EINSTEIN ON EINSTEIN

Einstein was the only physicist to appear in the 35 volumes of Arthur Schilp's Library of Living Philosophers (LLP), for which he wrote his famous intellectual autobiography, Autobiographical Notes, in 1946. The book begins by explaining the genesis and scope of the work, including the significance of the immediate post-war period and Einstein's political stance with respect to nuclear weapons and his consequent advocacy of world government. The second part consists of thirteen commentaries on major themes of Einstein's work, drawing on his own writings, correspondence and contemporary critical assessments. The third part lists the 23 thinkers who contributed to the volume, with Einstein's specific responses to their critical essays. Finally, there are English translations of Autobiographical Sketch and Autobiographical Notes with some concluding comments. The Sketch was written a few months before his death as a contribution to the centenary of ETH Zürich. Einstein was not alone in addressing philosophical themes raised by physics, and there are book length contributions from Sir James Jeans and Werner Heisenberg, while some readers may remember Ken Wilber's compilation Quantum Questions.

Interestingly, the origins of Schilp's series lay in a 1933 lecture by FCS Schiller, who noted the habit of not asking searching questions of living philosophers to open up discussion, which is precisely the aim of LLP - I have the volume devoted to Radhakrishnan. The extract at the front of the book quotes Einstein as saying that 'the essential in the being in a man of my type lies precisely in what he thinks and how he thinks, not in what he does or suffers.' This makes him sympathetic to Spinoza's God, 'who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and actions of human beings.' This is Deism rather than Theism, impersonal law rather than a personal God characterised by love. Elsewhere, Einstein writes about freeing himself from the chains of the merely personal, 'from an existence dominated by wishes, hopes and primitive feelings.' What was more real for him was the vastness of the cosmos, its mathematical beauty and law-like regularities. He was also inclined against free will, on the grounds that we act under external compulsion and inner deterministic necessity.

The main commentaries give hugely valuable insights into the development of Einstein's thinking and how he positioned himself with respect to his predecessors and contemporaries. He strove for 'a conceptual grasp of things' while remaining fully aware of the role of epistemology in this process. Philosophically, he was influenced by David Hume and Ernst Mach, while reacting against the a priori approach of Kant. He developed his views in a contribution about the relationship between knowledge and sensory experience in the LLP volume devoted to Bertrand Russell. He regarded concepts as 'the free creations of thought which cannot inductively be gained from sense experiences', a point easily missed and which includes causality, as noted by Hume. The important factor is logical coherence of these 'constructive-speculative' concepts and their connection with empirical research. He also positioned himself against the Vienna Circle and logical empiricism – he was interested in the thought process itself. He argued that theory does not so much discover reality but shapes what is being determined as real, and that we order the world through our intelligence while its very comprehensibility remains a mystery at the heart of consciousness itself. I have come to regard consciousness as (an expression of) the very faculty of knowing in itself, although at different levels and depths.

The chapter on the demise of mechanics as the basis of physics is interesting in relation to the persistence of the mechanistic metaphor within science generally – action at a distance is replaced by the field concept and gravity is related to the properties of space rather than being regarded as a force. Einstein does not regard it possible for facts by themselves to yield scientific knowledge without free conceptual construction, that is thinking embedded in necessary presuppositions, without which one cannot even ask scientific questions. He was well known for his controversial views on quantum mechanics, which he refers to as statistical, offering 'no useful point of departure for future development' due to what he regarded as its incompleteness in relation to his own search for a unified field theory.

The list of contributors to Einstein's LLP volume reads like a roll of honour with de Broglie, Pauli, Born, Bohr. Lemaitre, Godel and, interestingly, Henry Margenau, whose book The Miracle of Existence makes fascinating reading at the interface between physics and consciousness. The reply to criticisms is extraordinarily thorough, including five pages on Margenau, and differing from many contributors on questions of epistemology – he felt that many physicists lacked epistemological awareness, which is probably still true today and which makes him a philosopher-scientist. Needless to say, the Autobiographical Notes printed towards the end of this volume makes absorbing reading and a further clarifies his views on the nature of thinking and the structure of conceptual systems resting on a minimum number of axioms as undefined concepts and underived propositions. He felt that 'dogmatic rigidity prevailed in matters of principle' and sought freedom from this ethos, warning against attempts to retain a general theoretical foundation 'by adapting it to the facts by means of artificial additional assumptions' and 'the interpretation of facts by philosophical prejudices.' Einstein retained, contra quantum mechanics, the view that 'physics is an attempt conceptually to grasp reality as something that is considered to be independent of its being observed', very much a minority view these days, although further pursued by David Bohm. Readers with a background in physics will gain more from the technical discussions in this book than a non-specialist like myself, but it also provides accessible reading at the interface between philosophy and physics.