Synthesis philosophica, Vol. 27 No. 1, 2012.
Review article
The Problem of Albert Schweitzer’s Ethical Worldview
Borut Ošlaj
orcid.org/0009-0004-0911-5696
; University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Abstract
In the first part of this paper we present the problem of worldview within Schweitzer’s ethics of reverence for life, in the second we delineate the limits of his concept, followed by the discussion on possible worldview perspectives for the future. Based on the critique of philosophy and its inability to create a universally practicable ethics, Schweitzer tried to transform the traditional philosophy into a worldview, thus trying to initiate a process of ethical renaissance of culture. Most of his ethical efforts serve for the project of grounding and simultaneously possible realising an active and affirmative ethical relationship toward world and life which focuses not only on particular, highly sensible or even enlightened individuals, but which could also be capable for mobilising the entire society. Schweitzer tried to justify the worldview not according to the society, as it is usual, but from a direct view of life (Lebensanschauung) and its epistemological inscrutability (the will to live), thereby opening the social space for a direct, optimistic action orientation which accepts all forms of life. The effort for the enthusiastic character of moral actions, the character that should rise from the thinking experience of the will to live to the level of ethical worldview, was Schweitzer’s great novum.
Keywords
critique of philosophy; worldview; view of life; ideology; ethics
Hrčak ID:
94702
URI
Publication date:
1.10.2012.
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