{"id":10431,"date":"2012-08-09T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-08-09T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/thenewatlantis.com\/publications\/the-physicists-at-fifty"},"modified":"2022-08-11T09:38:32","modified_gmt":"2022-08-11T13:38:32","slug":"the-physicists-at-fifty","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/publications\/the-physicists-at-fifty","title":{"rendered":"The Physicists<\/em> at Fifty"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Fifty years ago, on February 21, 1962, a Zurich audience witnessed the premiere of Die Physiker<\/i> (The Physicists<\/i><\/a>), a grotesque tragicomedy by the Swiss playwright Friedrich D\u00fcrrenmatt. By the end of 1963, The Physicists<\/i> had been performed worldwide, from Johannesburg to Lima, from Mexico City to London. It arrived in New York the following year. Ever since, the play has been part of the canon of high school literature classes in Switzerland, Austria, and Germany, where it is also a favorite choice for high school theater groups and one of the most-performed dramas over the last half century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Physicists<\/i> is a complex drama, comprising in its two brief acts masterfully employed masquerade, intricate inversions, and a hero\u2019s demise after the fashion of classical tragedy. The play touches on many themes that were of importance to postwar audiences and readers, including institutional psychiatry and the way society deals with madness. But the play is most compelling because it raises questions of lasting importance \u2014 matters of science, ethics, and responsibility. With eloquent brevity, D\u00fcrrenmatt\u2019s play reveals the paradox of the twentieth century: at the supposed apex of reason and science, and under the banner of scientific and social progress, man became guilty of some of the most barbaric atrocities ever committed. Recent breakthroughs in nuclear physics were testimony to human ingenuity and scientific advancement, and at the same time allowed for weapons of unprecedented destructiveness. The Physicists <\/i>casts crippling doubt on the likelihood that either scientists or politicians would responsibly wield the power of science \u2014 a message well suited for its postwar audience and of lasting relevance today.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\r\n Discussed in this article <\/div>\r\n \r\n
\r\n \r\n \r\n <\/a>\r\n <\/figure>\r\n \r\n
\r\n \r\n The Physicists <\/a>\r\n <\/div>\r\n \r\n
\r\n Friedrich D\u00fcrrenmatt <\/div>\r\n \r\n
\r\n Grove ~ 1994
[Originally pub. 1962]
96 pp. ~ $14 (paper) <\/div>\r\n <\/div>\r\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n

The entire play takes place at the private sanatorium Les Cerisiers (The Cherry Trees), the home of \u201cthe mentally disturbed elite of half the Western world\u201d under the care of the famous Fr\u00e4ulein Dr. Mathilde von Zahnd. We learn early on that the hunchbacked doctor is the only sane descendant of a prestigious family. Her grandfather was a general, her father a privy councilor, her uncle a chancellor. At least one aunt and a cousin are in the madhouse, under medication.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Housed in their own mansion on the sanatorium grounds, three physicists, usually harmless and lovable, have recently been involved in a terrible disturbance. Three months before the play begins, one of them, a nuclear physicist named Herbert Georg Beutler, who believes himself to be Isaac Newton, strangled a nurse. Now, another nuclear physicist, Ernst Heinrich Ernesti, who claims to be Albert Einstein, has done the same. The play begins with a crime scene investigation \u2014 the murderer a mad scientist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But to call Einstein a \u201cmurderer\u201d would perhaps be too cruel. After all, as the hospital staff reminds the police inspector repeatedly, the man is mentally ill and therefore innocent before the law. Instead of arresting him, the inspector lets him play his violin to calm his nerves \u2014 Beethoven\u2019s Kreutzer Sonata<\/i>. This musical choice echoes Leo Tolstoy\u2019s novella by that name, a polemic against carnal passions and an argument for chastity: a husband murders his pianist wife in jealous rage after she has fallen in love with the violinist with whom she performed that same sonata.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With Einstein playing in the background, Newton explains to the inspector that he, Newton, had killed the nurse three months ago because they had fallen in love with each other. \u201cMy job,\u201d he says, \u201cis to think about gravitation, not to love a woman.\u201d*<\/a> It is Newton who informs us that Einstein is playing the Kreutzer Sonata<\/i> by commenting that Newton himself would play it with \u201ca good deal more dash\u201d than Einstein. We are led to believe, at this stage in the story, that Newton\u2019s murderous act arose from a similar \u201cdilemma\u201d to Einstein\u2019s: for both, love got in the way of their work as physicists. But given their mental state, we cannot quite take them seriously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The third physicist, and the protagonist of the play, is Johann Wilhelm M\u00f6bius. This physicist apparently suffers from the delusion that King Solomon appears to him in visions, revealing the secrets of the physical world. Although M\u00f6bius \u2014 unlike the other two patients \u2014 does not believe himself to be a famous scientist, D\u00fcrrenmatt clearly named the character after the nineteenth-century German mathematician August Ferdinand M\u00f6bius, who discovered what is called the M\u00f6bius strip, a looped, ribbon-like shape whose apparently opposite surfaces form only one side. This turns out to be the interpretive key for the paradoxical play: the two sides turn out to be an illusion; the lovers are also the killers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Endless Twist<\/em>, a 1950s sculpture by Max Bill, is a M\u00f6bius strip: An ant running along the surface will eventually end up on the “other” side and then come back to where it started.
Funkyxian \/ Wikimedia<\/cite><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

