[Weizsäcker and Indian philosophy - a new beginning in negotiating the dualism of mind and matter?].

Abstract

Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker's thought is centred around the idea of the unity of reality. He tries to express this idea in his interpretation of quantum physics as well as on the background of neoplatonic thinking. Even his interest in Indian philosophies is based on this concept that would overcome the dualism of mind and matter as well as the dualism of subject and object. On this basis he also tries to reflect on his own inexpressible "mystical" experience in Tiruvannamalai, India, interpreting it with the help of the experience he has been told about by the Indian thinker Gopi Krishna. This is the concept of prana (vital energy) that he uses to find a common terminological ground for physical and mental events. According to Indian Advaita Vedanta, the non-dualistic interpretation of the Vedantic scriptures, reality is based on a non-dual oneness that is self-reflective, transparent and neither immanent nor transcendent but beyond any category. It is pure bliss in its self-expression. Human "mental" experience is a reflective mode of this one reality, subject and object coincide. The result is a holistic psycho-somatology. In view of these ideas Weizsäcker reformulates the notion of "matter". It is less an interaction of particles with specific mass than a non-dual net of interrelations and information, and this would correlate with a concept of mind (consciousness) that could be conceptualized as the energy of self-reflectivity in that very process.