The Examined Life: In Tribute to Bertram D. Lewin—(1896-1971)

Writing on the art of poetry, Herbert Gold (1972) recently said: 'Words are too valuable to be expended on anything less than the meaning of life.' This aesthetic credo echoes and complements the rationalistic philosophical tradition of antiquity best articulated by Socrates when he said that the unexamined life is not worth living. Fundamentally there are two ways to examine life, the aesthetic-intuitive and the scientific-rational. In Bertram Lewin, both of these approaches were intextricably melded. Scientist, psychoanalyst, mathematician, astronomer, philosopher, Lewin was also an aspiring, if not a professional, poet. Words were his favourite instruments. He was a master of many languages—not only the languages of different peoples and places, but the languages of many disciplines and of many passions.

In the truest Aristotelian sense, Lewin's scientific work is a thing of great beauty. From beginning to end, it constitutes an aesthetic unity, a conceptual integrity. It is not surprising, therefore, that much of the poetry he wrote and the comments that he left on some of his poems concern the very themes he developed in his creative scientific work.

The modern Hebrew poet, Zalman Schneuer, wrote:

The awareness of death makes relevant the examination of life.

It was one of Lewin's favourite authors, Hanns Sachs, who placed these two major themes in perspective in regard to beauty. He wrote:

Life and death have to be present for the creation, even of the slightest, most superficial bit of beauty. When we turn to the great, the pure beauty, we find them united by the strictest interdependence … Life offers all of its strongest emotions without alloy of trifles or trivialities … Death brings with it the striving after permanence, stability, immobility. The presence of death makes itself felt in the sadness of beauty, which in its fullness is more than ordinary mort