Rudolf Eucken

Rudolf Christoph Eucken was born in 1846 in Aurich, in East Frisia, then part of the Kingdom of Hanover. His father died while he was a child and he was raised by his mother. He studied at Göttingen, where Hermann Lotze was among his teachers, and in Berlin, where Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg’s ethical and historical approach to philosophy left a lasting mark. After a doctorate on Aristotle’s language and several years as a schoolteacher, he was appointed professor of philosophy at Basel in 1871, preferred for the post over Friedrich Nietzsche, and in 1874 moved to Jena, where he taught until 1920.

Eucken’s work joins the history of ideas to constructive argument. The Problem of Human Life (1890) traces how the great thinkers from Plato onward answered the needs of their ages, while The Struggle for a Spiritual Content of Life (1896) and The Meaning and Value of Life (1908) set out his own position. He called it ethical activism: human beings stand at the junction of nature and spirit, and must win a spiritual life through continual effort rather than through intellectual assent alone. Religion, culture, education and social reform were, for him, parts of a single task.

The Swedish Academy honoured him in 1908, after a nomination from within its own ranks, for an idealistic philosophy of life presented with warmth and conviction. Widely translated in his lifetime, he lectured in Britain and spent part of 1912–13 as an exchange professor at Harvard. During the First World War he sided firmly with Germany’s cause. He died in Jena in September 1926; his son Walter Eucken became a founder of ordoliberal economics.