Albert Schweitzer's Western Vision of Indian Thought

Abstract

Doctor of Philosophy, Medicine and Divinity, Nobel laureate (1953), Albert Schweitzer embodied an indisputable ethical and intellectual authority that was universally admitted. However, in his book Indian Thought and its Development (1936), the so-called "good doctor" engaged in an incredible eulogy of Western superiority at the expense of Indian thought. The pieces of evidence he used to support this argument can now be compared to the thoroughly ambiguous attitude he displayed toward the African natives among whom he had lived in Lambaréné