Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677).
Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/ e/ea/Spinoza.jpg.
On Thursday, October 17th, Rebecca Goldstein gave a talk called “Why did Einstein write a (bad) love poem to Spinoza?” at Dartmouth College. Goldstein, a recipient of a grant from the MacArthur foundation, previous professor of philosophy at Barnard and Columbia, and author of several books bridging the arts and sciences such as The Mind-Body Problem and Thirty-Six Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, is a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth for 2013-2014. Montgomery Fellows are outstanding people Dartmouth invites to campus to stay for a year to enrich the academic and educational life of the college.
Spinoza’s work is the focus of Einstein’s love poem in Dr. Goldstein’s talk. Einstein was deeply interested in Spinoza’s work, mentioning Spinoza in letters, writing, or conversations throughout Einstein’s life. Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) was a Portuguese-Jewish philosopher who had been excommunicated from his Jewish community at the age of 24 because of his heretical thoughts. His major work, Ethics, was published posthumously. Of his two great contemporaries, Leibnitz (1646-1715) and Descartes (1596-1650), Spinoza was perhaps the most extreme Rationalist, making every claim possible to support the sole use of reason. Rationalists believe that only man’s reasoning leads to new knowledge, as opposed to empiricists, who believe observing and testing the outside world leads to new knowledge. Spinoza, in his work Ethics, makes use of metaphysics and other pseudo-scientific ideas.
Spinoza’s pre-science, pre-Newtonian methodology stands in sharp contrast to modern science’s empirically-driven scientific method. Given that his methodology would be unacceptable today, who would take Spinoza seriously? Why did Einstein admire him? Why would Einstein write a love poem to Spinoza?
Einstein loved Spinoza because many of Spinoza’s ideas resonated with him and seemed plausible to Einstein. Although Spinoza’s methodology was not always correct, many of his ideas and intuitions were sensible and proven to be true. Einstein agreed with Spinoza’s idea of God, replying to a telegram from a Rabbi Goldstein, “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.”
Spinoza believed in what Dr. Goldstein calls a “Final Theory of Everything,” and refered to a combination of nature, substance, and God. The Final Theory of Everything includes all laws of nature, reasons for them, and even a reason for the theory itself. Spinoza says in his Ethics that the only way to obtain happiness is the pursuit of reason; in understanding more of the Final Theory of Everything, you get closer to God and experience amor dei intellecutalis, the intellectual love of God.
Spinoza’s God cannot love us back and does not resemble the God of Islam, Christianity, or Judaism, the three major religions in his time. Naturally, it was not surprising the Spinoza was declared an atheist (despite his assertion for the existence of God) and reviled as a heretic for many years afterward.
His ideas, however, have resonated with generations of thinkers. Enlightenment philosopher John Locke was influenced by Spinoza’s ideas regarding the separation of church and state; a leading neurologist today, Damasio writes of Spinoza’s amazing ideas regarding the mind and body, some of which are consistent with recent research in the theory of emotion. Some string theorists call themselves “Spinozists,” believing that a final theory of everything can indeed be worked out through mathematics alone, using the pure reason Spinoza had advocated. And not least of all, the most famous Spinozist of all might be Einstein, who was influenced by and agreed with many of Spinoza’s ideas. His poem conveys his love towards Spinoza, a feeling shared by many throughout the centuries:
How much do I love this noble man
More than I could say with words
I fear though he’ll remain alone
With a holy halo of his own…
You think his example would show us
What this teaching can give humankind
Trust not the comforting façade:
One must be born sublime