Professor Eucken won a Noble Prize in 1908
RECOLLECTING PROFESSOR EUCKEN
Waging War to Make Peace Series
By David Arthur Walters
President Barrack Obama’s personification of the contradiction between pacific ideals and militant reality brings to mind the self-contradicting predicament of University of Jena professor and ‘Christian Activist’ philosopher Rudolf Eucken.
Professor Eucken won the 1908 Nobel Prize, not for Peace but for Literature, "in recognition of his earnest search for truth, his penetrating power of thought, his wide range of vision, and the warmth and strength in presentation with which in his numerous works he has vindicated and developed an idealistic philosophy of life,” announced Harald Hjärne, presenter of the Prize and director of the Swedish Academy.
The Prize was awarded over strenuous objections that philosophy is not literature even though philosophers may think of themselves as poets. Alfred Bernhard Nobel’s will provided that a prize for literature be “given to a person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.” Is not perpetual peace one of the greatest ideals of humankind? It has long been long for and promised by every religion worth its divinity.
Professor Eucken was a “typical German professor,” as British professors liked to say, meaning that he was patriotic: he supported his country in time of war instead of denouncing it for the sins that were obvious to its enemies who purportedly worshiped the same omnipotent god of love. Indeed, his reputation for espousing Christianity was grievously damaged by his patriotic support of the so-called Huns during the Great War, and his subsequent denial of their brutal activities; in fact, he lectured to the troops in Belgium as atrocities were being committed there. Yet he is still regarded by some thinkers as a literary genius whose foremost cause was the advancement of world peace.
In his essay, Rudolf Eucken, Anatole France, John Galsworthy, Armand Cuvillier stated that, despite his nationalistic tendencies, "Eucken undeniably made a major contribution to modern philosophy, fully justifying the award of the Nobel Prize in 1908," because his thought helped link religious traditions, if not organized religion, with the ideology of the developing twentieth century. "To Eucken," he concluded, "the Church is only a means of achieving the kingdom of God. It is even possible, he maintains, to be deeply religious without belonging to any formally organized religion; the main thing is religion as a personal experience."
Professor Eucken’s popular philosophy, dubbed Christian Activism, espoused the commission of loving acts, but his action was largely symbolic i.e. confined to mental activity i.e. lecturing and writing books; rationalizing belief and not necessarily doing anything about it, claiming to have gone beyond mechanistic naturalism, or devastating materialism, and arid intellectualism including scientism, both of which philosophers of life or vitalism had declared bankrupt, to fruitful mysticism, in order to gain direct access to the godhead.
So he was no pragmatist: he was not a “feel good” Christian who would do anything that makes one feel good including forgiving people; his “activism” was strictly spiritual, highly unlikely to bring the Kingdom of God to Earth. Nor was he a voluntarist, whose faith is in making oneself believe at will. Although his writings did refer to ethical choices, he generally relied on intuition for those choices, prescribing few deeds in particular.
Still, he believed that we are at times commanded by spiritual forces to do certain things: “They force human activity into particular channels; they speak to us with a tone of command and require absolute obedience.” He felt it was his bounden duty as an obedient German professor to turn from universal Christian Activism to the particulars of German patriotism when the Great War broke out. Thus does universal love and peace turn to particular hatreds and wars to somehow keep the former: it appears that he, a neo-Kantian to the extent that he emphasized concepts over intuition yet placed categorical limits on intellectual knowledge, was the unwitting victim of a Kantian antinomy.
Antinomianism in its Protestant context is the persuasion held by thinkers such as Philip Melanchthon that the Law of Moses does not have to be obeyed because faith not works saves man from eternal damnation; good works are motivated by faith rather than will. That persuasion was suppressed due to unseemly behavior, most of a sexual nature. The notion that a man can raise himself above the received law pursuant to some higher law is an ancient excuse. Antinomianism in its modern context may contradict positivism and monistic materialism, denying the supremacy of scientific law.
f Professor Eucken was an idealist at a time when people were becoming increasingly disgruntled with the gross materialism of “naturalism.” Philosophers disenchanted with reductive materialism as well as with the rationalization of irrational speculative idealism were flocking back to Kant, who had drawn conceptual boundaries at the frontier of human reason, beyond which was the spiritual realm ruled by a deity to be affirmed as a matter of faith for its utility rather than a supreme being whose existence could be proven. The world seemed to have been created on purpose for a purpose, and it was practical to behave as if that were true .
The New England transcendentalists, relying on secondhand interpretations of Kant, thought he supported the notion that one could get directly in touch with its godhead. But Kant had in fact explicitly warned his students about the illusions of transcendental mysticism.
