An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's PhilosophyJones, W. Tudor (William Tudor)
Religion
An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy
Jones, W. Tudor (William Tudor)
Eucken, Rudolf, 1846-1926
If, on the other hand, an acknowledgment of the reality of this
spiritual life is made, new questions immediately arise. And the most
fundamental of these questions have always been those farther removed
from any sensuous or physical domain. They are questions concerning the
value and meaning of life. It is a deep conviction of the reality of the
deeper kernel of our being that alone constitutes the entrance to a _new
kind of world_. But to acknowledge the presence of such a new world does
not signify the possession of it simultaneously with the acknowledgment.
The new world is discovered, but it is not yet possessed. There are
terrible obstacles in the way; there are enemies without and within to
be conquered. It is of little use entering into this struggle without an
acknowledgment--born of an inward necessity--of the spiritual nucleus of
our nature. Unless man has accustomed himself to hold fast to this
"subtle thing termed spirit" [p.42] he will soon be swamped in the
region of the natural life once more; and when this happens the
spiritual nucleus loses the consciousness of its own real subsistence as
something higher in its nature than physical things or than the body and
the ordinary life of the day. If the enterprise is to issue in anything
that is great and good--into a spiritual world with an ever-growing
content here and now--an insistence upon the reality of this deeper life
coupled with the highest end which presents itself to the life must be
made. Something is now seen in the distance as the meaning and value of
life--something which our deeper nature longs for, and which has created
a cleft within the soul between the ordinary things of sense and time
and that which "never was on sea or land." It is something of this
nature which Eucken discovers as the germ of all the spiritual ideas of
religion as well as of the essence of religion itself. The Godhead,
Eternity, Immortality, are concepts which arise within the soul through
a consciousness of the inadequacy of all natural things and of even
mental descriptions and explanations to answer and to satisfy the
potency and longing of human nature.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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