Contributed by Piero Formica (CORE Academy Fellow).
This website version has been adapted and slightly edited by the CORE Academy Secretariat with the author’s authorization. The original file can be read and downloaded at: 
MANIFESTO FOR A TRANSCIPLINARY SCHOOL.docx
Abstract
Toward a Transdisciplinary Renaissance: Reclaiming Knowledge Beyond Disciplinary Borders
In a world increasingly fragmented by specialized knowledge, this manifesto advocates for a transformative shift toward transdisciplinarity—an approach that integrates diverse disciplines into a unified pursuit of understanding. It critiques the historical tendency to label the unknown with fear and mystery, as symbolized by the monstrous figures in medieval maps. Instead, it argues for a map that incorporates questions to foster discovery and connection. Drawing inspiration from thinkers such as Blaise Pascal and Edgar Morin, this manifesto proposes transdisciplinarity as a remedy to the narrow specialization that hinders our ability to address complex global challenges. It is a call to action, a transformative power that inspires and motivates change.
Our current educational and scientific models are disjointed, each confined within its silo, which limits the ability to see the "big picture" and develop innovative solutions. Transdisciplinarity dissolves these barriers, creating a fusion of scientific, humanistic, and artistic perspectives. This fusion is not merely an academic exercise, but a practical necessity for addressing today's complex issues. By weaving together diverse ways of knowing, from psychology to physics, literature to engineering, transdisciplinarity constructs a holistic knowledge system that embraces ambiguity, fosters creativity, and cultivates intellectual resilience. This manifesto advocates for an educational paradigm that prepares students to think critically and act adaptively, fostering competence and comprehension in the face of complex global challenges.
The advent of artificial intelligence further underscores the urgency of transdisciplinary approaches. As AI evolves, so does the risk of relying on narrow technological expertise devoid of humanistic insight, leading to ethical blind spots and a diminished capacity for creativity. This manifesto echoes the concerns of scholars such as James Manyika and Edgar Morin, emphasizing the critical role of humanistic education in the ethical stewardship of AI. It argues that human sciences, focusing on ethical reflection and social values, are not just a supplement to technological expertise but an essential guide in ensuring that AI and other technologies are developed and used to align with human well-being.
This manifesto envisions a future where transdisciplinarity is not merely an academic ideal but a practical framework for knowledge, innovation, and education. It advocates a renaissance of learning that transcends disciplines, embraces complexity, and prepares us to tackle the world's interconnected challenges with a creative, ethical, and inclusive mindset. It is a vision that values and includes all perspectives, fostering a sense of belonging and shared purpose.
We draw maps by appealing to our knowledge. If spaces were left empty because we know we don’t know or, worse, we don’t know we don’t know, we could fill them by depicting monsters. Their figures stand out on the geographical maps of the world drawn by European cartographers in the 15th and 16th centuries. Is there an alternative? We can grasp this concept through the reflections of universal thinkers, such as Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), who proposed learning a bit of everything instead of knowing everything about a single thing. That is the choice of transdisciplinarity in the face of human limitations in traversing the vastness of the cognitive universe. In place of the monsters that symbolize fears and anxieties, we would not have certainties about one or more new states of knowledge, but rather the possibility of exploring transdisciplinarity in search of new discoveries by questioning ourselves about what could be out there, beyond our disciplinary boundaries.
Preview on transdisciplinarity
Shakespeare's Hamlet prompts us to reflect on the profound sense of bewilderment, alienation, and loneliness that educational institutions often evoke, a sentiment that his famous phrase "The time is out of joint" aptly captures. The time dedicated to education is out of phase. The instability in which we live requires a reorganization of education, which is fragmented into many knowledge flows. Separated into distinct parts, isolated or with minimal cross-contamination, knowledge hinders our ability to understand complex problems that require insights from multiple disciplines. We struggle to grasp the bigger picture. Instead of education being viewed as a holistic system, the knowledge imparted in classrooms, where educational activities take place, often leads to overly simplified solutions to complex problems that require a multifaceted approach. Problem-solving is limited and less effective because different perspectives and connections are not taken into account. The real world is interconnected, and we derive a distorted or incomplete understanding of reality from chopped-up knowledge.
Transdisciplinarity breaks down the high and often insurmountable barriers that separate disciplines, languages, countries, and ethnicities. It is the fusion of disciplines, a reaction in which two or more different disciplinary cores combine to form one or more larger, unique, and unusual cores. As different disciplinary boundaries intersect, a transdisciplinary vision begins to emerge. Natural systems examined by science interact with the moral systems of humanistic culture and scientific laws with humanistic models that support personal development and organizational behaviour. The humanities and sciences learn from each other.
The transdisciplinary space is an excellent synthesis of knowledge essential for innovation. The idea of looking at knowledge from the most diverse angles (scientific, engineering, visual arts, performing arts, literature, etc.) allowed Norio Ohga (1930–2011), former president of Sony Corporation, to develop the compact disc as a commercial medium with a valid audio format. A broader horizon, one that transcends immediate commercial values, allows for a deeper examination of the shifting assumptions about how knowledge is produced and utilized.
From transdisciplinarity, a way of being, streams of thought flow into the great river of unitary knowledge. Competence and comprehension are influenced by non-academic sources, particularly those generated by scientific companies in collaboration with the academic world. The philosopher Daniel Dennett (1942-2024) marked the distinction between competence and comprehension. Competence concerns operating effectively to achieve set objectives. Comprehension goes beyond reaching the finish line. Understanding implies the ability to grasp the reasons underlying the result. Building mental models of how things work helps you be flexible and adapt to solving problems in new circumstances.
Researchers from various disciplines and institutions collaborate to address complex and multifaceted problems. They jointly devise conceptual, theoretical, methodological, and translational innovations that complement and surpass discipline-specific approaches. Transcending disciplinary fields, transdisciplinarity fosters the unity of knowledge that enables us to comprehend the complexity of the world today. In transdisciplinary learning, students can make creative connections, conveying the same idea from one subject to another, and can, therefore, illustrate it practically and efficiently. Students who learn to solve problems creatively are introduced to the concept of scientific entrepreneurship. Sciencepreneurship examines the synergistic relationship between science, entrepreneurship, and sustainable economic development. Innovative and future-thinking entrepreneurs play a unique role in advancing science and technology. They help guide scientific discoveries into our daily lives and reveal new opportunities for social innovation as they exploit scientists' discoveries of the natural world.
