No God but Spinoza’s: Spiritual and Philosophical Influences on Einstein’s Thought

so welcome everyone can you hear me okay great my name is Steve Weitzman and I'm here in my role as director of the herbert d cat center for advanced genetic studies I have the honor of introducing our wonderful speaker this afternoon but before I do so allow me to make one practical announcement and also say a few words of thank you my practical announcement is to ask you to silence or extinguish your cellphone's so those don't go off in the middle of talk I also want to note that after the talk itself will have a brief period of time for questions and what we will do is circulate microphones so if you have a question at that point just raise your hand and somebody will come to you with a microphone and that will allow us both the speaker to hear you but also allow us to record your questions tonight's lecture launches a new initiative that has been made possible by a generous grant from the Josephine Cohen foundation our mission at the Kat Center is to foster new research about the Jewish people and its history and culture using each year of our fellowship program to focus on a different theme and this year we've been focused on Jews and their understanding of nature a topic that has taken us into the frontier zone between the history of science and mysticism among other fascinating areas the Josephine Cohen Foundation has given us a chance to share some of this intellectual adventure with a broader circle of people and I want to begin by expressing my thanks to the foundation and to the Cohen family and especially to Walter Cohen who is with us here this afternoon they've given us a chance to honor the memory of Josie Cohen in a way that shares the riches of Jewish Studies scholarship with the public and we're very grateful for that I also want to thank two co-sponsors of tonight's lecture for their help in making this evening possible first of all the Jewish Studies program directed by Katherine Hellerstein as well as the philosophy department shared by Michael Whitesburg and we thank Michael and Catherine for their support and lastly but not least of course I want to thank a member of the Kat Center staff dr. Ian Elbert who is the director of public programs so the cat Center who is very hard to make tonight's program a reality so thank you in the writing of our speaker tonight rebecca goldstein is populated by people at the height of their reasoning power philosophers and scientists who are trying to see the world in a new and clearer way their aspiration mirrors that of dr. Goldstein herself a Princeton trained for whose work allows her readers into some of the deepest mysteries of time space mathematics and God what distinguishes her writing however isn't simply the powerful mind at work but the ways in which that mind registers truths about itself that reason alone cannot fully encompass truth emerge from being in a body and feeling desire and pain the lessons that only the experience of love and being a parent can teach and the insights that faith and tradition can sometimes yield as I read them dr. Goldstein's novels works like the mind-body problem properties of light a novel of love betrayal in quantum physics 36 arguments for the existence of God among other works reveals a kind of intellectual kinship with the philosopher mathematician kurt gödel a subject of one of dr. Goldberg's non-fiction books some of you might know that Goethe was a mathematical genius associated with irresolvable logical paradoxes he also happen to be a close friend with Einstein one of the subjects of tonight's talk gödel's incomplete incomplete incompleteness theorems showed that within any system of reason there are always truths that can never be proven from within that system that there is always something incomplete and inconsistent in inadequate about reasoning in its most purified form for me at least Goldstein's fiction demonstrates something like that is true of the mind itself it can never fully generate the truth on its oan seems prone to self-contradiction and even self-betrayal and is never complete or self-contained always ultimately finding itself dependent on something beyond itself dr. Gould scenes double ability to reason and to think beyond the limits of reason is I imagine one of the reasons for writing has garnered the highest honours academic culture can bestow including a MacArthur grant election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences International Humanities medal conferred by President Obama among many many other accolades I think this is actually somewhat ironic because a good portion of our fiction is actually about the insufficiency of academia the way in which folly or self delusion can get in the way of the scholarly search for truth but academia got a right this time at least by recognizing her talent and her insight and I'm thrilled that we get a chance to learn directly from her now so without further ado please join me in welcoming [Applause] thank you that was an extraordinarily gracious introduction I really thank you for it and I hope I'm not going to disappoint you too much by now speaking but I want to make this evening three audacious claims three bold claims and they were so audacious and so bold that I'm afraid I'm not going to be able to argumentatively do justice to all three of them maybe two maybe one half we'll see we'll see how it goes so let me first just put forth these claims and even though without my explicate em they're probably going to be somewhat unintelligible so the first concerns the audacity of Einstein's physics both his special theory of relativity and especially his general theory of relativity my my entry into philosophy was by way of physics and I've always kept my interest in that the claim is that that I want to put forth is that this audacity and the confidence behind this audacity derive not from the empirical evidence that Einstein had available to him because in fact he had very little evidence empirical evidence that's part of the audacity it derived not so much from considerations of physics but rather from metaphysics very large views of how the nature of reality and a specific metaphysical intuition that I want to talk about about the hidden and nature of reality which I'm going to call the saturation principle for reasons that will hopefully become obvious the second large claim audacious claim I want to make is that in his deep commitment to the saturation prints Bob Einstein felt a profound affinity with the 17th century uber rationalist and I mean rationalist in the way the philosophers mean rationalist anti empiricists philosopher Burroughs when I was a 17th century Bruce who knows that and that this affinity partly explained the reverence and in fact love that Einstein expressed for Spinoza choosing love's favored chosen medium for expressing itself a love poem people always think I'm being metaphorical when I talk about Einsteins love poem to Spinoza I'm not being metaphorical there's the proof soosh the noses