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4.5
This book on the design and growth of meaning as an emerging expression of flourishingly undivided earth-human and divine dynamics is a work of uncommonly richly integrated sensibilities. These include, for just two recurring examples, the interpretation of the structures of consciousness offered by Jean Gebser and the work of C. S. Peirce on semiotics. And the creative inquiry goes on to compass a broad and deep ecology of interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary and intercultural understanding and practice. Seif’s interdisciplinary work draws on his background as a doctoral student of architectural design and later as professor in a graduate Whole Systems Design program to mature and enrich his transdisciplinary research, publication and professional consultations in semiotics. At the same time, his living intercultural roots go back far beyond his childhood in Egypt to the ancient mythopoeia of Ma’at, and the metaphysical aspects of ancient Egyptian design, only to flower anew in his transmodern ontohermeneutics midwifing among us a new aptitude for coevolutionary love in a flowing “semioethical” reality beyond absoluteness. A work of sometimes intense contemporary erudition, with occasional notes of humor, irony or chagrin, this is written clearly and will be of considerable benefit for those interested in consciousness studies, ecohuman well-being, and perhaps in the kinds of outlook intimated in, for instances, Thomas Berry’s, and some Indigenous or NeoConfucian discussions of our interbeing and/as eco-awareness. Through De-sign performing a functional cosmology as a constitutive mode of the nondualized and participative self-knowing of anthropo-cosmopoiesis in its inseparable spiritual, noetic, emotional, intellectual, etc. registers, Seif midwifes among us the emergence of a “teleological process of co-creating and co-transforming reality.” This book’s a keeper!
