The World As I See It
Albert Einstein
Translated by Alan Harris
Contents
Preface to the Original Edition
Preface to the New Authorized Edition
Introduction to the Abridged Edition
I The World As I See It
The Meaning of Life
The World As I See It
The Liberty of Doctrine—Á Propos of the Gumbel Case
Good and Evil
The True Value of a Human Being
Society and Personality
Address at the Grave of H. A. Lorentz
H. A. Lorentz’s Work in the Cause of International Co-Operation
In Honour of Arnold Berliner’s Seventieth Birthday
Popper-LynkÆus
Obituary of the Surgeon, M. Katzenstein
Congratulations to Dr. Solf
Of Wealth
Education and Educators
To the Schoolchildren of Japan
Teachers and Pupils
Paradise Lost
Religion and Science
The Religiousness of Science
The Plight of Science
Fascism and Science
Interviewers
Thanks to America
The University Course at Davos
Congratulations to a Critic
Greeting to G. Bernard Shaw
Some Notes on My American Impressions
Reply to the Women of America
II Politics and Pacifism
Peace
The Pacifist Problem
Address to the Students’ Disarmament Meeting
To Sigmund Freud
Compulsory Service
Germany and France
Arbitration
The International of Science
The Institute for Intellectual Co-Operation
A Farewell
The Question of Disarmament
The Disarmament Conference of 1932
America and the Disarmament Conference
Active Pacifism
Letter to a Friend of Peace
Another Ditto
A Third Ditto
Women and War
Thoughts on the World Economic Crisis
Culture and Prosperity
Production and Purchasing Power
Production and Work
Minorities
Observations on the Present Situation in Europe
The Heirs of the Ages
III Germany 1933
Manifesto
Correspondence with the Prussian Academy of Sciences
A Reply
IV The Jews
Jewish Ideals
Is There a Jewish Point of View?
Jewish Youth—An Answer to a Questionnaire
Addresses on Reconstruction in Palestine
The Jewish Community
Working Palestine
Jewish Recovery
Anti-Semitism and Academic Youth
A Letter to Professor Dr. Hellpach, Minister of State
Letter to an Arab
Christianity and Judaism
A Biography of Albert Einstein
Preface to the Original Edition
ONLY INDIVIDUALS HAVE a sense of responsibility.—NIETZSCHE.
This book does not represent a complete collection of the articles, addresses, and pronouncements 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.
To forestall this fate is the real object of this book. It meets a wish that has constantly been expressed both by Einstein’s friends and by the wider public. It contains work belonging to the most various dates—the article on “The International of Science” dates from the year 1922, the address on “The Principles of Scientific Research” from 1923, the “Letter to an Arab” from 1930—and the most various spheres, held together by the unity of the personality which stands behind all these utterances. Albert Einstein believes in humanity, in a peaceful world of mutual helpfulness, and in the high mission of science. This book is intended as a plea for this belief at a time which compels every one of us to overhaul his mental attitude and his ideas.
J. H.
Preface to the New Authorized Edition
ALBERT EINSTEIN WAS THE greatest physicist of the twentieth century. His image and name are recognizable to almost everyone, along with his equation E=mc2, which describes the relationship between energy and mass. His impact on science and intellectual thought during his lifetime was profound.
This volume contains a collection of sixty-seven essays written before 1935, when Einstein was at the height of his scientific powers but not yet known as the sage of the atomic age. His stature in the world allowed him to express his views on social, philosophical, and political issues that were outside the field of physics. These essays established his early foray into these areas.
Why are we so interested in all aspects of Einstein’s philosophical positions and his thought processes? His theories of relativity and universal gravitation are generally regarded as inaccessible to the ordinary person. Yet we know that he was an original thinker who was able to see beyond the conventional scientific worldview of his age. What is remarkable is that Einstein’s greatest discoveries belong to him alone. It is perhaps fitting that this volume is being published one hundred years after Einstein settled the question of why the sky is blue. What we see is a giant intellect struggling as an ordinary person to make sense of the realities of life in the twentieth century.
This book is divided into four parts:
(1) The World as I See it (28 essays)
(2) Politics and Pacifism (25 essays)
(3) Germany (3 essays)
(4) The Jews (11 essays)
Some of the essays are letters to friends and strangers. Others are well thought out, closely reasoned treatises on topics such as: “The Meaning of Life,” “Religion and Science,” “Fascism and Science,” and “Jewish Ideals.”
The fundamental tenants of Einstein’s philosophical positions are outlined clearly in several early essays. He indicated his indebtedness to Schopenhauer, the political ideal of democracy, his fundamental position of pacifism, and his understanding of his private religion.
Einstein’s position was that “everybody acts not only under external compulsion but also in accordance with inner necessity.” This enabled him to later mitigate his sense of responsibility for his role in the start of the atomic age. We see in the second essay, “The World as I See It,” a succinct outline of Einstein’s personal, religious, and scientific philosophy. It was his sense of wonder of the mysteries of experience which drove him toward his profound scientific achievements.
Much of the present volume represented a response to the world around him. A brief synopsis of the political events in Einstein’s life until 1935 should help set the stage: Since Einstein had Swiss citizenship his absolute pacifism would have been a natural ethical position. In 1914 he signed a petition against Germany’s acts of aggression leading up to the First World War. Soon after 1918 he accepted German citizenship in order to support the German Democratic Party and became an unofficial spokesman for the Weimar republic. He felt such a strong association with Germany that in 1921 he refused to attend the Solvay Congress in Belgium because other German scientists were excluded. He was very encouraged by the formation of the fledgling League of Nations in 1922, but was very troubled by the Lea
gue’s inability to respond to France’s occupation of the Ruhr. In 1922, he joined the Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, which was part of the League of Nations. It was within this context that he developed a correspondence with Sigmund Freud (“To Sigmund Freud”). In the period from 1922 through 1932 he broke with the League of Nations three times, the last being final. This was a testament to the conflict that he felt between his idealism and the reality of the political arena in which such an organization must work. An example appeared in his essay “A Farewell.”
