Transdisciplinarity and the Quest for a Tomorrow

Karen-Claire Voss (Department of English Literature, Fatih University,

Istanbul, Turkey)

Abstract

In this paper I will discuss what I think is the main problem associated
with attempts to use transdisciplinarity and will touch on the differences
between transdisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, with which the former
is often confused. I will then go on to examine some of its implications
for traditional methodology and will continue by exploring some of the
possibilities that it affords. I will also devote some time to considering
the implications of Basarab Nicolescu's characterization of
transdisciplinarity as a project for the future. Finally, I will close by
suggesting some potentially fruitful ways of utilizing the transdisciplinary
approach in the social sciences and in the humanities.

When I first discovered the transdisciplinary approach through an

exceedingly fortuitous encounter with Basarab Nicolescu, now over ten
years ago, it was as if I had finally come home. Up until that point, in my
work as a historian of religions I had focused on problems arising from
conceptual dualism, and no matter what my topic was, always ended up
returning to that issue, an issue that I consider to be the most pressing
intellectual and anthropological problem facing us today. For example,
when I studied alchemy I was most concerned with everything related to
the coincidence of opposites and the problem faced by every alchemist:
namely, making a whole from out of parts. When I explored problems in
mysticism, I grappled with the conflict that is generally believed to exist
between Eros and agape, and the perception, which in my view is
erroneous, that there exists some unbridgeable ontological gap between
that which we call divine and the human. When I turned to issues relating
to women in religion and culture I faced this dualism once again. Since
mind was considered superior to body, and since women are considered
to be more closely tied to (or even identified with) body, a plethora of
negative attitudes and behaviors has resulted. We call this "patriarchy"
and have been suffering its effects now for thousands of years. And so
it went, until that fateful encounter with the living ideas that constitute
transdisciplinarity. I soon realized that the transdisciplinary approach
enables the resolution of conflicts arising from conceptual dualism
(conflicts that are played out on a very deep level on account of the fact
that dualistic concepts are often believed to reflect ontology) while
celebrating complexity and preserving difference, allowing us to
distinguish one thing from another, and even value one thing more than
another, without thrusting us into the realm of cheap relativism.
Moreover, transdisciplinarity does not push us into a transcendence that
is somehow unrelated and superior to that which it transcends. Instead,
what transdisciplinarity does is encompass oppositions while
simultaneously going beyond them. There is a world of difference.

Thus, the transdisciplinary approach provides us with a viable

alternative to conceptual dualism and even provides an alternative to
thinking in terms of Hegelian dialectic and synthesis (which itself is
problematic for reasons I cannot go into here, except to note that Hegel's
thought is also irrevocably bound up with conceptual dualism and binary
logic and ultimately cannot escape from this, notwithstanding his
solution of synthesis, which is ultimately only an apparent solution(1)).
As Basarab Nicolescu writes:

Transdisciplinarity transgresses the duality of opposing binary pairs:

subject/ object, subjectivity/objectivity, matter/consciousness,
nature/divine, simplicity/complexity, reductionism/holism, diversity/unity.
This duality is transgressed by the open unity that encompasses both
the universe and the human being.(2)

In this paper I want to explore what I think is the main problem one must
confront when attempting to use a transdisciplinary approach and
continue by exploring some of the possibilities that it affords. At the
outset I must say that in my view, the possibilities far outweigh any
problems that might arise and that I advocate transdisciplinarity without
reservation. For that reason, most of what follows is devoted to exploring
those possibilities.

Transdisciplinarity is Not Only a Method

Those not yet familiar with transdisciplinarity may come to it with the idea
that it is yet one more highly-touted "new" method, one in a long line of
new methods. As such, they are likely to think of it as a fad, one that will
have a greater or lesser effect on a variety of disciplines, but that will
sooner or later fade into oblivion, only to be evoked by a historian of
ideas at some future date. However, if we regard transdisciplinarity
simply as one method among others we will miss its importance. I
remember, for example, when I was a young graduate student in the first
flush of enthusiasm for the "general systems approach." This seemed to
me then the last word and I read all the Gregory Bateson, Heinz von
Foerster and Clifford Geertz (along with a bit of Ken Wilber, which
somehow seemed to fit in very well) I could lay my hands on. As I recall,
when one of my professors was writing a letter of recommendation for
me while I was seeking admission to various doctoral programs he
somewhat excitedly explained that he gathered I was actually
contemplating trying to establish a new subfield of religious studies, one
that would be based on the principles of general systems theory. My
infatuation with conceptual spectrums, "thick description," feedback
loops, complexity per se, and such lasted two, maybe three years, but
then I began to see their limitations and went in search of greener
methodological pastures. That search ended when I encountered
transdisciplinarity and found that it resolved the problems of conceptual
dualism that I had been grappling with for years.

