Rudolf Eucken (1846-1926)

In his work Eucken transformed idealism into a quest toward elevated spiritual level. Eucken's fame was short-lived and today Eucken's writings are more or less forgotten. Besides philosophical studies, he also published works in religion. Eucken's award was in tune with the partly incomplete will of Alfred Nobel, in which he had intended the literary award to recognize "excellence in works of an idealistic tendency".

"Naturalism cannot give to literature an inner independence or allow it an initiative of its own; for if literature is only a hand of life on the dial of time, it can only imitate and register events as they happen. By means of impressive descriptions it may help the time to understand its own desires better; but since creative power is denied to it, it cannot contribute to the inner liberation and elevation of man." (from Eucken's Nobel lecture, 1909)

Rudolf Christoph Eucken was born in Aurich, in the province of East Friesland. His childhood was shadowed his poor health and the death of his father, Ammo Becker Eucken, who worked in the postal service. Also Eucken's only sibling, his younger brother, died. Eucken's mother, the former Ida Maria Gittermann, was a deeply religious woman; her father was a clergyman. To support the family, she took lodgers, and was able to provide her son a good education. At the gymnasium at Aurich, Euchen became under the influence of the theologian and philosopher Wilhelm Reuter. Eucken studied philosophy, philology, and history at the universities of Göttingen and Berlin, where he was attracted to the ideas of F.A. Trendelenburg, especially his ethical concerns and historical treatment of philosophy. Hermann Lotze's philosophical classes and rationalist teachings left Eucken dissatisfied, but he absorbed Adolf Trendelenburg's idealism and his views about interconnections between philosophy, history, and religion. Eucken took his doctor's degree at Göttingen. His dissertation dealt with the language of Aristotle.

After graduation Eucken worked as a high school teacher for five years. He published two pamphlets on Aristotle and in 1872 appeared Die Methode der aristotelischen Forschung, dealing with Aristotelian logic. In 1871 Eucken was appointed professor of philosophy at the University of Basle. From 1874 on Eucken held the chair of philosophy at Jena, succeeding Kuno Fischer. He remained there until his retirement in 1920. However, academic philosophers viewed with suspicion Eucken's ponderous style, his careless use of philosophical terms, and the lack of clear definitions. Eucken's own system of philosophical thought, which he called ethical activism, was rejected by the British philosopher Bernard Bosanquet, who defended the Older Idealism against personalist heresies. "There is in Eucken's immense literary output," he wrote in the Quaterly Review in 1914, "no really precise and serious contribution to philosophical science. Free cognition has been submerged by moralist rhetoric." Philosophy was for Eucken a question of the whole of life, it did not have mundane basis, but he welcomed the achievements of modern science. He contrasted naturalism's constricted view of human nature with spiritual existence. Like Nietzsche, he distrusted abstract intellectualism. He was not a system builder in the spirit of Hegel and his followers, or an empiricist, reducing human experience to sensations and impressions. Eucken emphasized actual human experience as it is "lived." This Lebensphilosophie (philosophy of life) was a part of currents which anticipated some central ideas of phenomenology.

After receiving the Nobel prize Eucken enjoyed a remarkable international popularity, and received invitations to lecture at several universities. Especially The Problem of Human Life as Viewed by the Great Thinkers (1890) was widely read in its time. In 1911 Eucken delivered a series of lectured in England and in 1912-13 he spent six months as an exchange professor at Harvard University in the United States, where he met among others Andrew Carnegie and Theodore Roosevelt. He also spoke at Smith College, the Lowell Institute at Boston, and Columbia University. During World War I Eucken wrote the pamphlet Wir "barbaren"; anekdoten und begebenheiten aus dem weltkriege (1915) and patriotically argued that Germany should not be blamed for the hostilities. Eucken married in 1882 Irene Passow; they had a daughter and two sons. Eucken died on September 15, 1926 at Jena.

Eucken used to revise his major works, Grundbegriffe der Gegenwart (1878, rev. ed. Geistige Strömungen der Gegenwart in 1908), Die Lebensanschauungen der grosser Denker (1890, The Problem of Human Life as Viewed by the Great Thinkers), and others, and update them over a period of several decades. Some of his works ran into more than a dozen editions. Eucken developed his philosophy of history in an essay entitled 'Philosophie der Geschichte' (1907). The Main Currents of Modern Thought was an attempt to stimulate a new sense of spiritual life - defined as "a self-contained life, itself giving rise to reality, a life which our human activity is far from penetrating, but towards which it strives as a great goal." "Wir Menschen sind keineswegs von Haus aus Persönlichkeit, sondern tragen in uns in die Anlage dazu, ob sie Wirklichkeit wird, darüber entscheidet unsere eigene Lebensarbeit."

In Socialism: an Analysis (1921) Eucken attacked Socialism for its naturalistic view of human beings and their place in the world. Philosophically Socialism was far from Eucken's emphasis on eternal spiritual values behind everyday life. Eucken saw that Socialism represented the political expression of naturalism. It limits human freedom and downplays spiritual values. While individual is conditioned by physical processes, the soul is something that could not be explained only by reference to natural processes. He maintained that an individual is a mixture of nature and spirit and that one must work to overcome nonspiritual nature by actively striving after the spiritual life. This pursuit requires especially efforts of the will and intuition. Eucken regarded Christianity as the highest religion – it was not the opium of the people, like Marx said – but he did not consider the orthodox religion and its concepts the right vehicle in the search for meaning in one's own life. Jesus was not God but "merely an incomparable individuality which cannot be directly imitated". To achieve spiritual autonomy, one must adopt a higher form of religious faith. Eucken – like Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) – saw life as the historical totality of human experience.