After the First World War, Einstein was a willing associate of Zionism. In March 1921 Einstein made the first of many visits to America. His main purpose was to raise funds for the establishment of the planned Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as he outlines in “Addresses on the Reconstruction in Palestine,” which were written at different times and delivered in different places. It was on this first visit that he received the massive public adulation that marked the transformation of a great scientist into a controversial and historic twentieth-century icon and public figure.
Einstein characterized himself as a supporter of cultural and social Zionism, but not political Zionism, thus attempting to stay true to his distrust of nationalism. He wanted the Jews to “solve the problem of living side by side with our brother the Arab in an open, generous and worthy manner” (“Addresses on the Reconstruction in Palestine II”). This position of a pluralistic state was at direct odds to the Zionist political ideal. Einstein did not have the unquestioned support of the Jewish community in America, and his backing of the Zionist movement was criticized by many who felt that Jews should assimilate to society in America.
In 1933 the world was just coming out of the Great Depression. The political stability of Europe was in question. In America, Prohibition, which Einstein felt lowered the prestige of the government (“Some Notes on My American Impressions”), was about to be repealed and change was in the air. Anti-Semitism was developing in Germany. Fascism was on the rise in Italy. Einstein responded to these developments and weighed in without equivocation. He was still profoundly hopeful that Germany would see the error of her ways, and was reluctant to criticize Germany since he was a Jew and a German citizen. In his essay “A Reply” we can see the application of his personal philosophy to an issue where he clearly felt a strong sense of responsibility to speak out but did not.
His visits occasioned the essay “Thanks to America” in 1931 as he was leaving, followed by “Some Notes on My American Impressions.” It was not until 1932 that he was offered a post at Princeton. It became obvious to him that he could no longer remain in Berlin, and that year he left Germany, never to return. In 1933 he renounced his German citizenship and settled permanently in America. What particularly struck him about America was the American patronage of science. One can see why he readily agreed to adopt America as his new homeland.
One of the more fascinating aspects of Einstein’s writings is his discussion of religion. In “Religion and Science,” first appearing in the New York Times in 1930, he outlined three stages of religious development. Stage one was fear and the concomitant belief that propitiating a divine being will secure safety and prosperity. Stage two was more developed and came with a moral basis and codes of action. Stage three was based on cosmic religious feelings with no anthropomorphic God. This was Einstein’s religion. It was in this essay that Einstein ascribed the highest kind of religious feelings to Spinoza, who exerted the most influence on his worldview.
The economic and social essays of Einstein found in Part II reflect his almost wholesale adoption of the current socialist and anti-capitalist views of the 1930s. They were based primarily on his notion of “surplus value of labor.” These views are currently out of favor with the pro-market, capitalist economists of today.
Einstein’s pacifism was particularly germane to the events that occurred after the push to develop the atomic bomb. In Part II he outlined his position, which was in stark contrast to his letter to President Roosevelt in 1939, urging the development of the atomic bomb, which forever changed the relationship between science and politics.
Einstein’s connection to all things German and, in particular, to the scientific community in Berlin, through his appointment to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, made it very painful for him to give up his German citizenship. In 1933 he even found it difficult to associate himself with a French manifesto against anti-Semitism in Germany, which is discussed in “A Reply.” Throughout his years in America, Einstein sought friendship and association with German Jews. Through this connection he developed a deep friendship with Dr. Dagobert D. Runes, the founder of Philosophical Library, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Spinoza. Many of Einstein’s essays were subsequently published by Philosophical Library, which is now reissuing this volume.
Neil Berger
Associate Professor Emeritus of Mathematics
University of Illinois at Chicago.
August 2010
Introduction to the Abridged Edition
IN HIS BIOGRAPHY OF Einstein Mr. H. Gordon Garbedian relates that an American newspaper man 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, therefore, is great in the public eye partly because he has made revolutionary discoveries which cannot be translated into the common tongue. We stand in proper awe of a man whose thoughts move on heights far beyond our range, whose achievements can be measured only by the few who are able to follow his reasoning and challenge his conclusions.
There is, however, another side to his personality. It is revealed in the addresses, letters, and occasional writings brought together in this book. These fragments form a mosaic portrait of Einstein the man. Each one is, in a sense, complete in itself; it presents his views on some aspect of progress, education, peace, war, liberty, or other problems of universal interest. Their combined effect is to demonstrate that the Einstein we can all understand is no less great than the Einstein we take on trust.
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 defence 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.
Albert Einstein was born in 1879 at Ulm. When he was four years old his father, who owned an electrochemical works, moved to Munich, and two years later 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 cour
se of enthusiastic study which made him, at the age of fourteen, a better mathematician than his masters. At this stage also he began the study of philosophy, reading and re-reading the words of Kant and other metaphysicians.
Business reverses led the elder Einstein to make a fresh start in Milan, thus introducing Albert to the joys of a freer, sunnier life than had been possible in Germany. Necessity, however, made this holiday a brief one, and after a few months of freedom the preparation for a career began. It opened with an effort, backed by a certificate of mathematical proficiency given by a teacher in the Gymnasium at Munich, to obtain admission to the Polytechnic Academy at Zurich. A year passed in the study of necessary subjects which he had neglected for mathematics, but once admitted, the young Einstein became absorbed in the pursuit of science and philosophy and made astonishing progress. After five distinguished years at the Polytechnic he hoped to step into the post of assistant professor, but found that the kindly words of the professors who had stimulated the hope did not materialize.
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