Transdisciplinarity is not really a method in so far as referring to it as a

method implies that one is still working within a binary framework of
mechanistic causality. In such a framework one chooses the
methodology one uses in much the same way as a carpenter chooses
the right tool for a job - a hammer for this, a chisel for that, a screwdriver
or saw for something else. In this case we are dealing with three
essentially discrete, non-interacting entities: we have the researcher, the
tool he or she is using (i.e., the method), and the phenomenon it is being
applied to. Now, in fields like the social sciences and the humanities one
can and certainly should employ different methods from a variety of
disciplines as Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty has advocated because only a
plurality of methods is able to begin to "get at" the multiple levels, the
"palimpsest"(3) of meanings that is inherent in every phenomenon.
Transdisciplinarity, however, is something other than a method.
Transdisciplinarity is an attitude, an approach - to everything.

Implications of Transdisciplinarity for Traditional Methodology

Since my training was in history of religions with a specialization in

esotericism I have garnered much of what I am going to say here from
that experience. As an undergraduate and master's student I had
become accustomed to being praised and encouraged as I struggled to
assimilate more and more knowledge. I was a true philosopher, the kind
of student who became drunk on ideas and tried to push them to their
limits; one of my professors once described me as a "young woman with
a gluttonous hunger for ideas," and she was right. It was something of a
shock therefore when I began doctoral work in a program at a school in
Berkeley, California and was almost immediately plunged into what then
seemed to me to be a veritable nightmare of methodological
proscriptions. Whereas my enthusiasm for learning and my tendency to
make connections between apparently disparate things (for example,
the work I did on the myths of Isis and Mary) had previously occasioned
enthusiastic encouragement from my professors, now this same
tendency was getting me into trouble. One of my fellow students told me
that after a few more years in graduate school my enthusiasm would be
drummed out of me and I would begin to sober up. My faculty advisor
allowed me to pass my orals, but she contrived things so that the
notation "Passed with distinction" was denied me on account of the fact
that what I had presented on methodology must not, in her view, ever
again be repeated.(4) "Not ever," she said. This was followed by the
extreme consternation caused by my dissertation proposal in which I
explained that I would investigate what I called "embodiment" in the life
and work of an obscure French duchess who was linked to freemasonry
and mesmerism and which used the word "ontology," two concepts
which caused no end of problems. I was spending the year in France in
order to do doctoral research and my graduate school required that I fly
back to California, even though I had told them I could ill afford it, in order
to defend my proposal. After undergoing a grilling that took place in a
conference room and reminded me not a little of an Inquisition, my
proposal was still only "provisionally" accepted and the sticking points
remained my insistence on using the term "embodiment," maintaining
that this had "ontological" implications, as well as my wanting to
approach the work in a primarily hermeneutical way. My problems with
methodology reached a zenith when I had a semi-public "methodological
falling out" (the phrase I have ever since used to refer to it) with my then
academic mentor (who happens to be the reigning giant in my field, a
scholar who knows all the facts about everything). During those years,
though, I gradually began to move from sheer terror of what might
happen to my academic "career" to increasingly outspoken insistence
that doing hermeneutics was not only inevitable, but necessary and even
desirable (and developing fairly elaborate theoretical articulations of why
this was the case) while he was becoming ever more insistent that the
empirical method was the sole method for doing legitimate scholarship,
or at least the sole method for doing truly significant scholarship. The
question of the meaning of a phenomenon was a dangerous issue since
it involved subjectivity, something that was to be avoided at all costs.

