Civilization and ethics

But it did not succeed in grounding its world- and life-affirming ethical world-view convincingly and permanently in thought. Our philosophy did nothing more than produce again and again unstable fragments of the serviceable world-view which hovered before its mind’s eye. Consequently our civilization also remained fragmentary and insecure.

It was a fatal mistake that Western thought never admitted to itself the unsatisfying result of its search for a stable and serviceable world-view. Our philosophizing became less and less elemental, losing all connexion with the elementary questions which man must ask of life and of the world. More and more it found satisfaction in the handling of philosophic questions that were merely academic, and in an expert’s mastery of philosophical technique. It became more and more the captive of secondary things. Instead of real music it produced again and again mere bandmaster’s music, often magnificent stuff of its kind, but still only bandmaster’s music.

Through this philosophy which did nothing but philosophize instead of struggling for a world-view grounded in thought and serviceable for life, we came to be without any world-view and therefore without any civilization.

Signs of an awakening of thought on this point are beginning to be visible. It is admitted here and there that philosophy must again try to offer a world-view. This is generally expressed by saying that people are encouraging it to venture once more on “metaphysics,” that is to put forward definitive views about the spiritual nature of the world, whereas hitherto it has been occupied with the classification of scientific facts and in cautious hypotheses.

But neither the cautious academic, nor the much-claiming fantastic “metaphysics,” can really give us a world-view. That the road to a world-view leads through “metaphysics” is a fatal error which has already enjoyed too long a span of life in our Western thought. It would be tragic if we renewed its vigour just now, when we are faced by the necessity of working our way out of that lack of world-view in which our misery, both spiritual and material, is grounded. No further wandering along the traditional roads that lead nowhere can save us, whether we advance as the successors of our fathers or on adventurous lines of our own. Only in a deep conception of and experience in the problems of world-view is there for us any possibility of advance.

The second task which the conscious search for a world-view must not shirk, is the consideration of what is the real and ultimate nature of the process by which it has hitherto attempted to secure that serviceable world-view which hovered before it. Reflexion on this is necessary that it may make up its mind whether further advance along the road it has hitherto followed gives any prospect of success. Our philosophy ought to have been philosophizing long ago about the road along which it was going in search of a world-view. It never did so, and therefore was always running uselessly round and round in a circle.

The process by which Western thought has hitherto sought for a world-view is doomed to be fruitless. It consisted simply in interpreting the world in the sense of world- and life-affirmation, that is, in attributing to the world a meaning which allowed it to conceive the aims of mankind and of individual men as having a meaning within it. This interpretation is acted upon by all Western philosophy. A few thinkers who venture to be un-Western and resolutely allow world- and life-negation and ethics to be made subjects of discussion, are side-currents which do not affect the main course of the river.

But this awakening of Western thought will not be complete until that thought steps outside itself and comes to an understanding with the search for a world-view as this manifests itself in the thought of mankind as a whole. We have too long been occupied with the developing series of our own philosophical systems, and have taken no notice of the fact that there is a world-philosophy of which our Western philosophy is only a part. If, however, one grasps philosophy as being a struggle to reach a view of the world as a whole, and seeks out the elementary convictions which are to deepen it and give it a sure foundation, one cannot avoid setting our own thought face to face with that of the Hindus and Chinese in the Far East. The latter looks strange to us because much of it has remained even till now naïve and embodied in myth, while in other parts again it has spontaneously advanced to refinements of criticism and to artificialities. But this does not matter. The essential thing is that it is a struggle for a world-view: the form it takes is a secondary matter. Our Western philosophy, if judged by its own latest pronouncements, is much naïver than we admit to ourselves, and we fail to perceive it only because we have acquired the art of expressing what is simple in a learned way.

The attraction and tension which in Hindu thought govern the relations between world- and life-negation and ethics, afford us glimpses into the problem of ethics for which Western thought offers us no comparable opportunities.

Nowhere, again, has the problem of world- and life-affirmation, both in itself and in its relation to ethics, been felt in so elemental and comprehensive a fashion as in Chinese thought. Lao-tse, Chwang-tse, Kung-tse (Confucius), Meng-tse, Lie-tse, and the rest, are thinkers in whom the problems of world-view with which our Western thought is wrestling, encounter us in a form, strange indeed, but compelling our attention.

Discussing these problems with them means discussing them with ourselves also.

That is why I bade our search for a world-view seek to reach clear ideas about itself, and come to a halt in order to fix its attention on the thought of mankind as a whole.

