The Decay and the Restoration of Civilization (The Philosophy of Civilization, Part I)

The first volume of Schweitzer's philosophy of civilization, published in German by C. H. Beck in Munich and in C. T. Campion's English translation by A. & C. Black in London, both in 1923; the English edition gives it as the Dale Memorial Lectures of 1922. It is a short diagnosis: Western civilization has decayed because it has lost an ethical view of the world, and philosophy has abandoned its task of providing one, so that the nations went into the war of 1914 without the convictions that make civilization possible. Its restoration depends on recovering, by thinking, an affirmation of the world and of life that is also ethical. The book prepares the argument of the second volume, Kultur und Ethik, where Schweitzer offers reverence for life as that foundation. The planned third and fourth volumes were never finished.