The philosopher who beat Nietzsche to a job and won a literature Nobel
In 1871 the Swiss University of Basel needed a new philosophy professor, and one of the candidates who lost out was Friedrich Nietzsche. The winner, a former schoolteacher named Rudolf Eucken, went on to receive the 1908 Nobel Prize in Literature, not for novels or poems but for an idealistic philosophy of life.
Aurich, a town in what was then the Kingdom of Hanover, was his birthplace, on 5 January 1846. His father died while he was small and his mother raised him. He studied at Gottingen, under Hermann Lotze, and in Berlin, where Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg's ethical, historical approach to philosophy drew him in. His 1866 doctorate was on Aristotle's style of expression, yet his real leaning was toward the philosophical side of theology.
Five years of schoolteaching in Husum, Berlin and Frankfurt preceded the Basel appointment. He left Basel for Jena in 1874 and remained there until retiring in 1920. In 1912 and 1913 he spent half a year as an exchange professor at Harvard and gave lectures at New York University. When the First World War came he, like many colleagues, backed his country's cause strongly, and the conflict shattered the international community of scholars he had belonged to.
His thinking joined history to construction. Early books traced how philosophical ideas are bound to the age that produced them; later ones built his own system. For Eucken, all philosophy was philosophy of life, meant to shape a new culture by applying living religious inspiration to society's practical problems rather than retreating into pure intellect. He called this ethical activism, and it led him to take social questions and education seriously. Humans, he held, have souls and so stand where nature meets spirit; the task of a life is continual effort to rise above the merely natural toward the spiritual.
Eucken married Irene Passow in 1882. Of their two sons, Walter became a founder of ordoliberal economics and Arnold a chemist and physicist. The Nobel committee praised his earnest search for truth and the warmth of his writing. He died in Jena on 15 September 1926, aged 80.
Source: Rudolf Christoph Eucken
