EDGAR MORIN or ODE TO COMPLEXITY

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We will learn, debate, enjoy and investigate philosophers and diverse themes from the philosophical perspective. Each reunion is structured as a conversation among all attendees about that day s philosopher softly moderated by the organizer. The conversation will kick-off from the very brief suggested reading providing easy access to all attendees both to the philosopher and the conversation.

Let´s be greek and dive today on…

EDGAR MORIN (1921-2026), the sadly recently deceased (at 104 !!) French philosopher who made of embracing complexity a way of life, a way of thinking, a philosophy...

Our world constantly requires us to simplify.
Choose sides. React quickly. Reduce reality to a clear cause, an enemy, an explanation.
Science invites us to believe that to know something is to measure it, manage it, parametrize it...

Edgar Morin’s philosophy begins with a refusal of these simplifications.

Reality is not simple. The human being. Society, Nature, History are not simple.
And therefore thought itself cannot remain simple if it wants to be faithful to reality.

Complexity is a discipline of thought. An attempt to think connections, tensions, contradictions without immediately reducing them to simple formulas.

Morin’s central enemy is reductionism.

Reducing human beings to biology, society to economics, politics to psychology, culture to ideology or history to material interests alone... Mutilates Reality !
Each of these explanations may contain some truth but become false when they claim to be the whole truth.

A human being is biological, psychological, social, cultural, historical, emotional, rational and irrational, individual and collective. None of these dimensions can be eliminated. To understand a person only as a biological organism is too poor. As a social construction also. A human being is the space where nature and culture, order and disorder, freedom and dependence, individuality and belonging... meet.

Edgar Morin´s thought becomes specially relevant in a world where problems are no longer isolated: a climate problem becomes a political problem. A technological problem becomes an ethical problem. An economic problem becomes a psychological problem.

Any simplification is fundamentally a mistep.

Simple thought searches for one guilty cause. .
Complex thought observes the system of relations that produced the events...

We are capable of reason but also of irrationality. We are capable of solidarity and of cruelty. We create civilizations but we also create barbarism inside civilization itself.

The task of thought is not to hide this contradiction....
But to face it.
Those are the Ethics of Complexity.

Complexity has therefore a fundamental ethical dimension.

Asuming all there is in front of us,..
Without denying... without cherry picking the events that match your narrative... with all its immense amounts of contradiction, uncertainty, ambigüity...
and therefore the impossibility to protect ourselves in simple answers.

Moran invites us to resist the arrogance of total explanations, that our knowledge is incomplete, that our perspective is partial, that every solution may create new problems... and that is not a failure, a weakness, our doubts are in fact the ultimate ethical strenght of being totally, relentlessly and uncorruptibly loyal to what we see

This does not paralyze action but makes action more responsible.

I want to understand but I refuse to mutilate reality in order to make it easier. I want clarity but not false simplicity.

Complexity asumes that our actions enter a world of interactions where we never fully control what will produce. This is not a reason to do nothing or evade responsibility but to act with dialogue and responsibility.

Morin’s ode to complexity is therefore also a praise of maturity.

Children want clear heroes and villains.
Mature thought accepts ambiguity. It can judge but carefully. It can act without pretending to possess absolute certainty. It criticizes without reducing the other to a caricature.

A thought that reduces too much mutilates reality.
That makes us not only ignorant but fundamentally unethical because we don´t asume reality, and leave it unanswered, unseen...

Edgar Morin does not offer us a solution for everything. He invites us to remain intelligent in the face of the real.

That is his ode to complexity

An intelligence able to look straight into the eyes to the complexity of life itself...

Humbly but firmly, and essentially, ethically...

If we succeed... maybe we live until 104...

Let´s think with Edgar...

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