“Einstein’s theories could only have been greeted so joyfully by a generation that had already been raised and trained in materialistic modes of thought. On this account it would likewise have been unable to flourish in this way anywhere else but in the soil of Marxism, of which it is the scientific expression, just as this is true of cubism in the plastic arts and of the melodic and rhythmic barrenness of music in recent years.”
The speaker summarized his views in the statement: “The formulation of general relativity as a principle of nature cannot be anything but the expression of a thoroughly materialistic mental and spiritual attitude.”
Comparisons can certainly be drawn between the expressions of a period in different fields. But that Einstein’s theories had developed on the basis of Marxism has certainly not been evident to the Marxists, as we shall soon see.
The same speaker later (1937) commented on his remarks, saying:
“Under the influence of the philosophy of enlightenment the nineteenth century was a period that was excessively attached to the surface of things and valued material things beyond all measure. Hence, the majority of scientists were unable to grasp and to develop the concept of the ether which by its very nature obeys other laws than those of matter. Only a few, among them Philipp Lenard, had the breadth of soul and mind that was necessary for such a step. The others fell into the hand of the Jew, who instinctively grasped and exploited the situation.”
In order to be able to judge these arguments, one must remember that the ether was introduced into physics only to explain phenomena by analogy with mechanics. Einstein was the first to recognize the impossibility of a mechanical explanation of optical phenomena, and therefore got rid of the ether. This was the consistent action of a man who recognized the untenableness of the mechanistic conception of nature. The scientific supporters of the National Socialist Party did not want to take this step. They did not want to give up the mechanistic conception of physics, since it somehow fitted into their philosophy of unsophisticated approach to nature. But as they were simultaneously opposed to materialism, their position became a rather difficult one. They introduced an ether that was not material, and thus had none of the properties for the sake of which it was introduced.
Later Lenard also proposed this compromise solution. Since the seizure of power by the Nazis, he attacked Einstein from a new standpoint. Previously he had opposed Einstein because the latter had given up mechanistic explanations in physics; now he accused Einstein of materialism and failing to recognize an immaterial ether. Einstein, however, introduced no mechanical basis whatever for optical phenomena and was farther removed than Lenard from materialism in this mechanistic sense.
Another reason for the opposition to Einstein came from the circumstance that the word “force” is a term that was used with particular favor by the National Socialists. They considered it a great misfortune that this word should disappear from physics. The fight for this word reveals very clearly the manner in which physics and politics are connected.
The Austrian Ernst Mach and the German Gustav Kirchhoff were the first among the physicists to construct a system of mechanics in which the word “force” did not occur in the laws of motion. This word was introduced only as an auxiliary concept to abbreviate the mode of expression. Since the National Socialists characterized everything that they did not like as “Jewish,” they regarded the elimination of the word “force” as the work of the Jews, even though, as we have seen, it was undoubtedly first carried out by German physicists. In his Mechanics Heinrich Hertz, the discoverer of electrical waves, followed Mach and Kirchhoff in seeking a new way to eliminate the word “force” from the fundamental laws of motion. National Socialist authors ascribed this striving to Hertz’s Jewish blood. One of them writes: “If we recall that the Jewish physicist Einstein also wanted to remove the concept of force from physics, we must raise the question at this point whether an inner, racially determined relationship does not appear here.” In Einstein’s theory of gravitation the concept of force does not appear as a basic concept. Bodies move in paths that are represented by the “shortest” possible curves.
This elimination of force as a fundamental concept is regarded as characteristic of the Jewish type of thinking. In an article in the Zeitschrift für die gesamte Naturwissenschaft we read:
“The concept of force, which was introduced by Aryan scientists for the causal interpretation of changes in velocity, obviously arises from the personal experience of human labor, of manual creation, which has been and is the essential content of the life of Aryan man. The picture of the world that thus arose possessed in every detail the quality of visual clarity, from which arises the happy impression that it produces on related minds. All this changed fundamentally when the Jew seized the reins in natural science to an ever increasing degree.… The Jew would not be himself if the characteristic feature of his attitude, just as everywhere else in science, were not the disintegration and destruction of Aryan construction.”
The author links “Jewish Physics” with a favorite Nazi target, the Talmud:
“The mode of thought that finds its expression in Einstein’s theory is known, when applied to other ordinary things, as ‘Talmudic thinking.’ The task of the Talmud is to fulfill the precepts of the Tora, the Biblical law, by circumventing them. This is accomplished by means of suitable definitions of the concepts occurring in the law and by a purely formalistic mode of interpreting and applying them. Consider the Talmud Jew who places a food receptacle under his seat in a railway car, thus turning it formally into his residence, and in this manner formally obeying the law that on the Sabbath one should not travel more than a mile from his residence. It is this formal fulfillment that is important for the Jews.
“This formalistic Talmudic thinking likewise manifests itself in Jewish physics. Within the theory of relativity the principle of the constancy of the velocity of light and the principle of the general relativity of natural phenomena represent the ‘Tom,’ which must be fulfilled under all circumstances. For this fulfillment an extensive mathematical apparatus is necessary; and just as previously the concept of ‘residence’ and ‘carrying’ were rendered lifeless and given a more expedient definition, so in the Jewish relativity theory the concepts of space and time are deprived of all spirit and defined in an expedient, purely intellectual way.”
