Albert Einstein. The human side. Glimpses from his archives. Selected and edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffmann. With a new foreword by Ze'ev Rosenkranz (Q2859322)

Why do I never get tired reading Einstein? Not only because he was one of the greatest scholarly minds that our planet has ever produced. Not only because of his unwavering commitment to human rights and his early anti-Nazi position, although they count for a lot. In writing on any topic, Einstein exhibits wisdom and elegance akin Michel de Montaigne, the philosopher I admire so much. And Einstein's profundity is mixed in equal measure with humor, a winning cocktail that only Pablo Picasso has also been great at producing.NEWLINENEWLINE This book is a collection of private correspondence of Einstein from the Albert Einstein Archives. The variety of topics is as diverse as are Einstein's correspondents, from a fifth-grader to a banker from my State of Colorado, and from the fellow Nobel Laureate Max von Laue to Queen Elizabeth of Belgium. But let me stop and Einstein speak in snippets I quote to whet your appetite for the book:NEWLINENEWLINE ``Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it. One should earn one's living by work of which one is sure one is capable. Only when we do not have to be accountable to anybody can we find joy in science.'' (p. 57)NEWLINENEWLINE ``I am not involved, thank God, and no longer need to take part in the competition of the big brains. Participating in it has always seemed to me to be an awful type of slavery no less than the passion for money or power.'' (p. 60)NEWLINENEWLINE ``You have given me great joy with the little book about Faraday. The man loved mysterious Nature as a lover loves his distant beloved. In his day there did not exist the dull specialization that stares with self-conceit through horn-rimmed glasses and destroys poetry.'' (p. 99)NEWLINENEWLINE ``Bear in mind that those who are finer and nobler are always alone -- and necessarily so -- and that because of this they can enjoy the purity of their own atmosphere.'' (p. 115)NEWLINENEWLINE ``How is it at all possible that this culture-loving era could be so monstrously amoral? More and more I come to value charity and love of one's fellow being above everything else\dots. All our lauded technological progress -- our very civilization -- is like the axe in the hand of the pathological criminal.'' (written on December 6, 1917; p. 88)NEWLINENEWLINE ``I could say analogously that tolerance is the affable appreciation of qualities, views, and actions of other individuals which are foreign to one's own habits, beliefs, and tastes. Thus being tolerant does not mean being indifferent towards the actions and feelings of others. Understanding and empathy must also be present\dots.NEWLINENEWLINE The most important kind of tolerance, therefore, is tolerance of the individual by society and the state. The state is certainly necessary, in order to give the individual the security he needs for his development. But when the state becomes the main thing and the individual becomes its weak-willed tool, then all finer values are lost. Just as the rock must first crumble for trees to grow on it, and just as soil must first be loosened for its fruitfulness to develop, so too can valuable achievement sprout from human society only when it is sufficiently loosened so as to make possible to the individual the free development of his abilities.'' (written in 1934; pp. 89--90)NEWLINENEWLINE ``The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend upon on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life. To make this a living force and bring it to clear consciousness is perhaps the foremost task of education. The foundation of morality should not be made dependent on myth nor tied to any authority lest doubt about the myth or about the legitimacy of the authority imperil the foundation of sound judgment and action.'' (p. 95)NEWLINENEWLINE In ca. 1935 in Princeton Einstein writes a concise story of the birth of the Third Reich. It has not been published in his lifetime (pp. 110--112):NEWLINENEWLINE``The everlasting shame of Germany, the spectacle unfolding in the heart of Europe is tragic and grotesque; and it reflects no credit on the community of nations which calls itself civilized! For centuries the German people have been subject to indoctrination by an unending succession of schoolmasters and drill sergeants. The Germans have been trained in hard work and made to learn many things, but they have also been drilled in slavish submission, military routine and brutality. The postwar democratic Constitution of the Weimar Republic fitted the German people as well as the giant's clothes fitted Tom Thumb. Then came inflation and depression, with everyone living under fear and tension.NEWLINENEWLINE Hitler appeared, a man with limited intellectual abilities and unfit for any useful work, bursting with envy and bitterness against all whom circumstance and nature had favored over him. Sprung from the lower middle class, he had just enough class conceit to hate even the working class which was struggling for greater equality in living standards. But it was the culture and education which had been denied him forever that he hated most of all. In his desperate ambition for power he discovered that his speeches, confused and pervaded with hate as they were, received wild acclaim by those whose situation and orientation resembled his own. He picked up this human flotsam on the streets and in the taverns and organized them around himself. This is the way he launched his political career.NEWLINENEWLINE But what really qualified him for leadership was his bitter hatred of everything foreign and, in particular, his loathing of a defenseless minority, the German Jews. Their intellectual sensitivity left him uneasy and he considered it, with some justification, as un-German.NEWLINENEWLINE Incessant tirades against these two ``enemies'' won him the support of the masses to whom he promised glorious triumphs and a golden age. He shrewdly exploited for his own purposes the centuries-old German taste for drill, command, blind obedience and cruelty. Thus he became the Führer. Money flowed plentifully into his coffers, not least from the propertied classes who saw him as a tool for preventing the social and economic liberation of the people which had its beginning under the Weimar Republic. He played up to the people with the kind of romantic, pseudo-patriotic phrase-mongering to which they had become accustomed in the period before the World War, and with the fraud about the alleged superiority of the ``Aryan'' or ``Nordic'' race, a myth invented by the anti-Semites to further their sinister purposes. His disjointed personality makes it impossible to know to what degree he might actually have believed in the nonsense which he kept dispensing. Those, however, who rallied around him or who came to the surface through the Nazi wave were for the most part hardened cynics fully aware of the falsehood of their unscrupulous methods.''NEWLINENEWLINEEinstein's prose is stimulating in that it prompts me to think, and to have an imaginary discussion with Einstein:NEWLINENEWLINE ``\textit{What artistic and scientific experience have in common}. Where the world ceases to be the scene of our personal hopes and wishes, where we face it as free beings admiring, asking and observing, there we enter the realm of Art and Science. If what is seen and experienced is portrayed in the language of logic, we are engaged in science. If it is communicated through forms whose connections are not accessible to the conscious mind but are recognized intuitively as meaningful, then we are engaged in art. Common to both is the loving devotion to that which transcends personal concerns and volition.'' (pp. 37--38)NEWLINENEWLINE Yes, I agree, there are commonalities between art and science. But our mind is responsible not only for logic but also for our feelings. In my humble opinion, the difference between art and science lies elsewhere. With science we objectively reflect on the world outside of us; with art we subjectively reflect on the world within.NEWLINENEWLINE I warmly recommend this book to everyone, as well as other Einstein books, many of which -- perhaps, most -- including the book under review, have been published by the historic Princeton University Press.