The transdisciplinary approach impacts traditional methodology in many

ways. It allows us enormous freedom in terms of how we approach our
research and in terms of the fact that it enables us to include things from
any field which we deem related to the object of our study. I will discuss
some specific examples of this below, in the section about how to apply
the transdisciplinary approach. As already noted, when one approaches
a research problem in a transdisciplinary way, one is immediately
afforded a much wider field of exploration than is traditionally the case.
For example, an anthropologist might very well do work that is informed
by findings and methods from art history, literature and religious
studies.(5) Or a scientist can explore archaeological studies dealing with
the invention of hunting bows while trying to understand how
instrumental music developed because the principles on which bows
operate probably helped us construct the first stringed
instruments.(6) This is the kind of thing that can lead to a conflation of
transdisciplinarity with interdisciplinarity. Interdisciplinary approaches
simply mean that one uses a variety of methods, from a variety of fields
and applies them to a variety of data. Nicolescu has provided a useful
taxonomy for understanding interdisciplinarity in terms of three degrees:
1) a degree of application; an epistemological degree; and finally a
degree of the generation of new disciplines.(7) In contrast, the
transdisciplinary approach encompasses various fields, just as the
interdisciplinary approach, but then moves across them, and finally,
beyond them. It is this space of the "beyond" that causes many of the
problems people have with transdisciplinarity which leads us to consider
the greatest impact that transdisciplinarity has. That impact lies in the
way that it requires us to include the Subject (the hitherto excluded
middle) in our research. It is this that causes the greatest consternation,
occasions the most controversy, and is the most threatening. Allow me
to explain.

One reason that it is not appropriate to think of transdisciplinarity as

being merely a method is because transdisciplinarity entails a whole new
approach, not only to problems in a particular discipline, but to Reality
itself. Moreover, the epistemology of transdisciplinarity is informed by
that of quantum physics and one thing this means is an acceptance of
the fact that Reality is comprised of more than just one level.(8) One also
has to understand that since the various levels of Reality are governed
by different laws and different fundamental concepts, those associated
with the level of Reality to which we are accustomed to dealing with
(classical, binary logic and mechanistic causality are two examples) are
not necessarily operative on all the other levels. In a paper that Basarab
Nicolescu and I wrote in 1995 we explained that:

By the term 'reality' we mean everything which resists our

representations, descriptions, images, experiences, or experiments. By
the term 'level' we mean a group of systems which is invariant under the
action of certain laws. Our current epistemology is based on classical
logic which itself is founded on three postulates: 1) The axiom of identity:
A is A. 2) The axiom of non-contradiction: A is not non-A. 3) The axiom
of the excluded middle: there exists no third term T (T = included middle)
which is at the same time A and non-A.

There are three postulates of modern science: 1. The existence of

universal laws with a mathematical character. 2. The discovery of these
laws by scientific experiment. 3. The perfect replicability of experimental
results. The methodology of modern science is silent on the topic of logic.
The entire history of pre-quantum physics shows that this methodology
can be adapted to binary logic. However, the scientific ideology began
to fall apart at the birth of quantum physics, with the discovery of a level
of reality that clearly differs from our own; in order to be understood, this
level seemed to demand a threefold logic, that of the included middle. In
fact, it can be said that the quantum revolution truly consists in the
emergence of the included middle as a result of the study of Nature.
More precisely, quantum mechanics and quantum physics have given
rise to experimental and theoretical evidence for pairs of mutually
exclusive contradictory terms (A and non-A). Here are some examples:
wave and corpuscle, continuity and discontinuity, separability and non-
separability, local causality and global causality, autonomy and
constraint, visible and invisible, manifest and non-manifest, symmetry
and breaking of symmetry, time and non-time, reversibility and
irreversibility of time. Returning to the notion of levels of reality, two
levels of reality are different if, while passing from one to the other, there
is a rupture of laws and fundamental concepts (such as that of causality).
A clear example is that of the microphysical level and the macrophysical
level. If one remains at a single level of reality, all manifestation appears
as a struggle between two contradictory elements (for example: wave
and corpuscle, visible and invisible; here we may add empirical and
meta-empirical, scientific and hermeneutic, etc.) like links in an endless
chain along a horizontal plane. The third point, which is that of the T-
state, occurs at another level of reality, on which that which appears
separate (wave and corpuscle, visible and invisible, empirical and meta-
empirical, scientific and hermeneutic, etc.) is in fact unified (quanton)
and that which is contradictory is perceived as non-contradictory."(9)

