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
(2) Social culture makes the judgment of the society the test of all
truth and requires from the individual a complete subordination. It can
do this, as we saw, only under the assumption that reason is summed in a
judgment by the people as a whole; but, in face of the experiences of
history and the impressions of the present time, can this assumption be
ratified? Upon its emergence, truth has nearly always been championed by
a minority so small as to be hardly discernible; and what in its case is
called victory is usually nothing else than the transforming of the
struggle from an external into an internal one. He who continues firm in
his faith in the victory of truth does so because he trusts, not so much
in the wisdom of the majority as in a reason transcending all that is
empirically human, and which begets a truth with power to constrain. The
present gives us the opportunity of testing this assertion by an
example. We see movements of the masses in plenty, but where do we see
great spiritual creations arise from the resulting chaos? Even Socialism
in the narrower sense has to thank but a few men for its vital power and
character, as, for example, Marx; the masses are indeed a condition and
an environment, but never as such the bearers of creative activity.
(3) Where man, as he is, governs all thought, his well-being, his
complacency, an existence as free from care as possible, and as rich as
possible in pleasure, will become the highest of all aims. But would not
one find an inner emptiness, a monotony, even more intolerable than any
suffering if this aim were reached and life were freed from all pain
and necessity? Intelligible as it is that, to the classes whose life is
spent in hard struggle against necessity and care, the deliverance from
these appears the highest good and an assurance of complete happiness,
it is just as unintelligible that anyone who is conscious of the work of
universal history and the inner movement of humanity can share such a
belief. For that movement has given rise to difficult problems and
severe conflicts within the soul of man; a wrestling for a truth and a
content of life, where we now drift hither and thither on the surface of
appearance; a longing for infinity and eternity, where now a finitude
and a past fascinate and charm us; a clashing together of freedom and
destiny, of nature and spirit. The tendencies and tasks which this
movement produces may for a time be thrust into the background, but they
continually reappear and claim their right. It is a foolish undertaking
to try to make man happy by directing him to give up what is distinctive
in him, and to give his striving a less worthy character.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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