epic is the name of this poem there are five stanzas and you can actually see he crossed out a lot he labored over this poem there are five stanzas I'm just going to read I think the first may be the second to do forgive me I'm not very good German accent feebly he's an eighth Landman mad ich mich vert and sag and con duck fish each dust every type to line with sign in style and in Heilig and shine how much do I love this nobleman more than I could say with words I fear though I'll remain alone with a holy halo of his own I'm gonna skip to the last verse bear with the tortured German dude ensign why feel psychic wounds Aben vast easily Rijn dimension can even the trial Anish and trustless and shine sooner haben and most monica bore ensign you think his example would show us what this teaching can give humankind trust not the comfort ain't prasad one must be born sublime well this it's a airless it's it's genuine love poem he also in nineteen twenty made a pilgrimage to Spinoza his model modest little house and The Hague there is his signature the sixth one down might see it Einstein what would inspire such devotion reverence love it was not only there having shared the same at a physical intuition the saturation principle I'm going to argue um but the sweeping implications ethical and spiritual that's been oza drew from it I think that's what swept so to speak Einstein off his feet or so I shall boldly claim this second or was no I don't think I'm up to the third bold claim yeah the third bold claim yet we had the audacity of life yeah okay the third Bowl claim I'd like to make concern Spinoza and his audacity and I'm not talking so much here about whatever it was that got him put into param the Jewish form of excommunication at the tender age of twenty four before he had even published anything I've got my audacious views about what lay behind the param the most severe param that the Amsterdam Portuguese community ever issued but that's not what I'm going to be talking about tonight rather I want to talk about his philosophical audacity of what was eventually published posthumously in his magnum opus called the ethics um nothing quite like his system had ever been attempted and he was in so many ways completely out of sync with the philosophical tenor of his time ah you're thinking no he wasn't what about Descartes what about Rene Descartes his slightly older rationalist predecessor wasn't Spinoza following in the footsteps of day card only going further being more of a rationalist extremist making more claims than Descartes had made for Pure Reason actually I think not I think in fact that the source of Spinoza's rationalism his metaphysical intuition laying down what he took as the requirements for existence is entirely different from the source of de cartes rationalism which isn't metaphysical at all but rather epistemological having to do with the requirements that Descartes thought were needed in order for something to count for a belief to count as knowledge indubitably one was an epistemological requirement Descartes Spinoza is entirely different it's a metaphysical intuition and I'm going to claim this really anxious claim that this metaphysical intuition came from the kind of discussions that were very current in the Jewish Spinoza Jewish Ben I was at the jewish Amsterdam of Spinoza stay kabbala I actually there's been a lot of starting with Wolfson there's been a lot of attempts to try to connect Spinoza up with traditional Jewish text usually concentrating on Maimonides perhaps because he's considered the most prominent of traditionally Jewish philosophers but I've always found such attempts quite forced and even worse distorting the ideas of Spinoza the basic intuitions of Spinoza spinosum self-condemned Maimonides approach to philosophy and the most vehement terms in his truck Tata Steel logical politicus therefore the method of Maimonides is clearly useless to which we may add that it does away with all the certainty which the masses acquire by careful reading of Scripture or which is gained by any other persons in any other way in conclusion then we dismissed Maimonides as harmful useless and absurd it's from Chapter nine there were other there were other places as well so I've always taken Spinoza at his word here Maimonides had tried to reconcile judaism with what was considered in his time to be the best philosophical / scientific thinking which was Aristotle at that time which was Aristotle was simply dubbed the philosopher in the late Middle Ages but Aristotle and so Maimonides with this teleological reasoning explaining all my ways of design and intentionality explaining things by reference so-called final causes the ends the goals the Telos that are meant to be accomplished by various changes that we see teleology is wildly irreconcilable with Spinoza he utterly condemns teleology this is really lies at the heart of Spinoza so here for example he writes thus the prejudice developed into superstition and took deep root in the human mind and for this reason everyone strove most zealous ly to understand and explain the final causes of things to try to explain things by reference to what is accomplished what is the end the goal but in their endeavor to show that nature does nothing in a vain they only seem to have demonstrated that nature the gods and men are all mad together such a doctrine might well have suffice to conceal the truth for the human race for all eternity if mathematics had not furnished another standard of Verity without regard to final cause smbus is from the ethics the first part the appendix in fact if there is any ancient philosopher Spinoza I think should be compared to its not Aristotle it's it's Plato that the fundamental intuitions about reality and the kind of explanations reality demands is has an affinity with Plato and and Plato's emphasis on mathematics and it just so happens that the thinkers of his immediate environment Spinoza's a media environment who were immersed in Platonism and Neoplatonism were were the Kabbalists in fact it was very popular view a speculation that the among them that the ancient Hebrews had been granted this esoteric divine wisdom and they had transmitted this esoteric wisdom to other ancient thinkers particularly Plato so that made Plato kosher right because he really got it from from the ancient Hebrews and and this was a very popular idea in Spinoza's Amsterdam Jewish Amsterdam so if we are determined to connect Spinoza's thinking with any traditional Jewish thinking I think it ought to be cobble ISM and if I'm going to boldly if insufficiently try to do so today okay so those are my three audacious old claims okay so the first claim if you remember concerns the audacity of Einstein's physics when I Saints theory of general relativity was published in 1915 it not only challenged the rainy Newtonian paradigm of space and time and gravitation not only subverted some of our deepest intuitions proto scientific physical intuitions what we call our folk physics about space and time and causality it also was