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The New Vision of Reality
| Article
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11323 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1986 |
3,367 Words |
| Author
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Fritjof Capra
Fritjof Capra, Ph.D., studied theoretical physics at the
University of Vienna in Austria and has done research in high
energy physics at several European and American universities.
The complete article from which this except is taken appeared
in Ancient Wisdom and Modern Science. Reprinted by permission
of SUNY press. |
A dramatic change of concepts and ideas occurred in physics during the first three decades of this century. Still being elaborated in our current theories of matter, the new concepts profoundly changed our worldview from the mechanistic thinking of Descartes and Newton to a holistic and ecological view.
The new view was by no means easy for physicists to accept at the beginning of the century. Exploration of the atomic and subatomic world brought them into contact with a strange and unexpected reality. In their struggle to grasp this new reality, scientists became painfully aware that their basic concepts, their language, and their whole way of thinking were inadequate to describe atomic phenomena. Their problems were not merely intellectual but amounted to an intense emotional and even existential crisis. It took scientists a long time to overcome this crisis, but in the end they were rewarded with deep insights into the nature of matter and its relation to the human mind.
I have come to believe that today the nations and societies of the world find themselves in a similar crisis. We can read about its numerous manifestations every day in the newspapers. Most of our economies produce high inflation and unemployment, with undiminishing levels of poverty and starvation; there is an energy crisis, a crisis in health care, an environmental crisis, and a rising wave of violence and crime. I believe that these are all different facets of one and the same crisis, which is essentially a crisis of perception. Like the crisis in physics in the 1920s, it derives from the fact that we are trying to apply the concepts of an outdated worldview--the mechanistic worldview of Cartesian-Newtonian science--to a reality which can no longer be understood in terms of these concepts.
Although the Cartesian worldview is characteristic of Western rather than Eastern culture, many of its basic principles are now also applied in the East because of the worldwide adoption of Western science and technology. The Cartesian worldview has now reached its limitations in many fields, including physics, biology, medicine, psychology, and economics. We live today in a globally interconnected world, in which biological, psychological, social, and environmental phenomena are all interdependent. To describe this world appropriately, we need an ecological perspective which the Cartesian worldview does not offer.
What we need, then, is a new paradigm--a new vision of reality, and a fundamental change in our thoughts, perceptions and values. The
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