Abstract
In his twenties, Schweitzer grew frustrated with the pessimism of many of his university friends and colleagues, thinking them spectators dissecting the past and not living in the present and into the future. He turned from theology and philosophy to something more directly practical, tropical medicine, and a life in Africa. For Schweitzer, civilization now had become external and lifeless, especially as manifest in the science and technology of his day, where a hollow sense of progress was not matched by an ethical maturation, but by a naïve belief in the power of reason to solve all problems. He briefly sketches his philosophy of civilization in his autobiography1 while charting this course of events more fully in Civilization and Ethics.2 Schweitzer characterized reason as having a magnificent run of it, but that in the great nineteenth-century German philosophers (Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel), the grand system of reason became exhausted by relying merely upon itself: “Reason alone cannot provide an interpretation of the world that assigns a course of ethical action for man.”3 Though he admired the primacy of reason that was a major legacy of the Enlightenment, Schweitzer saw that reason by itself could not provide cultural and ethical vitality.
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Notes
Albert Schweitzer, Out of My Life and Thought: An Autobiography, trans. Antje Bultmann Lemke (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Unilversity Press, 1998), 115., 201–4. Hereafter OOMLAT.
Albert Schweitzer, “Civilization and Ethics,” in The Philosophy of Civilization, trans. C. T. Campion (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1987).
Jackson Lee Ice, “Is ‘Reverence for Life’ a Viable Ethic?,” in Ice, Albert Schweitzer: Sketches for a Portrait (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994), 37–42. Hereafter Ice.
See Ara Paul Barsam, Reverence for Life: Albert Schweitzer’s Great Contribution to Ethical Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 132. Hereafter Barsam, Reverence for Life. In discussing some current thinkers on life or ecological ethics, and how they criticized Schweitzer’s lack of systematic development for reverence for life, Barsam says, “Schweitzer offers reverence as a banner or touchstone—and perhaps should have done more to prevent it from being taken for more, i.e. a practical, one-stop guide in all circumstances.” (Italics in original)
Though Schweitzer claimed that Reverence for Life came to him as an epiphany on the river, Ara Paul Barsam makes a case that study, thinking, and action over a long period of time (and influenced by Indian thought) led Schweitzer to that flash of insight, in Barsam, Reverence for Life, Chapter 3 “The Voyage to India.” The role of epiphanic insight in contrast to deliberative or meditative thought in determining one’s course of action is discussed in Tracy Kidder’s book on Dr. Paul Farmer, a contemporary figure often compared to Schweitzer. See Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains (New York: Random House, 2003), especially Chapter 14. Paul Woodruff, Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 63. Hereafter Woodruff.
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin, 1986).
Schweitzer discusses the rupture between Reverence for Life and a Nature that does not recognize this thought, a Nature of waterfalls and tornadoes, both awe-inspiring and destructive at once, in his sermons on Reverence for Life given in Strasbourg’s Saint Nicolai Church in 1919. See a detailed philosophical discussion of these sermons in J. Claude Evans, With Respect for Nature: Living as Part of the Natural World (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 49–54.
This rupture is also evident in that, while Reverence for Life recognizes every life as sacred, life can only exist at the cost of other life. See Predag Cicovacki, ed. Albert Schweitzer’s Ethical Vision: A Sourcebook (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 20.
Robert Payne, The Three Worlds of Albert Schweitzer (New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1957), 131.
The tragic sense of life is recognized by Schweitzer in the moral neutrality of nature, but he counters this with affirmation: “His theory of ethical optimism is not verifiable but is a postulate or demand of the will-to-live that claims for itself knowledge independent of empirical sources.” Ara Paul Barsam, “Schweitzer, Jainism, and Reverence for Life,” in Reverence for Life: The Ethics of Albert Schweitzer for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Marvin Meyer and Kurt Bergel (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002), 221–22. Hereafter Meyer and Bergel.
Martin Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Colophon, 1971) http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/heidegger7a.htm.
Anthony G. Rud, Jr., “Breaking the Egg Crate,” Educational Theory 43(1) (1993): 71–83.
See especially Steven C. Rockefeller, John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). I am indebted to Jim Garrison for discussion of Dewey’s religious humanism, especially the idea of natural piety.
John Dewey, The Later Works, Volume 9, in the Collected Works of John Dewey, ed. J. A. Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), 19.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 37.
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© 2011 A. G. Rud
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Rud, A.G. (2011). Reverence for Life. In: Albert Schweitzer’s Legacy for Education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230116238_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230116238_5
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