However, these results are achieved only on the condition that the various disciplines that enter into the relationship maintain intact the languages, methodologies, approaches, methods, and argumentative logic that characterize them individually. This means that it is essential to avoid the reductionist outcomes typical of all previous attempts at "unification of knowledge" pursued through the extension of the analytical method to various disciplines, the use of "non-ambiguous" scientific language, and the application of the computational approach.
The relevance of the humanities to human action in the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution
We are concerned that the obsession with specialization pushes us to descend to the bottom of the technological well of AI, managing to obtain answers to our questions quickly. Giving up the creative activity of the mind, which allows us to hunt for answers by imaginatively travelling the open and infinite spaces of transdisciplinary thought, means lulling ourselves in the calm sea of passivity. Once thus captured by AI, we would become its weakest link. Moreover, as we are differently specialized and unable to think more broadly, we will struggle to communicate with each other.
The discussion on the AI evolution projects itself onto an extended time frame and organizes the dialogue around the emergence of AI's 'true consciousness'. The extent to which AI can 'think' for itself is a source of great anxiety surrounding its development. Perhaps it could be reasoned that AI and the digital tools that define our modern existence have already become an extension of our corporal selves. The internet, phones, cameras, and all the digital connections and records have become the new appendages of our human body.
If we understand AI not just as a digital tool but as a digital extension of the human civilization and potentially, albeit far-fetched, a digital life form by itself, perhaps we could see artificial intelligence as an entity more intricately connected with the human and natural world. The connections between the natural world and human intellect make us wonder if this whole dialogue about AI could also be seen as a metamorphic reflection of our human civilization. After all, we were derived from the natural world the same way AI had been derived from us. Our anxiety surrounding AI comes when our relationship with nature is fraught with tension and worry. We think that there is room for dialogue about these subjects. At the centre of the dialogue, we place the relevance of humanistic studies.
Today, there is a strong emphasis on young people's STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education for their future coexistence with artificial intelligence. The STEM model teaches how to design, develop, and maintain new technologies. The aim is to respond promptly and anticipate human needs using technology efficiency. Education should be functional to this mission, neglecting humanistic knowledge that sheds light on the powers of science and technology and on the ethical and social problems that could arise and worsen from the development of technology applications.
James Manyika, Google's first senior vice president for Technology and Society, ha gone against the grain, arguing that it is essential to study STEM subjects, combined with a deep knowledge of the human sciences, for it is difficult to separate the development of AI from philosophy and ethics. The growth of artificial intelligence will lead to a positive evolution of humanistic education if humans leverage creative thinking and are careful not to be deceived by that intelligence's errors. In Encore un moment, his most recent essay, the philosopher and sociologist Edgar Morin, known for his research on complex thought and transdisciplinarity, has rallied to defend the human sciences. Concerned about the decline of their learning, he underpins <<The culture of humanistic studies whose virtues are always relevant again. The human sciences add the reflexivity that is absent in scientific hyperspecialisation. Furthermore, they reveal the human complexities hidden by the division between specific disciplines… While the sciences shed light on dark areas of our mind, philosophy, with the help of history and sociology, allows us to clarify dark regions of science>>.
The relevance of humanistic studies
History, literature, and the arts profoundly explore human creativity, experience, and past errors caused by technological advances. These make new technologies sensitive to human values and the danger of unwanted consequences caused by their advancements.
Philosophy educates on the ethics of emerging technologies, reflecting on their responsibilities and the damage they could cause to society.
Psychology and sociology shape technologies following human behaviour and the cultural context of social interactions.
Innovating what and how to learn is a journey that begins by breaking out of disciplinary silos. We will start to glimpse the interconnectedness of knowledge and how different fields of study inform each other. The goal is transdisciplinarity. Interdisciplinarity is the intermediate stage: you combine multiple disciplines and mix ideas from various fields but are committed within your disciplinary boundaries. Transdisciplinarity takes it a step further. It strives to create a holistic approach that transcends disciplinary divisions. The astronomer William Herschel (1738-1822) and other scientists of his time relied on connections, analogies, and parallels between various branches of science. The transdisciplinarity breaks down illusory and mortifying disciplinary boundaries, opens the mind enough to trigger revolutionary thinking, and encourages critical thinking and creative problem-solving. Researchers and students from the most disparate countries and disciplinary fields converge towards transdisciplinary projects with different perspectives supported by technology.
A multifaceted genius, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was a protagonist of the humanist movement, which celebrated human abilities and achievements, which he considered all the more powerful, the less compartmentalized knowledge. Leonardo leveraged his high creativity and insatiable curiosity to build bridges between art, science and engineering; in short, he was a builder of transdisciplinary, a distinctive feature of humanism. In this cultural context, Leonardo designed a vast range of machines and tools at the service of human work and the exploration of the unknown to conquer territories of knowledge beyond the existing boundaries of human understanding.
In the Free International University of Berlin manifesto, published in 1972, German artist Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) encouraged a collective approach to creativity through disruptive, innovative actions, using already known materials and ingredients but finding alternative ideas, forms and recipes. Venturing into Beuys's borderless prairie is an action that brings together doing with careful thinking, cultivating innovative ideas and proactive criticism. There is no map showing the way or a predetermined direction of travel. Those who venture into exploration carve out paths, appreciating the transdisciplinarity and beauty of imperfection sought by Beuys. Explorers will ask themselves questions and find answers through imagination and art that are not decorative frills.
