D O C . 3 7 9 T R A V E L D I A R Y O C T O B E R 1 9 2 2 2 9 7 chalk cliffs. Coast slowly recedes away to the left. Conversation with Europeanized Japanese physician Miyake from Fukuoka.[4] Afternoon, 4 o’clock, safety drill. All passengers—wearing the life-belts stored in their cabins—must report for review at the spot where the lifeboat designated to them for manning in the event of danger is located. Crew (all Japanese) friendly, precise without pedantry, without individualistic stamp. He (the Japanese) is unproblematic, impersonal, cheerfully fulfills the social function falling to his lot without pretension, but proud about of his community and nation. The abandon- ing of his traditional ways in favor of European ones does not gnaw away at his national pride. He is impersonal but not really reserved for as a predominantly social being, he seems not to possess anything personally that he could have the need to be taciturn or secretive about. 9th Oct. 4 o’clock in the morning, major racket. Cause: scrub-down of vessel. Great cleanliness of people and things. The ship is as if licked clean. It is already becoming significantly warmer. The sun assuages me and removes the gulf between “ego” and “id.” I begin reading Kretschmer’s Physique and Character.[5] Wonderful description of temperaments and their physical character. I can thus treat objectively many of my fellow beings but not myself, because my type is a hopeless mixture. Yesterday I looked into Bergson’s book on relativity and time.[6] Strange that time alone is problematic to him but not space. He strikes me as having more linguistic skill than psychological depth. He is not very scrupulous about the objective treatment of psychic factors. But he does seem to grasp the substance of relativity theory and doesn’t set himself in opposition to it. Philosophers constantly dance around the dichotomy: the psychologically real and the physically real, and differ only in evaluations in this regard. Either the former appears as a “mere indi- vidual experience” or the latter as a “mere construct of thought.” Bergson belongs to the latter kind but objectifies in his way without noticing. I’ve been thinking about the gravitation-electricity problem again. I find that Weyl is right that a field, or an invariant ds disconnected from the electric one, has no reality, therefore cannot be mathematically objectified either. But I do think that the final solution is further away from Riemann than for Weyl and also think that disconnected from the electromagnetic nothing directly corresponds to the elementary law of vectorial parallel displacement and that this formalism has no objective legitimacy as the basis of the theory beyond Riemann. However, it does seem to me possible that the field theory will be retainable whether the expression of the natural laws by differential equations will also be retainable appears doubtful.[7] [p. 2] [p. 2v] gμν
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