resemble each other in the beginnings of life, spirit has travelled far beyond nature or matter. It has developed for itself an essence which may be designated as substance. The chief characteristic of matter is that it occupies space; but spirit, though connected with, and largely conditioned by, matter as it exists in space, is now something quite other—something which has to be granted an existence of its own, and which forms the beginning of a new kind of world and unfolds a new kind of reality.

The reality of spiritual life is not discovered in anything which is external to life; it is to be found in life itself. The reality is revealed and, indeed, created by an act of the spirit of man. Such an act must be the act of one's own deepest being. But although such a new reality is not to be found in anything external to life, yet the very revelation points, as we have already observed, to something which is over-individual. Even the meaning of the reality itself, from its immanent side, is something quite other than the natural life and its contents. It is something revealed, but not as yet possessed; it is hard to be reached; and even within the man's own nature obstacles and hindrances of various kinds are to be found. But the new reality persists in the midst of the hindrances; the man discovers himself as the possessor of a deeper kind of truth than was present and operative in the ordinary life. A cleavage is therefore made between the "small self" and the spiritual life. In the degree the former wins through the calling forth of the deepest activities of the soul, in that degree does the transcendent aspect of the new reality urge itself upon man. And when the two aspects—immanent and transcendent—of the reality are firmly grasped by the soul, the soul moves upward in the exploration and possession of its new world.

The failure to enter into this region of religion is due to the fact that men often attempt to construct religion on certain so-called faculties of the soul. Some attempt to discover and establish religion through the power and conclusions of the intellect. It is evident that when the knowing aspect of consciousness takes such a leading part, and deliberately ignores the affective and active aspects, no more than a segment of the reality can be discovered, and such a segment leaves out of account important elements of human nature. If the affective aspect takes the lead at the expense of the other two aspects, we are here again in a region where only certain fragments of our nature are touched. If the active aspect busies itself without carrying along with itself the content of meaning and value to be discovered in consciousness, the true element of the greatness of the reality is missing. Eucken shows in his Truth of Religion that there must be a point in the soul, at some deeper level than any of the three, where the three are working conjointly.[48] It must be so, because what is now at stake is more than knowing a thing; it is to be the thing we know we ought to be. It is unfamiliarity with such a truth that brings a difficulty into the mind when face to face with the problem of religion. The mind has not learned how to attend to the truth in its own self-subsistence, but posits this truth in its relation to the conditions in the external world which brought it forth.[49] Thus the conception of truth is made up very largely of its history on its physical side, and this history of the truth comes to possess the entire meaning of the truth itself! The road to religion, in its deepest sense, is barred to everyone who fails or refuses to grant the deeper reality which presents itself within the soul a self-subsistence. The only existence of such a reality can be its own self-subsistence. The reality is now conceived as something quite other than an existence in space; it exists for consciousness and can persist within consciousness.

When reality is conceived as a substance subsisting in itself, the passage to the Absolute is opened. This Absolute is the most universal and complete meaning and value which the soul is capable of possessing; its very nature forces itself upon man as being true; and its value has revealed itself in its being the only power which will carry farther the spiritual evolution of the soul. If such an Absolute is left out of account, it is evident that the most universal truth which presents itself to life as absolutely necessary cannot enter into the deepest recesses of the soul; it cannot be more than a subsidiary element accompanying lower intellectual elements of life, which are more closely allied on such a lower level with physical processes of the body and with the physical world. And when truth is treated in this manner, it cannot possibly make its abode and become a power in the soul. Consciousness hesitates to create a further cleft within itself because the evidence of truth at such a height as this does not lend itself to the senses. The result is that the full power of the truth fails to produce effects on the consciousness, and thus keeps it on practically the same level as that on which it has been accustomed to work. The higher truth—the higher spiritual life—has not become anything more than a fact of knowledge or a probability. It has not become one's own life. It is only when this higher aspect of spiritual life becomes one's own life, and is acknowledged and used, that it is ever possible for man to become the possessor of an original energy, of an independent governing centre, and so to realise himself as a co-carrier of a cosmic movement. This is the presupposition of religion: it testifies that within man's soul there appears something higher than sense or intellect, but which remains surrounded by alien elements which impose checks to its further development. It is quite evident that the appearance of truths which are absolute and complete within the life is in direct antagonism to much that was previously present within it. This fundamental fact, however, is not evident without a great deal of attention paid to the nature of the higher elements which present themselves. Without comparing the values of the higher and the lower elements, how is it ever possible to know what they are and what they mean? When the whole being attends to both elements—higher and lower—there is no possibility of making a mistake concerning the different values of what are presented. A higher grade of reality reveals itself over against all that had been previously gained. The soul is forced to admit that something of a higher nature than it hitherto possessed seeks admission. And this Higher, if it enters into the whole of life, so far from revealing itself as a continuation of what had already happened, reveals itself as something which is discontinuous with the ordinary life, and superior even to the highest attainments of the intellectual life. And it is this aspect which produces the conviction of such a revelation as being objective in its very nature. It belongs to something or somebody outside our own individual experience or achievement. That there is much which is mysterious in all this, is only what might be expected. But the very fact that the Higher comes with such power when the soul expects, assimilates, and appropriates it is a proof of its existence somewhere at the core of the universe. It cannot mean an illusion; it brings changes of too fundamental a nature to be no more than that. Its very value and the enormous difficulty of turning it from being an idea into being a possession demand too much energy of the soul to allow of its being dismissed without any more ado. It contains elements so different in their nature from the ordinary life of the hour as to render it impossible to be considered of no more than of subsidiary importance. For it has to be borne in mind that the values and norms farthest removed from the regions of sense and intellect appear only when man follows the drift of his own higher being; it is not when he remains effortless and satisfied with the life of the hour that such values and norms appear. They appear when the ordinary life is seen through as no more than a stage for the further evolution of the soul through the grasping of a higher kind of reality than has as yet presented itself to it. As Eucken says: "Religion proves itself a kingdom of opposites. When it steps out of such opposites, it destroys without a doubt the turbidity and evanescence of ordinary commonplace life, and separates clearly the lights and shadows from one another. It sets our life between the sharpest contrasts, and engenders the most powerful feelings and the most mighty movements; it shows the dark abyss in our nature, but also shows illumined peaks; it opens out infinite tasks, and brings ever to an awakening a new life in its movement against the ordinary self. It does not render our existence lighter, but it makes it richer, more eventful, and greater; it enables man to experience cosmic problems within his own soul in order to struggle for a new world, and, indeed, in order to gain such a genuine world as its own proper life."[50]

All this is not a matter of speculation, but of fact. And it is in the recognition of this fact that Eucken's philosophy of religion constitutes a new kind of idealistic movement—a movement tending more and more in the direction of Christianity. But he differs here again from the absolute idealists and the pragmatists. The former base their Absolute upon the demands of logic, whilst Eucken bases all upon the demands and potencies of life; the pragmatists emphasise the primary place of the will in the development of the inner life, but they have certainly ignored the presence of over-individual norms, as the goal of volition, whilst Eucken holds to the necessity of both. With the absolutists the relation of the Absolute with the will is not clearly perceived, and consequently the Absolute becomes merely an object of thought and contemplation; and in all this the individual does not become aware of a burning desire to move in the direction of the goal. The pragmatist leaves the individual at the mercy of the momentary content of consciousness; this content is quite as likely to be trivial as to be great; and hence there is no absolute standard present to determine the nature and value of this content of the moment, and consequently no more than a life of effortless drifting can issue out of all this.