based on scant empirical evidence the only available empirical evidence was that the theory correctly accounted for the anomalous precession of the perihelion Hylian for here perihelion parent use of mercury as the closest planet to the Sun Mercury orbits a region of the solar system where space-time is at least according to general relativity disturbed or distorted by the sun's mass this is a core idea in the theory of general relativity that the geometry of space-time is warped by large masses Mercury's elliptical path around the Sun shifts slightly with each orbit so that its closest point to the Sun that's the pair Helion I've never said that word out loud I only read it shifts forward with each pass and the theory was published in 1915 an empirical validation of any kind income until 1919 when the English physicists Arthur Eddington shown there with Einstein together with his collaborators were able to use a total solar eclipse to test a prediction of general relativity namely the precise angle by which life would be deflected near a massive body like the Sun general relativity asserts that gravity doesn't work the way Newton's law of universal gravitation says it does that two bodies will attract each other proportionally to the to the product of their two masses and inversely proportional to the distance between them though it's very very hard to detect deviations from Newton's universal law rather what general relativity audaciously says is that a massive body will warp the geometry of space-time so that the path of traveling light will bend near a massive body like the Sun by picture so hoping to prove Einstein's theory tried to garner some empirical evidence for it Eddington and his collaborators traveled to the coast of West Africa in 1919 and photographed a total solar eclipse that was taking place there and when they examined the photos they were able to see the stars near the Sun that are usually invisible and seeing these stars they could confirm that the Sun's gravity had deflected the light one-point-seven arc seconds which is exactly what's predicted by general relativity the predictions were astonishing they were accurate to an astonishing degree really appear that gravity does more the geometry of space-time the way a bowling ball plays on some tautly stretched rope netting will change its geometry a major this is a major conceptual revolution and general relativity it's just a beautiful theory and it's so internally coherent it's mathis beautiful and it's just all so of a piece logically welded together just just as a good spinosus twould have it that it all either stands or falls together which is a very unusual theory in that regard and also unusual in that it was the work of one mind right that's very unusual in in science sorry which is usually collaborative I mean think about compared to quantum mechanics which had many many different minds working on it this just came all of one out of one mind so that it really it's it's sort of when that regard more like a work of art like a literary work who knows as a sort of coming out of one mind one author and this explains something of the great celebrity that Einstein was suddenly thrust into after the 1919 solar eclipse to quote the physicist Paul Davies what makes general relativity distinctive is that it treats gravitation not as a force between bodies such as the Sun and the earth but as a warping or distortion in the geometry of space and time this huge conceptual we orientation plus the sheer mathematical beauty of the theory ensured that general relativity acquired both a mystique and a fearsome reputation for impenetrability that made Einstein a byword for genius so the empirical conformation such as it was of Einstein's general theory was considered spectacular news there was a special meeting of the Royal Society of Science in London to announce the discovery and it made the front page of most major newspapers here's my favorite headline there are lots of headlines lights all askew in the heavens man of science more or less more or less a cog / results of eclipses observations Einstein's theory triumph stars not where they seemed or were calculated to be but nobody need worry yeah it was you know he was it was a real phenomena and he went on to travel the world lecturing on his theories both special and general relativity and according to Einstein's biographer a Walter Isaacson in the six years after the 1919 eclipse more than 600 books and articles were written about his theories of the cosmos when he was asked by his assistant what his reaction would have been if general relativity had not been confirmed by Eddington's experiments our observations of the solar eclipse Einstein famously quipped then I would feel sorry for the dear Lord the theory is correct anyway I mean this is constant this is confidence he was 40 years old and his name became the synonymous the eponym for genius as in you know he's no Einstein and reportedly Einstein once said I'm no Einstein having attained the reputation of a kind of 20th century Delphic Oracle he was applied with questions including about his religious beliefs he often used God language I'm speaking of the dear Lord or more often the Alta the old one but not much should be inferred from this kind of talk physicists and mathematicians play very fast and loose with God talk even when they're confirmed atheists playfully using such language to suggest ultimate objectivity of a kind to which we mere humans may not be privy at least not now and maybe not forever and in fact whenever he was asked out right for his opinion about God Einstein always resorted to Spinoza responding that he believed in no god but Spinoza's so for example they are a noted Orthodox Jewish rabbi whose name I always remember there was Herbert Goldstein of New York no relation Goldstein is a ex-husband's name anyway so of New York City hearing some once you publish under a name you can never lose it but hearing some disturbing reports of Einsteins decidedly unorthodox religious views telegraphed the physicists in Berlin do you believe in God stop answer paid 50 words so the rabbi rabbi Goldstein could actually have saved himself some money because Einstein used far fewer words and the prepaid 50 what he answered was I believe and Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and doings of mankind yes it became the most famous version of an answer that he often gave to this particular question always invoking Spinoza and this brings me to the second of my claims Einstein we're already audacious looking ahead such a strong metaphysical intuition as to the nature of reality that it empowered him to formulate a radical revision of space and time and gravity even when there was precious little empirical evidence to support his view my second claim is that the metaphysical intuition that lay so near the heart of Einstein's creative work in physics was one that the 20th century empirical physicists shared with the 17th century 'über a rationalist philosopher so Spinoza lived as the project of