CHAPTER THREE
REVERENCE FOR LIFE
| Albert and Helene Schweitzer were repatriated to Europe by the French
in 1917 and held as civilian interns. At war's end Albert Schweitzer was
in ill health and he underwent surgery. His spirits, for once, were low.
Burdened by debts from the old hospital and the need for funds to rebuild
and start again, his income came from serving as a Strasbourg hospital
physician, a clergyman and concert organist, playing so often the work
of his beloved Johann Sebastian Bach, about whom he wrote three books.
He lectured at universities in England, Sweden and Switzerland. He also
became the father of a daughter, Rhena. Before returning alone to Africa
in 1924 to move and rebuild the hospital, he devoted almost full time to
completion of four books. In his two-volume Philosophy of Civilization
he offered, in all of its implications, the meaning of Reverence for
Life.
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| Ethic of Love |
It may seem at first glance as if Reverence
for Life were something too general and too lifeless to provide the content
of a living ethic.... Anyone who comes under the influence of Reverence
for Life will very soon be able to detect, thanks to what that ethic demands
from him, what fire glows in lifeless expression. The ethic of Reverence
for Life is the ethic of love widened into universality....
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| Some Sort of Help |
The ethic of Reverence for Life prompts us
to keep each other alert to what troubles us and to speak and act dauntlessly
together in discharging the responsibility that we feel. It keeps us watching
together for opportunities to bring some sort of help to animals in recompense
for the great misery that men inflict upon them, and thus for a moment
we escape from the incomprehensible horror of existence.
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| Interpreting Life |
I must interpret the life about me as I interpret
the life that is my own. My life is full of meaning to me. The life around
me must be full of significance to itself. If I am to expect others to
respect my life, then I must respect the other life I see, however strange
it may be to mine. And not only other human life, but all kinds of life:
life above mine, if there be such life; life below mine, as I know it to
exist. Ethics in our Western world has hitherto been largely limited to
the relations of man to man. But that is a limited ethics. We need a boundless
ethics which will include the animals also.
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Dr. Schweitzer concluded that Western ethics in regard to animals and nature had been greatly damaged by the continuing influence of the 17th century French philosopher, René Descartes. |
| Animal Machines |
It would seem as if Descartes with his theory
that animals have no souls and are mere machines had bewitched all philosophy.
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| Philosophy Shrinks |
Because the extension of the principle of
love to animal creation means so great a revolution for ethics, philosophy
shrinks from this step. It would like to cling to a system of ethics which
prescribes for man his behavior toward other men in clear, reasonable commandments
without exaggerated demands.
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| Muddy Paws |
As the housewife who has scrubbed the floor
sees to it that the door is shut, so that the dog does not come in and
undo all her work with his muddy paws, so religious and philosophical thinkers
have gone to some pains to see that no animals enter and upset their system
of ethics.
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| Untouchable Keys |
Philosophy has totally evaded the problem
of man's conduct toward other organisms. We might say that it has played
a piano of which a whole series of keys were considered untouchable.
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Not all philosophers, of course, had shrunk from the horror of animal
suffering. But the influence of the Eastern philosophers and Western defenders,
such as Plutarch, St. Francis of Assisi, Jeremy Bentham and Montaigne had
not been sufficiently pervasive. The walls of European philosophy, education,
religion -- excluding animals and nature -- continued to stand, even though
humane movements were underway in England and the United States. Clearly
for Dr. Schweitzer this was insufficient.
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| Nature | The deeper we look into nature, the more
we realize that it is full of life, and the more profoundly we know that
all life is a secret and that we are united with all life that is in nature.
Man can no longer live for himself alone. We must realize that all life
is valuable and that we are united to all life. From this knowledge comes
our spiritual relationship to the universe.
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| Harsh Mystery |
The fact that in nature one creature may
cause pain to another, and even deal with it instinctively in the most
cruel way, is a harsh mystery that weighs upon us as long as we live. One
who has reached the point where he does not suffer ever again because of
this has ceased to be a man.
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| Mutual Dependence |
The important thing is that we are part of
life. We are born of other lives; we possess the capacities to bring still
other lives into existence. In the same way, if we look into a microscope
we see cell producing cell. So nature compels us to recognize the fact
of mutual dependence, each life necessarily helping the other lives which
are linked to it.
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| A Single Flower |
Whenever I injure any kind of life I must
be quite certain that it is necessary. I must never go beyond the unavoidable,
not even in apparently insignificant things. The farmer who has mowed down
a thousand flowers in his meadow in order to feed his cows must be careful
on his way home not to strike the head off a single flower by the side
of the road in idle amusement, for he thereby infringes the law of life
without being under the pressure of necessity.