Towards a regenerated humanism
Leonardo is the one who became the spokesperson of a "universal science" of integrated and systematic knowledge. Today, we feel the need for some form of return to humanism; this is because there has been some anti-humanist caesura. The tradition that arose with the Scientific Revolution, which gave rise to the Scientific Method, and consolidated with Isaac Newton (1643-1727) has established the role that science still has today (and rightly, at least in part), but placing itself in antithesis to every form of humanism. What was decreed with the Scientific Revolution is the disappearance of the subject in the face of the objective world of mathematical physics, which for a long time rose to the role of an all-encompassing paradigmatic science, therefore also embracing the human sciences.
In the field of study of economics, which pertains precisely to the human sciences, the multifaceted William Petty (1623-1687) is considered the pioneer of the idea of bringing economics closer to physics. With his Political Arithmetick, he opened the way to "economic science, understood as a way of thinking entirely focused on quantitative methods, data and statistics to understand economic phenomena and make the most appropriate decisions. Economic laws conceived as similar to physical laws marked a significant change in economic thinking. Petty advocated rigorous measurement of population, income, and wealth. Nullius in verba acquired the value of a dogma. When GDP came into existence during the Great Depression of the 1930s, standardized statistical calculations to measure it became the lodestar of the economy. A tiny calf then, today, GDP is a raging bull in its role as a critical economic indicator. With the emphasis placed on empirical data, statistical tools and mathematical models, economists have abandoned the role of social philosophers. Priority is given to efficiency that inflates the balloon of economic growth. Goodbye to Adam Smith (1723-1790) and John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), who, underlining the urgency of addressing social issues such as poverty and social justice, were concerned with the balance between efficiency, social well-being and individual well-being (care, healthcare, health).
Today, Morin denounces <<the hegemony of profit, of money, of calculation (statistics, growth, GDP, polls), which ignores our fundamental needs as well as our legitimate aspirations for a life that is at the same time autonomous and community >>. We are at the mercy of econocracy, writes Morin. Econocracy corners public participation in decision-making processes; economic policymaking is reserved for technocrats who prioritize efficiency and short-term gains while neglecting long-term environmental and social sustainability.
There are some exceptions to this biased approach. Quite notably, the Kingdom of Bhutan. This last Hymalayan kingdom set a new paradigm in the 1970s by measuring the well-being of the populace in terms of psychological health, quality education, and overall improvement, but in harmony with the rest of nature – Gross National Happiness versus GDP. Bhutan’s paradigm shift echoed in the late 1980s with Gro Harlem Brundtlan’s Our Common Future, which analysed economic growth, and development, as one and the same. The careful and responsible management of the environment is today an essential objective, as Brundtland envisioned it last millennium.
Environmental stewardship
The centrality of humanism and the convergence of disparate disciplines bring environmental stewardship to the forefront. The relationship between human existence and the natural world makes us increasingly cognisant of our epistemology's particular 'human-centric' nature. Perhaps the tenuous imprint of our epistemological fabric is most clearly reflected when our relationship with nature is most problematic. We have all the means to stop climate change and biodiversity loss and undertake far better environmental stewardship of our planet. But we have yet to see determined, satisfactory movements towards this direction. Maybe the dichotomous perception of the human world, accustomed to dominating, harvesting, and extracting from the natural world, propelled this inaction and negligence.
Such an attitude can be corrected by revisiting Aldo Leopold’s classic, A Sand County Almanac. In it, Leopold advocated for “the land ethic.” If humanity takes from the land, it must do so in a way that does not deplete it, for if does so unethically, it will lead to its demise. The land and everything in it must be respected.
In this sense, a transdisciplinary approach is a powerful tool for dismantling the epistemological shackles we have bound ourselves with. Uniting different disciplines, cultures, and peoples is essential to achieving a version of human civilisation responsible for both humanity and nature.
A new humanistic tradition cannot present itself as anti-scientific, reproducing for the umpteenth time the tragicomic misunderstanding of the "two cultures" (which it would be better to call, especially nowadays, two incultures). A regenerated humanism must take science into account. If the characteristic feature of scientistic anti-humanism is the clear separation of the subject from the world, the change in perspective can only come from a sort of reintroduction of the subject into the scientific world. In light of this perspective, we can think of a "scientific" humanism, a humanism based on the belief that the sciences are a human product and that visions of the world come from science that are not at all anti-humanistic.
We emerge from the impasse of the two cultures by listening to the contemporary openings of science to bring it back to an organic vision of the human. The time has come for the awareness that living is knowing (and vice versa) and that all knowledge (both scientific and humanistic) must contribute to the complementary understanding of all reality (including us), precisely with the awareness of its rooting in the human.
Hand-working and thinking head
Richard Sennett's essay, The Craftsman, which takes up and critically comments on Hannah Arendt's Vita Activa (1906-1975), presents us with two alternative scenarios.
One scenario is similar to that of the two seas that never mix. Homo Laborans navigates the sea of "doing things" where work is an end in itself and is dictated by the needs imposed by technology. Submissive to technology or pleasantly attracted by it, we are ‘Animal laborans’, as Arendt would say, because we are slaves to the tasks we are absorbed in at the behest of technology. Our work is comparable to the manual work of past industrial revolutions. Just think, for example, of the most intelligent machines that alert their operators when they need maintenance or of the cyborg (person equipped with prostheses), bionics and computerized prostheses, which give the human body the characteristics of the machine. Aided by technology, Homo Faber navigates the sea of producing thoughts, whose mind always finds inspiration that leads him to make discoveries. Among the various characters stand out poets, philosophers, sculptors, painters, dancers, playwrights, directors, video artists, documentary makers, sound and performance artists, and historians. In this scenario, technology and humanism do not meet. The first guides the hand of those who have to do concrete, material things. Humanism shifts attention from the hand to the head, from which innovative thoughts arise.
In the other scenario, the digital revolution enhances the figure, once typical of the craftsman, of the working hand and the head intimately connected, as argued by Sennett. Thus, the Renaissance workshop was re-evaluated where the experiments conducted to do physical things provided information processed by the mind to be translated into innovations. The craftsman's technique to do things well is a material culture, which develops the ability to create mental images without using the senses and vice versa. According to this vision, the digitalized factory is the place of return to the craft before the age of mechanization inaugurated with the First Industrial Revolution when a bottleneck occurred between doing and thinking - a mental impairment, to cite Sennett's words, which distances learning. The worker returns to being the owner of a profession in which the interaction between fingers and mind combines technological education with the liberal arts, awaiting, according to some visionaries, better oculometry technology along with the digital evolution of cranial implants that configure a head—'artisanal head'—that replaces the hands.
