I Am a Strange Loop

schoolmates, and this disparity disturbed him greatly. From that day onward, he insisted on dressing just like his poorer schoolmates.

A vivid excerpt from Schweitzer’s autobiographical opus Aus meiner Kindheit und Jugendzeit portrays the compassion that pervaded his life:

As far as I can peer back into my childhood, I suffered from all the misery that I saw in the world around me. I truly never knew a simple, youthful joie de vivre, and I believe that this is the case for many children, even if from the outside they give the appearance of being completely happy and carefree.

In particular, I was tormented by the fact that poor animals had to endure such great pain and need. The sight of an old, limping horse being dragged along by one man while another man beat it with a stick as it was being driven to the Colmar slaughterhouse haunted me for weeks. Even before I entered school, I found it incomprehensible that in my evening prayer I was supposed to pray only for the sake of human beings. And so I secretly spoke the words to a prayer that I had made up myself. It ran this way: “Dear God, protect and bless everything that breathes, keep it from all evil, and let it softly sleep.”

Schweitzer’s compassion for animals was not limited to mammals but extended all the way down the spectrum to such lowly creatures as worms and ants. (I say “all the way down” and “lowly” not to indicate disdain, but only to suggest that Schweitzer, like nearly all humans, must have had a “consciousness cone”, vaguely like mine on page 19. Such a mental hierarchy can just as easily give rise to a sense of concern and responsibility as to a sense of disdain.) He once remarked to a ten-year-old boy who was about to step on an ant, “That’s my personal ant. You’re liable to break its legs!” He would routinely pick up a worm he saw in the middle of a street or an insect flailing in a pond and place it in a field or on a plant so that it could try to survive. Indeed, he commented rather bitterly, “Whenever I help an insect in distress, I do so in an attempt to atone for some of the guilt contracted by humanity for its crimes against animals.”

As is well known, Schweitzer’s simple but profound guiding principle was what he termed “reverence for life”. In the address delivered when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1953, Schweitzer declared:

The human spirit is not dead. It lives on in secret… It has come to believe that compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to human beings.

The following anecdote, also from Aus meiner Kindheit und Jugendzeit, is particularly revealing. In the springtime, with Easter approaching, little Albert, seven or eight years old, had been invited by a comrade — a comrade-in-arms, quite literally! — to go on an adventure of killing birds with slingshots that they had just made together. Looking back at this turning point in his life from the perspective of many decades later, Schweitzer recalls:

This was an abhorrent proposal, but I dared not refuse out of fear that he would mock me. Soon we found ourselves standing near a leafless tree whose branches were filled with birds singing out gaily in the morning, without any fear of us. My companion, crouching low like an Indian on a hunt, placed a pebble in the leather pouch of his slingshot and stretched it tightly. Obeying the imperious glance he threw at me, I did the same, while fighting sharp pangs of conscience and at the same time vowing firmly to myself that I would shoot when he did.

Just at that moment, church bells began to ring out, mingling with the song of the birds in the sunshine. These were the early bells that preceded the main bells by half an hour. For me, though, they were a voice from Heaven. I threw my slingshot down, startling the birds so that they flew off to a spot safe from my companion’s slingshot, and I fled home.

Ever since that day, whenever the bells of Holy Week ring out amidst the leafless trees of spring, I have remembered with deep gratitude how on that fateful day they rang into my heart the commandment: “Thou shalt not kill.” From that day on, I swore that I would liberate myself from the fear of other people. Whenever my inner convictions were at stake, I gave less weight to the opinions of other people than I once had. And I did my best to overcome the fear of being mocked by my peers.

Here we have a classic conflict between peer pressure and one’s own inner voices, or as we usually phrase it (and as Schweitzer himself put it), one’s conscience. In this case, fortunately, conscience was the clear winner. And indeed, this was a decision that lasted a lifetime.

Does Conscience Constitute Consciousness?

In this region of semantic space there is one further linguistic observation that strikes me as most provocative. That is the fact that in the Romance languages, the words for “conscience” and “consciousness”, which strike us English speakers as very distinct concepts, are one and the same (for example, the French word conscience has both meanings, a fact that I learned when, as a teen-ager, I bought a book entitled Le cerveau et la conscience). This may merely be a lexical gap or a confusing semantic blur in these languages (the meaning on a literal level is “co-knowledge”), but even if that’s the case, I nonetheless think of it as offering us an insight that might otherwise never occur to us: that the partial internalization of other creatures’ interiority (conscience) is what most clearly marks off creatures who have large souls (much consciousness) from creatures that have small souls, and from yet others that have none or next to none.

I think it’s obvious, or nearly so, that mosquitoes have no conscience and likewise no consciousness, hence nothing meriting the word “soul”. These flying, buzzing, blood-sucking automata are more like miniature heat- seeking missiles than like soulful beings. Can you imagine a mosquito experiencing mercy or pity or friendship? ’Nough said. Next!

What about, say, lions — the very prototype of the notion of carnivore? Lions stalk, pounce on, rip into, and devour giraffes and zebras that are still kicking and braying, and they do so without the slightest mercy or pity, which suggests a complete lack of compassion, and yet they seem to care a great deal about their own young, nuzzling them, nurturing them, protecting them, teaching them. This is quite unmosquito-like behavior! Moreover, I suspect that lions can easily come to care for certain beasts of other species (such as humans). In this sense, a lion can and will internalize certain limited aspects of the interiority of at least some other creatures (especially those of a few other lions, most particularly its immediate family), even though it may remain utterly oblivious to and indifferent to those of most other creatures (a quality that sounds depressingly like most humans).

I think it’s also obvious, or nearly so, that most dogs care about other creatures — particularly humans who belong to their inner circle. Indeed, it’s well known that some dogs, displaying incredible magnanimity, will lay down their lives for their owners. I have yet to hear about a lion doing such a thing for any animal of another species, although I suppose some dog-like lion, somewhere or other, may have once fought to the death against another beast in order to save the life of a human companion. It’s a bit too much of a stretch, however, to imagine a lion choosing to be a vegetarian.

And yet a quick Web search shows that the idea of a vegetarian lion is not all that rare (usually in fiction, admittedly, but not always). Indeed, such a lion, a female named “Little Tyke”, was apparently brought up as a pet near Seattle. For four years (so says the Web site), Little Tyke refused all meat offered her until finally her owners gave up trying and accepted her vegetarian ways and her joy at playing with lambs, chickens, and other beasts. Until her dying day, Little Tyke was a vegetarian lion. Will miracles never cease?

In any case, having a conscience — a sense of morality and of caring about doing “the right thing” towards other sentient beings — strikes me as the most natural and hopefully also the most reliable sign of consciousness in a being. Perhaps this simply boils down to how much one puts into practice the Golden Rule.

Albert Schweitzer and Johann Sebastian Bach

I have to admit that I have always intuitively felt there was another and quite different yardstick for measuring consciousness, although a most blurry and controversial one: musical taste. I certainly cannot explain or defend my own musical taste, and I know I would be getting myself into very deep, hot, and murky waters if I were to try, so I won’t even begin. I will, however, have to reveal a little bit of my musical taste in order to talk about Albert Schweitzer and his musical profundity.

For my sixteenth birthday, my mother gave me a record of the first eight preludes and fugues of Book One of J. S. Bach’s monumental work, The Well-Tempered Clavier, as played on the piano by