M\u00f6bius appears for the first time in the play when his ex-wife, by now remarried, visits with their sons and her new husband to say a last good-bye before they leave for the Mariana Islands in the Pacific Ocean. The visit ends in disaster: M\u00f6bius drives out his family as he feverishly recites a disturbing psalm given to him in a vision by Solomon, telling of the gruesome deaths of astronauts in outer space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But our first impression of a mad M\u00f6bius is immediately put in question. A nurse, Monika, is convinced he is not insane, and as she calms his spirits after his fit she confesses her love for him. She had even requested and received Dr. von Zahnd\u2019s permission for M\u00f6bius to leave the madhouse with her forever. M\u00f6bius, becoming further agitated, urges her to leave: \u201cI never want to see you again.\u201d When she refuses, he strangles her \u2014 and Einstein begins to play his violin: Fritz Kreisler\u2019s Sch<\/i>\u00f6<\/i>n Rosmarin<\/i> (Lovely Rosemary<\/i>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This time, the musical echoes are much subtler. Kreisler (1875\u20131962) was a Viennese-born violinist and composer personally acquainted with the real Albert Einstein from the time they both spent in Vienna, and Einstein as an amateur violinist played privately with Kreisler. Kreisler wrote several pieces in the style of the Baroque and Classical masters, but claimed the works were in fact those masters\u2019 long-lost creations. On his sixtieth birthday in 1935, he revealed that he had fooled the public for decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sch<\/i>\u00f6<\/i>n Rosmarin<\/i> is one in a trio of old-Viennese waltzes, together with Liebesfreud<\/i> (Love\u2019s Joy<\/i>) and Liebesleid<\/i> (Love\u2019s Sorrow<\/i>), that Kreisler for some time falsely presented as transcriptions of compositions of an early nineteenth-century composer. The play-Einstein\u2019s performance of songs whose origins are wrapped in deception <\/b>invites us to suspect the unsuspected: nothing here is as it seems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Sch<\/i>\u00f6<\/i>n Rosmarin<\/i> we hear flirtatiousness together with heartache, joy followed by tension that is resolved with a return to the original theme. In Kreisler\u2019s trio of waltzes, Sch<\/i>\u00f6<\/i>n Rosmarin<\/i> sits between Love\u2019s Joy<\/i> and Love\u2019s Sorrow<\/i>, which suits its ambivalent mood \u2014 and underscores the ambivalence in M\u00f6bius\u2019s character.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the inspector reappears for another halfhearted investigation, the tune of the Kreutzer Sonata<\/i> is now coming from Einstein\u2019s room. (I am here following the German edition of 1980. The original 1962 edition has Einstein at this point play Liebesleid<\/i> instead of the Kreutzer Sonata<\/i>. In both editions, the play ends with Einstein playing Liebesleid<\/i>.) M\u00f6bius explains in front of the inspector that by killing Monika he was simply following orders: \u201cKing Solomon ordained it.\u201d \u201cI have discovered three murderers,\u201d says the relieved inspector, \u201cwhom I can, with an easy conscience, leave unmolested. For the first time Justice is on holiday \u2014 and it\u2019s a terrific feeling.\u201d<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n

So M\u00f6bius goes free \u2014 but becomes a captive nonetheless: At the command of the public prosecutor, new male nurses have turned the asylum into a prison. And worse yet, Newton and Einstein \u2014 now alone with M\u00f6bius \u2014 reveal that they too have been following orders. They are in fact both physicists working as spies in the secret service of opposing superpowers, tasked with the mission of stealing M\u00f6bius\u2019s ingenious works: Newton is after his solution to the problem of gravity; Einstein wants his unified field theory, the \u201ctheory of everything\u201d that the real Einstein searched for<\/a> during much of his later career. M\u00f6bius had also developed, \u201cout of curiosity, as a practical corollary to my theoretical investigations,\u201d the Principle of Universal Discovery, presumably a system by which all possible scientific discoveries could be made. No wonder the two superpowers (implied to be the Soviet Union and the United States) mark M\u00f6bius as the most important physicist in the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

