Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Ray Monk Read Free Book Online Page B

practical suggestions for improving the health, the working conditions and the housing of the people of New York; that involved itself in trade-union disputes; and that helped set up a number of nationally important campaigning groups – the National Child Labor Committee, the Civil Liberties Union, the Ladies Garment Workers’ Union, the Society for the Advancement of Colored People, and so on. Spending large sums of money (for even though Julius and Ella were ‘early buyers’ of Van Gogh and Picasso, the cost of these paintings was still considerable) on works that would be seen only by one’s immediate family and one’s closest friends scarcely looks consistent with the ethics that inspired the movement and its many social and political initiatives.
    And yet, when looked at in another way, it was not only consistent with Adler’s vision, but a fulfilment of it. Despite the practical nature of much of the work of the Ethical Culture Society, and despite its repudiation oftheology, Adler’s vision was first and foremost a
spiritual
one. His central motivation was to find a way of preserving the spiritual guidance that religions had provided, even after all faith in religious beliefs had been abandoned. He thought he had found what he was looking for in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, with its emphasis on what Kant called the ‘Moral Law’, which Kant thought
all
of us would find in our hearts. In a famous passage that Adler quotes in his discourses,
Creed and Deed
, Kant writes: ‘Two things fill the soul with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence: the star-lit heavens above me, and the moral law within me.’ According to Kant, the moral law is the same for all people at all times and at all places, and according to Adler: ‘The moral law is the common ground upon which all religious and in fact all true men may meet. It is the one basis of union that remains to us amid the clashing antagonisms of the sects . . . all that is best and grandest in [religious] dogma is due to the inspiration of the moral law in man.’
    What, then, is the moral law? In Kant’s formulation, it is this: ‘act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law’. This means something like: do as you will be done by; or: do to others what you would be happy to have done to you. Adler’s formulation, however, is rather different: ‘The rule reads, “Act so as to bring out the spiritual personality, the unique nature of the other.”’
    One brings out the ‘spiritual personality’ by awakening in other people the sense of the sublime, of the infinite. Art is able to do this, Adler emphasises, since it is a ‘high endeavour’ and ‘Truly disinterestedness is the distinguishing mark of every high endeavour’. Thus: ‘The pursuit of the artist is unselfish, the beauty he creates is his reward.’ The goal of life is to pursue ‘the Ideal’, which ‘is void of form and its name unutterable’. We can find the Ideal within ourselves – in fact, we can
only
find it within ourselves – through the discovery and appreciation of the moral law; and the ‘high endeavours’, of art, science and public service, can help us find it. So the acquisition of fine works of art does not, after all, constitute ‘luxurious living’, but rather a means of fulfilling the ‘Moral Law’.
    It was in an environment governed by this idiosyncratic version of the moral law that a concerted effort would be made to ‘bring out the spiritual personality’ of J. Robert Oppenheimer.
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    fn1 Adler resigned as president of the New York Society in 1882, though of course he remained – as he is described on Julius and Ella’s marriage certificate – ‘Leader of the Society for Ethical Culture’.

2
Childhood
    IT WAS IN the extraordinarily tasteful and expensively furnished apartment in West 94th Street that, on 22 April 1904, J. Robert Oppenheimer was born. To help look