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
Similarly, with the acknowledgment of an independent spiritual life in
us, a new light is shed upon the individual departments of life, and new
tasks are set them. They have now, primarily, not to further human
well-being, to be of service in the attainment of narrowly human aims,
but they are characteristic unfoldings of the spiritual life. The
particular nature of these departments has its basis in that life, and
they must prove their capacity by advancing it. They are concerned with
man only so far as he participates in the spiritual life; and so they
will not so much strengthen him in his human nature as elevate him
spiritually, and remould him more and more to the form of the spiritual
life. A deliverance from the confusion of that which is narrowly human
with the spiritual is also necessary, and, along with this, life as a
whole must be more energetically based upon the spiritual life, and the
spiritual life itself must be given a more distinct form. From the
position of this life, that which has been handed down to us must be
evaluated and new paths must be opened up for the future. Religion could
obtain no content, and all change in it would be only an advance from a
more crude to a more refined anthropomorphism, if it were based solely
upon human needs and aided man to attain a supposed happiness. Religion
rises above such a condition of doubt only if it exhibits its roots in
an independent spiritual life and is able to show its actuality and its
power by aiding the development of the spiritual life. At its highest
religion has always been concerned with winning a new world and a new
humanity, not with the achievement of something within the old world and
for the old humanity. And as we need a religion of the spiritual life,
we also need a morality, an art, and, finally, an all-comprehensive
spiritual culture, through which something really new may be produced
and man be elevated in this being, and not simply circle round and round
continually in the old paths. Everywhere the matter is one of advance
and revelation; from this point of view the complexes of every day must
also be seen in a new light, and in what is apparently simple and
self-evident great achievements and tasks become manifest. We now, for
the first time and in another sense, win again that which we thought we
already possessed; indeed, by the revolution to the spiritual life, life
as a whole is transformed into a task. Every individual has such a
life-embracing task in the cultivation of a genuine personality and a
spiritual individuality. Humanity as a whole has such a task in the
building up of a kingdom of reason within its domain, in the furtherance
of the movement which comes to it from the whole and summons it to
co-operation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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