modern mathematical physics was just getting off of the ground and he was dead at the age of 44 before the major Newtonian paradigm was even proposed the very paradigm that Einstein in the early years of the 20th century would overturn Spinoza died in 1677 Newton's Principia Mathematica was published in 1687 a decade later so that Einstein would have shared with Spinoza an intuition that helped the physicists to produce his extraordinary physics is all the more remarkable and remarkable too because Spinoza thinking is so radically anti empirical he said he's the uber rationalist of all time he's made every claim for pure a priori reason of the kind that we used in mathematics by passing empirical data he made every claim for pure a priori reason that has ever been made he claimed that pure reason can yield us the structure of the world not everything about the world but the fundamental structure of the world demonstrating it to be quite contrary to what it seems by way of our experience and that pure even our most intimate experience even our experience of ourselves and that pure a priori reason can also dictate to us how we ought to live right after all his magnum opus is called the ethics and here is the first two pages of the ences because as you can see it is written quite eccentrically probably many of you are familiar with it but it's those of you are in it it's written in a priori reasons most favored mode strictly formal deductive proofs beginning with definitions and axioms and proceeding on to propositions which then serve as XE amande the further proofs treating all of these propositions just trying to describe the nature of the world the nature of our minds the nature of our cells and our what our life's ought to be about as if they were theorems of geometry but later on and a rather offhand comment in the ethics he he makes what to me seems a very poetic statement it's my favorite statement and all of the epics he writes for the eyes of the mind whereby it sees things and understands are none other than proofs so this is a work that not only predates the major paradigm of modern physics newton's principia mathematica but which also seems just fly in the face of the entire scientific enterprise which no matter how much mathematics it uses and the physics uses obviously quite a lot it isn't one the less an empirical science empirical predictions are made and have to be confirmed so this makes spin spin noses influence on understand all the more remark about Spinoza I should just mention what's wrong about his system the surely a priori a priori work that he believed it to be a priori propositions empiricists like me believe in any case have no substantive descriptive content they are basically tautologies in order to get descriptives content out you have to put some descriptive content in and Spinoza just put just got descriptive content into a system by way of that substantive non tautological metaphysical intuition I'm calling the saturation principle you won't find the saturation principle which I haven't told you building up suspense I told you it's yet you all find it ever stated in his axioms or his definitions because he rather he uses it as if it's a veritable law of logic like the love of non-contradiction in the course of deducing his conclusions okay so what at long last is the saturation principle of that why is the how it's very descriptive intuition about the nature of the world that Spinoza had and Einstein did as well so perhaps the best way to approach it is with an anecdote that's told about William James the great philosopher and psychologist and I'm pretty sure it's an apocryphal story but for our purposes that doesn't matter and I'll give you the written version which I find slightly sexist that's why I don't want to say it I'd rather you read it and this comes from the linguist JR Ross after a lecture on cosmology and the structure of the solar system William James was accosted by a little old lady that's always a little old lady isn't it saying something stupid your theory that Sun is the center of the solar system and the earth is a ball which rotates around it has a very convincing ring to it mr. James but it's wrong I've got a better theory and what is that madam inquired James politely that we live on a crust of Earth which is on the back of a giant turtle not wanting to just mop demolish this absurd little theory by bringing to bear our the masses of scientific evidence he had at his command James decided to gently dissuade his opponent by making her see some of the inadequacies of her position if your theory is correct madam he asked what does the turtle stand on you're a very clever man mr. James and that's a very good question but I have an answer to it and it isn't this the first turtle stands on the back of a second for a larger turtle who stands directly under it but what does this second turtle stand on for sister James patiently to this little old lady crow triumphantly it's no use mr. James it's Turtles all the way down yeah and this is from this book constraints on variabilities instant tax published in 1967 so what the saturation principle asserts is that the little old lady was kind of right because it is something all the way down though it isn't turtle she got that wrong this isn't can you read this it's really yeah okay good you can read it what it is all the way down is reasons underneath every reason stands another reason and under that reason another and so on ad infinitum and beneath the whole series of infinite reasons there is of course a reason it has to be this very infinite series and no other this is what the saturation principle and sorts that reality the whole kit and kaboodle of it is saturated saturation principle through and through with reasons there is nothing arbitrary inexplicable unnecessary no brute contingency no fact which is a fact for no other reason than that it happens to be a fact there are no on sightly threads dangling out from the fabric of reality and that applies to the whole of reality itself it reality must account for everything including itself that it exists at all that there is something rather than nothing and that it exists precisely in the way that it exists Oh must be explicable by way of reasons that refer to nothing over and beyond reality itself and Spinoza's language reality is Casa Suey is the cause of itself it's the explanation of itself which we in our finest this completeness this implicit order whatever it is is infinite and we in our finer toot can't possibly penetrate at all we our minds can't encompass it yeah there's a kind of incompleteness theorem that comes out of Spinoza's ethics but if we were to fully understand it we would understand that it must be such this infinite infinity as to generate its own existence if the saturation principle is to be satisfied which he just took to be a kind of law of logic the violation of the saturation principle was to him like the violation of the law of non-contradiction it just is a violence to our reasoning capacity this means that