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| He Shatters No Ice Crystal |
A man is really ethical only when he obeys
the constraint laid on him to aid all life which he is able to help, and
when he goes out of his way to avoid injuring anything living. He does
not ask how far this or that life deserves sympathy as valuable in itself,
nor how far it is capable of feeling. To him life as such is sacred. He
shatters no ice crystal that sparkles in the sun, tears no leaf from its
tree, breaks of no flower, and is careful not to crush any insect as he
walks. If he works by lamplight on a summer evening, he prefers to keep
the window shut and to breathe stifling air, rather than to see insect
after insect fall on his table with singed and sinking wings.
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| After a Rainstorm |
IIf he goes out into the street after a rainstorm
and sees a worm which has strayed there, he reflects that it will certainly
dry up in the sunshine, if it does not quickly regain the damp soil into
which it can creep, and so he helps it back from the deadly paving stones
into the lush grass. Should he pass by an insect which has fallen into
a pool, he spares the time to reach a leaf or stalk on which it may clamber
and save itself.
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| Which Life? | To the man who is truly ethical all life
is sacred, including that which from the human point of view seems lower
in the scale. He makes distinctions only as each case comes before him
and under the pressure of necessity, as, for example, when it falls to
him to decide which of two lives he must sacrifice in order to preserve
the other. But all through this series of decisions he is conscious of
acting on subjective grounds and arbitrarily, and knows that he bears the
responsibility for the life which is sacrificed.
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If a life was taken or suffering inflicted because
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| No One May Shut His Eyes |
Whenever an animal is somehow forced into
the service of men, every one of us must be concerned for any suffering
it bears on that account. No one of us may permit any preventable pain
to be inflicted, even though the responsibility for that pain is not ours.
No one may appease his conscience by thinking that he would be interfering
in something that does not concern him. No one may shut his eyes and think
the pain, which is therefore not visible to him, is non-existent.
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| Consolation | Each of us must therefore decide whether
to condemn living creatures to suffering and death out of inescapable necessity,
and thus incur guilt. Some atonement for guilt can be found by the man
who pledges himself to neglect no opportunity to help creatures in distress.
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Dr. Schweitzer was often rankled by the low esteem in which animal and nature protectors were held, as if "animal loving" and "nature loving" should automatically mean "people hating," as if all life was created for man's benefit. To him, "life loving" included all. |
| Nature's Goal? |
We like to imagine that man is nature's goal; but the facts do not support that belief. |
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Often feeling quite isolated from other people
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| Friend of Nature |
The friend of nature is the man who feels
himself inwardly united with everything that lives in nature, who shares
in the fate of all creatures, helps them when he can in their pain and
need, and as far as possible avoids injuring or taking life.
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| The Masks Fall |
We are afraid of shocking people if we let
it be noticed how much we are moved by the suffering man brings to animals.
We think that others may have become more "rational" than we,
and may accept as customary and as a matter of course the things we have
gotten excited about. Once in awhile, however, a word suddenly slips out
which shows that even they have not yet become reconciled to this suffering.
Now they come very close to us though they were formerly strangers. The
masks with which we were deceiving each other fall off. Now we learn from
each other that no one is able to escape the grip of the cruelty that flourishes
ceaselessly around us.
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What is often referred to today as "conciousness raising" was expressed simply by Dr. Schweitzer as "thinking." Thinking about our relationship with animals -- especially our exploitation -- Dr. Schweitzer believed to be a necessity if that exploitation is to be terminated. In short, pure thoughtlessness is the cause of much suffering of animals at the hands of human beings. |
| Thinking | The man who has become a thinking being feels
a compulsion to give every will-to-live the same reverence for life that
he gives to his own. He experiences that other life in his own.
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| Good and Evil |
He accepts as being good: to preserve life,
to promote life, to raise to its highest value life which is capable of
development; and as being evil: to destroy life, to repress life which
is capable of development. This is the absolute, fundamental Principle
of the moral, and it is the necessity of thought.
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| The Quiet Conscience |
We must never become callous. When we experience
the conflicts ever more deeply we are living in truth. The quiet conscience
is an invention of the devil.
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Having lived through World War I and foreseeing another even more dreadful world conflict, Albert Schweitzer appealed to people everywhere to stop and think about the futility of war, how it is born of contempt rather than reverence for all life. He did not forget the animal victims of war -- cavalry and artillery horses and mules, carrier pigeons, first aid and scout dogs, and farm animals and pets caught in the line of battle. . . . |
| Victims of War |
Today there is an absence of thinking which
is characterized by a contempt for life. We waged war for questions which,
through reason, might have been solved. No one won. The war killed millions
of men, and brought suffering and death to millions of innocent animals.
Why? Because we did not possess the highest rationality of Reverence for
Life.
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