The characterization of the Einsteinian definitions of “length,” “temporal duration,” and so on, as “lifeless” in contrast to the definitions of traditional physics has only the following justification. At every stage of scientific development concepts are introduced by means of such definitions as correspond to the particular stage; that is, they are as practical as possible for the presentation of available knowledge. When such a stage has lasted for a long time, the words that are used in science gradually become words of daily life; they acquire an emotional overtone and become filled with life. Every introduction of new definitions appears to us to create “lifeless” concepts.
I once met on a train a Japanese diplomat who was just coming from the Wagner festival at Bayreuth. I asked him how he liked Wagnerian music. He replied: “Technically it is highly developed and ingenious. But in comparison with Japanese music it lacks a soul.” For one who has grown up with the sound of Japanese music in his ears Wagnerian music sounds just as “lifeless” and “intellectualistic” as the definitions of Einstein’s theory do to one who has been accustomed all his life to Newtonian mechanics.
4. Attitude of the Soviet Philosophy toward Einstein
The Soviet government publishes the great Soviet Encyclopædia that presents the entire knowledge of our time from the point of view of Soviet doctrines. This article on “Einstein” begins with the words: “Einstein is the greatest physicist of our time.” Among the Soviet philosophers he is regarded as a great physicist who was prevented by the economic circumstances under which he grew up from drawing the correct philosophical conclusions from his theory. Regarding Einstein’s p
hilosophical views the Encyclopædia reads: “Einstein’s philosophical position is not consistent. Materialistic and dialectical elements are interwoven with Machist assertions, which predominate in almost all of Einstein’s remarks.”
In order to understand these comments, it must be remembered that dialectical materialism has been the official philosophy of Soviet Russia, and that Machism, the teaching of Ernst Mach, has been the main target of its attack.
On consulting the article on “Ether” in the same Encyclopædia, we find there:
“In physics we often find a completely erroneous contrast between ether and matter. Since the physicists regard only gravity and inertia as criteria of materiality, they were inclined to deny the materiality of the ether. Here we have the same confusion of the physical and philosophical concepts of matter that was analyzed by Lenin in his consideration of the crisis in natural science at the beginning of the twentieth century.… The ether is a kind of matter and has the same objective reality as other kinds.… The antithesis of ether and matter is senseless and leads to agnostic and idealistic arguments.… The theory of relativity has recourse to a mathematical description, it abandons the answering of the question concerning the objective nature of physical phenomena; that is, in the question of the ether it takes the standpoint of Mach.”
By studying events in Russia since the seizure of power by Lenin, we can see that no attempt was ever made to exert political influences on physical theories proper, and when individuals did attempt to do this, it was not approved by the authorities. On the other hand, the philosophical interpretation of theories has been a political matter; the intervention of the party and its organs, as for example, the Communist Academy of Science in Moscow, has been regarded as a matter of course. Naturally, the boundary between a physical theory and its philosophical interpretation cannot always be drawn so distinctly, and on various occasions border trespassing has taken place. Lenin had already said on one occasion: “Not a single professor among those who are able to make the most valuable contributions to the special domains of chemistry, history, or physics, can be trusted even so far as a single word when it comes to philosophy.”
The official conception of the reciprocal relations between physics, philosophy, and politics is very clearly set forth in an address delivered by A. F. Joffe, the leading physicist of the Soviet Union, in 1934 at a memorial session of the Philosophical Institute of the Communist Party. This session was held to commemorate the publication twenty-five years previously of Lenin’s chief philosophical work, Materialism and Empiriocriticism, which contains Lenin’s views on the misinterpretations of modern physics and his attacks on “Machism.” In his address Joffe said:
“When physicists such as Bohr, Schrödinger, and Heisenberg express their opinions in popular works regarding the philosophical generalizations of their work in physics, their philosophy is sometimes a product of the social conditions under which they live and of the social tasks that they carry out, either consciously or unconsciously. Thus Heisenberg’s physical theory is a materialistic theory; that is, it is the closest approximation to reality possible at present. Lenin, too, did not criticize Mach’s scientific researches, but only his philosophy.”
The philosophers of the Roman Church made, already, a clear distinction between the astronomical theories of Copernicus and Galileo’s philosophical interpretation of these theories.
In 1938 A. Maximov, one of the best-known Soviet writers on the philosophy of physics, said in an article on the significance of Lenin’s book mentioned above:
“No physical theory has produced such a stream of idealistic fantasies as Einstein’s theory of relativity. Mystics, clerics, idealists of all shades, among them also a number of serious scientists, snatched at the philosophical consequences of the theory of relativity. The idealists directed all their efforts to the refutation of materialism. Somehow it had proved the philosophical relativity of time and space. Then came the general theory of relativity, together with the theory of the curvature and finiteness of space.”
