The World As I See It: by Albert Einstein.

 

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The World As I See It 

by 

Albert Einstein. 

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To anyone reasonably well educated even at a minimum level, reasonably well aware even at a minimum level, and not of an extreme totalitarian ideology that seeks to enslave and/or destroy rest of human civilisation, name of Einstein holds a level of respect bordering on reverence, and this is all the more so if one has actually attempted to read and understand anything of his work, especially so if that work is the most famous work of his, the theory of relativity. 

So it's of course interesting to read what he thought, said and wrote in general, on topics of relevance of his times, and it's all the more significant due to the time he lived in, spanning the two world wars and the emergence of not only air war but of nuclear era, ending the lines once for all between civil and warfield existence. 

It's interesting to note that his steadfast stand against militarism and for pacifism on one hand, and his stand for international unity of intellectual strata while he was still a German by birth as well as his professional life post the Swiss interlude, was very finely balanced in a way reminiscent of the general German's position on various issues. 

Most Germans refuse to acknowledge that their nation's history encompasses special, extraordinary horrors, of holocaust and genocides; they'd rather generalise the issue, speak of 'education' for all criminals with no execution no matter what, and also ridicule a vegetarian viciously by pointing out that vegetables are live too, or that some babies are allergic to their mother's milk, and so on - any extreme tidbit to support the notion that Germany was not at any time anything but normal. 

Einstein on the other hand takes it only as far as to say that all militarism is wrong, all patriotism is wrong, all conscription is wrong, ... but on the other hand stops short of saying France and her insecurities are wrong, on the contrary, he validates them and clearly states that they are due to German militarism. 

Which is very courageous and praiseworthy, especially since he still lived in Germany then. As to his position on all conscription being wrong, one has to wonder if he recognised that such a stand couldn't be absolute in face of say, Nazi aggression, when very existence of human civilisation was intentionally endangered, and U.S. general conscription and going to war was as necessary for defence of the world against its destruction, as was British standing firm, and Russia warring despite all odds, both with seemingly impossible odds?  

On the other hand, his response to criticism by Women of America is truly hilarious. 

""Reply to Women of America"

"Never yet have I experienced from the fair sex such energetic rejection of all advances; or, if I have, never from so many at once."

Most worth reading are, of course, his words on Zionism, Jewish community and identity, persecution in Germany, and his correspondence with German institutions about the persecution, when they accused him falsely of lying against Germany. This is all in the latter half, and one wishes to quote half of it verbatim. Too late! 

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"In his biography of Einstein Mr. H. Gordou Garbedian relates that an American newspaperman asked the great physicist for a definition of his theory of relativity in one sentence. Einstein replied that it would take him three days to give a short definition of relativity. He might well have added that unless his questioner had an intimate acquaintance with mathematics and physics, the definition would be incomprehensible. 

"To the majority of people Einstein’s theory is a complete mystery. Their attitude towards Einstein is like that of Mark Twain towards the writer of a work on mathematics: here was a man who had written an entire book of which Mark could not understand a single sentence."

"Einstein has asked nothing more from life than the freedom to pursue his researches into the mechanism of the universe. His nature is of rare simplicity and sincerity; he always has been, and he remains, genuinely indifferent to wealth and fame and the other prizes so dear to ambition. At the same time he is no recluse, shutting himself off from the sorrows and agitations of the world around him. Himself familiar from early years with the handicap of poverty and with some of the worst forms of man’s inhumanity to man, he has never spared himself in defense of the weak and the oppressed. Nothing could be more unwelcome to his sensitive and retiring character than the glare of the platform and the heat of public controversy, yet he has never hesitated when he felt that his voice or influence would help to redress a wrong. History, surely, has few parallels with this introspective mathematical genius who laboured unceasingly as an eager champion of the rights of man."

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" ... the boy went to school, experiencing a rigid, almost military, type of discipline and also the isolation of a shy and contemplative Jewish child among Roman Catholics – factors which made a deep and enduring impression. From the point of view of his teachers he was an unsatisfactory pupil, apparently incapable of progress in languages, history, geography, and other primary subjects. His interest in mathematics was roused, not by his instructors, but by a Jewish medical student, Max Talmey, who gave him a book on geometry, and so set him upon a course of enthusiastic study which made him, at the age of fourteen, a better mathematician than his masters."

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"I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves. The ideals which have lighted me on my way and time after time given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Truth, Goodness, and Beauty."

"The ordinary objects of human endeavour – property, outward success, luxury – have always seemed to me contemptible."

"I gang my own gait and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties I have never lost an obstinate sense of detachment, of the need for solitude – a feeling which increases with the years. One is sharply conscious, yet without regret, of the limits to the possibility of mutual understanding and sympathy with one’s fellow-creatures. Such a person no doubt loses something in the way of geniality and light-heartedness; on the other hand, he is largely independent of the opinions, habits, and judgments of his fellows and avoids the temptation to take his stand on such insecure foundations."

