Dr. Albert Schweitzer is captured in a rare color photograph taken in Aspen in July 1949. It was remarked that Schweitzer’s attire was dated to the fashion of the previous century.
Editor’s note: This is the final installment of a four-part Aspen Journalism series on Albert Schweitzer and his ethical impact on Aspen, the Aspen Institute and the world.
Where Johann Wolfgang Goethe was representative of Enlightenment thinking and emerging humanistic values, Dr. Albert Schweitzer stood as the embodiment of the Aspen Idea of body/mind/spirit. As a physician, he healed the body. As a philosophical scholar, he explored the mind. As a musician, he expressed the spirit. Albert Schweitzer was an exemplar for all that the Aspen Idea would later claim.
Aspen, a decrepit old mining town in 1949, became a confluence for human evolution during the Goethe Bicentennial, a heady experience for the 2,000 apostles who made a pilgrimage here. Aspen formed a culture based on ideas, thanks to a cabal of social reformers whose ambitious visions continue to provide a fount of inspiration to philosophers, artists, writers and savants — the thinkers of the day.
The importance of Aspen’s renaissance was articulated in a 1951 International Design Conference of Aspen brochure that forecast Aspen’s prestigious and impactful potential:
“The setting of this program in the mountain village of Aspen, Colorado, does more than provide the beauty and grandeur of nature, and the joys of outdoor life, as an accompaniment to thought and discussion. It creates a community of minds. Man is a socially rational animal. He is gregarious in thought as well as in action; he needs the company of his fellow men and the interchange of conversation as a condition of productive thought. Good conversation, one of the highest achievements of reason, requires a high degree of social and intellectual community. The Aspen program of music, lectures and seminars realizes itself most fully in the many conversations it engenders and sustains.”
Aspen Idea is born
Walter Paepcke articulated what would become known as “The Aspen Idea” in a 1952 letter he titled “Human Freedom,” in which he referred to Aspen as “an experiment” for which he sought intellectual and financial backers. Aspen, he wrote, “might be a place for quite a different vacation spot, one not dedicated to fishing alone, or riding, or skiing — but where these things might be done along with some mental and cultural exercise as well.”
Paepcke allowed that “this experience cannot guarantee vision or understanding, but if one or two or six engineers, controllers, sales executives, or public relations men come away with a broader horizon — perhaps even with greater wisdom — I shall think the experiment a success.”
Foreshadowing his ambition for the Aspen Executive Seminar series, Paepcke predicted: “In later years this group will be assuming important tasks in leadership in business and the nation. Their experience and acquaintance at Aspen will stand them in good stead.”
The son of a German immigrant, Paepcke was born in 1896. At 20, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale University in 1917. Paepcke took over his father’s lumber company in Chicago in 1922 and converted it into the Container Corp. of America, which manufactured cardboard packing crates and boxes. Paepcke was 49 when he first saw Aspen and recognized a “mystical something.” The year was 1945, and the Nazis had just exterminated 6 million Jews. The nuclear age had begun and brought with it the horror of mutually assured destruction. Specialization had reduced the scope of the average corporate executive to bottom-line myopia. An antidote was needed.
Paepcke, in a characteristic leap of faith, formed the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies in 1950 under vague, idealistic terms. “It is informal, but it is serious,” Paepcke wrote to potential subscribers. “The atmosphere is relaxed, but work goes on.”
“Aspen had everything,” Elizabeth Paepcke said in Mary Hayes’ book “The Story of Aspen.” “It had the mountains. It had fishing, climbing, skiing. Aspen had so much to add to leisure, to the renewal of the inner spirit. It was the perfect setting for music, art, education — all the things that make life worth living.”
Music became an artistic, auditory accompaniment to ideas with the formation of the Aspen Music Festival. Skiing became the physical component, with the incorporation of the Aspen Skiing Corporation. Design became a channel for creativity through the International Design Conference. Aspen took on utopian overtones as a community manifesting the Aspen Idea.
This was a conceit given that Greek philosophers had partitioned man into the triad 2,500 years before, particularly Plato, who identified three regions of man:
● The eros, located in the stomach, is related to one’s desires or body.
● The logos, located in the head, is related to reason or mind.
● The thymos, located in the chest, is related to spirit.
For Schweitzer and Goethe, spirit was the most ascendant quality of mankind, and yet grasping the meaning of spirit offers a great challenge. Most of us can’t quite define it. Some call it ethereal, the abstract other. Some call it essence. Spirit cannot be touched, except with emotional force and sensory experience. Spirit is pervasive. It envelops us. We can enrich it with receptivity. Like a radio receiver picking up invisible signals, our spirits are in constant contact with impulses far beyond our ken. We just need to tune them in.
Spirit is enriched through positive choices. A healthy spirit goes beyond well-being into the stratosphere of euphoria or rapture. Spirit needs peace, quiet, contemplation, fulfillment, love. Spirit is elevated by our sense of self and the roles we play in the world. Spirit is the aggregate of everything we do and think. Spirit defines us, in totality and eternally.
