The situation changes when we understand the command of life as the command of the Creator of life. Thus understood the command implies—and this already makes impossible the ringlike arrangements of Spencer’s ethics21—a radical relativizing of my will to live as the will to live my own life. I must see my own life both posited and set aside in the thought of God the Creator. In this thought my will to live must be readiness to maintain my life and also to surrender it. What is unequivocally commanded is that I live for God, not that I just live in general. With this relativizing the concept of the life of others already comes into my field of vision, and first of all the concept of the life of God which alone is original and self-grounded. If this is so, if in my attention a space has been created for a life that is not my own, this liberated attention, which we cannot direct to the life of God as such, is necessarily claimed vicariously by the fact of outside life of another kind, the creaturely life outside and alongside us. We know this life analogously from its expressions as life. But through the command, which has told us about our own life, we have to regard it as creaturely life like our own. We have to see that our own life, in spite of all its mysterious distance from it (because it is not our own, but inalienably that of another), stands in solidarity with it by reason of its being in the same relation to the Creator as we are. Necessarily if I really see my life as a creaturely life that is set under the command, the creaturely life around me is freed from being pushed into the second or third rank of my attention, from playing the part of a mere means to promote or hinder my own will to live. I know it in the relative autonomy that is no less proper to it than to me. Its factuality has a significance, if a very different one, for my willing which prevents me from simply defining the will to live as a good will. Naturally I can will to live only my own life. An alien life is the life of another which only the other, not I, can will to live. But more important than what we will is how we will. As I exercise my will to live, what might be more important for this will than its object is the fact that I will to live only with respect, with respect, of course, for the Creator, but also with a very different respect for the life of his creatures in which my own creatureliness, the absolute otherness of the life of God from which I also have my life, encounters me relatively, in a likeness.
The concept for respect or reverence for life is borrowed from Albert Schweitzer.22 As an opponent of Nietzsche among the naturalistic ethicists, Schweitzer had the great merit of one-sidedly, but for the first time comprehensively and forcefully, referring to the point which is at issue here, namely, the necessary determination of a good will by the factuality of the life of others as such. |
I cannot follow Schweitzer, of course, when, under the express title of ethical mysticism, he makes the will to live coincident with reverence for life. His own statement is that, when my life gives itself in some way to life, my finite will to live becomes one with the infinite will in which all life is one (K. und Eth. II, 243).23 This implies an erasing of the distinction between command and obedience, between God and man, which naturally will not do. That we will to live, but to live primarily with respect, may be one in the command but not in human fulfillment. Nor can I agree with Schweitzer when he allows all ethics to be exhausted in the ethics of reverence for life, bringing everything under this one common denominator. This is impossible for a theological ethics which does not know the God who commands merely as God the Creator. Again, Schweitzer himself robbed his argument of its true and final force when he failed to base the command of reverence on the concept of God, but retreated to his mystical experience and thus gave his whole presentation an element of biographical contingency.
Apart from these objections one must perhaps be more grateful for Schweitzer’s achievement than Nietzsche’s in view of the greater relevance of the weak point in all previous ethics which he has underlined. His concept of reverence or respect for life expresses very beautifully and carefully what is at issue here. It is not a question of our relation to our fellows or neighbors as such. Our fellows become an ethical problem through the command of God the Reconciler, and this problem cannot be simply subsumed under the concept of the life of others. That another human being lives alongside and with me is obviously a fact of a distinctive kind. Naturally, he also lives with and alongside me as the alien lives of other beings are lived alongside men. The concept of this alien life in general, which includes the life of animals and plants, cannot be an indifferent matter so far as the definition of the good will is concerned. In spite of his fatal mysticism, then, Schweitzer spoke felicitously, not of love, but of respect for life. Respect is in fact what alien life as such demands of us, or rather what is demanded for it by God the Creator. As we exercise our will to live, this life of others must be handled with awe and responsibility: with awe—we might also say piety, or, more deeply and basically, sympathy—because we know that the divine command can mean life or death at any time not only for our own life but also for all other life; and with responsibility because our attitude to this other life, by what we fail to do as well as by what we do, can mean its life or death, and thus represents God’s own action toward it, so that, whether we admit it or not, we have to signify and know in some way the crisis of this alien life. It is not that we are to stand in awe of the alien will to live as such—just as we cannot understand our own will to live to be good as such—but we are to stand in awe of the sword of the Lord under which it, too, stands and because of which its will and ours must be broken into a will to live and also a will to die, seeing that the command of life as the command of God can mean both. Nor are we responsible to the alien will to live as such but to the will of God in virtue of which what we fail to do, or do, means always the hindrance or the promotion of that alien will to live. This takes place either in the name and service of the Creator or by our own arrogance and arbitrariness. To act in that awe in face of the threatened nature of all creaturely life, and in that responsibility for what our own inaction or action means for it is to act with respect for life.
Albert Schweitzer complained not unjustly about the “narrowness of heart” with which previous ethics, including naturalistic ethics, had limited its attention to self-giving to men and human society. “Just as the housewife, having scrubbed the step, closes the door so that the dog will not come in and spoil her work by the marks of its paws, so European thinkers take good care that no dogs will run around in their ethics” (225).24 An ethics which knows God’s command seriously as also the command of God the Creator will in fact have to draw its circle much more widely at this point than is usually done. Let us listen first to what Schweitzer himself has to say on the point. According to him a person is truly ethical only when he follows the compulsion to help all life that he can, and is hesitant to do harm to anything living. He does not ask how far this life is valuable and deserves sympathy nor does he ask whether or how far it is capable of feeling. Life as such is sacred to him. He does not pluck a single leaf