Reverence for Life from the Perspective of Albert Schweitzer

Reverence for Life from the Perspective of Albert Schweitzer

Translator: Gholam-Ali Keshani

The expression "Reverence for Life" is a translation of the German phrase: "Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben". These words came to Albert Schweitzer during a boat journey on the Ogooué River in French Equatorial Africa (present-day Gabon). At that period of his life, he was searching for a universal meaning for the ethics of our time. Schweitzer believed that reverence for life is a concept born from observing the world around us. In the book "Civilization and Ethics", he expressed this meaning with the following propositions:

"Ethics is nothing other than reverence for life. Reverence for life gives me the fundamental principles of ethics, namely, that good consists in preserving, assisting, and enhancing life; and that evil means destroying life, harming it, or hindering its development."

James Brabazon (author of Albert Schweitzer's biography) defined reverence for life with this proposition:

"Reverence for life says that the only thing we are truly certain of is that we live and want to continue living. This is something we share with everything else that lives, from the elephant to the blade of grass – and of course, with every human being. Therefore, we are brothers and sisters to all living creatures, and we owe them all the same concern and respect we desire for ourselves."

Schweitzer made this phrase the cornerstone of the ethical philosophy he constructed and put into practice. He developed this expression in several books and published materials throughout his life, as well as in manuscripts that have been recently published. His main work, "The Philosophy of Culture" (in German: Kulturphilosophie), was an unfinished four-part project whose second title was: "The World-View of Reverence for Life". He also used his "Lambaréné" hospital in Gabon (Central Africa) to demonstrate this philosophy in action.

Albert Schweitzer hoped that reverence for life, based on his explanation in his books and speeches, based on the example of his life and the power of his reasoning, based on the depth of his fundamental thought, would make its way in the world. Part of this expectation has been realized to some extent by observing the growth of the environmental movement. (The book Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson, which is widely credited with launching the environmental movement, is dedicated to Albert Schweitzer.) Reverence for life can also be seen in the explosive growth of various charitable and ethical organizations in many parts of the world.

The Roots of "Reverence for Life"

Dr. Albert Schweitzer believed that the ethical values which could form the foundation of the ideal of true civilization must have their roots in deep reflection and be world-affirming and life-affirming. He therefore undertook a search for ethical values in several major religions and the world-views available to him, but he could not accept that any of them were explicitly and unambiguously capable of combining ethics with the principle of life-affirmation. Two years had to pass after his departure to Gabon to establish the Albert Schweitzer Hospital before he could finally discover the simple proposition that answered his question.

Schweitzer explains this process in his autobiography, titled "Out of My Life and Thought".

He describes "how he awoke from a kind of mental daze and confusion at the beginning of the summer of 1915, asking himself why he only criticized civilization and did not work on something constructive." Schweitzer recounts how he asked himself this question:

"But what is civilization?"

“The essential element in civilization is the ethical perfecting of the individual as well as society. At the same time, every spiritual step forward and every material step forward has significance for civilization. The will to civilization is, then, the universal will to progress that is conscious of the ethical as the highest value. Despite the great importance we attach to the scientific and technical achievements of mankind, it is clear that only a humanity that strives for ethical ends can benefit in full measure from material progress and can overcome the dangers that accompany it…”

“The only feasible way for us to escape from the abyss, chaos, and hell is to choose a meaning of the world based on the ideal of true civilization.

But what is the nature of that meaning of the world in which, by definition, the will to general progress and the will to ethical progress meet and join together?

This meaning is based on the ethical affirmation of the world and life.

What is the affirmation of the world and life? …”

“For months on end, I lived in a state of constant agitation and distraction. Even during my daily work at the hospital, I concentrated, without the slightest success, on the real nature of the affirmation of life and ethics, and pondered what these two have in common. I was wandering in a thicket where no path was to be found. I was pushing against an iron door that would not yield…”

“In this mental state, one day it was decided that I should go on a journey up the river … Lost in thought, I sat on the deck of the barge, struggling to find the elementary and universal meaning of ethics that I had not discovered in philosophy. I covered sheet after sheet with disconnected sentences, merely to concentrate on the problem. Two days passed. At the end of the third day, at the very moment of sunset, as we were making our way through a herd of hippopotamuses, the phrase: ‘Reverence for Life’ flashed into my mind, unforeseen and unsought. The iron door yielded. The path in the thicket showed itself. Now I had found my way to the principle in which the affirmation of the world and ethics are joined together!”

According to some writers, Schweitzer’s thought, and especially the development of his Reverence for Life, was influenced by Indian religious thought, particularly by the Jain principle of Ahimsa (non-violence).[1] Albert Schweitzer spoke of the role of Indian influence in his book “Indian Thought and Its Development”:

“The laying down of the commandment not to kill and not to injure is one of the greatest events in the spiritual history of mankind. Ancient Indian thought, starting from its principle of world and life negation and abstention from action—and this at a time when ethical discussions had not progressed much from other viewpoints—arrives at the tremendous discovery that ethics knows no bounds. As far as we know, this point is expressed for the first time by the Jains.”

But it should not be overlooked that in his childhood, he was deeply distressed by the suffering of all the living creatures around him. This was a hard blow for him. He writes, “As far back as I can remember, I was saddened by the amount of misery I saw in the world around me. I never really knew the unbounded ‘joy of life’ of youth … What especially saddened me was that the poor animals had to endure so much pain and misery … It was incomprehensible to me why in my evening prayer I should pray only for human beings—this was before I started school. Therefore, when my mother had prayed with me and given me my goodnight kiss, I used to add silently a prayer that I had made up myself for all living creatures. It ran thus: ‘O heavenly Father, protect and bless all things that have breath; guard them from all evil, and let them sleep in peace …’”

Schweitzer went fishing twice with a few boys because they had asked him to “… and this sport, because of the treatment of the worms that were impaled on the hook… and the tearing out of the mouths and jaws of the fish that were caught, immediately became impossible for me. I gave it up… From experiences like these, which made my heart tremble… gradually a firm conviction grew in me that we have no right to inflict suffering and pain upon another living creature, and that we all must feel what a terrible thing it is to be the cause of suffering and death…” The concept of “Reverence for Life” had begun to grow in him almost from birth itself.

