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Abstract
Edgar Morin took an early lead within the French intellectual community, but also in comparison with parallel reflections in the English-speaking world, as far as critical discussion of the epistemology of the new sciences of complexity is concerned. His “complex thought” raises many intriguing questions and offers a dazzling synthesis of a wide range of fields, from physics to biology to psychology and the social sciences. However, Morin's road to complexity bypasses some crucial issues in philosophy and political economy. Therefore, although Morin's insights remain invaluable, one has reasons to be a little skeptical about the exact nature of the reform of thought he has sketched out.
Notes
1 Morin himself uses a similar image to describe the human predicament: hespeaks in that respect of l'itinerance, the act of following a path (Morin, 1993, pp. 197–198). CitationHeinz Weinmann (1994, p. 11) also compares Morin's anthropological and philosophical writings to “an epistemologicaljourney,” an unfinished journey for that matter—indeed a journey that can have no end.
2 About this period, see CitationKofman (1996).
3 I am quoting here from a cassette tape Edgar Morin sent me in 1988 in answer to questions Ihad previously forwarded to him. Morin added some interesting remarks on these and other thinkers to explain how hisown thinking differs in some critical respects from the slant that they give to these seminal concepts. For example, he expressed reservations about CitationPrigogine and Stengers's (1984) overly optimistic view about the reconciliationbetween humans and nature; he explained that he locates himself somewhere between this sort of Panglosian positionand Monod's exaggeratedly pessimistic supposition that the alliance between human and nature has been lost.
4 My translation.
5 In a personal conversation (March 1997), Morin did in fact do so.
6 CitationBarel (1979) is in fact less openly Marxist in tone.
7 “What is dying today is not the notion of humankind but an insular notion of it, withdrawn from nature and from human nature itself” (CitationMorin, 1973, p. 210; my translation).
8 To quote the subtitle of volume 4.
9 Albeit very perceptive, Morin's one page survey of the whole of Greek philosophy stands almost as acaricature of what I am aiming at here (CitationMorin, 1991a, p. 53).
10 Most of these texts are collected in CitationMorin (1984).
11 The parallels between Merleau-Ponty's ontology (1962, p. 1968) and Morin's theoretical works are rather striking; Merleau-Ponty's reflections on the contingency ofthe self, of nature and of society, his skill in depicting their relationships, his analyses of the manner in whichthe “tacit Cogito” makes the presence of self known to self and precedes philosophy are some of the aspect ofhis legacy that Morin must have used in his search for a “method,” even though explicit references to Merleau-Pontyare quite rare in the four published volumes of La Méthode.
12 Three-dimensional tensions are not absent from La Méthode, the best example perhapsbeing the I-Me-Self relationship. However, Morin seems not to be very concerned about why some relationships appearas polar opposites and others require the introduction of a third (or fourth, etc.) level.
13 It is striking, for example, that in the otherwise insightful pages Morindevotes to the virtues of decentralization and the dysfunctional character of hierarchies in both nature and society, there is no reference to markets (CitationMorin, 1986, pp. 309–330); CitationKofman (1996, pp. 101–102) claims that in these pagesMorin implicitly declares a preference for markets and he is probably right, but implicit is the operative wordhere.
14 Morin himself, however, claims to have had an abiding interest in economic theory ingeneral, and a particular admiration for François Perroux (personal interview, March 1997).
15 Note that I am not implying that there isabsolutely no alternative to strict laissez-faire and libertarian politics; I believe that some forms of democraticdecision making, especially at the local level, are preferable to a complete reliance on market forces (see CitationdiZerega, 2000). I am even prepared to accept the idea that some form of “metadesign,” that is, some way of designingdemocratic institutions where global problems could be discussed, assessed, and perhaps deflected from their leastdesirable pathways, is worth pursuing. My point is simply that in talking about “control” at the global level Morincomes dangerously close to contradicting everything he has written on complexity!