In the vast field of new technologies, the craftsman is an artist. Going back to the time of Leonardo da Vinci, being a "painter and engineer" distinguishes the craftsman. This is to say that the technology that has its roots in the Greek word tékhne (i.e., “art, craft”) is married to the liberal arts. Painting, drawing, graphics, architecture, sculpture, and other plastic arts, as well as music, literature, psychology, and history, allow us to understand the human nature of technology. These design sources give a technological product that touches on creativity and empathy, essential for its success.
In intertwining the hand and the head, engineering and human sciences, the words propagated by Steve Jobs (1955-2011) when presenting the iPad2 resonate,
It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough. It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing, and nowhere is that more true than in these post-PC devices.
From “well-filled heads” to “well-made heads”
In two fundamental writings – Head Well Made: Reform of Teaching and Reform of Thinking and Seven Complex Lessons in Education for the Future – the French philosopher and sociologist Edgar Morin identified the pedagogical outcome of a path of reflection that began in the 1970s with, first of all, the outline a new anthropology, which acknowledges that man is not only sapiens but also demens, that is, that rationality does not exhaust the human and that the emotional sphere must necessarily be taken into account.
Michele de Montaigne (1533-1592) aimed to build “well-made heads” and not to produce “well-filled heads”. The French philosopher argued that education fills students' heads with memorized notions. Understanding and consciousness remain empty. Consequently, <<we can say that Cicero says so; these were Plato's ways; these are Aristotle's own words, but what do we tell ourselves? What do we judge? A parrot would say the same>>. Every discipline of study is a city-state governed by the aristocracy that holds it and loves order. One submits to teaching by entering a disciplinary silo and going down to the bottom of the well. By teaching, 'thoroughbreds' are formed who run in the world of reality with the doctrines and dogmas of acquired knowledge in the saddle. In the wake of past experiences, there is continuity with the past; ideation from nothing is absent.
The authority exercised by teaching is a barrier to learning, which requires contradiction and, therefore, the training of learners in the exercise of cognitive conflict. During the exercise, the knowledge learned changes in form and substance. Montaigne says: <<When someone contradicts me, he arouses my attention, not my anger: I advance towards the one who counters, who instructs me; the cause of truth should be the common cause of both>>.
How can students move from one city-state to another until they merge, generating a disorder harbinger of creative destruction? The answer lies in transdisciplinary knowledge. In the era of hyperspecialisation, transversality is an epiphany. The different disciplines give life to an orchestra. To contextualize it within Montaigne's context, you cannot hear the individual instruments (the disciplines) playing in the concert, but you can grasp the harmony that comes from being together. The sudden revelation of this vision of innovation to come is harshly opposed by the holders of vertical maps of skills, who fight for their impregnability.
As Peter DeLisi (2022) argues well, vertical competencies are the mirror of vertically integrated companies. In the early 1900s, we saw with industrial organizations the emergence of the vertically integrated enterprise. At the time, it was an answer to the high transaction cost involved in conducting business in the previous aggregated manner in which the steps of the production process were handled by separate companies. The vertically integrated enterprise, with its emphasis on functional specialization, had many benefits. It lowered the transaction cost of doing business, but it also provided an in-depth knowledge of the operating aspects of the business. Finance, engineering, HR, sales, and information technology were now highly specialized centres of knowledge.
The vertically integrated enterprise traces its roots back to the Age of Enlightenment and the 400-year-old thinking of Sir Isaac Newton and the philosopher, René Descartes. Their approach emphasised parts and segmentation addressed by specialized teams. Is this still the best organizational form for today’s times? In the early 1900s, physics discovered a new worldview – quantum mechanics that stressed interconnectedness and relativity. In turn, this inspired General Systems Theory (GST) as a way to both understand and to take advantage of the new discoveries. GST has impacted physics, biology, environmental science, and healthcare, but has not as yet had any influence on the way that organizations work, think, and are structured.
What if we could create a way of working in which the specialized functions came together interdependently for the greater good of the organisation? In effect, we would be creating a systems way of working. The strategy creation process and an empowering organisational culture could be used by leaders to bring people together across organizational silos to establish this new way of working. If we could accomplish this without breaking down the intrinsic identity of people with their function, we could also provide another huge benefit – namely, the innovation that research shows results from people coming together, and working on common problems, with their diversified backgrounds. People would see their work contributing not just to their own narrow function, but in a greater way, to the success of the overall corporation.
The vertical maps of knowledge on which the guidelines are drawn ensure that transdisciplinarity, the bearer of variability, ambiguity, dissonance, uncertainty and, therefore, disorder and discomfort, is seen as unbecoming and poorly chosen. The fact is that with very specialized and sectoral professional skills, it is impossible to solve the numerous and complex problems that humanity faces today. To do this, transdisciplinary research is necessary. It is holistic: a set of activities in which the whole is more than the sum of the parts—activities conducted, as has already been said, by researchers who, precisely because they come from the most disparate disciplines, can open new paths for innovation.
Custom, Montaigne warned, <<is in truth an overbearing and treacherous school teacher. She puts the foot of her authority on us little by little, without seeming to; but from this sweet and humble beginning, strengthened and well planted that she has with the help of time, she soon reveals to us a furious and tyrannical face, in front of which we no longer even have the freedom to raise our eyes > >. She is barred from the imagination, which, together with reason, is the discovery engine. To imagine, disciplinary constraints must at least be loosened in the sense of using plural approaches in tackling problems and research along the lines of the methodological statements of Pasquali, Popper and Morin.
