Rudolf Eucken
Rudolf Christoph Eucken (1846–1926), German philosopher and Nobel laureate, championed an idealist philosophy of life rooted in ethical activism. Educated at Göttingen and Berlin under Lotze and Trendelenburg, he became professor at Basel and later Jena, where he taught until 1920. Rejecting abstract system-building, Eucken emphasized lived human experience, seeing man as a meeting point of nature and spirit. He urged active striving toward spiritual life, guided by will and intuition, against the reductionism of naturalism. His works, including The Meaning and Value of Life and The Truth of Religion, inspired debates on freedom, culture, and humanity’s spiritual destiny.
Nature, of course, has its share in the life of the soul… But this natural life of the soul is peripheral, mere appendix to the material phenomena of nature.