Abstract
The complexity of the world outlook nowadays annihilates the pyramid of the classical outlook of articulating the subjects which consider physics domain as a basis, creating a real disciplinary subject “bing-bang”. The field of every subject is getting more and more restricted, which makes today the dialogue among them more and more difficult, if not impossible. The need for bridges among various fields and subjects has materialized itself in the appearance at the end of the twentieth century, of the pluridisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity concepts, as a complex phenomenon, generator of innovation in the field of the urban landscape metabolism as well by fragmentation of subjects, recombining them, diffusion of concepts and resorting to methods from other fields of activity. At the beginning of the new millennium, however, the interdisciplinary approach was rediscovered and used as an answer to the unprecedented challenge launched by the world we live in a “manifesto” of what was among and beyond the subjects, in a new approach, in order to express the need to get over the frontiers among subjects, expressing the need for unity both within the urban field and the landscape one. The methodology of transdisciplinary research is determined by Levels of Reality, The Logic of Included Tertiary and Complexity, which are at the same time the three postulates of modern science, unchanged from Galileo to our day, in spite of the appearance of the infinite diversity of methods, theories or patterns that have covered the history of various scientific fields of activity. Disciplinarity, pluridisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity are complementary, representing “the four arrows of the one and the same bow: that of knowledge”, making reference to the idea of scientific integration, to the “great book of nature”, in which every scientific subject or art is responsible for a segment of the whole. Transdisciplinarity is complementary to the disciplinary approach out of the confrontation among fields and subjects bringing about new results and new bridges among them, offering a new view on nature and reality.
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Notes
- 1.
Basarab Nicolescu, Transdisciplinaritatea. Manifest. (Transdisciplinarity. A Manifesto.), Polirom Publishing House, Idei Contemporane Collection, Plural Series, Iasi, 1999, 42.
- 2.
Example: A Renaissance painting can be studied from the perspective of the history of art, of the history of architecture and urbanism, landscape and nature, from the point of view of physics, of chemistry, of the history of religions, of the history of Europe and of geometry; Marxism can be studied from the point of view of philosophy, economy, psychoanalysis, physics or literature.
- 3.
Op. Cit., 53. “…ceea ce se afla în acelaşi timp şi între discipline, şi înlăuntrul diverselor discipline, şi dincolo de orice disciplină. Finalitatea sa este înţelegerea lumii prezente, unul din imperativele sale fiind unitatea cunoaşterii”.
- 4.
Basarab Nicolescu is a physicist and a researcher at CNRS. He obtained his doctorate in physics at Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris. He specialized in elementary particle theory, he is the author of many scientific articles published in international journals, and he has numerous contributions to joint scientific works. As a result of his interest in the relationships between art, science and tradition, he published works and articles on the role of science in contemporary culture. Founding President of the Centre International de Recherche et Etudes Transdisciplinaires (CIRET); cofounder of the Reflection Group on Transdisciplinarity affiliated to UNESCO (1992). In 1986, he received the Silver Medal of the French Academy for his work “Nous, la particule et le monde”. For the book “Science, meaning and evolution. The cosmology of Jakob Boehme” he was awarded in 1992 the Benjamin Franklin Award for Best History Book and the Writers’ Union Prize in Romania in 1993. Books published in Romanian: “Noi, particula şi lumea”; “Transdisciplinaritatea. Manifest; Teoreme poetice”; “Ştiinţa, sensul şi evoluţia. Eseu asupra lui Jakob Böhme”.
- 5.
There are correspondences between transdisciplinarity and other trends: at the level of experimental metaphysics and transdisciplinary isomorphism, between the outside world and the inner world with the Great Game (Le Grand Jeu)—a lesser known literary movement inspired by surrealism and having an esoteric and gnostic tint—a reaction against basic materialism and against the positivism of exact sciences (representatives: Roger-Gilbert Lecomte and Rene Daumal); or with the German Naturphilosophie movement (centred around the journal Atheneum).
- 6.
Michel Camus was born in 1929. He is a writer, a poet, a philosopher, a literary critic and an editor. He is also the cofounder of the journals Lettre Ouverte (1960) and L’Autre (1990). Between 1976 and 1983, he was editor in chief of the journal Obliques. He was director of the collection “L’Enfer de la Bibliotheque Nationale”, at éditions Fayard (1984–1988). He was cofounder and literary director of Editions Lettres Vives starting with 1981. He was a member of the board of Centre International de Recherches et d'Études Transdisciplinaires. He was cofounder of Associu Paleocorsu (Palaeolithic studies and research in Corsica). He published numerous papers in journals and collective works as well as collections of poetry. He was awarded the “Lucian Blaga” International Grand Prize in Poetry (1995). He held numerous conferences abroad: Mexico, Brazil, Quebec, Romania, Portugal, Switzerland, Belgium. Books published in Romanian: “Parafraze eretice”, “Proverbele tăcerii şi ale uimirii”, “Imn către Lilith”, “Femeia dedublată”.