The Ideation Laboratory
The Lab is an idea supercollider that moulds "well-made heads, " pushing knowledge and market boundaries. The Lab is rooted in the ground of creative ignorance (https://www.amazon.it/Role-Creative-Ignorance-Portraits-Creators/dp/1137489626), which by design comes after, not before, knowledge and unlocks otherwise unthinkable paths of economic growth and social development. Creative ignorance constantly searches for the inner nature of things through intuition.
In the Lab, the learning process takes over the teaching process to cultivate abstruse questions that reveal unusual paths. Teaching is focused on knowledge maps so that the student is placed in a position to say 'I know'. Instead, learning prepares the mind to understand ignorance. Learners exploring ignorance – "agnotology" is the term coined by the historian of science Robert N. Proctor – take pleasure in not finding what they were looking for, and they are not afraid to confront the uncertainty that comes from the 'unknown unknowns'. That is how the facts classified as immutable, fixed once and for all, are challenged and proven wrong.
The Lab raises cognitive conflicts that are constructive and energetic rather than destructive and emotional, like affective conflicts. Intellectual disagreement stimulates new ideas and sets in motion a process of idea collision. This produces a real quantum leap—new knowledge, unusual insights, and features. Through this process, personal knowledge turns into collective knowledge.
Would-be ideators experience the uncertainty and unpredictability of those who track a new path from nothing. They do not resort to knowledge practices, rules, and handbooks. Their pace is not slowed down by the uncertain consequences they must face; quite the contrary, it is accelerated by the motivations that led them to proceed
The "school of mourning" was born from the compartmentalization of disciplines
The disciplinary compartmentalization, which increases as one reaches the highest levels of teaching, ends up denying that general root of knowledge - at least in a Western key - that pure theorein, which Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) placed at the basis of the Western cultural enterprise, in which philosophy and science were in a certain sense the same, mutually true.
The school does not build a harmonization of knowledge. Its exaltation of specialism prevails, constructing absolutely distinct and little –if any– communicating knowledge. This is indeed a problem, which is now a widely shared observation starting from José Ortega y Gasset's (1883-1955) denunciation of the "barbarism of specialism," endorsed by scientists and philosophers of different origins. What has been generated is then - as Morin observes, looking at the highest point of education - a "school of mourning". "The school of Research" - writes the French philosopher - <<is a school of mourning. /Every neophyte who enters into research is forced to make a fundamental renunciation of knowledge. He is convinced that the era of the Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) passed three centuries ago and that it is now impossible to form a vision of man and the world together. /It is demonstrated to him that the growth of information and the ever-increasing heterogeneity of knowledge exceed the brain's storage and processing capacity. He assures him that he shouldn't complain but be happy about it. He will, therefore, have to dedicate all his intelligence to increasing that specific knowledge. He is inserted into a specialized team, and in this expression, the underlined term is "specialized", not "team" >>.
Specialization aims at perfection, risking losing the pleasure of connecting many phenomena that, at first glance, seem to have nothing in common. During the Renaissance, astronomical discoveries and the introduction of perspective allowed cartographers to draw more realistic maps than those in circulation until then. However, one must beware of the perfectionist syndrome, which involves the same passion and great mastery attributed by the Argentine essayist Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) to Popinga's geographers, protagonists of one of his stories. Experts who draw 'perfect' knowledge maps are skating on a thin sheet of ice that could cause disastrous falls. <<In the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind, there are few>>, stated Shunryū Suzuki (1904-1971), Sōtō Zen monk and master. Albert Einstein (1879-1955) believed that the more expert and famous one becomes, the more stupid one becomes: <<The intellect becomes paralyzed, but the glittering fame is still wrapped around the calcified shell>>, reports Walter Isaacson in his biography on the illustrious physicist.
The strength of specialisation turns into weakness
Specialising to be excellent at a significant task that serves a specific purpose is a superb intellectual exercise as long as the purpose exists. The Evolution Man – wrote Roy Lewis (1913-1996) – aimed to specilisation for perfection in killing his prey, but his strength was also a weakness: with nothing left for him to do, its evolution stopped. The opposite of the limit of specialisation is the opening of the transdisciplinary horizon made possible by philosophy.
From ancient Greece to the Enlightenment, philosophy has played a central role in pursuing knowledge by shaping various academic disciplines. Subsequently, with the rise of specialised fields of study, each with its own methodologies, the practice of unifying philosophy was abandoned. The concept of a research doctor is now re-emerging as a "Philosophiae Doctor" (PhD) who possesses extensive and profound knowledge in multiple disciplinary fields and the ability to conduct critical analyses that produce original research.
Introducing PhDs into the transdisciplinary world populates the paths of knowledge with manifold fascinating thinkers. Consider these compelling examples: a physics PhD graduate who, with a focus on ecological impacts, delves into agroecology; a law PhD who, driven by a commitment to environmental justice, studies how to intervene in poor and marginalised communities to mitigate the inequitable impacts of climate change; an economics PhD, who explores the demand for natural resources and measures their impact on the biosphere; an anthropology PhD, who investigates healthcare for disadvantaged populations affected by infectious diseases. These are just a few instances of how transdisciplinary knowledge can revolutionise our understanding of complex issues.
Better to rely on Homo eclecticus, the versatile people whose profile takes us back to the geographer painted by Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675), a leading exponent of the Dutch Golden Age (somewhere between the late 16th century and the late 17th century). The geographer fears being paralyzed by the assiduous reading of authoritative texts. Immersed in the calculations to plot the routes on the nautical charts, the geographer suddenly decides, by intuition, to take the broad line. He turns his gaze elsewhere towards the window that opens onto an unknown landscape, playing the role of the visionary and not just that of the meticulous specialist. Thus, he begins a unique journey into a world that the maps of knowledge ignore. Those who behave this way have embarked on a long journey and become so distant that they appear diminished and even irrelevant, having abandoned the customary practices dictated by education.
