Adapted from the Bertalanffy list
Einstein & the Common Language of Human-kind
When I read Einstein, I immediately find myself in a sphere of dignity and respect, of knowledge and understanding, of the sublime actuality of the potential that exists in our human sort! I honor and respect him as an exemplary teacher.
He seems to know clearly how it is to be a human being with an expressive power of thinking, language, and reasoning. He seems to know how we gradually started to make vocal notes and assigning these notes to objects in our surroundings. How we made rules that governed not only the relationship between and among these notes, but also the relatedness between our notes and our sensual perceptions. He knew how language was developed and how human being understood the notes he had created. He knew clearly that at the early stages we had just a simple system of notes with which we could call things by name. Our notes were just symbols for what we could only see in our environment. In further developments, our conceptual notes became independent of the representing objects in the world, and we learned how to reason. In other words, if language was just an object calling system at the beginning, it developed to be a reasoning system independent of the objects there existed in our environment. In its highest form, this development give way to the establishment of the science of mathematics; a system with its own internal regulations independent of the objective world. We learned to think and reason with the simple notes we had invented! But what happened in the process was that we could not make our notes without the guidance of our environmental objects. If could do that we would have been able to think without or independent of the language we are using. Now it is so that we think in terms of the concepts we have invented in our lingual systems. And that� is the reason why our growth in thinking and symbol making has much to do we the language we use.
The daily language we use is a source of much error and deceptions. The language of science is of much more clarity and certainty compared to the rather thoughtless language we use in daily casual life. Scientists have tried over time and space to develop a language in which the relationship between concepts in their correspondence with the sensual data is of increasing precision and clarity. This precision and clarity has made the amazing technical advancement of nowadays possible. Einstein himself has been an extra ordinary example of the power of thinking and reasoning that human sort has ever achieved.
He is a great representative of those human souls who have tried extensively to create a language which goes beyond the folkloric, national, and cultural lingual systems. He is one of the great leaders of �The Common Language of Science“! It has been a language in which one could arrive at general laws using his/her own specific observations. However, fascinating and unique as it is, this language of science by itself cannot determine the good and the evil of the path of the human kind. It is just and only an instrument in the hands of the human sort. What this instrument would offer human being is completely dependent on the nature of the aims and purposes the humans are striving for. The language of science can not afford to give us, humans, our goals and purposes in life. We create our goals and purposes, and science, as an instrument, can only help us accomplish and goals!
What has been lacking in our educational systems is truly a thorough study of the human needs, goals, and purposes. Our immediate situation on this rather gloomy star these days is a true mirroring of the fact that we have not learned what our purposes are and what our purposes can be. The language of science is much advanced while our language of human needs, human goals, and purposes is rather primitive.
We know many of the laws that govern our cosmos, but we do not efficiently know ourselves. We can afford to postpone scientific advancement, but we truly cannot afford to postpone human understanding.
Mohammad Reza Khalesi (Ph.D.)
mrkhalesi@hotmail.com
The Netherlands
