Civilization and Ethics (The Philosophy of Civilization, Part II)

The second volume of Schweitzer's philosophy of civilization, published by C. H. Beck in Munich and, in Campion's translation, by A. & C. Black in London in 1923. Most of the book is a history of ethical thought from the Greeks and the Chinese and Indian thinkers through Christianity, the Enlightenment, Kant, the German idealists and the nineteenth century, read as a long search for an ethical affirmation of life and the world that can be grounded in thought. Schweitzer judges that each attempt failed and then sets out his own answer: ethics as reverence for life (Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben), the attitude of the will-to-live that respects every other will-to-live, from which responsibility for all living things follows. The idea came to him, as he later recounted, on a river journey in Africa in 1915. This volume is the main statement of the principle for which he is best known.