Albert Schweitzer Portrait Digital Art by M Spadecaller

Albert Schweitzer Portrait

by M Spadecaller

Canvas Print

$73

Framed Print

$82

Art Print

$27

Poster

$27

Metal Print

$79

Acrylic Print

$87

Wood Print

$59

Throw Pillow

$27

Duvet Cover

$99

Tote Bag

$24

Greeting Card

$6.95

iPhone Case

$27

Title

Albert Schweitzer Portrait

Artist

M Spadecaller

Medium

Digital Art - Digitial Painting

Description

“Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing”.
- Albert Schweitzer

Born Jan 14, 1875 – died September 5, 1965. Albert Schweitzer, OM was a French-German theologian, organist, philosopher, and physician.
As a young man to his middle eighties, Schweitzer was internationally recognized as a concert organist. From his professional engagements as a young musician, he earned his way through medical schooling and then founded the medical hospital at Lambaréné in French Equatorial Africa. He received the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize for his philosophy expressed in his book, "Reverence for Life".

Despite his heroic work in Africa and the thousands of sick and suffering Africans he served, Schweitzer believed his most significant contribution to the world was his painstaking attempt to live by his personal philosophy embodied in “Reverence for Life.” Schweitzer was colonialism's harshest critics. Before he announced his plans to dedicate the rest of his life to work as a doctor in Africa, he spoke these words in a sermon (Jan 6, 1905).

He said:
"This culture does not know how hollow and miserable and full of glib talk it is, how common it looks to those who follow it across the seas and see what it has done there, and this culture has no right to speak of personal dignity and human rights...I will not enumerate all the crimes that have been committed under the pretext of justice. People robbed native inhabitants of their land, made slaves of them, let loose the scum of mankind upon them.Think of the atrocities that were perpetrated upon people made subservient to us, how systematically we have ruined them with our alcoholic 'gifts', and everything else we have done... We decimate them, and then, by the stroke of a pen, we take their land so they have nothing left at all..."

"True philosophy must start from the most immediate and comprehensive fact of consciousness, and this may be formulated as follows: 'I am life which wills to live, and I exist in the midst of life which wills to live.' In nature one form of life must always prey upon another. However, human consciousness holds an awareness of, and sympathy for, the will of other beings to live. An ethical human strives to escape from this contradiction so far as possible."

"Though we cannot perfect the endeavor we should strive for it: the will-to-live constantly renews itself, for it is both an evolutionary necessity and a spiritual phenomenon. Life and love are rooted in this same principle, in a personal spiritual relationship to the universe. Ethics themselves proceed from the need to respect the wish of other beings to exist as one does towards oneself.”

For Schweitzer, mankind would need to accept an ethically universal objective reality. Enlightenment requires that one can make their ethical will the primary meaning of life. Mankind had to choose to create the moral structures of civilization: the world-view must be based on the life-view, not vice versa. Respect for life, overcoming coarser impulses and hollow doctrines, can inspire the individual to live in the service of other people. In contemplation of the will-to-life, respect for the life of others becomes the highest principle and the defining purpose of humanity. Such was the theory which Schweitzer sought to put into practice in his own life. His example lives on in the lives of many. -Spadecaller