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The Books Einstein Swore By (And The Thinkers Who Built His Genius)
Before Einstein changed the world, these thinkers changed Einstein.
“The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest men of past centuries.” Philosopher and scientist René Descartes said that. Einstein didn’t think alone. He was in great company. He wasn’t a lone genius. Or a singular brain working in isolation. Einstein was a thinker who learned and studied other thinkers. He did this deliberately. More often than you know. The books he read and the minds he returned to, again and again, influenced his thought.
Spinoza
“I believe in Spinoza’s God.” — Einstein
Baruch Spinoza was a 17th-century Dutch philosopher. He got excommunicated from his own Jewish community for thinking too freely. He believed God and nature were the same thing. Like Einstein, he didn’t believe in a personal God. Or a God who intervenes in human affairs or answers prayers. But a God that is the universe: its laws, order and mathematical structure. Einstein read this and recognised himself. When people asked Einstein whether he believed in God, he said: “I believe not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind, but in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists.”