The "school of mourning" is the extreme outcome of specialization through the separation of cultures - the fault of which, to a certain extent, can be attributed to the submission of philosophy to the "classical" scientific paradigm of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), René Descartes (1596-1650) and Isaac Newton (1642-1726); an act of submission sanctioned by Immanuel Kant with the decree of the impossibility of metaphysics to constitute itself as a science - and which Morin, in the context of his analysis of the possibility of reforming teaching, denounces in these terms:
<<Culture, now, not only is it fragmented into detached parts, but also broken into two blocks. The great disjunction between humanistic and scientific culture, which emerged in the 19th century and worsened in the 20th century, causes serious consequences for both. Humanistic culture is a generic culture, which, through philosophy, the essay and the novel nourishes general intelligence, addresses fundamental human questions, stimulates reflection on knowledge and favors the personal integration of knowledge. Scientific culture, of a completely different nature, separates the fields of knowledge; it gives rise to extraordinary discoveries, brilliant theories, but not a reflection on human destiny and the evolution of science itself. Humanistic culture tends to become like a private grain mill made up of scientific acquisitions on the world and on life, which should fuel its great questions; scientific culture, deprived of reflexivity on general and global problems, becomes incapable of thinking and of thinking about the social and human problems it poses>>.
The "School of Joy" is born from transdisciplinarity
The School of Joy is a Transdisciplinary School in the Court of Thought, where culture and education adapt to the innovations essential to solving humanity's multifaceted problems. Its walls are books and works of art, a mosaic of ideas is the floor, and the open-air ceiling shows the infinite possibilities of imagination. Like all the others, the School is affected by geopolitical changes, new technologies, marked income and asset inequalities, and the climate crisis. Faced with such challenges, it is not enough to engage in preparing students for successful careers, which is understood as accumulating money. Instead of an economic vision dominated by the furious pursuit of funds, a broader perspective is required to encourage thinking creatively and critically about people's vital needs.
The 'Morin Mill' operates in the School to grind the grain of scientific knowledge. These receive from humanistic culture the reflexivity of which they are deprived. In the School, economists, sociologists and philosophers do not limit themselves to debating phenomena that are always and only quantitative, following Morin's thoughts. In the School <<What must grow is the useful and the clean; what must decrease is the useless and unhealthy>>. A mission aimed at incessant quantitative growth that neglects the quality of life is no good. In his critique of the consumerist culture of the 1960s and 1970s, Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) underlined that while in Leopardi's time <<nature and humanity were internalised in their ideal purity objectively contained within them, the average man today can internalize a Fiat Seicento, a refrigerator, or a weekend in Ostia>>.
The School is a personal journey of self-discovery for intellectual growth fueled by curiosity, an enthralling journey of exploration of the relationships between languages. As Ilya Prigogine (1917-2003) and Isabelle Stengers have observed, <<The real lesson to be learned from the principle of complementarity, and which perhaps can be translated into other fields of knowledge (as Bohr tried to do throughout his life), consists in underlining the richness of reality, which overflows from every possible language, from every possible logical structure. Each language can express only one part, even if successful. Thus, music is not exhausted by any of its styles; the world of sound is richer than any musical language, be it Eskimo music, that of Bach or Schönberg, but every language is a choice, an elective exploration and a story the possibility of fullness>>.
Problems often cross disciplines. The philologist Giorgio Pasquali (1885-1952) wrote in the 1930s: «there are no strictly delimited disciplines, “compartments”, Fächer, but only problems that must often be faced simultaneously with methods deduced from the most diverse disciplines». The classical humanist was echoed by the philosopher of science Karl Popper (1902-1994), observing, in 1956, that «there are no disciplines; nor branches of knowledge - or, rather, of investigation: there are only problems and the need to solve them>>. In his latest essay Encore un moment, Morin underlined the limits to research posed by <<compartmentalized knowledge, closed specialization and the quantitative method>>. In a previous essay, The Adventure of the Method, he accused scientific culture of the lack of reflexivity that is typical of humanistic culture which, however, is <<like a mill that grinds in vain until it receives the grain of scientific knowledge >>. To attack this problem, Morin proposes the epistemological tithe in his essay Head Well Made. <<It would involve establishing an epistemological or transdisciplinary tithe in all universities and faculties, which would take 10% of course time for common teaching that focuses on the presuppositions of different knowledge and the possibilities of making them communicate». In this dimension, the connections between the different disciplines could be grasped, and the anthroposocial sciences and natural sciences could be brought into true dialogue>>.
In modern times, Kenneth Mikkelsen introduced the concept of the neo-generalist. These are boundary-crossing people who continuously jump back and forth across the specialist- generalist continuum. To quote, they are tricksters traversing multiple domains, living between categories and labels. Encompassing rather than rejecting, the neo-generalist is both specialist and generalist. A restless multidisciplinarian, who is forever learning. They bring together diverse people, synthesising ideas and practice, addressing the big issues that confront us in order to shape a better future. They are curious, responsive, and connective.
Scientists and Literati: branches of the same tree
Literary people are educated people interested in humanistic studies. They are intellectuals who critically reflect on the current state of society and propose evolutionary or revolutionary solutions. Scientists have in-depth knowledge of one or more natural or physical sciences. Between them, the pressure of specialization has dug a deep chasm. In the United States, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, for example, advocate a return to a liberal education that balances the sciences and humanities in the wake of the quote attributed to Albert Einstein, "Branches of the same tree", referring to science, religion and the arts. Disciplinary silos artificially separate academic disciplines, hence the growing concern about disciplinary specialization that is ill-suited to the challenges and opportunities of our time. The National Academies propose improving STEMM (short for Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Medicine) curricula, workshops in the academic programs of students majoring in the arts and humanities, and the arts and humanities curricula and experiences in STEMM educational programs.
Johann Amos Comenius (1592–1670), the pedagogue who helped found modern education, suggested an educational model inspired by the interaction between different disciplines. The thought turns to a single garden instead of the traditional layout of the classrooms, which recalls the Taylorist/Fordist model. The garden is a learning environment with free and irregularly shaped contemplation spaces. There, students cross paths of knowledge where disparate disciplines meet and collide, and teachers can capture students' sensibilities rather than ascertain their ability to memorize. In the 19th century, we can imagine the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) strolling through that garden while attending chemistry classes to enrich his “stock of metaphors.” As the American essayist Nell Freudenberger recalls, grasping Coleridge's thoughts, it is possible that the poet expressed himself thus: <<Science, being necessarily performed with the passion of Hope, was poetical>>.
