Why did Einstein say of Dostoevski: “He gives me more than any other thinker, more even than Gauss?” What could Dostoevski give to the originator of the theory of relativity?

It is certain that it is not a question of the philosophical, moral or social ideas with which he filled the thoughts and utterances of his heroes. Einstein drew from artistic literature the driving force for his research and not the elements of a scientific concept of the world. The influence of artistic creation on scientific creation was the result not of any positive answers but of the common aesthetic ground in the problems and contradictions of the earlier representation of the world and in the intensity of the artistic conception of the infinite contradictions and complexities of the origin of the world.

It has been over two centuries since resemblance ceased to play in our culture a stable, adequate and autonomous role at the wellspring of knowledge. The classical age broke away from it. First Bacon, then Descartes established within our time a system of knowledge in which similitude no longer occupied more than a precarious and temporary place, on the border of illusion: “when we discover some resemblances between two things we ordinarily attribute what we have recognized as true of one only to the other as well, even aspects in which in reality they differ.” Since the 17th century the similar has offered no more to knowledge than an unstable countenance, ready to give way to knowledge, and it is the province of knowledge to determine immediately the identical and the different so that they appear one beside the other and are scrupulously distinguished.

No other culture, no other epoch has portrayed nature with as much nostalgia, has projected, discovered and venerated in nature so rich a complex of meaning as the one which, gradually and paradoxically, ended by sanctifying history. Around the time of the French Revolution the frontiers of the universe suddenly seemed to melt away into infinity: the emancipation which the Enlightenment had worked in the domain of religion, philosophy, morality, education was a prelude to the inauguration of a new world which, with the effervescence of a spring wine, flooded the carefully delineated and organized landscape of traditional humanism. The powerful wind of Sturm und Drang now blew across the world, closed and arranged like a garden, in which man had hitherto seen the theater of his actions and his sentiments. From Rousseau on nature is no longer the enemy of the spirit, but the life-giving force of a world fulfilled in and for itself. No longer does nature draw its movement and meaning from man, but on the contrary it obliges him to strain his limited forces and pushes him out of himself and toward the great Whole, the ἕν καὶ πἇν from which he had painfully torn himself.

Viewed from Mecca, its place of origin, or from Medina, its first capital, the expansion of Islam is impressive not least because it extended in every direction. There is one area of limited failure nearby, in the Ethiopian highlands across the Red Sea; otherwise a cohesive Islamic belt stretches with only minor interruptions or enclaves into India, Central Asia, past the Bosporus, throughout North and much of West Africa into the center and down the Eastern coast of the Black Continent—not to mention, apart from minor concentrations elsewhere, for example in the Western hemisphere, the solid blocks of Muslims in Indonesia, parts of China and the Southern Philippines.

Discussion of the concept of freedom in the history of philosophy differs radically from the actual historical struggles in which freedom was the goal. At least at first sight.

The theories of the philosophers appear to apply primarily to freedom of the will, to freedom in the metaphysical sense. According to St. Augustine, the church father whose concept of will is essentially the basis of Lutheran teaching, man, whose nature has been corrupted by the Fall, is by himself incapable of doing true good. All hangs upon divine grace. Man is powerless even to accomplish so-called good works. And inasmuch as grace is granted only to very few, faith alone can save one from despair. Faith is not based on logic or even reason; Luther often said that the beast reason should be displanted. The strength to act must come through faith. In everyday life men are capable of acting according to their resolves; their capability is expressed fully in their profession, in their private and economic existence, but it cannot gain them salvation. In practical life men are to some extent free, for here the state and economic order govern. One may serve the state and try to improve it. But this has nothing to do with eternal salvation. Temporal power may require obedience on earth, but it provides no passport to heaven.

The widespread and increasing vogue of astrology in France offers the spectacle of scientific popularization and esoteric speculation in full swing, with the two frequently intermingling. Disconcerting at first sight, this process must be placed within the framework of the social contradictions that have given rise to the rationalistic trends of “modernity.” As early as the Age of Enlightenment, occultism, as it spread, associated itself with natural science. In the nineteenth century this association continued, taking on new forms; it was now in connection with the history of religions and with Oriental studies that many magazines gave considerable space to occultism. From the Revue de Paris, where Nerval published his Aurélia, all the way over to the dignified Revue des deux mondes, the current seeped in a little everywhere. In our own day, while Planète is in the forefront, one must not lose sight of the outpouring of books and periodicals among which this publication is merely a particularly prominent commercial success. In this regard, astrology takes first place among all similar forms of speculation and occult practice that are merchandised in such fashion, in terms of its mass diffusion.

There are various ways of defining cybernetics. (1) Some recognize it in the so-called problems of information, when they are concerned with the transmission, elaboration and conservation of information. (2) Some consider it as the science of command and control in machines and in animals. (3) Some refer to it in studying the two aspects of automatism. (4) Finally some see in cybernetics the study not so much of the mechanisms which provide results that were previously provided by man, but rather of the superior and intelligent activities of men themselves, in order to analyse and describe them in terms which make possible their reproduction in a mechanical model; cybernetics being in this case the study of the mind.