Reflections

I am happy to announce that my article on the systemic principles of life, which I developed over the last two years, has been published in Resurgence magazine, Issue 346, September/October 2024. I found this new language, summarizing my synthesis of the systems view of life, in conversations with the students of my online Capra Course. I am very grateful to them for countless stimulating discussions.

I was trained as a physicist and spent twenty years doing research in theoretical high-energy physics. I left physics in the mid-eighties and turned towards the life sciences, where a new conception of life has recently emerged. It involves a profound shift in perspective from seeing the world as a machine composed of elementary building blocks to understanding that it is a network of inseparable patterns of relationships.

Over the last few decades, I have developed a synthesis of this new understanding, a conceptual framework that integrates four dimensions of life: the biological, the cognitive, the social and the ecological. I have presented summaries of this framework, as it evolved, in several books. My final synthesis is published in a textbook entitled The Systems View of Life,which is co-authored with Pier Luigi Luisi (Cambridge University Press, 2014). I call my synthesis a ‘systems view’ because it requires a new kind of thinking – thinking in terms of relationships, patterns and context. In science this is known as systemic thinking, or ‘systems thinking’.

What is systems thinking?

(To be published in Resurgence, Sept/Oct 2022)

Hazel Henderson, who died in May of this year at the age of eighty-nine, was an influential colleague and close friend of mine for over forty years, during which she decisively shaped my thinking about the intersections of economics, ecology, systems thinking, and feminism.

            An independent futurist, environmentalist, and economic iconoclast, she argued that the conceptual framework underlying the discipline of economics has become so narrow that it has driven economists into an impasse. Most economic concepts and models are no longer adequate to understand economic phenomena in a fundamentally interdependent world, and current economic policies can no longer solve our economic problems.

            In nine books, numerous essays, and countless editorials, Hazel drove home this point for over four decades with an intensity, brilliance, and originality that are still unmatched today. She challenged the world’s foremost economists, politicians, and corporate leaders with her well-founded critique of their fundamental concepts and values. Because of her special talent for presenting her radical ideas in a disarming, nonthreatening manner her voice was heard and respected in government and corporate circles; she held an impressive number of advisory positions and cofounded and directed numerous organizations, in which her new ways of thinking have been elaborated and applied.

When I was reviewing my career in preparation for the forthcoming collection of my essays from five decades (see previous blog post), I felt tremendous gratitude to many colleagues and mentors who have influenced and inspired me during various phases of my professional life. To acknowledge my debt to them I decided to document their names in a systemic way.

In the interactive PDF I have arranged their names and portraits in a network corresponding to the conceptual network of my synthesis of the Systems View of Life. Hovering the cursor over their portraits will open up biographical information about them, including my relationship with them, in the side bar. (Please note that this interactive feature requires opening the PDF with Adobe Reader or Acrobat.)

Over the years I have been influenced and inspired by many more colleagues than I was able to include in this map. To all I owe deep gratitude.

Fritjof Capra and Hazel Henderson

Imagine, it is the year 2050 and we are looking back to the origin and evolution of the coronavirus pandemic over the last three decades. Extrapolating from recent events, we offer the following scenario for such a view from the future.

As we move into the second half of our twenty-first century, we can finally make sense of the origin and impact of the coronavirus that struck the world in 2020 from an evolutionary systemic perspective. Today, in 2050, looking back on the past 40 turbulent years on our home planet, it seems obvious that the Earth had taken charge of teaching our human family. Our planet taught us the primacy of understanding of our situation in terms of whole systems, identified by some far-sighted thinkers as far back as the mid-nineteenth century.  This widening human awareness revealed how the planet actually functions, its living biosphere systemically powered by the daily flow of photons from our mother star, the Sun.

Geoffrey Chew, who died last April at the age of ninety-four, was one of the deepest and most radical thinkers of twentieth-century physics. His bootstrap theory, technically known as S-Matrix theory, is based on the idea that nature cannot be reduced to fundamental entities, like fundamental constituents of matter, but has to be understood entirely through self-consistency. According to Chew, all of physics has to follow uniquely from the requirement that its components be consistent with one another and with themselves.[1]

This idea constitutes a radical departure from the traditional spirit of basic research in physics, which has always concentrated on finding the fundamental constituents of matter. At the same time, it can be seen as the culmination of the conception of particles as interconnections in an inseparable web of relationships, which arose in quantum theory and acquired an intrinsically dynamic nature in relativity theory.

Carlo Pedretti, the world’s foremost expert on Leonardo da Vinci, died on January 5, one day before his ninetieth birthday, in his villa in Lamporecchio near Vinci. Pedretti’s specialty was the exact dating of Leonardo’s manuscripts and drawings (see The Science of Leonardo, 2002, p. 160). His pioneering works included the annotated edition of drawings by Leonardo da Vinci at the Royal Library at Windsor in several volumes, as well as annotated and translated facsimile editions of several of Leonardo’s codices. Pedretti published over 60 scholarly books and over 600 articles on Leonardo da Vinci. One of his last tasks was to assemble a committee for the celebration of the 500-year anniversary of Leonardo’s death in 2019. I knew Pedretti quite well. He was always very kind to me, encouraging and supporting my Leonardo research for many years. He will be greatly missed by the community of Leonardo scholars.

Obituary in La Repubblica, January 5, 2018

I am happy to announce that the article on ecological economics, which I wrote with my friend and colleague Ove Jakobsen, has now been published in the International Journal of Social Economics

I am reproducing the article here in the format we submitted it because I find it easier to read than the format used by the online publication.

Rabindranath Tagore, ca. 1930.

Werner Heisenberg, 1933.

In 1972, I met Werner Heisenberg, one of the giants of modern physics, whose book Physics and Philosophy had a decisive influence on my thinking and, in fact, determined the trajectory of my entire career as a scientist and writer. I gave a detailed account of my conversations with Heisenberg and of my personal impressions of him in my book Uncommon Wisdom (Simon and Schuster, 1988; pp. 40ff.).

At that time, I had just begun to work on The Tao of Physics, and so I was naturally curious to hear Heisenberg’s thoughts on Eastern philosophy. He told me to my great surprise not only that he had been well aware of the parallels between quantum physics and Eastern thought, but also that his own scientific work had been influenced, at least at the subconscious level, by Indian philosophy.

In 1977, two years after the publication of The Tao of Physics, I was invited to speak at a conference in London, “Mystics and Scientists,” organized by the Scientific and Medical Network (UK). This conference turned into an annual event, and last April they celebrated their 40-year anniversary. I was invited again to give the keynote speech at this event, and I did so via Skype.

In my speech (printed in Network Review, the journal of the Scientific and Medical Network), I talked about the origins, the main thesis, and the impact of The Tao of Physics, which is still my best known book, and about the evolution of my view of the relationship between science and spirituality over the past forty years.

Download PDF