Reviews of and Quotes From Dr. Schweitzer's Books

Here is my review of a book about Dr. Schweitzer. All the books I review are in English. Many of them are out of print, but generally can be found by a book search from a good used-book dealer or in softcopy from the Internet Archive. See The Albert Schweitzer Page for links to my reviews of books written by Dr. Schweitzer as well as other related information.


Safari of Discovery: The Universe of Albert Schweitzer

Written By: Herbert M. Phillips
Edition: Vision Press, London   1960
Hardcover, 271 pages

No ISBN Shown

This book is available via the Internet Archive at [IA].

Quotes

Table of Contents

I'm not quite sure what to make of Herbert Phillips. A dentist, he nevertheless seems to have met and discussed philosophy and education policy with some of the leading intellectuals in America during the 1940s and 50s. He clearly read widely and was very familiar with Schweitzer's writings. But his own ideas are hard to pin down, and seem rather avant garde if not actually zany.

While working briefly as a dentist in Lambarene, he met with Schweitzer on several occasions. His overt purpose was to gain Schweitzer's consent to founding Schweitzer Chair profesorships in prestigious universities (he indicates that people from universities and foundations have authorized him to propose this, though the details are vague). But what he really wanted to do is evaluate whether Schweitzer is a prophet. Not metaphorically, but a real Old-Testament style, inspired-and-directed-by-God Prophet. One can almost feel Schweitzer cringing at the adulation. Eventually Phillips decided that Schweitzer is not a prophet, or at least that he differs with Schweitzer on enough details that he cannot act as Schweitzer's herald. It is a serious evaluation, not simply or at least not totally hero-worship, but it is cloying and rather self-aggrandizing.

Phillips tried to incoporate ideas from modern science into his philosophy. He conceived of freedom as a sort of force or conglomerate of forces, and most other things as catalysts for good or evil. Though not thoroughly presented in this volume, Phillips seems to have ideas at the level of metaphor but without foundation. As is common with those who use terms from physics to propose philosophical ideas, once one gets past Phillips' terms and into the concepts, there appears to be nothing there or at most a simple re-casting of common ideas.But I do not want to be too hard on Phillips; he's clearly trying to articulate a vision of a better universe, and may have had something to contribute.


Quotes from Safari of Discover: The Universe of Albert Schweitzer:

[After Phillips asked him whether he had altered any of the convictions expressed in his early books about the significance of will-to-live and reverence for life, Schweitzer replied] "All of my studies and all of my years of experience have served only to confirm my fundamental convictions concerning the reality of 'will' in the universe, the centrality of 'will' in the life process, its supreme role as human self-consciousness, its rational connection with all good and evil in human relations, and its singularity as a sovereign value worthy of universal human reverence."


[As Phillips was imagining himself as a sort of traveling missionary of Schweitzer's ideas] "Instead of indulging in self-ridicule for my brash apostolic illusions, I asked a more poignant question: what has gone wrong that people must be embarrassed to share and declare their finest dreams?"


"The prodigious intellectual and spiritual accomplishment achieved by Dr. Schweitzer is, in my judgment, his new cosmic explanation of freedom. His theory of the universe is dissimilar from the feudal view and opposed to the Hegelian view. Like the eighteenth-century thinkers he finds freedom not in institutions but in man as a creature.... Freedom is composed of all the forces that have not been measured. The tools that disclose the truch of matter and energy will not work on freedom. All the enigmas seem to be forms of catalysts."


[Quoting Schweitzer, during a conversation about setting up Schweitzer Professorship Chairs in American universities] "Dr. Phillips, I do not believe that Reverence for Life should be stressed more in institutions of learning than in society in general. My system of ethics must not be organized or institutionalized. It should be discovered by individuals."



Table of Contents of Safari of Discovery: The Universe of Albert Schweitzer

Acknowledgments

  1. Entrance to a Forest Cathedral of Ideas
  2. In the Surgery
  3. An Evening With Dr. Schweitzer
  4. The Early Plan of the Albert Schweitzer Education Foundation
  5. Portrait of a Modern Prophet
  6. A Private Discourse on Ethics
  7. Dr. Schweitzer's Views of Jesus
  8. On Paul and Goethe
  9. Catalysis and Free Will
  10. Dr. Schweitzer Plays Bach for Me
  11. Reflections After the Music Evening
  12. Campus Religions
  13. Au Revoir to Lambarene
Epilogue
  1. The Real Crisis and the Educational Dream
  2. Christianity, Communism, and the Religion of Reason
  3. Re-living Theories of the Universe in the University of the Universe
  4. Reason's Ethics in Action on the Field
  5. Climax on the Scientific Summit
Index


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