"I can do no other than be reverent before everything that is called life. I can do no other than to have compassion for all that is called life. That is the beginning and the foundation of all ethics"
About this Quote
Schweitzer writes like someone trying to build an ethical system that can survive contact with reality: not a tidy set of rules, but a posture. The doubled phrase "I can do no other" is doing heavy lifting. It frames reverence and compassion not as virtuous choices but as moral inevitabilities, a conscience speaking in the register of necessity. That rhetorical insistence matters: he is trying to outflank the endless exceptions people use to wriggle out of duty.
The key move is his slippery, almost clinical repetition of "everything that is called life" and "all that is called life". He does not say "human life", or "innocent life", or "life like mine". He anticipates the reader's urge to draw boundaries and refuses to help. The phrase "called life" also hints at epistemic humility: we may not fully grasp what life is, but we can still commit to treating it as morally significant. It's reverence with a built-in warning against arrogance.
Context sharpens the stakes. Schweitzer is a theologian and medical missionary formed in an era when European modernity congratulated itself on progress while waging industrial war and administering empires. His ethic of "reverence for life" reads as a rebuke to that hypocrisy: you can't preach civilization and casually instrumentalize bodies, animals, or ecosystems. Calling this "the beginning" and "foundation" of ethics is strategic too. He is not offering one moral principle among many; he is staking out a baseline that judges every policy, institution, and personal comfort by a simple test: does it cultivate awe and care, or does it train us to treat life as disposable?
The key move is his slippery, almost clinical repetition of "everything that is called life" and "all that is called life". He does not say "human life", or "innocent life", or "life like mine". He anticipates the reader's urge to draw boundaries and refuses to help. The phrase "called life" also hints at epistemic humility: we may not fully grasp what life is, but we can still commit to treating it as morally significant. It's reverence with a built-in warning against arrogance.
Context sharpens the stakes. Schweitzer is a theologian and medical missionary formed in an era when European modernity congratulated itself on progress while waging industrial war and administering empires. His ethic of "reverence for life" reads as a rebuke to that hypocrisy: you can't preach civilization and casually instrumentalize bodies, animals, or ecosystems. Calling this "the beginning" and "foundation" of ethics is strategic too. He is not offering one moral principle among many; he is staking out a baseline that judges every policy, institution, and personal comfort by a simple test: does it cultivate awe and care, or does it train us to treat life as disposable?
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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