M\u00f6bius, fully aware of the immeasurable power of his discoveries, feared their abuse so much that he chose the insane asylum as the only place in which he could protect his work and avoid risking the destruction of mankind. Monika posed a threat because she was convinced of his sanity and the success of their future together beyond the safe walls of the madhouse. In his eyes, her love and life were necessary sacrifices for the greater good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The other two deaths were likewise \u201cnecessary.\u201d Newton\u2019s and Einstein\u2019s lovers threatened their missions, but the physicists understood that \u201corders are orders\u201d and that they \u201ccouldn\u2019t do anything else\u201d but kill them. These phrases echo the Nazi war criminals in the Nuremberg Trials providing the same explanation in their defense: Befehl ist Befehl<\/i><\/a>. The two superpowers alarmingly resemble the Nazi commanders in their willingness to sacrifice the innocent in the name of progress and the interests of the state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But, despite these sacrifices, the plans of all three physicists fail miserably. Out of fear of the police, M\u00f6bius has already burned all his notes, leaving Newton and Einstein to compete in persuading him to join their respective governments. Frustrated with the fact that neither side can guarantee him both freedom in his scientific pursuits and responsible use of science, M\u00f6bius insists on staying in the madhouse. With the argument that \u201ceither we stay in this madhouse or the world becomes one,\u201d he manages to convince the other two to join him in his self-imposed hermitage in the asylum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, in spite of M\u00f6bius\u2019s success in persuading the two physicist-spies to sacrifice their freedom to ensure the safety of mankind from his discoveries, his dangerous knowledge still manages to find its way into the world. For ironically, the person running the mental asylum turns out to be an insane tyrant who actually suffers from the delusion that M\u00f6bius feigned, truly believing that King Solomon has commanded her to rule the world using M\u00f6bius\u2019s discoveries. Dr. von Zahnd had made copies of all of M\u00f6bius\u2019s notes before he burned them; and, she tells the physicists, she had orchestrated the three murders: \u201cI had to render all three of you harmless. By the murders you committed. I drove those three nurses into your arms. I could count upon your reactions. You were as predictable as automata. You murdered like professionals.\u201d To the public, their insanity was a proven fact, so no attempt of theirs to expose Dr. von Zahnd would succeed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dr. von Zahnd informs the physicists of how she will use M\u00f6bius\u2019s discoveries to dominate the world by applying them to industry. She has already established a large trust and founded multiple factories to exploit the Principle of Universal Discovery and to conquer both earth and space. The physicists\u2019 mansion, she says, is the \u201cstrong room\u201d of her operation. While the domination of industry is Dr. von Zahnd\u2019s explicit goal, D\u00fcrrenmatt also covertly indicates that M\u00f6bius\u2019s knowledge will be put to military applications. Just before she reveals her plans to the physicists, in the drawing room of the mansion she replaces the portrait of her father, the privy councilor, with that of her grandfather, the general. Placing the image of the general together with the physicists symbolizes the militaristic use of science that M\u00f6bius had feared.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the 1964 version of The Physicists<\/i> that D\u00fcrrenmatt directed for German television, Dr. von Zahnd\u2019s self-disclosure is fraught with references to Nazi Germany, perhaps the worst case of a military-industrial complex: To demonstrate the futility of an escape attempt, she orders the chief male nurse to turn on searchlights (resembling those used in concentration camps). With each appearance of the male nurses, their attire matches more and more that of SS officers, while Dr. von Zahnd \u2014 played by Therese Giehse, who also performed in the stage premiere of the play \u2014 in her last speech moves and sounds like Hitler did in his public addresses. She marches off before the nurses close the metal gate, which now traps the physicists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second act ends with Einstein\u2019s violin playing Love\u2019s Sorrow<\/i>, a bittersweet piece that unites the joyful memory of love with the sorrow of love lost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Einstein\u2019s final tune sums up the tenor of the play: the paradoxical unity of opposites. D\u00fcrrenmatt himself said as much in a list of \u201c21 Points to The Physicists<\/i>\u201d that he appended to the end of the print edition of the play (Point 11: \u201cIt is paradoxical\u201d). And in a 1990 speech he delivered at the presentation of an award for V\u00e1clav Havel, D\u00fcrrenmatt discussed the concept of paradox, characterizing the grotesque as an \u201cexpression of the paradoxical, indeed nonsensical, state of affairs that comes about when an essentially rational idea … is transplanted into reality…. Man makes everything into a paradox; meaning turns into absurdity, justice into injustice, freedom into bondage, because man himself is a paradox, an irrational rationality.\u201d The \u201cessentially rational\u201d idea he had in mind was communism, but the larger point in D\u00fcrrenmatt\u2019s drama seems to be, as Ross Benjamin writes<\/a>, to express the \u201ctimeless experience that the century made devastatingly palpable: the experience of human ideals shipwrecked on the shoals of human reality.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

M\u00f6bius embodies this precise experience. His utopian dream of safe and certain scientific progress in isolation from messy and uncertain politics became the nightmare he tried to escape: the abuse of his science by nations and empires in pursuit of political power. At first glance, the play seems to suggest that M\u00f6bius never had any hope of success, and that much like the ancient tragic hero Oedipus, M\u00f6bius is in the iron grip of fate. The ninth of D\u00fcrrenmatt\u2019s 21 Points explicitly makes the connection:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Human beings proceeding by plan wish to reach a specific goal. They are most severely hit by accident when through it they reach the opposite of their goal: the very thing they feared, they sought to avoid (i.e. Oedipus).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

