Edgar Morin

Restricted Complexity, General Complexity

(1) The principle of universal determinism, illustrated by Laplace’s Daemon, capable, thanks to his intelligence and extremely developed senses, of not only knowing all past events, but also of predicting all events in the future. (2) The principle of reduction, that consists in knowing any composite from only the knowledge of its basic constituting elements. (3) The principle of disjunction, that consists in isolating and separating cognitive difficulties from one another, leading to the separation between disciplines, which have become hermetic from each other.

The Concept of System and the Paradigm of Complexity

It is important to clarify the concept of system. Although the systems theory has shown the generality of the concept of system, it has not gone deep enough to discover the generative nature of systems.

Organization and Complexity

The universe, in its diversity, has atoms; molecules; stars; galaxies; and—at least on one small planet—living organisms, humans, and societies. These different entities, which are different from each other and not reducible to each other, have in common the fact that each is made up of organized elements that form a whole. What we perceive as the world around us are these wholes. The significance of the general notion of organization is not immediately evident. It is not in a search for a common minimum that we need to concentrate our efforts. It is in the manner of perceiving, conceiving, and thinking about the things of our world in an organized way. To obtain a generic, rather than general, concept, it is the idea of organization that we have to delve into. What is organization? Organization binds elements (particles, atoms, molecules, cells, individuals, etc.) in relationships that thus become components of a whole. In the first definition, organization is a structure of relations between components to produce a whole with qualities unknown to these components outside the structure. Hence, organization connects parts to each other and parts to the whole. This gives rise to the complex character of the relation between the parts and the whole. Dilthey1 had already stated, “A whole cannot be understood except by understanding its constituent parts, which cannot be understood except by understanding the whole.” Two centuries earlier, Pascal2 referred to this circular relation, “I consider it impossible to know the parts without knowing the whole, or to know the whole without knowing the parts.” There is a close relation among the concepts of organization, interrelation, and system.b These three terms, although inseparable, can be distinguished from each other. The concept of interrelation refers to the types and forms of links between elements and between the elements and the whole. The concept of system refers to the complex unit of an interrelated whole, to its characters and properties. The concept of organization refers to the structuring of the parts within, with and through a whole. The two notions, organization and system, are linked by that of interrelation: the whole interrelation, if it has stability or regularity, acquires an organized character and produces a system. There is a circular reciprocity between these three terms. When the notion of system disperses the quality of being and existing (to say “living systems” tends to take the emphasis away from living beings and their existential dimension), the notion of organization refers to to something concrete.

RE: From Prefix to Paradigm

Abstract This article is a translated chapter from a large study of the philosophy of ecology and biology. It looks at the vast array of reiterative processes in nature and culture and argues that continuous recursion is the core activity that sustains living processes at all levels. Therefore, the prefix “re,” which is central to the concepts of repetition, renewal, reinforcement, regeneration, reorganization, recursion, and religion, is a radical concept that should be considered at the paradigmatic level. The author shows that by working “revolutions into its revolutions” the process of RE complexly unifies and intermixes the past and future in order to generate the creative pulse of evolution.

Realism and Utopia

The real, thought of as human reality, that is, a mixture of the imaginary, mythology, emotions, flesh, passions, suffering, love, is always surprising, full of possibilities and hard to grasp. A thinking adapted to the complex reality of our earthly homeland cannot be a trivial realism content with the established order and accepting the victory of the victorious. On the contrary, understanding of reality, lucidity are often the result of an ethical revolt against the fait accompli, against certainty. The thinking suggested by Morin attempts to move beyond the alternatives between, on the one hand, the worst option: the utopia that thinks it is realistic, and on the other the utopia that knows it is utopia, and is therefore harmless, outside the real. The hope is to introduce the poetry of intensity into reality, to resist the oppressive forces of pseudo-realism by cultivating the garden of our earthly homeland.

A comunicação pelo meio (teoria complexa da comunicação

O artigo trata da complexa relacao entre os meios de co mu ni ca cao e a sociedade num mundo cada dia mais mediado tecnologicamente. Morin questiona o pa pel da midia e, principalmente chama atencao para a ques tao referente ao potencial do receptor. Para o autor o desenvolvimento tecnologico da comunicacao nao substitui a compreensao, sendo esse um problema filosofico da humanidade.

La communication, hier et aujourd'hui

Dans cet entretien avec Dominique Wolton, Edgar Morin evoque la naissance des recherches sur la communication, a partir de son propre itineraire de chercheur.

Adolescents en transition. Classe adolescente et classes sociales, aspiration au divertissement et aspiration à la vie bourgeoise dans une commune du Sud-Finistère

diese Lage in Hinblick auf die Entwicklungsarten einer Identitat der Jugend und auf die Integration bzw. Segregation der Jugendlichen im heutigen Werden der Gesellschaft zu analysieren.

Política de civilização e problema mundial

Este artigo trata do problema do desafio da complexidade. Comeco pela ideia de que toda e qualquer informacao tem apenas um sentido em relacao a uma situacao, a um contexto. Se por exemplo eu disser “amo-te”, esta palavra pode ser a expressao de um apaixonado sincero e deve ser tomada nesse sentido; mas pode ser tambem a farsa de um sedutor e nessa altura sera uma mentira.

Order, disorder, and the absolute: An experiment in dialogue

The first section of this dialogue is excerpted from an edited conversation between Sean Kelly and the late David Bohm, and focuses on the concepts of order, disorder, and the Absolute. The second section explores these concepts in greater depth, with Bohm maintaining the impossibility of absolute knowledge and the fundamental unintelligibility of the concept of disorder, preferring instead to speak of “orders of infinite degree” which emerge out of an “unknown ground.” Kelly responds by proposing the concept of “absolute knowing” as the cognitive process within which the concepts of order and disorder, the known and the Unknown are seen as dialectically related moments of the Absolute as complex whole. The third section is Edgar Morins response to the preceding dialogue. He begins by outlining his views on the nature and limits of rationality, maintaining, with Bohm, the superiority of the “negative modality” of speaking about “being” or “reality.” In the second part, however, he proposes the notion of ...