Emily Hermann described the spiritually impoverished temper of the relatively prosperous time, in Eucken and Bergson, Their Significance for Christian Thought (1912):
“Hitherto the social conscience has agreed with popular pragmatism in glorifying the thing that ‘works’ most quickly and apparently in raising the submerged and ameliorating their conditions of life. We are just emerging barely emerging from a temper to which the man who cries for bread makes a more real and poignant appeal than the soul that crieth out for the living God, and which accounts the man who evolves a ‘darkest England’ scheme a greater hero than the man who ‘merely’ thinks and prays. To our passionate arraignment of modern civilization and culture on the count of its callousness and brutality to the toiling and unprivileged masses we are adding the deeper indictment of injustice and damage to the spiritual life of man, taking that term in its broadest signification. Slowly we are learning to believe the hackneyed truth that the central guilt and sting of all cruelty to body and estate is spiritual, and that a Herod's massacre of innocents is not so black a crime as the extinction in a single human soul of those ‘noble thoughts that pass across the heart of every man like great white birds.’ Tardily we are coming to see the essential triviality, vulgarity and heartlessness of unredeemed refinement and culture, the coarse selfishness and veiled sensuality at the core of romantic aestheticism, the stultifying influence of a pedestrian and conventional morality and its menace to true ethics, and the spiritual stupefaction and demoralization consequent upon a civilization which patronizes Christianity. And it is not from pulpits and theological colleges that this new appreciation of the Christian point of view comes, but from the philosophers and scientists, the essayists and novelists. Men everywhere are feeling the hollowness, the contradiction, the spiritual bankruptcy of our sleek and well-to-do culture.” The Ideal or ideal idol of the spiritual realm was naturally the Good to which all citizens of the cosmos are stoically obligated. The Good could only be intuited, could only be known by irrational, transcendental means. The relativity of the rationed goods on the material plane for which rational animals compete fail to provide a reliable model for unity, for the one good that is not relatively good but is absolutely good despite apparent ambiguity and ambivalence. To wit, in pagan terms, “god” (gott, ghut, etc, “that which is invoked”).
Man is a rational animal, but the reasoning power is merely a mediator between two irrationals: matter and spirit, so he must be a god as well, standing flat on his feet on Earth but with his head in the highest heaven. Likewise was the Logos adopted by Christianity, where the duality is incorporated in human form, irrational and absurd, some “thing” that can only be believed in by God’s fools, who faithfully intuit the Word beyond the words.
It was not a question of righting Hegel’s world after Marx stood it on its head, but of realizing the ideal: the ideal was once again the real; all else was illusory and doubtful. Man is in part a rational animal, but one given to revolt: irrationalism revolts against the static concepts of an age.
Irrationalism and individualism usually go hand in hand – Christian salvation is essentially a personal salvation, one that guarantees survival to the individual who has blind faith. That a man wakes up every day is evidence to a primitive man of his own immortality; that he dies by accident or by tooth and claw of other animals or by the hand of human beings seems unnatural; wherefore he attributes natural death to unseen, malevolent forces, which he would placate or conquer by magical means; he believes he is personally responsible for his fate. The individual naturally has a strong will to live forever, notwithstanding the possibility of a death instinct as well, hence is in need of absolute power to persist unimpeded, a power he projects and worships for his own sake. But survival also depends on the cooperation of others, led for the sake of convenience by a superior man, a super individual, a superman if not an omnipotent god, or at least one in direct touch with an omnipotent god.
Professor Eucken was no worshipper of the individual no matter how superior, so Nobel presenter Harald Hjärne did not associate Rudolf Eucken’s philosophy with an exaltation of the individual superman:
“It is not the individual or the superman in his separate existence," wrote the director of the Swedish Academy, "but the strong character formed in the consciousness of free harmony with the intellectual forces of the cosmos, and therefore profoundly independent, that in Eucken's view is called upon to liberate us from the superficial compulsion of nature and the never completely inescapable pressure of the historical chain of cause and effect."
Professor Eucken as a neo-Kantian was keenly interested in the role that concepts play in human development. In The Fundamental Concepts of Modern Philosophy (1880) traced the history of the concept of the individual in its relation to the many. We have neglected the other side of the story in our intentional focus on the individual. Eucken would undoubtedly take exception to our one-sided notion of Christian individualism. He would notice that the term ‘person’ has two components, the existential individual socially responsive Christian individuals.