The German spelling and pronunciation, \u00d6dipus, suggest a parallel to M\u00f6bius (just as there are resemblances between the real names of the two spies: \u201cNewton\u201d was really named Kilton and \u201cEinstein\u201d was really Eisler). Just as happened to Oedipus, M\u00f6bius\u2019s heroic effort to avoid disaster plunges him straight into it. Any point of departure on the M\u00f6bius strip soon enough becomes a point of return, even if one believes oneself to be on the opposite side of the strip.<\/p>\n

However, M\u00f6bius does not fail for simply fatalistic reasons. D\u00fcrrenmatt\u2019s Points 16 through 18 form a concise argument about the nature of ethical responsibility over science that also hints at M\u00f6bius\u2019s failure in the play:<\/p>\n\n\n

16. The content of physics is the concern of physicists, its effect the concern of all men.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

17. What concerns everyone can only be resolved by everyone.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

18. Each attempt of an individual to resolve for himself what is the concern of everyone is doomed to fail.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Against these ideas, M\u00f6bius explains to Einstein and Newton that \u201cthe decision we have to make is one that we must make as physicists; we must go about it therefore in a scientific manner.\u201d But the decision the physicists must make is not one that can simply be made by physicists, since it is concerned with the effect, not the content, of the science. Despite his opposition to the other physicists, M\u00f6bius shares a very significant agreement with them, namely his refusal to let the ethical questions before them be a concern of the people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Newton, for his part, seems untroubled about ethics altogether and probably represents the Western standpoint: \u201cIt\u2019s nothing more nor less than a question of the freedom of scientific knowledge…. Whether or not humanity has the wit to follow the new trails we are blazing is its own look-out, not ours.\u201d But, when pressed, he admits that in his country scientists work for the state, which presumably takes on the role of ethical decision-making in science. Einstein, who sounds more like a Communist, bluntly admits that he is above all committed to his state. \u201cIf we are physicists, then we must become power politicians. We must decide in whose favor we shall apply our knowledge, and I for one have made my decision.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In contrast to his physicists, D\u00fcrrenmatt argues in his Points that if a problem concerns everyone \u2014 as the potential destruction of humanity through the power of science most certainly does \u2014 then everyone needs to be part of the solution. Responsible ethical choice regarding the use of science can be neither the sole responsibility of the scientist, as M\u00f6bius believes, nor the sole responsibility of the government, as Newton and Einstein advocate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the action of the play reveals an objection to D\u00fcrrenmatt\u2019s imperative that the ethical and political problems of physics be solved democratically. M\u00f6bius isolates himself precisely out of fear that the world will abuse his science \u2014 and this fear is entirely justified, for Dr. von Zahnd will<\/i> abuse it. We can assume she would have done the same if M\u00f6bius had openly published his discoveries, entrusting to the people the responsibility of wisely using those discoveries. At face value, it seems the democratic solution \u2014 \u201cwhat concerns everyone can only be resolved by everyone\u201d \u2014 is simply the opposite of M\u00f6bius\u2019s choice, which, according to the nature of the paradox, would result in exactly the same catastrophe. We may add to this a second objection, one whose principle D\u00fcrrenmatt himself stated in his 1990 speech honoring Havel: \u201cWhere everyone is responsible, no one is responsible.\u201d M\u00f6bius\u2019s distrust of the public, we can surmise, might have arisen in part from the much-observed fact in human affairs that the larger the group responsible for the same object or cause, the more likely it is that the individual will neglect it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These concerns, however, are not fundamental objections to D\u00fcrrenmatt\u2019s democratic solution as much as they are warnings that the solution is incomplete. The necessary counterpart to democratic engagement is virtuous political leadership \u2014 and this was, as we shall see, another target of his criticism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Friedrich D\u00fcrrenmatt (left) at a Zurich rehearsal of The Phycisists<\/em> in 1962
ETH-Bibliothek Z\u00fcrich, Bildarchiv (CC BY-SA 4.0)<\/a><\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In the critical scene in which Newton and Einstein vie for M\u00f6bius\u2019s favor in order to win him over to their respective sides, they both have to admit that in both governments scientists are in bondage to military concerns. This leads M\u00f6bius to conclude, \u201cExtraordinary. Each of you is trying to palm off a different theory, yet the reality you offer me is the same in both cases: a prison. I\u2019d prefer the madhouse. Here at least I feel safe from the exactions of power politicians.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Subtly but unmistakably, D\u00fcrrenmatt is suggesting that both superpowers sacrifice scientific freedom for the interests of the state, particularly by providing weapons for the military. M\u00f6bius\u2019s concerted effort to escape this reality leads him into its most nightmarish fulfillment. When Dr. von Zahnd has the portrait of her grandfather, General Leonidas von Zahnd, moved to the physicists\u2019 mansion, she mentions that \u201che loved heroic deaths and that is what there have been in this house.\u201d The general\u2019s name alludes to Leonidas I, the famed Spartan king and hero who assisted the Greeks against an attack by the Persian Empire. At the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 b.c.<\/span>, Leonidas, along with three hundred Spartans and several hundred other allies, opted to withstand the onslaught of the Persian army, and in so doing chose certain death in battle. Perhaps D\u00fcrrenmatt is suggesting that under Dr. von Zahnd, rather than being safe and free as M\u00f6bius would have preferred, science will demand the ultimate sacrifice of some for the benefit of the many in the service of arms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This grim vision of science in bondage to the state and its military conjures up images of government-run laboratories under Soviet Russia and the Third Reich. D\u00fcrrenmatt implies that there is little difference between the regime that promises freedom for science and the regime in which science bows to chancellors and generals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