Then we added something that was especially relevant since the paper
was arguing for a change in the methodology used in the field of
esotericism. Since the transdisciplinary approach takes account of the
epistemological implications of the findings of quantum physics, if we
accept transdisciplinarity as a paradigm we know that every scholar (and
for that matter, every human being) necessarily

plays the role of translator, mediator from one language to the other,
from one logic to the other, from one level to the other. By virtue of our
constitution, a human being belongs to many levels of reality. Now, the
locus off interplay between levels is the macrocosmic level; the vantage
point from which this relation can be seen is that of the human being,
the subject. However, up to this point, the subject has been the excluded
middle. It is time to include the subject. More precisely, in fact, rather
than including something which is not present, we must acknowledge
what is already present; what in fact has never really been absent."(10)

Obviously, if scholars working in the humanities and the social sciences

begin to include the Subject we will have to abandon the idea that to do
scientific scholarship means being objective in terms of the pre-quantum
physics view of what constitutes objectivity. We will also have to
abandon the idea of Reality as being comprised of only one level, the
level governed by mechanistic causality and linear cause/effect relations.
That will mean that Jacques DeLors understanding of education as
something comprised of "four pillars: learning to know, learning to do,
learning to live together, and learning to be"(11) will be taken seriously,
thereby opening the way to allow things like nuance and emotion and
passion into our research. Imagine if you will, what a typical social
science article would read like if such things were inside. We would once
again accord the university its original meaning - the university is a place
devoted to the study of the universal.(12) Far from being a human
conceptual construct, as some postmodernists would have it, Nature;
i.e., the universe, emerges from complex, living systems, i.e.,
consciousness, and we human beings emerge from it. The universe
is objectively prior to our own individual, space/time beings, prior to the
beings who, among other things, busy themselves with making
conceptual constructs of this or of that the implications are enormous.
Science has also shown us that the universe is indeed "multi-leveled."
Given the nature of the human constitution, not only are we able to
"translate" between levels, we do in fact partici pate in both the macro
level and the quantum level. By including the middle in what we study
we acknowledge the fact of the reality of the universe; thereby the
universe, hitherto the object of our study, becomes the subject. By
including the subject in what we study we also acknowledge the fact that
human beings are a part of the universe (i.e., a part of Nature), and at
the same time that we are the locus of the transmission of knowledge
about the networks which link the various systems together on different
levels.

In sum, three things must be kept in mind. First, transdisciplinarity can

certainly give rise to methods, but it itself is not a method; rather, it is an
approach. This distinction is critically important. Secondly, a
transdisciplinary researcher is affected by the object of his or her study
in ways that lie outside the current paradigm of what constitutes
objective, empirical research. And thus, thirdly, to use the
transdisciplinary approach inevitably entails changes in the person using
it and, depending on the extent to which it is adopted, these changes
can be very profound indeed. As Nicolescu pointed out, while recalling
an observation made by Jacques Robin, "lived transdisciplinarity can
lead us not only to a change in the way we think but also in the ways
that we behave."(13)

Emergent Properties: Transdisciplinarity as a Project for the Future

In the Preface to his Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity, Basarab Nicolescu

writes: "I dedicate this manifesto to all the men and women who still have
faith, in spite of everything and against all odds - especially all dogma
and all ideology - in the quest for a tomorrow."(14) Since I count myself
among that number, it seemed appropriate to borrow from what he said
for the title of this paper.

The reason that transdisciplinarity can play a major role in this "quest for
a tomorrow," this project for the future, is that everything related to it is
characterized by the quality of emergence. To take up the idea of
emergence then, we say that a system has emergent properties when
we observe things that are more than the sum of the properties of the
system's parts. It is clear that this is precisely what happens everywhere
the transdisciplinary approach is used. Whenever a researcher goes
about his/her work with a transdisciplinary attitude, this results in the
manifestation (perhaps it is more precise to say the actualization) of
emergent properties. Thus, that which emerges from the use of the
transdisciplinary approach can potentially lead us into the future; most
importantly, it can lead us into a future characterized by openings, rather
than closings, by Life rather than by Death, for, as Nicolescu notes:
"Transdisciplinarity is globally open."(15)

