During preparations for the first issue of the new online journal “Mind and Science – Blueprints for Life” I recently came across an old collection of essays by Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. The title is: "On the Worldview of Physics", 2nd edition. Leipzig, 1944.
Okay, the book is no longer a current textbook on physics - but it already contains approximations of a new understanding of reality, which he would later develop into his idea of the "primordial theory": that reality consists of elementary distinctions ("primordial alternatives"), i.e. ultimately of information, and not of matter.
Even though the quantum-theoretical parts of the book seem outdated today, it is still a key document for the intellectual history of the 20th century.
Weizsäcker was just in his early thirties in 1944, writing in the midst of the war. His work is permeated by a yearning for a spiritual reorientation of science – away from the purely technical, towards a unity of nature and spirit. It thus forms a kind of counter-program to the mechanistic worldview and contains many of the later metamodern motifs (interdependence, process thinking, resonance).
Even more remarkable, however, is that the book can be read as a subtle counter-proposal to the ideological worldview of the Third Reich – not politically in an agitational sense, but metaphysically and intellectually. While Nazi ideology understood "life" biologically, vitalistically, and racistically, Weizsäcker conceives of "life" as an expression spiritual, i.e., immaterial regularity.
Weizsäcker was a member of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society at the time and closely associated with Heisenberg. Both worked on the theoretical physics of the German uranium project – on the borderline between loyalty, surveillance, and inner resistance. The very focus on epistemological and mathematical questions created a cover for intellectual freedom.