Between the 16th and the 18th centuries, it was customary to read scientific texts for the humanistic tracks and literary texts for the scientific tracks. At that time, scholars were conducting scientific experiments while writing novels and essays, and universities trained individuals whose knowledge encompassed diverse subjects. Students acquired the profile of the polymath:
As a polymath, I am a student of everything. I am constantly learning from the world around me, studying the mathematics of the universe, the art of life, and the workings of nature. This diverse and transdisciplinary approach to learning fuels my curiosity and drives me to ponder the reasons for existence, invent, create, and build.
Robert Recorde (c.1512–1558) was a polymath who mastered Greek, Latin, metallurgy, mathematics, and medicine. Recorde warned learners not to be entangled by the authority of those who know. Marcello Malpighi (1628–1694) studied philosophy and medicine. He is called the founder of microscopic anatomy. Edward Tyson (1651–1708) studied literature and medicine and is recognized as the founder of modern comparative anatomy. Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise de Châtelet (1706–1749), a French natural philosopher and mathematician, stands for the grandeur of her transdisciplinary thinking. She received an education in mathematics, literature and science. By age 12, she was fluent in Latin, Italian, Greek and German; she would later publish French translations of Greek and Latin plays and philosophical works. She translated Newton’s Principia (Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica). Joseph Black (1728–1799) studied philosophy and medicine. He was a Scottish physicist and chemist renowned for his discoveries on magnesium, latent heat and specific heat.
The meeting between scientists and writers brings out entrepreneurial activities rooted in science and awareness of the human and social values of business. The warning launched by the Italian writer Elio Vittorini (1908–1966) at the beginning of the 1940s resonates strongly today: <<<<I think one matures by doing something else, by taking on new, different duties, other tasks to carry out tasks which would satisfy our conscience in a new sense>>. It is a new duty to create a balanced relationship between scientific and literary influence to sweep away the fear of the domination of science over society that forces literature and the arts to the role of decorative handmaids. This was feared by the American literary scholar Marjorie Hope Nicolson (1894–1981), a pioneer in studying the relationship between literature and science. In times of profound change like the ones we are experiencing, the scientific mind, open to non-scientific influences, encounters new ways of seeing things that open the door to discoveries to be translated into scientific initiatives that will see their functioning differently.
Nicholas Callan: the experimental churchman-scientist. Lessons for innovators
In Ireland, discoveries, inventions and innovations have flourished in hybrid contexts such as St Patrick’s College in Maynooth – the National Catholic Seminary of Ireland, founded in 1795 – where an invisible thread has linked together theology, philosophy, art and science. The Seminary allowed the seminarist Joseph Callan (1799-1864) to advance into the field of natural and experimental philosophy. It was there that Father Callan, professor of natural philosophy, demonstrated the transmission and reception of electricity without wires. Professor Callan is known for his research on the induction coil and for making the largest electric battery of his time. Callan’s work contributed to the fertility of innovative entrepreneurship during the Industrial Revolution. A legacy that the University of Maynooth has renewed and enriched with new content.
Several lessons can be learned from Callan’s intellectual journey.
Creative power emerges when different disciplines collide. Innovation is a body contact sport; one door leads to another door. Adjacent ideas ignite a process of accretion. Nicholas Callan invented the induction coil in 1836. This resulted from combining two adjacent ideas: the discovery in 1831 of electromagnetic induction by physicist and chemist Michael Faraday and the electromagnet invented in 1825 by physicist William Sturgeon.
Adjacent psychological spaces may give rise to physical spaces that are sources of unlikely combinations. Socialising in the neighbourhood cultural space could lead to a ‘sole mode of thought’ syndrome of loyalty to the scientific or business community to which one belongs. Those who espouse anti-discipline move into wide and white (uncontaminated) spaces. Anti-discipline is a method that breaks down the barriers separating disciplines and specialisations. Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson lighted the fuse of the debate. Wilson, in his essay On Human Nature, saw anti-discipline as an “adversary relation that often exists when fields of study at adjacent levels of organisation first begin to interact” and generate creative tensions. At St Patrick’s College, each student, without exception, undertook a wide range of studies that included, in addition to Theology, Humanities, Rhetoric, Belles Lettres, Logic, Mathematics and Physics. Physics was studied under the guidance of the Professor of Natural Philosophy (as Physics was then known).
Exploration knows no bounds, whether physical or mental. Educational institutions that do not raise barriers between the Humanists and Scientists open the minds of their students. In his third year at St Patrick’s College, the Seminary allowed him to advance into the field of natural and experimental philosophy. Having broken down disciplinary barriers, Callan crossed geographical boundaries. He was ordained a priest in 1823 and went to Rome to complete his theological studies at Sapienza University. In 1826, Callan obtained a doctorate in divinity.
There are productive analogies between different specialised fields. A mind empty of preconceived ideas and a knowledge nomad, Father Callan was a curious person who informed himself. In Rome, he became acquainted with the work of two electric pioneers, Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta, and conversed. The conversation expanded his knowledge. The quality of conversation in the space marked by independence of thought and judgment shortens the birth of highly transformative ideas.
From hierarchies and disciplinary separations to circularity between knowledge
The philosopher Giambattista Vico (1688-1744) wrote that primitive men, characterized above all by great imaginative power and still weak rational capacity, outlined imaginary conceptions of reality, mistook them for objective interpretations of it, forgot that they had invented them and subjected themselves to them as if they were alien omnipotences, going as far as offering them other human beings as sacrifices.
