Albert Einstein (1879-1955).

Autograph letter signed (‘A. Einstein’) to Otto Juliusburger, Princeton, 13 January 1943.

In German. One page, 277 x 213mm (four light brown spots). Envelope. Provenance: Stargardt, 4 July 2000, lot 521 (part of lot).

‘It is this searching after what is hidden that keeps one upright in this inhuman world’: on Schopenhauer, the enduring value of scientific reflection – and his continuing labours on Unified Field Theory. Einstein is ‘toiling away the whole time with my old problem [the Unified Field Theory]. I have found very natural equations of the spatial properties, but cannot interpret them so far as to know if there is anything in it or not. This is how abstract science has become!’. At the opening of the letter, Einstein expresses his delight at a letter and a poem from his old friend: but he is particularly pleased to hear that Juliusburger is ‘busy with your old problems. I was completely unaware that you had pursued independent research in anatomical and morphological fields. It is this searching after what is hidden that keeps one upright in this inhuman world of humanity’ ('in dieser unmenschlichen Menschenwelt'). Einstein is zealously reading Schopenhauer (on whom Juliusburger was an authority) in his leisure hours: ‘Whether he finds the truth, or is wrong, he is always original and perceptive and above all honest. It is remarkable that such a penetrating mind could believe a priori in sensory perception, even though he knew well the empirical roots of our spatial judgments and their intellectual construction’. In this area and in that of ‘the a priori of logical forms’, Einstein sees him as in the shadow of Kant. Above all, Einstein admires how Schopenhauer brings out the essential in every subject, rather than ‘losing it in scholarly crevasses’ like almost all contemporary philosophers, even Bertrand Russell. The letter concludes with a hope that ‘the outrageous crime of the Germans will soon be atoned for’: his hopes are mostly in the Russians – Einstein expresses his mistrust of the capitalist motivations of the other Allies.

Otto Juliusburger (1867-1952) was a distinguished psychiatrist and philosopher, who had been a close friend of Einstein’s in Berlin since the years of the First World War. He had emigrated to New York as late as 1941.

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