D\u00fcrrenmatt was not alone in voicing criticism of the role of science in Western democracy in the early 1960s. In the same month that D\u00fcrrenmatt began writing The Physicists<\/i>, January 1961, President Eisenhower delivered his famous farewell address<\/a>. In it, he warned of two particular threats to the American political system that closely parallel D\u00fcrrenmatt\u2019s nightmare. First, \u201cwe must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.\u201d The now-permanent coalition of the military and mass industry, Eisenhower observed, was at that point unprecedented in American history. One might say that a military-industrial complex (the phrase has been in common parlance since Eisenhower used it) that exists for the purpose of being ready for war at all times leads to a situation in which even peace implies a state of war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, it is the ever-increasing resources of science and technology that make possible the maintenance of such a military-industrial complex. Dr. von Zahnd tells the physicists at the end of the play that she has already founded \u201cenormous plants and factories, one after another,\u201d and that she has built up \u201ca giant cartel.\u201d The goal of these efforts, she explains, is to exploit M\u00f6bius\u2019s Principle of Universal Discovery. If the painting of General Leonidas hints that science under Dr. von Zahnd will serve the government in developing weapons for the military, her words clearly indicate that she is eager to set up the military-industrial complex of whose \u201cunwarranted influence\u201d Eisenhower warned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eisenhower\u2019s suggestion for protecting against the dangers of the military industry is like D\u00fcrrenmatt\u2019s democratic solution. As Eisenhower puts it, \u201cOnly an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.\u201d Everyone must be part of this solution. But D\u00fcrrenmatt reminds us that it is a grotesque world where such a \u201cmilitary machinery of defense\u201d is the norm, where competing superpowers employ knowledge of nature for the potential destruction of man on a mass scale. He leads us to wonder if, after the tragedies of the two world wars and their Cold War aftermath, the democratic ideals of freedom and peace are still realistic possibilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second threat of which Eisenhower warned is the \u201ctechnological revolution,\u201d which, he observed, largely gave rise to the first threat. Research has become so important and expensive in this age of radical technological advancement that the federal government has come to direct and fund large parts of it. In consequence, \u201cthe prospect of domination of the nation\u2019s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present \u2014 and is gravely to be regarded.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We should remember at this point that Eisenhower saw both these threats as domestic, not menaces from abroad. In other words, Dr. von Zahnd\u2019s project of subjecting scientific progress to government domination was for Eisenhower a real and present danger that the American people have to counter in their own political leadership. There is however, he warned, an \u201cequal and opposite danger\u201d too, namely that \u201cpublic policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.\u201d The meshing of politics and science creates the ambivalent situation in which it is not easy to tell who is master over whom, and in which either condition poses possible threats to democratic principles of freedom and peace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And yet, D\u00fcrrenmatt\u2019s point could not have been to advocate unguided and ungoverned scientific advancement. On the one hand, the democratic principle \u2014 \u201cwhat concerns everyone can only be resolved by everyone\u201d \u2014 operates as a check on the scientist developing his own solution to complex ethical problems. On the other hand, the fact that M\u00f6bius tried to escape government bondage and fell into the hands of a tyrant is at once a criticism of government abusing science for its own ends, and an exhortation for political leadership to govern scientific progress, restraining its potential for unethical or dangerous overreach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The need for political leadership to govern science \u2014 especially in ways that protect human dignity \u2014 becomes clearer if we revisit the ethical decisions M\u00f6bius and his colleagues face. In order to protect their respective missions, they kill their nurses. Newton and Einstein do so at the command of their governments and consider themselves relieved of any ethical responsibility for their act: \u201cOrders are orders.\u201d But M\u00f6bius understands that all three of them are murderers:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anyone who takes life is a murderer, and we have taken life. Each of us came to this establishment for a definite purpose. Each of us killed his nurse, again for a definite purpose. You two did it so as not to endanger the outcome of your secret mission; and I, because Nurse Monika believed in me…. Killing is a terrible thing. I killed in order to avoid an even more dreadful murder. Then you come along. I can\u2019t do away with you, but perhaps I can bring you round to my way of thinking. Are those murders we committed to stand for nothing? Either they were sacrificial killings, or just plain murders.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