"I am quite aware that it is necessary for the success of any complex undertaking that one man should do the thinking and directing and in general bear the responsibility. But the led must not be compelled, they must be able to choose their leader. An autocratic system of coercion, in my opinion, soon degenerates. For force always attracts men of low morality, and I believe it to be an invariable rule that tyrants of genius are succeeded by scoundrels. For this reason I have always been passionately opposed to systems such as we see in Italy and Russia today."

"The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the State but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling."

"The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. It was the experience of mystery – even if mixed with fear – that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms – it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man. I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves."

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"The Liberty of Doctrine – Propos of the Gumbel Case"

"Academic chairs are many, but wise and noble teachers are few; lecture-rooms are numerous and large, but the number of young people who genuinely thirst after truth and justice is small. Nature scatters her common wares with a lavish hand, but the choice sort she produces but seldom."

"Compare the spirit which animated the youth in our universities a hundred years ago with that prevailing today. They had faith in the amelioration of human society, respect for every honest opinion, the tolerance for which our classics had lived and fought. In those days men strove for a larger political unity, which at that time was called Germany."

"Today also there is an urge towards social progress, towards tolerance and freedom of thought, towards a larger political unity, which we today call Europe. But the students at our universities have ceased as completely as their teachers to enshrine the hopes and ideals of the nation. Anyone who looks at our times coolly and dispassionately must admit this."

"I am convinced that every man who reads Herr Gumbel’s books with an open mind will get the same impression from them as I have. Men like him are needed if we are ever to build up a healthy political society."

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"Good and Evil"

"To be sure, it is not the fruits of scientific research that elevate a man and enrich his nature, but the urge to understand, the intellectual work, creative or receptive. It would surely be absurd to judge the value of the Talmud, for instance, by its intellectual fruits."

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"Society and Personality"

"A man’s value to the community depends primarily on how far his feelings, thoughts, and actions are directed towards promoting the good of his fellows. We call him good or bad according to how he stands in this matter. It looks at first sight as if our estimate of a man depended entirely on his social qualities. 

"And yet such an attitude would be wrong. It is clear that all the valuable things, material, spiritual, and moral, which we receive from society can be traced back through countless generations to certain creative individuals."

"Only the individual can think, and thereby create new values for society – nay, even set up new moral standards to which the life of the community conforms. Without creative, independently thinking and judging personalities the upward development of society is as unthinkable as the development of the individual personality without the nourishing soil of the community."

"The lack of outstanding figures is particularly striking in the domain of art. Painting and music have definitely degenerated and largely lost their popular appeal. In politics not only are leaders lacking, but the independence of spent and the sense of justice of the citizen have to a great extent declined. The democratic, parliamentarian regime, which is based on such independence, has in many places been shaken, dictatorships have sprung up and are tolerated, because men’s sense of the dignity and the rights of the individual is no longer strong enough."

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"In Honour of Arnold Berliner’s Seventieth Birthday"

"(Arnold Berliner is the editor of the periodical Die Naturrvissenschaften.)"

"The province of scientifically determined fact has been enormously extended, theoretical knowledge has become vastly more profound in every department of science. But the assimilative power of the human intellect is and remains strictly limited. Hence it was inevitable that the activity of the individual investigator should be confined to a smaller and smaller section of human knowledge. Worse still, as a result of this specialization, it is becoming increasingly difficult for even a rough general grasp of science as a whole, without which the true spirit of research is inevitably handicapped, to keep pace with progress. A situation is developing similar to the one symbolically represented in the Bible by the story of the Tower of Babel. Every serious scientific worker is painfully conscious of this involuntary relegation to an ever-narrowing sphere of knowledge, which is threatening to deprive the investigator of his broad horizon and degrade him to the level of a mechanic."

"But Berliner has come to the rescue, as far as the German-speaking world is concerned, in the most admirable way: He saw that the existing popular periodicals were sufficient to instruct and stimulate the layman; but he also saw that a first-class, well-edited organ was needed for the guidance of the scientific worker who desired to be put sufficiently au courant of developments in scientific problems, methods, and results to be able to form a judgment of his own. Through many years of hard work he has devoted himself to this object with great intelligence and no less great determination, and done us all, and science, a service for which we cannot be too grateful. It was necessary for him to secure the co-operation of successful scientific writers and induce them to say what they had to say in a form as far as possible intelligible to non-specialists."

"Question: What is a scientific author? Answer: A cross between a mimosa and a porcupine.

"(Do not be angry with me for this indiscretion, my dear Berliner. A serious-minded man enjoys a good laugh now and then.)"

"The scientific life of our time is simply inconceivable without his paper."