according to Spinoza the world is determined by logic itself at least if we regard the saturation principle as itself a logical principle which it isn't it's not on the same par with the law of non-contradiction try to get a picture for the saturation principle that's the best I can but if you've got anything if you find think better presentiment in any case whether or not it's a law of logic the saturation principle is what in Spinoza system puts the on toast being gives us the word ontological into the logos and the on toasts that he derives is of an infinite implicit water in which all is bound together by necessary connections because of its reasons all the way down then these reasons must ultimately be necessary otherwise contingency ugly arbitrary contingency we'll see them up and here are some further so this is this is what gets the whole system going this is what they say puts the objects into the logos and here are some further consequences that are drawn from the extraordinarily potent presumption of the saturation principle to be is to be explicable to be is either to be identical with the whole infinite web of an implicit order or to be implicated by it the ways we have of trying to conceive of the infinite web of the implicit order are severely limited we have only two ways of conceiving of it by way of the attribute of extension in my way of the attribute of thought but but it's actually it could be expressed in infinite ways but of course our finite minds can only think of two so two is an arbitrary number it can't be you know with Spinoza there are only either there's one or there's infinite there can't be anything in-between because that makes it our betray so the two that are the two attributes of art by means of which we try to explain things and make sense of our experience is simply a measure of our own finitude Spinoza anything else yeah we're we capable of grasping the whole infinite web of an implicit order which we are being finite necessarily incapable of doing then we would grasp the explanation for all and grasping them see how all is necessary the appearance of the arbitrary the contingent the undetermined is merely the measure of our own pathetic fine attune of our incomplete and in completable knowledge so this man also calls this on toast the infinite by various names he calls it substance user being the term that Aristotle had introduced to served as the linchpins of his own ontology but since the gnosis ontology is entirely different he radically deforms what Spinoza means by substance causing so much confusion to this day among philosophers he calls it nature though of course he doesn't mean by Nature you know bubbling Brooks or poetic sunsets he also calls it God subverting the conventional meaning of that term even more radically than he Suburbans the Aristotelian notion of substance or the common meaning of nature it is of course follows from his notion of God the one infinite implicit order that itself exhausts all reasons so that nothing can possibly exist outside of it that this precludes the assistance of of the Abrahamic God which has some kind of will who makes choices and acts on this choice against choosing what the unit that the universe should exist you know let it be and the laws of nature by which it exists not to speak of the ethical and religious laws by which we ought to exist all appeals to the will of God constitute violations of the saturation principles it can be nothing outside of substance also known as God also known as nature Einstein didn't regard the saturation principle as on a par with a veritable law of nature as Spinoza did he understood very very well that it is logically possible that it not be satisfied and that our world indeed may violate it but his strong intuition was that it is satisfied that it is reasons all the way down and this was the intuition he brought to bear in his physics I'm I've got a lot of quotes from him about his physics showing how much he hated the notion of anything arbitrary in both special relativity let's give you just the one in it was already present in in forming a special relativity his distaste for anything arbitrary contingent but his his spinosus intuition became even stronger after he was able to eliminate that the cosmological constant that it presented itself itself to him as I think he called it a renunciation of a logical simplicity of the theory by which he meant the expulsion of arbitrary elements lots of quotes about this but I'm just gonna give you one here since I haven't rused introduced this lambda term I've always had a bad conscience but at that time I could see no other possibility to deal with the fact of the existence of a finite mean density of matter I found it very ugly indeed but the field that the field law of gravitation should be composed of two logically independent terms which are connected by addition about the justification of such feelings concerning logical simplicity it is difficult to argue I cannot help to feel it strongly and I am unable to believe that such an ugly thing should be realized in nature and this was in a letter he wrote to a colleague la Mettrie um Einstein's intuitions spinosus intuitions that there's nothing arbitrary in nature not only shape the details of his theories but it determined the kinds of questions he asked of the universe the kinds of questions he thought the universe was capable of answering which is different from the assertion that we are capable of answering them this is from Steven Hawkings a brief history of time Einstein once asked the question how much choice did God have in constructing the universe even if there is only one possible unified theory it is just a set of rules and equations what is it that priests fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe why does the universe go to the father of existing is the unified theory so compelling that it brings about its own existence like Spinoza Einstein was convinced that ultimately the universe and nothing but the universe nature healthy answers to these questions and he was also of the opinion as Spinoza was that our capacities weren't up to the task of attaining those answers but that to accept this limitation while simultaneously striving always to increase our knowledge wasn't a tragic a deplorable a grievous situation but in fact an extensively joyous and redemptive one following the lead of Spinoza Einstein I did identified as a religious emotion our simultaneously understanding that the universe is replete saturated with reasons while only some small subset of them are apprehended by us its reasons all the way down but we will never see all the way down but we can trust that it goes all the way down but that for Einstein as for Spinoza is no cause for despair and quite in fact quite the opposite the most beautiful this is Spinoza ups Einstein the most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious to sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly this is religiousness in this sense and in this sense only I am a devoutly