The Restoration of Albert Schweitzer's Ethical Vision

Predrag Cicovacki

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781628923469
• eBook ISBN: 9781441165886
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

In 1913, Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965) left his internationally renowned career as a theologian, philosopher, and organ player to open a hospital in the jungles of Africa. There he developed in theory and practice his ethics of reverence for life. When he published his most important philosophical work, The Philosophy of Civilization, few people were serious about treating animals with dignity and giving any consideration to environmental issues. Schweitzer's urge was heard but not fully appreciated. One hundred years later, we are in a better position to do it. Predrag Cicovacki's book is a call to restore Schweitzer's vision. After critically and systematically discussing the most important aspects of the ethics of reverence for life, Cicovacki argues that the restoration of Schweitzer does not mean the restoration of any particular doctrine. It means summoning enough courage to reverse the deadly course of our civilization. And it also means establishing a way of life that stimulates striving toward what is the best and highest in human beings.

Part I

Our Age of Irreverence

“For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”

Mt.16.26

1

The Decay of Culture

Like a doctor listening to the pulse of an ailing patient, Schweitzer examines the well-being of our civilization. He finds his patient ill and speaks about the decay, the spiritual decline, the collapse, and even the suicide of civilization. Such judgments were not uncommon in the first decades of the twentieth century. We find similar assessments in Leo Tolstoy and Mahatma Gandhi, Oswald Spangler and Martin Buber, Franz Kafka and Hermann Hesse, Sigmund Freud and Carl G. Jung. The further course of the twentieth century contributed very little to dispel such dark tones. If anything, human behavior made the picture bleaker.

Schweitzer compares the state of civilization with Goethe’s Faust. In his eyes, the drama of Faust is being enacted on the stage of the world. Like Goethe’s hero, our civilization has become detached from nature, imbalanced, superficial, void of ethical ideals, and ethically inert. Our civilization has turned toward the devaluation of everything existing and the remaking of the world. Like Faust, it has condemned itself to a way of life that must result in error and guilt.¹

Schweitzer’s diagnosis of the decay of civilization is not new. It focuses on the double threat: the mechanization of nature and the depersonalization of humanity. The surprising aspect of his treatment is found in the cure he prescribes. It demands thinking: elementary thinking, reflective thinking, independent thinking. Such thinking would lead us back to the restoration of our ethical energy and ethical ideals, to a new sense of meaning and orientation. Such thinking, he argues, would lead to reverence for all life. The ethics of reverence for life is his cure for the decay of civilization.

We have a long way to travel before we can fully understand and evaluate what is involved in Schweitzer’s diagnosis and prescription. We will begin by taking a closer look at his conceptions of civilization, religion, and philosophy.

1.1 Civilization or Culture?

Schweitzer understands civilization (Kultur) as “a drive toward progress.” He clarifies: “Kultur I define in quite general terms as spiritual and material progress in all spheres of activity, accompanied by an ethical development of individuals and of mankind.”² Material progress relates primarily to our struggle for existence: an organization of various aspects of life which allows individuals and mankind to sustain their existence and make it more functional and convenient. Spiritual progress concerns the establishment of favorable conditions for the moral perfecting of individuals, which is the ultimate object of culture. The essential element of both material and spiritual progress is “the supremacy of reason over the forces of nature and over the disposition of men.”³ This is Schweitzer’s way of summing up what he believes happened in Europe under the influence of the Reformation, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment. In his mind, civilization is possible only when people have faith in truth, progress, and humanity.

This conception of civilization is controversial. Schweitzer points out two of its elements with which he expects others may disagree. The first is the view that the essence of civilization is ethical (rather than material, technical, historical, or aesthetic): “If the ethical foundation is lacking, then civilization collapses, even when in other directions creative and intellectual forces of the strongest nature are at work.”⁴ The second point of possible contention concerns his emphasis of the role of rationality and thinking, insofar as they lead toward an outlook or a vision of the universe (Weltanschauung). The point of this outlook is to provide a communal point of view, a shared vision: “Only as we again succeed in attaining a strong and worthy outlook on the universe, and find in it strong and worthy convictions, shall we again become capable of producing a new civilization.”⁵

Regardless of what our objections may be, one point deserves immediate attention. What Schweitzer is concerned with may be better described as culture than as civilization. When we know that the word he consistently uses is “Kultur,” rather than “Zivilisation,” we may wonder whether the translator of his work has not misled us by not rendering its title as “Philosophy of Culture.” The fault may also be Schweitzer’s. In the same work he claims that there is no valid ground for a significant distinction between the two words: “Some languages prefer one word; others prefer the other. The German usually speaks of ‘Kultur,’ the Frenchman usually of ‘civilization,’ but the establishment of a difference between them is justified neither philologically nor historically.”⁶

Schweitzer is wrong, and his mistake makes our understanding of his conception of civilization more difficult. Just a page later, he indicates something of a distinction between an external and an internal aspect of Kultur, which may indicate his own recognition of the different origins of the two terms.⁷ “Civilization” comes from Latin “civis,” meaning “a citizen,” “one who lives in a city.” More broadly, “civilization” refers to the total social development of a people, a nation, or a period. Schweitzer has problems with this external aspect of Kultur. Having spent considerable time in Paris and Berlin, he points out that “the conditions of life for the inhabitants of our big cities are as unfavorable as they could be. Naturally, then, those inhabitants are in most danger on their spiritual side.”⁸

Schweitzer also experienced first-hand what the “civilized” nations of Europe did to the “barbarians” of Africa. He was appalled by the physical brutality and moral irresponsibility of white colonizers. Mere external polish in behavior and superior social organization are insufficient for Kultur. Without the inner culture, ethical ideals, and moral constraints, we have only a superficial civilization: “Paradoxical as it may seem, our progress in knowledge and power makes true Kultur not easier but more difficult. Judging by the events of our own time and the two preceding generations, one might even say that we are almost entitled to doubt whether, in view of the way in which these material achievements have been showered on us, true Kultur is still possible.”⁹

Since Schweitzer is primarily focused on the internal aspect of Kultur, his book should have been translated as “Philosophy of Culture.” And he should have paid closer attention to the roots of the word. A few insights from Hannah Arendt help us understand not only the original meaning of the word “culture,” but also what it means for Schweitzer and how it eventually leads toward his ethics of reverence for life.