My solution of the problem is that we must make up our minds to renounce completely the optimistic-ethical interpretation of the world. If we take the world as it is, it is impossible to attribute to it a meaning in which the aims and objects of mankind and of individual men have a meaning also. Neither world- and life-affirmation nor ethics can be grounded on what our knowledge of the world can tell us about the world. In the world we can discover nothing of any purposive evolution in which our activities can acquire a meaning. Nor is the ethical to be discovered in any form in the world-process. The only advance in knowledge that we can make is to describe more and more minutely the phenomena which make up the world and their course. To understand the meaning of the whole—and that is what a world-view demands—is for us an impossibility. The last fact which knowledge can discover is that the world is a manifestation in every way puzzling, of the universal will-to-live.

I believe I am the first among Western thinkers who has ventured to recognize this crushing result of knowledge, and who is absolutely sceptical about our knowledge of the world without at the same time renouncing with it belief in world- and life-affirmation and ethics. Resignation as to knowledge of the world is for me not a hopeless fall into a scepticism which leaves us to drift about in life like a derelict vessel. I see in it that effort of honesty which we must venture to make in order to arrive at the serviceable world-view which hovers within sight. Every world-view which does not start from resignation in regard to knowledge, is artificial and a mere fabrication, for it rests upon an inadmissible interpretation of the world.

When once thought has become clear to itself about the relation in which world-view and life-view stand to each other, it is in a position to reconcile resignation as to knowledge with adherence to world- and life-affirmation and ethics. Our view of life is not dependent on our view of the world in the way that uncritical thought imagines it to be. It does not wither away if it cannot send its roots down into a corresponding world-view, for it does not originate in knowledge although it would like to base itself thereon. It can safely depend upon itself alone, for it is rooted in our will-to-live.

To this dualism all the problems with which human thought has busied itself ultimately go back. Every fragment of the thought of mankind which has any bearing on man’s view of the world—whether in the world-religions or in philosophy—is an attempt to resolve this dualism. It is sometimes softened down, but only to let a unitary, monistic world-view be adopted in its place; at other times it is left current, but is transformed into a drama with a monistic issue.

Innumerable are the expedients which thought used in trying to get rid of dualism. Everything it has undertaken commands respect, even the staggering naïvetés and the meaningless acts of violence to which it committed itself, for it was always acting under the compulsion of an inner necessity: it wanted to rescue a serviceable world-view from the abyss of dualism.

But from this continuous mishandling of the problem no solution could issue capable of satisfying thought. We were to be taken over the abyss on tottering bridges of snow.

Our relation to the world as it is given in the character of our will-to-live, when this latter seeks to comprehend itself in thought: that is our view of the world. World-view is a product of life-view, not vice versâ.

The rational thought of to-day, therefore, does not hunt the phantom of getting to know the world. It leaves knowledge of the world on one side as something unattainable by us, and tries to come to clear ideas about the will-to-live which is within us.

The problem of world-view, then, brought back to facts and tackled by rational thought without assumptions being made, may be put thus: “What is the relation of my will-to-live, when it learns to think, to itself and to the world?” And the answer is: “From an inner compulsion to be true to itself and to remain consistent with itself, our will-to-live enters into relations with our own individual being and with all manifestations of the will-to-live which surround it, that are determined by the sentiment of reverence for life.”

Reverence for life, veneratio vitæ, is the most direct and at the same time the profoundest achievement of my will-to-live.

In reverence for life my knowledge passes into experience. The unsophisticated world- and life-affirmation which is within me just because I am will-to-live has, therefore, no need to enter into controversy with itself, if my will-to-live learns to think and yet does not understand the meaning of the world. In spite of the negative results of knowledge I have to hold fast to world- and life-affirmation and deepen it. My life carries its own meaning in itself. This meaning lies in my living out the highest idea which shows itself in my will-to-live, viz. the idea of reverence for life. With that for a starting-point I give value to my own life and to all the will-to-live which surrounds me, I persevere in activity, and I produce values.

Rational thinking which is free from assumptions ends therefore in mysticism. To relate oneself in the spirit of reverence for life to the multiform manifestations of the will-to-live which together constitute the world is ethical mysticism. All profound world-view is mysticism, the essence of which is just this: that out of my unsophisticated and naïve existence in the world there comes, as a result of thought about self and the world, spiritual self-devotion to the mysterious infinite Will which is continuously manifested in the universe.

This world-affirming, ethical, active mysticism has always been hovering as a vision before Western thought, but the latter could never adopt it because in its search for a world-view it always turned into the wrong road of optimistic-ethical interpretation of the world, instead of reflecting directly on the relation which man assumes to the world under the inner compulsion of the deepest characterisation of his will-to-live.

From my youth onwards I have felt certain that all thought which thinks itself out to an issue ends in mysticism. In the stillness of the primæval forest in Africa I have been able to work out this thought and give it expression.

The restoration of our world-view can come only as a result of inexorably truth-loving and recklessly courageous thought. Such thinking alone is mature enough to learn by experience how the rational, when it thinks itself out to a conclusion, passes necessarily over into the non-rational. World- and life-affirmation and ethics are non-rational. They are not justified by any corresponding knowledge of the nature of the world, but are the disposition in which, through the inner compulsion of our will-to-live, we determine our relation to the world.