We could say that the same thing happened to the founders of Galilean-Newtonian science: they developed a perfectly mathematical-rational model of reality, they attributed to it an ontological value and, ignoring what they had modelled, and they created the contrast between "sciences objective" and humanistic, i.e., "subjective" disciplines. That is, they inaugurated a rigid "hierarchy of knowledge" which contained in a "structural" way the clear separation between what had to be accepted because it was "objectively true" and what remained a simple "subjective" opinion, obviously devoted to non-resolution discussion and therefore inconclusive. As a function of this, the subjects who personified divine science (the mathematics that, according to Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), "structured" the mind of God) became much more authoritative subjects than those who "only" expressed individual feelings and "personal opinions". Put bluntly, some subjects thus unconsciously hid themselves behind claims of objectivity. These subjects became the sole possessors of the Truth with a capital letter.
On this basis, knowledge of the human subject was thus organised, as the German physicist Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976), underlined, according to a hierarchical structure, from the objective to the subjective. Once this image was defined, the situation that still today presents itself as a disciplinary separation became the result of rigorous deduction. The paradox, which remained invisible for a long time, is that the same human subject appears to be all the more capable of creating the more he is capable of cancelling himself. This mindset has become so rooted in our brain and has conditioned it so much that even today, although the concept of scientificity has totally changed thanks to the radical revolutions that have occurred in the sciences, the way of acting, thinking and transmitting remains essentially linked to that imprinted by classical science. The human subject, creator of what, simplifying once again, he defined as "the two cultures", once again misunderstands his role. The change from the hierarchical and linear image to the one that the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) defined as equal and circular remains a chimaera both at the teaching transmission level and at the consolidated theoretical conviction level. The small step expressed in the form of interdisciplinarity remains subject to the objections of the distinction that John Dewey (1859-1952), the American philosopher and educational reformer, underlined when he stated that it is necessary to replace the "logic of interaction" with the "logic of transaction" because, based on the former what enters into relation remains identical to itself, while according to the second the elements in "transaction" modify each other.
From siloed teaching to open minds
It is undoubtedly not enough to move from simply teaching specialist topics to teaching topics across specialism and humanities, and we hope that some melding of the information improves the ability to cross barriers easily and think more conceptually about problems and opportunities. It may be amongst specific individuals, but without an intervention, one cannot be sure it would be the same for all individuals. That intervention might involve learning philosophy, creative thinking, and critical thinking as foundational elements of any specialism. Without this foundation, it is hard to see how transdisciplinary thinking will evolve. That might, and perhaps should, include self-knowledge learning so that each individual understands how their biases and heuristics affect their thinking process and how they may impact those they come into contact with, whilst recognising that they also will have biases and heuristics. This freeing of one's mind coma and an understanding of participants of philosophy, creative and critical thinking are prerequisites to a practical transdisciplinary approach.
Referencing the debates between Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein and their differing approaches regarding decision-making, it can be seen that Kahneman's approach is research-driven, with one variable at a time, so that results can be measured more easily. Klein's approach is much more of a reflexive practitioner, influenced by and influencing the environment in which they exist, looking for nuances and inflexions in people and events to make improvements rather than achieve absolute results. Klein's approach lends itself better to a transdisciplinary thought process.
The passage, which this manifesto proposes, from interdisciplinarity to transdisciplinarity has the profound meaning of a radical transformation which can be exemplified in this way: the "contamination" through the breaking of the borders between the various disciplines allows, and is certainly not a small thing, to transform the concept of Truth, property of a Subject or a discipline, into "intersubjective" truths, the result of the transactions that the various subjects embody starting from the multiple disciplines they deal with.
Contemporary Guilds and the contraction of transdisciplinary space
The guardians of power structures and established practices aim to stifle the development of transdisciplinary since the production of transdisciplinary knowledge challenges the dominance of professional orders and trade associations. As in the days of the medieval Guilds, groups of professionals who share the same profession have thus far played a significant role in shaping intellectual and cultural life. They have hindered experimentation and the emergence of new ideas by emphasizing the preservation and transmission of specialized knowledge and skills across generations. Their growing influence is visible in the professional silos that have reinforced disciplinary boundaries. Sealed intellectual compartments have narrowed the scope for the cross-contamination of ideas necessary for transdisciplinary innovation. Hindering and even preventing collaboration between different fields of study with the development of transdisciplinary programs has been the fallout in educational and higher education institutions.
Transdisciplinary culture challenges the status quo imposed by the Guilds' hegemony by using practices that support open access and knowledge sharing among independent researchers who design alternative, transdisciplinary systems of knowledge production.
In conclusion: navigating the confluence of scientific and humanistic currents
By studying and researching, we must ask ourselves what and how we apply ourselves, who (scholar, researcher) we focus our interest on, and why. The 'what and how' suggests our inclination towards experimentation or theoretical openness. The 'who' helps us choose our inspirational guide by disclosing a vast panorama of studies and researchers. The 'why' is the engine that drives our passion towards a cause or a particular topic. In transdisciplinarity, the 'what and how' and the 'who and why' live in symbiosis. Their close correlation contains randomness and uncertainty, which gives rise to results that are as advantageous as they are unexpected. This is a radical innovation in the organisation of studies.
The Manifesto proposes the reform of thought on education so that young people are educated to navigate the confluence of scientific (‘what and how’) and humanistic (‘who and why’) currents. An intimate association among disciplines is the outcome of considering them not as towers but trees in a forest. This allows us to address problems with intricate knots that need to be untied not by adhering to rigid disciplinary structures but by resorting to creative solutions from multiple levels and angles of reality. Richard Coase (1910-2013), a 1991 Nobel Prize winner for economics, argued that the problems, not the topic, determine which disciplines are relevant. The deepening of the growing wicked issues is only possible by turning attention to more disciplines and, therefore, breaking down their boundaries.
The Transdisciplinary School opens up a scenario that all decision-makers should agree on. Among them, Keir Rodney Starmer, leader of the Labour Party, expressed himself in the United Kingdom in an interview given to Corriere della Sera on 8 July 2023,
At the heart of the school curriculum, there must be the ability to express oneself clearly and fluently. It is a revival of the humanities that was already in the air, heralded by the boom of Latin in English primary schools, which has overtaken Chinese and undermined German as a language, because if in the 21st century technical tasks will be carried out by artificial intelligence, only Cicero and Shakespeare can provide the compass to guide technology.
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