By the phrase “refutation of materialism” is here meant the proof that departures from Newtonian mechanics and the ether theory of light are necessary. Maximov then referred explicitly to the political causes of the idealistic tendencies manifested by the scientists. He said:
“In our time the bourgeoisie in a number of countries has abandoned the veiled forms of capitalistic dictatorship for the open dictatorship of ax and bludgeon. As a result of the persecutions of the scientific Weltanschauung in the capitalistic countries, which was connected with this transition, many scientists joined the camp of reaction. This change of loyalties manifests itself among scientists by the appearance of avowals of idealism and metaphysics. During the last ten to fifteen years a retrograde trend has manifested itself in all fields of natural science in the capitalistic countries. Opposition to Darwinism and to the Kant-Laplace theories in physics, and attacks on the law of the conservation and transformation of energy, have become the fashion.”
It is certainly true that idealistic “interpretations” of the relativity theory have been frequently used to bolster up Fascist philosophy.
Soon after the general theory of relativity achieved world fame, in 1928, this same Maximov described it as a plant that had sprouted in the mystically inclined soil of the postwar period. After describing the postwar years in Germany, he said:
“This idealistic atmosphere surrounded the theory of relativity and still surrounds it at the present day. It is therefore only natural that the announcement of general relativity by Einstein was received with delight by the bourgeois intellectuals. The inability of scholars to withdraw from this influence within the boundaries of bourgeois society led to the result that the relativity principle served exclusively religious and metaphysical sentiments.
“What should be our relation to the theory of relativity? We should accept all the empirical material as well as all the conclusions and generalizations that follow logically from it.… But in place of the idealistic presentation of the theory of relativity favored by bourgeois society we must develop a dialectical presentation of the theory. We need young capable scientists who are thoroughly imbued with the proletarian ideology.”
In order to understand correctly the Soviet attitude toward Relativity we have to distinguish two periods. During the first years of the Soviet regime there prevailed among the official philosophers the opinions that the relativity theory contradicted materialism because it did not regard optical phenomena as phenomena of motion occurring in a material body. This view was supported by the Moscow physicist A. K. Timiryasev, who judged all physicists on the basis of their agreement or nonagreement with Newton’s mechanistic science.
It will be recalled that Lenard, the leading Nazi physicist in Germany, had also rejected Einstein’s theory because it could not present a mechanical model of optical events. Soon after its publication in 1922, Lenard’s book was translated into Russian and published with an introduction by Timiryasev. In the same year Maximov wrote a review of Lenard’s book for the leading philosophical journal of the Soviet Union, Under the Banner of Marxism, in which he said:
“While Einstein, the idealist, ascribes an absolute value to the creations of the mind and puts the world of events on an equal footing with the world of experiences, Lenard takes a diametrically opposed point of view. From the standpoint of common sense, which is more inclined to stick to the experiences of the material world than to the need of philosophy, Lenard prefers to retain the mechanical picture of the world. Starting from a standpoint that is in general purely materialistic, Lenard clearly recognizes the contradiction to which one is led by the theory of relativity.”
On the other hand we have seen that spokesmen of Nazi philosophy frequently asserted that Einstein’s theory could have flowered only in the soil of materialism and that it appears together with Marxism. Now we see that the authorized interpreters of Marxism were apparently not of this opinion. We also see that the de
scription of a physical theory as “materialistic” or “idealistic” depends only upon its philosophical interpretation.
The attacks of the earlier Soviet philosophers upon Mach and Einstein coincided at many points with those of the National Socialist writers. We need only consider the criticisms that Einstein’s theories only “describe” nature, but do not “explain” it, that they reject everything that cannot be an object of sensory experience, that they lead to general skepticism and to the destruction of all objective knowledge of nature, and so forth.
Later on confusion of materialism with “mechanistic physics” has been denounced by the “Soviet Institute of Philosophy” as a “reactionary” doctrine that is not compatible with modern science. By “materialism” one should not mean that all natural phenomena could be reduced to motions following Newton’s law. This “mechanistic materialism,” as a matter of fact, had been denounced already by Marx and Engels. But it enjoyed a comeback, as some physicists used it as a weapon against Einstein’s theory as Nazi physicists like Lenard had done in Germany. In stressing dialectical materialism in the sense of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, “materialism” means that science has to do with objective facts that are independent of human consciousness; but these facts do not need to be merely motions of material particles.
In the second period of Soviet philosophy, after the abandonment of “mechanistic” materialism, a leading Russian physicist, Vavilov, demonstrated that the theory of relativity is quite in agreement with materialism if this word is interpreted in the sense of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. In an article that appeared in 1939 Vavilov said clearly:
“Objective real space devoid of material properties, motion divorced from matter, are metaphysical phantoms that sooner or later have to be expelled from the physical picture of the world.… The historic service rendered by Einstein was the criticism of the old metaphysical conceptions of space and time.… In Einstein’s theory space-time is an inseparable property of matter itself. Such is the basic idea of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. The idealistic conception of space-time as a category of thought is swept away.… Before us is the first outline, still far from perfect, of the dialectical materialistic understanding of space and time. Once again dialectical materialism has triumphed.”
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