A historical past of philosophy in its most well-known quotes. At this time: Albert Schweitzer, medical physician, theologian, musician and thinker who left all of it behind to go and assist the poorest in Africa, saying: “Ethics is nothing apart from the Reverence for Life.”
On this sequence, we undergo probably the most well-known quotes within the historical past of philosophy! Subscribe here to by no means miss a publish! Discover all of the articles within the sequence here.
”Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965) was a medical physician, protestant theologian, musician and thinker – an virtually legendary presence of a person. In some ways, he was a son of his time, modern to others who appear larger than life: he was born proper between Gandhi, who was six years older, and that different Albert, the physicist Einstein, 4 years his youthful. It was an age whose protagonists constructed and destroyed empires, erected cathedrals of science, and devoted their lives to virtually inhuman ranges of altruism – and all that over lifetimes that included the 2 most horrible and inhuman wars that historical past had ever seen.
Considering again to the world they inhabited and fashioned, one is reminded of that nice line within the script to Graham Greene’s Third Man, the place Harry Lime says:
“In Italy for thirty years below the Borgias, that they had warfare, terror, homicide, and bloodshed, however they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, that they had cohesion, that they had 5 hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
Albert Schweitzer isn’t a lot remembered right now. His legacy isn’t carried ahead by a military of scientists or an entire nation of a billion folks. Philosophers by no means took him significantly as an ethicist, though few who name themselves ethicists right now could be prepared to place their entire lives within the service of their beliefs, as he did.
As a younger man, he studied theology and music, changing into an skilled within the examine and restoration of historic church organs. He was such an achieved musician, that in 1905 he was invited to play for the king and queen of Spain. After the live performance, the king requested him: “Is it troublesome to play the organ?” – to which Schweitzer answered: “Virtually as troublesome as it’s to rule Spain.”
As a scholar, he wrote two books on the interpretation of Bach’s music and revealed extra, extensively acclaimed books on the historic Jesus and (a lot later) the mysticism of early Christianity. However as he grew older, he additionally grew stressed, unhappy with a lifetime of privilege, as we might say now, asking himself how he might justify his existence within the face of Jesus’ commandments. To a buddy he wrote:
For me the entire essence of faith is at stake. For me faith means to be human, plainly human within the sense through which Jesus was. Within the colonies issues are fairly hopeless and comfortless. We – the Christian nations – ship on the market the mere dregs of our folks; we expect solely of what we will get out of the natives … in brief, what is going on there’s a mockery of humanity and Christianity. If this mistaken is in some measure to be atoned for, we should ship on the market males who will do good within the title of Jesus, not merely proselytising missionaries, however males who will assist the distressed as they should be helped if the Sermon on the Mount and the phrases of Jesus are legitimate and proper.
Now we sit right here and examine theology, after which compete for the very best ecclesiastical posts, write thick discovered books with the intention to grow to be professors of theology … and what’s going on on the market the place the honour and the title of Jesus are at stake, doesn’t concern us in any respect. … I can not accomplish that. For years I’ve turned these issues over in my thoughts, this manner and that. Eventually it turned clear to me that this isn’t my life. I wish to be a easy human being, doing one thing small within the spirit of Jesus.
We’d right now dislike a few of Schweitzer’s phrase selections, however this was over 100 years in the past and Schweitzer was simply utilizing the language of his time. Extra necessary is that, at this early stage already, Schweitzer felt that we should always be thankful for life. No person can know, he stated, the place we got here from or the place we had been going. The one certain factor was existence itself, and the one technique to affirm life was to take duty for our existence. A lot later, Schweitzer’s younger cousin, born across the time Schweitzer wrote these phrases, Jean-Paul Sartre, would make existence the central theme of his philosophy.
However for Sartre, this meant futility and misery, not thankfulness. The phrase “existentialist” might be utilized to each. However it was Sartre’s model, not Schweitzer’s, that gained foreign money within the philosophical world. (Brabazon, Albert Schweitzer. A biography. p.195)
Three years later, Schweitzer completed his medical research. Already educating theology on the college, he had grow to be a pupil once more, at 30, ten years older than his friends, and within the time left to him, he was an organist of rising worldwide status. As his biographer remarks, his greatest downside at the moment, amongst all of the learning, educating, writing and taking part in music, was to remain awake. However slowly he was approaching his dream of spending his life in a extra significant means. In 1913, he set out on a ship to Africa.