In the case of studying data from a variety of perspectives we invariably

find that new meanings emerge, meanings that would otherwise have
remained unseen; hence, unexpressed. On account of the fact that
transdisciplinarity is "based on questioning" when we approach things in
this way we are encouraged and enabled to look at them with fresh eyes.
What Nicolescu calls the "three pillars of transdisciplinarity: multiple
levels of Reality; the logic of the included middle; and complexity" are
what "determine the methodology of transdisciplinary research." Indeed,
these are the three elements which can help answer the question "How
do I use the transdisciplinary approach?" because the elusive X that is
transdisciplinarity necessarily manifests if one accepts the fact that
Reality is multi-leveled, that the logic of the included middle is a viable
alternative to binary logic depending on the level of Reality in question,
and that Reality is inherently complex. Although the opposite is usually
held to be true, simple solutions to problems are almost never realistic
because Reality is almost never simple.

From out of the transdisciplinary attitude also emerges an

unprecedented tolerance toward creeds, practices and people which
would otherwise have been at worst, actively oppressed; at best,
suppressed, relegated to the margins, regarded as Other.
Transdisciplinarity even fosters the emergence of ways of knowing that
are not merely limited to the realm of the intellect, but encompass
intuition, imagination, feelings and the body. This is extremely radical.
As I have already pointed out, the use of the transdisciplinary approach
necessitates change within the being of the researcher.
Transdisciplinarity entails respect for Nature; more than that, it entails
the experience of a lived connection with Nature. Thus, every instance
of reaching out towards an object of study results in deepened
knowledge of the self. Finally, we should take note that in every area of
human knowledge, since time immemorial, genius has always operated
in a transdisciplinary way. That is the nature of genius.(16)

Applying the Transdisciplinary Approach in the Social Sciences

and Humanities

These days, whenever I have a new project to do, I use a

transdisciplinary approach because I have come to the point where there
is no other possibility. However, for those who are not yet as committed
as I am, it may not be clear what using such an approach could mean.
What follows is addressed to those people.

Imagine that you have embarked on a research project that examines

the lives of middle-aged women in 14th century southern Italy. You
already plan to do work with local archives and various other documents
and artifacts that can be accessed in the villages your project
encompasses. You have also scheduled meetings with cultural
historians already working in the area and have even widened the scope
of your research to include relevant studies of domestic architecture.
Clearly, your project qualifies as interdisciplinary. What might qualify it
as transdisciplinary is if you went beyond all that and made time to
interview middle-aged women presently living in villages of southern
Italy. There would be no reason to assume there is any direct connection
but it could well turn out that you would gain insights that you never
dreamed were possible.
Or one might be studying some European alchemical texts and images
as I have and been struck by some apparent similarities between those
texts and images and the ones belonging to the tradition of Indian Tantra.
In my case, since I am not a Sanskrit specialist in an article I published
I could only suggest at the very end in what was almost an aside that
further work could very well be undertaken by scholars who were better
equipped to explore those apparent commonalities.(17)

As a result, several have written me and informed me that they have

begun to do just that. We have yet to see what will emerge from their
research but it will almost certainly be important and unexpected.

In the case of the scientist referred to above, while trying to understand

the development of stringed instruments, he explains that he had to look
at a number of disciplines, including that of the history of music. In a
personal communication he wrote:

The work required that I use three disparate methodologies

simultaneously. 1) The scientific method-which deals with the question
'what?'. When engaged in historical research, scientific method can only
be applied, as it were, in arrears, but it is nonetheless necessary.
Sometimes it is used in reverse. We know the historical outcome and
that gives clues to building the theory that led to that outcome. Here is
an example that may help. There is a considerable Greek literature
concerning the tuning of the seven-stringed lyre (from which both current
Western and Middle-Eastern music are derived). Dozens of systems
were described - but only one only leads to the conclusion that the next
development would be, specifically, an eleven-stringed lyre. Not only
that, but the eleven-stringed lyre would bring more discords and no
benefits. The extant literature, it turns out, does indeed tell us exactly
that. Thus we can be sure of the actual tuning of the classical lyre. 2)
Empiricism-which deals with the question "how?". It is necessary to
actually play a stringed instrument in order to understand, not just music,
but the regular needs of the instrument itself - in particular tuning. It is
necessary to build such instruments - so that virtual historic instruments
can be reliably imagined, and, if required, be constructed and played.
And finally, 3) hermeneutics, that deals with the most important, and
most often ignored, question "why?". It is necessary not just to interpret
what one reads and sees in worlwide literature, iconography, artifacts,
etc. It is necessary to recognize that which is not so obvious. In "Much
Ado About Nothing," Shakespeare wrote: "Is it not strange that sheep's
guts should hale souls out of men's bodies?". That sentiment is found
throughout history and throughout cultures.(18)
One of the most striking examples of the transdisciplinary approach can
be found in the work of the late archaeologist, Maria Gimbutas, who
founded a new discipline she called "archaeomythology", an area of
study that combines archaeology, linguistics, religion, and mythology. In
an article written by Marguerite Rigoglioso we read:

In 1956, Gimbutas became the first scholar to link linguistic research

with archeological data, identifying the homeland (in the steppes of
Russia) of the patriarchal Indo-European peoples she called "Kurgans"
and tracing their infiltrations into Europe. (After decades of debate, her
hypothesis was verified by Stanford geneticist L. L. Cavalli-Svorza.)(19)

Her work is generally described as being interdisciplinary but it was in

fact transdisciplinary because she did not only utilize methods and
approaches from a variety of disciplines but allowed herself to look at
the data she was examining with completely fresh eyes; that is, she
allowed the data to suggest meanings to her, rather than impose
conventional theories on the data.

The transdisciplinary approach encourages what Nicolescu has

described as a "quality" which leads us to "the very heart of the scientific
approach, which is the permanent questioning related to the resistance
of facts, images, representations, and formalizations."(20) We are
constantly led to ask "Why?" and this is what functions to move us into
a space that is "between the disciplines, across the ... disciplines, and
beyond all discipline." (21) This is what moves us into the
"transdisciplinary world," which is a world of "transfiguration," rather then
keeping us mired in "the classical world of figuration." We look at the
world with astonishment, rather than with tired, prejudiced, jaded eyes.
To quote Nicolescu here again: "The word mirror comes from the
Latin mirare, meaning, "to look at with astonishment." The act of "looking
at" presupposes two terms: the one who looks" (here, the researcher)
"and the one who is being looked at" (here, the data).(22)

Where else could this union occur except within the space of
transdisciplinarity?

Conclusion

The development of what can be termed the masculine sphere - which

has become identified with the Subject - has continued virtually
unchecked now for thousands of years now. The result is that the
feminine - which has become identified with the Object - has been
suppressed, or worse, attempts have been made to eradicate it
completely. It would be a grave mistake to reduce what I am referring to
here to mere biological terms or to ideological feminism as that is
generally understood. Here I intend something far more subtle, nuanced
and real than either of those. In his Manifesto of
Transdisciplinarity Nicolescu writes:

Reality encompasses the Subject, the Object, and the Sacred, which are
three facets of one and the same Reality. Without any one of these three
facets, Reality is no longer real, but a dangerous phantasmagoria."(23)

To baldly state that Reality encompasses the Subject is sufficiently

problematic in the postmodern academy, but to add that it also
encompasses the sacred will undoubtedly be the source of even more
consternation. Notwithstanding, with respect to the sacred Nicolescu
states in his opening address recently delivered to the Sixth Annual
Congress of Philosophy and Culture in Saint Petersburg: "In fact, the
presence of the sacred is our own human transpresence in the
world."(24) While a full explication of what he means is beyond the
scope of the present paper what I can say here is that he is absolutely
correct, and we ignore what he says at our peril. As for we academics,
not all of our cleverness and wit, nor all of our publications, however
prestigious, can function to change that fact. We human beings are
collectively in danger of becoming extinct, perhaps by way of some
nuclear "accident," or war, or perhaps because of damage to the
environment such that human life becomes no longer sustainable.

