Should a search for truth ever be subordinate?
By Albert Einstein
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 may be of significance even if
these convictions, as 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 the
constructive logical thought—as an
autonomous objective of our work? Or should our search for truth 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 influence upon our thinking and moral
judgment, provided that it si 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
towards 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 that these
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 unshakeable 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
of science no authority whose decisions and statements could have in themselves
claim to “Truth.” This leads to the paradoxical situation that
a person who devotes all his strength to objective matters 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 assert that intellectual individualism and the
thirst for scientific knowledge emerged simultaneously in history and remained
in separate ever since.
Someone
may suggest that the man of science as 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 individual, during many centuries, had not 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 only to those individuals in whom the
scientific mentality as 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 the
work of scientists has helped to change the radically the economic life of men
by almost completely eliminating the muscular work. He is distressed by the
fact that 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 hands of small minorities which have come to dominate completely the lives
of masses of people, who appear more and more amorphous.
But
even worse: The concentration of economic and political power in the ands of a
few has not only made the man of science dependent economically, it also
threatens his independence from within; the shredwed methods of intellectual
and psychic influences which it brings to bear will prevent the development of
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 superhuman efforts, has
fashioned the tools which are being used to make him a slave and to destroy him
falso from within. He cannot escape being muzzled by those who have 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 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 only be saved if a supernatural system, based on law,
would be created to eliminate for all time the methods of brute force. However the man of science has slipped so
much that he accepts the slavery inflicted upon him by the national states as
his inevitable fate.
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 to 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 day could find the time and the courage to honestly
and critically over 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