- 7.
Op. cit., 19. “interacţiunii dintre subiect şi obiect, interacţiune ireductibilă şi la subiect şi la obiect”, “nu vine nici dinspre ştiinţă, nici dinspre cultură, tradiţie sau religie, ci din dialogul dintre diferite discipline, îmbogăţite de cunoaştere”.
- 8.
The Romanian-born philosopher Stephane Lupasco (1900–1988) was a bachelor in science and a doctor in philosophy at the Sorbonne. His work includes reference books in the field of philosophy, social sciences and humanities (sociology, pedagogy, psychology, psychiatry), in the field of natural sciences and exact sciences (mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, cybernetics) as well as in the field of art. He was a nonconformist thinker in relation to the scientific and philosophical doctrines of his time, and he was a precursor of postmodernism in the field of the philosophy of science and transdisciplinarity.
- 9.
In Radacinile Libertatii (The Roots of Freedom), Basarab Nicolescu, Michel Camus, Curtea Veche Publishing House, Seria Actual collection, Bucharest, 2004.
- 10.
Having received the award of the French Academy, the book written by Basarab Nicolescu, an honorary member of the Romanian Academy, and titled Nous, la particule et monde, published in Romanian at Polirom Publishing House in a translation made by Vasile Sporici, was considered by Michel Camus as representing a real revolution, a key that brings together in a fundamental intuition physics and metaphysics. (We are facing a new philosophy of nature, a new Gnosis, in which the scientist’s erudition is intertwined with the deepness of philosophical thinking in a fascinating search of that suspended point where the rational and the irrational come together in a sort of bet with the unknown—translation) “Ne aflam în fata unei noi filosofii a naturii, a unei noi gnoze, în care eruditia savantului se îngemaneaza cu profunzimea gândirii filosofice într-o fascinanta cautare a spatiului de gratie unde se întâlnesc rationalul si irationalul, într-un fel de pariu cu necunoscutul”. The book received the prize for the best translation by the Bacau Branch of the Writers’ Union in 2002.
- 11.
Edgar Morin, “Le Debat”, no. 40, May–September 1986.
- 12.
The subject is not new, and it also appeared at the Frankfurt School whose most important representatives are Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin.
- 13.
In “Stiinta, sensul si evolutia. Eseu asupra lui Jakob Böhme” (“Science, meaning and evolution. The cosmology of Jakob Boehme”) Basarab Nicolescu, preface by Antoine Faivre. Translation from French by Aurelia Batali, 2nd edition, Vitruviu publishing house, “Eseu” collection, Bucharest, 2000.
- 14.
The various levels of reality were demonstrated with the advent of Quantum Physics and with the discoveries that opened a veritable Pandora’s box, discoveries made by Bohr, Einstein, Pauli, Heisenberg, Dirac, Schrodinger, Born, de Broglie, etc.
- 15.
The person who asks questions regarding what is to be found between Why? and How? between Who? and What?
- 16.
Basarab Nicolescu, Transdisciplinaritatea. Manifest. (Transdisciplinarity. A Manifesto.), Polirom Publishing House, Idei Contemporane Collection, Plural Series, Iasi, 1999, 5—“patru săgeţi ale unuia şi aceluiaşi arc: cel al cunoaşterii”.
- 17.
For Basarab Nicolescu, Joc Secund, the book of poetry written by Ion Barbu (the pseudonym of the mathematician Dan Barbilian who has an international reputation), which was published in 1930 and which generated critical interpretations from specialists in such various field such as mathematics, alchemy and Christian mysticism is a (jewel of transdisciplinarity—translation) (“giuvaer al transdisciplinarităţii”) and Eminescu-Blaga-Barbu represent (a fundamental axis of Romanian culture—translation) (“axă fundamentală a culturii românesti”).
- 18.
Anca Munteanu, Pledoarie pentru o noua arhitectura a conştiinţei (Plea for a new architecture of consciousness), online Journal of the Romanian Association for Transpersonal Psychology, No. 1–2/2004. (În macrocosmos, Teoria Relativităţii a lui Einstein, a demonstrat că universul nu e populat de obiecte newtoniene, ci de infinite fenomene vibratorii, că spaţiul şi timpul formează un continuum cvadridimensional, că spaţiul nu e tridimensional, iar timpul nu e unidimensional.)
- 19.
