Philosophy of Einstein

Suleyman DEmirel University

Philosophy of                Albert Einstein

Contemporary philosophers

Marshal Janibek 2A-04

Submitted to: Chongarov Yerzhan

 

 

Suleyman Demirel University

Almaty 21.04.2013

 

 

 

Contents

Introduction 2

Pantheistic Religion of Albert Einstein 2

Philosophy of Religion, Theology, God of Albert Einstein 3

“The World as I see it” 3

Good and Evil 6

Religion and Science 7

Peace 9

Culture and Prosperity 10

Conclusion 11

Reference 11

Introduction

As we know, Albert Einstein is the greatest mind in human history. Works and theories that he discovered has influenced largely into our centuries thoughts and changed world view as we understand now: quantum particles, energy represented as mass, theory of relativity etc. And all the time, he was searching for, as he said, “God’s particle” and get closer to meaning of the life. Did he manage to discover it or for a bit, does God exist, what was his thought?  By understanding his philosophical view in this article, I believe that we could improve our concept of this world.

Pantheistic Religion of Albert Einstein

 
A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive. (Albert Einstein, 1954)[1] 

I share the pantheist religion / philosophy of Albert Einstein that All is One and Interconnected (Nature, God), of which we humans are an inseparable part. I Hope that in the future Humanity will live by the truth, with greater harmony between different people, their religions and cultures, and to life in all its complex beauty.

Albert Einstein's ideas on Physics and Reality are also significant. It was from reading Einstein that I first realized that matter was not made of tiny 'particles'. And having also read Lorentz (who believed in an Absolute Space) I realized that a slight modification of Einstein's ideas on Physical Reality solved many of the problems of modern physics. Einstein represented Matter as Spherical Force Fields which caused 'Relative' Space-Time. This can now be explained by replacing Einstein's Spherical Force Fields with Spherical Wave Motions of Space, which cause Matter, Time and Forces.

The orthodoxy points of religions in which were no significant changes from the ancient time are interferes to grow. In order to free ourselves from this dogma, he said that we should find out keys of this beautiful nature.

Philosophy of Religion, Theology, God of Albert Einstein

 

The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend personal God and avoid dogma and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description. If there is any religion that could cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism. (Albert Einstein)[2]

I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.  
Following his wife's advice in responding to Rabbi Herbert Goldstein of the International Synagogue in New York, who had sent Einstein a cablegram bluntly demanding "Do you believe in God?" Quoted from and citation notes derived from Victor J. Stenger, Has Science Found God? (Albert Einstein) [3]

Einstein's views about religious belief have been collected from interviews and original writings. These views covered Judaism, theological determinism, agnosticism, and humanism. He also wrote much about ethical culture, opting for Spinoza's god over belief in a personal god.

“The World as I see it”

 

What is the meaning of human life, or of organic life altogether? To answer this question at all implies a religion. Is there any sense then, you ask, in putting it? I answer, the man who regards his own life and that of his fellow-creatures as meaningless is not merely unfortunate but almost disqualified for life. [4]

This book does not represent a complete collection of the articles, addresses, and renouncements of Albert Einstein; it is a selection made with a definite object - namely, to give a picture of a man. To-day this man is  being  drawn, contrary  to  his  own intention, into  the  whirlpool  of political  passions  and contemporary  history. As a result, Einstein is experiencing the fate that so many of the great men of history experienced: his character and opinions are being exhibited to the world in an utterly distorted form.

 

What an extraordinary situation is that of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he feels  it. But from the point of view of daily life, without going deeper,  we exist for our fellow-men--in the first place for those  on whose smiles and welfare all our happiness depends, and next for all those unknown to  us  personally  with  whose destinies we  are  bound  up by  the tie  of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my  inner and outer life depend on the labors of other men, living  and dead,  and that  I must exert myself in order to give in the  same measure as I have received and am still  receiving.  I  am  strongly  drawn  to the simple  life  and am often oppressed  by the feeling that I am engrossing an unnecessary amount  of the labor of my fellow-men.  I regard class differences as contrary to justice and, in the last resort, based on force.  I also consider that plain living is good for everybody, physically and mentally.

 

In  human  freedom  in  the  philosophical  sense  I  am  definitely  a disbeliever. Everybody acts not only under external compulsion but also in accordance with inner necessity.  Schopenhauer's saying, that "a man can do as he will, but not will as he will," has been an inspiration to me since my youth up, and a continual consolation  and unfailing well-spring of patience in the  face of the hardships of life,  my  own and  others'.  This  feeling mercifully mitigates the  sense of  responsibility which so  easily  becomes paralyzing, and it prevents  us  from taking  ourselves and other people too seriously; it conduces to a view of life in which humor, above all, has its due place.

