Einstein Papers Project’s editors’ reflections on The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 17 By Josh Eisenthal

Documentary editing is a meticulous process. Thorough research and skillful attention to detail are expected standards among practitioners in the field. One thing people outside of the field may not consider is that editors work to avoid injecting their present day understanding of historical events into their annotation of documents. Separating one’s knowledge of events as they later unfolded from factual details of the historical record requires rigor and balance. Editorial work and editorializing are distinct and separate things. Einstein Papers Project editors engage in the former, working to contextualize facts without the interference of hindsight. Project historians and researchers spend years sorting, analyzing and researching the materials that go into our volumes. Understanding this makes it especially interesting to find out what our editors think of the documents they edit, beyond the confines of the documentary editing process. Here, EPP Editor, Josh Eisenthal reflects on Einstein’s second meeting with Rabindranath Tagore which is documented in the forthcoming Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 17 .

Einstein and Tagore

“On the Nature of Reality” (Doc. 372) and “Tagore Talks with Einstein” (Doc. 396)

One aspect of Volume 17 that I found particularly intriguing was the interaction between Einstein and the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore was a remarkable figure from the period: a poet, short-story writer, song composer, playwright, essayist, and painter (not to mention the winner of the 1913 Nobel prize for literature). Einstein invited Tagore to visit him in Caputh on 14 July 1930 (they had met each other once before, back in 1926) and they met again a few weeks later, on 19 August, this time in Berlin. Versions of the conversations from both meetings were then published in the New York Times and Asia magazine respectively (Docs. 372 and 396).

The conversation from their second meeting is light hearted and ranges over a few different topics. After a brief back and forth concerning the peculiar nature of quantum mechanics, they quickly land on the topic of music and discuss the deep differences between European and Indian musical traditions. The first conversation, by contrast, is more focused and perhaps more argumentative. The topic at hand is “the nature of reality,” and Einstein begins by asking Tagore whether he believes in “the divine detached from the world.” Tagore replies, “Not detached.” For Tagore, all aspects of our understanding of the world are necessarily entwined with ourselves and our distinctively human nature. He remarks, “the universe is interconnected through us; it is a human universe,” and this applies to the notion of the divine just as much as to material things. In response, Einstein articulates his fundamental faith in the existence of an external world that is truly independent of human beings. Thus the stage is set for an ancient and fundamental philosophical debate. Einstein holds firmly to his belief in a “detached” world, though recognizes that there’s nothing he can say to prove its existence. Thus, by the end of the exchange, his final remark to Tagore is: “Then I’m more religious than you!”

A further reason why this episode is interesting, especially from an editorial perspective, is that the two men did not speak to each other in the same language. (Tagore spoke in English and Einstein replied in German. One of the other people present must have taken on the role of interpreter, at least to some extent.) Perhaps inevitably, it seems that a lot was lost in translation. Einstein himself was very dissatisfied with this state of affairs, writing in a letter to the French writer Romain Rolland a couple of months later, “The oral dialogue with Tagore was completely unsuccessful due to difficulties in communication and of course should not have been published” (Doc. 431). However, this certainly hasn’t prevented the dialogue from being intriguing to others. Indeed, in the decades since Tagore and Einstein first sat down for tea in Caputh, their conversation on the nature of reality has been published and republished dozens of times.

Joshua Eisenthal is a Research Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the California Institute of Technology and Editor at the Einstein Papers Project.