Shortly thereafter, the three toast to their agreement to stay in the madhouse, each of them remorsefully confessing to their dead nurses, \u201cYou had to be sacrificed.\u201d The implicit reasoning seems to be that killing a few is justified, even necessary, if it ensures the benefit of the many, and \u2014 perhaps more importantly to the physicists \u2014 the progress of science, a goal M\u00f6bius articulates in an earlier speech. The perversity of this logic is revealed in the end when we learn that these were the principles that the insane Dr. von Zahnd had also followed. She sacrificed the nurses to trap the physicists, so that she could ensure scientific progress in the sacred world order given to her by King Solomon.<\/p>\n

By contrast, D\u00fcrrenmatt in his 1990 speech praises V\u00e1clav Havel for his leadership in demanding \u201chuman rights, daily bread for everyone, equality before the law, freedom of thought and speech, freedom of assembly, transparency, the abolition of torture, and so forth.\u201d These, he says, are \u201cinsignia of [man\u2019s] dignity, rights that do not violate the individual but make it possible for him to live together with other individuals.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the negative example given to the ethics of sacrificing the few for the putative greater good, The Physicists<\/i> urges political leadership to protect the dignity of the individual and the sanctity of life. The physicists sealed their fate by their failure to act in love toward their nurses. The nature of this missing love is not eros<\/i>, but the simple yet profound respect and kindness that we owe another human being, whether in philia<\/i> (friendship) or agape<\/i> (charity in the traditional sense of love for one\u2019s neighbor).<\/p>\n

Here again we find that a contrast between two opposites and their paradoxical conflation reveals the characters\u2019 failure to see the third and right option. Einstein\u2019s violin makes this clear. Choosing to play the Kreutzer Sonata<\/i> each time the inspector visits reminds us of Tolstoy\u2019s story and the choice it offers: we either give in to the carnal and irrational passion of love and reap the disastrous results, or we choose chastity. Like the husband in Tolstoy\u2019s story, the physicists choose to murder their loved ones. We do not find in the physicists\u2019 reasoning a consideration of fundamental kindness, much less of the loving commitment that builds on such kindness. M\u00f6bius\u2019s former wife and her new husband show this sort of love toward M\u00f6bius, but they take it away with them to the farthest end of the world. We also hear it in the words of Monika \u2014 and it dies with her.<\/p>\n

Even the friendship that binds the physicists in their agreement to stay in the madhouse stands on rather hostile ground. Not only have all of them already sacrificed human life to safeguard their scientific and political ends, but the inability of Newton and Einstein to enlist M\u00f6bius with either of their governments leads them to choose violence toward each other. \u201cI\u2019m sorry this affair is moving to a bloody conclusion,\u201d Einstein says to Newton after both get their weapons. \u201cBut we must fight it out, between us and then with the attendants. If need be with M\u00f6bius himself. He may well be the most important man in the world, but his manuscripts are more important still.\u201d Their lives are spared only by M\u00f6bius disclosing that he has burned his notes. The play appropriately ends with Einstein\u2019s Liebesleid<\/i>, mourning the death not only of loved ones but more so of love itself as the heartless tyrant begins her rule.<\/p>\n

This imperative to love your neighbor should not be taken as utopian romanticism. To do so would be to miss the particular significance of love for one\u2019s neighbor in the scientific-technological age. Whereas D\u00fcrrenmatt depicted this significance by showing us the effects of its absence, Gabriel Marcel, a contemporary French philosopher and playwright, articulated it directly and in positive terms in The Decline of Wisdom<\/a><\/i> (1954). In this short treatise, Marcel argues that the trend of finding technical solutions to problems of the physical world has been extended to human beings so that the individual is now \u201ca unit whom it is possible and right to deal with as with all the other units in his category.\u201d Marcel is careful to underline the positive value of technical progress, but denounces the reductionism that interprets all areas of life in a primarily materialist way. \u201cLife is no longer, as it were, conceived except in bio-sociological terms, that is to say, as a process whose physico-chemical conditions are claimed to be strictly and objectively definable and which exists in view of a given task which relates to the collectivity.\u201d The way in which this principle of \u201cdehumanization,\u201d as he calls it, operates in the experience of the individual becomes clearer in a passage from Marcel\u2019s Man Against Mass Society<\/i><\/a> (1951):<\/p>\n\n\n

In our contemporary world it may be said that the more a man becomes dependent on the gadgets whose smooth functioning assures him of a tolerable life at the material level, the more estranged he becomes from an awareness of his inner reality. I should be tempted to say that the center of gravity of such a man and his balancing point tend to become external to himself: that he projects himself more and more into objects, into the various pieces of apparatus on which he depends for his existence. It would be no exaggeration to say that the more progress \u201chumanity\u201d as an abstraction makes towards the mastery of nature, the more actual individual men tend to become slaves of this very conquest.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

Marcel claims that scientific-technological progress has given enormous power to humanity at large, especially to states, but at the cost of devitalizing the spirit of the individual. It is therefore at the level of the concrete, of the individual person, Marcel explains, that the spirit of dehumanization must be confronted. The remedy, he says, is love, not as an abstract principle of foolish romanticism, but as the gift of goodwill enacted in humility toward one\u2019s neighbor. This humility is directly opposed to the pride of mastery of nature extended to control over humans that Marcel saw as an effect of the materialist thinking of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes.<\/p>\n

