Kulturphilosophie. Verfall und Wiederaufbau der Kultur

First edition of Verfall und Wiederaufbau der Kultur, the first part of Albert Schweitzer's Kulturphilosophie.

Publisher's Bradel binding in cream half cloth, author and title lettered lengthwise on spine, blue-green paper boards, author and title printed on upper cover. Binding sunned and lightly soiled, a few leaves with creased corners. One passage marked out and accompanied by pencil drawings.

Signed and dated autograph inscription from Albert Schweitzer to Isidor Philipp on the front free endpaper: "A I. Philipp avec mes bonnes pensées Albert Schweitzer Sept 1923".

This work by a scholar of many callings, at once philosopher, musician, theologian, physician and protector of animals, is a reflection on the self-destruction of European civilization. The subject had preoccupied him since the turn of the century, and the Great War lent it a tragic immediacy. According to Schweitzer, Europe had surrendered culture without a struggle by abandoning the ethical ideals inherited from the Enlightenment, and the cult of national culture ranks among the most devastating symptoms of this decline. The second part of the Kulturphilosophie, Kultur und Ethik, published the same year, sets out the path Schweitzer proposed for rebuilding European thought upon the affirmation of life and the demands of ethics, what he called "reverence for life".

Schweitzer composed the first two parts of the Kulturphilosophie before the end of the war, during his stay in Lambaréné, Gabon, but they did not appear until 1923. Of the four parts planned, only three were published, the third posthumously, reconstructed from the author's manuscripts and drafts. Schweitzer presented this first part to his former piano teacher, Isidor Philipp, composer and author of works on piano technique, with whom he had refined his playing after settling in Paris in 1898.

A major study of the decline of European civilization, of which the Great War was, in the author's view, one of the manifestations, presented by Albert Schweitzer to a man who left his mark on his early years in Paris.