Mânzat I., Psihologia transpersonala (Transpersonal Psychology), Iasi, Cantes publishing house, 2002; “reprezentarea realităţii este dependentă de starea conştiinţei în care ne aflăm. Ca urmare, cea de-a patra stare, adică supraconştiinţa ne dezvăluie o realitate inefabilă şi înca necunoscută clasicismului ştiinţific, deschizând o altă fereastră spre ascunderile lumii”.
- 20.
The inventor of imaginary numbers, Cardan, was also the inventor of the suspension system that bears his name and he was also a mathematician, a doctor and an astrologer. Kepler was an astronomer and astrologer. Newton was a physicist, a theologian and an alchemist who was passionate about the Trinity but also about geometry.
- 21.
For instance, in science, there is a distinction between exact sciences and humanities or within hard sciences and soft sciences—the terms used in English terminology through which an exact denomination and the antagonistic perception of the two was sought.
- 22.
Computer art becomes spectacular by using the information that travels through Internet as new material.
- 23.
There are manifestations through which the landscape is seen as an unconventional art form in which landscapers, architects, artists and scientists from various fields meet in cyberspace (on the Internet) to create together using sounds, colours and images.
- 24.
See Article 2 from the Charter of Transdisciplinarity.
- 25.
See the unconventional methods promoted in the book written by Cerasella Crăciun “Metabolismul urban. O abordare Neconventionala a Organismului Urban” (The Urban Metabolism. An Unconventional Approach to the Urban Organism) (366 A5 pages in colour), “Ion Mincu” University Publishing House, ISBN 978-973-1884-14-1, Bucharest, 2008 (a work selected by an international jury at BAB—ARCHITECTURE BIENNALE Bucharest, 2008, Publications section).
- 26.
Education (has the difficult task of transmitting a culture accumulated for centuries but also of training subjects for a largely unpredictable future—translation) (“are dificila misiune de a transmite o cultură acumulată de secole, dar şi o pregătire pentru un viitor în bună măsură imprevizibil”) as Jacques Delors maintained in Comoara lăuntrică. Raportul catre UNESCO al Comisiei Internaţionale pentru educaţie în sec. XXI (The lăuntrică Treasure Within. Report to UNESCO of the International Commission on Education for the twenty-first century) Polirom, Iaşi, 2000. Also, in this context, Professor Dr. Vasile Marcu and Lecturer Dr. Mariana Marinescu from the University of Oradea, at the course “Implementarea tehnologiilor in educaţie sau educaţia tehnologica” (Implementing technology in education and technological education), aim at discussing the directions to be taken in restructuring educational realities at the beginning of this millennium in a society characterized by the accelerated dynamics of structural changes, but also by the depth of these changes and by placing the human being in the context of these “technological outbursts” in which the way mankind will take is unclear: towards globalization or towards atomization. In the context of the explosive evolution that has taken place across all the fields in the last 10–15 years, especially in those fields that have determined a problematic change, technological education is inserted and is considered a metamorphosis of traditional education mixed with the principles of the new educational paradigm, including here landscape, urban and architectural education.
- 27.
This refers to learning the methods that help us to distinguish between what is real and what is an illusion and to have an access way to the knowledge of the era we live in.
- 28.
This refers to acquiring a job and the knowledge and practices associated with this job, as well as learning to be creative by avoiding the danger of the specialty.
- 29.
This refers to complying with the rules that regulate the relationship between the human beings that form a community which is open to transcultural, transreligious, transpolitical and transnational attitudes.
- 30.
This refers to exploring our certainties, beliefs, conditionings, to a type of (integral education of man—translation) “educaţie integrala a omului” (Rene Daumal).
- 31.
A type of humanism which Basarab Nicolescu calls Transhumanism, in Transdisciplinaritatea. Manifest. (Transdisciplinarity. A Manifesto.), Polirom Publishing House, Idei Contemporane Collection, Plural Series, Iasi, 1999, 164—“focarul unui nou tip de umanism”.
- 32.
Mircea Maliţa (mathematician, essayist, scholar, diplomat—ambassador in the USA and Director of the Romanian Library in New York, university professor) in Zece mii de culturi o singura civilizaţie (Ten thousand cultures, one civilization), Nemira publishing house, Bucharest, 2002—“Spiritul ştiinţific unifică omenirea la un nivel abstract şi raţional, dar tocmai aceasta dă civilizaţiei umane un caracter universal”.
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Crăciun, C. (2014). Pluridisciplinarity, Interdisciplinarity and Transdisciplinarity: Methods of Researching the Metabolism of the Urban Landscape. In: Crăciun, C., Bostenaru Dan, M. (eds) Planning and Designing Sustainable and Resilient Landscapes. Springer Geography. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8536-5_1
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