Editorial Letter – Law and Transdisciplinarity

By Glênio Sabbad Guedes

“Πάντες ἄνθρωποι τοῦ εἰδέναι ὀρέγονται φύσει.”All men by nature desire to know.

— Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book I, Chapter 1

1. An Invitation to Reflection

Welcome to Law in the Twenty-First Century. This portal is born from a conviction: that contemporary law must rediscover its humanistic and transdisciplinary vocation. We live in a time of unprecedented complexity — technological, ecological, and cultural — that no longer fits the fragmented and reductionist frameworks of traditional legal thought.

As Thomas Kuhn observed, the present is not merely a time of change, but a paradigm crisis. The Cartesian-Newtonian model — treating the world as a predictable machine — is exhausted. The law that grew within that paradigm has become rigid, compartmentalized, and normatively blind to life itself.Our challenge, therefore, is not to abandon legality, but to reimagine it.

2. From Mechanism to Network

The new century calls for a different architecture of thought: not the tree, but the network. Deleuze and Guattari described this model as rhizomatic: a structure of multiple connections without a center or hierarchy. Quantum physics reinforces the same intuition — the universe as a vast web of interrelations. Neuroscience confirms it: in the connectome, the map of neural pathways, every thought is a connection, every idea a bridge.

So it should be with the law. When legal systems isolate themselves from social reality, they suffer from what might be called normative connectopathy: a breakdown of the links that bind justice to life.A living legal order, by contrast, mirrors the brain — plastic, adaptive, relational.

3. Why Transdisciplinarity?

Following Basarab Nicolescu, transdisciplinarity is the movement that goes beyond disciplines. It integrates scientific, philosophical, artistic, and spiritual knowledge, acknowledging different levels of reality. Law, therefore, must learn again to listen — to science, to art, and above all, to lived experience.

To achieve that, it must also listen to non-Western epistemologies:

• to African thought, where being is defined through community;

• to Asian traditions, which ground ethics in harmony and balance;

• to Indigenous cosmologies, where the land is not a possession, but a living partner.

  
  

This is not mere cultural courtesy — it is an act of epistemic decolonization. It restores to law the polyphony of voices that modern rationality tried to silence.

4. The Epistemological Principles of Transdisciplinary Law

Principle	Source / Author	Meaning for Law
Uncertainty	W. Heisenberg	Every legal decision carries an irreducible degree of indeterminacy; recognizing it is part of justice.
Complementarity	N. Bohr	Reason and emotion, norm and life, individual and community are not opposites but complements.
Autopoiesis	Maturana & Varela	The legal system continually recreates itself through its interaction with society.
Included Middle	B. Nicolescu	Between legal and illegal lies a gray zone requiring new categories and mediations.
Holography	Holistic Principle	The whole is reflected in the part; each case is a microcosm of the legal order.

These principles form the epistemic core of a renewed jurisprudence — one capable of facing complexity without surrendering coherence.

5. The Risks and the Challenge

To adopt a transdisciplinary stance is to accept a risk:If law is a rhizome, where does its normativity come from? If we embrace plural epistemologies, how do we avoid pure relativism, where justice dissolves into taste? And even in a decentralized network, what of power, which always finds new nodes and centers?

Such questions are not objections but obligations.Transdisciplinarity does not abandon normativity — it seeks to ground it anew, through dialogue, recognition, and shared rationality. It is a call for a law that convinces not by force, but by meaning.

6. The Age of Rupture

As Marc Halévy reminds us, we live at the end of modernity — a civilization marked by materialism, technocracy, and the fetish of progress. The legal tradition, subordinated to market and machine, has lost its ethical center. Boaventura de Sousa Santos warned that democracy itself became captive to capitalism: defended only insofar as it defends capital.

Yet a new landscape is emerging — one of complex law, a complexus intertwining ethics, ecology, and justice.Halévy calls this the noetic revolution: a renewal of human consciousness. Law, if it is to remain humane, must be part of that awakening.

7. The Roman Reminder

Roman jurists already understood:

It is not force that creates law. It is law that legitimizes force.

For them, the force of law did not lie in coercion, but in persuasion.A rule was “juridical” not because the State could enforce it, but because wise men — jurisprudentes endowed with auctoritas — had reasoned it toward justice. The imperium of the magistrate was only the arm of a mind already convinced by reason.

Transdisciplinary law retrieves this Roman insight: that the legitimacy of power depends on the rational and ethical integrity of those who interpret it.

8. The Challenges of Our Time

Like the chorus in Sophocles’ Antigone, we are pantoporos áporos:we have countless pathways, yet remain blocked by our own impasses. Our challenge is to turn abundance into meaning — to transform paths into ethics.

Transdisciplinarity is not a luxury of thought; it is the moral necessity of our century. It does not dissolve law — it re-enchants it. It invites us to practice jurisprudence as an art of reconnection: between reason and empathy, between human and planet, between justice and life.

Glênio Sabbad Guedes

Lawyer

Founder of Law in the Twenty-First Century