“It is no easy task to show the relation of Christianity to the problem of individuality, because it involves different and conflicting elements. Viewed in connection with a cosmology which makes the ethico-religious element the sole meaning and design of the world and of life, the events which occur in the experience of each individual must be, above all, the most important, and the individual must thus receive an immeasurably increased significance. The Church Fathers generally believed (in opposition to the ancient theory) that every individual is the object of divine care, for which reason the activity of the Church must be directed to each individual. The doctrine of the unlimited freedom of the will, generally held during the earlier centuries, by the form which it gave to action insured an independence to the individual; and the distinctive feature of that doctrine was recognized in the idea of an organic union of individuals in a comprehensive whole. On the other hand, the assumption of an absolute value in the individual was contradicted by the doctrine of eternal punishment, and we need hardly explain that, at that time, nothing was said of any rights of the individual as opposed to the general interests. As soon as the individual deviates from the general order he is considered as one who has gone astray, and is to be brought back to the truth, even though by coercion. The whole everywhere precedes the individual; it communicates itself to it as an objective power, demanding faith and obedience, so that all which occurs in the individual is intelligible only by the appropriation of a meaning which is raised above the arbitrary judgment of any one man. No salvation is possible for the individual, except as salvation for the whole has been and is an all-comprehensive fact, ‘that the opposition in itself has been removed constitutes the condition, the presupposition of the possibility that each subject should remove it for himself.’ (Hegel) Whether these two tendencies have been equally worked out is more than questionable; we must rather answer negatively, because, as a matter of fact, the recognition of the individual was ever more and more repressed. No one contributed more to this than Augustine, who, above all others, both in his whole idea of the world and of life, and in his personal appropriation of Christianity, made the fullest use of his own individuality. All things considered, of the Church Fathers Origen has best established the principle of individuality.” The soldier sacrifices himself as an individual for the good of his group; that good is purportedly peace and prosperity; thus he wages war to make peace, the more booty for the victors the better. Socrates, an experienced soldier who speculated on the stars and then turned within to behold the cosmos since he believed the individual to be a microcosm, said that it is better to suffer an evil than to do one; we find that Greek tenet pickled in the Christian canon. Today Christian soldiers say it is best to die fighting for peace; yet we know of early Christians who preferred to die rather than kill their kind, because Jesus said to put away the sword and leave the defense to his heavenly father. Indeed, the Romans despised the early Christians because they would not fight for the state; but Christians were won over to waging war behind the cross soon enough, that their religion would become a world religion instead of a minor Jewish cult.
Martyrdom is for saints. Philosophy is for the wise. Still Professor Eucken would not tell his philosophy students to put away the sword and depend on God for justice: “Philosophy,” he proclaimed, in a homily appearing in the April 1916 edition of New York’s ‘Homiletic Review’, “is summoned to proclaim the unity of mankind over against the present split among the peoples…. (Philosophers) are not merely scholars; they are also living men and citizens of their own nation. When they see this assaulted and its existence put in peril, it is for them a holy duty to come to the defense of the fatherland…. Meanwhile, the belief is entirely proper that the intellectual gains which are the result of philosophical labor remain unharmed by war, that a realm of intellectual creation will remain fully recognized beyond the enmities of man…. Let each, therefore, remain true to his own people, but never forget the task and aim of philosophy – to consider things under the form of perpetuity, maintaining for humanity in the present a world superior to all the littleness of human action.”
Edwin E. Slosson’ essay on Rudolf Eucken in Six Major Prophets (1917) praised the professor and claimed that, if the Nobel committees “have not discovered original genius, they have at least pointed it out to the world at large. The men thus distinguished as having contributed to human progress have extended their influence over their contemporaries, as well as received a due appreciation of their efforts. The Nobel Prize does not add to the stature of a man, but it does elevate him to a pulpit.”
Rudolf Eucken among other German professors blamed the Great War on British greed and egotism. He signed with other notables the infamous White Paper that denied any war crimes were committed, having preached patriotism to the German soldiers in Belgium who were committing atrocities.
Apparently the atrocious works of faithful soldiers are motivated and sanctioned by the Christian god of love, who chose to die on the cross rather than wield a sword yet directs men to pick up the sword and wage war for the general moral improvement and ultimate salvation of mankind so man can finally rest in peace. We witness in war the epitome of the underlying crisis or hypocrisy of our kind, the difference between what we really do and the ideals we mouth.
XYX
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interesting article re Prof Eucken
During my time in college while working with Christian antiwar groups, I encountered many young American Christian men who sought the course of "conscientious objection" to the draft. Some succeeded and some failed, I guess according to their history with the church. Since I was declared 1Y and not considered draftable, I was not faced with that conundrum.
Your allusion to Obama's seemingly contradictory statements/actions do harken back to whether we go to war to save peace or not. I look at it as a need for police action. Arresting the bad guys are taking them out. I think war between nations is getting a bit passé with the internationalization of everything.
Ron