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
To the difficulty in respect of the relations of the different
departments among themselves, we must add another, if anything greater,
in respect of the relation of each department to life as a whole. To be
well organised each department needs a co-operation of form and content,
of the technical and the personal; the former gives the department its
particular nature; for the latter a relation with life as a whole is
necessary. The work of science, for example, follows certain forms of
thought, which it evolves from itself, and which are equally valid for
all times and parties. But even the most conscientious following of
these laws does not give to science a content and a character; science
can acquire these only in relation with a movement of life as a whole,
which, in its striving from whole to whole, takes up the experiences of
humanity and unites them into a whole. Only in this way does science,
from being simply an arrangement and accumulation, become knowledge, an
inner appropriation of things. If in accordance with this the individual
departments are detached more and more from life as a whole, and are
made dependent solely upon their own capacity, it can hardly be
otherwise than that in the midst of all perfection in execution they
lose more and more all spiritual content and all definite character. At
the same time, it may soon follow that the effect upon humanity as a
whole will become subsidiary and a matter of indifference; the
individual departments will become exclusively a matter of a circle of
specialists, and strive for an effect within this circle only. In this
way an art arises which, in the artist, forgets the man, and which does
not so much convey new content to human life, or help the time to attain
to a characteristic feeling of life, and elevate it above the
meaninglessness and the confusion of commonplace everyday experience,
but which is for the most part mindful of refinement in execution, and
so, easily degenerates into the complicated and the virtuoso. In the
case of science we find the same thing. It may, through exaggerating the
independence necessary to it, assume an air of proud self-satisfaction,
and, by detachment from the movement of life as a whole, that which is
its main concern, namely, knowledge, may suffer. For it soon tends to
become mere erudition, which treats problems as something half-alien,
gains no inner relation to things, does not understand how to animate
reality, indeed even rejects, as unscientific, all striving after such
animation. This tendency produces, to use an expression of Hegel's,
excellent "counter-servers," who do not look after business of their
own, but only that of others.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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