Frontiers of Rationality

Albert Einstein's reflections on the knowledge of truth - and its limits

“The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence.” - Albert Einstein, 1939

While it is Einstein’s achievements in physics that made him such a legendary figure, my admiration for him rests elsewhere. He came from the last generation of scientists who were given a broad education, one that included the works of Plato, Aristotle, and Immanuel Kant, and were thus philosophically grounded in both ancient European thought and the more recent ideals of the Enlightenment. It was in the decades after Einstein that the long slow march towards the intellectual gulags of specialisation commenced, narrowing the horizons of human experience both in the sciences and beyond. But for one brief and shining period of history, we had thinkers who could bridge between the precision required in the sciences and the distinct excellences of the humanities.

As the opening quotation (from a letter sent to the Liberal Minister’s Club of New York City) makes clear, Einstein appreciated the hopelessness of depending entirely upon rationality. Beyond the regimented towers of scientific knowledge lies the wild hinterlands of the arts and the well-travelled paths of moral practices. Einstein had some of Nietzsche’s books in his extensive library, and perhaps it was here that he encountered the idea that animates his quote above - that knowledge alone is insufficient to justify our motive to seek the truth. But for Einstein, quite unlike Nietzsche, the problems of justification and value already had a timeless solution in the practices of the religious traditions. Along with his contemporary Mahatma Gandhi (who Einstein corresponded with in the 1930s), Einstein found a great merit to all the major religions.

In Einstein’s view, the achievements of scientific understanding and its technical application through technology were insufficient to ensure a dignified and happy life. He claimed that we had every reason to venerate those who proclaimed “high moral standards and values” even “above the discoverers of objective truth”, a view wildly at odds with contemporary thinking. He further denied any suggestion that we should seek the truth unconditionally (thus rejecting what Nietzsche had named ‘the will to truth’), conceding that some questions were simply unanswerable from a rational perspective. Yet he also expressly resisted “the so-called ‘relativistic’ viewpoint”, that is to say, he would not accept that there might be no possibility of secure truth “even when dealing with the more subtle moral decisions.”

Quite unlike Gandhi, who was a committed Hindu (although he admired and even considered converting to Christianity), Einstein lacked any specific faith. He once described himself as a “religious nonbeliever”, and also stated “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists”. Today it seems unthinkable that anyone who wasn’t committed to a religion could sincerely state that our debt to “Buddha, Moses, and Jesus ranks for me higher than all the achievements of the enquiring and constructive mind.” But Einstein’s thinking in this regard was entirely unique. Consider his unorthodox view that Jesus’ talk of ‘the Kingdom of God’ referred to “the small group scattered all through time of intellectually and ethically valuable people.” These are views you will not find expressed by anyone in our time.

In assigning a role for religious tradition as repositories of moral practices, Einstein risked falling prey to the segregation of facts from values that brought about terrible conceptual problems later in the twentieth century. We have to remember that religions are not the sole sources of moral principles (consider your local library and the school classroom, for instance). We must also remain mindful that facts can be just as open to interpretation as values - witness Einstein’s disagreements with the quantum physicists (still unresolved, and today Einstein’s position is taken even more seriously than ever before). Yet it is Einstein’s commitment to recognising the immense worth of the landscape beyond the frontiers of rationality that I admire most greatly, and I share with him the commitment that beyond the high-walled citadels of knowledge lie ways of being we must guard if we are not to lose our dignity and our joy in living.