 

To inquire after the meaning or object of one's own existence or of creation generally has always seemed to me absurd from an objective point of view. And yet everybody has certain ideals which determine the direction of his endeavors and his judgments. In this sense I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves--such an ethical basis I call more proper for a herd of swine. 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. Without the sense of fellowship with men of like mind, of preoccupation with the objective, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific research, life would have seemed to me empty. The ordinary objects of human endeavor--property, outward success, luxury--have always seemed to me contemptible.

 

My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced freedom from the need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. 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.

 

My political ideal is that of democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. It is an irony of fate that I myself have been the recipient of excessive admiration and respect from my fellows through no fault, and no merit, of my own. The cause of this may well be the desire, unattainable for many, to understand the one or two ideas to which I have with my feeble powers attained through ceaseless struggle. 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 to-day. The thing that has brought discredit upon the prevailing form of democracy in Europe to-day is not to be laid to the door of the democratic idea as such, but to lack of stability on the part of the heads of governments and to the impersonal character of the electoral system. I believe that in this respect the United States of America have found the right way. They have a responsible President who is elected for a sufficiently long period and has sufficient powers to be really responsible. On  the  other hand,  what  I  value in  our political  system is  the  more extensive provision that  it makes  for the individual in case of illness or need. 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.

 

This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of the herd nature, the military system, which I abhor. That a man can take pleasure in marching in formation to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him. He has only been given his big brain by mistake; a backbone was all he needed. This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism by order, senseless violence, and all the pestilent nonsense that does by the name of patriotism--how I hate them!  War seems to me a mean, contemptible thing:  I would rather be hacked in pieces than take part in such an abominable business. And yet so high,  in spite of everything, is my opinion of the  human race that  I believe this bogey would have disappeared long  ago,  had  the  sound  sense  of  the nations not been  systematically corrupted by commercial and political  interests acting through the  schools  and the Press.

 

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. An individual who should survive his physical death is also beyond my comprehension, nor do I wish it otherwise; such notions are for the fears or absurd egoism of feeble souls. Enough for me the  mystery of the eternity of  life, and the inkling  of  the  marvelous structure of  reality,  together with the single-hearted  endeavor to comprehend  a  portion, be it never so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature.

Good and Evil

 

It is right in principle that those should be the best loved who have contributed most to the elevation of the human race and human life. But, if one goes on to ask who they are, one finds oneself in no inconsiderable difficulties. In the case of political, and even of religious, leaders, it is often very doubtful whether they have done more good or harm.  Hence I most seriously believe that one does people the best service by giving them some elevating work to do and thus indirectly elevating them. This applies most of all to the great artist, but also in a lesser degree to the scientist. 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.

 

The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which he has attained to liberation from the self.

Religion and Science

 

Everything that the human race has done and thought is concerned with the satisfaction of felt needs and the assuagement of pain. One has to keep this constantly in mind if one wishes to understand spiritual movements and their development. Feeling and desire are the motive forces behind all human endeavor and human creation, in however exalted a guise the latter may present itself to us. Now what are the feelings and needs that have led men to religious thought and belief in the widest sense of the words? A little consideration will suffice to show us that the most varying emotions preside over the birth of religious thought and experience. With primitive man it is above all fear that evokes religious notions--fear of hunger, wild beasts, sickness, and death. Since at this stage of existence  understanding of causal conations is  usually  poorly developed, the human mind creates for  itself more or less  analogous  beings  on whose wills  and  actions  these fearful happenings depend. One's object now is to secure the favor of these beings by carrying out actions and offering sacrifices which, according to the tradition handed down from generation to generation, propitiate them or make them well disposed towards a mortal. I am speaking now of the religion of fear. This, though not created, is in an important degree stabilized by the formation of a special priestly caste which sets up as a mediator between the people and the beings they fear, and erects hegemony on this basis. In many cases the leader or ruler whose position depends on other factors, or a privileged class, combines priestly functions with its secular authority in order to make the latter more secure; or the political rulers and the priestly caste make common cause in their own interests.

 

The social feelings are another source of the crystallization of religion. Fathers and mothers and the leaders  of larger human communities are mortal and fallible. The desire for guidance, love, and support prompts men to form the social or moral conception of God. This is the God of Providence who protects, disposes, rewards, and punishes, the God who, according to the width of the believer's outlook, loves and cherishes the life of the tribe or of the human race, or even life as such, the comforter in sorrow and unsatisfied longing, who preserves the souls of the dead. This is the social or moral conception of God.

Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic character of their conception of God. Only individuals of exceptional endowments and exceptionally high-minded communities, as a general rule, get in any real sense beyond this level. 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 marvelous order which reveal them 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. The beginnings of cosmic religious feeling already appear in earlier stages of development--e.g., in many of the Psalms of David and in some of the Prophets. Buddhism, as we have learnt from the wonderful writings of Schopenhauer especially, contains a much stronger element of it.