By comparison, D\u00fcrrenmatt\u2019s nightmarish tragicomedy depicts the precise absence of this humble gift of love that Marcel urged his readers to enact. The physicists strive for the wellbeing of a state, or for humanity at large in the case of M\u00f6bius, but fail to act in goodwill toward the individual who is present before them. We encounter the same paradox in Dostoevsky\u2019s Brothers Karamazov<\/i>, in which the elder Zosima tells the story of a doctor who says, \u201cI love mankind … but I am amazed at myself: the more I love mankind in general, the less I love people in particular, that is, individually, as separate persons.\u201d The failure to love human beings as individuals is the starting point of The Physicists<\/i> that ultimately ends with Dr. von Zahnd\u2019s tyrannical reign.<\/p>\n

I<\/span> don\u2019t start out with a thesis but with a story,\u201d announces the first of D\u00fcrrenmatt\u2019s 21 Points. The German word Geschichte<\/i> (both \u201cstory\u201d and \u201chistory\u201d) is conveniently ambivalent, suggesting as a historical reference point and origin for the drama the corrupted view of human life that treats the individual as a mere cog in the machine of the state, and individual life and spirit as expendable for the scientific progress of the masses. But twentieth-century political ideologies that have capitalized on this view cannot be defeated by another mass movement that again absolves the individual of personal responsibility. In his 1990 speech, D\u00fcrrenmatt quotes his fellow playwright Havel, who was similarly skeptical that contemporary Western democracy and capitalism offer a true alternative to the ideologies of the masses:<\/p>\n\n\n

In this whole static complex of petrified mass parties guided by no principle other than political efficacy, governed by professional apparatuses that relieve citizens of any concrete and personal responsibility, in all these complicated structures of secretly manipulative and expansionistic centers of capital accumulation, this omnipresent dictatorship of consumption, of production, of advertising, of commerce, of consumer culture, this endless flood of information \u2014 in all this, so frequently described and analyzed, one would be hard put to find anything like a perspective, a path on which man could find the way back to himself.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

The history that serves as the starting point for the play incorporates another theme. In December 1956, D\u00fcrrenmatt published a review in the Zurich newspaper Die Weltwoche<\/i> of a book titled Heller als tausend Sonnen <\/i>(Brighter than a Thousand Suns<\/a><\/i>) by Robert Jungk, which recounts the story of the people involved in constructing the atomic bomb. D\u00fcrrenmatt highlights how Hitler\u2019s theory of races first destroyed the internationality of science, so that physicists suddenly found themselves pitted against each other. Out of a fear that Germany was constructing a bomb \u2014 which later turned out to be unfounded \u2014 Einstein recommended to President Roosevelt that the United States build one as well. Elite physicists failed, says D\u00fcrrenmatt, by not acting in unity and by delivering themselves up to politicians and military men in whose hands their theories became unstoppable once they had been uttered. \u201cNow, nuclear power is at the disposal of those who don\u2019t understand it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Scientists, D\u00fcrrenmatt says, reached a limit. He agrees with the comment of the mathematician David Hilbert that \u201cphysics has become too difficult for the physicists.\u201d M\u00f6bius echoes this sentiment when he explains to Newton and Einstein, \u201cour knowledge has become a frightening burden. Our researches are perilous, our discoveries are lethal. For us physicists there is nothing left but to surrender to reality…. We have to take back our knowledge and I have taken it back.\u201d But the insight M\u00f6bius gains after Dr. von Zahnd\u2019s self-disclosure is that \u201cWhat was once thought can never be unthought.\u201d<\/p>\n

M\u00f6bius thus looks like the real Einstein, in more than one sense: When quantum physicists introduced the notion that chance, not strict causality, governs the mechanics of subatomic particles, that probability must take the place of certainty in our knowledge of the movement of the most basic constituents of matter, Einstein protested, \u201cI cannot believe that God would choose to play dice with the universe.\u201d Until his death, he searched for a unified field theory that would give an ordered and certain account of the apparent uncertainty of subatomic matter and that would be in harmony with the lawful system of his own theory of relativity. In a 1979 speech commemorating Einstein\u2019s centenary, D\u00fcrrenmatt suggested that his failure to find a unified field theory might have actually been his most important contribution to physics. The comment reflects D\u00fcrrenmatt\u2019s Kantian epistemology, particularly the stance that reason never penetrates to an understanding of things in themselves<\/i>. Einstein\u2019s failure demonstrates for D\u00fcrrenmatt this limitation of knowledge of an incomprehensible reality.<\/p>\n