“I have the firm conviction that the spirit is a being of an indestructible nature,” said Schweitzer, quoting Goethe, from his Aspen Music Tent pulpit.
Emulating platonic virtues
Living the Aspen Idea, as Schweitzer intoned, should be purposeful, filled with high intent leading to action. The Aspen Idea is ultimately communal, esoteric and nonmaterial. “Here, indeed,” Paepcke said in a “Great Ideas” advertising campaign of the Aspen Institute’s mission, “was an opportunity to stimulate thinking and discussion about the ideas at the roots of what the philosophers call ‘the good life,’ ideas that are infinitely more important to the preservation of our society and our liberties than the pursuit of material gains.”
Paula Zurcher, one of Walter and Elizabeth Paepcke’s two daughters, reflected in an Aspen Times interview that “The Aspen Idea was of the universal man. Make a person a good citizen and they would eventually be good doctors, lawyers and everything else. But first, make them good citizens of the world.”
Mortimer Adler, philosophy professor at the University of Chicago, editor of Britannica’s Great Books of Western Civilization, and an architect of the Aspen Institute executive seminar, gave the Aspen Idea credence as a defining principle as quoted in James Sloan Allen’s “The Romance of Commerce and Culture.” “The Aspen Idea,” wrote Adler (1902-2001), “uniquely demonstrates that in the scale of values the Platonic triad of the good, the true and the beautiful takes precedence over the Machiavellian triad of money, fame and power.”
It is ironic, therefore, that material wealth would later become a hallmark of Aspen in the popular sense. Most media describe Aspen as a monument to excess marked by an ambiance of opulence. Perhaps the Machiavellian triad is conspicuous in Aspen because the Platonic triad made it so appealing. Money, fame and power are drawn to Aspen because the good, the true and the beautiful are still here.
Elizabeth Paepcke, the most prominent woman spearheading Aspen’s renaissance, reflected decades later that Aspen had squandered an all-too-rare opportunity.
Elizabeth Paepcke was a prime mover in making Aspen a seat of culture in the heart of the Colorado Rockies. Shown here in 1975, she was a grand dame who radiated sophistication and wit.
“A good deal of courage, imagination and shared guts was needed to do such a thing in a sleepy, almost dead little town in the high Rockies,” she recalled. “And the goal was to make something better than what was begun. My sorrow now lies in the fact that people have come to Aspen to make money. My heart is broken.”
Those who come to Aspen and recognize a holistic spirit that illuminates the soul of the town realize that Aspen is different from other resorts. That’s why the backstory of cultural richness here is so important to understand.
“Today,” Pitkin County Commissioner Greg Poschman said, “the Aspen Idea is interpreted as running the Four Pass Loop or doing yoga. These are modern interpretations that may have a commercial aspect. But, really, we ought to get back to the original thing, which was pure. We still have a community that understands the value of service for humanity and nature. Aspen has [hundreds] of nonprofits, and I don’t know any other community that has so many volunteers. Aspen has a culture of giving and service against a backdrop of wealth and glamour and ostentation.”
Schweitzer, in “The Philosophy of Civilization,” called for altruistic virtue. “Wealth, acquired or inherited, should be placed at the service of the community.” However, he emphasized, “Let no man judge his neighbor. The one thing that matters is that each shall value what he possesses as a means to action. Wealth must reach the community in the most varied ways if it is to be of the greatest benefit to all.”
That philanthropic ideal is reflected in Walter Paepcke’s optimism that the Platonic triad would spread like a vine with many tendrils, overshadowing the Machiavellian. In Aspen, this clash of triads has made for a contentious community. Affordable housing, environmental integrity and ongoing issues over the entrance to Aspen and airport expansion are often debated in terms emanating from conflicting values, where community and quality of life compete with commercial development and economic growth.
Aspen’s role in fomenting civil dialogue about the issues of the day was articulated in an address to the IDCA in 1955 by Chairman Will Burtin:
“Man is at his best and greatest when he looks up and beyond himself. We are here because we have questions. We are here because we want to test ideas that may be important to us and others. Whatever they may be, it is necessary that there be discussions and agreements which may carry in themselves the seeds of new questions already. This is the continuum of living — proceeding from question to answer to new question to new answer in an unending chain of challenges and responses.”
Many of these questions were sparked by Schweitzer’s outspoken morality: “A man is ethical only when life is sacred to him — the life of plants and animals as well as that of his fellow men. In a thousand ways, my existence stands in conflict with that of others. The necessity to destroy and to injure life is imposed upon me. I become a persecutor of the little mouse which inhabits my house, a murderer of the insect which wants to have its nest there, a mass-murderer of the bacteria which may endanger my life. I get my food by destroying plants and animals. My happiness is built upon injury done to others.”
Schweitzer’s “Reverence for Life” mantra means “to be in the grasp of the infinite, inexplicable, forward-urging will in which all being is grounded. In Reverence for Life lies piety in its most elemental and deepest form. It is piety that comes from inward necessity.”