By way of conclusion I want to recall a phenomenon that Nicolescu calls

the "Eros of the world" and the "Eros in Nature."(25) What is needed is
for us to resolve the oppositions of masculine and feminine in an
approach to Reality that would be essentially a celebration of the Eros
of the world. Eros is fluid, processual, emergent, the source of infinite
creativity; it is that which transmutes. The opening of a subject onto an
object which is something that all researchers do is a dialectic movement;
it does not occur in only one direction. In other words, it is not simply a
matter of a subject reaching out towards an object, but rather, of a
mutual, reciprocal, exquisitely nuanced movement, on all levels,
whether they are seen or unseen, said, or unsaid. This movement
constitutes a way of knowing which entails opening, not closing. It is a
way of knowing in which a subject opens onto an object, and thereby
enters into relation with it, and experiences a change in being as a
result.(26) We are talking here about a qualitative process, a process
that might be called "interactive co-evolution," a term I conceived as a
result of an inspiration from Predrag Cicovacki.(27) This way of knowing
is intimately bound up with the enabling power of Nature (which I
understand in the broadest possible sense, to mean all of Reality, the
entire universe). This movement is the movement of Eros.(28) This
movement is the movement of Eros.(29) In other words, this result-the
Eroticization of the world-will have the character of necessity. It is this
movement that constitutes the hallmark of transdisciplinarity and thus
functions as the profoundly transformative, mysterious X that is at the
center of the transdisciplinary approach. To approach things in a
transdisciplinary way will inevitably result in the Eroticization of the world.
It is this that can insure that our quest for a tomorrow that will bear fruit
in the form of a future for humanity and it is this that will make possible
the "re-enchantment of the world."(30)

© Karen-Claire Voss (Department of English Literature, Fatih

University, Istanbul, Turkey)

NOTES

(1) In Joseph's Brenner's paper; Paraconsistency and Transconistency in the Logic of Stephane
Lupasco, p. 1, http://perso.club-internet.fr/alemore/ZXPhilosophy.html he pointed out that "the
philosophical use of dialectics by Fichte and Hegel . . . maintained the tautological character of
classical logic," which is indeed true.

(2) Basarab Nicolescu; Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity, Translated by Karen-Claire Voss, State

University of New York Press, 2002, p. 56.

(3) From the preface The Myth of Method in Mythology, in Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty; Women,
Androgynes and Other Mythical Beasts, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980, p. 4.

(4) Looking back again on the text of the closed book examination which I did on the methodology
of Eliade for the purpose of the present paper was illuminating because I had forgotten how radical
it was. In it I upheld the ideal of "a methodological diversity every bit as rich and varied and
celebrated as the idea of cultural diversity which most scholars of religion have currently
embraced (or at least pay lip service to)." I continued by saying that "social scientific method(s)
are acceptable (for example, they characterize most of the presentations at the annual meetings
of the AAR, most of the articles published in JAAR) while the 'other' methods - more
humanistically-oriented, speculative, metaphysical, etc., are being marginalized . . . I find that it is
the social scientists who have climbed on the ladder to sermonize." I also invoked Wilfred Cantwell
Smith's horror at the fact that it is prevalent in academia to prefer the articulation of method as
opposed to the articulation of substance. Clearly, I had gone beyond the pale even then, in 1990.

(5) This is the kind of work that is being done increasingly in universities such as the Centre for
Cross Cultural Studies at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia and the
University of East Anglia in Norwich, Norfolk in the United Kingdom, to give but two examples.

(6) From a personal communication by photographic scientist Andrew Green.

(7) Basarab Nicolescu; Manifesto, op.cit., The Transdisciplinary Evolution of Learning, p. 2.

(8) In our paper; Strained Bedfellows: Scientific Method, Hermeneutics and the Study of
Esotericism, p. 25, Basarab Nicolescu and I wrote that: "It is critically important to emphasize that
the notion of "level of Reality" is not the result of mere philosophical speculation; rather, it is
engendered by the study of natural systems." Presented at the 17th International Congress of the
International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR), Mexico City, August 5-11, 1995.

(9) Ibid., pp. 15-18.

(10) Ibid., p. 25.

(11) Basarab Nicolescu; Manifesto, op. cit., p. 132.

(12) See Basarab Nicolescu; Les sciences exactes-Interaction avec les sciences humaines et
rôle dans la societé, p. 1. Presented to a conference at the Université Saint-Joseph, Bayreuth,
December 2002.

(13) Basarab Nicolescu, Manifesto, op cit., p. 142.

(14) Ibid., p. 3.

(15) Basarab Nicolescu; The Transdisciplinary Evolution of Learning, p. 3. A paper presented at

the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Meeting, Montreal, Canada,
April 1999, in the round-table session Overcoming the Underdevelopment of Learning: a
Transdisciplinary View.