Culture, word and concept, is Roman in origin. The word “culture” derives from colere—to cultivate, to dwell, to take care, to tend and preserve—and it relates primarily to the intercourse of man with nature in the sense of cultivating and tending nature until it becomes fit for human habitation. As such, it indicates an attitude of loving care and stands in sharp contrast to all efforts to subject nature to the domination of man. Hence it does not only apply to tilling the soil but can also designate the “cult” of the gods, the taking care of what properly belongs to them. It seems it was Cicero who first used the word for matters of spirit and mind. He speaks of excolere animus, of cultivating the mind, and of cultura animi in the same sense in which we speak even today of a cultured mind, only that we are no longer aware of the full metaphorical content of this usage. For as far as Roman usage is concerned, the chief point always was the connection of culture with nature; culture originally meant agriculture, which was held in very high regard in Rome in opposition to the poetic and fabricating acts. Even Cicero’s cultura animi, the result of training in philosophy and therefore perhaps coined, as has been suggested, to translate the Greek paideia [παιδεία], meant the very opposite of being a fabricator or creator of art works.¹⁰

Arendt’s passage helps us with several points regarding Schweitzer’s philosophy of culture. Like Arendt, he does not see nature as something dangerous, something to be tamed, restrained, or sublimated. Mastering and controlling nature is foreign to Schweitzer’s way of thinking. Nature has to be cultivated, not suppressed. As the Stoics, Francis of Assisi, and Goethe would say, nature must be “ennobled” by our rational and spiritual capacities. Our ability to cultivate the soil and ennoble nature does not depend on imposing the right designs on the soil or on nature; it depends on the potentialities inherent in them.

This brings us to another important point. We may associate culture with what is artificially made, but Arendt does not. Nor does Schweitzer. Arendt points out that fabrication involves the relationship of means and ends and focuses on utility:

The category of means and ends derives its legitimacy from the sphere of making and fabricating where a clearly recognizable end, the final product, determines and organizes everything that plays a part in the process—the material, the tools, the activity itself, and even the persons participating in it; they all become mere means toward the end and they are justified as such. Fabricators cannot help regarding all things as means to their ends or, as the case may be, judging all things by their specific utility.¹¹

Although frequently taken as a symbol of civilization (e.g. in the emphasis on homo faber, man the tool maker), the process of fabrication does not figure prominently in Schweitzer’s account of Kultur. Nor, as it will become clear later, do the categories of means and ends play any significant role in his understanding of Kultur or in his ethics of reverence for life. He also rejects the idea that utility is a relevant moral category: utility is important for expedience, not for morality. As a moral theory, utilitarianism is based on the confusion of the good and the useful.¹² The cultivating process focuses on allowing that which is alive to maintain its existence, and, as in the case of land-cultivating, to grow and prosper. This process deals not with means and ends but with the relationship of parts with the whole (see Chapters 4–5). In human beings, this process deals with developing one’s whole personality, one’s entire humanity.

Arendt also helps us realize why, with the exception of Socrates, Schweitzer does not show much interest in ancient Greek ethics and philosophy.¹³ He is more fascinated by the Stoics; his conception of Kultur relies not only on the Stoic imperative of living in accordance with nature, but also on their concern for the well-being of all human beings—rather than only free-born citizens (as, for instance, is the case with Plato and Aristotle).¹⁴ What the Stoics developed is humanitas, and that is precisely what Schweitzer sees as the central point of Kultur, as the culmination of “a drive toward progress,” and the end product of “an ethical development of individuals and of mankind.” Culture is the reason for man’s existence. We exist not for what we can accomplish, which is a mere external aspect of culture, but for what can be accomplished in us.

This conception of culture has a dimension we have neglected so far. Unlike Arendt, who relates culture to politics and political engagement, Schweitzer relates it to religion: “The ultimate [goal] of philosophy and religion is to bring people to the deepest humanity. The deepest philosophy becomes deeply religious and the deepest religion becomes thinking. They both fulfill their true destiny when they allow people to become humane in the most profound sense of the term.”¹⁵ Without considering his thought on religion, any attempt to understand Schweitzer’s conception of culture and his ethics remains incomplete.

1.2 Culture and Religion

Freud maintains that the aim of Kultur is to nurture humanity away from seeking gratification of a natural impulse (Trieb). In his celebrated book, Civilization and its Discontents (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, 1930), he claims that “the word Kultur describes the sum of achievements and institutions which differentiate our lives from those of our animal forebears and serve two purposes, namely, that of protecting humanity against nature and of regulating the relation of human beings among themselves.”¹⁶ This view of culture aims to replace a more ambitious conception which stirs “discontent” by inclining us to seek a definitive meaning and purpose in life. In denouncing this ambitious conception, Freud is especially skeptical of religion. He is critical not only of institutionalized religion, but even more of what “the ordinary man understands by his religion, that system of doctrines and pledges that on the one hand explains the riddle of this world to him with an enviable completeness, and on the other assures him that a solicitous Providence is watching over him and will make up to him in a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Prelude
• PART I     OUR AGE OF IRREVERENCE
• PART II     THE ETHICS OF REVERENCE
• PART III     REVERENCE AS A WAY OF LIFE
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright