Transdisciplinarity

Everything is connected to everything else. What exactly is meant by this? What does this everything refer to? Is it possible to consider the totality of human knowledge as a whole without first splitting it up into a multitude of disciplinary fields and subfields? How high is the complexity one has to deal with if one rejects any disciplinary demarcation? How does one deal with a complexity for which there are as yet hardly any tools, in a culture of complexity avoidance, complexity reduction, and complexity denial? Disciplinarization in science, like all specializations in societies, is a form of complexity reduction. In interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary research projects, a cooperative collaboration between researchers from different academic disciplines takes place. In this process, the demarcation of boundaries increases the certainty of action and thus facilitates cooperation. For the successful planning and organization of this cooperation, however, a transdisciplinary view is necessary, in which these boundary demarcations are removed.

In my 1997 thesis at the Oberstufenkolleg Bielefeld I succeeded in developing a transdisciplinary view on the basis of system-theoretical considerations of simulatability and different forms of stability. The concept of the system enabled a domain-spanning coherent view, in which the question of stability turned out to be a universally applicable criterion of evaluation. Even today, 24 years later, the resulting possibilities of new insights do not seem to me to be remotely manageable.

Many philosophers have searched for criteria that could lend stability to their view of the world and of themselves, and have been severely criticized by Nietzsche for doing so ("The will to system is a lack of righteousness." in Götzen-Dämmerung of 1889). Possibly the criterion of stability is the only thing that can give stability to a world- and self-view, even though there may be no sure methodology for its application.