“We are living in a period of such great
external and internal insecurity and with such a lack of firm objectives that
the mere confession of our convictions may be of significance even if these
convictions, like all value judgments, cannot be proven through logical
deductions.
There arises at once the question:
should we consider the search for truth or, more modestly expressed, our
efforts to understand the knowable
universe through constructive logical thought as an autonomous objective of
our work? Or should our search for truth to be subordinated to some other objective, for example to a “practical”
one? This question cannot be decided on
a logical basis. The decision, however,
will have considerable influences upon our thinking and our moral judgment,
provided that it is born out of deep and unshakable conviction. Let me then make a confession: for myself, the struggle to gain more insight and
understanding is one of those independent objectives without which a thinking
individual would find it impossible to have a conscious, positive attitude
toward life.
It is the very essence of our striving
for understanding that, on the one hand, it
attempts to encompass the great and complex variety of man’s experience, and
that on the other, it looks for simplicity and economy in the basic assumptions. The belief that these two objectives can exist
side by side is, in view of the primitive state of our scientific knowledge, a
matter of faith. Without such faith I
could not have a strong and unshakable conviction about the independent value
of knowledge.
This, in a sense, religious attitude of
a man engaged in scientific work has some influence upon his whole
personality. For apart from the
knowledge which is offered by accumulated experience and from the rules of
logical thinking, there exists in principle for the man in science no authority
whose decisions and statements could have in themselves a claim to “Truth.”
This leads to the paradoxical situation that a person who devotes all this strength to objective maters will
develop, from a social point of view, into an extreme individualist who, at
least in principle , has faith in nothing but his own judgment. It is quite possible to asset that
intellectual individualism and scientific eras emerged simultaneously in
history and have remained inseparable ever since.
Someone may suggest that the man of science
is sketched in these sentences’ is no more than an abstraction which actually
does not exist in this world, not unlike the homo oeconomicus of classical economics. However, it seems to me that science as we know
it today could not have emerged and could not have remained alive if many
individuals, during many centuries, would not have come very close to the
ideal.
Of course, not everybody who has learned
to use tools and methods which, directly or indirectly, appear to be “scientific”
is to me a man of science. I refer onto
to those individuals in whom scientific mentality is truly alive.
What, then, is the position of today’s
man of science as a member of society?
He obviously is rather proud of the fact that the work of scientists has
helped to change radically the economic life of men by almost completely
eliminating muscular work. He is
distressed by the fact that he results of his scientific work have created a
threat to mankind since they have fallen into the hands of morally blind
exponents of political power. He is conscious of the fact that
technological methods made possible by his work have led to a concentration of
economic and also of political power in the hand of small minorities which have
come to dominate completely the lives of the masses of people who appear more
and more amorphous. But even worse:
the concentration of economic and political power in few hands has not only
made the man of science dependent economically; it also threatens his
independence from within; the shrewd methods of intellectual and psychic
influences which it brings to bear will prevent the development of really independent
personalities.
Thus the man of science, as we can
observe with our own eyes, suffers a truly tragic fate. Striving in great sincerity for clarity and
inner independence, he himself, through his sheer superhuman efforts, has
fashioned the tools which are being used to make him a slave and to destroy him
also from within. He cannot escape being
muzzled by those who have the political power in their hands. As a soldier he is forced to sacrifice his own
life and to destroy the lives of others even when he is convinced of the
absurdity of such sacrifices. He is
fully aware of the fact that universal destruction is unavoidable since the historical
development has led to the concentration of all economic, political, and military
power in the hands of national states.
He also realizes that mankind can be saved only if a supranational
system, based on law, would be created to eliminate for good the methods of
brute force. However, the man of science
has slipped so much that he accepts the slavery inflicted upon him by national
states as his inevitable fate. He even degrades himself to such an extent
that he helps obediently in the perfection of the means for the general
destruction of mankind.
Is there really no escape for the man of
science? Must he really tolerate and suffer
all these indignities? Is the time gone
forever when, aroused by his inner freedom and the independence of his thinking
and his work, he had a chance of enlightening and enriching the lives of his
fellow human beings? In placing his work
too much on an intellectual basis, has he not forgotten about his
responsibility and dignity? My answer
is: while it is true that an inherently free and scrupulous person may be
destroyed, such an individual can never be enslaved or used as a blind tool.
If the man of science of our own days
could find the time and the courage to think over honestly and critically his
situation and the tasks before him and if he would act accordingly, the
possibilities for a sensible and satisfactory solution of the present dangerous
international situation would be considerably improved.”
Albert Einstein
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