M\u00f6bius, however, succeeds in developing a unified field theory, which at first appears to be a heroic solution to the epistemological dilemma. Where Einstein failed, M\u00f6bius succeeds because his theory can account for the apparently accidental \u2014 yet M\u00f6bius himself, despite his intricate planning, comes by accident (or so it seems from his point of view) to be trapped by Dr. von Zahnd. Biographer Peter R\u00fcedi comments in his 2011 book D\u00fcrrenmatt oder Die Ahnung vom Ganzen<\/a><\/i> (D\u00fcrrenmatt: Or, the Idea of the Whole<\/i>), \u201cIt belongs to the paradox that is D\u00fcrrenmatt that his heroes (and he with them) founder not only in the world but also on it.\u201d Human reality ultimately escapes M\u00f6bius\u2019s rational grasp. He goes beyond Einstein in the realm of physics but faces the same unavoidable fate in human affairs.<\/p>\n

Along with parallels to Einstein, Oedipus, and the original M\u00f6bius, there is yet one more figure represented by the fictional M\u00f6bius. At the conclusion, each of the physicists introduces himself to the audience with a brief biography \u2014 Kilton speaking as Newton, then Eisler as Einstein. But M\u00f6bius identifies himself as King Solomon, the \u201cpoor King Solomon\u201d whose formerly great kingdom is now a wasteland.<\/p>\n

D\u00fcrrenmatt\u2019s deepest assessment of the modern scientist is embedded in this imagery of Solomon. The ancient king of the Hebrews, when asked by God what he would choose if he could have anything, chose wisdom and received not only that but also prosperity and longevity. The reputation of his wisdom and wealth spread to faraway lands and he became known as the wisest king of his time (1 Kings 3 and 10). Furthermore, Solomon built the temple that became God\u2019s stationary dwelling place among His people (1 Kings 5 \u2013 6).<\/p>\n

Francis Bacon, that early father of modern science, takes up this image of Solomon for his own temple-like institution of a new science, which searches the deep mysteries not of God but of nature. In the dedication to his work The Great Instauration<\/i>, Bacon urges King James of England to imitate Solomon \u201cin taking order for the collecting and perfecting of a natural and experimental history … that so at length, after the lapse of so many ages, philosophy and the sciences may no longer float in air, but rest on the solid foundation of experience of every kind.\u201d (The reference is presumably to 1 Kings 4:33, where Solomon is said to have spoken of various kinds of trees, beasts and birds, reptiles and fish.) In his story \u201cNew Atlantis,\u201d Bacon envisions a temple of scientific learning meant to far transcend the wisdom of the ancients. He names the lawgiver in his story King Salomon and the secret laboratory Salomon\u2019s House \u2014 after King Solomon, whose legendary scientific writings are actually intact in Bacon\u2019s scientific utopia.<\/p>\n

D\u00fcrrenmatt believes that Baconian optimism is impossible in the world inherited from the generation of Einstein, who in the play concludes his biographical sketch with the poignant words: \u201cI love my fellow men and I love my violin, but it was on my recommendation that they built the atomic bomb.\u201d He goes to his room to play Kreisler\u2019s Liebesleid<\/i> (\u201cLove\u2019s Sorrow\u201d), which then provides the background for M\u00f6bius\u2019s concluding confessional as \u201cpoor King Solomon.\u201d M\u00f6bius\u2019s image of Solomon builds on Bacon\u2019s but extends it to include the fuller, less hopeful Biblical account: after Solomon had accumulated wealth, wives, and weaponry beyond good measure, he turned away from God. The kingdom after Solomon split in two and subsequent generations experienced their fill of political conflict and folly (1 Kings 10 \u2013 12). For D\u00fcrrenmatt, M\u00f6bius as Solomon represents the scientist whose knowledge entails power that splits not only atoms but the whole world.<\/p>\n

But while M\u00f6bius perceives the resemblance between his foundering and Solomon\u2019s, he misses its actual source and thereby reveals to us the final meaning of D\u00fcrrenmatt\u2019s critique in The Physicists<\/i>. In M\u00f6bius\u2019s valediction delivered as \u201cpoor King Solomon,\u201d he declares that it was his wisdom that undermined his fear of God and ultimately destroyed his kingdom. He blames his very wisdom for his undoing. This points to M\u00f6bius\u2019s fundamental confusion: he mistook scientific knowledge<\/i> for wisdom<\/i>, when in fact true wisdom, including an appreciation for the centrality of human love in its many forms, was what M\u00f6bius direly needed. And so, too, do we.<\/p>\n

\n
Author\u2019s Note
<\/span><\/span>*<\/a> Most quotations from The Physicists<\/i> in this essay are taken from James Kirkup\u2019s fine 1964 translation. However, when Kirkup\u2019s translation diverges significantly from D\u00fcrrenmatt\u2019s text, I have substituted my own translation from the original.<\/span><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Samuel Matlack reconsiders the classic play about science, civilization, and insanity<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17403,"template":"","article_type":[14],"noteworthy_people":[],"topics":[5007,5048,2266,4999,5032],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/10431"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/article"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/10431\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25729,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/10431\/revisions\/25729"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"article_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article_type?post=10431"},{"taxonomy":"noteworthy_people","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/noteworthy_people?post=10431"},{"taxonomy":"topics","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thenewatlantis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topics?post=10431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}