According to Ateljevic (2016), natural and social sciences, economists, political activists, writers, spiritual readers and many successful social entrepreneurs argue that humanity needs a major global mind change and a paradigm shift in the 21st century. To describe this emerging socio-cultural, economic, political and philosophical shift of consciousness, values, worldviews, and paradigms, different authors from different disciplines use a variety of terms, such as transmodernity paradigm, transmodern philosophy of political liberation, integral culture, circularity paradigm, reflective/living-systems paradigm, partnership model of caring economics, relational global consciousness and biosphere politics, to name a few.
Nevertheless, all authors point in the same direction which is the planetary vision in which humans are beginning to realize that we are all including plants and animals connected into one system which makes us all interdependent, vulnerable and responsible for the Earth as an indivisible living community. In speaking about the transmodern emerging paradigm shift, Ghisi (2006, 2008) primarily refers to the changing underlying values in which humans make their judgments and decisions in all areas of their activities like economy, politics and everyday life. He begins his thesis with an overview of five levels of change that he describes through the ‘iceberg metaphor’ of the human global (un)consciousness and its (un)awareness and (in)visibility, whereby the first two levels are the least visible in terms of the awareness of their ‘slow death’. The first level is at the darkest and coldest bottom, where our global civilization finds itself today at the edge of unsustainability and what he describes as the collective suicide of humanity. The second level relates to the death of ‘command, control and conquest’ patriarchal values, which have turned the world into a competitive and territorial battleground. Level three refers to the death of modernity as a dominant paradigm through which we see the world as an objective reality rooted in impartial truth.
Level four refers to the death of the industrial type of businesses and decline of the material economy, while level five concerns the overall crisis of overtly bureaucratic and pyramidal institutions. According to Ghisi, the very concept of transmodern implies that the best of modernity is maintained. As such, it is not a linear projection that takes us from pre- modernity via postmodernity to transmodernity, but rather transcends modernity in that it takes us trans, i.e. through, modernity into another state of being, from the edge of chaos into a new order of society (Sardar, 2004) The shift is associated around phenomenon of the so-called ‘silent revolution’ led by the growing number of so-called ‘Cultural Creatives’ (Ray and Anderson, 2000; Ghisi, 2008). Arnold Toynbee is the one who analysed the rise and fall of 23 civilisations in world history and who claims that when a cultural shift occurs, usually 5% of ‘creative marginals’ are preparing the shift in silence. Also, the concept of the silent revolution of cultural creatives come from the historian Arnold Toynbee.
This concept has been borrowed by sociologist Paul H. Ray and psychologist Sherry Ruth Anderson who have applied it to their market cluster research of politics in America. Rosa Maria Rodriguez Magda has Ph.D. in Philosophy (University of Valencia) is a writer and Spanish feminist philosopher, born and raised in Valencia City, Valencia.
She had used transmodernity as a philosophical concept in her 1989 essay La sonrisa de Saturno: Hacia una teoría transmoderna. Then, further developed by Marc Luynckx Ghisi (1999) as the new political and socio-economic platform of the European Union. Her approach as based on Hegelian logic was views modernity, postmodernity, and transmodernity as a dialectic triad in which transmodernity is critical of both modernism and postmodernism, but merge elements of both. The third tends to preserve the defining impetus of the first yet is devoid of its underlying base by integrating its negation the third moment reaches a type of specular closure (Rodriguez, 2007). Transmodernity is an easy term describing a development of thought that seeks a synthesis of the best of pre-modern, modern, and postmodern reality.
Transmodernity is moves beyond the alternatives of critical modernity and postmodernity, promising to overcome the shortcomings of each, constructing a more adequate and super-ordinate orientation invigorated by the critical perspective of the oppressed other. Transmodernism, as first identified in the philosophical work of Rodriguez (2004), is an umbrella term that signify the emerging socio-cultural, economic, political and philosophical shift way beyond postmodernity (Ateljevic, 2013) which is much more wide, deep and radical than what dominant economists and politicians call globalization (Ghisi, 2010). Transmodernism is a development in thought following the periodization of postmodernity. It sees postmodernity, or hypermodernity as the conclusion or culmination of modernism, and critiques modernism and postmodernism on material, social, and spiritual viewpoints.
Other interpretations on this term have been developed together with the cultural movement of transmodernism founded by Argentinian-Mexican philosopher Enrique Dussel. The concept of transmodernity has also been used to re-work the notion of postmodernity, highlighting its structural relation to globalization and informatisation. Enrique Domingo Dussel Ambrosini or known as Enrique Dussel was a founder of transmodernism which is means a philosophical and cultural movement. He was born on December 24, 1943 and is an Argentine and Mexican academic, philosopher, historian and theologian. From 2013 to 2014, he served as the interim rector of the Universidad Autonoma de la Ciudad de Mexico.
He has made contributions to several fields, including the philosophy of liberation, ethics, political economy, theology and history. Enrique Dussel has two books which are Postmodernidad and Transmodernidad (1999), frames it in the context of the philosophy of liberation and reflection on Latin-American identity, taking as transmodern theories those that, coming from the Third World, claim a proper place facing Western modernity, incorporating the look of the Postcolonial subaltern other