 

The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious  feeling,  which knows no  dogma and no God conceived in man's image; so that there can be no Church whose  central teachings are  based on it. Hence it is precisely among the  heretics of every  age that we find men who were filled with the highest  kind of religious feeling and were in many cases  regarded  by their contemporaries  as Atheists,  sometimes  also  as saints. Looked at in this light, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza are closely akin to one another.

 

How can cosmic religious feeling be communicated from one person to another, if it can give rise to no definite notion of a God and no theology? In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are capable of it.

 

We thus arrive at a conception of the relation of science to religion very different from the usual one. When one views the matter historically one is inclined to look upon science and religion as irreconcilable antagonists, and for a very obvious reason. The man who is  thoroughly convinced of  the universal  operation of the law of  causation cannot for a moment entertain  the idea of a being who interferes in  the  course  of events--that is, if he takes the hypothesis  of  causality really seriously. He has no use for the religion of fear and equally little for social or moral religion. A God who rewards and punishes is inconceivable to him for the simple reason that a man's actions are determined by necessity, external and internal, so that in God's eyes he cannot be responsible, any more than an inanimate object is responsible for the motions it goes through. Hence science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear and punishment and hope of reward after death.

 

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 labor 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 skeptical 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 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.

Peace

 

The importance of securing international peace was recognized by the really great men of former generations. But the technical advances of our times have turned this ethical postulate into a matter of life and death for civilized mankind to-day, and made the taking of an active part in the solution of the problem of peace a moral duty which no conscientious man can shirk.

One has to realize that the powerful industrial groups concerned in the manufacture of  arms are doing  their best in all  countries to  prevent the peaceful settlement of international disputes, and that  rulers  can achieve this great end only if they are sure of the vigorous support of the majority of  their peoples. In these days of democratic government the fate of the nations hangs on themselves; each individual must always bear that in mind.

Culture and Prosperity

 

If  one  would  estimate  the  damage  done   by  the  great  political catastrophe to the development of human civilization, one must remember that culture in its higher forms is a  delicate plant which depends on a complicated  set of conditions and is wont to  flourish only in a few places at any given  time.  For  it to blossom there  is  needed, first  of all,  a certain degree of prosperity, which enables a fraction of  the population to work at things not directly necessary to the maintenance  of life; secondly, a moral tradition of respect for cultural values and achievements, in virtue of  which this class is  provided with  the  means  of living  by the  other classes, those who provide the immediate necessities of life.

 

During the past century Germany has been one of the countries in which both conditions were fulfilled. The prosperity was, taken as a whole, modest but sufficient; the tradition of respect for culture vigorous. On this basis the German nation has brought forth fruits of culture which form an integral part of the development of the modern world. The tradition, in the main, still stands; the prosperity is gone. The  industries of the  country have been cut  off almost completely  from the sources of raw materials on  which the  existence of  the  industrial part of  the  population was  based.  The surplus necessary to support the intellectual worker has suddenly ceased to exist.  With it the tradition which depends on it will inevitably collapse also, and a fruitful nursery of culture turns to wilderness.

 

The human race, in so far as it sets a value on culture, has an interest in preventing such impoverishment. It will give what help it can in the immediate crisis and reawaken that higher community of feeling, now thrust into the background by national egotism, for which human  values have validity independent of politics and frontiers. It will then procure for every nation conditions of work under which it can exist and under which it can bring forth fruits of culture.

Conclusion

 

Albert Einstein’s thoughts helped me to understand that believe that you follow must be not dogmatic, it should be personal God. Additionally to this, believe that people following is not really important, beside of this you should take everything rationally. These things I grasped before reading Einstein’s thoughts, but he convinced me this more.

 

As political sight of Albert Einstein, his political view was in favor of socialism and critical of capitalism, which he detailed in essays like “Why Socialism?”[5]. in his opinion, planned economy helps to adjust production needs to the community, and this would distribute stable work spaces. And education of the individual would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibilities for his fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society. At that time, disagreement between capitalism and socialism was only has begun to increase and this opinion seriously influenced to people thinking. Nowadays, socialism is almost defeated, but, in other hands, we see how several nations has started to feel that capitalistic form is not helping to them get to comfortable zone.

So how exactly he saw this world? As I understand from his essays, meaning of life is like a puzzle: at the first, we don’t know anything, but step by step you are starting to solve this problem by figuring out every piece of this puzzle, and, if we manage to correct all the pieces, we finally understand the true meaning of the life. What about religions? Most religions give you the full view of the puzzle, even if the most of the pars are wrong, and that’s all; live with it. From the past, people thought that all unnatural things to them all done by powerful God, but in the end, people started to understand that these unnatural phenomenon is occurred by lows of nature, which can be proved by scientific answers. Discover the unknown and develop your consciousness to think rationally, this is what he wanted to say to us.