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"Obituary of the Surgeon, M. Katzenstein"

"During the eighteen years I spent in Berlin I had few close friends, and the closest was Professor Katzenstein. For more than ten years I spent my leisure hours during the summer months with him, mostly on his delightful yacht. There we confided our experiences, ambitions, emotions to each other. We both felt that this friendship was not only a blessing because each understood the other, was enriched by him, and found ins him that responsive echo so essential to anybody who is truly alive; it also helped to make both of us more independent of external experience, to objectivize it more easily."

"He never became the typical conscientious North German, whom the Italians in the days of their freedom used to call bestia seriosa. He was sensitive as a youth to the tonic beauty of the lakes and woods of Brandenburg, and as he sailed the boat with an expert hand through these beloved and familiar surroundings he opened the secret treasure-chamber of his heart to me – he spoke of his experiments, scientific ideas, and ambitions. How he found time and energy for them was always a mystery to me; but the passion for scientific enquiry is not to be crushed by any burdens. The man who is possessed with it perishes sooner than it does."

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"Religion and Science"

"But there is a third state of religious experience which belongs to all of them, even though it is rarely found in a pure form, and which I will call cosmic religious feeling. It is very difficult to explain this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it. The individual feels the nothingness of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvellous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought. He looks upon individual existence as a sort of prison and wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole."

"It is therefore easy to see why the Churches have always fought science and persecuted its devotees. On the other hand, I maintain that cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest incitement to scientific research. Only those who realize the immense efforts and, above all, the devotion which pioneer work in theoretical science demands, can grasp the strength of the emotion out of which alone such work, remote as it is from the immediate realities of life, can issue. What a deep conviction of the rationality of the universe and what a yearning to understand, were it but a feeble reflection of the mind revealed in this world, Kepler and Newton must have had to enable them to spend years of solitary labour in disentangling the principles of celestial mechanics! Those whose acquaintance with scientific research is derived chiefly from its practical results easily develop a completely false notion of the mentality of the men who, surrounded by a sceptical world, have shown the way to those like-minded with themselves, scattered through the earth and the centuries. Only one who has devoted his life to similar ends can have a vivid realization of what has inspired these men and given them the strength to remain true to their purpose in spite of countless failures. It is cosmic religious feeling that gives a man strength of this sort. A contemporary has said, not unjustly, that in this materialistic age of ours the serious scientific workers are the only profoundly religious people."

"The Religiousness of Science"

"You will hardly find one among the profounder sort of scientific minds without a peculiar religious feeling of his own. But it is different from the religion of the naive man. For the latter God is a being from whose care one hopes to benefit and whose punishment one fears; a sublimation of a feeling similar to that of a child for its father, a being to whom one stands to some extent in a personal relation, however deeply it may be tinged with awe. 

"But the scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation. The future, to him, is every whit as necessary and determined as the past. There is nothing divine about morality, it is a purely human affair. His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection."

"The German-speaking countries are menaced by a danger to which those in the know are in duty bound to call attention in the most emphatic terms. The economic stress which political events bring in their train does not hit everybody equally hard. Among the hardest hit are the institutions and individuals whose material existence depends directly on the State. To this category belong the scientific institutions and workers on whose work not merely the well-being of science but also the position occupied by Germany and Austria in the scale of culture very largely depends. 

"To grasp the full gravity of the situation it is necessary to bear in mind the following consideration. In times of crisis people are generally blind to everything outside their immediate necessities. For work which is directly productive of material wealth they will pay. But science, if it is to flourish, must have no practical end in view. As a general rule, the knowledge and the methods which it creates only subserve practical ends indirectly and, in many cases, not till after the lapse of several generations. Neglect of science leads to a subsequent dearth of intellectual workers able, in virtue of their independent outlook and judgment, to blaze new trails for industry or adapt themselves to new situations. Where scientific enquiry is stunted the intellectual life of the nation dries up, which means the withering of many possibilities of future development. This is what we have to prevent. Now that the State has been weakened as a result of nonpolitical causes, it is up to the economically stronger members of the community to come to the rescue directly, and prevent the decay of scientific life."

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"Fascism and Science"

Here on, copying was denied permission. But it's interesting to note that Einstein's letter to authority in italy argued for freedom of scientists from fear in the then fascist Italy. 

Subsequently he spoke in U.S. praising the spirit of private enterprise supporting academic research and particularly so in science.

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""Reply to Women of America"

"Never yet have I experienced from the fair sex such energetic rejection of all advances; or, if I have, never from so many at once."

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Most worth reading are, of course, his words on Zionism, Jewish community and identity, persecution in Germany, and his correspondence with German institutions about the persecution, when they accused him falsely of lying against Germany. This is all in the latter half, and one wishes to quote half of it verbatim. Too late!
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December 12, 2020 - December 31, 2020. 

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