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Born on this day
Joseph Erlanger
1st week in year
5 January 2024

Important personalitiesBack

Rudolf Christoph Eucken5.1.1846

Wikipedia (10 Mar 2013, 20:20)
Rudolf Christoph Eucken (5 January 1846 – 15 September 1926) was a German philosopher, and the winner of the 1908 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Early life

Eucken was born in Aurich, Kingdom of Hanover (now Lower Saxony). His father died when he was a child, and he was brought up by his mother. He was educated at Aurich, where one of his teachers was the classical philologist and philosopher Ludwig Wilhelm Maximilian Reuter (1803-1881). He studied at Göttingen University and Berlin University. In the latter place, Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg was a professor whose ethical tendencies and historical treatment of philosophy greatly attracted him.

Career

Eucken received his Ph.D. in classical philology and ancient history at Göttingen University in 1866, but the bent of his mind was definitely towards the philosophical side of theology. In 1871, after five years working as a school teacher, he was appointed Professor of Philosophy at the University of Basel, Switzerland. He stayed there until 1874 when he took up a similar position at the University of Jena, Germany in 1874. He stayed there until he retired in 1920. From 1913-1914 he served as guest lecturer at New York University. During World War I, Eucken, like many of his academic colleagues, took a strong line in favour of the causes with which his country had associated itself.

Ethical activism

Eucken's philosophical work is partly historical and partly constructive, the former side being predominant in his earlier, the latter in his later works. Their most striking feature is the close organic relationship between the two parts. The aim of the historical works is to show the necessary connexion between philosophical concepts and the age to which they belong; the same idea is at the root of his constructive speculation. All philosophy is philosophy of life, the development of a new culture, not mere intellectualism, but the application of a vital religious inspiration to the practical problems of society. This practical idealism Eucken described by the term “activism.” In accordance with this principle, Eucken gave considerable attention to social and educational problems.

He maintained that humans have souls, and that they are therefore at the junction between nature and spirit. He believed that people should overcome their non-spiritual nature by continuous efforts to achieve a spiritual life, another aspect of his ethical activism.

It seems as if man could never escape from himself, and yet, when shut in to the monotony of his own sphere, he is overwhelmed with a sense of emptiness. The only remedy here is radically to alter the conception of man himself, to distinguish within him the narrower and the larger life, the life that is straitened and finite and can never transcend itself, and an infinite life through which he enjoys communion with the immensity and the truth of the universe. Can man rise to this spiritual level? On the possibility of his doing so rests all our hope of supplying any meaning or value to life (R. C. Eucken, Der Sinn und Wert des Lebens, p. 81).” Personal life

He married in 1882 and had a daughter and two sons. His son Walter Eucken became a famous founder of neoliberal thought in economics.


   
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