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Rating: 
Summary: Excerpt from review essay by the translator
Review: Excerpt from a review essay by Karen-Claire Voss, translator of Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity. After reading Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity, it is hard to imagine how any thinking person could retreat to the old, safe, comfortable conceptual framework. Taking a series of ideas that would be extremely thought-provoking even when considered one by one, the Romanian quantum physicist Basarab Nicolescu weaves them together in a stunning vision, this manifesto of the 21st century, so that they emerge as a shimmering, profoundly radical whole. Nicolescu's raison d'être is to help develop people's consciousness by means of showing them how to approach things in terms of what he calls "transdisciplinarity." He seeks to address head on the problem of fragmentation that plagues contemporary life. Nicolescu maintains that binary logic, the logic underlying most all of our social, economic, and political institutions, is not sufficient to encompass or address all human situations. His thinking aids in the unification of the scientific culture and the sacred, something which increasing numbers of persons, will find to be an enormous help, among them wholistic health practitioners seeking to promote the understanding of illness as something arising from the interwoven fabric-body, plus mind, plus spirit-that constitutes the whole human being, and academics frustrated by the increasing pressure to produce only so-called "value-free" material. Transdisciplinarity "concerns that which is at once between the disciplines, across the different disciplines, and beyond all discipline," and its aim is the unity of knowledge together with the unity of our being: "Its goal is the understanding of the present world, of which one of the imperatives is the unity of knowledge." (p. 44) Nicolescu points out the danger of self-destruction caused by modernism and increased technologization and offers alternative ways of approaching them, using a transdisciplinary approach that propels us beyond the either/or thinking that gave rise to the antagonisms that produced the problems in the first place. The logic of the included middle permits "this duality [to be] transgressed by the open unity that encompasses both the universe and the human being." (p. 56). Thus, approaching problems in a transdisciplinary way enables one to move beyond dichotomized thinking, into the space that lies beyond. You must read this book for yourself. It constitutes a veritable treasury of living ideas assembled by a visionary who is also a renowned scientist. To my mind, this is a peerless combination. Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity indeed serves to rekindle our hope, (p. 2) and can lend all of us heart to proceed on the "quest for a tomorrow." (p. 3)
Rating:
Summary: Excerpt from review essay by the translator
Review: Excerpt from a review essay by Karen-Claire Voss, translator of Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity. After reading Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity, it is hard to imagine how any thinking person could retreat to the old, safe, comfortable conceptual framework. Taking a series of ideas that would be extremely thought-provoking even when considered one by one, the Romanian quantum physicist Basarab Nicolescu weaves them together in a stunning vision, this manifesto of the 21st century, so that they emerge as a shimmering, profoundly radical whole. Nicolescu's raison d'être is to help develop people's consciousness by means of showing them how to approach things in terms of what he calls "transdisciplinarity." He seeks to address head on the problem of fragmentation that plagues contemporary life. Nicolescu maintains that binary logic, the logic underlying most all of our social, economic, and political institutions, is not sufficient to encompass or address all human situations. His thinking aids in the unification of the scientific culture and the sacred, something which increasing numbers of persons, will find to be an enormous help, among them wholistic health practitioners seeking to promote the understanding of illness as something arising from the interwoven fabric-body, plus mind, plus spirit-that constitutes the whole human being, and academics frustrated by the increasing pressure to produce only so-called "value-free" material. Transdisciplinarity "concerns that which is at once between the disciplines, across the different disciplines, and beyond all discipline," and its aim is the unity of knowledge together with the unity of our being: "Its goal is the understanding of the present world, of which one of the imperatives is the unity of knowledge." (p. 44) Nicolescu points out the danger of self-destruction caused by modernism and increased technologization and offers alternative ways of approaching them, using a transdisciplinary approach that propels us beyond the either/or thinking that gave rise to the antagonisms that produced the problems in the first place. The logic of the included middle permits "this duality [to be] transgressed by the open unity that encompasses both the universe and the human being." (p. 56). Thus, approaching problems in a transdisciplinary way enables one to move beyond dichotomized thinking, into the space that lies beyond. You must read this book for yourself. It constitutes a veritable treasury of living ideas assembled by a visionary who is also a renowned scientist. To my mind, this is a peerless combination. Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity indeed serves to rekindle our hope, (p. 2) and can lend all of us heart to proceed on the "quest for a tomorrow." (p. 3)
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