Life's Basis and Life's Ideal: The Fundamentals of a New Philosophy of Life

Nobel laureate Rudolf Eucken issued this radical challenge in 1912: humanity had conquered the material world, yet found itself spiritually adrift. Writing in the shadow of accelerating industrial progress and mounting social anxiety, Eucken diagnosed a civilization at war with itself, prosperous on the outside but hollow within. He systematically dismantles the dominant worldviews of his age, from religious orthodoxy to aggressive materialism, from socialist collectivism to atomized individualism, exposing how each fails to address the full depth of human existence. His counterproposal is characteristically bold: a philosophy of life grounded not in abstract reasoning or economic calculation, but in the categorical demand that we become more than we are. For readers willing to wrestle with early twentieth-century philosophical prose, Eucken offers a fascinating time capsule of Edwardian intellectual culture and a surprisingly timely meditation on what it means to live meaningfully in an age of plenty.