Civilization and ethics — A Reader’s Guide

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In Category - Political Philosophy

Authors: Schweitzer, Albert, 1875-1965, Campion, C. T. (Charles Thomas), 1861-1938 [Translator] Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2025 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: Ethics; Civilization -- History Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

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Words 106,408

Reading time 463 min

Text sections 14

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Schweitzer's unsparing reckoning with Western philosophy's failure to ground an ethical world-view, tracing how thought became academic and civilization fragmentary. A critique of Hegel's subordination of ethics to the State and his kinship with Brahmanic intellectualism.

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t it. On the other hand, it is clear that ethical thinkers like Socrates, Kant, or Fichte had a moralizing influence on many of their [pg 022] contemporaries. From every revival of ethical reflexion there went forth ethical movements which made the contemporary generation fitter for its tasks. If any age lacks the minds which force it to reflect about the ethical, the level of its morality sinks and with it its capacity for answering the questions which present themselves to it.

In the history of ethical thought we wander in the innermost circles of world-history. Of all the forces which mould reality morality is the first and foremost. It is the determining knowledge which we must wring from thought. Everything else is more or less secondary.

For this reason everyone who believes that he can contribute something to help forward the ethical self-consciousness of society and of individuals has the right to speak now, although it is political and economic questions that the present day prescribes for study. For what is inopportune is really opportune. We can accomplish something lasting in the problems of political and economic life only if we approach them as men who are trying to think ethically. All those who help forward in any way our thought about ethics are working for the coming of peace and prosperity to the world. They are engaged in the higher politics, and the higher rational economics, and even if all they can do is nothing more than to bring ethical thinking to the fore, they have nevertheless done something valuable. All reflexion about ethics has as one result a raising and rousing of the general disposition to morality.

The search for a basic principle of morality

But however certain it is that every age lives by the energies which have sprung from its thought about ethics, it is equally certain that up to now the ethical thoughts which have become current have after a longer or a shorter period lost their power of convincing. Why has the establishment of an ethical system never met with more than a partial and temporary success, and never been a permanency? Why is the history of the ethical thinking of [pg 023] mankind the history of inexplicable stoppages and fallings-back? Why has there been in this sphere no organic progress which allows one period to build upon the achievements of preceding ones? Why in the sphere of ethics do we live in a town full of ruins, in which one generation builds for itself here, and another there, what is absolutely necessary?

“To preach morality is easy, to establish it is hard,” says Schopenhauer, and that saying shows what the problem is.

In every effort of thought about ethics there is to be seen, distinctly or indistinctly, the search for a basic principle of morality, which needs no support outside itself, and unites in itself the sum total of all moral demands. But no one has ever succeeded in really formulating this principle. Elements only of it were brought to light and given out to be the whole, until the difficulties which emerged destroyed the illusion. The tree, however finely it sprouted, did not live to grow old, because it was unable to send its roots down into the permanently nourishing and moisture-giving earth.

The chaos of ethical views becomes to some extent intelligible as soon as one sees that we are concerned with differing and mutually contradictory views about fragments of the basic principle. The contradiction has its foundation in their incompleteness. There is ethical matter in what Kant objects to in the ethics of rationalism, as also in what he puts in its place; in that part of Kant’s writings where his conception of the moral is opposed by Schopenhauer, as also in what is to take its place in the ethical system of the latter. Schopenhauer is ethical in the points on which Nietzsche attacks him, and Nietzsche is ethical in his opposition to Schopenhauer. What is wanted is to find the fundamental chord in which the dissonances of these varied and contradictory ethical ideas unite in producing harmony.

The ethical problem, then, is the problem of a basic principle of morality, which is founded in thought. What is the common element of good in the manifold goods which we feel to be such? Is there such a universally valid [pg 024] conception of the good? If there is, in what does it consist, and how far is it real and necessary for me? What influence has it over my general disposition and my actions? Into what relations with the world does it bring me?

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Schweitzer opens by declaring his subject “the tragedy of the Western world-view.” He recounts how, as a student, he noticed that the history of thought was written as a history of philosophical systems, not as a history of man’s effort to arrive at a world-view. This observation drives his unsparing reckoning with Western thought: it sought a world- and life-affirming ethical foundation for civilization, but never succeeded in grounding it convincingly. Instead, philosophy produced “unstable fragments” and became captive to secondary, academic questions. Schweitzer’s diagnosis is blunt: philosophy offered “bandmaster’s music” instead of real music.

Philosophy’s Failure to Be Elemental

Schweitzer charges that Western philosophy lost connection with the elementary questions that man must ask of life and the world. It found satisfaction in handling merely academic questions and in mastering philosophical technique. The result was a philosophy that “did nothing but philosophize” instead of struggling for a world-view grounded in thought. This failure, he argues, made civilization itself fragmentary and insecure. The language is striking: philosophy produced “again and again mere bandmaster’s music, often magnificent stuff of its kind, but still only bandmaster’s music.” The metaphor suggests technical proficiency without genuine substance—a performance that impresses but does not nourish.

Hegel’s Supra-Ethical World-View

Schweitzer’s critique of Hegel is detailed and pointed. He notes that Hegel wrote no treatise on ethics; what he published on ethics appears in his philosophy of law. For Hegel, the State is “the self-conscious moral substance,” and the most valuable in the moral comes to actuality in and through it. Schweitzer sees this as an overvaluing of the State, a consequence of Hegel’s low valuation of the spiritual significance of individuality. Hegel refuses ethics the liberty to be conceived as a relation of the individual to the universe; instead, ethics are restricted to regulating relations between individuals and society. They are “simply built into the edifice as an already shaped and dressed stone.”

An Unexpected Kinship: Hegel and the Brahmans

Schweitzer draws a remarkable analogy between Hegel’s thought and Brahmanic philosophy. Both, he argues, allow ethics only a preparatory role: with the Brahmans, ethics prepare the individual for an intellectual act of experiencing the Absolute; with Hegel, they help form the society in which the Absolute experiences itself. The inner similarity is that both give value to ethics only as a phase of intellectuality. Schweitzer insists that in neither system are ethics shown to be necessary. For Hegel, society could come into existence by law alone, making his ethic “only a species of law.” The comparison is not flattering: it exposes a deep intellectualism that subordinates ethical life to a higher, non-ethical end.

Schweitzer’s argument demands that the reader reconsider what philosophy ought to do. He does not offer a solution here; instead, he lays bare a pattern of evasion and intellectualism that he believes has crippled Western civilization. Readers should attend to his recurring metaphors—bandmaster’s music, dressed stone, colouring—as clues to his method. The book is a diagnosis, not a prescription, and its force lies in the precision of its accusations.

I remember sitting with Schweitzer’s grief over Hegel’s tidy system—how ethics dissolved into the State’s machinery, like Brahmanic air. It felt like watching a friend’s faith quietly crack. Later, The Philosophical Theory of the State — Key Ideas to Explore offered a gentler echo of that ache, a map of the same precarious ledge. Both left me less certain, but oddly warmer toward what remains.