The Potsdam Denkschrift is a declaration of Hans-Peter Dürr, J. Daniel Dahm and Rudolf zur Lippe under the patronage of the Federation of German Scientists-VDW.
It is the base – the “mother” of the abstract condensed version, the Potsdam Manifesto ‚We have to learn to think in a new way’ what was up to now signed by more than 130 scientists and personalities from all over the world.
The resultant development of the critical and bracing symposium was the full backing of all participants, as well as the decision to publish a short Manifesto additionally to the “Denkschrift”.
The Russell–Einstein Manifesto was an ultimate calling for a new way of thinking that would guarantee war, in the future, to be completely banned as an instrument of politics and conflict resolution.
"This wide variety of crises today confronting us and threatening to exceed our ability to cope are the expression of a mental crisis in the relation between us humans and our living world.
The idea of a separated, fragmented reality dissolves in the micro physics and dynamically transforming and differentiating relations are taking the place of substantial segregations.
The image of a world assembled from dead matter is superseded by a cosmology, what is based on an immaterial omni-connectedness and what is inherently “alive”.
"Instead of the world assumed until now – a mechanical, temporally determined “reality” of objectifiable things, the real “Wirklichkeit” (a world that effects) turns out to be basically “potentiality”: an indivisible, immaterial, temporally essentially indeterminate and genuinely creative bonding of relations that determines only “can”-probabilities, a differentiated potential for a material-energetic realization.
"Animate nature draws its ability for continued, creative differentiate and cooperative integration from its “pre-living” (microphysically recognizable) primordial ground, whose “information”, through instabilities, rises enhanced into the meso-sphere, where it unfolds in more intense and richer form.
The diverse processes and relations between individuals, cultures, organisms and ecological complexes are demanding within open systems different patterns of action and creations of strategies, than it is feasible within the old mechanistic constructions, theorems and predefinitions of the scientific description of “the” reality.
The progressing uniformity of all ideas of value and affluence, habits of consumption and economic strategies on the pattern of a Western/North American/European knowledge society is still legitimated by a way of thinking that argues for a rational objectifiability of the Wirklichkeit on the basis of secured scientific foundations.
Because "if we continue to “tilt” our common playing field of life by unrestrainedly striving for power, so that the majority of humankind and a great part of all living creatures are slipping off, our problems will grow into a catastrophe."