My Life and Thought by Albert Schweitzer

In October of 1893 the young Albert became a student at Strasbourg University. He grew up in Gunsbach in the Muster valley. Schweitzer was born on January 14th, 1875 at Kayserberg in Upper Alsace, his father was a minister from a long line of ministers, and he was the older cousin of Jean-Paul Sartre. Schweitzer argues that the concept of civilization has been forgotten, and the material infrastructure which accompanied it historically has been put over as the thing itself. In an age when 'civilization' is either vilified as hierarchical, exploitive and environmentally unsound, or it is reduced to a sociological examination of cities, it may help to know that, at least according to Schweitzer, we are beating the wrong dead horse. In 1923 he published, The Philosophy of Civilization 2 While many of Schweitzer's ideas are quaint, seemingly outmoded, even naive, they contain a profound nature.

Wright Mill's notion of the 'cheerful robot,' as well as the decline which now besets our society. In so arguing, he anticipated much of Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man, and C. When he went to Africa, it became easy to tuck him away as a convenient symbol of humanitarian sacrifice, and to ignore the bothersome notions which had shocked thinkers of his day: Schweitzer argued (as early as 1900), that civilization was already dead, and that we live in a barbarous society. Yet today, his philosophy has been forgotten. 1 Yet, in addition to being a theologian, minister, and concert organist, Schweitzer was also a philosopher. Today he is chiefly known for his medical mission, and secondly as the theologian who shaped our modern view of early Christian eschatology. Unlike Mother Teresa, however, Schweitzer gave up not one, but four brilliant careers to became a doctor in equatorial Africa. At the time of his death in 1965, he was the household symbol of the best sacrificial instincts in humanity, a man who gave all he had to serve among the poorest of the poor. No theory of the universe has been advanced which can give them a solid foundation.Įfore there was Mother Teresa, there was Albert Schweitzer. The ethical ideas on which civilization rests have been wandering about the world, poverty stricken and homeless.

My Life and Thought by Albert Schweitzer