The unity of nature

Carl F. Von Weizsäcker

pp. 239-254

in: Robert S. Cohen, Mark W. Wartofsky (eds), Physical sciences and history of physics, Berlin, Springer, 1984

Abstract

"In my beginning is my end." Thus begins T.S. Eliot's philosophical poem East Coker, the second of his Four Quartels [1]. The application to our present topic: philosophy and, I think, fundamental science move in circles or, if the hope for progress is not delusive, in spirals. When we begin to speak about language, we have been speaking, i.e., we have been using language, for years. When we decide to learn scientifically from experience, we are already in possession of the human experience of how to learn from individual and common experience. Language and experience, science and philosophy are parts of human cultural history, the beginning of which is beyond our memory. And when, on the other side, an end is achieved, say a scientific theory is completed, one of its tests is its semantic consistency, that means its ability to justify precisely that language and to explain precisely that experience which had initially been needed to endow its concepts with an understandable meaning.