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Updated: May 5, 2025
We have noticed in the two preceding chapters how Eucken distinguished the two stages of religion the "Universal" and the "Characteristic" and how he showed the necessity of both stages.
But the great tasks must be handled with a greatness of spirit, and such a spirit demands freedom freedom in the service of truth and truthfulness. Eucken is aware of the various Life-systems which present themselves on every side as all-inclusive. But he sees no hope for a real spiritual education of mankind until every Life-system shall seek for a depth beyond the natural man and all his wants.
Something over-individual issues out of all these relations, and this enters into the still higher over-individual norms which are the heritage of society. Eucken consequently shows that history itself is dependent upon something which works within it interpreting its events, and absorbing into itself something that is of value.
It is quite easy to understand how a young man of Eucken's temperament and training should acquiesce in all the logical treatment of Lotze's philosophy, and still find that more was to be obtained from other sources which had quenched the thirst of the great men of the past. Adolf Trendelenburg was a great teacher as well as a noble idealist, and his influence upon young Eucken was very great.
"This primal phenomenon," he says, "overflows all explanation. It has, as the fundamental condition of all spiritual life, a universal axiomatic character." Again he says, "The wonder of wonders is the human made divine, through God's superior power." "The problem surpasses the capacity of the human reason." For taking up this position, Eucken is sharply criticised by some writers.
One of these was pointed out long ago by Eucken: "The gist of religion is with Hegel nothing but the absorption of the individual in the universal intellectual process. How such a conception can be identified with moral regeneration of the Christian type, with purification of the heart, is unintelligible to us." Eucken's philosophy, on the other hand, is pre-eminently a spiritual activism.
Eucken has written less on this subject than on any of those which constitute the headings of the chapters of this book. But he has treated art in precisely the same manner as he has treated all other important problems: he has shown that no great art is possible unless it is rooted in a creativeness which is spiritual.
But why, despite his magnificent tribute to Judaism, does this unfettered thinker imagine that the last word is with Christianity? Eucken, too, would call the future Christian, though he rejects the Incarnation and regards the Atonement as injurious to religion, and the doctrine of the Trinity as a stumbling-block rather than a help.
From Eucken's point of view the difficulty is not so serious. When he speaks of personality he does not mean the mere subjective individual in all his selfishness. Eucken has no sympathy with the emphasis that is often placed on the individual in the low subjective sense, and is averse from the glorification of the individual of which some writers are fond.
Even philosophical historians like Troeltsch seem unable to see the monstrosity of a political doctrine which has caused his country to be justly regarded as the enemy of the whole human race. Eucken, writing some years before the war, in a rather gingerly manner deprecates Politismus as a national danger; but he does not dare to grasp the nettle firmly.
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