Featured Essay: 'Torn Between Paradigms? A Reflection on Schweitzer’s Failure to Complete His Philosophy of Civilization'

by Predrag Cicovacki

Why did Albert Schweitzer never complete the projected third volume of his Philosophy of Civilization? In this important new essay, Predrag Cicovacki argues that the answer lies not in any lack of intellectual resolve, nor in a defect in Schweitzer’s ethic of reverence for life, but in a fundamental conflict between that ethic and the dominant assumptions of the modern worldview.

Schweitzer sought to establish reverence for life within a framework shaped by rationalism, reductivism, individualism and faith in linear progress. Yet an ethic grounded in responsiveness to living beings could not easily be reconciled with a worldview that takes inert matter, separable objects and mechanical causation as its primary model of reality.

Drawing on Schweitzer’s growing engagement with Rabindranath Tagore, Indian thought and Chinese ideas of complementarity and balance, Cicovacki shows how Schweitzer was moving towards a more relational and dynamic account of reality without ever fully formulating it. The essay proposes that dynamic symmetry provides the conceptual framework that Schweitzer lacked: one in which life is understood through interaction, self-organisation, tension, adaptation and continually negotiated balance.

Cicovacki’s argument recasts Schweitzer’s unfinished philosophy not as a simple failure, but as an incomplete transition between two fundamentally different paradigms. It also suggests a way of carrying Schweitzer’s work forward: by developing the metaphysics, theory of personality and axiology needed to give reverence for life a more adequate philosophical foundation. 

Download the essay here