Two Friends of Humanity
Examine the Causes of War
Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein (1879-1955) and Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
International Institute of Intellectual
Cooperation, League of Nations, 60 pages, 1933.
Translated from the original German by Stuart Gilbert.
000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
Preface of the Online Edition of 2023:
A Few Lines by Sigmund Freud
Now war runs most emphatically counter to the psychic disposition imposed on us by the growth of culture; we are therefore bound to resent war, to find it utterly intolerable. With pacifists like us it is not merely an intellectual and affective repulsion, but a constitutional intolerance, an idiosyncrasy in its most drastic form. And it would seem that the aesthetic ignominies of warfare play almost as large a part in this repugnance as war’s atrocities.
How long have we to wait before the rest of men turn pacifist? Impossible to say, and yet perhaps our hope that these two factors – man’s cultural disposition and a well-founded dread of the form that future wars will take – may serve to put an end to war in the near future, is not chimerical. But by what ways or by-ways this will come about, we cannot guess. Meanwhile we may rest on the assurance that whatever makes for cultural development is working also against war.
(An excerpt from pages 56-57 in the present book)
000
The book Why War?, by Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, was published in PDF at the websites of the Independent Lodge of Theosophists, on 10 April 2023.
000
Regarding the role of the esoteric movement in the ethical awakening of mankind during the 21st century, see the book “The Fire and Light of Theosophical Literature”, by Carlos Cardoso Aveline.
Published in 2013 by The Aquarian Theosophist, the volume has 255 pages. Contact: Indelodge@gmail.com.
000