Schweitzer, Dewey, and a Reverent, Rewilded Education

Abstract

The principle of Reverence for Life grounded Albert Schweitzer’s thought and guided his life. For us today, it has implications not only for how we treat our fellow human beings, but how we treat all of life, especially other-than-human animals. I became interested in the life and thought of Albert Schweitzer in the late 1990s, and was particularly captivated by his idea of Reverence for Life, as this idea applied to human— animal relationships. In this chapter, I discuss Reverence for Life in relation to animals because I believe Schweitzer’s relations to animals have not been fully appreciated in the context of his theory. I begin with analyses of several incidents where Schweitzer developed his sense of compassion for and connection with animals. Two popular books bring together passages of his work that concern animals (Free, 1988; Schweitzer & Joy, 1950). I discuss passages of these books in relation to education about animals, developing further ideas that I explored initially in my book on Schweitzer and education (Rud, 2011). I then make an argument for an expanded sense of human interaction and relation to other-than-human animals by connecting the idea of Reverence for Life to John Dewey’s pragmatic naturalism (Hickman, 2013) and to the movement called “rewilding,” and I conclude with a meditation upon the possibility of a reverent, rewilded, sustainable future where human animals exist alongside non-human animals rather than over them.