(16) The word 'genius' comes from the Greek 'gignesthai' meaning 'to be born or come into being.'
It also meant a deity or spirit who guarded a person (the spirit who belonged to a person from
birth and who guided them through life and also through death). In the mythology of Islam a 'jinni'
also has the meaning of a guardian spirit. It is etymologically related to words like 'engender,'
'generation,' and 'generate,' hence, the word 'genius' is intimately bound up with creative energy
and spirit. Intuition, imagination and creativity-all operative in the transdisciplinary approach-have
always characterized scientific discovery. For example, mathematician Karl Fredrich Gauss
related in his journal that the proof that every number could be represented as a product of prime
numbers in only one way came to him suddenly after years of work. In his diary he wrote: "Like a
sudden flash of lightning, the riddle happened to be solved . . . I am unable to name the nature of
the thread which connected what I previously knew with that which made my success
possible" http://www.geocities.com/madhukar_shukla/crebook/66.html

(17) See Karen-Claire Voss; Spiritual Alchemy: Interpreting Representative Texts and Images, in:
Roelof van den Broek & Wouter J. Hanegraaf, eds.; Gnosis and Hermeticism from Antiquity to
Modern Times, Albany, New York, State University of New York Press, 1998.

(18) From a personal communication from Andrew Green, dated 25 October 2003. I am grateful
for his permission to quote from it here. I note the striking similarity between what Shakespeare
said and what William James wrote in The Sentiment of Rationality, 194), p. 76: "A Beethoven
string quartet is truly, as someone has said, a scraping of horses' tails on cats' bowels, and may
be exhaustively described in such terms; but the application of this description in now way
precludes the simultaneous applicability of an entirely different description." Cited in
O'Flaherty, op. cit., p. 9.

(19) Marguerite Rigoglioso; Marija Gimbutas: 1921-1994: Grandmother of a Movement, New Age
Journal, May/June, 1997. See the reprint
at http://www.kindredarts.com/kindredarts/articles/gimbutas.html

(20) Basarab Nicolescu; Manifesto, op cit., p. 133.

(21) Ibid., p. 44.

(22) Ibid., p. 66.

(23) Ibid., p. 72.

(24) Basarab Nicolescu; Toward a Methodological Foundation of the Dialogue Between the
Technoscientific and Spiritual Cultures, at the Sixth International Congress of Philosophy and
Culture, Differentiation and Integration of World View, on the theme of the Dynamics of Dialogue
Between Cultures in the 21st Century, Saint Petersburg, 29 October - 2 November 2003. The
conference was organized by the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Minister of Culture with
the support of UNESCO.

(25) Ibid., pp. 85-86.

(26) For a detailed explanation of esoteric gnosis see Antoine Faivre and Karen-Claire
Voss; Western Esotericism and the Science of Religions, Numen, January 1995, 48-77.

(27) In Predrag Cicovacki's Transdisciplinarity As an Interactive Method: A Critical Reflection on

the Three Pillars of Transdisciplinarity, presented in the section The Unifying Method of the
Humanities, Social Sciences and Natural Sciences: the Method of Transdisciplinarity," at The
Unifying Aspects of Cultures Conference held in Vienna, 7-9 November, 2003, he proposed that
it would be more precise to substitute the term "interaction" for Nicolescu's term "coevolution." In
the discussion we had after his presentation I suggested that a third solution-preferable to either
of these two-would be to use instead the phrase "interactive co-evolution."

(28) Adapted from 'Feminine' Gnosis: Gnosis and Modern Feminist Thought, an invited lecture
presented to the Amsterdam Summer University Course on Gnosis and Hermeticism from
Antiquity to Modern Times. Amsterdam, The Netherlands, August 15-19, 1994.

(29) Adapted from 'Feminine' Gnosis: Gnosis and Modern Feminist Thought, an invited lecture
presented to the Amsterdam Summer University Course on Gnosis and Hermeticism from
Antiquity to Modern Times, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, August 15-19, 1994.

(30) Basarab Nicolescu; Science, Meaning & Evolution: The Cosmology of Jacob Boehme, New
York; Parabola Books, 1991, p. 109.

1.6. The Unifying Method of the Humanities, Social Sciences and

Natural Sciences: The Method of Transdisciplinarity