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
But this movement extends beyond the immediate state of the soul of the
individual to spiritual work, and gives it a particular form. Life as a
whole, as reality's consciousness of itself, may be regarded as
throughout capable of a multiplicity, as containing within itself
different sides and possibilities. Since its evolution produces this
multiplicity, life as a whole can express itself in the individual
aspects and tendencies; expand them till they become different
departments; experience itself in particular ways in these departments,
and in so doing achieve a development of its own; it is able also to
bring these departments and their developments into their relation to
one another. Since thus, within the world as a whole, life concentrates
in different ways, and the particular tendencies which thus arise meet
and enter into conflict with one another, and since their conflict is in
particular a contest to determine the form of the whole, there is
revealed the prospect of a wealth of experiences which come not from
without but out of the movement of life itself, and spring from its
occupation with itself. The conflict between the different movements of
life must bring the whole into a state of tension and lead it to further
development. In the progressive formation of itself, in the development
of a reality conscious of itself, life through its movement finds itself
and develops a content. This movement will summon all the psychical
powers of man to activity; it cannot possibly proceed from them. If we
are to take part in the building up of that inner world, a spiritual
creative activity from the basis of our being must be operative through
these psychical functions, uniting them, and applying them as means and
instruments.
If, for us men, life becomes conscious of its content only through
movement and conflict, nevertheless this content may not be regarded as
ultimately proceeding from them. If, as a whole, life did not transcend
movement and conflict, if the latter were not included within a
self-conscious and self-determining life, then they could yield no
inner result, and could not lead to the further development of the
whole. The attempts to derive this self-conscious and self-determining
life from ontological conceptions such as "being," "whole," "movement,"
and so on, as the older metaphysics often undertook to do; or the
tendency to treat it only as a supplement to them, are to be dismissed
most decisively. The fundamental qualities that the spiritual life
evolves always presuppose a self-conscious life and become intelligible
only in relation to it. Without it, the conceptions of the true and the
good remain in complete obscurity, as will be shown later in more
detail.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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