religious man Spinoza too had argued that this his conception of God feeling of reverential awe that it ought to inspire in us what he had called a more de intellectual Alice the intellectual love of God was truly religious was true piety heidy that's consistent with the nature of reality we know what his scandalized Spinoza scandalized contemporaries thought of his claim and after he was put into harem by his community it fell on Greater Christian Europe to excoriate him declaring him to be Satan's emissary on earth right into the next centuries Age of Enlightenment and beyond but even Einstein had to defend his chosen sense of religiosity that he claimed for himself following Spinoza I can understand your aversion to the use of the term religion to describe an emotional and psychological attitude which shows itself most clearly in Spinoza but I have not found a better expression than religious for the trust and the rational nature of reality the saturation principle right that is at least to a certain extent accessible to human reason and once more does I love these quotes from him the human mind no matter how highly trained cannot grasp the universe we are in the position of a little child entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different languages the child knows that someone must have written those books at des ekkada know who or how it does not understand the language is in which they are written the child notes a definite plan and the arrangement of the books a mysterious order which it does not comprehend but only dimly understands lest you think that Einstein and speaking of someone writing these books is appealing to something like the conventional God the Abrahamic God who exists outside of nature and acts with intentions choosing the laws of nature rather than Spinoza's God then it seems to me miss Einstein again it seems to me that the ideas of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously I feel also not able to imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere my views are near those of Spinoza admiration for the beauty of and belief in the logical simplicity of the order which we can grasp humbly and only imperfectly I believe that we have to consent ourselves with our imperfect knowledge and understanding and treat values and moral obligations as a purely human problem the most important of all human problems and I think was further in the Spinoza s direction and in drawing these ethical implications in 1915 1950 a grieving father having just lost his young child to polio wrote to Einstein to ask for some kind of Solace I'm kind of consolation that's the kind of position that I same played in the culture of that day and Einstein wrote back to the father in terms that are utterly Spinoza istic demonstrating how far he was willing to go and following Spinoza's spiritual and ethical deductions regarding our human situation in such a universe as Spinoza had described and how we might give in our situation cope with the tragic dimension at least from a human point of view it seems like the tragic dimension of that universe I think rigorously Spinoza answer to this grieving father is really extraordinary here's a picture of it you can see he it's this working draft you can see how we really labored over to compose him at first he worked out his thoughts in German and then he translated them into English and then he had his secretary type it out and it says a human being is a part of the whole called by us universe apart limited in time and space no no experiences himself his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest a kind of optimal up up optional up optical sorry it's very hard to read this delusion of his consciousness the striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion not to nourish the delusion but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind with my best wishes Sincerely Yours Albert Einstein I don't know how much consolation that poor father derived from that okay so I've boldly claimed about Einstein's physics physics was generously fed by his metaphysical intuition and that his metaphysical intuition dubbed the saturation principle was one that he shared with the uber rationalist Spinoza and I've also claimed that whether or not Einstein came by his metaphysical intuition independently of Spinoza which I think he did when it came to drawing the spiritual and ethical implications from it he was deeply influenced by Spinoza thus explaining the reverence the love that that would inspire a love poem and I come to my last of my claims the most audacious that the intuition that resonated so deeply in Einstein finding expression not only in his physics but in his spiritual and ethical outlook had been suggested to Spinoza whether consciously or unconsciously by the Cobble ISM that was being pursued by many in his community including some of the teachers that he had had in the Talmud Torah school that he had attended the only formal education he ever had how is it that he came to his fundamentalist intuition that reality consists of an infinity that holds within itself an explosively Jenner generative power a coiled up necessity that can't be contained just explodes into existence yelling an infinity of constant consequences more than our feeble minds can conceive of making it the imminent and indwelling cause of everything including each of us whose failings intellectual psychological ethical all have their source in our financial including our excessively finite knowledge necessarily incomplete though not so necessarily incomplete as what we tolerate in ourselves so that the work of repairing our and our world of human relations which is the proper subject of ethics rests in expanding our knowledge trying to replicate the infinite order that is reality as much as we can within our own minds and that is freedom for him from what with such intuitions about the vast consequence of the infinite have derived and ainst oath right those people letters spell out of course ain't solid literally without n the Hebrew for infinite the infinite infinity which in law trionic kabbalah designates the hidden core of god's being which we can never completely penetrate we can never our lines can never encompass because it's infinite the ain't soft emanates in the sefirot the manifestations of the in itself that constitute the visible universe if I had more time you could you could I could perhaps explicate the very confusing relationship between Spinoza's notions of nature' anot iran's and that torah not to rata nature nature een and nature natured from the relationship between the ant self and the sefirot we know that Spinoza kept abreast of these ideas there were several Kabbalists books in his personal library at the time that he died and he actually tells us in the Tractatus theological politico's that he was and personally known several Kabbalists though actually his words there don't lend to much support to my claim of a Cobb West influence on Spinoza to wit I have also read and for that matter personally