What is it to realize? The philosophers of mind have a working definition: “a dependence relation that is thought to exist between higher-level properties or states and lower-level properties or states”. As arcane and baroque as it is, it holds a kernel of truth: to realize something is to be able to shrink a problem down. In short, it’s the way “modern” people think about scale in life. But surely, realization must also be an event.

At moments of clarity, we recognize ourselves as living and dying. So do knowledge systems, which are law-likely articulations of care, articulated into epistemic divisions that we now understand as disciplines. It follows from this that all questions of interdisciplinarity are now, and always have been, questions of intergenerationality. What do we inherit from previous generations, and what do we want to pass on? Intergenerationality is not a form of interdisciplinarity – it is the other way around.