{"id":73689,"date":"2016-05-16T12:00:44","date_gmt":"2016-05-16T11:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=73689"},"modified":"2016-05-15T17:31:46","modified_gmt":"2016-05-15T16:31:46","slug":"in-praise-of-the-tamed-metaphysicist-einstein-on-reality-rationality-and-the-human-passion-for-comprehension","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/05\/in-praise-of-the-tamed-metaphysicist-einstein-on-reality-rationality-and-the-human-passion-for-comprehension\/","title":{"rendered":"In Praise of the Tamed Metaphysicist: Einstein on Reality, Rationality, and the Human Passion for Comprehension"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cThere exists a passion for comprehension, just as there exists a passion for music. That passion is rather common \"ideasandopinions_einstein\"<\/a>in children, but gets lost in most people later on.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cReason is a tool, a machine, which is driven by the spiritual fire,\u201d<\/em> Dostoyevsky wrote in 1838 as he contemplated how we come to know truth<\/a>.<\/p>\n

More than a century later, Albert Einstein<\/strong> (March 14, 1879\u2013April 18, 1955) examined the nature of the spiritual fire that fuels reason, which he called \u201ca passion for comprehension,\u201d in a 1950 Scientific American<\/em> essay later included in Ideas and Opinions<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 that superb compendium that gave us Einstein\u2019s abiding reflections on the value of kindness<\/a>, the secret to his thought process<\/a>, the common language of science<\/a>, and his increasingly timely message to posterity<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Einstein, who first contacted that \u201cpassion for comprehension\u201d in his formative experience with a compass<\/a>, writes:<\/p>\n

There exists a passion for comprehension, just as there exists a passion for music. That passion is rather common in children, but gets lost in most people later on. Without this passion, there would be neither mathematics nor natural science. Time and again the passion for understanding has led to the illusion that man is able to comprehend the objective world rationally, by pure thought, without any empirical foundations \u2014 in short, by metaphysics. I believe that every true theorist is a kind of tamed metaphysicist, no matter how pure a \u201cpositivist\u201d he may fancy himself. The metaphysicist believes that the logically simple is also the real. The tamed metaphysicist believes that not all that is logically simple is embodied in experienced reality, but that the totality of all sensory experience can be \u201ccomprehended\u201d on the basis of a conceptual system built on premises of great simplicity. The skeptic will say that this is a \u201cmiracle creed.\u201d Admittedly so, but it is a miracle creed which has been borne out to an amazing extent by the development of science.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"einstein1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Complement the indispensable Ideas and Opinions<\/em><\/strong><\/a> with Einstein on science and religion<\/a>, the secret to learning anything<\/a>, growing old<\/a>, his breathtaking love letters<\/a>, and his magnificent letter of advice to Marie Curie on how to handle haters<\/a>.<\/p>\n

________________________________<\/p>\n

Brain Pickings<\/em> is the brain child of Maria Popova, an interestingness hunter-gatherer and curious mind at large obsessed with combinatorial creativity who also writes for <\/em>Wired<\/em> UK and <\/em>The Atlantic<\/em>, among others, and is an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow. She has gotten occasional help from a handful of guest contributors<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 brainpickings.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cReason is a tool, a machine, which is driven by the spiritual fire,\u201d Dostoyevsky wrote in 1838 as he contemplated how we come to know truth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-spirituality"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73689"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73689\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}