known some kabbalists try fleurs i've never been able to be sufficiently amazed by their madness but that's not the only thing he ever says in a letter to Henry Oldenburg who was a secretary of the newly established moral Society in London and a very frequent correspondent with Spinoza Spinoza makes a remark that might be interpreted as an oblique homage to cobble ism and that letter Spinoza is addressing Oldenburg somewhat scandalous reaction to Spinoza's I don't vacation of God with nature I favor an opinion concerning God in nature far different from the modern Christians usually defendants for I maintain that God is as they say the eminent but not the transitive cause of all things but all things are in God and move in God I affirm I say with Paul and perhaps with all the ancient philosophers I would also be so bold as to say with the ancient Hebrews as far as we can conjecture from certain received traditions corrupted as they have been in many ways received traditions is what cup a lot that's that's the translation of Qabalah I'm not alone among scholars and thinking that Spinoza's reference to certain receive traditions in this letter as a reference to Cobb a lot and in suggesting that his view was shared by all the ancient philosopher Spinoza is endorsing in this opinion that was very current in his and Jewish Amsterdam namely that there had been an ancient of thy divine wisdom first grasped by the ancient Hebrews and transmitted through them to other ancient philosophers most especially to Plato but that it had become so corrupted by established religions is to require fresh revelation from the Kabbalists of of Spain who after the expulsion of 1492 is scattered some to the Holy Land especially just thought or to Constantinople and many to Portugal and then eventually to Amsterdam it's getting late but there was one there's a book that has only recently been translated from the Portuguese by Abraham Cohen to Herrera and the book is puede si Ella the gate of helot of heaven and where is it there it is we don't know where Herrera came from came from Florence but he showed up in Amsterdam and he had a tremendous influence on Amsterdam Amsterdam Sephardic community because of his deep knowledge of Kabbalah was actually from him that rabbi Isaac tapassin 'kathy chief rabbi of the Sephardic community received his instructions in Kabbalah there are stunning parallels to be found in gates of heaven with Spinoza philosophy most stunningly between Spinoza's conception of this generative power of of the infinite for herrera the aim soph entails maximum potency it's an infinity that activates everything that is possible I've got lots of quotes so giving the parallels here in Spinoza these ideas about generative capacities of the infinite generated consequences inimical to even the most philosophical false that it generated in Spinoza consequences that are inimical to even the most philosophical of loriana Kabbalists such as Carrara for even Carrara I found in reading the book describes that symptom the self contraction of God that made room for the emergence of the visible world that is so fundamental in Lauria Lanica Cobble ISM as an act of conscious deliberate will on the part of God and this is irreconcilable with Spinoza's universe not in Spinoza's universe this attribution to God of a human type of well bringing brings down for Spinoza the whole mad logic of teleology that would subvert the self-contained assess 'ti of the universe and that might have made Spinoza even categorize Herrara as a catalyst rifle R for not carrying through to what Spinoza sauce logical conclusion of the generative capacity of the infinite but that's still consistent with the original conception of such a generative conception of the infinite having been implanted in Spinoza by what he heard and read of the kabbalists in Amsterdam and that hence my third and most ill argued claim tonight that the most heretic most famous heretical Jewish stunned maybe Marxist even more famous and heretical but one of the most heretical Jewish sons so put into permanent harem at the age of 24 so that nobody in his community not anybody of his family was ever permitted to exchange a word with him was only taking certain esoteric Jewish ideas that it captured his own community and carrying them forth fully what they shisei fearlessly to whatever startling conclusions they seemed to yield to him and from his having done so so many other startling consequences followed I think the entire European enlightenment in fact followed a hundred years later from what Spinoza had done but oh yeah I worked so hard to get that yeah including one of the one of the consequences that the most celebrated physicists of a modern age was so deeply touched by the conclusions of this uber rationalist system as to write a love poem to Spinoza's ethics so anyway that's it thanks [Applause] thank you so much for your talk I say what I'm about to say is that with full complement because everything was so lucid it was almost like Spinoza for dummies but my questions are to number one if everything derives from reason does that create a deterministic world number two the answer is yes mm-hmm and number two how is it does does this notion of the saturation principle saturate individual lives because because it seems to me that individual life is saturated with contingencies so how do you recognize and the universe at large but those are my questions thank you they're very very good questions yes I mean Spinoza's is a strongly determinist system everything is ultimately we you know reduce to logic if its reasons all the way down it's there's always a reason why and yet the ethics is is a work that tries to change us right and it actually did it had tremendous consequences historical consequences and so it's it's not a fatalist system even though determinist system and the way that we can change is we can we can change our ideas we will that will didn't determined he's trying to determine us he's trying to necessarily determine us to change our ideas right so by writing a book like this and we read this book we study it we understand it we become convinced you know we change our ideas and and and all sorts of ideas will change as a consequence including and this I think gets to your second question and Chu including our notions of ourself that we are just clusters by nighters of the infinite ideas of of God of this infinite implicit order and and and so the sort of the belief in our in the inviolability the certainty of our of our identity of our self-identity that shrivels a way to that where it our commitment of that to our own cells shrivels away to a certain extent the more we identify with that thing which is substance reality God nature and so they he even offers us at the ends our emotions change that's one of the things that he promises us that by seeing how we are part of this thing and also seeing how our reactions to things are determined all of the painful emotions will disappear so anger hatred resentment you know what you see that everything