Life's Basis and Life's Ideal: The Fundamentals of a New Philosophy of LifeEucken, Rudolf
Philosophy
Life's Basis and Life's Ideal: The Fundamentals of a New Philosophy of Life
Eucken, Rudolf
Life; Ontology
everything alien to it, advanced from the original outline to full
concreteness.
According to the results of our inquiry, the chief decision in the
struggle with regard to the nature of the world also depends upon our
type of life. We convinced ourselves that there was no conception of
life common to the different systems, but that from its starting-point,
throughout its whole development, each of them shaped life differently
from the others; and we saw that the differences even went as far as
complete opposition. Each system of life had its own kind of experience;
each formed its own instruments for the appropriation of the world; each
saw of the infinite that in particular which corresponded to the main
direction of its own movement. A consideration of all the facts makes it
quite clear that a decision depends neither upon externals nor upon the
individual, but upon the inner life and the whole; and further, that
cognition does not give a solution to the problems of life, but that
life itself has to reach a solution through its own organisation and
construction, its own advance and creative activity.
However, that which was the compelling and deciding power in the systems
of the present day--the struggle for life itself--has not attained to
complete recognition in them. Rather, they were too quick to begin to
occupy themselves with objects, and sought to show themselves superior
in this respect to their rivals; the attention to results prevented the
correct appreciation and estimation of experience itself. The
impossibility of coming to an agreement concerning the object then
forced us back to the life-process; and we were led to the view that the
object appeared different because we ourselves placed something
different into it, and that we saw less the object itself than ourselves
and our life in the object. Thus we were induced to place our attention
chiefly on the subject; but then there was a strong tendency to leave
the world outside as a special realm; and the division of work between
subject and object drove us still further into uncertainty. In the
midst of such confusion, we did not come to the point of making a
decision; we did not attain the position from which alone an agreement
is possible; at one time one system, at another time another carried us
away. We failed to recognise that, however much we come into contact
externally, we live spiritually in separate worlds; that, while using
the same expressions, we speak different languages, and therefore cannot
possibly understand one another.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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