Apparent and Real Perspectives of Culture

The reader of Albert Schweitzer's “History of the Life-Jesu Research” (from Reimarus to Wrede, 1906) and other writings by the same author must consider him to be a very sharp thinker. For someone who wants to use his thoughts to penetrate into areas of intellectual life that many others consider inaccessible to thought and only reachable through emotional, mystical or religious experience.

One therefore eagerly seizes upon the recently published first part of a “Philosophy of Culture” by Albert Schweitzer, entitled “Decay and Rebuilding of Culture” (Paul Haupt, Academic Bookshop Bern, 1923).

Right from the first pages, we encounter a description of the feelings evoked by the signs of decay in today's “culture”. The lack of a way of thinking that takes hold of the spirituality of the world is thoroughly felt and characterized with cutting sharpness. The words of criticism fall like cutting knives on the entire face of contemporary life.

The first sentence is: “We are under the sign of the decline of culture.” This sets the tone. And from its continuation we hear: “We abandoned culture because there was no reflection on culture among us.”... “So we crossed the threshold of the century with unshakable illusions about ourselves.”... “Now it is clear to everyone that the self-destruction of culture is underway.”... “The Enlightenment and rationalism had established ethical rational ideals about the development of the individual into true humanity, about his position in society, about its material and spiritual tasks...” ... ”But around the middle of the nineteenth century, this confrontation of ethical rational ideals with reality began to decline. In the course of the following decades, it increasingly came to a standstill. The abdication of culture took place without a fight and without a sound...

Schweitzer believes he sees the reason for this. In earlier worldviews, ethical ideals of reason lay in the same sources as thoughts about nature. These worldviews saw a spiritual world behind nature. And from this spiritual world, impulses flowed into the facts of nature; but so did ethical ideals of reason into the human soul. There was a “total worldview.” This does not exist today. The thoughts of the new worldview can only speak of forces in natural phenomena, but not of ethical goals of the human soul.

Schweitzer sees only a powerless philosophy within this situation, and this is to blame for the decline. “That thinking did not manage to create a worldview of optimistic-ethical character and to found the ideals that make up culture in such a worldview was not the fault of philosophy, but a fact that arose in the development of thinking. But philosophy was guilty of our world because it did not admit the fact and remained in the illusion that it was really maintaining a progress of culture.” ... ”So little philosophy philosophized about culture that it did not even notice how it itself, and the time with it, became more and more cultureless. In the hour of danger, the guard who was supposed to keep us awake slept. And so it came about that we did not struggle for our culture."

Schweitzer points out that institutions in the external world, on which modern humanity relies, cannot stop the decay of culture. He is clear that all material life, if it is to develop into culture, must radiate from the independent creations of spiritual life. He finds that people of the present time, because they have lost themselves in the material world around them, have become unfree, unsummoned in their thinking, incomplete in the development of their full humanity, and humanitarian in their ethical behavior. The institutions of life appear to him to be over-organized, because the initiative of the individual is inhibited by the harnessing into the organizations, which everywhere want to absorb the individual into an abstract, impersonal general.

The fact that trust in the creative power of the thinking mind has vanished is characterized by Schweitzer in the most diverse ways. “In the past, every scientist was also a thinker who meant something in the general intellectual life of his generation. Our time has arrived at the ability to distinguish between science and thinking. That is why we still have freedom of science, but almost no thinking science.” In the souls of thinkers, in Schweitzer's sense, the impulses must arise that have an effect on all material cultural events. ”Kant and Hegel have ruled millions who have never read a line from them and did not even know that they were obeying them.” ... “That the Roman Empire, despite the many outstanding rulers it had, perished, was ultimately because ancient philosophy produced no worldview with empire-preserving ideas.” ... “For the whole as well as for the individual, life without a worldview is a pathological disturbance of the higher sense of orientation.”

I must now shape the rest of these remarks in such a way that I expose myself to the danger of being considered an imagined drip by many. But in view of my conviction about the things that Albert Schweitzer discusses, there is no other way.

Let us assume that someone wants to build a house and one asks them: how should it be designed? He answers: solid, weatherproof, beautiful and such that one can live comfortably in it. You won't be able to do much with this answer. You will have to design a concrete plan and well-founded forms. Albert Schweitzer sees through the dilapidation of “contemporary culture”. He asks himself: what should the structure of a new one be like? He answers: “The great task of the mind is to create a worldview.” “The future of culture thus depends on whether thought is capable of arriving at a worldview that embraces optimism, that is, an affirmation of the world and of life, and that possesses ethics more securely and more fundamentally than those that have existed to date.” Well, you can't do much with this answer either. Anthroposophy perceives the negative in ‘contemporary culture’ in a similar way to Schweitzer. She may express this less loudly and less forcefully; but she answers the observed with a spiritual insight that leads human thinking from the legitimate demands of the view of nature to a rootedness in the living spiritual world. In this spiritual world, ethical ideals have a force effect again, as in the field of nature, the forces of nature.

Schweitzer believes that modern thinking shies away from penetrating into the spiritual and leaves this field to thought-free mysticism. “But why,” he says, “assume that the path of thinking ends before mysticism?” He wants a thinking that is so alive that it can penetrate into the regions that many assign to mysticism. Now, anthroposophy lives entirely in such thinking and in such a relationship to mysticism. Schweitzer finds: “How much would be gained for today's conditions if we all just looked up thoughtfully at the infinite worlds of the starry sky for three minutes every evening and, when attending a funeral, would surrender to the mystery of death and life...” One can see how anthroposophy relates to this.

Schweitzer characterizes all this as someone who says: I want a house that is solid, weatherproof, beautiful and so on that one can live comfortably in it. Anthroposophy does not want to remain in these abstractions, but to design the concrete building plan.