What the activity of this disposition of ours means in the evolution of the world, we do not know. Nor can we regulate this activity from outside; we must leave entirely to each individual its shaping and its extension. From every point of view, then, world- and life-affirmation and ethics are non-rational, and we must have the courage to admit it.

If rational thought thinks itself out to a conclusion, it comes to something non-rational which, nevertheless, is a necessity of thought. This is the paradox which dominates our spiritual life. If we try to come through without this non-rational, the result is views of the world and of life which are without life and without value.

This rational thought must become the prevailing force among us, for all the valuable ideas that we need develop out of it. In no other fire than that of the mysticism of reverence for life can the broken sword of idealism be forged anew.

In the disposition to reverence for life lies enclosed an elementary conception of responsibility to which we must surrender ourselves; in it there are forces at work which drive us to revision and ennoblement of our individual social and political disposition.

It is the disposition to reverence for life, too, which alone is capable of creating a new consciousness of law. The misery prevailing under our political and social condition consists to a great extent in this, that neither jurists nor laity have in their minds a living and direct conception of law. During the age of rational thought there was a search made for such a conception, and effort was made to establish fundamental laws which were held to be given in the nature of man, and to get them generally recognized. Later on, however, this was given up, and laws passed at definite dates displaced natural law. Finally we got to the stage of being satisfied with purely technical law. This was the intermezzo which followed the period of rational thought in the sphere of law.

This state of things was in preparation from the moment when the search for the natural conception of law, grounded on rational thought, was given up.

The only thing to be done, then, is to make a new connexion in the sphere of law also, at the point where the thread of the rational thought of the eighteenth century got broken. We must search for a conception of law that is grounded in an idea which grows directly and independently out of a world-view. We have to re-establish human rights which cannot be infringed, human rights which guarantee to each person the greatest possible freedom for his personality in his own national body, human rights which protect his existence and his human dignity against any foreign violence to which he may be subjected.

Jurists have allowed law and the feeling for law to be ruined. They could not help it, however, for there was no idea provided by the thought of the time to which a living conception of law could have anchored itself. In the complete absence of any world-view law collapsed entirely, and it is only out of a new world-view that it can be built up again. It is from a fundamental idea about our relation to all that lives, as such, that it must flow in future, as from a spring which can never dry up and never become a swamp. That spring is reverence for life.

In this way a world-view is the germ of all ideas and dispositions which are determinative for the conduct of individuals and of society.

Flying machines carry men to-day through the air over a world in which hunger and brigandage have a place. It is not in China only that one recognizes the grotesque character of such progress: it is almost typical for mankind generally, and such grotesque progress cannot be changed to the normal till a general disposition prevails which is capable of bringing order again into the chaos of human life through ethics. In the last resort the practical can be realized only through the ethical

What a remarkable circle! Rational thought which thinks itself out arrives at something non-rational and subjective which is a necessity of thought, viz. the ethical affirmation of world and life. On the other hand, what for the purpose of moulding the conditions of existence for individual men and mankind as a whole is rational, that is to say, what is objectively practical in this regard, can only be brought about by individuals perseveringly putting into action the above-mentioned non-rational and subjective. The non-rational principle underlying our activity, a principle which is provided for us by rational thought, is the sole rational and practical principle underlying all the happenings which are to be produced through human action. Thus the rational and the non-rational, the objective and the subjective proceed each from the other, and return each into the other again. Only when the play of this mutual interchange is in full activity do normal conditions of existence arise for men and mankind. Let it be disturbed and the abnormal develops.

But I also put into this book my conviction that mankind must renew itself in a new temper of mind, if it is not to be ruined. I entrust to it, further, my belief that this revolution will come about, if only we can make up our minds to become thinking men.

A new Renaissance must come, and a much greater one than that in which we stepped out of the Middle Ages; a great Renaissance in which mankind discovers that the ethical is the highest truth and the highest practicality, and experiences at the same time its liberation from that miserable obsession by what it calls reality, in which it has hitherto dragged itself along.

I would be a humble pioneer of this Renaissance, and throw the belief in a new humanity, like a torch, into our dark age. I make bold to do this because I believe I have given to the disposition to humanity, which hitherto has ranked only as a noble feeling, a firm foundation in a world-view which is a product of elementary thinking and can be made intelligible to everyone. Moreover, it has gained thereby a power of attracting and convincing which it has not had hitherto; and is capable now of coming to terms in energetic and consistent fashion with our so-called reality, and of proving its full value within it.

ALBERT SCHWEITZER.

July, 1923.

The translator offers his thanks to Mrs. C. E. B. Russell, now helping at Lambarene, who kindly reviewed the whole work before it went to the printers. Many of her criticisms and suggestions were adopted, and have helped to secure a better translation.

CONTENTS