April 19th, 1951
To Professor Hyman Levy.
I feel rather tempted to go deeply into your letter, for you raise a number of interesting points. However, I won’t. Instead of yielding to my love for polemics–it quickens the wit and is good for the soul–1 touch on only one thing: Goethe and doggerel. You are, I am afraid, allowing that one poem I wrote ridiculing “specialisation” to irritate you, for you haven’t read my letter very carefully. Goethe didn’t write on doggerel–its relationship to poetry–he himself wrote a great deal of doggerel. In fact, Philip Wayn, Translator of the Penguine Faust, says that he “revelled in it.” Which, of course, does not make your opinion of doggerel invalid, but merely broadens out the subject, makes it a fit subject for objective examination, particularly bearing in mind the fact that your opinion of Goethe as an artist, a great poet, is much higher than mine. Hence the fact that such a man was lavish in his use of doggerel cannot be dismissed as easily as when I use it in my poetry. Is this not so?
I deal with one of your other points. I pointed out that there is, and always will be true specialisation. There is no way of avoiding it since we are not gods, just human. But true specialisation is not a bit afraid of examining conclusions from other fields and voicing an opinion on those conclusions. Is not the Communist movement proof of this? Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin rise over their contemporaries precisely because they had minds capable of bringing together the primary threads of knowledge, even as an expert weaver is master of his loom. And what is true for them is, in slightly letter degree, also true for many other comrades, for example, the grasp Zhdanov shows in fields “other than his own.” Zhdanov, like Stalin, was a professional revolutionary. How are such intellects developed? First, through laws of heredity, inheritance, about which there is much to learn, about which, in all truth, we are only beginning to learn a little. Second, because their practice was varied and many sided, the very nature of their job as revolutionaries forced them to link one thing to another.
That is why I, an ordinary Worker, without higher schooling, can confidently assert that certain of Einstein’s mathematical concepts will ultimately be proven to be unsound. The point is that these equations must, sooner or later, be expressed in language other than mathematical formulae, and thus reveal to the ordinary layman its connections with the dialectical movement of things as a whole. Should it come into conflict with a basic law of general movement–that space and time are infinite–then I confidently assert that on this subject Einstein has left the firm ground of reality. It will then rest with science itself to prove in the field of higher mathematics my assertion: that matter is infinite, space and time are limitless. Deny this, and you bring in God. So science then will have to prove the existence of God!