is necessary is to for all of these idea motional reactions to be dissolved and and all that we and all that we experience is the joy of understanding and this ultimate joy one more day intellectual it ously the intellectual love of God you know this appreciation of having been implicated derived from this one system so he even offers us a kind of cold consolation and that's what Einstein was echoing there in his letter to the grieving father for you know our own mortality which is part of our fine and and the mortality of those whom we love you know we the kind of consolation is gee whiz you know we were implicated for however short a period of time and that implication will always be true right it will always necessarily be true that we will have existed that we had once existed and that's all the consolation that we can derive about our mortality and ourselves which is consistent with the true nature of reality and um you know it kind of works actually the you've the more you read it the more you can get into this transcendent state it's not very good for raising children the spinosus transcended state but uh um Spinoza didn't have children yes comment on evolutionary psychology and the rationalist program by what miracle could it be that a faculty that's only been shaped by reproductive edge and survival could possibly penetrate the reality of the universe how is it that we can do physics and we can when we can only do psychology yeah so of course you know Einstein Spinoza would love this question I think you know that it is in fact you know that we we have been shaped first well in some sense he would love it evolution the theory of evolution and it's it's stretching into evolutionary psychology seems to recognize the merely contingent they you know accidents of nature that happen and you know and and you know he wouldn't accept that he would say was an incomplete theory if we really saw Theory you know saw reasons all the way down we would see that all of these things in fact had to happen so evolutionary Darwinian evolution evolutionary psychology since it's so recognized as it's so prioritizes the contingent would not go down well with with Spinoza or with Einstein um however that the fact that the second part of it that we have its endowed us with these you know very finite ways of explaining the universe it's consistent with with with what they would say but yeah I mean this trying to reconcile evolutionary theory with with with Spinoza view of things is seems not necessarily all that such a person would say and there are people around in fact a lot of string theorists so my best audience for talking about Spinoza it's always string theorists right because they think it's reason X tegmark for example it's it's math its reasons all the way down it's basically a priori reason we can't see it but that's just because our minds are our finite for our minds to be infinite where they would have to be congruent with with God nature substance so not a very good answer but that's the best I can do Thanks yeah so his son-in-law was in feta spinosus scholar and written a book on on Spinoza and I think you know that this it seems to me that there really is evidence of as having grappled with the with the ethics he he very much understood what the basic fundamental metaphysical intuition was that his reasons all the way down and that's one that he I don't think he derived it from there I think that it came just isn't it became naturally to him but that in having seen it maybe haven't spoken to his son-in-law and being you know a prize of the fact that that this is what makes the system work I think he actually really studied it and will you really see it coming out is for example I think in that letter to the father of the grieving father right that he had followed the implications of the of the ethics to this very radical conclusion that the the self kind of if we really follow the reasoning out the self kind of that grasp we have of ourselves and our commitment to ourselves somehow unravels and such and simply the apprehension of the whole and and there I think you know in his spiritual and ethical conclusions there's evidence of his really having studied Spinoza and that would explain you know this profound reverence uh you know a holy halo nobody you know on round his head so I don't think it's just the oh you know a heretic like me one of a kind sort of thing I think Spinoza must have changed his views about certain things you don't have in a person like Einstein that kind of reverential gratitude unless your views were taken further that's just claim thank you wonderful lecture I have a question if pure reason is a priori which I think I believe it is then why would knowledge be beyond the limits of reason because there can be implications infinite number of implications that we can't get to being finite I mean that's a situation we have even in mathematics right there are conjectures that we think are true Kobach's conjecture for example that every even number is the sum of two primes we've checked it out every even number that turns out to be the sum of two primes but we can't keep going ad infinitum and perhaps a proof that we just doesn't exist that we can get you perhaps it's true if it's false that we could discover it because there's a counterexample so if Goldbach's conjecture that every even number is the sum of two primes is false then in principle we could discover but it might be true and we can never know it's true because we just have to go on and keep checking every number and that no proof actually exists so that's the kind of thing does that satisfy you at all the with reason and more knowledge that we accumulate every single day in year right eventually will we would be able to to have all the answers yeah now you can go on for many many many many years forever but you can you constantly get to more knowledge through reason yeah that's where I find the contradiction and and that's what he tells us we ought to do and therein lies our freedom right also a very Jewish idea right that to the extent that we understand we are we make spiritual advances and become better and freer so we ought to be doing that but if in fact reality is reasons all the way down and it's and it's and it's and it's infinite we may not be able to ever get to it all not even such a paltry little isolated truth as Goldbach's conjecture that every even number is the sum of two primes that may lie beyond us how much more so to get to the very bottom and understand why it had to be this universe and no other universe but he promises us that universe were we to know it in its entirety would yield that answer but we can't and that's the human situation but it's not one to grieve about but rather to to rejoice in okay I kind of liked emptying with that poetic sense but yes okay [Applause] you

Channel: Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies

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Length: 80min 32sec (4832 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 29 2017