This sensitivity and awareness affected him throughout his life, for instance, when he carefully, cautiously, and gently cupped his hands to lift a spider out of a hole that had been dug for planting crops, the produce of which would serve the patients and their families who worked on the hospital farm. In his notes, he wrote that, just as our own existence matters to each of us, the existence [of a creature] matters to itself. And he continued “… my relationship with my own ‘existence’ and with the objective world is determined by reverence for life. This reverence for life is posited as an element of my will-to-live…” And this will-to-live exists in all creatures and must be respected.

As a child he learned, and later as an adult in his lectures he taught, that “the fundamental truths of the Christian religion are not something that conflict and are at war with reason (i.e., they are not anti-reason), but on the contrary, reason strengthens them.” Many people were later grateful to him for this, saying that this teaching “helped them to keep their religion in their future lives.” He had a prodigious mind, so much so that he carefully read and digested “piles of books” so high that he was forced to clear a path through them to pass. He examined the depth of the Christian life with such precision that few have been able to succeed in this task. His own philosophy, summarized in the phrase “Reverence for Life,” had found this foundation in the four Gospels of the New Testament.

Schweitzer writes in the book The Philosophy of Civilization, “Ethics is unlimited responsibility towards all that lives…. Love means more, as it includes fellowship and sympathy in suffering, in joy, and in striving…” The content of this book shows what a well-read person Schweitzer was, both of ancient and modern philosophers.

The Will-to-Live

The word “will,” meaning determination and persistence in purpose and aim, is used very little today, and therefore, Schweitzer’s understanding of the meaning of the German word “Wille” may be unfamiliar. In any case, this concept is an important part of Schweitzer’s message. In the 1920s, his view was that people had generally lost touch with their own will, surrendering it to external authority and sacrificing it to external circumstances.

Therefore, he returned to the fundamental part of our selves that can be in contact with our “will,” and which a person can employ for the good of all.

He wrote in the book “Out of My Life and Thought”:

The most immediate fact of human consciousness is the assertion: “I am life which wills to live, in the midst of life which wills to live.”

The affirmation of life is a spiritual act by which one ceases to live unreflectively and begins to devote oneself to one’s life with reverence, in order to give it true value. To affirm life is to deepen it, to make it more inward, and to exalt the will-to-live.

At the same time, the person who has become a thinking being feels a compulsion to accord to every will-to-live the same reverence that he accords to his own. […] This is the absolute, fundamental principle of ethics, and the fundamental, self-evident principle of thought.

In his search for an answer to the kind of problems that he considered the “decline of Western civilization,” he was not prepared to abandon belief in the fundamental concept of progress[2]; a belief that was taken as highly self-evident by rational European thought. Instead, he sought to identify why this “will to progress” apparently goes off course and causes the fragmentation and collapse of European civilization.

In response, in the book “Out of My Life and Thought,” he concluded:

“Affirmation of life (or life-acceptance) can only produce a partial and incomplete civilization. Only if it turns inward and becomes ethical can this will to progress attain the ability to distinguish the phenomenon of the ‘valuable’ from the ‘worthless.’ We must therefore strive for a civilization that is not based solely on the affirmation and emphasis of science and sheer power, but for a civilization that is, above all, concerned with the spiritual and ethical development of the individual and of all humanity.”

“Man, who stands before this dual predicament of the ‘will to live,’ like all living beings, is constantly compelled to preserve his own life and life in the general sense, only at the cost of another life. But if he is under the influence of the ethic of ‘reverence for life,’ he harms or destroys another life only when a necessity arises that cannot be avoided, but never does so out of thoughtlessness or recklessness.”

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For further reading:

Ara Paul Barsam (2008). Reverence for Life: Albert Schweitzer’s Great Contribution to Ethical Thought. Oxford University Press US. ISBN ۰-۱۹-۵۳۲۹۵۵-۴ .

Albert Schweitzer (1961). The Decay and the Restoration of Civilization. Unwin Books.

Albert Schweitzer (1966). The Teaching of Reverence for Life. Peter Owen Limited.

James Brabazon (2000). Albert Schweitzer, A Biography. Syracuse University Press, New York. ISBN ۰-۸۱۵۶-۰۶۷۵-۳ .

James Brabazon (2005). Albert Schweitzer, Essential Writings. Orbis Books, New York. ISBN ۱-۵۷۰۷۵-۶۰۲-۳ .

Marvin Meyer & Kurt Bergel (2002). Reverence for Life, the ethics of Albert Schweitzer for the twenty-first century. Syracuse University Press, New York. ISBN ۰-۸۱۵۶-۲۹۷۷-X.

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[1] Jainism: Alongside Hinduism and Buddhism, Jainism is one of the ancient living Indian religions, which presents its goal as providing a path toward spiritual purification and salvation. According to the beliefs of this faith, this goal is attainable through a life based on ahimsa (refraining from harming any living being). The Jain religion arose in protest against Hindu rituals, especially sacrificial ceremonies, and the power and influence of the Vedic texts.

[2] progress: This refers to the philosophical concept of human progress in technology, science, and social organization throughout history, which emerged during the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods and was later taken for granted. This concept is the foundation of modernity. Walter Benjamin and many thinkers criticize the taking-for-granted nature or the definitions and details of this trajectory.

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