The Aspen Meadows campus in its early years shows in the foreground the first Aspen Institute buildings, with the Music Tent beyond. Note the old horseracing track in the center, which dated to the mining-ranching era.
Nurturing the whole person
The Aspen Idea can’t be packaged as a commodity. The pieces can be provided, but assembly is required, individually. Putting it all together is not about mechanics. It’s about the art of living. Finding the balance that works is not taught, it is intuited from experience. The only requisite is aspiring to what Goethe defined as “the heights.”
Best of all, you don’t have to live in Aspen to find it, and you don’t need to be rich. There’s no charge, fee, payment or debt. We all write our own contracts. We make the choices that matter.
The Aspen Idea is a response to the volatility of today’s world — fueled by war, terrorism, climate change, environmental crises and threats to representative democracy. These are reasons enough for revisiting the notion of human nobility, or what is known as “humanism.”
If Aspen has a unifying religion, it is the Aspen Idea. Adherents feel it in the glow of health from a day of skiing or mountain climbing; in the artistry of a Sergei Prokofiev piano concerto or a ballet performance; or in an epiphany from a Great Books seminar. The Aspen Idea is a synthesis of ideas, a culmination of experiences, a revelation.
The life choices we make here determine which triad touches us most. Regardless of one’s chosen triad — Platonic or Machiavellian — most people in Aspen revel in the self-realized pleasures of nature, arts, music and ideas. That’s why the Aspen Idea stands as the organizing principle underpinning the cultural and philosophic heart of this old mining town. It shines as the brightest nugget among the gilt and rhinestones for which Aspen is sometimes dismissed and disparaged.
If we look Buddhist-like at material wealth as a burden, then Aspen is an invitation to seek higher planes. Living the Aspen Idea can mean shrugging off the mantle of prestige and self-absorption by embracing humanistic virtues. The Aspen Idea represents a transformational opportunity that disciples have taken far beyond the Roaring Fork Valley. Now, it’s time to bring it back home.
What Schweitzer can bring today
From “The Philosophy of Civilization,” Schweitzer described the challenge for culture, society and the individual: “Civilization,” he wrote, “can only revive when there shall come into being in a number of individuals a new tone of mind independent of the one prevalent among the crowd and in opposition to it.”
And so dawns a revival in Aspen today with a small but committed cohort of reformers who seek Schweitzer as exemplar of Aspen’s higher purpose.
J.R. Atkins, minister at the Aspen Community Church, is a newcomer to Aspen who appreciates and endorses the city’s Albert Schweitzer legacy.
“What Schweitzer offers,” said J.R. Atkins, minister at Aspen Community Church, “is an opportunity for people to make a better place, a better home, by caring for others and, as part of our human nature, to step up and inspire others, encouraging and pouring into others.”
“Albert Schweitzer is almost like a saint in most people’s lives,” said former Aspen Mayor Bill Stirling. “His focus was on life and the whole person. Aspen was a kind of laboratory for the whole person, and that makes it an exception to ski towns because of the arts and ideas. One of the things Schweitzer stood for was a sense of community. An event next summer could be a start to something meaningful.”
Amy Honey of the Aspen Historical Society and Pitkin County Commissioner Greg Poschman are spearheading a local initiative to restore the legacy and ethic of Albert Schweitzer.
“Now is great timing for reopening education on Albert Schweitzer, Goethe, the convocation and that amazing time in Aspen,” said Amy Honey of the Aspen Historical Society. “There is a wonderful opportunity to open these ideas to high school kids and to the larger community. I hope to create a talk that can apply to classes on government, civics and history. The opening questions may be: ‘What inspires you? Is Schweitzer relevant to you now?’ We’re living in a culture of followers. I would want to lead it into inspiration, asking young people to know yourself and think for yourself.”
“Despite rumors of the demise of our community, it’s still here,” Poschman said. “We ought to do something like getting an Albert Schweitzer Day declared in the county and the city or in the entire state, recognizing what he brought to Aspen was a culture of service.
“I also like the idea of bringing contemporary Schweitzers here, people who are living the ethic and walking the talk of service to others. They could come to Aspen and provide an understanding of what’s important here, of values that have come out of the Aspen Idea. We need that more than ever now that civics is no longer taught in schools. We have a concentration of people here doing good through service. The ideas are swirling. We should put together something that can bring someone here to speak and perhaps start a speakers series based on Schweitzer and the Aspen Idea.”
“Aspen is known for a lot of things,” said former Aspen Chapel minister Gregg Anderson, “but for Aspen to be known as a compassionate place for community would be wonderful. Reverence for Life is so key to making religion real. The stronger the reverence for natural life, the stronger grows that of spiritual life. We should have at least one day a year for a Schweitzer memory day, maybe a Schweitzer award for humanitarian virtues.”
“Reverence for Life is only real,” said Schweitzer scholar Lachlan Forrow, “if each of us thinks about what it means for Aspen today and what we, individually and together, can be doing that expresses ourselves in a way that contributes to the thriving of Aspen, the valley and, in the process, find our own thriving.”