It was in Africa the place Schweitzer based his hospital together with his personal cash at Lambaréné on the Ogooué river, in what’s now Gabon. It was the work in Africa that introduced into sharp focus for him the distinction between one’s rationality and one’s feelings:
I used to be at all times, whilst a boy, engrossed within the philosophical downside of the relation between emotion and cause. Sure truths originate in feeling, others within the thoughts. These truths that come from our feelings are of an ethical sort – compassion, kindness, forgiveness, love for our neighbour. Cause, however, teaches us the truths that come from reflection.
However with the nice spirits of our world – the Hebrew prophets, Christ, Zoroaster, the Buddha, and others – feeling is at all times paramount. In them, emotion holds its floor in opposition to cause, and all of us have an internal assurance that the reality of emotion that these nice religious figures disclose to us is probably the most profound and a very powerful fact.
In the future, Schweitzer needed to take an extended journey up the river that handed by his hospital. He recounts:
Misplaced in thought, I sat on the deck of the barge, struggling to seek out the elementary and common idea of the moral that I had not found in any philosophy. I lined sheet after sheet with disconnected sentences merely to focus on the issue. Two days handed. Late on the third day, on the very second when, at sundown, we had been making our means by means of a herd of hippopotamuses, there flashed upon my thoughts, unexpected and unsought, the phrase: “Reverence for Life”. The iron door had yielded. The trail within the thicket had grow to be seen. Now I had discovered my technique to the precept through which affirmation of the world and ethics are joined collectively!
Later he would summarise his philosophy on this passage from Civilisation and Ethics:
Ethics is nothing apart from Reverence for Life. Reverence for Life affords me my basic precept of morality, particularly, that good consists in sustaining, helping and enhancing life, and to destroy, to hurt or to hinder life is evil.
“Reverence” isn’t the very best translation. The German phrase Schweitzer used is “Ehrfurcht”: a composite of Ehre, which means honour, and Furcht, which means concern. Ehrfurcht is the awe and concern we expertise within the presence of the Elegant, within the presence of God. Like his modern Albert Einstein, Schweitzer too agreed with Spinoza that God isn’t some being that resides distant on a cloud and judges mankind. As a substitute, Schweitzer’s God, like Einstein’s and Spinoza’s, is one who can’t be separated from the world – God is the world:
I imagine in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself within the orderly concord of what exists, not in a God who considerations himself with fates and actions of human beings. (Albert Einstein)
Schweitzer lived his life in keeping with the concept that God manifests Himself in each type of life. His co-workers at his hospital would bear in mind him fastidiously selecting up and inserting little earthworms and spiders to the facet earlier than planting a sapling into the bottom.
And if God is equally current in all life, then we can not see human life as superior to different types of life. The important ethical aspect in all dwelling issues is life itself – the second one begins to tell apart completely different qualities of life, one is on the trail that leads, finally, to the misunderstanding that animal life is extra helpful than vegetation, that human life is extra helpful than animal life, and that maybe even some human lives ought to be seen as extra helpful than others. And this Schweitzer was by no means going to just accept. Ultimately, due to this fact, his view of issues boils all the way down to a quite simple maxim:
I’m life that wills to dwell within the midst of life that wills to dwell. (Albert Schweitzer, Out of My Life and Thought).
Schweitzer was given the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952. He returned to Africa, the place he used the Nobel Prize cash to develop his hospital in Lambarene. Shortly earlier than he died, his daughter wrote in a letter:
Lambarene hospital is in nice diploma an African village, which now includes 72 buildings grouped across the central core: working theatre, X-ray room, laboratory, dental clinic, supply room … A couple of thousand operations a yr are carried out … About 350 infants are born annually on the hospital.
Till the tip, Schweitzer didn’t discover peace both with the church or together with his well-known cousin, and his ethics by no means bought the popularity of educational philosophy. About Sartre he wrote:
We’re appropriate and pleasant with each other, however we’ve got no deep relationship. His philosophy is witty and intelligent however not profound. … His performs are higher than his philosophy. In them he offers with ethics, which don’t have any place in his philosophy.
As a result of for Albert Schweitzer, actual philosophy was nothing with out the Reverence for Life.
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