REVERENCE FOR LIFE

“Reverence for Life” provided Dr. Schweitzer with the philosophical and ethical basis of his life’s work for the fifty years between his “discovery” of it in 1915 and his death in 1965. It is simultaneously an extraordinarily simple and an extraordinarily complex and deep idea. James Brabazon provides some helpful background in his new and extremely useful anthology, Albert Schweitzer: Essential Writings (published in fall 2005):

Reverence for Life is a translation of the German Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben, and the word "reverence" is really not quite adequate. It lacks the German word's overtones of awe before an overwhelming force. "Ehrfurcht" is respect carried to ultimate lengths. It holds reverberations of the feelings we experience on the tops of high mountains, in a storm at sea, or in a tropical tornado. This was the element that the African jungle gave to Schweitzer's thinking – the acknowledgement of immensity and of overwhelming power - the force of continuing life and ever-present death in the vastness of nature.

This is a poetic concept. It came to him after much diligent thought, true, but it came out of the blue, an intuition, not a logical answer to an intellectual problem. So how can he call it a product of thought, or worse still, a necessity of thought?

 Many readers of Schweitzer have been troubled by this problem and have criticized him for failing to notice that Reverence for Life is not a necessity of thought, that no logical sequence of propositions compels any man to arrive at Reverence for Life. It is simply Schweitzer's own personal view of life summed up in a phrase, and thought has nothing to do with it.

But Schweitzer’s word "denken " carries other connotations, of meditation, of brooding absorption in a subject, which the word "thought" does not encompass. For example, in The Decay and Restoration of Civilisation, this is how he defines it: "thought is no dry intellectualism, which would suppress all the manifold movements of our inner life, but the totality of all the functions of our spirit in their living action and interaction.”

 Slowly we crept upstream, [on one of the long African errands of mercy], laboriously feeling -- it was the dry season -- for the channels between the sandbanks. Lost in thought I sat on the deck of the barge, struggling to find the elementary and universal conception of the ethical which I had not discovered in any philosophy. Sheet after sheet I covered with disconnected sentences, merely to keep myself concentrated on the problem. Late on the third day, at the very moment when, at sunset, we were making our way through a herd of hippopotamuses, there flashed upon my mind, unforeseen and unsought, the phrase, “Reverence for Life.” The iron door had yielded: the path in the thicket had become visible. Now I had found my way to the idea in which world- and life-affirmation and ethics are contained side by side! Now I knew that the world-view of ethical world- and life-affirmation, together with its ideals of civilization, is founded in thought. (Out of My Life and Thought, pp. 185 f.)

Ethics grow out of the same root as world- and life-affirmation, for ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. That is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil. Affirmation of the world, which means affirmation of the will-to-live that manifests itself around me, is only possible if I devote myself to other life. From an inner necessity, I exert myself in producing values and practicing ethics in the world and on the world even though I do not understand the meaning of the world. For in world- and life-affirmation and in ethics I carry out the will of the universal will-to-live which reveals itself in me. I live my life in God, in the mysterious divine personality which I do not know as such in the world, but only experience as mysterious will within myself. (The Philosophy of Civilization, p. 79.)

The fundamental fact of human awareness is this: “I am life that wills to live in the midst of life that wills to live.” A thinking man feels compelled to approach all life with the same reverence he has for his own. Thus, all life becomes part of his own experience.” (World Book Yearbook, 1964).

How can ethics become the basis for a world philosophy? When it relates to the entire world; when if forms and builds our spiritual relationship to the world. It does that only if it shows us how we are linked with all living beings. As the wave in the ocean surges forward together with all waves, so must we feel in our life the life that is around us, with its privations and anguish. Then we will have an ethical code that is meaningful and can sustain a world philosophy. I have ventured to express the thought that the basic concept on which goodness rests is reverence for all life – the great mystery in which we find ourselves together with all living things. (The Schweitzer Album, p. 40)

What we call love is in its essence reverence for life. (Indian Thought and Its Development, p. 260.)

Reverence for Life does not allow the scholar to live for his science alone, even if he is very useful to the community in so doing. It does not permit the artist to exist only for his art, even if he gives inspiration to many by its means. It refuses to let the business man imagine that he fulfils all legitimate demands in the course of his business activities. It demands from all that they should sacrifice a portion of their own lives for others. (Civilization and Ethics, p. 269.)

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