This Albert Einstein passage can be found in the "This I Believe" archives.
My assertion is that Albert Einstein was somewhat of “modern” Transcendentalist. Although these values are not necessarily specific to his time, I think that many of his ideas are comparable to the era. They are, obviously, stated a little differently. In this passage, Einstein denies the question of a rewarding or punishing God. Einstein highlights ethical behavior and the service of fellow men. In an unrelated passage, Einstein also says that “If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.” Although these ideas do not pertain directly to the Transcendentalist movement, they help to establish his viewpoints. I made the connection to Transcendentalism near the end of his passage, when he says “the education of the individual aspires to revive an ideal that is geared toward the service of our fellow man”. I think that this embodies many of the factors we discussed in class. He is promoting the education of the individual to serve mankind. Also, he previously spoke of a spiritual force present in nature but not related to individual affairs. He may not be connected to the time, but I think Einstein was definitely connected to the idea of Transcendentalism.
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I do not think that Albert Einstein had values or even ideals that were related to Transcendentalism. They might have sounded similar to them, but they had no true meaning towards those ideals of Transcendentalism. He even stated in his autobiography that,"....without the Lord God, the realm of physics would not exist and would not be understood by such minds as those who seek those realms." He shows that he might have had a belief that was not of the tradition that was known in the late 1800's and early 1900's; he was more of a person whose faith was not the one that he discussed extravigantly, but he did have a faith in God by being Jewish. He was in no sense, though, connected to any of the ideals or ways that the reformists of Transcendentalism had or believed in.
ReplyDeleteAssertion in response to Mr. Blough;
ReplyDeleteI did not mean to assert that Einstein was a transcendentalist by defintion, I simply meant that some of the ideas he presented in "An Ideal if Service to Our Fellow Man" resembled the values that we associated with Transcendentalism during class. Obviously he wasn't striving to be a Transcendentalist, but some of the ideas are undeniably similar. Yes, i agree that he maintained a belief in the divine, but your quote simply represents the fact that he acknowledged the presence of a greater force over science and physics. I think that being Jewish was more of a heritage than a religion for him. He even says, "I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it." This shows that he valued a god as a source of structure in the universe, not as a personal deity.