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Updated: June 5, 2025
Moreover, there is evil in the world, let pantheists and others say what they will. Eucken refuses to close his eyes to, or to explain away, opposition, pain, and evil the world is far from being wholly reasonable and harmonious, and idealists must acknowledge this fact.
Some never get further, and dispense with the question of human life and thought as mere aspects or manifestations of the material world. But the problem of life is for Eucken the one problem he seeks to find the reality beneath the superficialities of human existence, and he has little to say concerning the world of matter.
The spiritual nucleus is something to be gained not by means of knowledge, but by means of love. Eucken goes so far as to state that the idea of love and love of one's enemy as presented in Christianity forms a new element for the redemption of the individual and of the race. To grasp this idea and to penetrate into its nature is to solve all the problems of life and death.
Acknowledging such a nucleus as constituting the very substance of Christianity, Eucken proceeds to show the necessity of preserving and unfolding the nucleus against the changes of Time. The nucleus has to be preserved over against Nature. It has been noticed in previous chapters how modern science has presented us with a view of Nature immensely vaster than that presented in Christian theology.
"The Spiritual Life," however, as Eucken says, "has an independent origin, and evolves new powers and standards." Neither do the two aspects run together in life in parallel lines. On the contrary, the spiritual life cannot manifest itself at all until a certain stage of development is reached in nature.
As Eucken himself puts it: "If this sublimity superior to the world secures an abode in the soul, and, indeed, becomes the inmost and most intimate part of our being, and enables us to participate in the self-subsistence of infinity, it opens up within us a fathomless depth, in which the existence that lies nearest to our hands is swallowed up, and it makes us a problem to ourselves a problem which transforms the whole of life whilst it enables us to understand and to handle what at the outset appeared to be its whole life as a mere phase and appearance.
In The Problem of Human Life Eucken sees in the message of every one of the great thinkers of the ages, however much he may differ from them, the vindication of a life higher than that of sense or even of in-intellectualism. In one form or another, they all present some world of values which is born and nurtured within the mind and soul.
We have already dealt with this aspect in former chapters; the conclusion was reached that everywhere the presence of a life of the spirit made itself felt, and gave a meaning and interpretation to all life and existence. That is the conclusion Eucken arrives at in his Kampf um einen geistigen Lebensinhalt. The problem of religion qua religion is hardly touched.
And are we able to say that society has progressed much during the past century in this direction of illuminating lower needs in the light of higher ones which include the good of all? Eucken doubts whether the progress has been great.
Several writers have gone astray when they have imagined that Eucken has but scant sympathy with the social needs of our times. It would be difficult to find anywhere a man of a more tender heart. But he sees deeper than the level of material and social needs and their fulfilment.
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