Beyond multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary: From aesthetic experience in art to relational epistemology for the new humanities

For over two centuries, modern universities have evolved through a disciplinary foundation that has successfully fostered differentiation, specialisation, and the advancement of knowledge. In recent decades, various reform efforts have been made through multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary approaches in response to the increasingly complex issues of life. However, the transformation of the global knowledge landscape in the 21st century reveals that contemporary problems—ranging from ecological crises, artificial intelligence, digital coloniality, to cultural changes—no longer merely demand dialogue between disciplines, but require a reassessment of how knowledge itself is organised. This article begins with a reflective-conceptual reading of that transformation to question whether the paradigms of multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinarity are still adequate as a horizon for the development of the humanities. By combining a critical study of the development of contemporary humanities theory with the dynamics of global knowledge organisation, this paper argues that the fundamental issue facing the humanities today lies not in inter-disciplinary relations but in the architecture of knowledge that governs the possibilities of encounters among various ways of understanding the world. On this basis, the article proposes an epistemological shift from the paradigm of knowledge is power to knowledge is relation, which understands knowledge as a relational space that enables dialogue, openness, and coexistence of various knowledge traditions. Thus, the reconstruction of the architecture of knowledge is seen as a new horizon for the development of the humanities in the 21st century, so that universities are no longer understood merely as a collection of adjacent disciplines, but as a shared space that allows for the emergence of more dialogic, reflective, and relevant forms of knowledge in response to the challenges of contemporary civilisation.